A Cognitive Approach to Ernest Hemingway's Short Fiction [1 ed.] 1527567621, 9781527567627

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A Cognitive Approach to Ernest Hemingway’s Short Fiction

A Cognitive Approach to Ernest Hemingway’s Short Fiction By

Gabriela Tucan

A Cognitive Approach to Ernest Hemingway's Short Fiction By Gabriela Tucan This book first published 2021 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2021 by Gabriela Tucan All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-6762-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-6762-7

In loving memory of my mother.

“In the study of the mind, whatever looks natural is most suspect” (The Literary Mind, Mark Turner)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... x Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Chapter One .............................................................................................. 16 Cognitive Sciences Come Together 1.1 Mind, body, and cognition ............................................................ 16 1.2 The turn to embodied cognition .................................................... 29 1.3 Windows to the mind: the theory of conceptual blending............. 33 1.4 Mappings in thought and language: the theory of mental space ... 40 1.5 Contexts, constructions, and inferences: frame semantics ............ 45 1.6 Mapping the mind: domains and the theory of domains ............... 48 1.7 Space, movement, embodiment: the meanings of the body .......... 49 1.8 Metaphorical thinking: its conceptual force and further implications ................................................................................... 53 1.9 Metonymic thought: a cognitive approach .................................... 59 Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 63 What the Mind has to do with Literary Texts. Cognitively Oriented Literary Studies 2.1 General overview .......................................................................... 63 2.2 Reading in the cognitive age ......................................................... 69 2.3 Cognitive poetics as the new interdisciplinary venture ................. 76 2.4 A cognitive inquiry into narrative: toward a cognitive narratology .................................................................................... 80 2.5 Cognitive poetics and cognitive narratology: gains and gaps ....... 90 Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 94 Ernest Hemingway’s Short Stories: Cognitive Features and the Reader’s Mind 3.1 On defining short storyness........................................................... 94 3.2 The autonomy of short fiction: intrinsic nature and distinctive features ........................................................................................ 100 3.3 Short stories: creative tools for thinking ..................................... 107

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3.4 Short stories and counterfactual thinking: an introduction ......... 109 3.5 Practical argument: Hemingway’s style and artistic technique... 112 3.6 Ernest Hemingway: exercises of artistic style............................. 115 3.7 The definition and nature of the Hemingway short story: a close-up .................................................................................... 119 Chapter Four ........................................................................................... 125 Narrative Space, Possible Worlds and Counterfactuality in Ernest Hemingway’s Short Stories 4.1 Image-schematic knowledge and immersive features of short stories .......................................................................................... 125 4.2 Time as a forking path. Metaphorical spatializations of time ..... 141 4.2.1 Fathers and Sons ................................................................ 150 4.2.2 A Canary for One ............................................................... 154 4.2.3 Hills like White Elephants .................................................. 156 4.2.4 The End of Something......................................................... 159 4.3 The theory of possible worlds. Private embedded narratives ...... 163 4.4 Living in the best possible world: The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio, Now I Lay Me, and A Way You’ll Never Be ........ 167 4.5 Self-construal and identity. Preliminary concluding remarks ..... 175 4.6 The world as it might have been: counterfactuals in Wine of Wyoming, The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife, and The ThreeDay Blow ..................................................................................... 177 Chapter Five ........................................................................................... 192 Fictional Minds, Mental Spaces, and their Couterfactual Capacities 5.1 Hemingway reconsidered............................................................ 192 5.2. Emergence of fictional minds .................................................... 197 5.3 Fictional thought in behavioral and transitional narratives: The Killers, Out of Season, and Up in Michigan ......................... 203 5.3.1 The Killers .......................................................................... 203 5.3.2 Out of Season ..................................................................... 208 5.3.3 Up in Michigan................................................................... 216 5.4 Blending and the study of narrative ............................................ 222 5.5. Double-scope identity blends: blending and de-blending the counterfactual self. Big Two-Hearted River, The Sea Change, Cat in the Rain, and Soldier’s Home .................................................. 230 5.5.1 Big Two-Hearted River ...................................................... 234 5.5.2 The Sea Change .................................................................. 237 5.5.3 Cat in the Rain.................................................................... 241 5.5.4 Soldier’s Home ................................................................... 245

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5.6 Compression of vital relations: A Very Short Story .................... 251 Conclusions ............................................................................................ 256 Bibliography ........................................................................................... 268

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Over the past several years, I have taught a course in communication strategies in short fiction and another in twentieth-century American literature at the West University of Timi‫܈‬oara, Romania. I have been extremely fortunate in the intelligence and acute sense of observation that my students have brought to these classes. I wish to thank them for their countless observations, lively critical comments, and enthusiasm that have contributed to the development of my research trajectory and helped me to formulate the ideas of this book. A debt of gratitude is owed to my friends and colleagues at the West University, in particular the literature specialists Cristina Chevere‫܈‬an and Ana Cristina Băniceru, who were generous and especially supportive in their remarks when the book was in its thesis phase. Special thanks go to my friend Diana Nacu, who read a late version of the manuscript and gave brilliant suggestions that immensely improved my work. I can only express my gratitude to professor Mircea Mihăie‫ ܈‬for his encouragement and support through the years. My further research was aided by the postdoctoral school of the West University that generously funded a month of research in Venice, Italy, at Ca’ Foscari University. The libraries there were an invaluable resource for this study. This book has also benefited immeasurably from the debates at conferences in the arts and the humanities in Mainz, Baltimore, Venice, Budapest, and elsewhere. I am also indebted to the proofreader of the book, Alex Monaghan, for his helpful comments and the editor, Adam Rummens, for his great attention to this work. Finally, I owe my engagement with cognitive science and short fiction to my husband, Dumitru, who began reading in the field to show his tireless support of this project. I thank him for his intellectual comradeship and especially for his trust and great patience in assisting me with the publication of the manuscript.

INTRODUCTION

It is something of a commonplace today that natural scientists are only able to judge their work in isolation while humanities research is intended to be understood only by specialists working in their respective academic fields. It is a matter of some debate whether work by practitioners in differing disciplinary areas is expected to remain invisible and intellectually uninteresting for their counterparts. In place of this traditionally sharp division between humanities and natural sciences, the past decades have seen a growing interest in the enriching cross-fertilization between scientific approaches and humanistic investigations. This scientific turn in the study of literature outlines a new paradigm founded on rigorous and reliable knowledge, on methodological discipline and theoretical assumptions. Research in the new field known as the empirical study of literature flourished with the pioneering work published in the Scientific Study of Literature, a journal launched in 2010. Defined as a repertoire of cultural artifacts, literature is studied here with scientific stringency to cast new light on literary phenomena and processes. This cutting-edge journal has helped revitalize the declining state of core humanist concerns by welcoming contributions that use scientific methods to explore and validate new hypotheses. One of the most important lines of inquiry in the Scientific Study of Literature is that texts are not universal repositories of meaning but “fluid objects that are created in the minds of readers.”1 This shifts the focus on the investigation of the interaction between reader and text. In 2012, Van Peer et al. edited the volume Scientific Methods for the Humanities,2 which provides a repository of methods and approaches to further promote empirical research in humanities. They argue that the realms of science and humanist disciplines are not divided by an unbridgeable chasm and that the relation between them is complementary rather than one of opposition. What brings them together is their shared concern with questions of how to ascribe meaning to one’s life. They hold that such queries have always had a predominant role in culture and so 1 Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi, “The Scientific Study of Literature: What Can, Has, and Should be Done,” Scientific Study of Literature 1, no. 1 (2011): 59–71. 2 Wille Van Peer, Frank Hakemulder and Sonia Zyngier, eds., Scientific Methods for the Humanities (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012).

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Introduction

abolishing them would mean disregarding meaningful cultural phenomena. In their words, reflections on how one grasps meaning show that “we are human and humane, that we maintain a relationship with our surroundings, that we mean something to ourselves and to others.”1 The point is taken further in an argument that stresses that questions involved in meaning processes need to be confronted with “the very best methods we have at our disposal” while relying on a scientific repertoire of methods. In fact, what they propose is consistent with the multifaceted investigation conducted in the Scientific Study of Literature: cross-disciplinary dialog and tight collaboration between natural sciences and humanities are premised on the realization that they both need each other so as to know the world better. Scientific Methods for the Humanities reminds us of C. P. Snow’s high aspiration for bridging the two cultures into a “Third Culture”2 to narrow the cultural divide. The collaborative ties he advertized in 1959 are still disputed today. For instance, the dichotomy between sciences and arts are at the core of Jonathan Gottshall’s publications on the matter.3 In Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, he identifies the origin of the crisis: the failure of literary scholars to produce reliable knowledge, which sets them apart from scientists who operate on theoretically robust assumptions. In stark contrast to scientific inquiry, literary studies pose vital questions in a space of explanation that is too vast. The key to obtaining more reliable results is a systematic “shrinking down” of this broad space of possibility. Gottshall gives the example of science understood as “the most successful method humans have devised for shrinking the space of possible explanation. The work is carried forward by research communities whose members typically focus on little parts of big problems. Through their competitive, cooperative, and cumulative efforts, scientific research communities seek to narrow the range of plausible response to given questions. Sometimes this process is spectacularly successful and possibility space is reduced to a speck.”4 In a similar vein, narrowing down the possibility space in literary studies would enable us to test ideas rigorously. Gottshall hopes that advances in humanities will result from emulating techniques, methods, and theories from allied domains.

1

Van Peer, Hakemulder and Zyngieret al., Scientific Methods for the Humanities, 6.

2 His thesis was published in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1959). Jonathan Gottshall, Literature, Science, and a New Humanities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 4 Gottshall, Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, 8. 3

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Other seminal work in interdisciplinarity has been done by Slingerland.1 In his study analyzing what science offers the humanities, he explains that the historically entrenched divide between academic departments originates in the rather old-fashioned metaphysical mind-body dualism. This universal intuition maintains that there are two types of substances in the world: mind and matter. They operate independently and according to their distinct principles. This dualistic model is replicated in the academic debate: humanists study the mind to grasp its mysterious inner workings whilst scientists concern themselves with the properties of matter. The distinction between understanding and explanation has thus become the hallmark of a divided academic world. However, Slingerland’s non-dualistic concept argues for “an integrated, ‘embodied’ approach to the study of human culture.”2 Why does this merit attention? This guiding principle of “an embodied cognition,” embraced by research3 in the interdisciplinary matrix called cognitive sciences, means that all cognitive innovation is constrained by the structure of our bodies and minds. Our unique physical and cognitive architecture and the way we experience the world are fundamental conditions for calling into question the classical mind-body dualism. In Slingerland’s words: “By breaching the mind-body divide—by bringing the human mind back into contact with a rich and meaningful world of things— this approach to the humanities starts from an embodied mind that is always in touch with the world, as well as a pragmatic model of truth or verification that takes the body and the physical world seriously.”4 Cognitively-informed sciences welcome the embodied mind approach, which indeed forms the fundament of their scientific practice. In this sense, psychologists5 and scholars who study perception6 argue that the mental 1

Edward Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities. Integrating Body and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 2 Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities, 9. 3 Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., Embodiment and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See also: Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993 [1991]); Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 4 Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities, 8. 5 Ulric Neisser, Cognitive Psychology (New York: Psychology Press, 2014). See also: Ulric Neisser, Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications of Cognitive Psychology (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976). 6 Diane Pecher and Rolf Zwaan, eds., Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language and Thinking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

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Introduction

representation of the external world arises from everyday embodied experiences and from a sensory contact with the world. This leads to the conclusion that cognition is “embodied action.” Varela et al. explain the term “embodied” by arguing that “cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities,” which are themselves “embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context.”1 The term “action” emphasizes that “sensory and motor processes, perception and action, are fundamentally inseparable in lived cognition.”2 Overall, current empirical evidence presents an embodied picture of cognition. This view shows that perception does not only occur in the sensory apparatus but is a kinesthetic activity that is able to transform mental images.3 Concerned with an empirical investigation of the mind, artificial intelligence4 (AI) provides evidence against the dualist thesis, suggesting that consciousness is not a mysterious substance but rather a property emerging from matter. The machines built by AI, capable of replicating the mind’s physical complexities, strengthen the argument in favor of the physicalist view of consciousness. Similarly, cognitive linguistics5 focuses on deep cognitive processes to show how understanding and creativity arise from an embodied human experience. Language does not emerge from See also: James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Psychology Press, 1986). 1 Varela, Thompson and Rosch, Embodied Mind, 173. 2 Varela, Thompson and Rosch, Embodied Mind, 173. 3 Gibbs, Embodiment and Cognitive Science. 4 Dana Ballard, “On the Function of Visual Representation,” in Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception, eds. Alva Noë and Evan Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2002), 459–479. See also: Dana Ballard, “Animate vision,” Artificial Intelligence 48 (1991): 57–86; Rodney Brooks, “Intelligence without Representation,” Artificial Intelligence 47 (1991): 139–159. 5 Gibbs, Embodiment and Cognitive Science. See also: Vittorio Gallese and George Lakoff, “The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-motor System in Conceptual Knowledge,” Cognitive Neuropsychology 22 (2005): 455–479; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2003 [1980]); Leonard Talmy, Toward a Cognitive Semantics, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press/Bradford, 2000); Ronald Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Volume 2: Descriptive Application (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Ronald W. Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Volume 1: Theoretical Prerequisites (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987); Eve Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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autonomous parts of the brain but from bodily experience.1 Cognitive linguistics has seen a growing body of evidence claiming that syntactic systems cannot work independently from semantics, while both of them are informed by basic sensorimotor activities. In a helpful survey study, Wilson2 identifies the major tenets held by linguists: cognition is dynamic, context-dependent, situated, designed for action, and constructed on experience. It is deeply entrenched in the restraints of the body and reflected in the surrounding environment. There is a common thread that runs through most of the body and practices of research in the affiliated disciplines discussed above that argues that cognitive activity emerges from interactions between the brain, body, and environment. This present volume explores the question of how an engagement with cognitive sciences can change the ways we study literature. How has literary endeavor—an exploration of the powers of imagination, if nothing else—come to be indebted to the rational faculties of cognitive sciences? Is it worthwhile, and perhaps even necessary, to consider the importance and sheer size of the body of the research on mind and brain processes? Might their empirical investigations breathe new life into the intellectual environment of the traditional tenets of literary studies? Turner3 saw this trend almost thirty years ago, arguing then that cognitive science “requires” the study of literature as a vital product of the human mind, constituted via complex processes of comprehension and production. Since Turner’s discovery, many others4 have turned to the cognitive study of literature. However, “resistance to unified theories” still informs literary cognitive work, as Zunshine notes in her introductory chapter5 to Cognitive Literary Studies. Despite general interest in establishing a common 1 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 2 Margaret Wilson, “Six Views of Embodied Cognition,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 9 (2002): 625–636. 3 Mark Turner, Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 4 Michael Burke and Emily T. Troscianko, eds., Cognitive Literary Science. Dialogues between Literature and Cognition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Peter Garratt, ed., The Cognitive Humanities. Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016); Lisa Zunshine, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Patrick Colm Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts. A Guide for Humanists (New York/London: Routledge, 2003); Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain. Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jerry R. Hobbs, Literature and Cognition (Stanford, CA: CSLI, 1990). 5 Zunshine, Cognitive Literary Studies.

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research background, even scholars1 attracted by interdisciplinary work often remain critical. Ryan criticizes the fact that the work of literary theorists engaged with heterogeneous methodology creates the impression of “interdisciplinary bricolage.”2 In order to counterbalance criticism, Hartner holds that “cognitive literary studies therefore need to engage in a continued reflection on their concepts, aims, and methods” while the intersection between science and literature demands “a heightened degree of epistemological awareness and conceptual deliberation.”3 In this spirit, numerous studies engage in sound theoretical reflections on the scope of cognitive approaches. Schneider and Hartner,4 for example, eloquently advocate the literary implications of Fauconnier and Turner’s blending theory. In Why We Read Fiction, Zunshine5 conducts a rigorous examination of the theory of mind, and in Social Minds in the Novel, Palmer6 designs analytical tools to investigate “social minds” in action. Spolsky7 examines the mind’s instability arising from cognitive gaps that enables innovation in fictional writing and literary criticism. Richardson8 uses concepts and recent findings from neuroscience to better understand the relations between literary activity and brain science in the Romantic era in Britain. The collection of forty articles edited by Kreutz and MacNealy,9 mostly indebted to cognitive psychology, demonstrates how literary effects can be described by means of empirical methods. In the more recent and wide-ranging 1

Marie-Laure Ryan, “Narratology and Cognitive Science: A Problematic Relation,” Style 44, no. 4 (2010): 469–495; Patricia Waugh, “Introduction: Criticism, Theory, and Anti-theory,” in Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Patricia Waugh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–33. 2 Ryan, “Narratology and Cognitive Science,” 476. 3 Marcus Hartner, “Scientific Concepts in Literary Studies. Towards Criteria for the Meeting of Literature and Cognitive Science,” in Cognitive Literary Science. Dialogues between Literature and Cognition, ed. Michael Burke and Emily T. Troscianko (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 22. 4 Ralf Schneider and Marcus Hartner, eds., Blending and the Study of Narrative: Approaches and Applications (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2012). 5 Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2006). 6 Alan Palmer, Social Minds in the Novel (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2010). 7 Ellen Spolsky, Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). 8 Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 9 Roger J. Kreuz and Mary Sue MacNealy, eds., Empirical Approaches to Literature and Aesthetics (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1996).

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volume coordinated by Zunshine,1 the common thread is the contributors’ commitment to a variety of theoretical paradigms. They are open to unexpected approaches, perceived as irrelevant to cognitive inquiry a decade ago. For instance, cognitive disability studies spearheaded by Ralph James Savarese radically revises our view of autism2 as a debilitating condition known to prevent autists from comprehending figurative language. He demonstrates instead that they possess enormous sensitivity to poetic expression. This type of research shows how literature is able to offer benefits back to cognitive science and contribute to cognitive-scientific debates. The ground-breaking research in cognitive postcolonial studies3 and cognitive queer studies4 opens other new theoretical perspectives and offers new models for literary studies. Yet in the process of exploring the vast volume of research that treats the goals of literary, linguistic, and cognitive studies as possibly overlapping or even shared, I aim to apply the advances of cognitive poetics5 to literary reading. Freeman6 contends that this new field in literary analysis focuses on general cognitive processes of comprehension. This enables us to discover mental operations happening below the level of conscious awareness. Stockwell emphasizes that such natural phenomena do not appear when one engages in acts of interpretation but rather both in individual readings and in those shared by a group or a community: 1

Zunshine, Cognitive Literary Studies. Ralph James Savarese, “What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry. A Neurocosmopolitan Approach,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 394–417. 3 Patrick Colm Hogan, “The Psychology of Colonialism and Postcolonialism. Cognitive Approaches to Identity and Empathy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 329–346; Suzanne Keen, “Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion. Postcolonial Fiction,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 347–365. 4 Keith J. Vincent, “Sex on the Mind: Queer Theory Meets Cognitive Theory,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 199–221. 5 Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen, eds., Cognitive Poetics in Practice (London/New York: Routledge, 2003). See also: Peter Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002); Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper, Cognitive Stylistics. Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2002). 6 Margaret H. Freeman, “Cognitive Mapping in Literary Analysis,” Style 36, no. 3 (2002): 466–483. 2

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Introduction

“cognitive poetics offers a means of discussing interpretation whether it is an authorly version of the world or a readerly account, and how those interpretations are made manifest in textuality. In this sense, cognitive poetics is not simply a shift in emphasis but is a radical re-evaluation of the whole process of literary activity.”1 Literary theorists are therefore able to explain readings with reference to general cognitive processes and linguistic dimensions. Viewed as a form of everyday experience, literature can be understood on the basis of our knowledge of the world that arises from our embodied interaction with our surroundings. This is also one of the basic tenets of cognitive linguists, who “assume a close connection between experience, cognition, and language,” as Gavins and Steen explain.2 While cognitive poetics receives cognitive input through linguistics, it is also connected to other research branches, in particular psychology and psycholinguistics. Since a cognitive poetic analysis offers the opportunity to dive into a detailed awareness of otherwise barely noticeable mental processes, I believe it has advantages when rethinking the reception of short fiction. Before I explain why I have chosen Ernest Hemingway’s modernist short stories for analysis, I first need to clarify why I focus on short fiction. I argue that short stories can best be used for explanatory purposes in cognitive poetics. They provide good illustrations of cognitive operations required for building mental representations. How readers are able to arrive at perceived meanings is still largely a mystery and a matter of pure speculation in short story theory. The narrative mystery is even seen as a generic factor, which led Eudora Welty3 to conclude that “every good story has mystery—not the puzzle kind, but the mystery of allurement. As we understand the story better, it is likely that the mystery does not necessarily decrease; rather it simply grows more beautiful.” In his approach to the modernist short story, Head4 explains that critics have taken refuge in theories of mystery and uncertainty for lack of a better critical approach to deal with ambiguity, paradox, and ellipsis, three fundamental properties of the modernist short story. He goes on to argue that these prevailing features generate a great deal of disunifying effects, contrary to the esthetic unity that critics generally seek to attain. His thesis focuses on “the cultivated disunity of the modernist story,” rarely observed in discussions of short fiction. He points 1

Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics, 5. Gavins and Steen, Cognitive Poetics in Practice, 9. 3 Eudora Welty, “The Reading and Writing of Short Stories,” Atlantic Monthly 183 (1949): 46–49. 4 Dominic Head, The Modernist Short Story. A Study in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 2

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out that this approach “should lead us away from the search for a unifying authorial presence, and towards a focus on the historical gaps and conflicts in a text, […] [which] inevitably result in an uneven textual surface.”1 Even though such formal disruptions are often recognized, existing short story theories have not discussed them adequately. In line with Head’s argument, I stress that a rigorous language is required to theorize the hidden parts of the short text. Basically, this involves intense acts of imagination on the reader’s part. They need to transcend intentional absences, cope with fragmentary messages, and compact brevity. All of this means that readers are affected subliminally while their imaginative powers and cognitive abilities are stretched to their limits. It follows, therefore, that the problem of gaps and silences in the story should not be deemed as “mysterious” but accounted for by means of a new esthetic theory. This premise is tested in this book. The chapters that follow are a practical investigation of cognitive poetic principles demonstrated in the work of Ernest Hemingway. His short stories serve as an extended example to substantiate my argument. In fact, I have selected him as my subject because critics have never ceased to offer him attention. Starting with Philip Young’s initial studies2 up until the 1980s, critics offered readers the image of a hypermasculine writer. That was a relatively stable critical filter that stressed his uncompromised masculinity and his code of heroes. However, in the late ‘70s, Fetterley3 condemned the masculine comportment in Hemingway’s texts as homophobic and misogynistic. With the posthumous publication of The Garden of Eden in 1986 and the release of Lynn’s revisionary biography,4 the critical consensus was challenged again in the sense that critics began to address the complications in the author’s life. Another turning point in the critical reception was the publication of his collected letters that disclosed some of his life choices and motivations regarding the characters of his fiction. The decades following the volume The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays,5 published in 1975, have seen a growth in Hemingway short story criticism. The 1990 New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of

1

Head, The Modernist Short Story, 20. Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway (New York: Rinehart, 1952); Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966). 3 Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). 4 Kenneth S. Lynn, Hemingway (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 5 Jackson J. Benson, ed., The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975). 2

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Ernest Hemingway1 attests to the elation of Hemingway’s status and also the improvement in the quality of what had already seemed to be repetitive, sterile criticism in the 1970s. In the new critical climate, scholars have turned their attention to new methodologies and possibilities, questioning long-accepted tenets in Hemingway criticism. For instance, the critical heritage is revalued in the very recent volume edited by Moddelmog and Gizzo,2 which considers the various contexts that informed the author’s life and writing. Throughout the decades, scholars have combined traditional avenues with newer approaches, but very little has been done about what the most natural perspective may be for most of Hemingway’s readers. In particular, Hemingway criticism has failed to explain the emotional undercurrent of his short literary works or how readers build and engage with the text. However, I argue that with the benefit of recent discoveries in cognitive sciences, we are able to infer how textual perceptions creep up on the reader’s mind. Among the very few applications of cognitive poetics to Hemingway’s fiction, Semino’s3 “Possible Worlds and Mental Spaces in Hemingway’s ‘A Very Short Story’” develops a cognitive framework of mental space theory4 to deepen the understanding of Hemingway’s text. Mental spaces are formed by means of linguistic features and the reader’s knowledge of the world, which help Semino offer a plausible picture of the narrative worlds processed by readers. In a similar vein, the methodological framework in this book relies primarily on the theory of mental space, arguing that all thought, in both its actual and fictional forms, manifests itself by activating mental spaces and cross-mappings between them. However, in my research direction, emphasis falls on the mental life of the created figures as I draw on hypotheses raised by recent research about the transparency of fictional minds. According to Palmer,5 they become visible in overt actions and behaviors, providing thus transparent access to hidden states of mind. I 1

Jackson J. Benson, ed., New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990). 2 Debra A. Moddelmog and Suzanne del Gizzo, Ernest Hemingway in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 3 Elena Semino, “Possible Worlds and Mental Spaces in Hemingway’s ‘A Very Short Story,’” in Cognitive Poetics in Practice, eds. Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen (London/New York: Routledge, 2003), 83–98. 4 Gilles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also: Gilles Fauconnier. “Mental Spaces,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, eds. Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 353–376. 5 Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).

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therefore examine the mind in action of Hemingway’s characters to prove that there is a degree of transparency even in the case of very opaque minds. The extension of this argument also has evident benefits for the study of actual minds, as recognized by Bernini: “fiction gives access to multiple internal opacities and to the interpretive nature of cognition.”1 In Hemingway’s simple, unadorned stories, in which plot is deemphasized and esthetic effects result from calculated repetition and sparse dialogue, there is little description to reveal the depth of the characters’ thinking. So, an investigation of the mental spaces created by their wishes, dreams, unrealized hypotheses, and alternatives that are considered but never actualized can disclose the emotional core of the story. The other theory that called my attention to insights from cognitive poetics is conceptual integration,2 which promises to shed new light on “the way we think,” the title of Fauconnier and Turner’s 2002 seminal study. In the 1990s, the two scholars3 launched a joint project meant to offer an even more convincing view of how the mind is able to set up blended mental spaces from where new meanings emerge. They examine the rapid connections established between conflicting mental spaces that run counter to the present story. Exposed to such potentially distracting information, we still remain unconfused. Turner summarizes the force of this extraordinary feat of imagination as follows: “Running multiple mental spaces, or, more generally, multiple constellated networks of mental spaces, 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.”4 Turner’s arguments guide my analysis and help me indicate how blended mental spaces are conceptualized in literature. In particular, Hemingway’s stories will be used as case studies 1

Marco Bernini, “The Opacity of Fictional Minds: Transparency, Interpretative Cognition and the Exceptionality Thesis,” in The Cognitive Humanities. Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture, ed. Peter Garratt (Durham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 51. 2 Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language; Mark Turner, “Conceptual Blending and Counterfactual Argument in the Social and Behavioral Sciences,” Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives, eds. Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 291–295. 3 Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think. Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002). See also: Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, “Conceptual Integration Networks,” Cognitive Science 22, no. 2 (1998): 133–187. 4 Mark Turner, “Conceptual Integration,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, eds. Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 378.

12

Introduction

underlining that literary texts engage the mind in advanced mental work. One illuminating example is the capacity for conceptual integration. Hemingway’s characters are adept at creating mental alternatives that are rapidly blended with other scenarios prompted by actual storyworlds. In sum, they have the extraordinary capacity to operate mentally on the unreal, to run simultaneous mental scenarios, and to perform off-line cognitive simulations. The analyses that follow hold that virtual worlds, produced by characters or narrators and acknowledged by readers, far outnumber the worlds prompted by the factual narrative. Readers must therefore ignite their cognitive abilities that are essential for dealing with virtuality and counterfactuality. I hold that it is here that the knot of cognitive interpretation lies. This argument will be supportive for advancing a model of reading Hemingway’s short stories. I will test this theoretical hypothesis within the framework suggested below. Cognitive scientists have addressed the notion of counterfactual thinking in conjunction with the theory of conceptual integration. Turner’s Conceptual Blending and Counterfactual Argument in Social and Behavioral Sciences1 and Fauconnier and Turner’s The Way We Think are two examples of outstanding research on the implications of counterfactual thinking in diverse areas, such as social and behavioral sciences. In outlining their hypotheses, they have shown that examples of counterfactuals may appear in more common examples, such as the “if/then” conditional form, but they may also take less visible or indirectly stated forms. Narratologist Gerald Prince’s famous notion of the “disnarrated”2 describes counterfactuals as articulated in hypothetical modes. Notable examples may include “all the events that do not happen” but which “are nonetheless referred to (in a negative or hypothetical mode) by the narrative text.” In a similar vein, the concept of “hypothetical focalization” developed by cognitive narratologist David Herman3 rethinks the nature of narrative. He explains that “hypothetical focalization, or HF, is the formal marker of a peculiar epistemic modality, in which […] the expressed world counterfactualizes or virtualizes the reference world of the text.”4 Also of special relevance here is Marie-Laure 1

Turner, “Conceptual Blending,” 291–295. Gerald Prince, “The Disnarrated,” Style 22, no. 1 (1988): 1–8. 3 Notable contributions to the field of cognitive narratology are: David Herman, Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Karin Kukkonen, “Navigating Infinite Earths: Readers, Mental Models, and the Multiverse of Superhero Comics,” StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 2 (2010): 35–58. 4 Herman, Story Logic, 310. 2

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Ryan’s theory of possible worlds,1 which refers to the private and virtual worlds of the characters, which are embedded in the narratorial construction. It is perhaps Hilary Dannenberg’s ground-breaking study2 on counterfactuality that gives the most informed demonstration of how the novel has evolved over time by following the main plot patterns of coincidence and counterfactuality in alternation and at crucial moments. With the insight from the abovementioned studies on counterfactuality and possible worlds, this volume focuses on less visible mental scenarios prompted by imaginative counterfactuals and hypothetical states. This line of inquiry explains the intense mental activity in the reader who is only guided by Hemingway narrators weary of subjective responses and uninterested in rendering sensations. Instead, the emphasis lies on objective details producing these emotions. This allows readers to infer the suggested emotion and recreate what Cather calls “the inexplicable presence of the thing not named.”3 In his study Art Matters, Robert Lamb contends that the representation of the world is so intense in Hemingway that it virtually creates the emotion. The technique of “intensifying the world” is then recognized as vital to his esthetics.4 Even though emotions are omitted or not expressed directly and metaphors are overtly rejected, one can still grasp the emotional suggestiveness. Lamb explains that this depends on two factors: “the reader’s sensitivity” and “the degree of their imaginative and sympathetic involvement in the story.”5 This book examines the sources of the reader’s imaginative involvement in a number of short stories that deal with the physical reality of journeys, with movement and mobility. The characters begin on straight roads but seldom fail to reach the destination as the routes multiply. This not only requires a different kind of motion but, invariably, a new locus of the mind. Here is the switch from the physical landscape to the mental terrain of counterfactuality that has already been introduced above. The idea of roads that have not been taken translates into mental possibilities that may never be actualized. My demonstration is

1

Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 2 Hillary P. Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality. Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction (Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). 3 Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé,” (1922) in Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, and Other Writings, ed. Sharon O’Brien (New York: Library of America, 1987), 834– 837. 4 Robert Paul Lamb, Art Matters. Hemingway, Craft and the Creation of the Modern Short Story (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 70. 5 Lamb, Art Matters, 72.

14

Introduction

based on the theory of conceptual metaphor.1 For instance, the metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY helps me discover the intricate mental connections emerging from mappings between the domain of life and the inferential structures associated with journeys. In the end, this endeavor is meant to conceptualize suppressed emotional turmoil, something that Hemingway readers only used to feel viscerally. As we shall see, the structure of this volume reflects its multiple goals. They are all united, however, by my interest in exploring the mental processes accompanying the production of meaning in short fiction—in particular, the meaning emerging from non-obvious cognitive activity. The first two chapters present the theoretical foundations. They contextualize the ensuing discussion and investigate the possibilities of dialog between various fields of cognitive science. It shows that the cognitive framework is open to multiple perspectives. In this sense, Chapter 1 offers an outline of the significant developments generated by the cognitive revolution that helped establish the grounds of an empirically-based new science of cognition. This chapter gives a clear sense of the intellectual forays preceding the establishment of cognitive science in the mid-1950s. Chapter 2 briefly introduces two relevant sub-disciplines: cognitive poetics and narratology. While the research methods and terminology employed are more indebted to cognitive poetics, I am aware that in this field, research must cross the borders of other disciplines. This section further explores the embodied mind approach to literary studies alongside reading practices in the cognitive age. In the remainder of the chapter, I seek to narrow down the focus by addressing short fiction directly. Chapter 3 further investigates relevant practices and theory in short fiction reading, using Hemingway’s exemplary short stories as illustrations. The largely theoretical considerations ought to be taken as points of departure for a more applied approach to the American short fiction writer. Chapter 3 also introduces the concept of counterfactual thinking and its relevance in short fiction reading practices. Chapters 4 and 5 explore methodological approaches that can be applied to literary investigations. They provide a cognitive analysis of narrative time and space as elements that may affect the framing of conflict in the narrative structure, produced on the virtual terrain of narrative possibilities. Chapter 5 outlines new directions in the study of fictional minds. By the end of this 1

In 1980, Lakoff and Johnson started research on the conceptual basis of the metaphor. Other notable related contributions to the study of conceptual metaphors are: Peter Crisps, “Conceptual Metaphors and its Expressions,” in Cognitive Poetics in Practice, eds. Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen (London/New York: Routledge, 2003), 99–113; Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., The Poetics of Mind. Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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book, I aim to have given a sense of the immediate positive implications of a closer exploratory relationship between literary studies and cognitive research. This reinforces the idea that can only be a sizeable advantage for both in “an age in which the key intellectual goal is not to celebrate the imagination but to make a science of it.”1

1

Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 89.

CHAPTER ONE COGNITIVE SCIENCES COME TOGETHER

1.1 Mind, body, and cognition This chapter provides a brief introduction to the major findings and tenets of cognitive sciences with a view to applying them to literary studies. It grounds them in a cognitive approach to advance new perspectives on the cognitive-literary dialog. As I indicated in the introductory chapter, more and more scholars are adhering to the disciplinary boundaries, seeking new research opportunities in emergent areas of scientific inquiry. Despite irrefutable differences, there are many recurrent methods and principles in the cognitive-literary field. Scholars draw on these research commonalities to offer new viewpoints on literature and, in particular, literary reading. In practice, their concerted efforts concretized in 2013 when the term “cognitive literary studies” (CLS) was coined.1 Some of the major topics addressed in CLS are embodiment, emotion and empathy, immersion, mental imagery, simulation, enactive perception, and so forth. While this current work does not seem to be particularly unified, there is a consistent interest in reading as a cognitive act. In this context, Burke and Troscianko outline the general guidelines for CLS: “(1) brain structures and neurological processes, (2) mental states and mental processes, and (3) literature as a social and cultural phenomenon.”2 This idea of literature as culture and as a component of the mind adds a new level of analysis to cognitive science. Before developing the contribution of literary scholars working with cognitive science, an overview of the tenets of the founders of cognitive science is necessary. For one thing, practitioners cover a wide range of distinct disciplines: psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology, and artificial intelligence (AI). Given this high number of individual theoretical agendas, it may often have been difficult to reach a perfectly cohesive view on cognitive science. This interdisciplinarity may explain why scholars prefer the phrase “cognitive sciences.” Despite potential 1 2

Burke and Troscianko, Cognitive Literary Science, 4–5. Burke and Troscianko, Cognitive Literary Science, 25.

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irregularities and the lack of a universally accepted definition, most of the key topics researched by cognitive theoreticians have fallen under one broad category: the nature of the mind, the mind-body problem, and the interaction between the human mind and the physical world. The thinking mind and its place in nature have always intrigued humankind in general and intellectuals in particular since Aristotle. In our daily lives, we struggle to understand how our individual brains work, how they react to the environment, and how they condition our creative processes. We often feel intrigued by situations in which the rapid connections between mental powers and brain activity seem impossible to perceive. The work performed by machines mimicking the mind’s inner workings can be equally puzzling. Sometimes we may ask whether only the human being can have a mind or whether machines can too. Can they think? How are we able to perceive the surrounding world or, in cases of mental illnesses, is there something wrong with the brain or with the mind? Such intriguing questions about our complex mental capacities have been systematically posed by cognitive scientists. In light of these existential queries, this chapter offers an overview of major theoretical threads relevant to “the mind’s new science,” as phrased by Garden in his eponymous study.1 This intellectual endeavor invites us to reconsider the very nature of the mind and its relation to our physical bodies. Over the last three centuries, philosophy has attempted to answer two fundamental questions relating to one’s existence: What are minds? How does the mind relate and interconnect with the body? In this context, this chapter introduces a brief discussion of the traditional mind-body relation, arguing against a dualistic view. The doctrine of dualism goes back to René Descartes. A Cartesian perspective holds that human beings are distinct from their bodies, meaning that the mind lacks any physical characteristics and should be seen as a purely immaterial substance. In Cartesian dualism, individuals are subjected to this flow of immaterial substance, which enables them to engage in a number of mental states lacking any visible physical characteristics. It is only in the mind that thoughts and feelings manifest themselves, but not in bodies or brains. Bodies and minds are seen as distinct substances: bodies are material substances that are able to develop the attribute of extension in space, whereas minds cannot take the form of material substances, which gives them the contrasting attribute of thought. Dualism purports that bodies alone are incapable of thought creation and processes and are exclusively determined by a set of mechanical laws, and thus incapable of producing any intelligent activity. This line of 1

Howard Gardner, The Mind’s New Science. A History of the Cognitive Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

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Chapter One

inquiry goes as far as to claim that minds can exist without the physical shape of a body and are able to exist even in a disembodied state. Clearly, the view has elicited a series of inevitable objections, such as the possibility that the mental and physical substances, while displaying radically different properties, may mutually effect some degree of influence one upon the other. On this issue, questions are raised, for instance, by Heil: “But if minds and bodies are utterly different kinds of substance, it is hard to see how such causal interaction could occur. Minds or selves […] are immaterial thinking but unextended substances. Material bodies, in contrast, are extended but unthinking. How could entities of such wholly different kinds affect one another causally? How could an event in an immaterial mind bring about a material effect? How could a physical event beget a change in an immaterial mind?”1 The fundamental Cartesian thesis was rendered implausible by empirical evidence, such as reports of out-of-body experiences where individuals claim they are able to float away and see themselves out of their physical shells. Strange as they may appear, such abnormal or disputable experiences where individuals seem to be enjoying a state of disembodiment have been put down as resulting from sheer transitory hallucinations, however. Similar reports of attempts to travel in time or reimagining past events differently are also less solid evidence than is necessary to prove that the past can be directly changed. Such acts of sheer imagination are insufficiently reliable to conclude that human beings are able to live outside of the human body.2 Dissatisfied with the tenets of the dualist theory, behaviorist philosophers3 refocused their research questions in the empirical field, where philosophical investigation stemmed from observing behavioral manifestations. They did not wish to address the challenges of introspection and insight into mental operations as mental activity was considered unreliable from a scientific standpoint. It was regarded as unable to explain behavior and predict human acts. In essence, scholars such as Ivan Pavlov, B. F. Skinner, E. L. Thorndike, and John B. Watson advance the claim that it is only the analysis of overt behavior in both verbal and non-verbal forms that can lead to serious 1 John Heil, Philosophy of Mind. A Contemporary Introduction (New York/London: Routledge, 2004), 22–23. 2 Jonathan Lowe, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 12. 3 See, for instance, the work of the behaviorist psychologists, such as: Clark L. Hull, “The Conflicting Psychologies of Learning – Away out,” Psychological Review 42 (1935): 491–516; B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1953); Edward L. Thorndike, Human Learning (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1931).

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research outcomes. They argue that thoroughly controlled environments and objective observations of manifested behavior can collectively answer questions about the workings of our mental life. In his seminal article “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” American psychologist John B. Watson established the principles of behaviorism, as follows: Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist’s total scheme of investigation.1

At the heart of Watson’s manifesto is the idea that the science of behavior ought to avoid such complex topics as mental representation, thought processing, and mental constructs. As behaviorists argue that the essence of our human cognitive activity is impossible to explain, they turn their attention to the nature of the environment, which behaviorism believes to be superior to the “mysterious” mental life. Behaviorist scientists then turn to samples of hardly decipherable mental activity by using the language of observable behavior. According to the behaviorist view, Lowe stresses that “the only evidence on whose basis attitudinal and other mental states can be ascribed to subjects is behavioural evidence, that is, publicly available evidence of how people behave in various circumstances.”2 Both psychological and philosophical behaviorism reject the view that external acts emerge from internal mental states. The difference between the two doctrines is that the former is based on empirical research, whereas the latter seeks to define the nature of the mind and the origins of mental states. In Bechtel’s words, “philosophical behaviorism is primarily concerned with the semantics of our common mentalistic vocabulary. It seeks to explain the meaning of mental terms like belief without having to treat them as referring to some mental substance. The goal is to translate terms that purport to refer to mental activity into terms that speak only of behaviors or propensities to behave in certain ways.”3 1 John B. Watson, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” Psychological Review 22, no. 2 (1913): 2. 2 Lowe, Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, 44. 3 William Bechtel, Philosophy of Mind. An Overview for Cognitive Science (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1988), 89.

20

Chapter One

What the discipline of philosophical behaviorism was significantly successful in addressing was assembling a mental vocabulary designed to describe behavior. According to philosopher Gilbert Ryle,1 our mental vocabulary needs to be “reduced” in order to provide an accurate description of behavior, which the philosopher calls “propensities to behave” in certain ways. His guiding idea is that the set of mental idioms we own accurately reflect our mental dispositions to act in particular ways. Ryle illustrates this with the following example: if we believe it is likely to rain, then we are disposed to a series of behavior propensities, such as to change our plans for a picnic, carry an umbrella, stay indoors, etc. Such positions as the one given in the previous example are debatable, however, on the basis that philosophical behaviorists can be seen to account for a reductive analysis of mental states. Many of our mental states and beliefs manifest in other forms, not only in and through overt behavior. A dispositional analysis further avoids addressing the uncertainty over the existence of potentially unlimited behavioral actions or dispositions to behave, all of which are dependent on a wide variety of contextual circumstances. Lowe2 argues that it is therefore difficult to anticipate the exact type of attitude that might be generated by a particular mental activity. This may not always happen despite the presence of the same mental state, which may not generate a similar behavior on that particular occasion since individual beliefs or desires may slightly affect the situation. In his own words: “So we see that there can in fact be no such thing as behaviour that is uniquely characteristic of someone who possesses an attitudinal state with a given propositional content or a sensational state of a certain type. And consequently it is impossible to explain what it means for someone to possess such a state in terms of his or her supposed behavioural dispositions.”3 In the early 1950s, a shift in the paradigm appeared that resisted reducing the analysis of mental activity to mere observable behavior. In 1959, Noam Chomsky4 published “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” in which he reconsidered the aims of psychology and the theory of mental processes and stated that their object of study was similar and should be shared. He then showed that Skinner’s behaviorist model of learning was largely inadequate on the basis that Skinner had attempted to explain linguistic behavior by exploring the same stimulus-response theory and by 1

Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Routledge, 2009 [1949]). Lowe, Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, 43–44. 3 Lowe, Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, 44. 4 Noam Chomsky, “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” in Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, ed. Ned Block (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980 [1959]), 48–64. 2

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placing special emphasis on overt behavior. Chomsky1 deemed Skinner’s lines of argument fundamentally flawed and argued that our linguistic choices cannot be objective representations of the external world but are instead accurate mirrorings of the structure of our individual mind, which forms the basis of his original “mentalistic” linguistic theory. To achieve this, Chomsky’s explicit goal was to call attention to particular mental areas, such as that of language, that normally operate with a set of clear rules and principles. According to his theory, at some deep level of understanding, speakers possess a set of rules and principles that are known intuitively. Due to his ambitious goals, Chomsky’s body of works is more than a linguistic contribution, in that it shows that the study of language is able to provide a viable model for how to study the mind and other additional mental processes. In fact, his main contribution lies in assembling the principles of modern linguistics and new cognitive sciences that were about to revive interest in the intricate dimensions of the mind and its complex structures. This brief overview of Chomsky’s work can only scratch at the surface of this complex scientific territory, but it nevertheless gives a sense of the several interdisciplinary lines of inquiry that preceded the official birth of cognitive science in the mid-1950s. Its origins can be found in the fundamental questions first posed by classical philosophy, later investigated in depth by theorists with a cognitive reorientation in the early 20th century, and brought to prominence toward the end of the last century. One of the significant moments was in September 1948 when the California Institute of Technology organized a conference to prompt discussions on how the nervous system can influence behavior. On this occasion, psychologist Karl Lashley2 presented a seminal paper entitled “The Problem of Serial Order in Behavior,” later published in 1951. This study challenged the traditional principles of psychology and set a new agenda for research in cognition by confronting the assertions of the then popular associative chains between stimuli and responses, used to explain thought production in linear terms. Lashley clearly expressed his dissatisfaction with these linear chains, which he found unable to explain rapidly unfolding sequences of events as they give but very little time for feedback and reflection on the preceding events. For instance, in the case of someone playing an arpeggio, the tones succeed one another with such rapidity that it is almost impossible to reflect on one particular preceding tone,3 making it impossible to explain them by referring to the surrounding stimuli present in the environment, as 1

Chomsky, “A Review.” Karl S Lashley, “The Problem of Serial Order in Behavior,” in Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, ed. L. A. Jeffress (New York: Wiley, 1951), 112–131. 3 Gardner, The Mind’s New Science, 12–13. 2

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Chapter One

behaviorists state. This is why Lashley maintains that behavior sequences have to be systematically organized in advance in the form of overarching structures present in the nervous system. At that historical moment, Lashley’s theory was revolutionary: brain processes determine subsequent patterns of behavior and dictate how behavior will manifest in its environment. Thus, his new theory challenged the theoretical framework of behaviorism and the idea of the authoritative influence of external behavior over mental processes and representations. The research questions addressed by scientists in the early 20th century focused on the exploration of mental states using increasingly intensive scientific methods to identify the underlying motivations and determinants of behaviors. This new theory of mentalism,1 in direct contrast to the claims of behaviorism, no longer took mental activity for granted but investigated the role of mental states and processes as the cause of visible patterns of behavior. Another major philosophical position on the mind-body relation, which was expected to be scientifically relevant for cognitive sciences, appeared in the 1950s in the form of materialism which recognized the existence and importance of internal mental states. The identity theory, seen as a strand of materialism, held the view that mental states can be identical to physical brain properties. In the 1950s, this theory was extensively developed by U. T. Place2 and J. J. C. Smart3 in Australia and Herbert Feigl4 in the USA. These scholars suggested that mental vocabulary and physical idioms can actually refer to the same types of states, even though they may be markedly different. Not only do mental events correlate with brain processes, but they are nothing else but neurobiologic events. Accordingly, minds are both material entities (brains) and mental states, which may automatically give them the material properties of brains and the chemical composition of the nervous system. If identity theorists5 advanced the idea that mental states 1

William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981 [1890]); Jerry A. Fodor, The Language of Thought (New York: MIT Press, 1975). 2 Ullin T. Place, “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?” The British Journal of Psychology 47, no. 1 (1956): 44–50. 3 John J. C. Smart, “Sensations and Brain Processes,” Philosophical Review 68, no. 2 (1959): 141–156. 4 Herbert Feigl, The ‘Mental’ and the ‘Physical’: The Essay and a Postscript (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1958). 5 See, for instance, Davidson’s identity thesis: Donald Davidson, “Mental Events,” in Experience and Theory, eds. L. Foster and J. W. Swanson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 79–102.

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overlap with brain processes, many others objected1 to this thesis. Since mental and brain events are often experienced differently, it means that we may have “privileged” access only to our states of mind; we are limited in investigating the material states of our nervous system in an indirect way only. With these two notably asymmetrical types of access, the idea of a strict identity between mental and physical states becomes generally false, as argued by Heil: Your mental life is “private” in a way that no material object or state ever is. You are aware of your own states of mind and the qualities of your conscious experiences directly and without evidence or observation. I, in contrast, have access to your mental life, if at all, only indirectly. I infer your thoughts and feelings by observing your behavior, verbal or otherwise. Suppose I observe goings-on in your brain, and suppose these goings-on are reliable indicators of your mental condition. Then I am in an epistemologically strong position to know what you are thinking and feeling. Still, my access to your thoughts and feelings differs from yours. I must infer the character of what you experience “directly.”2

In defense of the identity theory, Smart3 was willing to accept the possibility that mental events could be different in kind, but he believes that they may eventually become brain events. He explains that most people are not acquainted with their brain processes or with their brain idioms but, on the other hand, they are familiar with their private mental states. In the end, Smart clarifies that the identity theory needs to be understood differently, away from pure folk understanding. He writes: “An illiterate peasant might well be able to talk about his sensations without knowing about his brain processes, just as he can talk about lightning though he knows nothing of electricity.”4 Another objection suggests that there are a number of properties that may be attributed either to mental events or to brain events, but not to both. This means, for instance, that mental events may lack spatial coordinates, which further indicates that an attempt to locate several mental events would fail and become meaningless. Shaffer holds that “so far as thoughts are concerned, it makes no sense to talk about a thought’s being located in some place or places in the body. If I report having suddenly thought something, the question where in my body that thought occurred 1

See, for instance, G. E. M. Anscombe’s skepticism on identity theory in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981). 2 Heil, Philosophy of Mind, 74. 3 Smart, “Sensations and Brain Processes.” 4 Smart, “Sensations and Brain Processes,” 147.

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Chapter One

would be utterly senseless.”1 At this stage, the worlds of philosophy and neuroscience became more polarized due to the continuous debates between identity theorists and their critics, who have been unable to reach common ground on this matter. This point is further discussed by Daniel Dennett as follows: The Identity Theory’s defining claim that mental events are not merely parallel to, coincide with, caused by, or accompaniments of brain events, but are (strictly identical with) brain events, divides people in a curious fashion. To some people it seems obviously true (though it may take a little fusing with details to get it properly expressed), and to others it seems just as obviously false. The former tend to view all attempts to resist the Identity Theory as motivated by an irrational fear of the advance of the physical sciences, a kind of humanistic hylephobia, while the latter tend to dismiss identity-theorists as blinded by misplaced science-worship to the manifest preposterousness of the identity claim.2

Despite identity theory’s controversial views, current work in cognitive sciences is strongly connected with its claims rather than those of philosophical behaviorism. It argues that mental states are accompanied by a sense of reality and a degree of physicality that make them a reliable object of study. Accordingly, mental events are equated with neurological events, and thus another thread of neuroscience theories is generated. Advocates of these theories3 appear to ignore cognitive phenomena altogether in order to explore neural processes more extensively. In this context, eliminative materialism places so much emphasis on neurological processes that the vocabulary necessary to describe mental states is replaced with a number of brain idioms. Among others, Churchland4 and Stich5 claim that intentional states, desires, intentions, and beliefs do not exist. They mean that thoughts 1

Jerome A. Shaffer, “Recent Work on the Mind-Body Problem,” American Philosophical Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1965): 97. 2 Daniel C. Dennett, “Current Issues in the Philosophy of Mind,” American Philosophical Quarterly 15, no. 4 (1978): 252. 3 Paul M. Churchland, “Some Reductive Strategies in Cognitive Neurobiology,” Mind 95, no. 379 (1986): 279–309. See also: Paul M. Churchland, “Reduction, Qualia, and the Direct Introspection of Brain States,” The Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 1 (1985): 8–28; Paul K. Feyerabend, “Materialism and the Mind-Body Problem,” The Review of Metaphysics, vol.17, no. 1 (1963): 49–67. 4 Paul M. Churchland, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Paul M. Churchland, “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes,” Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981): 67–90. 5 Steve Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983).

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and intentions are in fact an intricate network of complex neural mechanisms that need to be studied by scientific standards. This principle makes them skeptical about the platitudes of folk psychology, which Heil defines as “the commonsense theory of mind encoded in our language, enshrined in our social and legal institutions and refined in the social and behavioral sciences.”1 Beyond a relatively small nucleus of theorists, eliminativism has not enjoyed wider acceptance. McCauley2 concludes that it failed to demonstrate exactly how commonsense psychology can be replaced, or even eliminated, since without a mentalistic language, it would be impossible to handle everyday situations well. On the other hand, Heil3 argues that the eliminativist theory may be a worthwhile investigative tool as it is the natural extension of “the intentional stance,” as defined by Dennett.4 He sees it as the attribution of desires, beliefs, intentions, or reasons for actions belonging to any kind of system, whether this is a system of humans, minerals, plants, or artifacts. By “taking up the intentional stance,” predicting and making sense of behavior become easier. In Dennett’s words, “the point of the intentional stance is to treat an entity as an agent in order to predict its actions.”5 He further argues that mental phenomena are generally marked by a degree of intentionality, which makes it possible to describe mental processes as intentional systems. Humans and computer programs can both be described as agents whose purposeful behavior can be explained. Such entities supposedly behave as if they were rational agents, governed by well-defined propositional attributes. To the individual, taking up the intentional stance seems to be an unavoidable task. Our interactions with non-human entities usually take place after having identified a set of beliefs, intentions, or reasons for action. Dennett adds: “Adopting the intentional stance is not just a good idea but the key to unraveling the mysteries of the mind—all kinds of minds. It is a method that exploits similarities in order to discover differences—the huge collection of differences that have accumulated between the minds of our ancestors and ours, and also between our minds and those of our fellow inhabitants of the planet.”6

1

Heil, Philosophy of Mind, 168. Robert N. McCauley, “Intertheoretic Relations and the Future of Psychology,” Philosophy of Science 53, no. 2 (1986): 179–199. 3 Heil, Philosophy of Mind, 170. 4 Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds. Toward an Understanding of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1996). 5 Dennett, Kinds of Minds, 34. 6 Dennett, Kinds of Minds, 27. 2

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Another version of materialism (the token identity type) proves to be more compatible with the research in cognitive sciences, in that it addresses the philosophical mind-body relation in a similar way as the advocates of the cognitive paradigm. In the main, it makes the claim that every “token” of a mental state is in fact a “token” of a brain event, but also suggests that there are a few incompatibilities between internal mental events and neural events. Token identity theorists1 hold the view that while two individuals may be in the same mental state, they could still experience a different brain state. In their attempt to dissociate mental events from brain events, theorists have appealed to functionalist philosophical research. Most congenial to the primary aims of cognitive sciences, the philosophical program developed by functionalism holds that states of mind are realized by brain states without being identical with the latter.2 In light of the rising interest in computation in the 1950s and 1960s, functionalism was best placed to observe the implications of computational processes for a deeper and more accurate investigation of mental events. As computers replicate the workings of the human mind with a degree of precision, the advent of such sophisticated machines gave hope to scientists that it was just a matter of time until human cognitive processes were fully dissected. AI scientists have been designing and reviewing computational programs that are able to store and retrieve information, recognize patterns, or classify information in the same ways humans use their own “mental programs” and symbolic language to do the same and in the same way. Computing machines were designed to be able to perform the same cognitive tasks as the ones conducted by humans. This means that, for instance, identical computational processes can appear in a range of artificially constructed mechanisms, in spite of their being built with different types of material compositions. As symbol processors, machines can show therefore that thinking can now be replicated by artificial devices made of transistors and vacuum tubes rather than nerves and tissues. Heil concludes pointedly: “Every program is ‘embodied,’ perhaps, in some material device or other. But the very same program can run on very different sorts of material device. In the same vein, we might suppose that every mind has some material embodiment, although minds may have very different kinds of material embodiment.”3 In fact, the 1

See Jaegwon Kim, “On the Psycho-Physical Identity Theory,” American Philosophical Quarterly 3 (1966): 227–235; Donald Davidson, “Mental Events,” in Essays on Actions & Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 205–227. 2 See D. H. Armstrong, “A Materialist Theory of the Mind,” Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 74 (1969): 73–79; David K. Lewis, “An Argument for the Identity Theory,” The Journal of Philosophy 63, no. 1 (1966): 17–25. 3 Heil, Philosophy of Mind, 88.

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idea of “multiple realizability” is central to the functionalist theory. As shown above, it indicates that one mental property can be realized by other properties in a different entity. American philosopher Hilary Putnam1 was among the first scholars to take an interest in computational operations and their relevance to the understanding of human thought processes. He strengthened the idea that mental events can be realized in different physical media, a theory further developed by Jerry Fodor,2 who added that the functioning of a system depended on its software rather than on its hardware. This led to cognitive sciences embracing the information-processing approach and viewing the mind as a computational device able to manipulate symbols and perform cognitive operations. However, this new mental computational analysis theory seemed to be rather unsatisfactory, since it appeared to restrict the complexity of the human mind to nothing else than a set of machine-like processes, as argued by Neisser: “None of [these programs] does even remote justice to the complexity of human mental processes. Unlike men, ‘artificially intelligent’ programs tend to be single minded, undistractable, and unemotional.”3 Early cognitive theories in AI arguing that machines can think and use humanlike cognitive processes advanced a limited model of the mind and failed to account for the complex ways in which human beings think and reason in the world. Criticism prompted AI scientists to refine and develop their first programs able to manipulate symbols in finite systems into more complex ones. Later, more advanced digital computers tried to simulate the intricate architecture of the mind, but their artificial neural systems often failed to replicate the immense diversity of living neural connectivity accurately. In the end, the point is not to claim that human beings are nothing else than mechanical robots but rather to show that the type of mindbody relation may be analogous to the relation computer programs have with the physical device in which they are designed to run. This analogy4 representing minds as computers advanced another research objective aimed at discovering the representational capacities of the mind. Taking the computer machine analogy further, we note that the mind works on two levels: the “hardware” level and the “software” level. Likewise, in computer devices, the hardware shows how the device is programmed and the 1

Hilary Putnam, “Meaning and Reference,” Journal of Philosophy 70, no. 19 (1973): 609–711. 2 Jerry A. Fodor, “Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis),” Synthese 28, no. 2 (1974): 97–115. 3 Ulric Neisser, Cognitive Psychology (New York: Psychology Press), 9. 4 Heil, Philosophy of Mind, 92–97.

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software shows how it operates. By analogy, neuroscientists aim to explore the human brain in conjunction with the nervous system in order to offer plausible explanations on the workings of the “hardware,” while psychologists examine the “software.” In sum, the appeal of AI systems lies largely in the promise to help us understand “mind as machine.”1 Computational concepts have possibly sharpened philosophical views2 and enabled scientists to implement their ideas in more scientific and rigorous ways, as supported by Gardner: In addition to serving as a model of human thought, the computer also serves as a valuable tool to cognitive scientific work: most cognitive scientists use it to analyze their data, and an increasing number attempt to simulate cognitive processes on it. Indeed, artificial intelligence, the science built around computer simulation, is considered by many the central discipline in cognitive science and the one most likely to crowd out, or render superfluous, other older fields of study.3

In this sense, the study of “mind as machine” is an empirically based effort to show how the human mind functions. Key findings on the nervous system, breakthroughs in cognitive psychology and in artificial intelligence, and tools from logics and mathematics have all created a new and complex pathway for cognitive sciences, as they build on the interest in the computational and representational capacity of the mind. Cognitive scientists do not take mental activity for granted but carefully analyze the representational level of the mind, paying detailed attention to such representational entities as symbols, image schemas, frames, scripts, or mental models. Gardner adds that “the major accomplishment of cognitive science has been the clear demonstration of the validity of positing a level of mental representation: a set of constructs that can be invoked for the explanation of cognitive phenomena, ranging from visual perception to story comprehension.”4 Such theoretical reflections on the nature of mind and its place in nature truly speak with more than one voice but need to be

1

Margaret A. Boden, Mind as Machine. A History of Cognitive Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 2 Reference is made to the focus on the formation and representation of mental events, as shown in D. M. Armstrong, The Nature of Mind and Other Essays (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980) and Lewis, “An Argument for the Identity Theory.” 3 Gardner, The Mind’s New Science, 40. 4 Gardner, The Mind’s New Science, 383.

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regarded as a unifying intellectual enterprise developed prior to the launching of “the mind’s new science.”1

1.2 The turn to embodied cognition This section continues to explore “the cognitive commitment” as proposed by Lakoff2 in 1990. It refers to a number of generally accepted assumptions in cognitive theories. Firstly, it claims that the relationship between language, mind, and experience is complemented by what is empirically known about minds and brains from other disciplines. This explains the theoretical incursion in the evolution of cognitive science outlined in the previous sub-chapter and also the overall highly interdisciplinary nature of this book. Secondly, the commitment maintains that cognitive concepts are engaged in constant dialog with the external world of sensory experience. In other words, an exploration of the type of interaction with the world is in fact an attempt at comprehending the inner organization of one’s conceptual patterns. The idea of embodiment3 mentioned above provides a solid theoretical framework for cognitive theorists, in particular for linguists. The thesis of “embodied cognition” maintains that both the human mind and the conceptual system are “functions” emerging from the interaction between individuals and the world they inhabit. Placed at the heart of everyday experiences, the human body, with its distinct cognitive structure, appears to visibly impact how individuals perceive the nature of personal experiences. This automatically implies that the discovery of one’s unique physical body, endowed with natural biologic scaffolding, can pave the way toward a deeper understanding of embodied experiences and subsequently to a refined understanding of human cognition. The idea of the thinking mind as suffused by the body argues against the default conceptions of body and brain and invites an inquiry into conceptual thought and language processes. According to the notion of the mind as embodied, the cognitive theory of embodiment4 holds that our conceptual categories and structures

1

Gardner, The Mind’s New Science. George Lakoff, “The Invariance Hypothesis: Is Abstract Reason Based on ImageSchemas?” Cognitive Linguistics 1, no. 1 (1990): 39–74. 3 See, for instance, Tim Rohrer, “Embodiment and Experientialism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, eds. Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 25–47. 4 Johnson, Body in the Mind; George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2

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and all the other sense-making operations are mediated by bodily experiences, which means that they are constructed on the basis of experience and under the restraints imposed by our bodies. By addressing complex issues questioning one’s ability to create and comprehend meanings, cognitive linguistics has begun an investigation of the roots of human creativity. The body of research outlined below aims to prove that the ground-breaking developments reached by cognitive linguists can be applied to other neighboring areas of study and research concerned with the nature of language, regarded as a “product of general cognitive abilities.”1 In this context, cognitive theories of meaning formation2 have strengthened two major arguments: 1. Meanings are not “packaged” or “preencoded” in language; 2. they emerge out of our embodied and dynamic experience. In addition, this new approach to the formation of meanings reconsiders them as situational and contextualized. In this light, an important part of the available research is devoted to the study of the continuum between language and experience, namely how our conceptual patterns become reflected in the language we speak. This can be found in Fillmore’s research in frame semantics3 and his theory of construction grammar,4 Lakoff and Johnson’s joint project on conceptual metaphors,5 1987); Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh. 1 Antonio Barcelona and Javier Valenzuela, “An Overview of Cognitive Linguistics,” in Cognitive Linguistics. Convergence and Expansion, eds. Mario Brdar, Stefan Th. Gries, and Milena Žic Fuchs (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2011), 20. 2 Richard J. Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds. On the Psychological Activities of Reading (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998 [1993]); Catherine Emmott, Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999 [1997]). See also: Catherine Emmott, “Reading for Pleasure: A Cognitive Poetic Analysis of ‘Twists in the Tale’ and Other Plot Reversals in Narrative Texts,” in Cognitive Poetics in Practice, eds. Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen (London/New York: Routledge, 2003), 145–160; Catherine Emmott, Anthony J. Sanford and Eugene J. Dawydiak, “Stylistics Meets Cognitive Science: Studying Style in Fiction and Reader’s Attention from an Interdisciplinary Perspective,” Style 41, no. 2 (2007): 204–227; Herman, Story Logic. 3 Charles J. Fillmore, “Frame Semantics,” in Linguistics in the Morning Calm, ed. Linguistic Society of Korea (Seoul, Korea: Hanshin Publishing Company, 1982), 111–137. See also: Charles J. Fillmore, “Frames and the Semantics of Understanding,” Quaderni di Semantica 6, no. 2 (1985): 222–254. 4 Charles J. Fillmore, “The Mechanisms of ‘Construction Grammar’,” in Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, 13–15 February 1988, eds. Shelley Axmaker et al. (The Berkeley Linguistic Society, 1988), 35–55. 5 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.

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Lakoff’s1 and Fauconnier and Turner’s theories of conceptual integration,2 Turner and Fauconnier’s,3 Leonard Talmy’s,4 and Anna Wierzbicka’s5 theories of conceptual semantics, Ronald W. Langacker’s cognitive grammar,6 Lakoff’s7 problems of categorization, or Fauconnier’s study of mental spaces.8 The research conducted by cognitive linguistics outlined above will further support my investigation of how specific language processes take part in the emergence of literary meaning. According to Turner: “Perhaps the most encouraging signs of cognitive linguistics […] are its eagerness to explore all languages, including literary language, and its commitment to linguistic research as part of [the] general inquiry into the capacity of the human mind.”9 With reference to literary texts, this book will explore a host of distinct faculties of the mind that allow us to formulate the final construct, i.e. the story. I have found inspiration toward this end in Barbara Dancygier’s concept of stories as “linguistic artifacts.”10 She argues that, whether or not texts are supposed to carry meaningful insights, there have to be specific linguistic phenomena that can drive the literary meaning. In this regard, the theories advanced by cognitive linguists may explain how meanings in stories are generated while their instruments can be successfully tested in ample literary contexts. Cognitive enterprise explores a number of modes of textual interaction, such as the ability of readers to evoke cultural frames of reference while they are engaged in reading. It also studies their mental capacity of blending narrative spaces, which Dancygier details as 1

Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think. 3 Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Binding,” in Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads. A Cognitive Perspective, ed. Antonio Barcelona (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000), 133–145; Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, “Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression,” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10, no. 3 (1995): 183–204. 4 Talmy, Toward a Cognitive Semantics. 5 Anna Wierzbicka, Semantics: Primes and Universals (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 6 Ronald W. Langacker, “Convergence in Cognitive Linguistics,” in Cognitive Linguistics. Convergence and Expansion, eds. Mario Brdar, Stefan Th. Gries, and Milena Žic Fuchs (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2011), 9–16. See also: Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vols. 1 & 2. 7 Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. 8 Fauconnier, Mental Spaces. 9 Turner, Reading Minds, 22. 10 Barbara Dancygier, The Language of Stories. A Cognitive Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 195. 2

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“reading the words, activating the frames, searching for correlates in one’s experience, making cross-space connections, blending narrative spaces, establishing identities, constructing tentative scenarios, storing them in memory, revising them as new events are narrated, responding emotionally, et cetera.”1 These are illustrations of complex conceptual operations necessary to access meaning which normally happen without conscious awareness of their complexity. Nevertheless, in his ground-breaking study Reading Minds, Turner2 argues that when we read literature, we employ the same conceptual material available in everyday language use, which is the condition upon its intelligibility. With this view in mind, originality is expected to lie in the territory of our ordinary imaginative understanding. Turner goes on to explain: “It is only by being constituted upon commonplace conceptual patterns that provide most of the meaning to literary texts that literary texts can be for us something other than impossible questions, opaque challenges, bizarre and mute anomalies.”3 The point is, however, that the ordinary conceptual apparatus should not be underestimated or regarded as relatively simple, with implications that are only too obvious to discuss. By contrast, the reader’s ability to elucidate meaning in literature depends precisely on how they explore conventional conceptual resources. In the age of cognitive science, the study of literature grounded in shared patterns of thought opens a new line of inquiry: “a concept of literature must be simultaneously a concept of the human mind,” as supported by Turner.4 In line with this argument, the chapters that follow examine the vast space of automatic and unconscious thought in short literary works. The definition that I embrace is given by Vermeule in his recent study “The New Unconscious.” He holds that the unconscious includes “a wide array of automatic processes and activities of which we are not and cannot become consciously aware”,5 In other words, all the mental work that cannot be seen or experienced directly. Perhaps it is necessary to remember that most cognitive activity is performed outside conscious awareness.6 With the instruments of cognitive poetics and narratology, I intend to explore the gaps left by the conscious brain and glimpse into the unconscious mind.

1

Dancygier, The Language of Stories, 54. Turner, Reading Minds, 246. 3 Turner, Reading Minds, 14. 4 Turner, Reading Minds, 16. 5 Blakey Vermeule, “The New Unconscious,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 468. 6 Vermeule, “The New Unconscious,” 469. 2

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1.3 Windows to the mind: the theory of conceptual blending The first step toward a cognitively-oriented mapping of a literary text is to present a model of reading that explores the processes of meaning formation in literature, using instruments from cognitive linguistics. Nevertheless, this is not reduced to basic linguistic details, but will be supplemented in Chapter 2 with findings from recent narratological studies that have already moved in the direction of cognitive explanations (see the work of Fludernik,1 Jahn,2 Abbott,3 and Herman4). The cross-fertilization of linguistic research in the area of cognitive science with narrative analysis has collected solid evidence that can show the goals of literary, linguistic, and cognitive studies have become largely the same. The “cognitive commitment” discussed in the previous section is an illustration of their shared goals. I have found much of the inspiration for this study in two cognitively oriented linguistic theories: the first is the theory of mental spaces (Fauconnier,5 Fauconnier and Sweetser6), which developed the tools and methodological framework for a critical analysis concerned with the narrative mental spaces constructed while we read. The second theory of conceptual integration or blending (Fauconnier and Turner7) uses Fauconnier’s theory of mental spaces. The former can help readers decipher the meaningful correlations between mental spaces (“mental mappings”) prompted on-line 1

Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996). Manfred Jahn, “‘Speak, friend, and enter’: Garden Paths, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Narratology,” in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 167–194. See also: Manfred Jahn, “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of ThirdPerson Narratives: Towards a Cognitive Narratology,” Poetics Today 18, no. 4 (1997): 441–68. 3 Porter H. Abbott, “The Evolutionary Origins of the Storied Mind: Modeling the Prehistory of Narrative Consciousness and Its Discontents,” Narrative, no. 3 (2000): 247–256. 4 David Herman, ed., Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (Stanford, CA: CSLI, 2003). See also: David Herman, “Introduction,” in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. David Herman (Stanford, CA: CSLI, 2003), 1–30. 5 Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language. See also: Gilles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 [1985]). 6 Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser, Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 7 Fauconnier and Turner, “Conceptual Integration Networks”; Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think. 2

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by linguistic phenomena in the text, while the latter focuses on the on-line processes of meaning construction in the course of reading literary texts. Both these theories assume the dynamic quality of meaning, as illustrated by Evans and Green, meaning construction is “a dynamic process whereby linguistic units serve as prompts for an array of conceptual operations and the recruitment of background knowledge.”1 These complex theories will be applied to Ernest Hemingway’s works of short fiction with a view to clarifying the problem of meaning formation when we read short literary texts. As I will discuss in Chapter 3, short stories are attested examples of written discourse of a highly fragmented nature. The very fact that these texts are limited in narrative space appears to challenge writers of short fiction to employ particular narrative devices, such as deletion or substitutions, and at the same time, short stories become increasingly challenging in this respect for readers. My argument is that such fragmented short stories are indeed powerful cognitive exercises, as they stretch our sense-making abilities to their limits. Cognitive analyses of such texts exercise one’s general cognitive abilities by making visible the range of mental operations at play while reading. In other less challenging types of reading, these strategies often remain only partly discovered or rather implicitly embedded in the text (further details in Chapter 3). With respect to the complexities of driving meaning in short fictional narratives, the theory of blending is extremely suitable for a thorough investigation of meaning formation. In order to recover the final meaning of a text, readers need to go through a multi-leveled process while engaged in the act of reading. But the final meaning does not emerge by simply deciphering the linguistic details of the text and adding them up. This process is mediated by a set of diverse cognitive mechanisms that can account for the overall understanding of a narrative discourse. In what follows, I will provide an overview of the particular mechanisms in the mental processes of conceptual integration or blending, together with the theoretical framework used to explain how overall meanings of short stories can be arrived at. The current research relevant to the application of the theory of blending to literary texts has been fueled by the invaluable exploration of blends in non-literary forms (Fauconnier and Turner, Fauconnier, Turner2). The cognitive

1

Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green, Cognitive Linguistics. An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 162. 2 Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, “Mental Spaces. Conceptual Integration Networks,” in Cognitive Linguistics. Basic Readings, ed. Dirk Geeraerts (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006), 303–371. See also: Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We

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study of conceptual blending has revealed the crucial role played by this mental process in human evolution, more precisely in the development of the thinking mind. Blending may explain, for instance, how humans are able to run hypothetical mental scenarios, advance alternative hypotheses, lie or imitate, or delude or deceive. It is, in fact, the key to human imagination or creativity and to understand how humans work out meaning. The most relevant research in this sense is that of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, who seek to demonstrate that humans are now “cognitively modern beings” due to the development of this unique human capacity for conceptual blending. They claim that “conceptual blending underlies and makes possible all these diverse human accomplishments, that it is responsible for the origins of language, art, religion, science, and other singular human feats, and that it is as indispensable for basic everyday thought as it is for artistic and scientific abilities.”1 Recognized as a general mental capacity, conceptual integration therefore plays a decisive role in human thought formation. The most prominent claim of conceptual integration has been prompted by the observation that we often construct meanings that do not seem to derive from the available conceptual or linguistic structure. How is that possible? Conceptual areas, which we refer to as “mental space,” “frames,” or “input spaces,” can be activated by various prompts (e.g. linguistic or visual) and integrated into a new emergent structure, i.e. the blend. While the blended space relies on the material recruited from the input spaces (in a relation between source and target), the blend can only become fully coherent by previously selecting the relevant elements deriving from the two inputs. In this way, the new emergent structure is created. If the blend is still connected to its input spaces, it has its own independent logic, and it often contains information that does not appear in either of the input spaces. The cognitive work done to construct blends, mostly invisible to conscious activity, shows how new knowledge can be produced in creative and dynamic ways. Let us look at one example given by Evans and Green2 in their cognitive linguistic study of blending. They argue that the difficulty posed by such an apparently straightforward statement like “the surgeon is a butcher” comes from the impossibility to explain its negative assessment. The point is that the mental inputs of “surgery” and “butchery” taken separately are not associated with a negative implicature. Neither of these spaces contains a negative evaluation. Even if butchery is a highly skilled Think; Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language; Fauconnier, Mental Spaces. Turner, “Conceptual Blending.” 1 Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, vi. 2 Evans and Green, Cognitive Linguistics, 401–406.

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profession, the conceptualization of a surgeon as a butcher always involves a negative assessment of the work done by the surgeon so as to evaluate the surgeon as incompetent. But where exactly does this negative assessment arise from, as it does not seem to be contained in either of the input spaces? The blending theory maintains that meanings are not formed by adding the elements emerging from the two inputs but involves the emergence of a new structure. From this perspective, in the example of “the surgeon is a butcher,” the implication of incompetence seems to appear only in the structure emerging from the newly created blend. The contrasting features of the two input spaces are clear and evident: surgeons save the lives of human patients while butchers perform work on dead animals; the activity performed by surgeons mainly focuses on physical repair and bodily reconstruction, whereas butchers perform dismembering activities, etc. However, in the blend, the contrasts result in the new idea of incompetence: a surgeon who is assessed as a butcher will have highly inadequate manual skills and mental capacities to perform complicated operations on human patients. As illustrated by this example of an ordinary blend, it seems that humans make no cognitive effort to understand the emergent meaning. This is due to the mental operations occurring in the nervous system at lightning speed, therefore making it more difficult for the conscious mind to interpret and project the ongoing mental processes. When Turner1 speaks of “the unconscious, automatic, unoriginal aspects of thought,” he aims to clarify the fact that most of our mental life goes unnoticed. In this sense, the mental phenomenon of conceptual blending is an extraordinary example of invisible and unconscious mental activity and one that has a tremendous impact on meaning construction. It is not an accident that conceptual integration has been placed at the core of research in neuroscience. Neuroscientists now attempt to explain, for example, apparently simple neuronal phenomena, such as the recognition of a single entity perceived as a unitary item. The classic example of “the perception of the coffee cup” used by neuroscientists might seem rudimentary, but in reality, it is not. The amount of features to be quickly apprehended by the viewer is certainly overwhelming: the color of the cup, the shape of the opening, the topology of the handle, the smell of the coffee, the texture of the surface of the cup, the taste of the coffee, the heavy feel of the cup in the hand, the reaching for the cup, and so forth. Moreover, all these details are processed differently and at different places in the brain, while in the end, the sum of their perceptions results in one unitary entity. How is that possible? Fauconnier 1

Turner, Reading Minds, 43.

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and Turner believe conceptual blending offers the right answer: “We see the coffee cup as one thing because our brains and bodies work to give it that status. We divide the world up into entities at human scale so that we can manipulate them in human lives, and this division of the world is an imaginative achievement. […] These chinks in the armor of form show us that elements of mental life that look like primitives for formal analysis turn out to be higher-order products of imaginative work.”1 A further significant contribution of the mental process of blending is the research conducted in counterfactual thinking. This research topic has been coupled with the demonstrable human capacity for mental simulation. Cross-disciplinary research into counterfactuals and mental simulation proves that counterfactuality is not just mere philosophical speculation but an advanced cognitive ability, as demonstrated by theoretical advancement in psychology (Kahneman and Miller,2 Kahneman,3 Roese and Olson4), political studies (Tetlock and Belkin5), and cognitive science (Turner,6 Fauconnier and Turner,7 Schwartz and Black,8 Johnson-Laird9). In what follows, I analyze an illustration of a counterfactual blend, which will be essential to my analyses in the following chapters. Fauconnier and Turner10 studied this example: “In France, Watergate wouldn’t have done Nixon any harm.” Understanding this counterfactual involves complex conceptualization in order to produce a blended space in which Nixon is not harmed by the 1

Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 8 Daniel Kahneman and Miller T. Dale, “Norm Theory: Comparing Reality to Its Alternatives,” Psychological Review 93, no. 2 (1986): 136–153. 3 Daniel Kahneman, “Varieties of Counterfactual Thinking,” in What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking, eds. Neil J. Roese and James M. Olson (New York: Psychology Press, 2014 [1995]), 375–396. 4 Neal J. Roese and James M. Olson, eds., What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking (New York: Psychology Press, 2014 [1995]). 5 Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 6 Turner, “Conceptual Blending.” 7 Fauconnier and Turner, “Conceptual Integration Networks”; Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think. 8 Daniel L. Schwartz and John B. Black, “Shuttling Between Depictive Models and Abstract Rules: Induction and Fallback,” Cognitive Science 20, no. 4 (1996): 457– 497. 9 Philip N. Johnson-Lair, Mental Models (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 10 Fauconnier and Turner, “Mental Spaces,” 323–326. 2

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Watergate scandal, an emergent meaning that is not present in the inputs: American politics and French politics. The first space of President Nixon and the Watergate break-in is structured by the frame of American politics. However, in the blend, we only recruit skeletal or indeterminate information (“selective projection”): Nixon and Watergate have the properties of a political leader who breaks the law. In the second input of French politics, a similar political scandal has never happened, so we recruit from here the cultural view on such an event. In the counterfactual blend, the political scandal in France, such as the one associated with Watergate, does not stir any public outrage, thus the implication that the president is unharmed. The point of such a counterfactual is to show the disanalogy between American and French politics, more specifically between their attitudes with respect to the political conduct of politicians. In the US, the scandal led to the resignation of Nixon, while in France, the president would not have been harmed politically. Admittedly, this example is not a curiosity of language. We are used to running such counterfactual scenarios, for instance in the imaged situations prompted by an if-space. “If I were your mother, I would get involved in your education” sets up an imagined scenario in which the speaker is the hearer’s mother and they both know the coordinates of reality: the hearer does not get enough education, the mother is not involved in the child’s education, etc. In the blend, the mother shares the responsibility of the speaker to get involved in her child’s education. My research interests center around a cognitively-oriented study of counterfactuals in reading literature. I claim that such an intellectual enterprise can show authentic mental responses to situations requiring the ability to counterfactualize. In addition, it can give a clear sense of our fascination with events that might have been. In truth, counterfactual life stories in narratives that are dreamed of, alternatives never realized, and speculations about how actions might have developed are evident examples of counterfactual work that can stimulate genuine human cognitive ability. As suggested in Marie-Laure Ryan’s “poetics of readerly immersion,”1 the simulation effect of the reading experience is crucial to the reader’s engagement with the text and immersion in its universe. Among many strategies that can stimulate immersion, counterfactual thought can create a state of immersion in the reader, as we systematically undergo trans-world journeys between factual and counterfactual spaces. These alternate mental developments are regarded as human attempts to break out of the “real” world and plunge into these counterfactual worlds that will subsequently 1

Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

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emerge. In this sense, Roese and Olson’s definition of counterfactuality is extremely revealing: “Counterfactual thinking is an essential feature of consciousness. Few indeed have never pondered a lost opportunity nor regretted a foolish utterance. […] Indeed, counterfactual thought processes may be one of the central components of the human experience.”1 In this regard, I argue that narrative theory can be supplemented by the crossfertilization with the domain of counterfactual thinking in order to show that it can be essential to building narrative mental spaces. Without the mental instruments provided by counterfactuality, readers are unlikely to restore the narrative thread and recover the underlying hidden narrative worlds which are often only hinted at and partially uncovered in the narrative discourse of the text. In Chapter 3, focusing on the practical applications of cognitive theory when it comes to short fiction analysis, I suggest that in order to understand the sources of the narrative powers of short stories, readers need to make use of counterfactuality so as to create alternate narrative worlds and to be able to remap the characters’ life journeys. The study of the basic mental operation of blending, with its distinctly cognitive instrument of counterfactuality, is motivated by the general relationship between cognitive science and narrative theories. In this respect, cognitive science can offer a different but complementary line of analysis explaining the production of meaning in literary studies. If narrative theories are concerned with dynamic aspects of meaning formation, the crucial insight of blending theory can offer new theoretical grounds for explaining human thought and imagination in acts of reading. Blending narrative mental spaces can ultimately uncover the dynamics of the mind, whether it is the human mind or the humanlike fictional mind during its performance of exceptional imaginative exercises. As explained further by Fauconnier and Turner,2 “the next step in the study of mind is the scientific study of the nature and mechanisms of the imagination.” The intersection of cognitive theory and other ground-breaking narrative theories will be covered more extensively in Chapter 2, while the practical application of cognitive analysis will be detailed in reference to the representation of the fictional mind in Chapter 5 (the concept of the “fictional mind” is developed by Palmer3 and Zunshine4). In the end, what I want to focus on specifically is this invariant mental operation of blending in order to prove that it may

1

Roese and Olson, What Might Have Been, 46. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 8. 3 Gary Palmer, Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics (Austin: Texas University Press, 1996). 4 Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction. 2

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be “the central engine of human meaning”1 and a complex mental mechanism in literature, all of which I will demonstrate in the analysis of a number of short stories. As suggested by Turner,2 the ability to perform blending may have been the key mechanism to our developing advanced mental behavior. My goal is to show that this is facilitated by the mental exercises we perform in reading short literary works: “It [blending] is part of us, […] [of] all cognitively modern human beings, beginning very far before written history and stretching indefinitely into our phylogenetic future. Blending is basic, not exotic.”3

1.4 Mappings in thought and language: the theory of mental space In section 1.2, I identified the central tenets of cognitive semantics, claiming that “research on cognitive semantics is research on conceptual content and its organization in language.”4 This means that general linguistic phenomena and meanings are perceived as outward manifestations of one’s conceptual structure. The diversity of our mental representations need to take linguistic expressions only as points of departure on the longer way to the larger repository of encyclopedic knowledge which has been steadily accumulated through experience. Zoltán Kövecses is right when he maintains that “meanings are not in the words or sentences; meanings are creatively constructed by speakers and hearers.”5 As already proven by blending theory (analyzed in section 1.3), meaning construction is a complex process emerging from the construction of dynamic but temporary conceptual domains. These domains, already referred to as “mental spaces” in the previous section, are found to be interconnected in on-line discourse. The conceptual projections established between a number of different mental spaces (“mappings”) can be constructed on-line for local understanding, as in the case of blending, or they can be conventionalized, as in the case of conceptual metaphors and metonymies. This section is primarily concerned with the matter of mental spaces. The construal of mental spaces is not limited to the understanding of language, since it can only provide a minimal basis to the complex mental 1

Turner, Reading Minds, 21 Turner, Reading Minds. 3 Turner, Reading Minds, 21. 4 Talmy, Toward a Cognitive Semantics, 4. 5 Zoltán Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture. A Practical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 268. 2

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representations performed by the speaker. In other words, language functions as an initial prompt for richer and more detailed processes of conceptualization. This approach to language has been developed by Gilles Fauconnier in his theory of mental spaces,1 which holds that meaning construction is fundamentally conceptual in nature and is based directly in context and language use, which shows that meanings are situational and context-dependent. He holds that “mental spaces are defined as short-term cognitive representations of states of affairs, constructed on the basis of the textual input on the one hand, and the comprehender’s background knowledge on the other.”2 In the process of thinking and speaking, we build and modify mental spaces, and, more significantly, we are able to connect these spaces in various ways through processes of “identity” or “analogy.” Fauconnier3 argues that mental spaces are built from different sources. One such source is the conceptual domain we are already acquainted with, followed by the retrieval of information from these domains (examples of such domains could be “buying and selling” or “social conversations in public places”). So, if we were to consider a situational example, such as “Julie buying coffee at Pete’s,” we must draw on the larger knowledge arising from the conceptual domains previously mentioned. If this space is generically structured by the COMMERCIAL FRAME, it can also be structured by other additional frames, such as TAKING A BREAK FROM WORK, GOING TO A PUBLIC PLACE FOR ENTERTAINMENT, or ADHERENCE TO DAILY ROUTINE (frames are often denoted by the use of capitalized words). In other cases, we can use our immediate experience to form mental spaces, for instance, we may see Julie purchasing coffee at Pete’s and subsequently build a mental space of Julie at Pete’s, or we may rely on information conveyed by other people: “Julie went to Pete’s for coffee.” In brief, “there is no fixed set of ways in which mental spaces come about,”4 which further strengthens the idea that mental spaces are extremely diverse. Fauconnier5 advances another important observation that shows that, in constructing mental spaces, in metaphorical or analogical mappings, in counterpart connections, and in any other language activity, language itself can give us only rudimentary instructions for the formation of meaningful 1

Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language; Fauconnier, Mental Spaces. Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language, 11. 3 Fauconnier, “Mental Spaces,” 352. 4 Fauconnier, “Mental Spaces,” 372. 5 Gilles Fauconnier, “Methods and Generalizations,” in Scope and Foundations of Cognitive Linguistics (Cognitive Linguistics Research Series), eds. Theo Janssen and Gisela Redeker (The Hague: De Gruyter, 1999), 95–128. 2

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significances. It is in the hidden area of “backstage cognition”1 that complex conceptualizing processes take place, but because they are not readily available and visible, such processes remain largely unnoticed: [C]ognition […] lies behind language and goes far beyond it, but which language reflects in certain ways, and which in turn supports the dynamics of language use, language change, and language organization. […] I have called this backstage cognition. Language is only the tip of a spectacular cognitive iceberg, and when we engage in any language activity, be it mundane or artistically creative, we draw unconsciously on vast cognitive resources, call up innumerable models and frames, set up multiple connections, coordinate large arrays of information, and engage in creative mappings, transfers, and elaborations.2

In this sense, Fauconnier further claims, it is essential to build methods which can serve to understand how language relates to general cognition. Thus, we can explain the great contrast between the impoverished linguistic forms and their brevity and the wealth of emergent meaning construction. Generally, we have little or no awareness of the complexities of the cognitive operations taking place as we speak or listen. To illustrate, let us look at one ordinary example of what happens in the mind when we are engaged in simple conversation. Despite appearances, a wide range of complex and rapid processes take place, and this happens without our being aware of them, as we have no direct access to the depth of our mental operations. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson describe this as being only a small part of the underlying labyrinthine process below conscious awareness when we are engaged in ordinary conversation. This process includes: Accessing memories relevant to what is being said Comprehending a stream of sound as being language, dividing it into distinctive phonetic features and segments, identifying phonemes, and grouping them into morphemes Assigning a structure to the sentence in accord with the vast number of grammatical constructions in your native language Picking out words and giving them meanings appropriate to context Making semantic and pragmatic sense of the sentences as a whole Framing what is said in terms relevant to the discussion Performing inferences relevant to what is being discussed Constructing mental images where relevant and inspecting them Filling in gaps in the discourse 1 2

Fauconnier, “Methods and Generalizations,” 96. Fauconnier, “Methods and Generalizations,” 96.

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Noticing and interpreting your interlocutor’s body language Anticipating where the conversation is going Planning what to say in response.1

When we try to spell out the high amount of unconscious work below such ordinary utterances, we are struck by the wealth of remarkable mental paths and the rich cognitive operations performed. Because we speak or perceive things almost automatically and without conscious effort, the work conducted at an unconscious level is generally taken for granted. By and large, language production and comprehension have been seen as “natural” processes that necessitate no further explanation. As a result, unconscious cognitive processes have long been ignored, while the focus of analysis has often been on the external manifestations of language. It is cognitive linguistics that challenged this unquestioned tacit assumption. The fundamental insight of mental space theory is on identifying the processes involved in meaning construction, i.e. the building of mental spaces and the corresponding correlations or mappings between these spaces. The mappings are established in accordance with the purposes of the ongoing discourse, and therefore are inherently context-bound. Moreover, they are based on the recruitment of more general, cultural, and pragmatic information. Kövecses defines a mental space as “a ‘conceptual package’ that gets built up on-line in the course of communication. To use an analogy, we can think of mental spaces as small lightbulbs lighting up in the brain/mind. The area ‘lit up’ corresponds to an activated mental space.”2 Accordingly, if mental spaces are “real world phenomena” constructed “online,” the issuing results are a number of specific and temporary “conceptual packets.” As previously mentioned, in the architecture of mental spaces, linguistic phenomena often function as “underdetermined prompts” or “partial building instructions”3 which only have the potential for meaning; the actual resulting meaning is dependent on the larger context of the discourse. Therefore, the setting up of mental spaces is not exclusively restricted to the understanding of the language, as most of our effort devoted to the construction of meaning is focused on the exploration of the surrounding context. However, in order to set up a mental space, we need to make use of specific linguistic units, called “space builders,” which have the capacity to signal the type of mental space about to appear in the course of communication. Space builders can be a wide range of expressions or 1

Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 10–11. Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture, 249. 3 Evans and Green, Cognitive Linguistics, 371. 2

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grammatical forms, such as prepositional phrases (in 1999, from your point of view, at the hospital, etc.), connectives (if, when, either … or, etc.), adverbials of time (yesterday, in the future, last year, etc.), other adverbials (possible, perhaps, really, theoretically, etc.), and subject-verb combinations (Liz thinks, Mary hopes, Richard believes, etc.), among many others. When mental spaces are prompted by these linguistic units, the speaker/hearer is required to build a mental scenario, beyond the “here and now,” which reflects beliefs, ideas, possibilities, past realities, future hypothetical situations, realities happening in another location, and so forth. Let us consider the following space building example provided by Fauconnier: “Maybe Romeo is in love with Juliet.”1 We start the construction of a mental space by activating pre-stored cultural knowledge of X being in love with Y. In our cultural frame of reference, lover X and lover Y have pre-assigned roles: the roles of “the lover” and “the loved one.” In the Base space (the space that remains accessible for the formation of a new space), the two elements, Romeo (a) and Juliet (b), are linked by our background knowledge of other frames and also by the previous meaning construction in the discourse context. A new Possibility space is built by the adverb “maybe,” which functions as a space builder. This newly created mental space is relative to the Base space, thus generating opposing counterparts (mappings between elements in different spaces create counterpart elements) for Romeo (a’) and Juliet (b’), in virtue of the “access principle.”2 What all this means is that the new mental space is internally structured by the frame X IS IN LOVE WITH Y and the counterparts a’ and b’ that can fit this frame. This analysis of meaning generated by the theory of mental spaces can provide the necessary mechanisms for understanding cognitive structures and the connections between them as communication unfolds. I believe mental space theory lays the theoretical foundations that enable readers to account for the multitude of mental spaces emerging in a fictional story. Literary texts allow us to explore a wealth of diverse mental spaces that can be set up in the on-line course of reading. As the literary discourse advances, mental spaces will proliferate and the reader will be required to follow the network or “lattice” of spaces that will eventually account for the achievement of the overall literary effect closely. From this perspective, an analysis that treats readerly mental constructions by means of a mental theory framework can lead to the understanding of a narrative thread otherwise missed. My goal here is to elucidate the usefulness of a mental space theory with a 1

Fauconnier, “Mental Spaces,” 355–356. “This principle states that an expression which names or describes an element in one mental space can be used to access a counterpart of that element in another mental space.” Fauconnier, “Mental Spaces,” 353.

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practical application to short story theories. The chosen methodology complements my claim that short stories can generate a prolific source of enriched networks of mental spaces. Since short stories are known for the brevity of their formal structures and the language economy of their content, short narratives can be deemed as remarkable examples of mental processes constructed on reduced and impoverished textual input, supplemented by the reader’s background knowledge.

1.5 Contexts, constructions, and inferences: frame semantics As we saw earlier with mental spaces, the Base space contains considerable information that is not explicitly provided via linguistic expressions but is nevertheless available to the discourse. Where exactly does this underlying knowledge come from? Humans have the cognitive ability to evoke a larger context even when parts from the whole discourse might be missing. If, for instance, we see a dead bird on the porch, we assume it was killed by a cat, or, if we see an advertisement in a newspaper, we assume that a company has placed it, etc. Any such mental work is performed automatically and arises from one’s excellent ability to draw “frame-metonymic inferences.”1 Some of these inferences may sometimes turn out to be wrong, but they nevertheless allow us to perform crucial cognitive processes. Without the help of these mental inferences, it is impossible to verify the actuality of such situations at an individual level. We have no choice but to trust our inferences. Overall, in order to understand the large amount of underlying knowledge of a mental space, we have to perform inferential work, which can be done by drawing on contextually relevant information or by using the default information that is already available at any time. Dancygier and Sweetser explain: Inferential structure, frame-metonymic reasoning, and contextual affordances are constantly and productively at work in giving us access to such meanings—which may become conventionalized, once they have been accessed. Overall, it makes little sense to see grammatical meaning—or cognition—as purely compositional. Rather, we need to recognize that both may exploit cues which are often minimal, to build a much larger and more complex structure from known context and correlations.2

1

Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser, Mental Spaces in Grammar. Conditional Constructions (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 24. 2 Dancygier and Sweetser, Mental Spaces in Grammar, 26.

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Our understanding needs to be supported by “specific unified frameworks of knowledge” or “coherent schematizations of experience.”1 This is to say that the knowledge of the world is given a coherent organization in order to help us understand, categorize, and conceptualize human experience. Charles Fillmore2 has systematically demonstrated that a “frame” contains the structured knowledge which is associated with language. According to him, words and meanings are “relativized to frames,”3 which means that significances are closely dependent on the frames with which they are associated. For instance, in order to interpret a sentence like “We never open our presents until morning,” interpreters with specific cultural awareness would immediately create a Christmas context, even though there is no direct mention of the event in the text.4 This happens because frames make use of general strategies of representing what we already know about the world, as supported by Kövecses: “the frames constitute a huge and complex system of knowledge about the world. This large network of frames reflects the knowledge that we make use of in using language (e.g. figuring out meaning) and thinking about and acting in the world.”5 Most importantly, frames do not reflect a pre-existing or objective reality. To illustrate, let us take one example analyzed by George Lakoff in his extremely popular study Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987). In it, Lakoff poses one important question concerning the mental representations formed by the conceptual category of FRIDAY. When one tries to define this concept, Lakoff observes, one needs to activate several other frames, such as the natural cycle of the movement of the sun and the seven-day calendric cycle. So, it seems that the definition of “Friday” as “the fifth day of the week” will make use of the other frames essential to the understanding of this particular conceptual category. This brings us to another important feature of frames, i.e. that they may refer to entities that do not actually exist in the realities of the world. In nature, we witness the alternation of light and darkness and the natural cycle of the sun. In this 1

Fillmore, “Frames and the Semantics of Understanding,” 232.

2 Fillmore, “Frame Semantics”; Fillmore, “Frames and the Semantics of Understanding.”

See also: Charles J. Fillmore. “Scenes-and-Frames Semantics,” in Linguistic Structures Processing, ed. Antonio Zampolli (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company, 1977), 55–82; Charles J. Fillmore, “An Alternative to Checklist Theories of Meaning,” in Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 15–17 February, 1975, ed. Cathy Cogen (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1975), 123–131. 3 Fillmore, “Scenes-and-Frames Semantics.” 4 Fillmore, “Frames and the Semantics of Understanding,” 232. 5 Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture, 69.

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sense, Friday and the other days of the week are not concrete objectified entities in nature but “constructs of our imagination”—not mental representations that directly fit a pre-existing objective reality. As demonstrated above, frames are “imaginative devices of the mind.”1 The fact that they do not always correspond to a pre-existing reality often makes them “idealized,” or in Lakoff’s own terms,2 “idealized cognitive models” (ICMs). They can also vary cross-culturally and often require the activation of larger cultural frames in order for speakers to be able to determine the meaning of a context. Charles Fillmore3 illustrates this with the word “bachelor.” First, he provides the dictionary definition: a bachelor is “human, male, adult, and never married,” which he then questions by raising further problematic issues: Is the Pope a bachelor? He is adult, male, and never married. Is Tarzan a bachelor? What about a committed gay man? Are eunuchs bachelors? They seem to meet all the requirements of the definition, but yet most of us would not call them “bachelors.” Fillmore then concludes that the definition of “bachelor” needs to be further refined by taking into account specific cultural frames together with their own particular requirements and contexts of marriage. The definition of “bachelor” (adult, male, and never married) may function only in those cases that fall under a larger cultural frame, i.e. the prototypical male life cycle. A relevant example is a society based on the institution of marriage, where males marry females or who live in relationships only with females. Accordingly, Tarzan cannot be called a bachelor as he lives outside society, and male homosexuals cannot be seen as bachelors because they live in relationships with other males, etc. As this example illustrates, background knowledge is extremely important to the understanding of the underlying contextual information. If frames are cultural products or commonly shared knowledge, the world may be regarded as a vast network of cultural and cognitive frames, which can provide valuable insight into what we think of the world and how we ought to act in the world. Another aspect of frame semantics, developed by Fillmore in the ‘70s and ‘80s, is the increased interest in (literary) text analysis. Interpreters are able to make sense of texts or may assign texts a special interpretation by invoking frames that are known independently of the text to be analyzed or which are derived from general knowledge. This is due to our ability to organize knowledge, one that generates acts of comprehension that are more complex than those limited to the understanding of meanings associated with words. On the other hand, frames can also be invoked by a text’s 1

Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture, 69. Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. 3 Fillmore, “An Alternative to Checklist Theories of Meaning.” 2

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particular lexical or grammatical phenomena. Fillmore1 explains that successful text analyses need to provide a detailed understanding of how exactly a scene or an image of the world can be generated and developed in the interpreter’s mind. Specifically, this process undergoes several stages: first, the text activates a picture of the world in the mind of the interpreter, and further parts of the text will complete the picture with more and more information, inscribing this activated image in the logical development of the story. However, while mentally creating the world of the text, interpreters are prone to using their personal experiences and bringing them to life, which may account for interpreters attempting to build personally-oriented interpretations of the same text. By adopting a frame-based analysis, we can further explore the rich conceptual knowledge underlying the lexical or grammatical expressions in a text.

1.6 Mapping the mind: domains and the theory of domains Fillmore’s theory of frame semantics argues that meaning is essentially “guided” by context and therefore may not exist independently, but only when framed by our general knowledge of the world. In the same vein, Ronald Langacker’s theory of domains2 makes similar assumptions regarding the encyclopedic and experiential nature of meaning. Consequently, domains are schematizations of human experience stored in long-term memory. Both Fillmore’s and Langacker’s theories acknowledge that lexical units can only be understood with the help of the background information contained by frames or domains. For example, we would not be able to use lexical expressions like “hot,” “cold,” or “lukewarm” without the understanding of the domain of TEMPERATURE, which provides the necessary information of the temperature system.3 It should be emphasized that Langacker’s theory complements Fillmore’s in several important points. Where Fillmore acknowledges that multiple frames can define a one and the same concept, Langacker4 adds the concept of the “domain matrix,” whereby concepts are relative to several cognitive domains, which he further categorizes into “basic domains” and “abstract domains.” The former derive directly from embodied experience and arise from pre-conceptual experience;

1

Fillmore, “Scenes-and-Frames Semantics,” 61. Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1. 3 Evans and Green, Cognitive Linguistics, 230. 4 Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1, 147. 2

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in this sense, a basic domain is “a primitive representational field.”1 The latter are more abstract, even if they too ultimately arise from the nature of our embodiment. The experiential basis of basic domains can derive from subjective embodied experiences (e.g. the experience of the passage of time) or from the sensory-perceptual experience of the external world. For instance, while the basic domain of SPACE relates directly to the embodied experience, tied to our basic kinesthetic perception and sensory capacity, the more abstract domain of MARRIAGE involves relations to basic domains, such as physical proximity, as well as to other abstract domains, such as the experience of wedding ceremonies. Alongside the frame theory, the theory of domains adds support to the main claims of the embodied cognition thesis and expands understandings of mental representations. As seen above, if the structure of frames and domains is grounded in the physical interaction with the external world and in the interaction with other people, the nature of our mental representations reflects both our physical and social experience.

1.7 Space, movement, embodiment: the meanings of the body If we accept the assumption that meaning is embodied, general cognitive models (or frames, domains, scripts, schemas, etc.) are deemed to be born out of the interaction between body and brain, on the one hand, and the physical environment, on the other hand. Therefore, one’s sense-making activities cannot be restricted to mere biology; brains and bodies are deeply mapped into processes of understanding and creation. At the same time, they reach out into the world and establish connections with the surrounding environment. As we move around within the world, we create concepts and conceptual systems that we use for reasoning and functioning optimally. In short, one’s embodied experience can draw attention to the commonalities of bodies and brains and to the characteristics of the world we inhabit. This means that it has mainly been acquired by means of sensory and kinesthetic experiences, i.e. by perceiving visually and moving around in space. In this context, Lakoff and Johnson hold that “the very mechanisms responsible for perception, movements, and object manipulation could be responsible for conceptualization and reasoning.”2 Humans move in space and time, acquiring perceptions of their world, gaining valuable experience, which results in the formation of image 1 2

Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1, 148. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 38.

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schemas at a cognitive level. The idea of image-schematic conceptual knowledge is closely associated with the theory of embodied cognition advanced by pioneering cognitive researchers, notably Lakoff and Johnson.1 In Metaphors We Live By, they argue that the complexities of one’s conceptual thinking can be explained by exploring the correlation between the concepts we form and the nature of the bodies we own. This central idea of embodied cognition is addressed and developed by the theory of image schemas. Like basic domains, therefore, image schemas are conceptual representations that directly derive from pre-conceptual experience. The theory of image-schematic knowledge developed by Johnson,2 among others, states that conceptual representations are able to emerge from the interactions with the world around us. He defines image schemas as “recurring, dynamic pattern[s] of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that give coherence to our experience.”3 This is to say that a great deal of knowledge arises from the interactions between language, mind, and the human body. In effect, image-schematic knowledge shows how we perceive and understand the world as a result of embodiment, and image schemas represent our basic interaction with the environment. If human understanding is “embodied,”4 as is claimed by cognitive scientists, then one’s bodily experience will lead to the formation of abstract and highly schematic images. These mental patterns appear through sensory-motor activity as we orient ourselves in time and space or as we observe the focus of the activities we perform. For instance, individuals represent their bodies as containers with organs and fluids, but we also function within other containers, such as buildings or rooms. Thus, the emergence of the CONTAINER image schema can organize thinking according to its structural elements of “interior,” “boundary,” and “exterior.” This manner of structuring experience significantly impacts how we understand the world and ultimately how we build meanings, as shown in several metaphors originating in the CONTAINER image schema: PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS ARE CONTAINERS or STATES ARE CONTAINERS. Such image-schematic reasoning is believed to sit at the basis of metaphorical thinking. That is why we say that “we are in love” or we can be “in trouble.”5 Other examples given by Mark Johnson6 sum up our experiences emerging from the CONTAINMENT image schema. 1

Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. Johnson, The Body in the Mind. 3 Johnson, The Body in the Mind, xiv. 4 Johnson, The Body in the Mind, xv. 5 Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture, 209. 6 Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 331. 2

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People experience habitual actions of CONTAINMENT during the normal course of their morning routine: we wake up out of a deep sleep, get up out of bed, and go into the bathroom, where we look into the mirror and pull a comb out from inside the cabinet. Later that same morning, we might wander into the kitchen, sit in a chair at the breakfast table, and open up the newspaper and become lost in an article. Johnson further argues that certain image-schematic structures have preconceptual embodied meanings, i.e. they are developed prior to conceptual thinking as expressed in language use. Here he draws on the work carried out by the developmental psychiatrist Daniel Stern, who demonstrates that infants develop image schemas of feeling before they develop any linguistic codes: “In trying to soothe the infant the parent could say, ‘There, there, there…,’ giving more stress and amplitude on the first part of the word and trailing off towards the end of the word. Alternatively, the parent could silently stroke the baby’s back or head with a stroke analogous to the ‘There, there’ sequence, applying more pressure at the onset of the stroke and lightening or trailing it off toward the end […] the infant would experience similar activation contours no matter which soothing technique was performed.”1 Another example of image schematic structure, SOURCE-PATHGOAL, has been developed through observing how to focus our eyes and find forms in the visual field. The emergent image schema can now be applied to a variety of more abstract domains of reasoning. For instance, this image schema can be at the core of any intellectual enterprise we undertake: we start off a Ph.D. thesis, but on the way we get diverted from our initial goal, then we try to get back on the right track and keep our purpose in mind as we move along so as to reach the goal in the end. This particular image schema results in the well-established metaphor PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS that reveals our understanding of intentional acts.2 In the last instance above, we build conceptual structures through embodied image schemas that can offer a deeper understanding of the physical space often experienced in ordinary interactions. We can infer that the environment structures the mind, or more specifically, that it structures the conceptual system residing in the human mind. Image schemas illustrate the connection between mind and matter, whereby the physical world provides the necessary structure for the mind. Moreover, image schemas contain our shared experience with the world and with the community in 1

Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (London: Karnac Books, 1998), 58. 2 Gibbs, Poetics of Mind, 444.

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which we live. This enables us to communicate and understand each other through processes of repetition and re-enactment that organize experiences in a coherent manner. This revolutionary claim that brains are organized in terms of image schemas is supported by evidence from cognitive neuroscience: regions of the brain maintain consistent images of the space or visual field which has been perceived, which leads us to conclude that (visual) perception and conceptual operations share neuronal and physiological processes. Lakoff and Johnson researched the field of computational neuroscience and concluded that it is “concerned not merely with where the neural computations are done but with how, that is, with precise neural computational mechanisms that perform sensorimotor operations and that carry out conceptualizing, categorizing, reasoning, and language learning.”1 Since one’s conceptualization of the world is based on image schemas and in this way one’s image-schematic knowledge reflects embodied experience, much abstract language thus becomes meaningful to us. Image schemas are able to underlie many conceptual metaphors. Still more recently, scholars in the field of narrative studies have begun to draw explicitly on the idea of image-schematic knowledge (see Kimmel,2 Palmer3). For instance, literary theorist Michael Kimmel4 shows how impactful image schemas can become for remembering the plot in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. His textual demonstration shows that image schemas can produce readerly constraints not only for the understanding of the narrative events, but also for reaching the deep symbolic level of the text. Kimmel’s intricate analysis is extremely useful in that it describes the cognitive format of the macrostructure of the text. In Chapter 4, I propose a cognitively-oriented representation of narrative space and time. Following Ryan,5 I will attempt to show that the reader is immersed in the fictional world as long as the text can simulate the experience of time and space. Temporal and spatial immersions are two important aspects of how readers experience fiction. The text is substantially immersive only if it is able to capture the real-world elements of our experience alongside the physical space and temporality. This last point is especially important as the spatial dimension has now been reconsidered in 1

Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 38.

2 Michael Kimmel, “From Metaphor to the ‘Mental Sketchpad’: Literary Macrostructures

and Compound Image Schemas in Heart of Darkness,” Metaphor and Symbol 20, no. 3 (2005): 199–238. 3 Palmer, Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics. 4 Kimmel, “From Metaphor to the ‘Mental Sketchpad’.” 5 Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality.

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recent narratological studies (Herman1) with a view to demonstrating that the perception of physical space can offer the basic cognitive skeleton for the metaphorical understanding of time. In Chapter 4, I will outline the parameters of an analysis of fictional space as the basis for metaphorical projections concerning time in the narrative world.

1.8 Metaphorical thinking: its conceptual force and further implications In this section, I begin an examination of metaphors and metaphorical thinking by first considering the traditional view2 that makes a clear distinction between literal and figurative language. According to this argument, figurative or metaphorical meanings are very often analyzed as embellished features of poetic language characterized by indirectness and exaggeration. By contrast, in literal language, one word is never understood in terms of another. Furthermore, literal meanings are not context-bound, so they can exist independent of specific communications. To think figuratively or poetically means to distort literal language and, eventually, to be at odds with clarity and precision, as explained by Lakoff and Johnson: “Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish – a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor.”3 Cognitive scientist Ryan Gibbs4 closely examines these traditional tenets in his psycholinguistic experiments, which prove that the longstanding traditional assumptions are straightforwardly false. He demonstrates that the traditional views on thinking and language as inherently literal impose significant limitations on the study of mind. Such an erroneous perspective stemmed from another incorrect assumption that views language as independent of cognition. However, this was contradicted by recent advances in cognitive sciences5 that show language as inextricably linked 1

Herman, Story Logic. For a historical examination of metaphor, see the first two chapters in Paul Ricœur’s The Rule of Metaphor. The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (London/New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004). First published in 1978. 3 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 3. 4 Gibbs, Poetics of Mind. 5 See, for instance, Mark Turner, “The Embodied Mind and the Origins of Human Culture,” in Cognition and Culture: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, eds. Ana Margarida 2

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to the physical and cognitive system, meaning that, if we can prove that language is structured metaphorically, so is much of the conceptual system. Many analyses in cognitive linguistics1 or psychology2 indicate that ordinary language is largely figurative in nature. Thus, it is safe to conclude that we conceptualize experiences in figurative ways by means of metaphor, metonymy, irony, etc. These are concepts “we live by,” as supported by Lakoff and Johnson suggesting that “metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action, [and that] our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”3 Put differently, metaphors and metonymies are not simply linguistic devices meant to embellish literal language but are also conceptual instruments central to our understanding of the world. The metaphor is always present in our thinking when we refer to abstract ideas in terms of more concrete and familiar experiences. Consider the way we talk about arguments in everyday language.4 The conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR is reflected in a great number of ordinary expressions, such as “I demolished his argument,” “If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out,” “Your claims are indefensible,” “You disagree? Okay, shoot!” and so many others. These examples are representative of the ways we refer to arguments. The main point is that these abstract mental expressions rely on the language of motion and change in physical location in order to devise the course of action we take when arguing: the person we are arguing with is seen as an opponent, so we defend our position, and we attack our opponent’s plans and strategies. Hence, ARGUMENT IS WAR not only appears in language but also in action. Even if there is no actual physical battle, the arguments used are grounded in the experience of physical conflicts. This example of a conceptual metaphor shows that arguments are seen as grounded in culture and in everyday experience. Such Abrantes and Peter Hanenberg (Frankfurt/Berlin: Peter Lang, 2011), 13–27; Bradd Shore, Culture in Mind. Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 1 See, for instance, Sandra Handl and Hans-Jörg Schmid, eds., Window to the Mind. Metaphor, Metonymy and Conceptual Blending (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2011); Gitte Kristiansen, Michel Achard, René Dirven, and Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, eds., Cognitive Linguistics. Current Applications and Future Perspectives (Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006). 2 See, for instance, Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., “Making Good Psychology out of Blending Theory,” Cognitive Linguistics 11, no. 3 (2001): 347–358; Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. and Jennifer E. O’Brien, “Idioms and Mental Imagery: The Metaphorical Motivation for Idiomatic Meaning,” Cognition 36, no. 1 (January 1990): 35–68. 3 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 3. 4 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 4–6.

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detailed studies of conceptual metaphors foster a more informed understanding of the processes underlying metaphors. The theory of conceptual metaphor is particularly significant to the seminal studies of Lakoff and Johnson,1 Lakoff and Turner,2 Stockwell,3 Kövecses,4 Johnson,5 Lakoff,6 and Turner.7 The theory of conceptual metaphors adds support to the theory of image schemas developed by cognitive scientists (illustrated in section 1.7). As defined by Johnson, image schemas are “primary means by which we construct and constitute order and are not mere passive receptacles into which experience is poured.”8 In addition, they derive directly from our perceptual and kinesthetic experiences in the external world and are perceived as schematic representations of spatial relations. Because they are so pervasive in our general experience, they impact a wide range of bodily actions, physical manipulations of objects, and ways to orient ourselves spatially and temporally. Even the abstract thought of conceptual metaphors appears to have an image-schematic basis.9 Therefore, an important, perhaps primary, engine driving the concept of metaphorical thinking is that its meanings arise directly from bodily experience. If both domains share their image-schematic structure, cross-domain mapping also becomes possible (the Invariance Hypothesis in Lakoff and Turner,10 Lakoff11). When we think of time as having a linear form, of events having a certain 1

Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 3 Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics. 4 Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). See also: Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 5 Johnson, Body in the Mind. 6 Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things; George Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 202–251. See also: Lakoff, “The Invariance Hypothesis,” 39–74. 7 Turner, Reading Minds; Mark Turner, Death is the Mother of Beauty. Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 8 Johnson, Body in the Mind, 30. 9 Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things; Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.” See also: Lakoff, “The Invariance Hypothesis.” 10 Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason. 11 Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.” See also: Lakoff, “The Invariance Hypothesis.” 2

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evolution (e.g. circularity, extension), or of causal relations as following links and paths, these all form dynamic skeletal image schemas. If we consider the BALANCE schema, almost everything we know about balancing and equilibrium emerges from our bodily experience. We all know how we respond physically to disequilibrium and imbalance, and in such instances, we do whatever it takes to regain equilibrium or to maintain our bodily functions in equilibrium. In this way, we have come to understand the meanings of balance or loss of equilibrium. The BALANCE image schema can be elaborated metaphorically in abstract concepts of balance, which gives us the understanding of balanced personalities, balanced views, the balance of power, the balance of justice, etc. Without the physical understanding of the image-schematic knowledge underlying these abstract mental concepts, we would fail to comprehend many concepts in mathematical, legal, or moral domains.1 As illustrated by the previous examples, metaphors are realized by establishing correspondences between two conceptual domains via “crossdomain mappings.” These mappings are facilitated by pre-conceptual embodied experiences, as image schemas give rise to conceptual metaphors. In the conceptual metaphor AFFECTION IS WARMTH, feelings of affection correlate with bodily warmth, as one enjoys physical warmth when hugged and feels affection, protection, or comfort. Other bodily motivated metaphors use the increase in body temperature to explain metaphors we use to describe emotional states or strong psychological pressure. In this sense, an increase in body heat corresponds to the intensity of the activity, and hence the emergence of the conceptual metaphor INTENSITY IS HEAT, as it appears in many concepts relating to “anger,” “lust,” “argument,” and so on. These bodily motivated metaphors can explain the following expressions: “She is boiling with anger” or “I’m burning with love.”2 The conceptual link in the metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR discussed above is based on connections between the source domain of ARGUMENT and the target domain of WAR, respectively. In conclusion, Lakoff and Johnson3 hypothesize that metaphors reside in our capacity of conceptual projection from one domain to another. According to this view, the conventional association of LIFE (the target, which is the more abstract 1

Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., “Embodiment in Metaphorical Imagination,” in Grounding Cognition. The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking, eds. Diane Pecher and Rolf A. Zwaan (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 70. 2 Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture, 117–118. 3 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.

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domain) with JOURNEY (the source, which is the more physical domain) emerges in the conceptual metaphor of LIFE IS A JOURNEY. Many expressions commonly view life from the perspective of a journey, if we only consider the following popular expressions: “they will go far in life,” “some people have no direction in life,” “some people have a head start in life,” or “you are at a crossroads in life.” The choice of these two corresponding domains is not accidental; there are recurrent correspondences between the concepts of LIFE and JOURNEY: the traveler in the domain of “journey” is connected to the person leading a life in the second domain of “life.” Moving toward a destination will correspond to the purpose one has in life, the obstacles in the direction of travel resemble difficulties in life, the choices about the path correspond to choices in life, etc.1 These body-based conceptual correspondences or mappings between source and target domains have led to the neural theory of metaphor.2 This theory claims that if metaphors are embodied and the body is closely connected to the activity in the brain, metaphors must be triggered by neural connections. Cognitive neuroscientists3 assume that in the course of metaphorical thinking, two sets of neurons in the brain are activated: one group of neurons fires and so they trigger the activation of another group of neurons. The former group represents the source of the metaphor, while the latter is the target domain, and the mapping between the two domains is produced by neural circuitry. In light of this theory, metaphors are physical structures or connections that enable the coming together of source and target domains, and eventually, neural connectivity can explain metaphorical linguistic expressions. Another line of research shows that the source domain is placed in the sensorimotor system while the target domain can be found in higher, abstract cortical areas. The discovery leads Lakoff and Johnson to conclude: “Metaphor is a neural phenomenon. What we have referred to as metaphorical mappings appear to be realized physically as neural maps. They constitute the neural mechanism that naturally, and inevitably, recruits sensory-motor inference for use in abstract thought.”4 One case in point to illustrate the 1

Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture, 116. The Neural Theory of Language project was directed by Jerome Feldman and George Lakoff at the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley in 1997. The Neural Theory of Metaphor was developed by Srinivas Narayanan. See Srinivas Narayanan, “Knowledge-based Action Representations for Metaphor and Aspect” (PhD diss., UC Berkeley, 1997). 3 William R. Uttal, Mind and Brain: A Critical Appraisal of Cognitive Neuroscience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 4 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 256. 2

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neural grounding of metaphors is the “primary metaphor.” Complex metaphorical thoughts arise from primary metaphors that incorporate our earliest experience. In this way, everyday sensorimotor experience is linked to more abstract judgments. In the primary conceptual metaphors KNOWING IS SEEING or ARGUMENT IS STRUGGLE, children begin to learn metaphors by integrating conceptual domains in their everyday life. In the KNOWING IS SEEING metaphor, children first “see” literally, so seeing entails vision only, and only later does the seeing overlap with knowing. More complex abstract thoughts such as “See what I mean?” develops later in life and are grounded in primary metaphorical experience. Likewise, the primary metaphor ARGUMENT IS STRUGGLE shows how children first experience the meaning of argument, as understood in abstract thinking. Early in life, even before acquiring language, children struggle against unwanted physical manipulation by their parents, and thus they develop the basis for “argument is struggle.” Similar metaphors to ARGUMENT IS WAR will only be acquired later in life when children grow up and learn about other forms of physical struggle like battles or wars. In short, incipient forms of metaphorical thought can prove how pervasive metaphors are in thinking and speaking. In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson formulate this point very convincingly: “we will think and speak metaphorically, whether we know it or not.”1 Given metaphorical mapping is realized neurally in the brain, and since we all have roughly the same neural structures and the same bodies and exist in similar environments, most primary metaphors will be universal. This says a lot about the nature of understanding and, generally, how we perceive the most common concepts, such as time, space, emotion, causation, affection, ethics, and others. However, complex conceptual metaphors are culturally based2 and make use of cultural frames that may differ from one culture to another. When we act or think metaphorically, parts of the brain are active and trigger dynamic brain functions called enactments.3 In metaphorical enactments, abstract concepts are rooted in sensorimotor enactments that take place in real time and real contexts. It is proven that the brain can carry out multiple enactments. For example, the sentence “I’ve fallen in love, but we seem to be going in different directions” shows 1

Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 257. Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture. Universality and Variation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 3 Lakoff and Johnson use the term enactment for “dynamic brain functions, shared both during perceiving and acting and during imagining. An enactment, real or imaginative, is dynamic, that is, it occurs in real time.” Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 257. 2

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complex metaphorical enactment: love as a state (you are in love), love as a lack of control (falling in love), and love as a journey (going in different directions). These examples lead us to conclude that metaphorical mapping involves multiple elements from the source space being mapped onto other elements in the target domain.1

1.9 Metonymic thought: a cognitive approach On a theoretical level, metaphors can be defined as cognitive mechanisms that facilitate the partial mapping of one experiential domain2 onto a different experiential domain and are unidirectional, i.e. the target domain cannot be mapped onto the source domain. Unlike metaphors, metonymy is a mapping of the vehicle and target within the same conceptual domain, which is a within-domain mapping. Kövecses and Günter Radden define metonymy as “a cognitive process in which a conceptual element or entity (thing, event, property), the vehicle, provides mental access to another conceptual entity (thing, event, property), the target, within the same frame, domain, or idealized cognitive model (ICM). We can conceive of this as a ‘within-domain mapping’, where the vehicle entity is mapped onto the target entity.”3 They also explain the emergence of metonymies in terms of “access” rather than mental mappings. In other words, metonymic expressions serve as points of access to a particular conceptual domain, thus providing access to a target concept. On the other hand, Croft,4 for instance, suggests that metonymy can be considered in terms of a mapping process that highlights certain domains within the domain matrix of the concept. He goes on to explain that “it is possible for metonymy, as well as for other lexical ambiguities, to occur across domains within a domain matrix. In this way, domains do play a significant role in the interpretation of metonymy.”5 To illustrate this point, the example found in Croft6 is relevant here: “Proust spent most of his time in bed” and “Proust is tough to read.” In order to understand these two statements, one needs to shift domains in the domain matrix. In our encyclopedic knowledge of the writer Marcel Proust, we 1

Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 258. Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1. 3 Zoltán Kövecses and Günter Radden, “Metonymy: Developing a Cognitive Linguistic View,” Cognitive Linguistics 9, no. 1 (1998): 37–77. 4 William Croft, “The Role of Domains in the Interpretation of Metaphors and Metonymies,” in Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, eds. René Dirven and Ralf Pऺrings (Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003), 161–206. 5 Croft, “The Role of Domains,” 178. 6 Croft, “The Role of Domains,” 178–179. 2

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include our knowledge of Proust the man (including his habits of spending much time in bed) and what we know of Proust’s literary work and career as a writer. These two particular expressions highlight metonymically different aspects of our encyclopedic knowledge concerning Proust. The metonymic shift relates to a highlighted domain in the domain matrix. Another defining feature of metonymy identified by Lakoff and Johnson1 is that it can be explained by causal associations. For instance, in the metonymy “Nixon bombed Hanoi,” former president Richard Nixon “stands for” the US Air Force, and even if Nixon himself did not drop bombs on Hanoi, we still think of him as responsible for it. In this case, metonymy structures not just the language but also actions and thoughts. This metonymy is also possible due to the close relationship between the two entities (Nixon and the US Air Force), which can be termed as contiguity. Because metonymies are contextually-motivated, usually by “communicative and referential requirements,” as supported by Evans and Green,2 in “Nixon bombed Hanoi,” the mapping of the vehicle (Nixon) and the target (US Air Force) activates the idea of responsibility. Following on from the study of Kövecses and Radden3 and their idea that metonymy provides “access” to a domain within a domain matrix, complex questions arise in relation to the types of access and vehicles that facilitate such access. In theory, any element can stand for any other element from the same domain, but what Kövecses and Radden prove is that, in practice, the cognitive process of “standing for” another element can only be realized between elements that have a strong conceptual relationship with each other. Consequently, certain kinds of relationships cannot produce metonymic structures. One illustrative example is given by Kövecses4 in the form of the HUMAN FACE frame. In this case, the nose and the mouth cannot produce metonymic relationships despite their relationship of spatial contiguity: the nose cannot stand for the mouth, nor can the mouth be used to stand for the nose. Given the construction of frames as wholes and parts, “the whole and its parts” relationship is a major sense-making instrument. In the following example “Washington denied the charges” given by Kövecses,5 located in the GOVERNMENT frame, the place stands for the institution. The other “part and part” configuration, illustrated by “the violin sneezed during the performance,” located in the CONCERT frame, shows that the instrument 1

Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 35–40. Evans and Green, Cognitive Linguistics, 312. 3 Kövecses and Radden, “Metonymy,” 37–77. 4 Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture, 99. 5 Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture, 98. 2

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becomes the major object that represents the artist. In the examples given, one essential question refers to one’s ability to connect elements (vehicle elements stand for target elements). The connection is made possible by the notion of “frame,” more exactly, we are able to connect elements due to a detailed understanding of the elements of the frame. In the first example, for instance, the frame of the U.S. GOVERNMENT would comprise a variety of elements, such as the president, the building of the government, its location, the cabinet members, and others. Thus the location of the U.S. government, Washington, can stand for the U.S. government. This all adds support to the cognitive theory that metonymies are both cognitive and cultural products. From this perspective, the cultural construction of metonymies shows how we organize knowledge in the world: we are inherently influenced by cultural factors, social and cultural stereotypes, as well as by how we imagine ideal members or prototypes. This points to an important feature of the ongoing research on metaphors and metonymies, namely that human cognition is inherently related to poetic figurative processes and operations. In this sense, metaphors and metonymies represent basic aspects of the mental system and are responsible for conceptualizing the world and one’s experience. This opposes the traditional view that claims that the ability to think poetically requires special cognitive and linguistic abilities that are rarely employed in ordinary speech or acts. Even though metonymies are correlation-based while metaphors are resemblance-based, it can be concluded that both metaphors and metonymies are more than simple linguistic devices—they are conceptual items. They appear in language, in thought, and in cultural practices and reflect the organization of our underlying conceptual system. My own position in relation to this point is premised upon the idea that a great deal of language, cognitive systems, and experiences are metaphorically structured. My particular interest is in how the various disciplines clustered under the umbrella term of cognitive sciences look at the pervasiveness of the metaphor and the extent of other figurative processes in everyday thought and cultural behavior. In The Poetics of Mind, Gibbs makes this point clear: Similar cognitive mechanisms drive our understanding of both literal and figurative speech. This does not mean that figurative language is always understood in exactly the same way as nonfigurative language or that all types of figurative languages are processed similarly. There may be many occasions when we encounter figurative discourse, especially in reading literary texts, that require additional mental effort to be understood. But the experimental evidence shows that people need not recognize figurative

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utterances as violating communicative norms or maxims in order to understand what these expressions figuratively mean.1

In the realm of narrative studies, cognitive metaphorical models can allow us to glimpse into the reader’s mind when engaged in the process of reading literary works and in the act of exploring narrative worlds. I will expand more on this in Chapters 4 and 5, where I will attempt to shed new light on the theory of conceptual metaphors and how it relates to the conceptualization of time and space in the narrative.

1

Gibbs, The Poetics of Mind, 435.

CHAPTER TWO WHAT THE MIND HAS TO DO WITH LITERARY TEXTS. COGNITIVELY ORIENTED LITERARY STUDIES

2.1 General overview In the previous chapter, I supplied an overview and surveyed the directions in which various research ideas and theories arose and developed in the field of cognitive studies. The chapter focused on introducing the basic principles, methods, and research topics available in cognitive sciences and aimed to explore the cognitive view on the nature of the mind. One of the chapter’s central results showed that the disciplines of linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and philosophy contribute and bring support to the position that the mind is fundamentally embodied and intricately involved with thought processes. In recent years, scientists have begun to embrace the view of the mind as being metaphorical, emotional, and rather “illogical,” which in turn gave new insights into many cognitive functions. All this leads to a general agreement nowadays that thinking and cognitive functions, as represented in language, are shaped by the physical features of our bodies and brains (see the theoretical findings on “the embodied mind” by Johnson1 and Turner2). What cognitive scientists propose are new ways of framing “the embodied mind” by trying to cut against the premise that views the mind and the body as separate objects of study. In this way, they ask us to re-examine some of the most engrained cultural assumptions and claim that cognition and mental activity cannot be separated from the body, as brain activity happens in the human body. Consequently, thoughts stem from the architecture of the human body and brain, and also from the capacity to negotiate our way in the environment. By embracing a fundamentally embodied understanding of the mind, cognitive scientists 1

Johnson, The Body in the Mind. See also: Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 2 Turner, Reading Minds. See also: Mark Turner, The Literary Mind. The Origins of Thought and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

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begin one of the most challenging intellectual enterprises currently dominating many theoretical paradigms. Supported by neuroscience, which emphasized the material aspects of the brain, current cognitive research highlights the essential role of embodiment in the study of cognition (see Damasio1 and Edelman2). The first chapter also provided an overview of the theoretical assumptions regarding the mind-body question prior to the acceptance of the central notion of “body-minded brain” and explored the basic concepts of cognitive work currently receiving critical attention and which point to the ground-breaking developments in the future and to the possibilities that lie ahead. The first part of Chapter 1 was organized as a selective overview of important philosophical debates in the philosophy of the mind. I concentrated mainly on those philosophical threads and approaches that are essential for the inception of the cognitive revolution. The chapter continued with a broad discussion about the insights and innovations in cognitive linguistics brought about by theoretical advances in the study of cognition and human knowledge. Among the most important aspects in connection with this is the new approach to meaning, which, according to cognitive linguists, is motivated by human physicality and by the role of the innate cognitive architecture. The middle part of the chapter then focused on the most influential research conducted in the field of cognitive linguistics, and it ended with a detailed analysis of its central assumptions, models, and methods. My aim was to introduce the basic concepts of cognitive linguistics, since it is important to realize that a number of other cognitive disciplines draw on the large body of work carried out by cognitive linguists. The fact that most mental work is largely unconscious, “the unconscious mind,” as coined by Mark Turner,3 means that its study requires an interdisciplinary framework. To this end, collaboration and shared knowledge between sciences and across disciplines have revealed increasing evidence about human cognition and mental processing. A major insight came from cognitive linguistics, which posits that much of the mental work happens below the level of conscious awareness while the conscious phenomena are only regarded as “the smallest tip of the iceberg” of our thinking.4 Many cognitive theories aim to demonstrate that the unconscious phenomenon is not a marginal act of thinking, and consequently it needs to be re-examined. 1 Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994). 2 Gerald M. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire. On the Matter of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1993). 3 Turner, Reading Minds. 4 Turner, Reading Minds, 151.

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Without a cognitive revision and a re-centering of “unoriginal” and “automatic” thinking, we would not be able to explain the remarkable powers of the human mind and what we share in language and thought. In the end, Chapter 1 set out to give a cognitive scientific account of language and also to delineate the analytical models developed further in this present volume. However, the methodological toolkit will be completed in this chapter and in the following ones. I decided to take a cognitive linguistic approach because the principles and concepts advanced by cognitive linguists have now become paradigmatic and applicable to other areas of study. Chapter 1 focused on a revolutionary critical inquiry into language, which also asks for a revision of our fundamental understanding of the cognitive apparatus. To this end, I adopted the instruments developed by cognitive linguistics and elaborated in detail on the relationship between language and cognition, namely on the ways in which we form conceptual structures, how bodies can be mapped in the mind, how we understand image-schemas, and how we construct mental spaces and conceptual blends. Finally, the chapter reviewed the principles of cognitive linguistics to reassess the ways in which language can reveal this complex conceptual system. This means that an analysis of the emergence of the conceptual apparatus in the diversity of language leads to a new focus on the automatic work done by the “cognitive unconscious.” Cognitive scientists contributed to developing new and intellectually exciting approaches to language, mental operations that can be fruitfully used in literary studies. Conversely, key concepts and terms, as well as new research topics, borrowed from literary criticism helped cognitive studies reveal the workings of the thinking mind. Fundamental to this new approach in cognitive sciences is the role of cognitive linguistics, which centers around a revolutionary model of the metaphor, itself at the center of the way we think and pervasive in human cognitive processes. A number of leading cognitive theorists in this field, including George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, and others, emphasize the idea that conceptual metaphors need to be viewed not only as fundamental to human creativity, but also as cognitive tools in everyday communication as well as essential mental instruments in sophisticated works of art. Their approach to the matter of metaphor has been particularly prominent in guiding the way in which the conceptual system and the experience of living in the world are now perceived. In line with this argument, Lakoff and Johnson stress the importance of research on hidden conceptual mechanisms, which include

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image schemas, metaphors, and other embodied imaginative structures, since they make it possible “for us to experience things the way we do.”1 Other closely related strands of research, especially those developed by cognitive psychologists, attempt to confer an experimental basis to the mind’s capacity for poetic or figurative thought. For instance, psychologist Raymond Gibbs’ “poetics of mind”2 approach aims to show that metaphorical thought and the propensity for metonymy are basic creative feats of imagination. In the same vein, Richard Gerrig3 gathers empirical evidence to identify a set of cognitive psychological patterns that generally fuel narrative worlds. With the aid of cognitive psychological theories, Gerrig4 seeks to capture regularities across narrative experiences by explaining one central metaphor of reading fiction, i.e. “literature as transportation.” When the metaphorical concept of “being transported” is applied to the experience of reading, it is possible to imagine readers as undertaking a metaphorical journey. Instead of focusing on how readers try to reconstruct the narrative, cognitive studies should investigate how it becomes possible for a narrative world to reconstruct its readers, he claims. The potentialities of fictional information and narrative worlds allow Gerrig to reassess the influence of literature on the real world. He claims: “We continually draw inferences and exhibit participatory responses in everyday life. In some respects, our real world is as much constructed as any narrative world […]. For exactly that reason, researchers have often turned to narrative comprehension as a microcosm in which to study the processes and memory representations that guide our existence.”5 Other cognitive psychologists6 and computer scientists7 use the language of “scripts,” “stories,” “scenes,” and “storytelling” to investigate the structure of our general cognitive architecture. The experiments performed on stories help them to discover the structural representations of stories and the cognitive mechanisms that control, for instance, memory or comprehension. Research on stories entails analysis of general structures, and it is also concerned with the identification of narrative regularities, which can be 1

Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 509. Gibbs, Poetics of Mind. 3 Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds. 4 Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds, 11. 5 Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds, 27 6 Jean Matter Mandler, Stories, Scripts, and Scenes: Aspects of Schema Theory (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1984). 7 Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997). 2

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understood by using the principles of mental scripts and image schemas, i.e. a set of pre-existing representations stored in memory. That such research projects dealing with the representational powers of the mind are no longer limited to their own area of research but extend to literary studies can now forge a model for a “new interdisciplinarity.”1 From the early 1990s, the pursuit of a mutually beneficial approach and shared interests in cognitive sciences and literary studies meant that scholars are ready to negotiate hypotheses about mental acts, imaginative processes, and creative feats. By placing their intellectual interests in the largely accommodating arena of humanity, cognitive scientists promise to redefine their theoretical directions and research toward the more challenging realm of interdisciplinary work. Literary critics also take an interest in the challenging disciplinary boundaries for the study of cognition, the benefits of cognitively oriented methods, and the dialog between sciences, and have thus succeeded in creating a prolific theoretical terrain that can offer an important insight into human cognition and mental work.2 The investigation of the structures emerging when we produce and comprehend stories can be integrated into research programs on cognition. Literary critics and theorists turned to cognitive science largely due to their increasing dissatisfaction with post-structuralist limitations in approaching meaning and interpretation. Bound by the theoretical concerns of their respective areas of study, constructionists, deconstructionists, newhistoricists, and other post-structuralist critics find the text “guilty of crimes of class, patriarchy, or race, or declared indifferent to human concerns as the inhabitant of a world of pure language,”3 as Miall and Kuiken hold in their study. In contrast, critics interested in the cognitive study of literature prefer to take the opposite stance and move away from the traditional theoretical framework of post-structuralism in favor of a more humanistic and pragmatic approach. The reader is now recognized as “an embodied intelligence,” a real embodied person who undertakes intriguing narrative processes of comprehension. Richardson and Steen explain this new interdisciplinary reorientation as having grown out of a “spreading dissatisfaction with the more bleakly relativistic and antihumanist stands of

1

Mary Thomas Crane and Alan Richardson, “Literary Studies and Cognitive Science: Toward a New Interdisciplinary,” Mosaic 32, no. 2 (1999): 123–140. 2 The website “Literature, Cognition and the Brain” (http://archive.is/bhZce) maintained by Alan Richardson and Mary Crane is a helpful resource in this sense. 3 David S. Miall and Don Kuiken, “The Form of Reading: Empirical Studies of Literariness,” Poetics 25, no. 6 (1998): 327.

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Poststructuralism.”1 In fact, their theory sets goals for the new science of cognitive literary theory: rethinking literature from a cognitive standpoint and calling on literary studies to lead the way to a reconsideration of the mind. In his ground-breaking work on the study of English, Mark Turner2 was one of the first figures to voice criticism of the contemporary literary world, which he sees as “an ungrounded and fragmented” area reserved for specialists only. He proposes a reconsideration of the main claims of critical theory in light of recent research in cognitive sciences: “The neglect of contemporary critical theory to analyze literature as the expression of everyday capacities and to help us understand those capacities cuts it from the full human world, making it a special world, simpler than the human world, smaller and marginal, exhilarating as a magic kingdom contained within its own walls, often viewed derisively as an exclusive Disney World for literary critics.”3 Turner’s approach is motivated by the need to bring literary criticism into a new stage where language, literature, and mind can work together. This continuity between literary language, “natural” or ordinary language, and the allied conceptual resources allows us to understand the inner details of imagination and our soaring creative abilities. Above all, literature should be regarded as a “system” revelatory, through language use, of complex conceptual capacities. This means that when we arrive at an intimate understanding of this system, we will begin to see the ground of our thinking and language. This leads me to the conclusion that literature and literary criticism cannot be separated from everyday human life since, when we respond to literary works either by comprehending texts or by giving them a critical analysis, we are supposed to use roughly the same set of conceptual schemas and connections as the ones we normally employ in commonplace utterances. The complex consequences of a cognitive analysis of literary works can reveal a massive amount of commonplace conceptual knowledge. Nevertheless, by claiming that literature is grounded in ordinary conceptual patterns, cognitive literary studies do not aim to reduce literary language to everyday speech or make them homogenous. Rather, the aim is to make literature “human,” in the words of Turner.4 Without a proper understanding of the common conceptual ground for both everyday speech and literary texts, literature is far too complicated to decipher. In Turner’s own parlance: 1

Alan Richardson and Francis Steen, eds., “Literature and the Cognitive Revolution: An Introduction,” Poetics Today 23, no. 1 (2002): 171. 2 Turner, Reading Minds. 3 Turner, Reading Minds, 4. 4 Turner, Reading Minds, 246.

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“It is only by being constituted upon commonplace conceptual patterns that provide most of the meaning to literary texts that literary texts can be for us something other than impossible questions, opaque challenges, bizarre and mute anomalies.” 1 If we believe in the veracity of the arguments above, literature can only exist because both writers and readers bring ordinary linguistic skills and conceptual structures to the text in order to construct its meaning. This existing repertory of linguistic knowledge and conceptual thoughts makes literature possible. It is therefore hard to imagine literature as standing alone, independent of everyday language or separated from ordinary concepts conventionally embedded into the language. Without this basic condition, the sharing of language and conceptual resources, literature would fail to make sense.

2.2 Reading in the cognitive age The theoretical turn in the fields of humanities studies in the 1990s and the subsequent “disciplinary migration”2 into social sciences and other research domains brought about radical consequences for literary studies. There is one major claim that changed the nature of literary studies: if literature is understood as a product of the human mind, then literary creations are grounded in general cognitive abilities. This means that literary critics need to develop new tools in order to understand the complexities of language and cognition, strongly anchored in the minute architecture of bodies and brain. The change of status of literature has implications for the broader area of literary criticism, the studies of stylistics and narratology, and for cognitive poetics, too. While we should bear in mind that each of these disciplines has its own goals and research methods, they have all contributed to the newly emergent study of literature with a cognitive lens. However, irrespective of the individual critical approach adopted, cognitively oriented literary critics share the same object of study: the text, regarded as “the outcome of shared cognitive mechanism.”3 If this is true, then the task of literary criticism is to explain such mechanisms that become evident in readings. By adopting the cognitive approach, literary criticism begins to pay closer attention to the mental processes involved in reading. But what 1

Turner, Reading Minds, 246. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, eds., The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory (London: Routledge, 2007), 379. 3 Peter Stockwell, Texture. A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 1. 2

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exactly do critics mean when they refer to “reading”? The way forward is to explore the “natural forms of reading,” a concept coined by Peter Stockwell in his first study on cognitive poetics1 and later developed in his more recent book, Texture. A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Stockwell defines “natural reading” by analyzing one piece of physical evidence taken from recent literary reading practices and new reading habits. He considers the increasing number of different reading settings, such as reading groups who meet in libraries, people who read informally in pubs, cafés, and private houses, online reading groups, discussion forums on blogs, and recorded conversations on websites, all of which forms social reading that literary criticism can no longer ignore. Stockwell further argues2 that the number of people engaged in this new type of reading far outnumbers those in academic institutions, critical journals, or arts media. However, besides this being obvious physical evidence, the new reading practices offer a great advantage for the literary critic: they can offer insight into “the social mechanisms of private reading.” Obviously, the exploration of a text starts in the privacy of the human mind where it is “an entirely natural phenomenon,”3 which means that the vast majority of readers may rarely get the chance to share these meanings and intellectualize them in a theoretical framework. This new science is concerned with understanding what we are doing when we read literature and how we make sense of a text. In the end, such an approach is the direct outcome of taking the “cognitive embodiment” seriously. It is a fact that, ordinarily, readers do not reflect consciously upon the linguistic and conceptual resources they use. Such an analysis is necessary in the theoretical field of criticism if we want to understand the common cognitive capacities that constantly fuel textual explorations. The focus on the widely shared conceptual capacities available does not mean that one should not be interested in special, alternative, or individual readings. On the other hand, Turner holds that it is also reasonable to argue that taking for granted the basic capacities for invention extraordinarily reduces our chances to discover our common imaginative nucleus: “Given a bit of language, a discourse, or a text, how does the reader understand it? Given alternative readings, what were the different processes that led to those alternative understandings? The most amazing phenomenon our profession confronts, and the one for which we have the least explanations, is that a reader can make sense of a text, and that there are certain regularities across the individual senses made of a given text. How

1

Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics. Stockwell, Texture, 79. 3 Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics, 1. 2

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do readers do that?”1 It is often assumed that they combine individual factors and aspects emerging from the interpretative community. Cognitive literary studies do not deny that these factors have an impact on the experience of reading, which may well be, after all, a matter of personal tastes or may be motivated by the community’s shared values. While accepting that readings may differ greatly, literary theorists invite us to examine what we share in textual explorations and what we tend to agree on. This claim is based on the essential assumption about the joint embodied experience upon which literary creations are constituted. The complex consequences of shared conceptual mechanisms change the status of literature to a considerable degree: the central claim is that literary texts are vehicles for our everyday conceptual capacities. This means cognitive research into literary acts seeks to remove another recurrent misconception—that common language, as expressed in common thought, is simple and obvious, while an exploration of this ordinary linguistic system is unnecessary. Instead, we should concentrate exclusively on literary language that is marked by special literary devices, nuanced poetic structures, and original literary forms. It is a fact that traditional literary criticism has systematically taught readers to focus on the careful examination of this poetic language and thought, which means that we have been trained to focus exclusively on the “conscious” level of reading literature. To put it differently, this means that readers are trained to focus exclusively on “nuances of meaning” that stand in stark contrast to the “vast space of systematic unconscious understanding,”2 which usually goes unnoticed. Essentially, Turner3 argues that this unconscious component of understanding is often ignored solely on the grounds that this part is so simple and transparent that it does not need explaining. In conclusion, cognitively oriented literary studies aim at reconsidering one default concept of reading—understanding how readers arrive at the meaning of a literary text should not only provide “an interpretation” or “a reading” of the text but primarily explain the fundamental processes that have led them to their own reading. The aim would be to discover the thick layer of dominant and unoriginal thought, as revealed both in everyday language and literature. To understand special literary phenomena, we should first start by acknowledging the nature of the ordinary embodied mind and its knowledge of category patterns, image schemas, mental spaces, or analogies, to name just a few fundamental conceptual resources used by readers and writers alike. 1

Turner, Reading Minds, 19. Turner, Reading Minds, 18. 3 Turner, Reading Minds, 19. 2

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Nevertheless, in the process of reading literary works, we never stop to think about how we are able to build imaginative connections; this may be because these connections have become so firmly ingrained in the mind that they are no longer perceptible to conscious examination. We are used to building conceptual connections in everyday life that are themselves highly imaginative. Once we have learned how to master fundamental concepts, they become automatic and unconscious and no longer require conscious attention. This conclusion accords with research suggesting that the largest part of our conceptual ground is normally taken for granted. The fact that we master it and the language disclosing these concepts has led us to the astounding misconception claiming that an inquiry into this system would receive obvious answers. What cognitive research studies are trying to do is to remove this general misconception regarding a supposedly uncomplicated everyday conceptual apparatus. Turner explains that the study of the unconscious mind is necessary to understand basic concepts used for making sense of the world when we speak, move in space, relate to others, and read literature: “The ultimate goal of cognitive science should be— precisely—to provide a cogent scientific account of how human beings achieve their most remarkable symbolic products: how we come to compose symphonies, write poems, invent machines (including computers), or construct theories (including cognitive-scientific ones).”1 Cognitive studies prove that the background conceptual apparatus should be considered in much more detail, as it is the fundamental ground for everyday language and literary works. Thus, we should inquire, for instance, into how our basic conceptual structures provide meaning to literature. Without the mastery of these essential concepts, readers will not be able to get much of the meaning of literary texts. The process of understanding in the act of reading is based on the premise that both readers and writers share the same conceptual patterns. When we talk about literature, we should bear in mind this vast space of commonality that is generally taken for granted. Cognitive scientists describe the whole cycle of understanding: they claim that literature is part of everyday language and language itself is an act of the human mind, which is a human brain, in a human body, in a human environment.2 This leads to one of the most important principles in cognitive sciences: our cognitive capacities are largely shared, despite cultural, geographical, historical, ideological differences. Indeed, what makes us different across humanity ultimately reduces to the common ways in which the mind works and to the similar 1 2

Gardner, The Mind’s New Science, 391. Turner, Reading Minds, 49.

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ways in which we interact with the environment. This guiding principle arguing for continuities is reflected in language, since “language is not modular, language and cognition are not separate,”1 as Stockwell claims. Central evidence to prove the amount of regularities across readings may be found in the widely shared set of definitions given to the experience of reading. Cognitive psychologists (see Gerrig,2 Nell,3 Green et al.4), cognitive poeticians,5 and cognitive narratologists6 have all investigated, with their own different methods, the capacity of literature to create a state of immersion in the reader. Contrary to Samuel T. Coleridge’s famous words claiming that literature is “a wilful suspension of disbelief,” cognitive theorists set out to show that, quite the opposite, literature should engage readers and facilitate total immersion into the text. In relation to this, it is evidently useful to reconsider our most shared metaphorical perspectives on the act of reading. According to the data collected by a number of cognitive psychologists from online reading groups (see Stockwell7), the most popular definition of reading is contained in the metaphor of “being transported,” which generally describes the experience of reading. Reading is associated with images of moving and transition to another state, as illustrated in ordinary descriptions such as “I was carried away by it,” “It swept me off my feet,” “It was like another world,” “I can lose myself in a book,” etc. Here, the reader-traveler undertakes intellectual journeys that can potentially change their beliefs and emotions, prompt new attitudes, and redefine conditions. The second most popular organizing metaphor, as analyzed by Stockwell,8 presents the literary experience as a form of control coming from the author and affecting the reader, as in the popular expressions “It’s gripping stuff” or “I couldn’t put it down.” Both these metaphors, reading as “transportation” and reading as “control,” are treated as individual specifications of the broader conceptual metaphor of READING IS A JOURNEY, corresponding to a more general level of the 1

Stockwell, Texture, 3. Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds. 3 Victor Nell, “Mythic Structures in Narrative. The Domestication of Immortality,” in Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, eds. Melanie Green, Jeffrey J. Strange, and Timothy C. Brock (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 17–38. 4 Melanie Green, Jeffrey J. Strange, and Timothy C. Brock, eds., Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002). 5 Stockwell, Texture. 6 Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality. 7 Stockwell, Texture. 8 Stockwell, Texture, 79–81. 2

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metaphorical concept of LIFE IS A JOURNEY. Interestingly, the behavior of readers actively engaging in the experience of reading, or sometimes being controlled by the text, is dramatically modified by changes occurring in their mind. As they are being “transported” to a new literary realm subsequently triggers a change of identity into another mental world. Stockwell explains the process: “The notion that a reading mind is ‘transported’ in a literary work involves a projection of identity into another mental world, in which all the deictic references and attributes of the observing consciousness are shifted to the imaginary landscape.”1 In his theory on the psychology of emotions, Keith Oatley2 analyzes two similar types of metaphors that define the reading process: the metaphors of “transportation” and “transformation,” which impact readers differently. Specifically, “transportation metaphors” are passive metaphors as they take us to another place, as if undertaking a journey to an unknown place. However, even before beginning this new experience, readers know in advance that nothing really dangerous can happen, so reading could be judged as perhaps the safest journey. The example given by Oatley3 is that of thrillers that transport readers into a genuinely new place, but they enter the experience hoping to return safely “back home.” While reading thrillers, one can often experience states of anxiety, intense horror, or painful fear, but this entire inventory of extreme emotions is eased by the assurance that no harm will ever happen at the end. Put differently, we feel empowered by this certainty, as we can put the book down at any time and stop the potential mental distress. Other researchers have developed this aspect of narrative safety. For example, psychologist Victor Nell4 sees the world of the narrative as one of the most non-threatening worlds. In this respect, he points out a contradiction in the reader’s behavior: on the one hand, they maintain a safe distance between the real world and the potentially threatening reading experience, and on the other hand, they feel wilfully absorbed into the unknown depths of the text. If fiction means a transition to new places, as revealed by the “transportation metaphor,” literature can impact one’s identity, as shown by the “transformation metaphor.” We are transported to alternative possible worlds, often by experiencing deictic shifts, where we are offered a plurality of perspectives on the actual world. Oatley details this 1

Stockwell, Texture, 87. Keith Oatley, “Emotions and the Story Worlds of Fiction,” in Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, eds. Melanie Green, Jeffrey J. Strange and Timothy C. Brock (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 39–70. 3 Oatley, “Emotions and the Story Worlds of Fiction.” 4 Nell, “Mythic Structures in Narrative,” 17. 2

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transformation as follows: “By means of the story our emotions may be transformed by having them deepened or understood better, and they may be extended toward people of kinds for whom we might previously have felt nothing. And when we come to the last sentence, we put the book down, something of the transformation of our identity can remain.”1 The basic concept underlying this universal reading of metaphors relies on the commonly shared capacity for mental projection, i.e. the human capacity for recognizing and building small spatial (bodily) stories and projecting them metaphorically, as mental or abstract stories. As Turner notes, “these projections show up constantly in both everyday language and literary language because they are general cognitive processes indispensable to human thought and action.”2 This complex mental process of combining story and projection, coined as a “parable” by Turner in his study The Literary Mind, is a mental instrument for constructing meaning in fiction or everyday life. Mental processes found in parables are not exclusively literary but prove essential for basic everyday mental concepts. In keeping with the principle that this intricate work of cognition happens across both literary and everyday thinking, literary exploration can illuminate important parts of human understanding and thought. Therefore, the study of the “literary mind” should be an important part of the study of the mind in general. Turner speaks of this scientific attraction: “The processes of the literary mind are usually considered to be different from and secondary to the processes of the everyday mind. On that assumption, the everyday mind—with its stable concepts and literal reasoning—provides the beginnings for the (optional) literary mind. On the contrary, processes that we have always considered to be literary are at the foundation of the everyday mind. Literary processes […] make the everyday mind possible.”3 There is another significant reason why these reading metaphors are of interest for research both in cognition and literature, and especially for cognitively informed studies in cognitive poetics.4 It is reasonable to ask how readers become involved in the intricate ways of narrative plots and how literary emotions are aroused, even if we all know the experience is 1

Oatley, “Emotions and the Story Worlds of Fiction,” 43. Turner, The Literary Mind, 39. 3 Turner, The Literary Mind, 115. 4 Theorist Reuven Tsur was the first to use the term “cognitive poetics” and later developed it in his approach to poetry. See Reuven Tsur, What is Cognitive Poetics (Tel Aviv: The Katz Research Institute for Hebrew Literature, 1983); Reuven Tsur, Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics (Amsterdam, North Holland, 1992); Reuven Tsur, On the Shore of Nothingness: A Study in Cognitive Poetics (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003). 2

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purely fictional. How are readers able to articulate the emotional experience of the “transportation metaphor” on the same terms with which they would talk about a non-literary transportation in a non-literary discourse? How can readers feel “transported” cognitively and emotionally and “controlled” by the book and by the author at the same time? In truth, cognitive poeticians wish to explore this emotive response to literature, reconsidered as a particular cognitive phenomenon, and want to discover how it functions in actuality. By refueling the emotional world of texts, cognitive poetics does not intend to re-enact the feeling of literary emotion but offer a solid analytical framework for the emotive response stimulated by literature. And this takes us back to the simulated literary feeling responsible for the immersive effect of literature. In this sense, we may safely conclude that literature is “the semblance of the felt life.”1

2.3 Cognitive poetics as the new interdisciplinary venture The new cognitive turn in the field of literary studies, as detailed above, was initially regarded as an interdisciplinary effort to bridge the vast field of cognitive sciences with that of literary analysis (i.e. the bridge between linguistics and poetics). Cognitive poeticians were the first to take up this interdisciplinary framework and challenge disciplinary boundaries. However, only over the last ten years has cognitive poetics transformed itself into a discipline in its own right, with its own disciplinary standards and principles. The reason for this late emergence of the new cognitive science may lie in what Henkel sees as the “mutually suspicious attitudes”2 of both linguists and literary scholars with regard to each other’s approaches and interests. This happens to be the case with many academic departments where both disciplines coexist. Mark Turner3 illustrates the current situation of the profession of English within academia thus: Consider, as an illustration of this instability [of the profession], the condition of the current doctoral student, who, by way of training in the profession, apprentices himself or herself in one of the unrelated fields or one of the rival theories, and acquires through that apprenticeship a

1

Margaret H. Freeman, “The Fall of the Wall Between Literary Studies and Linguistics: Cognitive Poetics,” in Applications of Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations and Fields of Application, eds. Gitte Kristiansen et al. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007), 403. 2 Jacqueline Henkel, Language of Criticism: Linguistic Models and Literary Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 3 Turner, Reading Minds, 9–10.

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specialized competence that may share no common component with the competences acquired by students apprenticed to other fields or theories. As these doctoral students obtain their degree and fill the ranks of the professoriate, the fragmentation in the profession and its lack of shared discourse will grow increasingly manifest and painful.

Despite the marked differences between cognitive and literary studies, cognitive linguists recognize the invaluable expertise literary critics can bring to the process of analyzing texts and literary phenomena, such as point of view, focalization, types of authors, narrative perspective, etc. They worked on ground-breaking theories of the blends of mental spaces, deixis, figures, grounds, and a host of other interesting topics. In effect, both linguists and literary critics address topics that seem to be complementary, the only difference being that the focus in literary studies is on the text (theories of literature), whereas in cognitive linguistics it is placed on the language of the embodied mind (theories of mind). These are obvious reasons to speak of the divorce of the two disciplines. Critics of these theories highlight the dangers of a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary framework on the basis that applying terms and concepts from neighboring domains may result in a poor adaptation of external methodological practices and a misunderstanding of analytical discourses. Freeman explains: “It is no surprise, therefore, that many literary critics find cognitive linguistic applications to literary texts merely ‘jargonizing’ what they already know, and cognitive linguists find literary readings ad hoc and impressionistic.”1 Nevertheless, efforts to join these two epistemic directions have been progressing for more than thirty years, one of them being George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s seminal work Metaphors We Live By, which treats literature as one of the essential tools for understanding the conceptual system and how minds work. The cognitive turn toward literature remodeled literary phenomena into “figures of thought” now populating our “literary minds,” to use Turner’s phrasing.2 Though interdisciplinary exchange highlights commonalities between cognitive linguistics and literary studies, their epistemic marriage was not promptly declared from the outset. The “fall of the wall” between the two disciplines, as referred to by Margaret Freeman3 in her eponymous essay, only happened when cognitive poetics welcomed different theoretical strands and methodological approaches from other disciplines. This new joint cognitive undertaking forges links between the language of the literary 1

Freeman, “Fall of the Wall,” 404. Turner, The Literary Mind. 3 Freeman, “Fall of the Wall.” 2

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text and the act of literary reading, on the one hand, and the language and the workings of the mind, on the other. In short, cognitive poetics has the ability to look “both toward the text and toward the mind.”1 Therefore, this is what the new cognitive science can contribute to both literary theories and to theories of the human mind. In this sense, a cognitively oriented analysis of a literary text is more than a purely linguistic approach, whereas literature is no longer an “uncommon” sub-category of language. The linguistic evidence provided by the analysis is just the theoretical basis for explaining the connection between cognitive processes and literary texts. The role of cognitive poetics in the exploration of the workings of the “unconscious mind” is now regarded as the major breakthrough in bringing disciplines together. If we accept the scientific evidence from cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics that most of our mental capacities happen below the level of consciousness, then a detailed cognitive analysis can provide a systematic account of unconscious processes. Generally, these mental operations happen at lightning speed, and it is therefore impossible to be aware of them and rationalize them rapidly in on-line communication. This is where cognitive analyses come in. Cognitive poeticians are expected to articulate consciously the powers of the reader to use language and conceptual thought so as to construct meaning in the text. In what follows, I will survey the new science of literature and the reassessment of the processes taking place in the act of reading. I will first point out the gains of cognitive poetics and give a clear sense of how this discipline addresses key literary concepts and ideas. Most cognitive studies are narrow in their research focus—a consequence of the great diversity of disciplines within cognitive sciences—but they tend to agree on one essential aspect: that is, if literary works are artifacts, the readings of literature are “natural” phenomena, as Stockwell calls them. He claims: “Creating literature is natural; reading is a natural process—both draw on our natural cognitive capacities even as they create a sense of transcendence.”2 Alan Richardson and Francis Steen’s study “Literature and the Cognitive Revolution”3 is one of the first attempts to promote “the natural as a category that has its own history, forming the conditions of possibility for the cultural.” In their view, culture becomes possible if we rely on our complex bodies, nervous systems, and sensory apparatus, all parts of the culture they create, but not identical to it. They further argue that rethinking the “natural” should happen with the tools offered by the

1

Freeman, “Fall of the Wall,” 405. Stockwell, Texture, 5. 3 Richardson and Steen, “Literature and the Cognitive Revolution,” 173. 2

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most recent insights from disciplines ranging from cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics to cognitive anthropology. To this end, I will look more closely at the benefits of employing cognitive analysis to illuminate key phenomena in literary reading such as narrative worlds, narrative space and time, metaphorical language in the narrative discourse, and fictional minds. My examinations of these will use the model of cognitive linguistics, which offers a set of concepts and notions that can supplement literary analysis and can provide in-depth explanations for a number of literary phenomena. For instance, the theories of mental spaces and of conceptual integration can explain how readers are able to construct various mental spaces by drawing on textual information and then bring them together in a newly emergent blended space. Blending can explain the resources we employ in reading and thinking creatively and imaginatively. Cognitive linguistics builds on image schemas that can give us a detailed description of the narrative space. In addition, linguistic analyses of the metaphorical projections of time and space in narrative show how narrative time can be conceived in terms of spatial relations. Using linguistic tools in cognitive analysis is particularly challenging in one main respect that I will focus on in what follows: finding the meaning(s) of stories. In my analysis below, I will concentrate almost exclusively on textual meanings rather than on interpretations. I argue that in order to be able to give a critical interpretation, one must look at the mechanisms (mostly invisible and unconscious) that have led to the formation of the meaning of the story. In this sense, a cognitive narratological approach is well-suited to complement the analytical tools of cognitive poetics. I believe that it is difficult to draw a clear line between cognitive poetics and narratology, and my intention is not to point out their differences but to use their tools to formulate a solid explanation for the emergence of meaning in literary short stories. As cognitive poetics is mainly interested in readerly interpretation and the representation of the narrative world, this new discipline actually shares many of the concerns traditionally dealt with by stylistics, narratology, or reception theories. In the complex territory of literary interpretations, cognitive poetics has one significant advantage, as pointed out by Stockwell: “[It] is now in a position to offer an explanation for intersubjective readings.”1 I contend that the framework of cognitive poetics can inform an evaluation of even traditional literary issues and recast old questions in the field of literary theory. The next sub-chapter will constitute an informed analysis of cognitive narratology that will show a renewed interest in key literary issues 1

Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics, 122.

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from a cognitive perspective. In the remainder of this chapter, I will explore the mutual benefits of cognitive poetics and cognitive narratology drawn from their relationship, and will also address the theoretical gaps that both disciplines can fill in the future, as well as the challenges that lie ahead through an overview of a number of theoretical strands applied to literary texts by promoters of both disciplines.

2.4 A cognitive inquiry into narrative: toward a cognitive narratology Cognitive narratology and cognitive poetics are closely linked by virtue of their theoretical goals and issues. This sub-chapter will also show that the data and insights of cognitive poetics are altered and enriched when reframed around hypotheses shaped by what is now known as the new science of narratology. Insofar as narratological theories tie in with cognitive theory, they are able to account for the specific cognitive abilities of the interpreter/reader (induced by the narrative)—a condition necessary for constructing mental representations of the story. One major research topic for cognitive narratologists is analyzing the process by which interpreters or readers (hereinafter referred to as “readers”) reconstruct “storyworlds.”1 Herman defines the world of the story as a mental model containing “configurations of participants, objects, and places and sequences of states, events, and actions, evoked by cues contained in narratives.”2 In relation to Herman’s storyworlds, it is necessary to investigate the cognitive processes that occur when readers construct mental models of worlds emerging from the story. As readers try to comprehend stories, they take the “deictic shift,” i.e. the power of stories to transport the reader to the time and space of the storyworld. We can infer that the act of reading is not limited to the reconstruction of the timeline and the existents within the story, but that cognitive abilities and emotional responses are also required to construct actual storyworlds or imaginary projections of embedded stories. In effect, this intense mental work necessitates complex cognitive operations that allow readers to uncover the overall meaning of a story. What cognitive narratologists do is investigate how beneath apparently basic work of interpretation, readers use complex cognitive operations to build meanings. In fact, readers do not simply put together parts of the story by rearranging the plot, but instead immerse themselves 1

Herman, Story Logic. David Herman, “Narratology as a Cognitive Science,” Image and Narrative, no. 1 (2000). http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/narratology/davidherman.htm

2

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into the world of the story. They live out imaginary events, respond emotionally to narrative actions and characters, draw inferences, and imagine alternatives for narrative events in the story.1 Given the wide variety of story types and narrative media, cognitive narratologists try to identify that set of cognitive tools readers use in order to recognize stories and learn how to distinguish them from non-stories. We should note here that cognitive narratology seeks to inquire into a more comprehensive range of media and artifacts, approaching diverse corpora like fictional and non-fictional narratives, digital narratives, e-mail novels and blogs, graphic novels, and storytelling in face-to-face interactions, among others. Herman claims that, irrespective of the narrative media, all these approaches share a common focus on “mind-relevant aspects of storytelling practices—where ‘mind’ is shorthand for ‘mind-brain.’”2 The multiplicity of projects in narratology has led to a less structured framework for scholars to locate their theoretical approach within the broader domain of cognitive narratology. This is also due to the term cognitive narratology being a relatively recent coinage (first used by Jahn3), which may account for many scholars being unwilling to integrate their work into the new cognitive domain. It is true that cognitive narratology seeks to rethink narrativizing processes, but most importantly, it claims narrative should be regarded as a “tool of understanding” and “a sense-making instrument in its own right.”4 Regarded as instruments of mind, narrativizing processes reveal much about how the brain functions. Moreover, if we believe that the brain functions primarily in terms of narrative, as argued by Turner,5 then everyday thinking and literary capacity overlap greatly. For both, we use roughly the same mental instruments. In the end, arriving at the core meaning of the story (either in literary or everyday stories) becomes one basic mental activity, essential to human thought. Ultimately, the human ability of thinking in narrative enables people to own the powers of “story logic” that, according to Herman, provides “an unreplaceable resource for structuring and comprehending experience, a distinctive way of coming to terms with time, process, change.”6 For this reason, it is worth investigating 1

Herman, Story Logic, 16–17. David Herman, “Cognitive Narratology,” The Living Handbook of Narratology, July 7, 2011 (revised December 24, 2013). https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/38.html. 3 Jahn, “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives.” 4 Herman, “Cognitive Narratology.” 5 Turner, The Literary Mind, 7. 6 Herman, Story Logic, 23. 2

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the story logic that allows readers to construct the world of the story and, simultaneously, to make use of this logic in real life in an attempt to structure experience and make it “cognizable, manipulable, liveable.”1 If the implications of recent cognitive studies for narratology have been recognized in the new theoretical strands (see Richardson and Spolsky,2 Herman,3 Richardson and Steen,4 and Abbott5), current theoretical models of narratology have not been sufficiently acknowledged by cognitive sciences. In this sense, David Herman’s essay “Narratology as a Cognitive Science” (2000) analyzes and evaluates The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS, 1999) and observes that it lacks entries for narrative and story and does not discuss relevant narrative concepts, which, Herman claims, would answer key research questions of cognition. What he aims to do in his article is raise awareness of the fruitful potentialities of a dialog between researchers in cognitive sciences and those interested in the study of narrative. In this sense, a more sustained dialog can open new lines of communication, essential for both cognition and narratology. He further suggests that narratological tools have the potential to reshape key research concerns in cognitive science, which means that narrative theories and linguistics should be both taken as genuine resources for cognitive science, or rather, as sub-domains in cognitive research.6 Studies in literary narratives are particularly consequential for current overall narrative research with a cognitive orientation. More specifically, narrative understanding of literary narratives is regarded as a process of building mental models of the story, a process of reconstruction where readers rebuild roughly the same mental patterns that are likely to have appeared in story production. When dealing with a story, readers try to understand the intentions and goals of characters, the circumstances that surround specific acts in the story, or actions and events in the story—this complex process of text representation aims to replicate the initial design of the story. The theoretical attempts to arrive at the meaning of the story have been present in the study of narrative, even in its early stages, starting with Aristotle. That there is such a wide range of narrative forms and narrative media shows that the story, “like life itself, […] is there, international, 1

Herman, “Narratology as a Cognitive Science.” Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky, eds., The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 3 Herman, Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. 4 Richardson and Steen, “Literature and the Cognitive Revolution.” 5 Porter H. Abbott, ed., “On the Origins of Fiction: Interdisciplinary Perspectives,” Special Issue of SubStance 30, no. 1/2 (2001). 6 Herman, “Narratology as a Cognitive Science.” 2

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transhistorical, transcultural,”1 in Barthes’ words. However, the universality and complexities of stories in today’s world appear to complicate matters. Critics in the field of narrative studies are often puzzled by such large inventories of stories. Indeed, the effort to control and understand narrative has shown the need for a design of a unitary model for common reference. Arguably, the questions addressed by cognitive narratologists (for instance, the claim that narrative can be a firm basis for knowing a mind) could not be formulated earlier, but some scene-setting had already been laid by structuralist representations. In literary theories, structuralism is known to have advanced a theoretical model concerned with the analysis of a common structure for narratives, their implicit rules, and narrative units. These fundamentally constitutive elements of narrative, taken together, put forward a design for a narrative grammar with structural similarities to the grammar of the language. As Robert Scholes2 notes in his comprehensive work Structuralism in Literature, the poetics of fiction makes use of varied linguistic possibilities, structured by a set of supra-grammatical rules of structuration. Structuralist narratologists have tried to describe and classify the infinite number of narratives and attempted to formulate principles and theories in order to sketch out a common narrative structure. By the same token, literary theorists have tried to produce a narrative grammar by following the rules initially provided by linguistics. In light of this theory, the sentence represents the smallest unit of the narrative, yet the organization of sentences is seen as a different “language,” different from that of grammar. Barthes speaks of the special language of the discourse: “And yet it is obvious that discourse itself (as an arrangement of sentences) is organized, and that, through this organization, it is perceived as the message of another ‘language,’ functioning at a higher level than the language of linguistics: discourse has its units, its rules, its ‘grammar.’ Because it lies beyond the sentence, and though consisting of nothing but sentences, discourse must naturally be the object of a second linguistics.”3 Structuralism, regarded as the “second linguistics,” highlights the need for a more coherent and orderly system as a reaction to the modernist fragmentariness and alienation. As Scholes explains, scholars were seeking a coherent system that “would unite the modern sciences and make the

1

Roland Barthes, “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” New Literary History 6, no. 2 (1975): 237. 2 Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature. An Introduction (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1974), 112. 3 Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” 240.

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world habitable for man again.”1 It is probably clear that with the rise of structuralism, literature was provided with a scientific basis, while the idea of a system became more pervasive. Literature as an “integral system” may adapt while its features transform, but its systemic form will be largely preserved. From this vantage point, the value and meaning of a narrative are always in relation to those of another narrative work, while they both refer to the system outside them. Therefore, to structuralists, the system of literature functions as a reference for any individual narrative work. This particular conceptualization of literature had previously informed the theoretical works of Russian formalists (1915–1930). Their first attempts to create “the science of literature” were primarily concerned with the concept of “literariness,” while their poetics approach formulated the first general principles for examining fiction. Interpreting individual literary texts was not their main research focus, however. Tomashevsky2 shows that “the theme” and “the general thought” form the unifying principles in a fictional structure. Victor Shklovsky,3 Boris Tomashevsky, and Boris M. Eichenbaum4 delineate the universal principles of examining the literary language and lay the foundation of structural thinking as a research methodology, later complemented by a cultural approach to the interpretation of literature. In this sense, the work of Vladimir Propp5 focuses on a structural study of fiction, which he first applies to the reading of Russian fairy tales. What he seeks to demonstrate is that folktales, myths, or fairy tales are the prototypes for modern narratives and for ulterior developments in fiction. He elaborates that modern literary forms have built on and developed from these incipient fictional forms, but their remnants are hardly noticeable in modern fiction. Propp6 categorizes fairy tales according to the functions assigned to the characters in the narrative into 31 functions and four constant laws, applicable to all individual works of literature, where their combinations 1

Scholes, Structuralism in Literature, 2. Boris Tomashensky, “Thematics,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 61–95. Originally published in Russian in 1925. 3 Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 3–24. Originally published in Russian in 1917. 4 Boris M. Eichenbaum. “The Theory of the Formal Method,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 99–140. Originally published in Ukrainian in 1926. 5 Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). 6 Propp, Morphology of the Folktale. 2

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will constitute the grammar and syntax for all narratives. Meanwhile, in anthropological studies, Claude Lévi-Strauss1 focuses his research on the myth, the primary narrative unit of any one culture, and therefore able to reveal essential aspects of that particular culture. In line with the work of Propp2, Algirdas-Julian Greimas3, Claude Bremond et al.4, and Tzvetan Todorov5 further investigated basic fictional structures with a view to isolating the essential narrative units and the governing laws of combination. Their purpose was to divide the narrative into functioning units and then determine the rules of combining these elementary units. Unlike Propp, Bremond6 does not assign functions to the character, but is more interested in the logic or succession of the choices made by the characters at some point in the story. This second model was established by Greimas,7 who identified a set of “binary oppositions” in the functions that will contribute to the genesis of narrative structures; actants are “syntactic elements that are distributed in ‘narrative’ sentences in patterned, predictable ways. […] Whereas actors are semantic units, actants are syntactic ones, such that ‘an actor functions as an actant only when it is put into play by either narrative syntax or linguistic syntax.’” In turn, Todorov sought to analyze rules of combinations for the actions of

1 Claude Lévi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes: Mythologiques, Volume 2, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), first published in French in 1966. See also: Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Origin of Table Manners, Mythologiques, Volume 3, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), first published in French in 1968; Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man: Mythologiques, Volume 4, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), first published in French in 1971; Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, Volume 1, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), first published in French in 1964. 2 Propp, Morphology of the Folktale. 3 Algirdas-Julien Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, trans. Danielle McDowell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). 4 Claude Bremond, Joshua Landy and Thomas Pavel, eds., Thematics: New Approaches (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). 5 Tzvetan Todorov, “Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme?” Poétique, vol. 2 (Paris: Seuil, 1973). 6 Claude Bremond, La Logique du récit. Collection Poétique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973). 7 Algirdas-Julien Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, trans. Paul Perron and Frank H. Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 260–261.

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characters and how these actions become fundamental predicates in the logic of a narrative. Based on these structuralist narratology principles, characters are seen as actants (participants in actions) assuming general roles in the unfolding narrative, a perspective later criticized by practitioners of “high structuralism,”1 among them Roland Barthes in “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.” He states that characters are not defined as “beings” (what they are), but as participants (what they do) or “agents.” By assuming general roles, characters are seen as artificial constructs, reduced to simple typology, and not defined by essential psychological traits: “[S]tructural analysis showed the utmost reluctance to treat the character as an essence, even for classification purposes. […] Structural analysts, scrupulously avoiding to define the character in terms of psychological essences, have done their best until now, experimenting with various hypotheses to define the character not as a ‘being’ but as a ‘participant.’”2 In view of this structural analysis of the narrative in literature, characters are the sum of their actions, and what really matters in the syntagmatic axis of the narrative is the result or impetus of their acts. This means that traditional narratologists sought to identify the narrative units of the story that form the entire narrative syntax. However, little attention has been paid to the content or narrative semantics or, for that matter, to narrative pragmatics, which concerns the world-knowledge of readers and the contextual indicators they use in arriving at the meaning of the text. It is precisely here that the structuralist approach to literature is proving weak. Conversely, narratology can be used to formulate a more pragmatic approach to readerly interpretation. The study of the narrative can look at how thinking actually happens in the mind of readers in their efforts to understand the work of the author, as reflected in the lives of the characters and narrators. Based on this, we should ask how it is possible for readers to cope with the text and get meaning from it. This theoretical enterprise seeks to lay cognitive foundations to literature. The main research question arising from the above is how to get to the complex cognitive operations required to interpret characters, actions, events, circumstances, and, broadly speaking, the design of a story. This new approach to literary reading takes the leap from the grammatical paradigm of the narrative to a new “logic of narrative,” as suggested by Herman in his study Story Logic. Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Many narratologists are concerned with the cognitive basis of literature, for 1 2

Scholes, Structuralism in Literature, 157. Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” 256–257.

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that matter, and reject the initial definition of narrative understanding adopted by structuralism. What cognitive narratologists do not approve of is the restrictive manner in which structuralists combine narrative and linguistics models, only to create a grammar of narrative (la langue from which narratives originate), not a “logic” of narrative. Cognitive narratologists are nevertheless far from altogether dismissing the study of linguistics. On the contrary, recent developments in the field prove that linguistic principles, along with advances in cognitive sciences and discourse analysis, can formulate a new grammar for stories. Certainly, narratology and linguistics can both contribute to a new theory of narrative that is primarily concerned with the creation of mental representations of the storyworld. In this sense, the work on the discourse in a “post-classical age”1 seeks to show how interpreters or readers arrive at the meaning in the text and how they explore the message of the text by taking into account linguistic and cognitive factors, as well as contextual ones. Herman shows enthusiasm for the new narratological developments: “Postclassical narratology (which should not be conflated with poststructuralist theories of narrative) contains classical narratology as one of its ‘moments’ but is marked by a profusion of new methodologies and research hypotheses; the result is a host of new perspectives on the forms and functions of narrative itself.”2 It is true that the new science of narratology exploits the possibilities of older narrative designs, but it intends to develop more illuminating explanatory models. For instance, the text is no longer regarded as an autonomous object with a pre-defined underlying code that is waiting to be discovered. As structuralists are concerned with a general system of features to explain the narrative langue, they deal with five basic concerns, often deemed insufficient to explore narrative meaning. Martin Cortazzi outlines these structural approaches to narrative followed by structuralist analysts: 1. 2. 3. 4.

the text with its particular rules and patterns; the difference between discourse and story; the description of deep and surface narrative structures; the concern with characters as actants with a limited number of typical roles in the narrative; and 5. the combination of narrative units.3 1

David Herman, “Introduction: Narratologies,” in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 2. 2 Herman, “Introduction: Narratologies,” 2–3. 3 Martin Cortazzi, Narrative Analysis (London/New York: Routledge, 1993), 88.

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In its “postclassical phase,” narratology does not use all lines of research proposed by narratologists working in the structuralist tradition. They do claim, however, that classical narratology needs to be re-contextualized and its model of analysis enriched so as to answer new challenging questions regarding unexplored narrative phenomena. Margolin argues that in the shift from the structuralist to the cognitive paradigm, “the results of structuralist narratology are reinterpreted and inscribed into a more comprehensive vision, that of the ‘age of cognitive science’ (Mark Turner’s term).”1 Recent studies have reinvigorated narratological research after the demise of the structuralist paradigm. In fact, other new methodologies, perspectives, or voices (feminist, deconstructive, rhetorical, discourseanalytical, etc.) have already shown that narratology has turned into a host of narratologies2 or a plurality of narrative analyses. “Post-classical narratology” reassesses the possibilities of earlier structuralist models of the 1960s. However, as supported by Herman, it reveals “a more sustained reflection on its scope and aims, a fuller awareness of surrounding criticotheoretical developments, a less programmatic and more exploratory posture, a greater willingness to admit that, when it comes to the study of narratives (or anything else!), no one can or should hope to get everything right once and for all.”3 Most significant in this respect is the rethinking of the scope and role of narrative analysis: “post-classical” approaches to narrative revert to asking basic questions about stories, story production, and comprehension—what stories are and how they can be read, described, analyzed, and, ultimately, lived. Narrative can help us comprehend how we build storyworlds and how we represent the world in our mind and imagination. This long and painstaking process of storyworld representation is encoded in the narrative process and is ready to be discovered by readers. To underscore this large narrative repertoire that shows the human mind in action in countless forms and modes is to deny the benefit that literary studies can bring to other sciences preoccupied with the study of the mind and brain. Therefore, it is essential to reshape the understanding of literature so that it can benefit from contact with other disciplines and complement the complex research investigating how we think and how our mind functions. 1

Uri Margolin, “Of What is Past, is Passing, or to Come: Temporality, Aspectuality, Modularity, and the Nature of Literary Narrative,” in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 143. 2 See Herman’s study on the postclassical narrative model in “Introduction: Narratologies.” 3 Herman, “Introduction: Narratologies,” 3.

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This new interdisciplinary approach can now offer literature in general, and narratology in particular, previously envisaged prerogatives. As a crossdisciplinary science, narratology can become a valuable and reliable research method that can foster innovation in the field of artificial intelligence or medical neurosciences. Cognitive narratologists suggest that if we are able to understand how the human mind creates and processes stories, then we will know more about the unknown part of the human brain. Despite cognitive researchers’ mutually shared interest in how the mind works, they follow different research directions and have individual theoretical objectives (further detailed in Chapters 4 and 5). The project of blending narrative theory and cognitive sciences should be viewed as mutually beneficial, i.e. a valuable contribution made by cognitive sciences to narratology and a new narratology-based approach in cognition sciences. This will result in a better understanding of the workings of the mind and the complex neuronal processes instrumental to our ability to make sense of stories. Crane and Richardson argue that the thinking organized in narrative texts can be used as a semiotic resource for comprehending our intricate mental activity: There is also an opening for what might be called a ‘neural historicism,’ which would explore how the peculiar structure and workings of the human brain may enable cultural innovation over time and offer revisionary accounts of the representation of mind and mental processes in literarycultural history along new lines suggested by the frameworks and models emerging from the cognitive neurosciences. Conversely, recent work in cognitive rhetoric and the ‘poetics of mind’ presents an invitation to literary scholars and theorists to bring their particular expertise to bear, as collaborators, critics, or both, on the further development of cognitive science.1

This revolutionary cognitive approach views stories as an essential part of our basic mental equipment and our narrative competence as of utmost importance, even to the most ordinary events in our life. It is a fact that we often understand and remember our world better when processed in the form of a story, mentally stored and available to us at any time. People use stories as an everyday activity, so they must reveal something crucial about how we cope with the world around us and how we manage our complex experiences. The recognition of the vital role of stories in our everyday life has set a new agenda for narrative analysis. This “narrative turn” seeks to explain more complex reading processes rather than focus on short and artificially constructed texts, which were used in early cognitive attempts 1

Crane and Richardson, “Literary Studies and Cognitive Science,” 137.

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applied to literature. Starting in the 1980s, academic programs have concentrated on approaching thinking and the mind in narrative terms, with stories as basic units for human thought. Herman details this process: “Analysts have studied narrative as itself an instrument for sense-making, a semiotic and communicative resource that enables humans to make their way in a sometimes confusing, often difficult world.”1 By incorporating these cognitive ideas into meaning construction in literary reading, researchers view the act of reading as an outcome of the mind performing complicated cognitive operations. Or, as brilliantly phrased by narratologist Catherine Emmott, “reading involves the interaction of the mind with the text.”2

2.5 Cognitive poetics and cognitive narratology: gains and gaps Cognitive poetics and cognitive narratology seem to be natural allies in many ways, so an interdisciplinary enterprise will be able to explain literary texts through cognitive processes. The desire to uncover human cognitive processes in literary texts is mainly motivated by the idea that literary language is thought to be shaped by our general cognitive operations. A key strength of this approach is that it can link the literary text to cognitive processes taking place in the human mind. Before dwelling on the intersection of these two cognitively oriented disciplines, let me offer several additional points of caution. As the methodological perspective of cognitive poetics has been already introduced, it is worth mentioning again that its primary concern is with literary readings and, more specifically, with what happens when readers are engaged in the act of reading. In this sense, cognitive poeticians have taken insights from both cognitive linguistics, concerned with detailed linguistic analyses, and cognitive psychology, interested in the psychological dimensions of reading. Equipped with these methodological tools, cognitive poeticians seek to discover the continuities between literary readings and readings of non-literary accounts, or between the literary and everyday thought. However, the risk of such an analysis is to reduce literary works to mere resources of analytical data, while critics would be unable to make informed comments on the literary value of the text. That is why it is crucial to remember that in applying cognitive poetics, we need to have knowledge of literary concerns that have been the focus of literary critics for generations, 1 2

Herman, “Introduction,” 12. Emmott, Narrative Comprehension, xi.

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i.e. critical theory and narratological textual dimensions. Cognitive poetics does not mean that such theoretical approaches are replaced altogether. That would only stand for a purely linguistic analysis, whereas literary reading would be nothing other than scientific inquiry. In the last instance, cognitive studies in literature are valuable contributions to research because a cognitive poetic exploration richly reconceptualizes previous literary concerns and reorients old questions about reading literature. As Peter Stockwell explains,1 this is taking “the cognitive turn” seriously: “It means a thorough re-evaluation of all of the categories with which we understand literary reading and analysis. In doing this, however, we do not have to throw away all of the insights from literary criticism and linguistic analysis that have been drawn out in the past. Many of those patterns of understanding form very useful starting points for cognitive poetic investigation. Some of them require only a little reorientation to offer a new way of looking at literary reading.” Another crucial aim, and I hope contribution, of this sub-chapter and of the practical chapters to follow is to explore the links between cognitive poetics and cognitive narratological analyses. If cognitive poetics grounds its theory in cognitive linguistics, I set out to explore how cognitive poetic ideas are also related to key literary issues. Cognitive poetics (based on cognitive linguistics) is thrown into the arena of literary criticism. That contact between cognitive poetic studies (with their research focused on frames, schemas, scripts, domains, possible worlds, deixis, conceptual metaphors, mental spaces, discourse worlds, image schemas, etc.) and other more traditionally literary aspects, such as the ones of narratology (which focus on narrators, narratees, authors, plots, stories, literariness, voices, points of view, narrative structures, episodes, characters, figurative tropes, etc.), can explain more thoroughly what makes literature possible. To illustrate the tight collaboration of cognitive poetics and narratology, in the practical part (Chapters 4 and 5), I will address the key issues of narratology and the cognitive poetic models that can best complement one another. For instance, I will use the cognitive phenomenon of image schema as an illuminating tool for the analysis of narrative space. Also, the cognitive perspective on conceptual metaphors will be used as a means of discussing time and space in narratives. The theory of mental space and conceptual blending will be explored in connection with the recent narratological concept of fictional minds. I believe that these two cognitively rooted theories can develop and expand on the idea of a fictional mind that simulates our human capacities of thinking and rationalizing. Both cognitive 1

Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics, 6.

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poeticians and cognitive narratologists have addressed topics that help us have a better view of our capacities to imagine, understand, and represent our cognitive processes. Their work on literary texts is part of their effort to rejuvenate the field of literary reading, while these two disciplines bring their own expertise to engender new developments in cognitive science. Cognitively informed readings of literary texts aim to give a sense of new possibilities for interpretation and also to delineate promising theoretical dimensions in the joint field of cognition and literature. Chapters 4 and 5 share this interdisciplinary impulse. I do feel that the work conducted in cognitive poetics and linguistics, coupled with research conducted in narratology, can further deepen our understanding of processes involved in reading narrative fictional works. But again, advancing scientific theories in narrative acts is not meant to be a sort of “life jacket that will save the humanities,” as Aldama1 points out in his attempt to explain narrative fiction works with the help of cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, and the brain sciences. The epistemic marriage of cognitive poetics and linguistic studies with cognitive narratology is emerging as a phenomenon of ever-greater intensity and scope, if we were only to look at the rapidly growing number of publications that are sprouting from this interdisciplinary endeavor (further detailed in Chapters 3, 4, and 5). Scholars in the new field have been quick to see the advantages of such an approach. Specifically, they wish to extend the study of critical theory beyond the confines of the literary text to encompass a more multidimensional perspective, characterized by an informed evaluation of literary works. In this sense, Margaret Freeman2 is right to acknowledge the novel perspective of the emergent literary paradigm when she speaks of “the changing status of literary appreciation through time, the [new] evaluation of quality in both literary texts and criticism, and the empirical testing of literary choices and judgments.” Despite the laudable effort to ground the esthetic evaluation in solid scientific terrain, cognitive poetics needs to overcome several problems that mainly relate to the methodology used by literary critics. In the quotation above, Freeman mentions the new potentially successful method of the “empirical testing of literary choices and judgments.” Nevertheless, even 1

Frederick Aldama, “Introduction: The Sciences and Humanities Matter as One,” in Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts, ed. Frederick L. Aldama (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010), 7. 2 Margaret H. Freeman, “Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Literary Studies: State of the Art in Cognitive Poetics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, eds. Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1194.

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though this is a possibly efficient method for assessing literary impact, it actually calls into question the long-standing fear of empiricism that has characterized different areas of literary research. Critics who make use of formalizing procedures or quantitative approaches, who talk of “facts” in literary interpretation, will be “suspect from the outset,” as Brône and Vandaele1 notice in their critical introduction to cognitive poetics. This fear can be partly explained by the difference in methodology between wellcontrolled observation in experimental studies and introspection research. While these two distinct methods need the design of different theories and concepts, they have also led to many critical debates among scholars. Moreover, this fear of an experimental critical design in literary theory gives voice to another criticism that finds cognitive poetics guilty of selectively borrowing insights from cognitive science. For instance, Louwerse and Van Peer criticize cognitive poeticians for not taking full advantage of the whole potential of cognitive science, and this is evident in the lack of innovative insights from computational science, on the one hand, and in their almost exclusive focus on the embodied perspective on the other: “We ‘basically seem to be fighting a straw man’ […] [that] embodies a cognitive poetics which carefully selects an embodiment approach to investigate language understanding and which ignores empirical methodologies in these investigations.”2 Given this fear of empiricism or introspective analysis, it is clear that the new interdisciplinary field of cognitive literary studies, still in its infancy, is sometimes driven by “methodological distrust,” “mutual ignorance and caricature.”3 But if we truly wish to start the engine of this new project, we will need to make every effort to dissolve distrust and use every available disciplinary tool in order to overcome ignorance and “live happily together” in the “country of the mind.”4

1

Geert Brône and Jeroen Vandaele, “Cognitive poetics. A critical introduction,” in Applications of Cognitive Linguistics. Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains, Gaps, eds. Geert Brône and Jeroen Vandaele (Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009), 23. 2 Max Louwerse and Willie Van Peer, “Incorporated Means Symbolic and Embodied,” in Applications of Cognitive Linguistics. Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains, Gaps, eds. Geert Brône and Jeroen Vandaele (Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009), 452. 3 Brône and Vandaele, “Cognitive poetics,” 24. 4 Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics, 174.

CHAPTER THREE ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S SHORT STORIES: COGNITIVE FEATURES AND THE READER’S MIND

3.1 On defining short storyness In the long tradition of short story criticism and theory, literary critics have tried to answer two deceptively straightforward questions: What do stories do to us and What makes a short story? Attempts to establish any clear-cut underlying characteristics of the short story seem to require a narrow definition that would certainly exclude other multiple possibilities to approach short storyness. A short story can probably be this but never that. Critics have tried to distinguish short fiction from other fictional forms by explaining why a short story is not a novel, a fairy tale, a sketch, or an anecdote. The real problem with this oppositional approach is that any such definitions can only reduce the short story to a limited number of qualities while sacrificing others. In the same vein, questions like these are extremely difficult to answer: How can we define the effect of a short story? How can we recognize the constituent elements that make up a short story? Despite this, stories do matter to us, we continue to read them, and they reappear to us as memorable recollections with the force of very personal memories. Many of the stories we read appear in our memory in a simple or natural form as if we were recalling some powerful personal experience. Put differently, life is best enacted in a narrative pattern. We make use of this pattern when we tell lies, make excuses, recount small anecdotes, and so on. Many theorists concerned with the act of narrative regard stories as formative for the configuration of human identity. Renowned narrative theoretician Paul Ricœur1 claims that our core identity is formed in the process of telling stories or, more specifically, in the telling and retelling of the story of our life. Human acts become intelligible when they are reflected upon and 1

Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2004 [2000]).

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interpreted in stories narrated about them. For Ricœur, narration and life are inseparable. The narrative act makes room for a careful examination of experience, and in so doing, life becomes worth living. The repetitive act of telling and retelling our individual experience enables us to attain our narrative identity, i.e. our fundamental mode of self-expression. According to Ricœur, fictional and non-fictional narrative modes are used by humans mostly as a space for reflection and self-understanding of the narrated-self: “As long as we are living we are simply ‘caught up’ (verstrickt) in stories. If our stories are not recounted, they call out for recounting. Ricœur says that we tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated. Furthermore, time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through the mode of narrative.”1 In sum, the stories we tell and the recurrent narrative processes which we use are essential for coming to terms with life in our quest for representing reality. That is, we can only understand where we stand in the present in light of past memories and future projections. This is the reason why stories do matter to us. As previously acknowledged, fictional or non-fictional stories can reappear in our memory with equal power and vividness, and this may be due to our human inclination to remember the past in narrative forms. More than that, we can share experiences and retell the past to each other through stories, which makes narrative the most natural way of communication. I mention the general influences of stories on one’s existence to create a space within which to discuss the Hemingway story. To many, another study of Hemingway’s canonical short stories may appear as not particularly adventurous. While I do acknowledge this point of view, I want to show that we can still find “newness” even in the most popular or canonical writings. It is true that Hemingway scholarship has been enhanced by innovative views such as the psychoanalytical2 and multicultural3 approaches or the ones advanced by ecocriticism4 and gender and masculinity studies.5 This 1 Maria Duffy, Paul Ricœur’s Pedagogy of Pardon. A Narrative Theory of Memory and Forgetting (London: Continuum, 2009), 17. 2 Carl P. Eby, Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Debra A. Moddelmog, Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 3 Gerald J. Kennedy, Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 4 Glen A. Love, Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). 5 Lawrence R. Broer and Gloria Holland, eds., Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002);

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shows that while short stories continue to change and grow, Hemingway’s stories are still held in high regard. But despite the sustained interest in Hemingway criticism, there are reasons for the continued hostility particularly expressed vis-à-vis Hemingway’s public image. According to Lamb, the peak of the writer’s literary career coincided with the rise of the mass media in the United States that immediately transformed him into a public celebrity. Lamb speaks of the midcentury social context that was responsible for the enduring image of the charismatic and handsome Hemingway, an icon of American masculinity: “He perfectly fit the construction of gender in the midcentury, embodying a strong but sensitive, slightly ‘bad boy’ masculinity that charmed women and appealed to men. He was kept constantly before the public eye by photographs in slick magazines that never tired of reporting on his comings and goings or quoting his opinions on everything.”1 However, later, his powerful manhood was associated with a form of machoism and brutal insensitivity. To intellectuals with fixed ideological agendas, he became a sexist and misogynist writer who was identified with an oppressive figure in many of his texts. Although I consider it unjust to judge the real Hemingway based on the thoughts of his characters, this book does not aim to explore these issues. Instead, I propose a cognitively informed model of reading the Hemingway story. My demonstration will be based on a selection of short stories, chosen in terms of their usefulness for my research aims. Before introducing the practical part of this sub-chapter, I survey a body of theoretical accounts of short storyness in order to further consolidate my own position concerning the nature of short fiction and its cognitive dynamics. I argue that we need to establish a set of features that define the nature and genre of short stories, i.e. “short storyness.” To provide further context for my thesis, I turn now to an overview of the main research within the area of short fiction theory. Historically, short fictional narrative is seen as secondary to the novel, often regarded as the dominant genre and the legitimate and complex literary form, i.e. the more refined and “serious” in its scope and intentions. The novel has provided fascinating avenues for critical research. Brander Matthews, the first to focus on short fiction theory, shows the unique art of short stories is different from that of novels2. Despite this first critical attempt to establish Thomas Strychacz, Hemingway’s Theaters of Masculinity (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). 1 Lamb, Art Matters, 9. 2 Brander Matthews, “The Philosophy of the Short-Story,” in The New Short Stories Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994 [1901]), 73–80.

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a tradition for short fiction, the reading public will be more familiar with the comment of an anonymous reviewer on Matthews’ study The Philosophy of the Short Story: “The short story is a smaller, simpler, easier, and less important form of the novel.” Over time, many other skeptical critics have treated short fiction as strictly dependent on the novel, grounding their claims on there being no individual set of features defining short stories. Fergurson explains: “That there is no large and distinguished corpus of short story theory because the short story does not exist as a discrete and independent genre is a hypothesis—repugnant to many, of course—that ought to be taken seriously on occasion, if only to contemplate the perspective the hypothesis provides. […] [T]here is no single characteristic or cluster of characteristics that the critics agree absolutely distinguishes the short story from other fictions.”1 In the same vein, another skeptic, Mary Louise Pratt,2 argues that the short story can only be defined in relation to other more complex literary genres, like the novel, stating that the relation between the two genres is “highly asymmetrical” or “a hierarchical one with the novel on top and the short story dependent.” Pratt explains that the dependency is twofold: historical and conceptual. For a long time, the novel had been the more established and prestigious of the two genres. Assuming that short and long literary forms have not developed simultaneously, critics argue that short prose needs to be explained in relation to the novel in order to obtain legitimacy. On the surface, the novel provided the fundament for the development of the short story and its subsequent inclusion in the ranks of the established genres. In this view, the hierarchical relations between the two paired genres can be explained by the binary oppositions of “unmarked to marked, of major to minor, of greater to lesser, even ‘mature’ to ‘infant.’”3 Again, the short story’s negative juxtaposition with the longer form denies the possibility of creating an independent, formal genre definition for short fiction. The structural shortness of the short story—characterized by economy, concentration, and unity—is seen as too arbitrary a quality to construct an autonomous genre. This is why critics who support this view claim that a new genre based on the formal principle of shortness is bound to fail. As a 1

Suzanne C. Ferguson, “Defining the Short Story. Impressionism and Form,” in The New Short Stories Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994), 218. 2 Mary Louise Pratt, “The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It,” in The New Short Stories Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994), 96. 3 Pratt, “The Short Story,” 96.

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result, Graham Good claims, we should only deal with individual short texts, assessed by the dominant rules imposed by the normative novel: “So the tendency is to give up the business of formal genre definition for short fiction as hopeless or fruitless, and to deal with individual texts as parts of the author’s whole oeuvre, within a general perspective on fiction dominated by the novel. Fiction is thus thought of as ‘the novel’ plus assorted hangers-on of lesser proportions: the colon in Novel: A FORUM ON FICTION implies as much.”1 In contrast, other critics maintain that short fiction can stand alone as a legitimate genre, one that is not dependent on the novel (see Lounsberry et al.2). Their position and conceptualization are grounded on two major arguments: the short story’s structural properties and its historical traditions. These particular conceptualizations inform the recognition of a new genre: the short story as distinct from other, longer fictional forms. This comes with great unease, however, when literary critics locate other fictional prose forms prior to the birth of the novel. Frye speaks of this unexpected discovery: “The literary historian who identifies fiction with the novel is greatly embarrassed by the length of time that the world managed to get along without the novel.”3 It is surprising, however, that the great diversity of narratives produced before the birth of the novel often goes unnoticed, while the novel has always enjoyed extensive critical attention. In his study on the nature of knowledge in short fiction, Charles E. May4 suggests that the short story has, in fact, a longer tradition than that of the long story. He adds that, initially, the short story was the most natural form of communication, used to express religious feelings. The primeval relation between humans and the sacred would manifest itself in isolated short narratives that were only later linked together. Therefore, we can consider these two early narrative forms: the short narrative (with “the limit of a single sitting,” as Poe suggests), which later took the form of the fairy tale, the folk ballad, and the modern short story. The second, longer form requiring more sessions for its delivery gave birth to the saga, the epic, and the novel. The critic concludes that the family resemblance between short 1

Graham Good, “Notes on the Novella,” in The New Short Stories Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994), 147. 2 Barbara Lounsberry et al., eds., The Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story (Westport, CT/London: Greenwood Press, 1998). 3 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays (Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000 [1957]), 303. 4 Charles E. May, “The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction,” in The New Short Stories Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994), 131–143.

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stories, fairy tales, myths, or fables (as they all seem to emerge from the same basic source: the primeval religious nature of narrative) generates specific properties in the ontology and epistemology of short fiction. By referring explicitly to these properties, May provides a more rigorous integration of previously insular findings and helps deepen our knowledge of the basic differences between reality and experience embodied in the two emergent narrative forms: one short and one long. He then asserts that the major difference between these two artistic modes is principally one of essence. The notion of structural distinction is crucial and ought to be taken as a means of capturing the nature of “big and small forms,” each reflecting an individual mode of knowing. In identifying the short story’s particular mode of knowing, he emphasizes several major sources and subject matters: short fiction takes its inspiration from the abstract realm of “dreams, desires, anxieties, and fears,” “the timeless theme,” and “the immaterial reality.”1 In contrast, May claims that novels appear to be more indebted to a social context and a public form that need to be reconstructed so as to recreate the “illusion of reality,” whereas the short story is mythic and spiritual. He goes on to present other structural differences: “While the novel is primarily structured on a conceptual and philosophic framework, the short story is intuitive and lyrical. The novel exists to reaffirm the world of ‘everyday’ reality; the short story exists to ‘defamiliarize’ the everyday.”2 On the whole, short story critics argue either for the short fiction’s dependency on the novel or, conversely, for the recognition of short fiction as an autonomous genre that proposes a radically different mode of experiencing reality. Given the diversity of approaches and theoretical stands in existence, critics have seldom wondered whether they could actually agree on a standard definition for short prose. Despite attempts to reach a common ground for defining short stories, writers have often challenged precisely this lack of firm boundaries and instead tried to identify deviations from the norm in an attempt to disrupt the already established categories. Deviations and exceptions themselves are intriguing cases, given the problematic questions they raise. If these exceptional cases are accepted and integrated into the existing practice of short fiction criticism, the definitions themselves may change, shift, and adjust to new requirements. In any event, the cases that seem to challenge current standard norms and generic definitions should not be allowed to deny the possibility of reaching a consensus in defining short stories. Such an accord will certainly not stay true for all literary periods, movements, or particular 1

Charles E. May, “Introduction,” in The New Short Stories Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994), xxvi. 2 May, “The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction,” 133.

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authors. If we attempt to define short stories, or any other literary form, we need to be aware that generic definitions of literature can only include the dominant features reflected in a certain historical reality. Indeed, as Pasco claims, “the hope of contriving a definition of [the] short story which will remain useful until the end of time will be possible only when the short story dies as a genre.”1 The task of formulating a valid working definition is, in truth, a problematic one. There will be a vast area of works generally recognized by practice as short fiction while others will be normally excluded. I am hopeful that this conceptualization can foster further research within the field of short story studies. Despite inherent differences between writers of short fiction or between particular features specific to certain literary periods, one should identify the essential cluster of characteristics that makes the short story a recognizable and autonomous literary genre. I will return to this point later.

3.2 The autonomy of short fiction: intrinsic nature and distinctive features In this chapter, I situate Hemingway’s short fiction within the generic field of short fiction literature, with the overall aim to draw comparisons and to illustrate how his short stories can be viewed from a cognitive perspective. In this sense, it is important to explore the general features of the short story that have been highlighted by critics in order to make theoretical statements about the very nature of short fiction. However, this study does not envisage a comprehensive overview of the genre across its historical evolution and its most representative writers, but concentrates on several key models and characteristics that have become paradigmatic for short storyness and takes away a predominant cluster of features that will be useful for my analysis. Across the various theoretical approaches and frameworks in short story criticism, we note that their differences lie mainly in their approaches to the nature of the short story. In this section, I draw on a body of distinct approaches to short fiction, and the selection of the material is justified by the premise stated in sub-chapter 3.1 which regards short fiction as an autonomous genre. With this in mind, I set out to define the cluster of features that qualify short fiction as an independent literary genre, which set out my thesis against other critical responses that regard short-form prose as inherently dependent on longer and more established forms of literary art 1

Allan H. Pasco, “On Defining Short Story,” in The New Short Stories Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994), 116.

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(i.e. the novel). My investigation does not, however, lead to a mere reconsideration of the distinct features of what a short story is but aims to show how they can redefine the act of reading and, ultimately, significantly impact on the reader’s mind. I have chosen Ernest Hemingway’s short stories as case studies because, first of all, even if most of them are highly popular and canonical, I believe innovative interpretations of the multiplicity of aspects are possible, and, secondly, I want to show that cognitive poetics and cognitive narratology can give insight into textual layers that have been unexplored so far. To illustrate the latter part of my argument, I begin with a number of assumptions about the nature of the short story, generally accepted in contemporary criticism. One of the best-known features of short fiction is the emphasis on “closure”: short story writers focus on the final part of the story with the view of stirring surprise and raising unexpected questions. In identifying the role of closure, critics claim that the whole weight of the text is concentrated here. In this view, the closure effect may explain the entire concept of “storyness” in short fiction. It seems to be one essential feature that allows readers and critics to recognize a short story. For this reason, the artistic devices and techniques should create a set of expectations that will have been heightened until toward the end of the story. For instance, critic Susan Lohafer1 proves that the idea of short storyness is more closely related to closure than to any other feature that may define short fiction. Many other theorists define literary short fiction by discussing the modifier “short,” as in the story is a work of fiction of “short” length. But how short should they be? We have an increasing number of anthologies that publish stories of no more than one page or just several paragraphs but, at the other end of the spectrum, there are stories of seventy or eighty pages. With no definitive limits for size or length, a clear definition of the short story still eludes us. Nevertheless, “shortness” does seem to be an inescapable feature that many short story critics use as a point of comparison with the more established literary form of the novel. For reasons that I will detail further, I argue that the physical shortness should not be treated as only an intrinsic feature but a property that occurs only relative to something else. In the first classical study on short fiction, Matthews makes this point clear: “a true Short-story is something other and something more than a mere story which is short.”2 It is true that the short story, due to its length and fragmented experience contained in the brief time dedicated to its reading, will express the inherent 1

Susan Lohafer, “A Cognitive Approach to Storyness,” in The New Short Stories Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994), 301–311. 2 Matthews, “The Philosophy of the Short-Story,” 73.

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discontinuity and fragmentariness of the stories we generally share outside the fictional realm. The limited physical length excites the reader’s imagination, just as in real life we are used to coming to terms with the incompleteness of experience and its transitory nature. Put differently, this is how we learn how to manage fragmentariness. (Short) stories are fundamentally incomplete and indeterminate in both fiction and real life— they tell fragments of life, and at every turn, the intentional gaps in the story challenge us to discover a potentially new story. My position is grounded upon the premise that the short story should be defined in terms of narrative length, or, better said, in its “wise use” of narrative space. While “shortness” may seem too much of a quantitative and material feature to evaluate short storyness, traditional critical studies on short fiction have treated the opposition between “short fiction” and other “longer narrative forms” with the aim of establishing the superiority of longer narrative modes. By so doing, the short story has often been seen as a poorer and more condensed form of the novel. Despite the complexity and forced continuity of the novel, short fiction has been regarded as a minor art form. Indeed, the question of how and where the short story differs from the novel has been dealt with recurrently by literary critics, and not without good reason. While I do admit that the relation between the two artistic forms needs to be recognized (for a better understanding of how they both communicate human experience), I argue that the examination of the differences between long and short fiction should not consolidate new structural relations between individual literary genres. Rather, we should acknowledge the emergence of a new literary form (short fiction), along with an ontologically different mode of knowing reality and of thinking. The “reality” encapsulated in short fiction is processed by a mode of thinking most similar to how we comprehend stories in our actual world. Fictional short stories imitate our natural narrative habits in that they mimic our desire of telling stories that are fragmented and that capture one “discrete moment of truth” —not the moment of truth—or that focus on the realities of the present moment. Gordimer’s argument is relevant in this sense: “Short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be sure of– the present moment. Ideally, they have learnt to do without explanation of what went before, and what happens beyond this point.”1 In truth, we tend to remember single fragments of life, memories of our distant or more recent past, and in this way, the active work of our memory shapes our identity by patching together reconstructions of the stories we 1 Nadine Gordimer, “The Flash of Fireflies,” in The New Short Stories Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994), 264.

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once lived. In her study on acts of memory and imagination, Kuhn argues that memory has “its own modes of expression: these are characterized by the fragmentary, non-linear quality of the moments recalled out of time.”1 In order to better understand the parallel between fiction and memory, one can compare the workings of imagination and those of memories with the aim of showing whether they have any common traits. I am adopting here a working hypothesis used by Paul Ricœur2 in his work on memory and imagination. The French philosopher proves that both memory and imagination start from “the presence of the absent” while, at the same time, they differ in their relation to reality: whereas fiction brackets reality and glorifies the unreal, memory always relates to an earlier reality. To be sure, when we recall something that has happened in our past, we “recall” that event, and therefore we cannot say that we “imagine” it. Therefore, the object of the real differs from that of the imagination due to the former being imagined. However, despite this essential difference, Ricœur3 noticed a significant reversal that would modify his theory of memory: the act of recollection takes place on “the terrain of the imaginary,”4 i.e. the past as remembered cannot escape the seductive force of the imaginary. Ricœur calls this force “the hallucinatory seduction of the imaginary”5 that enables the annihilation of distance and absence, and eventually renders the act of imagination as a “magical” one. He further explains: “The incantation is equivalent to the voiding of absence and distance. ‘This is a way of playing at satisfying my desire’ (179). The imagined object’s ‘not-being-there’ is covered over by the quasi presence induced by the magical operation. Its unreality is warded off by this sort of ‘dance before the unreal’ (205). In truth, this voiding was nascent in ‘placing before the eyes’ considered as ‘putting into images,’ the putting-on-stage constitutive of the memoryimage.”6 It seems that the parallel between memory and imagination can only be understood if we recognize a special form of imagination, that one emerging from fiction and hallucination or, as brilliantly put by Ricœur, emerging 1

Annette Kuhn, “Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination,” in Theories of Memory. A Reader, eds. Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 232. 2 Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 44. 3 In order to account for “the pitfall of the imaginary for memory,” Ricœur bases his demonstration on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre in The Psychology of Imagination (New York: Citadel, 1965). 4 Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 53. 5 Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 53. 6 In this passage, Ricœur cites Sartre’s The Psychology of Imagination.

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from “an intermediary form of imagination,” “a mixed form,” whose function would consist in “placing [the past] before the eyes” and making it visible. In the same vein, Henri Bergson’s memory-image, quoted by Ricœur,1 is another mixed form, analogous to the intermediary form of imagination; the memory-image differs from “pure memory” as it has been put into images. Bergson shows that this operation is the key to our past and the work of recollection: “To call up the past in the form of an image, we must be able to withdraw ourselves from the action of the moment, we must have the power to value the useless, we must have the will to dream. Man alone is capable of such an effort.”2 In line with the remarks above, I will elaborate on another argument to prove that short fiction can voice the infinite nuances of human experience. Stylistically, short stories focus on a single or distinct moment that can best capture “the ultimate reality,” that is, the subtle meanings of our human experience and the multiple reflections of human life. Conversely, novel writers use the novel as an artistic means of “netting ultimate reality,”3 but their artistic tools have often failed to attain such an ambitious goal. This may explain the novel’s frequent changes in form and approach. Regardless of the artistic form employed by novel writers, novels seem to be losing themselves in a bewilderingly complex search for continuity, completeness, or totality. It can be said that writers of novels genuinely seek to give a complete sense of resolution. Admittedly, they try to render the full-length of life in order to give an authentic account of a complete life. This sustained attempt of the novel can nonetheless prove rather deceptive. Novels misleadingly teach us that we can live out the “totality” of experience. It is empirically impossible for the living subject to experience completeness, totality, or plenitude, however. Ryan proves that logical completeness is arguably an attribute of real objects and actions in real life. Her line of argument is this: “ amounts to providing its mental description. But a description, verbal or mental, is always incomplete. When we think up an entity, we only specify a subset of its potential properties. It would take a divine mind to run through the list of all possible features and to think up an object into logical completeness.”4 Throughout this chapter, I have discussed the difference between the two fiction prose genres, one short and one long, with a view to showing that the 1

Ricœur borrows Henri Bergson’s concepts of “pure memory” and “memoryimage,” as developed in Matter and Memory. 2 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, qtd. in Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 94. 3 Gordimer, “Flash of Fireflies,” 263. 4 Ryan, Possible Worlds, 21.

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major distinction is one of essence: the short story focuses on fragmentary, incomplete experiences and the brief illumination generated by single situations, whereas the novel focuses on the full length of life and descriptions of completeness and totality. What I would like to suggest is that these essential differences should not be regarded as mere contrasting equivalents but as two models that allow different engagement in two artistic forms. In essence, these two individual literary fictions propose fundamentally different ways of understanding experience and reality. It is reasonable to argue that short fiction, by its very length, will present individual characteristics for “short” experiences or snapshots of reality. The way we reflect on such fragments of experience will clearly differ from the mode of thinking used for understanding longer narratives. In the end, short stories and long fiction suggest two particular ways of confronting reality and coming to terms with experience. Understanding the thinking we are presented with in short fiction will help us make sense of the world, of who we are, and of how we should live our lives. Hogan’s thesis reinforces the argument of the similarity between art and reality: “In life as in art we only have the discontinuous, partially disordered fragments of experience. We are in much the same cognitive situation in the two cases. Unsurprisingly, then, we follow the same cognitive procedures. Specifically, given an array of fragments, we construct agents, objects, actions, events, and causal sequences, hoping that we ‘get the story straight’. Here, as elsewhere, the human mind proceeds in the same way, whether it is dealing with nature or with art.”1 In suggesting that brevity is the most significant constituent feature of this particular literary genre, I am primarily interested in formulating a definition. Firstly, I note the brevity of the message presents a serious difficulty for the short story writer, who needs to carefully examine the methods and artistic devices used with a view to achieving the desired effect in limited length and condensed narrative space. Secondly, the shortness of form results in individual properties that differ from the conventions of the novel. Such properties have triggered shifts in both the practice and understanding of the new genre, i.e. the short story. Edgar Allan Poe was the first to acknowledge the issue of shortness, linked to the concepts of unity and singleness of effect. For Poe, the brevity of the short story creates a sense of intensity and compression. Due to its unified and compact form, the short story requires a special type of reading and understanding, one that explores meanings in depth. This means that readers and interpreters of short fiction need to use a fundamentally different mode of thinking: they 1

Hogan, Cognitive Science, 116.

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are able to recognize the deep level of understanding at which meanings begin to develop. As I have already argued, the structural brevity of short stories generates changes in artistic techniques and devices, which, in turn, can cause dramatic shifts in reading and in the corresponding cognitive operations used by readers for understanding and interpretation. Thus, in the analysis of (modernist) short stories, one needs to look at two major shifts— the shift in writing technique and the one in the reader’s ability to understand the theme (the meaning) of the story. In her study on the modernist short story (late 19th and early 20th century short stories), Suzanne C. Ferguson1 argues that the brevity of short fiction requires the use of two distinct techniques: stylistic economy and the foregrounding of style, which, together, mean that short story writers have to overcome the limits and restraints imposed by the limited length, and this will also determine the stylistic devices used by this genre. Among the essential technical characteristics of the modernist/impressionistic2 short story, Ferguson mentions the limiting of the point of view to one character that has much to say regarding the subject matter employed by short fiction. While, in the case of long narratives, the subject topic is often the totality of human experience or the full length of life, short stories usually explore single experiences or fragments of life. The representation of experience vs. an experience is not only a shift in how these two paired genres view reality but also a shift in technical devices. In this sense, short fiction allows an indepth exploration of the subjectivity of one isolated human experience. Specifically, the frequent use of the first-person limited point of view in short fiction emphasizes a change in the subject matter in addition to a shift in reading techniques. In his study on short fiction, The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor argues that short stories do not normally create “heroes” or models that can be followed; instead, the world of short fiction is populated by isolated figures “wandering about the fringes of society,” dreamers, artists, or lonely idealists. This fictional world is that of “the submerged population,” one that differs from writer to writer, but that will always describe a sense of “an intense awareness of human loneliness.”3 Quite clearly, “the lonely voice” of the submerged population prompts a particular attitude of mind used to understand reality, as Ferguson shows in her research: “The reality the short story presents us with is the reality of those 1

Ferguson, “Defining the Short Story.” The term “impressionistic” or “impressionism” is taken from the French painting movement of the 1870s and is used to describe a new research method focusing on perceptual phenomena. 3 Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (Cleveland/New York: World Publishing Company, 1963), 19. 2

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sub-universes of the supernatural and the fable which exist within the socalled ‘real’ world of sense perception and conceptual abstraction. It presents moments in which we become aware of anxiety, loneliness, dread, concern, and thus find the safe, secure and systematic life we usually lead disrupted and momentarily destroyed. The short story is the most adequate form to confront us with reality as we perceive it in our most profound moments.”1 Short story writers’ preoccupation with such unsettling themes, along with the employment of a limited point of view, creates further problems for readers in their quest for meaning(s) due to the uncertainty generated by the narrative point of view. This limited access to the condensed textual universe means that the reader’s journey to reach the meaning of the story will be a long and challenging one. What we can conclude from the above is that short narrative fiction can be used as the training ground or the arena where readers serve their apprenticeship to develop useful tools for thinking in order to organize thoughts and support cognition in real life. From this perspective, the practice of short fiction can provide us with the cognitive equipment to take hold of reality.

3.3 Short stories: creative tools for thinking The approach in this sub-chapter is indebted primarily to Ferguson’s definition of the modernist short story,2 which I find useful for an in-depth understanding of the nature of thinking in short stories. The critic explains that short story writers create “elliptical plots”3 by using the technique of deleting classic elements of plots—for instance, they may omit the exposition, parts in the middle, and closure. In other cases, the omitted elements are substituted for unexpected courses of events or unfamiliar existents in the story; this sort of substitution produces “metaphorical plots.”4 This leaves the reader to deal with a range of seemingly insignificant images, and only by decoding them will they be able to reach “the deep level of significance.”5 Both elliptical and metaphorical plots challenge the reader to mentally (re)construct the incomplete story and eventually reach the deep structure basis of the narrative. In essence, short story readers are asked to build

1

May, “The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction,” 142. Ferguson, “Defining the Short Story.” 3 Ferguson, “Defining the Short Story,” 222. 4 Ferguson, “Defining the Short Story,” 223. 5 Ferguson, “Defining the Short Story,” 224. 2

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“hypothetical narratives,”1 which are mental constructs that are intended not only to uncover the narrative sequence but to evaluate other possible developments of the condensed or suppressed plot. In Ferguson’s own words: “By hypothetical plots I mean something more specifically formulable than the bare-bones structuralist ‘fabula’: a counter-story, with a beginning, middle, and end, that tells ‘what happened’ in chronological order. […] The reader must to some extent construct this hypothetical plot in order for the actual story to seem meaningful.” 2 In my turn, I will focus principally on one issue: elliptical plots in short stories can generate a higher number of possible courses of narrative developments than in longer fiction. The various short stories analyzed in this book will make this evident. I will consider the outcome of this premise in the broader context of critical reading. More specifically, I set out to show that the crucial task for short story readers is that of assessing the range of narrative possibilities arising from deletions and substitutions. This means that readers of short fiction are required to stay alert for potential narrative developments as to, for instance, what could be happening in the story’s present, what might have happened in the past, what may yet happen (based on present evaluations), or what may never actually happen. In this view, readers are asked to draw inferences about existents or actions that have only been implicitly included in the text, and in the end, they should be able to make mental representations of these implicit items. The complex process of reading and understanding short fiction leads me to conclude that readers of short stories need to be capable of intensive interpretative reflection upon the large virtual narrative universe presented in short stories. Apart from what “happens” in the world of the text, readers may need to make sense of other dynamic alternative worlds that are dreamed of, imagined, wished for, or secretly planned by characters. An analysis of the wide range of potentialities contemplated by readers can deepen our knowledge of how strategic gaps in the story can proliferate meaning and diversity rather than lead to semantic dead ends. Short storyness seems to reside in the reader’s ability to recognize this large alternative system of the text and later bring it to life. This is also important for the configuration of the story—on the one hand, there is the actual world generated by the text, and on the other hand, the storyworld is surrounded by a multitude of alternative possible worlds. From this vantage point, I suspect that the world-creating power of narrative is more powerful in short fiction. I further argue that in the process of reading short fiction, 1 2

Ferguson, “Defining the Short Story,” 224. Ferguson, “Defining the Short Story,” 222.

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the reader’s mind operates as a world-making machine. Finally, I maintain that the particular mode of thinking in short fiction is a major factor in differentiating it from other kinds of narrative or literary genres. Principally, this may explain why short stories necessitate particular approaches in both writing (not the object of this study) and reading (examined in detail in Chapters 4 and 5). Such a fundamentally distinct mode of thinking requires readers and interpreters to accommodate a new mental profile, equipped with special cognitive abilities: the construction of the hypothetical plot or double plot (the story that has not been (fully) told yet), the ability to reach the deep level basis of the text where meanings are gradually developed, and the capacity of restoring the sum of possible worlds that form the “semantic domain” of the text.

3.4 Short stories and counterfactual thinking: an introduction As argued in the previous section, most mental work performed during reading short fiction involves dynamic substitutions, creative mental constructions of non-actual worlds, and structural combinations of fragmented textual universes. In the end, because the mental reconstruction of the story needs to be unitary and whole, it is rather difficult to guess the intricacy of the re-construction process. Still, I believe that an investigation of the nature of meaning in short fiction can yield significant knowledge about human imaginative work, as performed in reading short fiction. In this light, I set out to show that narrative conflict in short fiction is produced by the clash between what “happens” in the story and the non-actualized worlds that only exist in the minds of the characters and readers. And so, making sense of the narrative universe or the storyworld1 requires readers to carry out intensive cognitive work. In order to build mental constructs of “true” possible worlds, readers need to compare non-actual facts with the facts existing in the textual actual world and then combine these elements in a new blended narrative space. In fact, the examination of this mental work massively and repeatedly used by short story readers is a valuable contribution to research in the theory of advanced conceptual integration or blending (detailed in Chapter 1, sub-chapter 1.3, and further analyzed in Chapter 5). Short stories provide one of the most important laboratories for the analysis of conceptual blending (Chapter 5). In most cases, the space of the actual narrative world and the newly built hypothetical spaces are radically at odds. This conceptualization leads me to conclude that readers 1

Herman, Story Logic.

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need to develop their capacity for counterfactual reasoning1 in order to blend incompatible mental spaces. Readers must build counterfactual scenarios to be able to deliver entire possible worlds. Counterfactual spaces do not refer to the “reality” of the story, but draw upon one equally important aspect of mental activity, namely our ability to operate on the unreal. Counterfactuality has been defined as “forced incompatibility between [mental] spaces,”2 which means that the implicit oppositions between the focused actual space and its counterfactual counterpart are straightforwardly manifested. To exemplify this, a specific type of conceptual integration— double-scope blending—demands matches between incompatible mental spaces, as illustrated by this ordinary blend offered by Fauconnier and Turner: “When we look in the refrigerator and see that there is no milk to be had, we must simultaneously have the mental space with no milk in the refrigerator and the counterfactual mental space with the milk in the refrigerator.”3 With this example in mind, it will be interesting to see the ways in which short story fiction readers use counterfactual reasoning to build similar but more complex mental blends that eventually contain the full mental representations of deletions or missing elements emerging from the actual plot. By performing this kind of mental work, readers develop an essential mental capacity for coping with the unreal. In this sense, cognitive scientists are right to assume that “counterfactuals have an enormous and basic indispensability in human life,” as acknowledged by Fauconnier and Turner.4 Another key property of hypothetical narrative spaces5 is that they are “literally false” with respect to the “actual” space of the text. Nonetheless, it might seem paradoxical that “falsity” can yield new “true” relations between spaces, which will be relevant for “the semantic domain of the text.”6 Counterfactual reasoning creates elements that are “true” in the blend 1

In The Way We Think, Fauconnier and Turner argue that conceptual integration is the “central engine” of their thinking (xv), while counterfactual reasoning is seen as a complex product resulting from this imaginative operation. 2 Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 230. 3 Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 29. 4 Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 231. 5 I am sympathetic here to Ferguson’s argument that regards the concept of the “hypothetical plot” as the “deep structure” of short narratives. See Ferguson, “Defining the Short Story,” 222. 6 The semantic domain of a text is defined in the theory of possible worlds (developed by leading theoreticians like Thomas Pavel, Marie-Laure Ryan, or Lubomír Doležel): “The semantic domain is the sum of the meanings suggested by a text, the set of all the valid inferences and interpretations.” Ryan, Possible Worlds, 112. See also: Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard

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but “false” in the text’s actual world—in essence, these elements are “nonthings,” as coined by Fauconnier and Turner,1 but “nonthings we can’t do without”: “our mental universe is populated by a dark matter of nonthings”2 and also by a series of nonevents or nonactions. Finally, by aligning myself with Fauconnier and Turner, I argue that the short story’s narrative universe is built on a set of free-floating possible worlds, populated by nonevents, nonthings, and nonactions. Conceptual blending offers the key to assessing this narrative universe. Before wrapping up this sub-chapter, I wish to emphasize that it provides a useful introduction to counterfactuality, while Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 in particular further explore the links between counterfactual thinking and Hemingway’s short fiction. I argue here that this pivotal mental activity may be an essential cognitive tool that enables readers to comprehend short fictional texts and build meaning. I also claim that mental counterfactuality is generated by technical and stylistic devices used by short story writers. Economy of style, compression and compactness, deletions and substitution, or elliptical texture—key short story properties (illustrated in sub-chapter 3.2)—will normally translate into an intentional incompleteness of the story or strategic gaps of the storyworld. I maintain that the set of inner properties of short narratives (brevity/economy/concentration/compactness) can generate an increase in the number of alternative narrative worlds, significantly more than in longer narratives. This will lead to a particular mode of thinking applied specifically to reading and comprehending short stories. In keeping with this, I favor Fauconnier and Turner’s argument that (short) fictional narratives may be used as “tools of the imagination”3 and Herman’s claim that narrative is a tool for constructing models of reality.4 These concluding remarks support claims made by many scholars from the umbrella discipline of cognitive science. Indeed, cognitive scientists are now trying to bring to the fore one compelling piece of evidence that recognizes the wide-ranging power of narrative in one’s life. So, it is not surprising that scholars of cognition have advanced fundamental research questions regarding our capacity to recognize and comprehend stories. As stated by cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner,5 it is surprising that stories University Press, 1986); Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 1 Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 241. 2 Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 245. 3 Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 139. 4 Herman, Story Logic. 5 Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 1 (1991): 1–21.

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have been widely neglected from the analysis of mental processes, despite “narrative comprehension […] [being] among the earliest powers of mind to appear in the young child and among the most widely used forms of organizing human experience.”1 To this end, a cognitive analysis of the mental work required in the course of reading will serve to illuminate the most significant aspects of constructing meaning, equally relevant for the study of the mind.

3.5 Practical argument: Hemingway’s style and artistic technique I begin this sub-chapter by restating the theoretical assumption that the genre of short fiction should be viewed as independent and autonomous. The motivational underpinnings of this assumption look at the related features that are able to define the peculiarities of short fiction. The various case studies presented in the following sub-chapters will bring evidence of this. As the discussion in sub-chapter 3.1 indicates, short narrative fiction has been a subject of inquiry in literary criticism for many decades. As part of the theoretical debate, I wish to propose an analysis that is informed by cognitive science, cognitive poetics (with a cognitive linguistic orientation), and cognitive narratology in particular. So far, the tools developed by cognitive linguistics (i.e. conceptual integration, mental space theory, etc.) have been applied mostly to shorter narrative texts. While they have their own roles to play, I think further significant progress needs to be made in analyzing more complex literary texts. In longer texts, we witness the human brain at work for a longer time, and the material itself is more sophisticated, revealing the depths of human expression and of related cognitive needs. My goal of performing a closely targeted examination of language and cognition, close allies in the construction of narrative meaning in short texts, will be illustrated by the analysis of material from Ernest Hemingway’s short fiction. Why did I choose Hemingway and his short stories as the experimental arena in which to apply a cognitive model for analysis? The application of this model to early 20th century short prose emphasizes the dynamic quality of the American writer’s short narrative, and more importantly, it helps my goal of showing that we can reconstruct Hemingway in a different way than before. In identifying a new theoretical framework, I do not intend to suggest that knowledge deriving from other disciplines (i.e. cognitive sciences) will provide the “real” approach to Hemingway’s short fiction. 1

Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” 9.

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Rather, I suggest that critics should develop a more humanistic approach to reading Hemingway. One of the consequences of recasting critics’ interest is to “slow down” their critical interpretations and, in this manner, they may begin to understand how particular textual interpretations have been reached. Being involved in acts of critical interpretation, we take a lot of the unconscious and automatic thinking, as well as much of our cognitive resources, for granted. The theoretical grounding and practical examination in this volume ask us to reframe how we read and study Hemingway and, simultaneously, to revise our concepts and practice of performing interpretative work, or, better said, performing instances of reading. To my knowledge, no critic to date has explored Hemingway’s short fiction in this manner, and this may be because the basic cognitive toolkit we typically use for conventional interpretation has barely cracked the surface of the text. In brief, I will propose that an active reconsideration of the basic conceptual knowledge for the reading of Hemingway will lead to a revision of critical responses and will generate a fresh new view on the concept of reading. This, I hope, will stretch our cognitive abilities as readers to their limit and be a practical exercise for an intimate discovery of our conceptual system. Critics may suggest that Hemingway’s challenging literary short fiction offers so many narrative strands (many still undiscovered!) for textual interpretation that a cognitively oriented theory would fail, just because it lacks the convincing power of critical exercises and because it does not open new avenues of interpretation. I do not intend to fight back against this criticism. But I argue that “traditional” criticism leaves out obvious (though not simple) and important questions regarding the construction of narrative meaning. The critics I refer to tend to forget that readers (ordinary readers and specialized critics alike) are human, and they read and interpret with their human brain, in their physical body. They tend to ignore that their fundamental cognitive apparatus is revealed in language and reflected in the literary text. True, Hemingway’s texts are extremely challenging for literary interpretations, but it is precisely the text’s challenging nature that can open the door to a cognitive analysis of the complexity of structure and style. A key strength of Hemingway’s fiction, consistently addressed by critical studies, is his writing style (the further discussion on style illustrates part of my argument). In truth, one can speak of the inevitable consideration of Hemingway’s style, to use a catchy phrase from Wagner-Martin’s Ernest Hemingway: Seven Decades of Criticism. His short declarative sentences, the alternation of short and long sentences, word repetitions, the pacing of his phrases, his impersonal tone, the apparent simplicity of his delivery, his reliance on the concreteness of things, the frequent use of one-syllable words, and his intentional omission of emotion are just some of the

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quintessential hallmarks of the American writer’s style—the strength of Hemingway’s writing and living in his own style. Readers and critics strive to decipher the “secret” of his style or, more precisely, to absorb or possess his writing expertise and read it in the manner of the text: “the style simulates possession,” in Wright Morris’ words.1 Over time, countless readers have attempted to master Hemingway’s intricate style. Annual contests teach people how to write the funniest parodies of Hemingway (“How to Write Good Bad Hemingway” and “The Best of Bad Hemingway” are among the many imitation contests). However, joking aside, in addition to being a source of inspiration and imitation, the writer’s distinctive style marked the birth of a new form of prose at the end of World War I, a time when late Victorian sentimentalism was no longer able to grasp and reflect the realities of history. Since then, Hemingway’s impersonal tone and stylistic reserve have enthralled and challenged generations of readers to uncover the potentialities of his works. How is it possible that the camera-like quality of his narrative, sometimes confined to insistent observation, can appeal to our senses and arouse our emotions? How does it capture us? Where exactly does this nearly hypnotic stylistic force come from? With reserved narrators and protagonists engaged in characteristically laconic dialogs, the text does not seem to “say” much. Sometimes, Hemingway’s words seem to be drained of energy, but the world of his story still remains emotionally charged, bursting at the seams with tension. Style is celebrated in an unprecedented manner. At this point, we can ask how readers can make their way through a seemingly opaque text, one that appears unwilling to reveal its intrinsic meaning. In one of his articles published posthumously, Hemingway writes: “I sometimes think my style is suggestive rather than direct. The reader must often use his imagination or lose the most subtle part of my thought.”2 If the use of imagination is the key to opening Hemingway’s texts, as the writer himself suggests, I will begin my analysis by questioning the very resources of our imaginative powers when we are reading his short stories. Imagination, viewed from within, along with the conceptual apparatus fueling our imaginary powers, can disclose the foundations of Hemingway’s style. What I wish to show here is that a cognitive approach can supply the right tools for investigating the depths of Hemingway’s narrative, where meanings begin to abound. 1

Wright Morris, “Ernest Hemingway,” in Ernest Hemingway: Seven Decades of Criticism, ed. Linda Wagner-Martin (Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1998 [1978]), 98. 2 Hemingway qtd. in Ernest Hemingway: Six Decades of Criticism, ed. Linda Wagner-Martin (Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1987), 275.

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3.6 Ernest Hemingway: exercises of artistic style In “The Art of the Short Story,” Hemingway gives guidance on the methods of short story writing and instructs aspiring writers on how to master one essential technique—in short, this is what he calls the theory of omission or the technique of leaving out. He explains: “The test of any story is how very good the stuff is that you, not the editors, omit,”1 and then he goes on to exemplify his technique by citing one of his canonical short stories—The Sea Change—in which, the writer claims, everything is left out, even the story itself. Paradoxically, however, Hemingway adds, the story is all there, “it is not visible but it is there.”2 Admittedly, the success of his style may lie in his extraordinary capacity to discern between what should be left in and what should be taken out. And then, it is probably more than a writer’s sound judgment to decide on his texts, but it is the reader who should feel what has been left out—in essence, the writer’s art rests in this message for the reader. Hemingway’s most famous metaphor reveals the essence of his writing style: If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of the ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.3 I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.4

As the quotations here attest, a well-written story is produced by submerging information or emotion, which sends both writer and reader in search of the meaning that lies beneath. Hemingway further explains the difference between stories in which all is left in and stories where writers take it all out: the former type of stories may be easy to read, but they are 1

Ernest Hemingway, “The Art of the Short Story,” in Ernest Hemingway: A Study of Short Fiction, ed. Joseph Flora (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989 [1959]), 130. 2 Hemingway, “The Art of the Short Story,” 131. 3 Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner Publishing, 2002 [1932]), 154. 4 George Plimpton, “The Art of Fiction: Ernest Hemingway,” in Conversations with Ernest Hemingway: Literary Conversation Series, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1986 [1958]), 125.

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rarely the subject of repeated readings. By contrast, stories that are made minimal by cuttings, reductions, or deletions tend to challenge readers’ imagination and ask them to see the story within the limits of the minimal fictional world. Hemingway’s use of the iceberg metaphor to describe his writing theory speaks volumes about the two artistic forms of expression at the core of his artistic credo: the understated and the unstated. Hemingway’s ideal of writing upon and about the controlled underspecified proves to be extremely demanding, thus requiring high concentration from his readers. By inviting them to see to the lower part of the iceberg, the writer immediately warns that he has put very little of his iceberg above water, meaning that the real test of the story lies in what is omitted or made silent intentionally. It is, therefore, the reader’s main duty to view the “submerged iceberg” and search for meaning there while dealing with the writer’s economy of style, the limited number of words, and the compactness of his narrative worlds. Hemingway’s original style, based on stylistic abbreviation and economy, must have developed during his early training period as a journalist at the Kansas City Star (from October 1917 to April 1918), or later as a correspondent for the Toronto Star in Europe in the 1920s. Clearly, the journalistic apprenticeship helped to develop his prose style considerably in that his regular assignments as a news correspondent required him not to report hard news but to write “human interest accounts,” and then to wire them in “cablese,” which meant that Hemingway was used to the telegraph style that entailed delivering a lot of information with the minimum number of words or characters. In this very specific condensed writing form, Hemingway needed to send his press messages across clearly and unambiguously, making use of abbreviations, avoiding unnecessary words, and disregarding punctuation. The heavily condensed journalistic style prepared the young reporter for the as yet undisclosed possibility of writing prose, which he would later use and refine into his distinctive writing techniques. However, it was not only Hemingway’s journalistic apprenticeship as a reporter that taught him the covert possibilities of lean prose but also his apprenticeship in Paris under the extraordinary influence of one of the best poets of the 20th century, Ezra Pound. Hemingway calls him “the man who taught me to distrust adjectives.”1 In Paris, Hemingway learned directly from the promoter of the imagistic movement in poetry, and many of his best stories owe him a lot in terms of literary techniques, language, and style. Hemingway must have been extremely familiar with the credo of this literary movement, as expressed in Pound’s essay, “A Retrospect,” first 1 Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009 [1964]).

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published in 1918. Pound’s advice given to aspiring writers dramatically influenced his young disciple: “Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something,” and “use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.” One may say that these bits of literary advice became fundamental for Hemingway’s prose style. Also, the definition of “an image,” as given by Pound in his essay as a complex form of emotions and intellect, would be an important base for Hemingway’s esthetics, as well as for his preoccupation with literary techniques and the architecture of his style: “an ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”1 In tackling the complexity of Hemingway’s minimalist style, readers should look away from the tip of the small iceberg and unravel the puzzles raised by the enormous base lying beneath the surface—the large mass of understated storylines, unvoiced facts, and undisclosed images. It is Hemingway’s technique of “taking out information” or keeping it to its minimum that challenges the imagination of his readers and stretches their conceptual powers. In reading most of his short stories, readers need to deal with a “lexical riddle” or “a lexical crux,” considered by Brenner as one of Hemingway’s three epistemological formulas, in addition to “textual perplexity” and “extratextual reversal.”2 As the critic explains, in “textual perplexity stories,” readers are often confronted with textual confusion and are overwhelmed with riddles, feeling they first need to find the missing word, and then decode the riddle and see what lies beyond its lexical key. It is precisely here that the story begins to reveal its complexities. In his 1959 essay “The Art of the Short Story,”3 Hemingway uses three of his stories, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, The Sea Change, and Big-Two Hearted River, to exemplify the stylistic achievement of his ideal of leaving out textual information, while intentional gaps and blanks in the text generate puzzling riddles for the reader. For one of these stories—A Clean, Well-Lighted Place4—, Hemingway concludes: “There I really had luck. I 1

Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1968), 4. First published in 1918. 2 Gerry Brenner, “From ‘Sepi Jingan’ to ‘The Mother of a Queen’: Hemingway’s Three Epistemological Formulas for Short Fiction,” in New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, ed. Jackson J. Benson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 160. 3 Hemingway, “The Art of the Short Story,” 140. 4 All the short stories by Ernest Hemingway further analyzed can be found in Ernest Hemingway. The Collected Stories, edited and introduced by James Fenton (London: Everyman’s Library, 1995). The in-text citations provide the page references thereto.

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left out everything.” In this very famous story and one of the most discussed by critics, Hemingway builds a very “simple” story in five pages: the action is set in an almost empty Spanish café where we witness the conversation of two waiters, who keep a close watch on their single client, a deaf old man sitting in the shadows and giving himself away to excessive drink. As the closing time approaches, the younger waiter is preoccupied with his family life and rushes home. Because of that, he bluntly refuses the old man’s request for another drink. Meanwhile, the older waiter is more understanding to the needs of their client. The unnamed character, the deaf old man, is projected against the darkness of the night, sits quietly, and only speaks when he makes his request to the bartender. Indeed, nothing much seems to happen; as is the case with most of Hemingway’s stories, the action is minimal. The story seems to revolve around the news retold by the young waiter who hears that “last week he [the old man] tried to commit suicide” (291). In fact, the retelling of this tale only covers the small peak of the iceberg showing above the surface. Therefore, one may say that A Clean, Well-Lighted Place truly shows Hemingway at his best in achieving his understated, lean, and laconic style. It is the stylistic achievement of this short story that generated critical interest. Many critics see the story as a nihilistic point in Hemingway’s career, as it appeared in the 1933 collection Winner Take Nothing, a time of profound despair when even winners take “nothing.” It is the concept of “nothingness” that has received detailed consideration in the critical interpretation of the story, as acknowledged by Baker: “The word nothing (or nada) contains huge actuality. The great skill in the story is the development, through the most carefully controlled understatement, of the young waiter’s mere nothing into the old waiter’s Something – a Something called Nothing which is so huge, terrible, overbearing, inevitable and omnipresent that once experienced, it can never be forgotten.”1 Other critics note that the three characters in the story meet nada without voicing it, even if they all experience nothingness in their very personal manner, and give individual human responses to it. If this experience of nothingness is the central theme in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, critics see it as the expression or the summary of a recurrent crisis treated in other Nick Adams stories, in which death, disillusionment, despair, or loss are the other facets of the more generalized nothingness, or in later stories (The Snows of Kilimanjaro or The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber) when characters are confronted with the emptiness and hollowness of their inner 1

Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 124.

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nothing. True, Hoffman is right to say that “the shadow of nada looms behind much of Hemingway’s fiction.”1 Nada appears to dominate the atmosphere of the “clean, well-lighted” café: “the old man sat in the shadow of the leaves of the tree that moved slightly in the wind” (291), looming also over the minds of the protagonists. It is clear that the two waiters use the term in different manners: while for the young waiter, nada is more a lack of personal commodity, a thing he luckily possesses—he has a wife, a job, confidence, and youth: “‘You have youth, confidence, and a job,’ the older waiter said. ‘You have everything’” (293)—, the older, mellower waiter understands the void as a universal state with serious existential implications, and he further comments on this to himself: “What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too” (294). The parody-prayer uttered by the older waiter outlines a microcosm in which nada is the powerful force that dominates every aspect of existence: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada” (294, emphasis in original). The character substitutes the word nada for all the key nouns or verbs to give a general sense of physical or metaphysical absence, as well as to show the absence of any source of power or authority, and most crucially, the character signals the impossibility to escape from the situation of living in the nada. The further comments in the next sub-section call into question the type of critical reading like the one advanced by A Clean, Well-Lighted Place by pointedly interrogating the very construction of such critical responses and finally challenging Hemingway’s critics to move beyond established critical patterns.

3.7 The definition and nature of the Hemingway short story: a close-up The analysis of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place in sub-chapter 3.6 supports my theoretical endeavor in several important ways. Firstly, I argue that this extremely compact and unified story is representative of the American writer’s short fiction—it has the quintessential characteristics of his prose: 1

Steven K. Hoffman, “Nada and The Clean, Well-Lighted Place: The Unity of Hemingway’s Short Fiction,” in New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, ed. Jackson J. Benson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 174.

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economy of style, intentional indetermination, and controlled fragmentariness. However, the storyworld constructed according to these stylistic principles has been “decoded” by competent readers, if we only look at the variety of critical interpretations of the concept of nada in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. To be sure, Hemingway’s short fiction has received much critical attention and been the subject of many critical (re)interpretations, despite the consistent “complaint” that the text does not give away much or that the characters themselves only utter minimal monologs and engage in laconic dialogs. In studies on the Hemingway short story, critics often comment on the multitude of textual meanings but never stop to reflect on how exactly they have been able to reach those meanings. Very rarely do they reflect on how they have been able to solve the riddle of the text, given the small amount of textual information. How have they been able to extract the meaning when much of the text has been left out? As many critics have shown, Hemingway’s short fiction poses questions focusing on abstract concepts, such as nothingness, death, emptiness, failure, and so on, concepts that are generally difficult to grasp. And yet, competent readers succeed in abstracting the meaning and expressing it in quite articulated critical responses. This chapter suggests a new critical approach to Hemingway’s short fiction—a line of research aimed at encouraging a reconstruction of default readings. I argue that what criticism lacks is the study of the overall sensemaking patterns that readers use to negotiate their way through his complicated narrative worlds. What this novel critical endeavor seeks to analyze and understand is the thinking required in reading Hemingway’s short fiction. In this view, the analysis of his stories is not an accidental one—these fragmented, underrepresented short texts are probably the most inviting texts for such an analysis. Due to their compactness, they are good exercises to stretch our mental capacities to their limit. In this sense, cognitive analyses speak volumes: they problematize the inner strength of our cognitive ability as readers by making explicit the mental operations that would otherwise remain implicit in other forms of reading. In this sense, I believe Hemingway’s short stories can be seen as covert expressions of basic mental acts. Indeed, our focus on the human mind shows the need to look for specificities when we are engaged in reading literature. I suspect that a detailed analysis of the cognitive operations used to read Hemingway’s short texts could reveal meaningful insight into our general conceptual apparatus. In this study, I am interested in evaluating Hemingway’s short fiction as “an act of the human mind.” My main assumption is that, without an accurate investigation of the nature of the language used in these short

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stories, and without a knowledge of their possibilities, or rather of their limitations, systematically imposed on the language by human thought, Hemingway’s critical readings would only accumulate distinct interpretations and fail to account for the nature and source of such critical responses. At this level, competent readers should be able to examine the texture beneath “the tip of the iceberg.” As literature is seen as probably the highest expression of language use, the result of this critical endeavor would help us understand the manifold ways in which language functions and the intricate ways in which mental connections are performed. Fauconnier details this intellectual endeavor: “Language, as we use it, is but the tip of the iceberg of cognitive construction. As discourse unfolds, much is going on behind the scenes: New domains appear, links are forged, abstract meanings operate, internal structure emerges and spreads, viewpoint and focus keep shifting. Everyday talk and commonsense reasoning are supported by invisible, highly abstract, mental creations, which […] helps to guide, but does not itself define.”1 This chapter therefore proposes that there is scope for a more detailed investigation of “what is going on behind the scenes” and that there are solid grounds to expect answers from a cognitively oriented literary theory. This means bringing criticism and cognitive analysis together: we need to see how readers build dynamic concepts, how they structure different image schemas, and how they construct mental spaces and establish connections between them. Finally, we need to look at conceptual structures, such as metaphors or metonymies. Ultimately, the use of varied conceptual connections or patterns should be part of a continuous conceptual exercise with which competent readers are able to engage. I should add here that the concept of “competent readers” is indebted to Mark Turner’s view of cultural literacy (see Turner’s2 chapter on “Cultural Literacy and Poetic Thought”)—culturally literate persons have the capacity of working conceptual connections dynamically, can make metonymic links, or can connect concepts metaphorically. To illustrate, let us look at one particular case of a popular metaphor given by Turner3: the case of the Grim Reaper, whom we all know as the personification of Death. He claims that what would qualify a culturally literate person is not just to recognize that the Grim Reaper stands for death, but “to possess the conceptual patterns behind the concept of the Grim Reapers, and those patterns are elaborate and powerful.”4 In this sense, one must know in detail how we can run a 1

Fauconnier, Mental Spaces, xxii-xxiii. Turner, Reading Minds. 3 Turner, Reading Minds, 220–225. 4 Turner, Reading Minds, 225. 2

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metaphorical connection between our concept of plants and our concept of persons, as the life cycle is understood based on the basic metaphor PEOPLE ARE PLANTS (other similar expressions exploiting such a metaphorical understanding would be “He’s a late bloomer,” “He’s a budding theoretician,” etc.). In addition, we should mentally unfold the scenario of harvest in which reapers harvest the grain, and so the death of the plant is mapped onto the death of the person. To paraphrase Turner’s terms, a culturally literate reader does not only recognize bits of information, but they also have the ability to fit that information into our large dynamic conceptual system, and this assumption is grounded in the idea that this information is never isolated, and therefore only occurs relative to our conceptual system. Likewise, in Hemingway’s well-known metaphor of the iceberg—“the dignity of the ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water”1— , readers perform metaphorical work in order to understand the basis of Hemingway’s style and his concept of writing short fiction. Readers should start by analyzing this unconventional conceptual metaphor of SHORT TEXTS ARE ICEBERGS and should probably wonder what this metaphor can say regarding our ability regarding conceptual connections, and this will subsequently say something about our understanding of Hemingway’s short prose. First, this rather idiosyncratic metaphor expresses no common or basic metaphors we normally know of—to be sure, texts are not generally understood in terms of icebergs. Before I explain how readers are able to grasp the meaning of such an arresting metaphor, I should mention that metaphorical invention and understanding are constrained by our imageschematic structures,2 and in this case, we deal with the image schema of a container (a bounded space with an interior and exterior)—the iceberg is a flat, large mass of floating ice, with a bounded interior and an exterior, while much of its mass remains hidden under the surface of the water. Our schematic image of the top of the iceberg is structured by the image schema of a flat region, with undisclosed regions beneath. When we conceive this metaphor, we map a source image onto a target image, namely we map the source image of an iceberg onto the target image of a text. While operating this cognitive mapping, we are restricted by the image-schematic structure of the source image, that of the iceberg. Also, we should look at the notion of “the nature of things,” as presented by Turner,3 which states that “attributes of a form of being lead to the way it behaves.” In this case, the 1

Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 154. Image schemas are used in cognitive operations and express our bodily sense of spatiality. 3 Turner, Reading Minds, 184. 2

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inanimate form of the iceberg is thought to function in a certain way, given its attributes: because the density of ice is lower than that of the water, only one-eighth of its volume lies above water, while the larger proportion beneath the water’s surface is difficult to judge. Consequently, the attributes of this inanimate form lead to its behavior. We can read the metaphor of SHORT TEXT IS AN ICEBERG if we map the nature of the iceberg onto the nature of a text. We should not be concerned with the difference between the source and target: the text is an imaginary production, the iceberg is a physical entity; the text has creative causality, the iceberg has physical causality. Rather, we should focus on the aspectual form and the behavior we associate with the iceberg and subsequently map them onto the aspectual form and behavior of texts. At this level, words are seen as a “flat” surface, while the textual mass below the textual surface should be inspected in detail. By performing this metaphorical work, readers will construct connections between conceptual domains that will give access to the possibilities of Hemingway’s short fiction. Using concepts and notions of cognitive poetics, this chapter has suggested that the metaphor of SHORT TEXT IS AN ICEBERG is particularly illustrative of the type of understanding required to read Hemingway’s short fiction. This overarching metaphorical conceptualization of short stories invites us to reconsider the genre of short fiction in its entire complexity. In the classical definition, a genre is defined by a set of criterial features possessed by each component member of the genre. Cognitive studies on category constructions cut against this traditional premise and claim that conceptual categories are not created by a shared set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Rather, categories are defined by what Ludwig Wittgenstein1 first coined as the “family resemblance” among members of a category. John Austin2 later extended the scope of category organization and showed that its members may be best, good, or bad examples to represent the category. In light of this theory, categories are represented by their “basic level,” where category members are recognized immediately, with little cognitive work. The general assumption made here is that Ernest Hemingway’s short stories inspire us to reconsider our default views of short fiction as a genre. In sum, this chapter has sought to investigate case studies of cognitive theory that are applicable to his short fiction. In what follows, I shall be looking at three main levels: 1. the genre level, wherein the close 1

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986 [1953]). 2 John Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962 [1955]).

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investigation of Hemingway’s short stories should give us new insight into our thinking about short fiction, specifically about the type of thinking and imagination required for reading short fiction; 2. the text level, claiming that individual literary short works are inspired by global conceptual connections; and 3. the level of individual phrases, focusing on local expressions or phrases.

CHAPTER FOUR NARRATIVE SPACE, POSSIBLE WORLDS AND COUNTERFACTUALITY IN ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S SHORT STORIES

4.1 Image-schematic knowledge and immersive features of short stories I begin this chapter by reasserting one of the main tenets in cognitively oriented literary studies—that there is a deep continuity between literary discourse and non-literary forms of expression. As Peter Stockwell1 points out, “readers do not suddenly become non-human beings when confronted by the literary.” In line with this comment, let us remember the intensity of our engagement with fictionality. For instance, even though we know that fictional characters are not real to us, we still continue to connect to them in similar ways we talk about our friends or acquaintances. Their memories, attitudes, and feelings are as intensely familiar to us as those of the living individuals in our day-to-day experience. Critics may say, however, that these are not genuine or authentic feelings. While we accept this objection, there is no denying that our personal responses to fictional encounters mirror our everyday experiences. In this way, characters become real for us and the fictional world becomes a temporary substitute for our actual world. Whether we speak of the simulation effect or the pseudo-reality of fictional worlds, there are unavoidable implications of readerly engagement with fictionality. For instance, Paul Gray claims that this pseudo-reality can generate a degree of ambiguity of literary characters: “Foolish to wonder whether Rhett ever came back to Scarlett or how many children had Lady Macbeth, lecture the professors. Such killjoys are technically right, of course, but imaginatively out to lunch. One of the principal pleasures of reading stems from the illusion of eavesdropping on unguarded lives, of getting to know people better than they may know themselves.”2

1 2

Stockwell, Texture, 106. Paul Gray, “Telling it Like Thackeray,” qtd. in Ryan, Possible Worlds, 22.

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In this view, when we cross the boundary between the literary and the non-literary, we become interested in the lives of inhabitants of fictional worlds and begin to examine how they experience narrative space and time, how they manipulate imaginary worlds through mental operations, and how they reflect upon the rich narrative universe. The only difference between the two forms of discourse is not of essence, but one of degree. True, when we try to take hold of the complexities of the narrative world, we use the same cognitive mechanisms, but literature exploits our cognitive patterns extensively, heightens them, and gives us a better understanding of linguistic and cognitive abilities that would not otherwise be noticed. Therefore, a cognitive investigation of the workings of literary discourse not only tells us more about the artistic setting but, perhaps more importantly, it tells us more about our conceptual make-up. This conceptualization informs my thesis, and in this chapter I am particularly interested in examining the cognitive simulation of the bodily experience of space in Hemingway’s short narratives. Classical studies on narrative have given prominence to temporal sequences in stories and have paid scant attention to the dynamics of space in narrative. In contrast, recent research in narratology (see Emmott,1 Fludernik,2 and Herman3) regards spatial relationships as equally essential for story construction. Reading is compared to a “cinema in the mind” where readers get the chance to activate spaces never visited before and which they are probably very unlikely to experience otherwise. As Herman notes, “humans spatialize and thereby comprehend the world. In this sense, narrative does not merely reflect spatial categorizations of experience but furthermore is one of the chief means by which people go about building spatial representations of a world that they could not otherwise begin to experience at all. It is thus a fundamental, not a specialized or derivate, mode of cognition.”4 Our ability to spatialize storyworlds is an essential mode of cognition: in the fictional world, we are able to locate events, characters, objects, or actions. We engage in shifts to new contexts or locations, where we need to constantly update our mental representations of space by performing dynamic mental work. This process of maintaining mental models of a context or creating other new ones is related to our ability to deal with 1

Emmott, Narrative Comprehension. Monika Fludernik, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction. The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness (London/New York: Routledge, 1993). 3 Herman, Story Logic. 4 Herman, Story Logic, 289–299. 2

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continuity and change.1 This cognitive approach to the study of narrative examines the role of space in creating mental representations of the story. I will pay special attention to spatial configuration as a background for the understanding of the journeys taken by Hemingway’s characters across narrative worlds. Characters experience space physically in movement, see, hear, relate to one another, and discover the narrative world. Readers construct “mental maps”2 that can guide them through the rather incomplete and fragmentary narrative space in the hope of achieving a better representation of the story and eventually of becoming wholly immersed in the narrative. Thus, space is mentally created to various degrees of precision, as readers sketch out possible cognitive maps by positioning objects or actors in the storyworld, by configuring the relations between these entities, and by mentally representing the movements of the characters in space. “Cognitive mapping” entails activating the text’s visual cues that help readers locate things and events in the storyworld, and mentally model fictional space into cognitive maps: “Reading and interpreting a text, especially a literary one, are not mental activities that stop when the eye moves away from its visual inscription. There are indeed readers who spontaneously draw sketches of fictional worlds to clarify their cognitive maps.”3 In this chapter, I advance a twofold argument to develop and refine the concept of narrative space: while characters experience space physically, they also remap their spatial trajectories to create altered outcomes of their fictional life. I argue that this imaginary remapping of space gives narrative power to Hemingway’s stories and forms the basis of our readerly interest. As readers try to construct mental maps of his imaginary narrative spaces, they become involved in alternative plots of counterfactuality, and this human fascination with events that might have been may well add to the attraction toward his fragmented storyworlds. In this context, the present 1

The approach here is indebted to Catherine Emmott’s “theory of contextual frames” which she uses to explain how information about contexts influences mental representations: “contextual information, which I view as being stored in mental representations termed contextual frames, provides ‘episodic’ information about a configuration of characters, location, and time at any point in a narrative, rather than details about individual people and places.” Emmott, Narrative Comprehension, 104. 2 Cognitive maps are essential for the construction of narrative space and for the immersion of the reader in the textual world: “a cognitive map is a mental model of spatial relations.” Marie-Laure Ryan, “Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Narrative Space,” in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. David Herman (Stanford, CA: CSLI, 2003), 215. 3 Ryan, “Cognitive Maps,” 232.

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chapter examines a series of short stories that are formulated as spatial stories; this means that the core narrative revolves around the physical journeys undertaken by characters. However, it is not simply the common theme that brings these stories together, but it is the very configuration of the journey that sheds light on the potentialities of the narrative, i.e. the spatial pattern concerns the ramification or multiplication of narrative pathways. Hemingway’s characters travel across space and time in narrative worlds, arrive at junctures where space becomes multiplied and bifurcated, or reach intersections of divergent directions. If characters become involved in the fragmentation of space, their own life trajectories receive different configurations, and, perhaps more importantly, their fictional mind is dramatically transformed by having to manage unexplored possibilities, diversification, and multiplicity (Chapter 4 in part and Chapter 5 explore the potentialities of fictional minds). Ahead of them are the unknown terrain of alternate possible futures and the as yet undiscovered realm of missed opportunities. Characters venture into these uncharted spaces and remap their present life accordingly. The ability to perform experiments about what might have been or speculations about how things may turn out creates room for counterfactual thought. This cognitive make-up of Hemingway’s characters stimulates our conceptual activity and simulates our cognitive mechanisms. I argue that these two mental activities are sufficient to ensure our immersion in the American writer’s short fiction. To support the goals I explore in this chapter, I took inspiration from several cognitive theories: cognitive rhetorician Mark Turner’s theory of basic spatial stories (discussed below), the theory of embodied cognition, focused on imageschematic conceptual knowledge (illustrated in sub-chapter 1.7), and the theory of conceptual metaphors (detailed in sub-chapter 1.8). This present volume relies heavily on the analytical tools provided by these theories, and I will elaborate on their frameworks in ways that best respond to the dynamic powers of imagination triggered and developed by Hemingway’s short stories. In trying to formulate a new model of reading for the narrative space in Hemingway’s short stories, I will first examine the pattern of spatial bifurcation in one of his canonical short stories, The Snows in Kilimanjaro (1936, published in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories). I was motivated to choose this particular story by the text’s unusual form: in addition to the main storyline, retelling Harry and Helen’s experience on an African safari, the story is completed by Harry’s flashbacks (in the form of italicized vignettes) to his past experiences and his dissatisfaction with his inability to write about them, as well the two tentative endings: the first one, the false rescue of the protagonist after he becomes infected from a scratch

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and later gets gangrene in his leg, a life-threatening condition aggravated by a lack of proper medical treatment in the African camp, and the second one, the death of the protagonist. Hemingway habitually uses laconic dialogs and does not allow narrators to evaluate the exchanges between characters. While this is true for Snows, the technique in the italicized passages makes this story stand out from his short fiction. Here, readers get the indirect presentation of Henry’s thoughts. While the narratorial voice is kept to a minimum and does not interfere with the protagonist’s reflections, the clipped passages become a narrative report meant to record observations, but which offer very little interpretation. Given the special narrative structure, we can ask questions about the readers’ interpretative abilities to respond cognitively to such narrative plots. The details of the African safari provide an overall picture of the importance of the journey theme in Hemingway’s story; at the same time, as readers, we activate the journey schema to reach the relevant structure for understanding the storyworld. Of course, the journey schema in Snows has well-differentiated coordinates: the protagonists follow a path leading to a destination and a desired goal (Henry and Helen’s safe homecoming from the safari), their journey should involve progress toward the purpose (unfortunately, their progress halts before the goal is reached as Henry’s medical condition worsens), and also the journey involves vehicles that serve to transport the travelers to the destination (in this case, physical vehicles, like a plane or a truck, fail to appear in time to carry them back to civilization). As Henry is literally rotting from within and his gangrene is killing him, his physical inability to move becomes the main impediment to stop the couple from attaining their goal (journeying back home). While we generally associate the journey schema with images of motion and movement, in Snows, the protagonist is confined to his cot, where he lies still most of the time or, often, refuses to move: “‘I don’t want to move,’ the man said. ‘There is no sense in moving now except to make it easier for you’” (405).1 Obviously, Henry can’t move due to his impaired physical condition, but the other characters do not move around a lot either, at least not as much as we would expect from a safari experience. Instead of hunting, hiking, or shooting big game, Henry’s personal boy “was sitting by his bed” (410), his wife “was sitting by him in a canvas chair” (409), or “she was leaning back in the chair” (422). The reversal of the action story (nonaction replaces expected motion and prolonged lethargy substitutes physical activity) leads us to think that IMPEDIMENTS TO ACTION ARE 1

Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, in Ernest Hemingway. The Collected Stories, edited and introduced by James Fenton (London: Everyman’s Library, 1995), 405–425.

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IMPEDIMENTS TO MOTION. This general expression is part of our overarching cognitive architecture and should not be interpreted as a mere figure of speech, as it also guides the way we think. It concerns a pattern of thought that maps or projects a story of bodily motion to a non-spatial story. I argue, along with Turner,1 that we may comfortably say that our abstract thought and reasoning are always grounded in bodily spatial stories, whereas “these [metaphoric] projections show up constantly in both everyday language and literary language because they are general cognitive processes indispensable to human thought and action.” As the concept of the “journey” informs Snows, it becomes crucial to understand that our capacity to interpret abstract stories is based on our human ability to recognize basic small stories of events in space, everyday stories such as recognizing the wind blowing clouds through the sky, a child throwing a rock, a mother pouring milk into a glass, or a whale swimming through the water.2 To be sure, these stories seem to be banal or completely unproblematic, and hence we may ask whether they can pose any scientific questions for further analysis. The answer given by cognitive scientists is clear: without the knowledge stored in such small spatial stories, life would be impossible, our experiences would be too chaotic to analyze, and we would be less confident in our interactions with the world. Similarly, without the knowledge of these basic spatial stories, critical reading would consist of impossible questions or opaque challenges. It is only by being informed by commonplace spatial stories that Hemingway’s literary journeys can be something other than abstract understanding. Snows gives us basic spatial stories and invites us to project them metaphorically onto more abstract stories. While we perform the mapping of the source (bodily story) onto the target (abstract story), we need to recruit the relevant imageschematic knowledge.3 Consider, for instance, the minimal image schema for container with a body inside: the cot where Henry lies motionlessly, with its distinct interior and exterior and the boundary that separates them. First, we recognize this general image schema of container, and then we project the image-schematic structure of the bodily story to give structure to the non-spatial story. The closed bounded shape of the cot and the physical confines of the camp that separate the protagonists from the wilderness are projected onto the non-physical form of the African expedition—the end of the experience is limited to the very few choices given to the characters. The help that fails to reach them in time limits their possibilities. Confined 1

Turner, The Literary Mind, 39. Turner, The Literary Mind, 13. 3 Image schemas are “skeletal patterns that recur in our sensory and motor experience.” Turner, The Literary Mind, 16. 2

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within these limits, Henry and Helen await the plane while it becomes less and less certain that they will journey back to civilization safely and in due time. In this complicated story of a journey where the overall action story seems to have halted as Henry’s gangrened leg gets worse, wild animals cross the open field and slip lightly along the edge of the camp. The reader need not search for the intricacies of the image, as the narrator plunges into Henry’s thoughts and explicitly recounts: “just then it occurred to him that he was going to die. It came with a rush; not as a rush of water not of wind; but of a sudden evil-smelling emptiness and the odd thing was that the hyena slipped lightly along the edge of it” (414). Death is personified as a wild animal, a hyena that sticks around making noise and giving the feeling of the imminence of Henry’s death. However, the event story of death is later extended through a surprisingly animated action story. Death is not personified with the traditional scythe and skull but overlaps with the arresting image of two bicycle policemen. While we are familiar with the general personification of death as an actor, it becomes more specific in the imagination of the protagonist: in the event story of dying, Henry personifies death as a bicycle policeman. In this surprising personification, death as an actor tries to enforce the departure, and for that matter, it uses force like a policeman with the legal authority to take enforcement action to remedy a breach in security. In this action story of restoring order and resolving conflicts, readers need to make use of more complex image schemas of force dynamics. Specifically, the image-schematic structure of the event shape of death accords with the image-schematic structure of the action story of enforcing action. Much of the image-schematic knowledge arises from the physical interaction with death: death as an actor moves up on Henry, it occupies space but has no shape, crawls up to him, comes even closer, moves in on him, puts its weight upon his chest, crouches, becomes heavier, until Henry cannot breathe, and finally passes away. The event story of dying arises from the body action that involves movement, the physical manipulation of objects, bodily grasping, pushing, and pulling. Death becomes the intentional manipulator of Henry’s physical body, reaching for it, grasping it, manipulating it, and pushing it. In this case, the basic story of physical manipulation is projected onto a different abstract story. And again, we know that GRASPING AN OBJECT IS CONTROLLING A STATE, which means that for this story, readers project the story of physically manipulating objects onto the abstract story of death. The metaphorical density in Snows draws on the extended conceptual schema of LIFE IS A BATTLE, with its logical continuation, DYING IS LOSING A BATTLE. Specifically, having experienced the loss of this

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battle, Hemingway’s protagonist extends, elaborates, and questions this standard schema regarding life. The questioning of this basic conceptual metaphor has implications at the narrative level. With this in mind, we can infer that Snows deals broadly with varied narrative techniques that allow Hemingway to play with our firmly fixed conceptual make-up, perhaps even to the point of reversing it and suggesting that DYING IS WINNING A BATTLE. At least as far as the narrative is concerned. First, the distinctly printed vignettes in Snows move the story away from the African safari camp and give us access to Henry’s thoughts and memories. As we are immersed into his mental work (by means of tags like “he remembered,” “he thought,” “in his mind”), we become part of his reveries, while the African safari and the physical space in the narrative slowly disappear. At this point, we should inspect the italicized fragments that are integrated into the coherent narrative: they deal with his past life as a soldier, a husband, an expatriate in Paris, and a grandson. While Henry is the internal focalizer of these loosely connected stories, together they speak about Henry’s distinct experiences that he could have used to create fiction. Arguably, their intrinsic potential for fiction has never been exploited. They are lost stories and the type of writing Henry wishes he had written but never did. In these five jumbled short narratives, the protagonist is confronted with the rich possibilities of a past that has never materialized and that opens the door to bitter regret, now that death is imminent. By opening up the character’s mental world, the story itself opens up to a constellation of events that only exist for Henry, for his memories and inner thoughts: they all dwell on him having meant to write about them “but he had never written a line of that” (409), “he had never written any of that” (416), “but he had always thought that he would write it finally” (416), “he had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would” (417). These are non-actual events in a non-existent story. They are non-events of “all the stories that he meant to write” (420) in an unrealized and unauthentic narrative world. Here, we can ask whether this emergent narrative diversity has an implicit effect on the act of reading. I argue that the introduction of the counterfactual stories heightens the immersion effect of the story. Indeed, for readers to share in Henry’s grief and feeling of loss, they need to be fully immersed in his unwritten “masterpieces.” How is that effect achieved technically? Once again, we are engaged in systematic counterfactual thought as we have the potential for counterfactual thinking as a fundamental mode of human reasoning, as Roese and Olson maintain: “Counterfactual thinking is an essential feature

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of consciousness. Few indeed have never pondered a lost opportunity nor regretted a foolish utterance.”1 Since counterfactuality is inherently abstract, I will attempt a definition: a counterfactual is a hypothetical alteration of past events that changes the events in order to create a different, counterfactual outcome. I believe that a more thorough analysis of counterfactual reasoning may indicate that this sort of thinking involves more detailed and specific alterations of the past with a view to constructing a new world, and therefore creating an altered present. As we witness the remapping of narrative space (the availability of the bifurcation pattern) in Snows, pluralist narrative views occur and new possibilities arise within an unstable chain of unresolved narrative conflicts. In her study Coincidence and Counterfactuality, Hilary Danneberg focuses on the counterfactual as a particular plot device in which narrative paths diverge and create space for diversification and multiplicity. According to the scholar, plots of counterfactuality need to adopt a reader-oriented theoretical model that should examine the key cognitive operations stimulated by the plot. She further concludes that the narrative strategy or device of the counterfactual stimulates “the reader’s cognitive desire to be in possession of the second aspect of plot”2 and allows him or her to glimpse into the counterfactualizing capacity of fictional characters, a replica of human mental work. In order to evaluate the “reality effect” triggered by counterfactuals in short fiction, we need to consider just what cognitive strategies are involved, how they operate, and how an analysis of such mechanisms can reveal more about short fiction and our response to it. An examination of the apparently disjointed mini-narratives in Snows involves the reconstruction of “the sense of a double plot,” as termed by Suzanne C. Ferguson3 in her analysis of modernist short fiction. By analyzing the set of imagined alternatives in the characters’ lives, readers have also been supplied with the elements of “the hypothetical plot.” But what is really the point of so much counterfactual material? What is the point of having the characters consider alternatives and something other than their actual narrative world? Again, Ferguson points out, hypothetical plots or double plots share a cognitive dominant, our concern with alternate possible worlds in narrative implicates our ability to recognize the “theme”4 of the story: “In the modern, impressionistic short story, in which plot is frequently suppressed, in which characterization is often achieved by having the characters perceive something or somebody ‘other’ rather than acting or 1

Roese and Olson, What Might Have Been, 45–47. Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality, 13. 3 Ferguson, “Defining the Short Story,” 223. 4 The “deep structure” bases of meanings in short narrative. 2

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being themselves described by an implied author, in which setting may displace event, and in which the very sentence structures or figurative language may imply relationships not otherwise expressed, the reader’s ability to recognize a theme is paramount to their acceptance of the work as belonging to the genre, ‘story’.”1 What I am suggesting here is that reading Hemingway’s short fiction is not a matter of simply decoding one sentence after another. Rather, it is a multilayered process of constructing mental representations of hypothetical plots that heavily relies on the reader’s ability to understand and interpret rich conceptual metaphors and key image-schematic knowledge. Therefore, the unrealized scenarios in the italicized passages should not be treated as separate or additional appendices to the main storyline but as tremendously complex processes of counterfactual reversals. In this sense, Snows does not provide a clear key to the ontological status of the mini-narratives, and so the reader struggles to explore the different versions of Henry’s life and determine the role of his counterfactual fantasies. As we have seen, they are no less relevant than the actual version of events in that they do not simply show the way in which the reality of the story could have turned out but construct an ontologically unstable narrative space in which actual events and characters remain elusive. Jennifer Riddle Harding demonstrates that using the device of the counterfactual in Snows unites the disparate elements of the story and dramatizes the tension between possibility and foreclosure in narrative. She claims: “the analysis of ‘counterfactuals’ as a thematic element provides a means to identify coherence and unity in a seemingly fragmented text.”2 These three main reading models introduce counterfactual reasoning in Hemingway’s short story: firstly, the protagonist’s wishes and his unrealized hypotheses in the form of the italicized vignettes; secondly, the dialog between the characters set in the actual narrative world of the African safari; and, finally, the two endings. Having considered the specific case of counterfactual thinking in the clipped fragments, I now examine the broad effect of counterfactuality that underlines and defines the relationship between the two protagonists as revealed by the dialog in the narrative. Surprisingly, when Henry and Helen talk, they mainly focus not on what did happen but on what did not happen in their past. They create parallel embedded stories describing things that might have happened to them or events that could have been realized but are viewed as unaccomplished from 1

Ferguson, “Defining the Short Story,” 228. Jennifer Riddle Harding, “‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro,’” Hemingway Review 30, no. 2 (2011): 21. 2

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the present perspective of the narrator. Obviously, they are not part of the main narrative, but, for many readers, they are emotionally charged and thoroughly and instantly engaging. I suggest that our involvement in counterfactual scenarios might be explained by the fact that we do not feel we have to choose between the multiple developments of the story. In fact, we are given the mental liberty to consider alternatives, propose unexplored hypotheses, simulate, and, finally, we are given the possibility of developing “our extraordinary ability to operate mentally on the unreal.”1 While Hemingway mainly uses non-linguistic forms of counterfactuals in the protagonist’s fragmented fantasies (here the focus is on implicit or unremarkable alternatives to the actual narrative world), the counterfactual scenarios created by the dialogs have both a cognitive and a linguistic dimension. The explicit counterfactuals in the dialogs are available in the form of conditionals (“If you wanted to shoot we could have gone shooting in Hungary and been comfortable,” 407), negatives (“You never would have gotten anything like this in Paris,” “I wish we’d never come,” 407), and modal verbs (“We could have stayed in Paris or gone anywhere,” 407). With their fictional mind, Henry and Helen image how their life trajectories could have been different in order to manipulate their current situation and mental disposition. In the following lengthy excerpt uttered by Helen, she does not only make small changes to their actual situation or simply imagine what she would have to change in their real fictional world for the counterfactual scenario to become “real.” Possibility is beside the point in their case. The alternatives she considers are perhaps the most direct way to evaluate their past, deliver their attitude to it, and, more importantly, to make causal inferences. Her intense mental work depends upon her analysis of counterfactuals: “‘I wish we’d never come,’ the woman said. She was looking at him holding the glass and biting her lip. ‘You never would have gotten anything like this in Paris. You always said you loved Paris. We could have stayed in Paris or gone anywhere. I’d have gone anywhere. I said I’d go anywhere you wanted. If you wanted to shoot we could have gone shooting in Hungary and been comfortable’” (407). As demonstrated by Roese and Olson in The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking, “counterfactuals are […] intimately related to causal inference. A counterfactual conditional always contains causal implications, though there may be great variation in the salience or applicability of those implications.”2 If we examine the extant literature of social psychology and its established discoveries, we may argue that all 1 2

Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 207. Roese and Olson, The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking, 15.

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counterfactual conditionals are causally determined. However, scholars show that not all conditionals have a causal base (“If today is Thursday, then tomorrow is Friday” does not mean that Thursday and Friday are causally related), and also not all causal assertions are mediated by counterfactual thinking.1 Given that the antecedent of a counterfactual is always false, we can derive causal conclusions from the contrast between a false alternative and a factual state of affairs. In line with these theoretical specifications, let us now turn to Hemingway’s text. When Helen states “I wish I’d never come,” she builds a counterfactual scenario in which they did not travel to Africa. But what triggers counterfactual generation in the mind of the female protagonist? The reason for this is that with the establishing of a false antecedent, she immediately sets up a relation to the factual reality of their African safari. The discrepancy between the two outcomes (in the first counterfactual outcome Henry is safe and unscathed, enjoying his time in Paris—“You never would have gotten anything like this in Paris”—, whereas, in the focal outcome, Henry is rotting from within, stranded in the African camp) provides her with information to draw causal conclusions. In this case, the antecedent is viewed as the main cause. Specifically, Helen implies that their trip to Africa is in stark contrast to the unrealized scenario in which they never made the trip to Africa. The contrastive outcome of their trip provides Helen with sufficient information to make causal inferences: the African safari is the cause for Henry’s gangrenous leg and their unfortunate situation. In order to deliver causal assertions, Helen must be able to undo the outcome. Mentally, she undoes the trip (“I wish we’d never come”), and she begins to assess their experience in Africa unfavorably. Roese and Olsen2 show that antecedents can be perceived as causal if they fulfill two basic conditions: they must be mutable and must undo the outcome. They also point out that “mutability refers to the relative ease with which elements of reality can be cognitively altered to construct a counterfactual statement.”3 That is, if an antecedent is perceived as having greater mutability, this will lead to a more significant number of counterfactual representations. For instance, gravity is relatively immutable.4 In contrast, other factors may

1

Roese and Olson, The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking, 12. Neal J. Roese and James M. Olson, “Counterfactual Thinking: A Critical Overview,” in What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking, eds. Neal J. Roese and James M. Olson (New York: Psychology Press, 2014 [1995]), 12. 3 Roese and Olson, “Counterfactual Thinking,” 7. 4 “Antecedents elements that are exceptional, salient, controllable, dynamic, or recent tend to be more mutable than their counterparts, that is, to be seized on more 2

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influence mutability. Exceptional, unexpected, or unusual events may be mutable1 in the sense that they can be converted back into their normal forms. Helen’s default expectations for their journey to Africa encourage her to build the counterfactual by converting their exceptionally unlucky experience back into a normal trip. On their counterfactual trip, everything happens according to their expectations: they are either safe in Paris or on a safe hunting trip in Hungary, or anywhere they wanted. Negative events are even more prone to mutability and can trigger counterfactual generation, as they are “more likely to capture the attention […] than positive events.”2 Henry’s rapidly developing infection, their worries, and their anxieties that the plane may not come to save them reveal why the protagonists assess the situation negatively. This permits the manipulation of imaginal alternatives and fictional possibilities of whatmight-have-been scenarios. Helen takes advantage of this feat of imagination and explores it so profitably that she would accept anything instead (“I’d have gone anywhere”). In the end, it is the imaginative escape she takes, as Riddle Harding claims: “Rather than developing one alternative, she communicates her feelings by emphasizing that a single scenario is not really the issue. For Helen, it seems, any situation other than the one they are in will do. Her unrealized alternatives are a way to find an imaginative escape from the hell of their current situation, and any number of counterfactuals may serve that purpose.”3 In the unrealized non-actual scenarios, Helen imagines how their vacation could have been better if only they had not taken the decision to travel to Africa. She comments bitterly on their failed expedition and sets up better alternatives. By allowing her imagination to focus on better alternatives (it could have been better in Paris or anywhere else), Helen constructs a series of “upward counterfactuals.”4 McMullen et al. claim that a full understanding of counterfactual thinking readily in the construction of a counterfactual version of an outcome.” Roese and Olson, “Counterfactual Thinking,” 34–35. 1 Roese and Olson, “Counterfactual Thinking,” 8. 2 James M. Olson, Neal J. Roese, and Ronald J. Deibert, “Psychological Biases in Counterfactual Thought Experiments,” in Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives, eds. Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 300. 3 Riddle Harding, “He Had Never Written a Word of That,” 30. 4 Matthew N. McMullen, Keith D. Markman, and Igor Gavanski, “Living in Neither the Best Nor Worst of All Possible Worlds: Antecedents and Consequences of Upward and Downward Counterfactual Thinking,” in What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking, eds. Neil J. Roese and James M. Olson (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), 134.

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requires a consideration of the costs and benefits of upward and downward counterfactuals. In other words, what motivates people to imagine better or worse alternatives to reality? Specifically, they argue that imagining different types of counterfactuals will have an effect on behavior and affect: “[P]eople generate upward counterfactuals in response to negative outcomes because of a desire for future improvement, but generate downward counterfactuals in response to positive outcomes because of a desire to enjoy the present.”1 Researchers who have studied different types of counterfactuals (see Boninger et al.,2 Markman et al.,3 Roese4) have set their sights on one crucial aspect regarding counterfactuality and affect, i.e. people feel better and more satisfied after making downward counterfactuals, whereas they feel worse after generating upward counterfactuals. The affective responses to imagined counterfactual alternatives generate three basic “counterfactual emotions”: relief, regret, and disappointment.5 Moreover, our affective response to counterfactuals, our behavior, and our plans for the future may be changed according to what these counterfactual scenarios signify for the past or for the future. That is, they have both “affective and behavioral consequences.”6 If we consider these findings and theoretical perspectives, we are hopeful of understanding the counterfactual scenarios introduced by Hemingway in his story and, more generally, of being able to understand the role of non-actualized elements in short literary narratives. In the broad context of fictional mental simulation, Helen generates upward counterfactuals in the negative context of their African safari: Henry’s aggravating infection and their isolation. But what is the exact impact of counterfactual thinking 1

McMullen, Markman, and Gavanski, “Living in Neither the Best Nor Worst of All Possible Worlds,” 142. 2 David S. Boninger, Faith Gleicher, and Alan Strathman, “Counterfactual Thinking: From What Might Have Been to What May Be,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67, no. 2 (1994): 297–307. 3 Keith D. Markman et al., “The Impact of Perceived Control on the Imagination of Better and Worse Possible Worlds,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 21, no. 6 (1995): 588–595. 4 Neal J. Roese, “The Functional Basis of Counterfactual Thinking,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 66, no. 5 (1994): 805–818. 5 McMullen, Markman, and Gavanski, “Living in Neither the Best Nor Worst of All Possible Worlds,” 157. 6 Faith Gleicher et al., “With an Eye Toward the Future: The Impact of Counterfactual Thinking on Affect, Attitudes, and Behavior,” in What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking, eds. Neil J. Roese and James M. Olson (New York: Psychology Press, 2014 [1995]), 284.

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on her behavior and affects? The fact that she conjures up better (potentially uplifting) alternatives will only make her better prepared for the future (she will possibly avoid similar scenarios in the future), but her feelings of dissatisfaction and frustration will increasingly intensify. However, if the outcome of the experience strikes heavily on her emotions and affects, when Helen begins to focus on her negative feelings, her “coping responses”1 are better stimulated. Accordingly, she starts planning courses of action for their rescue: ‘The plane will be here tomorrow.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘I’m sure. It’s bound to come. The boys have the wood all ready and the grass to make the smudge. I went down and looked at it again today. There’s plenty of room to land and we have the smudges ready at both ends.’ ‘What makes you think it will come tomorrow?’ ‘I’m sure it will. It’s overdue now. Then, in town, they will fix up your leg […].” (414)

Helen’s coping activity and her engagement to take immediate action have been stimulated by the mental scenarios set up by her counterfactual thoughts. In this way, she tries to reduce the negative effects of their experience. Interestingly, as Helen’s affective responses to the negative events gradually heighten, the female protagonist plans subsequent courses of action to give the perception of control. In other words, her behavior is mediated by affects. Pain, frustration, and regret stimulate and motivate her involvement in action. The dynamics of the narrative plot can therefore be explained by the initial generation of imaginative alterations in the dialog. Only by mentally undoing the painful African safari can Helen initiate action and move forward. The fact that she evokes upward counterfactuals, as opposed to downward counterfactuals, intensifies her feelings of regret and dissatisfaction. Specifically, the emotional amplification is related to a set of counterfactual emotions: disappointment, regret (generated by upward counterfactuals), and relief (generated by downward counterfactuals). Such emotions cannot be experienced per se but only by making counterfactual inferences about how events might have happened.2 The idealized world constructed by Helen’s counterfactual thoughts generates the experience of regret and disappointment. Her feelings are elicited by the unexpected outcome of their trip and also by the negativity of the events. Overall, the implications of counterfactual thinking are organized broadly into affective 1

Shelly E. Taylor and S. K. Schneider, “Coping and the Simulation of Events,” Social Cognition 7 (1989): 174–94. 2 Kahneman and Miller, “Norm Theory.”

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and behavioral responses. Helen feels and behaves in ways dictated by her counterfactual mind. The characters’ ease of constructing alternatives represents a systematic cognitive mode of thought employed by humans and simulated by fictional minds. The sense of disappointment is further increased by the dual endings of the story in that they recreate and intensify the reader’s experience with counterfactuality. Both endings take place in Africa, but they give us mutually incompatible resolutions to the story: the rescue ending (focalized by Henry) and the ending when Henry dies (focalized by Helen). However, there is a key difference in ontology between the forms of counterfactuality in Hemingway’s story: if in the vignettes and dialogs the counterfactual involves a binary opposition between factual narrative events and counterfactual storylines, the two endings offer two possible future versions. I argue that the point of interpreting the future alternatives is not to establish an actual dominant version or assess which version is less “actual” than the other. Do we witness the death of the protagonist or his rescue? To give a clear answer to this narrative dilemma would probably mean to go back to the reassuring effect of realist fiction in which a set of narrative developments are confirmed to be actual at the end of the story. With Hemingway’s story, readers cannot find the ontological clarity of realist texts, and therefore they begin to take delight in the bewilderingly fascinating game of playing with alternate versions of narrative realities, of constructing pluralistic worlds, and of permanently experimenting with unrealized possibilities. Accordingly, the text’s ontological ambiguities and complexities map out an unstable plot development in which readers can play with virtual narrative products that do not occur in the actual text universe. By allowing one world to become possible or actual, readers do not follow a chronological sequence but immerse themselves in the sum of dynamic possibilities and take a “multiple-world approach to plot.”1 If we accept Danneberg’s new concept of plot, we also embrace a new approach to narrative: the story, the only ontological version of the text, loses territory, creating space for other different ontological levels. In this view, the chronological story gains multifaceted complexity and becomes comprehensive in that it now incorporates events that actually occurred in the storyworld and events that are narrated but prove to be counterfactual constructs. In short, these contradistinctive plot developments set up “the actual narrative world,” as acknowledged by Dannenberg: “This concept clearly has affinities with the traditional structuralist ‘story’ but no longer has that concept’s dominant position and automatic emphasis on a single, 1

Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality, 63.

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unilinear chronology that is dechronologized by the discourse, its conceptual Other. In the multiple-world approach to plot, the actual narrative world’s conceptual Other is not discourse (in the sense of the rearrangement of story chronology) but the larger, ontologically multifarious realm constituted by the alternate possible worlds generated by the text.”1 Viewed in this fashion, the experience of reading is in itself an ontologically unstable act through which readers constantly negotiate meaning and gradually assess and reassess events and relationships from a variety of possibilities that say something about the narrative world. Finally, I return to the fictional space. If characters cross different physical world levels, they are also able to engage in exploring the imaginal worlds of alternate constructs and future possibilities. At all times, they are drawn into a narrative space of alternate versions, a space of narrative multiplication, which creates new patterns of diversification. Readers must engage in experiencing such fictional spaces equipped with cognitive mechanisms that allow them to accept altered outcomes and dramatically reconsidered life trajectories. These observations raise the question of tellability of narrative: the potential narrative appeal does not necessarily lie in the directness of the route followed but in the reconfigurations of the landscape. In Marie-Laure Ryan’s parlance: “the principle of tellability […] derives from the claim that the appeal of the trip depends not so much on the immediate surroundings of the road actually followed as on the glimpses it permits of the back country, and of the alternative roads it invites the reader to travel in imagination.”2 On the whole, Henry’s journey into his virtual past as a fulfilled writer and Helen’s considerations of an alternate trip, together with the two projections of potential futures, are not part of the story at all but deviations that evoke the capacity of the narrative to stimulate our ability to generate versions of reality. In this way, counterfactual generation becomes a narrative device essential for plot development and for stimulating our human propensity to juggle virtual constructs.

4.2 Time as a forking path. Metaphorical spatializations of time As the previous chapter attests, our bodily experiences of space can transfer into abstract meanings and non-physical phenomena. When reading Hemingway’s fragmented stories, readers elaborate on the image-schematic 1 2

Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality, 63. Ryan, Possible Words, 174.

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structures of imagination to transform them into abstract patterns of thought. Our bodily experience of space also provides us with sufficient information to understand non-physical concepts imaginatively and help us reason creatively. If our mind functions primarily in terms of metaphor,1 the cognitive connections we generally make are disclosed in our patterns of reading. The case study of Snows of Kilimanjaro shows that a literary text can be informed globally by an overall conceptual connection: the controlling concept of journey informs the story at several key points. First, the conceptual schema for journey is mapped onto the target conceptual schema for life. This metaphorical transfer comes almost automatically, as our conventional metaphorical understanding of life as journey contains prefabricated structures of imagination. Specifically, the compounding elements of the source schema (journey) are projected onto components of the target schema (life): the traveler is the person leading a life, the route traveled is mapped onto the ways and means for reaching our aims, our purposes are destinations, difficulties we face in life are impediments on the physical route of the journey, etc. As shown previously, the understanding of Snows inherits these conventional metaphorical projections—a number of commonplace unoriginal transformations that conceptually map the source onto the target. Claiming that Hemingway’s story is fundamentally constituted through the conceptual metaphor of LIFE IS A JOURNEY may sound straightforward and simple. But the use of the commonplace concept of journey and its metaphorical transformations is anything but simple. This is the ground of the story. The point is that we tend to ignore that ground and take it for granted. Turner claims that the approach should be to proceed from it, “for it is the most important, most complex, and by far the least well understood thing […]. We must start with this ground, admit our great ignorance of what is involved in it, and seek to explain it.”2 However, with this exploration of unoriginal cognitive capacities, individuals grasp more abstract thoughts, as in the example of the concept of journey, which becomes cognitively inseparable from the issue of multiplication and diversification. It translates into the branching of narrative space and, nonphysically, into imaginative counterfactuals. In this section, I continue to explore a set of short stories that dwell on the conceptual domain of JOURNEYING. An important, perhaps primary, engine of this concept is that it must have a beginning, proceed in a linear 1

My approach to metaphor is grounded in the idea argued by Johnson that views “metaphor as a pervasive principle of human understanding that underlines our vast network of interrelated literal meanings.” Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 65. 2 Turner, Reading Minds, 242.

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way, and progress toward the destination. Crucially, then, a JOURNEY DEFINES A PATH.1 The schema of path has been explored by Mark Johnson in his ground-breaking study The Body in Mind and defined as a recurring image-schematic pattern, deeply rooted in our experience with the physical world. He exemplifies: “There is the path from your bed to the bathroom, from the stove to the kitchen table, from your house to the grocery store, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and from the Earth to the Moon. Some of these paths involve an actual physical surface that you traverse, such as the path from your house to the store. Others involve a projected path, such as the path of a bullet shot into the air. And certain paths exist, at present, only in your imagination, such as the path from Earth to the nearest star outside our solar system.”2 The scholar goes on to explain that each of these paths has the same components: the source, the end-point, and the contiguous locations linking the source to the target. Paths have directionality and a temporal dimension (the timeline). Notably, the linear spatialization of time becomes important for how we understand temporality. Within this theoretical framework, my intentions in this chapter are centered upon one essential point: Hemingway’s short stories analyzed here develop the concept of journey that generally focuses on the linearity of narrative time, but more importantly, they move beyond the limitations of the discourse viewed from a linear timeline. The form of narration is also viewed against a set of textual possibilities and counterfactuals, i.e. events that did not happen, actions that were only contemplated as alternatives, or expectations that were not fulfilled. The guided tour here analyzes the temporal orchestration of such possible worlds. To give a better sense of the scope of my analysis, I will show that Hemingway’s modernist fiction uses a system of alternate worlds in the same fashion as semi-realist fiction (fantasy or science fiction) or metafictional texts. I argue along with Dannenberg3 that alternate possible worlds are used across distinct fictional genres, but literary genres use them “with different forms of ontological hierarchy.” As seen in Snows of Kilimanjaro, the text suggests more than one version of the past and the future, which means that we become interested not only in the actual narrative time but also in the intricate networks of virtual time. At this point, the linear directedness of time and the narrative backward-forward movement switches to a more fluid form while characters or narrators move freely between parallel worlds. The linear path now becomes a forking path that opens the way to another type of journey—a journey into the virtual past and the future of the narrative. 1

Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 90. Johnson, Body in the Mind, 114. 3 Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality, 46. 2

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To prove this latter part of my argument, I will use Hemingway’s short fiction as highly illustrative instances of retrospective narration. Very briefly, Margolin defines narrative retrospection as follows: “When a narrated course of events is textually presented as anterior, as having been completed prior to the moment of viewing, we are obviously dealing with narrative retrospection, with a reconstruction of what has gone on earlier, with a configuring of earlier states and events into a totality with global coherence and significance. All relevant facts are already there, so to speak, and so are their interrelations. The time line of the actions is bounded as regards both initial and terminal phases, and certain and complete knowledge about them can be available to the narrator.”1 While events and situations have already been accomplished in Hemingway’s narration and facts of relative certainty dominate the storyworld, I suggest that these stories move beyond the limitations of one single individual narrative world and involve the interweaving of possible worlds (for further analysis of the theory of possible worlds see sub-chapter 4.3). Since readers have to deal with the plurality of narrative worlds, they need to have the special ability to coordinate the complex system of potential alternatives and possibilities. It is important to note that this is an attempt to reassess the limits of classical narratology and develop new models of looking at temporal orchestration in narrative. Such a widening of the scope is caused by a need for a broader concept of narrative that will enrich the vocabularies of narratology as regards temporality. Despite the laudable results made by structuralist narratology on narrative temporality,2 the cognitive narratological paradigm asserts the need to reinterpret them in a more comprehensive perspective. Moreover, cognitive scientists call into question the tools used for describing temporality and challenge a broader reconfiguration of temporality in narrative. Margolin voices this concern: “There is consequently a need for a much broader, integrated model of narrative where the standard classical case will form just one variety among many, and not necessarily the basic or privileged one. Such a revised unified model will require an anchoring in a broader or more fundamental framework for its defining parameters, and may lead to a revised or even new view on the very nature of narrative as a semiotic product.”3

1

Margolin, “Of What is Past,” 147. Classical narratology demonstrates that the effects of the narrative world result from the relations between the time of the story and the discourse time, while the primary focus is on the distinctions between story and discourse, fabula or sjužet, the narrated and the narrative. 3 Margolin, “Of What is Past,” 142. 2

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Specifically, when Margolin1 refers to the paradigm case of narrative in classical narratology, he revises the narrative model PAST + FACTIVE + COMPLETIVE and bases his revision on the Tense-Aspect-Modality (TAM) approach. The critic further argues that traditional narration, consisting of the previously mentioned triplet (mainly featuring known or established facts), should be substituted for a newer, more integrated model that focuses on non-factual events in the story, namely the set of events that did not happen, imagined counterfactuals, unresolved possibilities, or unconfirmed hypotheses or conditionals. Margolin’s valuable contribution reconceptualizes the implications of dynamic narrative situations and their mental representations in our patterns of reading. The new shift to “the merely potential or possible” narrative worlds heightens the reader’s powers for “mental simulation of possible situations.”2 A key strength of this model is that it consistently addresses the question of temporality by reviewing concepts from the possible worlds theory. Margolin’s insightful analysis shows that the classical model of narrative discourse—retrospective narration—, focusing on completed events, known actions, or established states, has limited applicability to the diversity of literary possibilities. He then examines how the model may be complemented by the perspective offered of negative facts in the story: the entire inventory of what did not happen, like unconfirmed possibilities, unrealized hypotheses, incomplete events, or unresolved courses of action. It is precisely in these hypothetical or prospective situations that we need to refine the narrative theory. Therefore, recent narratology tries to offer an alternative model accommodating narrative variety and, for that matter, addressing the whole range of deviations, modifications, or narrative alternatives.3 This discussion points to an important feature of the temporal status of narrative events in relation to the aspect and modality of the narrative discourse (see Margolin’s TAM model4). Narratologists are particularly interested in the viewing or narrative perspective, i.e. narratorial 1

Margolin, “Of What is Past,” 142. Margolin, “Of What is Past,” 164. 3 In Story Logic, David Herman develops the concepts of “fuzzy temporality” and “polyphonic narration” to define narrated events that are impossible to locate in fixed temporal positions. With an intentionally “fuzzy” temporal sequencing, the story is constructed in a “polyphonic” style of narration. Herman holds that “polyphonic narration can be described as a specialized cognitive instrument. It is a narrative device that cues interpreters to rethink the scope and limits of narrative itself—specifically, to rethink its linearizing capacity viewed as both a discourse genre and a pattern of thought.” Herman, Story Logic, 220. 4 Margolin, “Of What is Past.” 2

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voices retelling events may have a different epistemic attitude, like certainty, disbelief, hope, negation, or wish (modality). The temporal status of events is judged in relation to the time (the NOW) of viewing (earlier/contemporary/later) while actions and events are seen as completed, incomplete, or in progress. Whereas traditional narratological lines of research center on retronarration, i.e. on factive elements or aspects completed before the time of narrating or viewing, new narratological studies propose that there is scope for a more comprehensive approach to retrospective narration in that it should also account for the whole set of potentialities or probabilities, or of counterfactual information.1 In sum, narrative fiction’s capacity to incorporate unrealized scenarios and courses of action leading to different resolutions draws inspiration from our ability to generate different world versions: [L]iterary narrative inevitably and essentially models the full complexity of human experience of things in time. […] [O]ne could argue that literary narrative models the basic cognitive factors involved in the mental representation or mapping of temporal situations, that is, temporal perspective and mental attitude […], and the different possible configurations of these factors. On this cognitivist view, literary narrative – and especially the narrating voice’s discourse – offers us models of the human mind at work as it constructs different internal representations (cognitive maps) of dynamic situations.2

I would now like to connect our conceptual make-up to the concept of literary criticism as applied to Hemingway’s short fiction. In this view, narrative is regarded as “the ideologeme par excellence […] [that] helps constitute a culture’s or a subculture’s sense of reality. Correlatively, the study of narrative form should not be viewed as merely an examination of verbal design. It is also an inquiry into how models of storytelling—in particular, strategies for ordering—help shape people’s intuitions about what is and what is not the case.”3 As I have shown previously, cognitive narrative models display mechanisms and operations that explain the different ways in which our human mind views temporality. The last point is especially important since it can explain why we all share an interest in the powers of narrative. Ultimately, narrative can reveal the mind in all its 1

All these negative facts appear in Gerald Prince’s concept of the “disnarrated,” i.e. all textual elements that consider what did not happen but could have. Prince, “The Disnarrated.” 2 Margolin, “Of What is Past,” 165. 3 Herman, Story Logic, 235.

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complexity as it perceives events, remembers, and represents them in time. The various case studies presented in this chapter will illustrate this point. I will now return to the point of retrospective narration as developed in Hemingway’s short stories—Fathers and Sons, A Canary for One, Hills Like White Elephants, and The End of Something. Collectively, these throw new light on the concept of retrospection in narrative in conjunction with the appreciation of the complexity of narrative time. Readers are presented with completed journeys undertaken prior to the present of the narration, with narrators who reconstruct courses of events that are already accomplished. Significant for the topic of this chapter is that the timeline of these journeys includes initial and end stages, which give a sense of totality and stable knowledge of what has already happened to the characters and to their narrative worlds. Through the eye of the narrator, readers see characters boarding a train, traveling long distances by car, or breaking their journeys for a short while. The present of the viewing is through the window of a fast-moving car or that of a train compartment, giving readers complicated versions of the spatial story of a journey. As suggested at the beginning of this chapter, also important for the representation of spatial stories and of our bodily sense of spatiality are our skeletal imageschemas—in particular, those representing the spatiality of the journey when we use our image schemas of a path leading from a source to a target, directionality, forward movement, or orientation (front-back, up-down, and center-periphery), etc. In addition, and even more importantly in this chapter, we need to consider the concepts, other than images, structured by imageschematic knowledge: time, events in time, and causal relations. Generally, we imagine time as having a skeletal structure: linear or circular; subsequently, events in time have certain shapes, such as continuity, extension, completeness, open-endedness, circularity, part-whole relations, etc.1 This chapter explores the link between the path schema and our concept of time in the short stories mentioned above. I set out to prove that narrative time is reproduced in the physical spatiality of the narrative worlds through the use of a special type of path schema—the forking path schema. In spatial terms, coming upon a fork corresponds to the opening of new physical ways, but “metaphorically […] corresponds to coming upon alternatives,” as shown by Turner.2 By exploring the forking path schema, rather than the directed path, Hemingway’s texts propose a special cognitive pattern for orientation in the fictional space that directly affects the metaphorical 1 2

Turner, Reading Minds, 58. Turner, Reading Minds, 273.

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representation of the experience of fictional time. What is at stake in Hemingway’s stories is not a complete lack of definite time sequence, but a narration that exploits the tendency to de-linearize, which opens the door to plurality and temporal multiplicity. Or, to rephrase this last point, the events recounted are there and are given a clear sequence in time, but the narration creates room for events that remain intentionally inexact or ambiguously ordered in time. Technically speaking, in Hemingway’s fictional worlds, time does not always unfold linearly. The strategies for de-linearizing the action are the strategies used by readers to effectively recreate the narrative worlds and comprehend them exhaustively. In A Canary for One, a couple take a night train trip to Paris and share their compartment with an old American lady who is traveling to see her daughter and who fears the train will be derailed. In this short story, the prospect of failure looms over the marriage of two unnamed partners, but this version of events turns out to be a mental construct to be further explored as the last line of the story announces that the couple will “set up separate residences” (256). Physically, the story plot meets a point of bifurcation, which means that the timeline purposely delinearizes itself into a forking path of temporal possibilities and subsequent alternate worlds. The event of separation has not yet happened, but in some sense has already occurred in the reader’s mind, where this possible scenario is created and supported through and across narrative. In Fathers and Sons, Nick Adams drives a long way on the uncongested country road and then onto the modern highway, but in parallel he takes a mental journey through the bumpy, swampy road of his childhood and through the woods of his boyhood. The journey in Fathers and Sons is not an entirely objective experience as it is mediated through Nick’s subjective perspective on his past, so the narratorial voice describes a constant interplay between the real and the remembered. This play between what Nick perceives during his long car journey and what he remembers principally concerns a particular mode of dealing with temporality in narrative. Once the time of the main story has stopped or been temporarily suspended, a new virtual timeline opens the door to a parallel mental story. Arguably, the newly created alternate storyworld is constructed by the protagonist (and reconstructed by the narrator) on a flexible temporal scaffolding. By embedding this parallel chain of events in the main storyline, the narrator recounts what went on in the protagonist’s past and invites readers to locate the events and situations on the chronological timeline of the whole story. Many of the events in the embedded story are difficult to determine temporarily, and this touch of elusiveness marks time in Fathers and Sons. These purposely indeterminate retrospective stories

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challenge our capacity to deal with linearity and directionality when we read narratives and search for linear progression. In Fathers and Sons, we engage in an indeterminate time order and in multiple stories unfolding at different times in the narrative, and this is viewed as a strategy to stimulate our mental powers of dealing with a “nonsingular now” and to “ambiguate and pluralize the meaning of here.”1 In Hills Like White Elephants, a mature couple sit and drink while they wait to make a train connection in a small unnamed Spanish town. The female protagonist (derogatorily called “the girl” by the narrator) mentally reviews her options in dealing with a critical stage in her life. By refusing to take immediate action or delaying decisions, she reads the present in terms of an imagined future that has very few realistic coordinates. Hence, the temporal coordinate of her future projections remains distinctively dim and intrinsically uninteresting. It is as if she were telling her story beyond the limitations set by time and space. From this possible world, the time arrow can be reversed in any direction. Lastly, The End of Something sees two adolescent characters take a short journey along the shore of a swampy lake. The dialog and the narrator’s comments systematically recount events that have not happened or which will never occur. The network of negatives affects the temporality of the story in a radical way. To anticipate, humans have an inability to mentally chronologize events that have not yet happened or that do not meet the conditions to happen in the future. Still, as will be proven below, humans set up negative scenarios because these spaces are the material anchors for counterfactual spaces. While in The End the set of negatives places the story in the realm of absolute indeterminacy, the timeline slowly advances into the fluid temporality of counterfactuality. These four examples of retrospective narrative show how temporality is de-linearized and forced to accommodate to a forking pattern, which creates room for narrative alternatives and fictional possibilities. Admittedly, when reading retrospective fiction, our perception is grounded in a linear unfolding of time. However, the search for a definitive order and clear sequence in Hemingway’s short stories is abandoned in favor of another strategy: the attempt to de-linearize and challenge our most ingrained patterns for reading retrospective fiction. Early 20th century modernist fiction, possible worlds, and counterfactual spaces apparently have nothing to share. Quite the contrary, this study suggests that Hemingway’s narrative can be the right tool to develop patterns of thought emerging from the mix of these seemingly irreconcilable trends.

1

Herman, Story Logic, 225.

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4.2.1 Fathers and Sons Fathers and Sons (1933, published in Winner Take Nothing) portrays the now middle-aged Nick Adams driving his son to his home to spend time with him and, most probably, to visit his stepmother, although this is not directly mentioned by the narrator. The son is now living in France while his father lives in the United States, but in a different part of the country to where he used to live as a child and where his own father is now buried. Clearly, what the reader gets is a day’s journey, with Nick driving his automobile through open country, in mid-fall, gradually approaching the end of their journey. During most of the trip, Nick’s son is asleep, which gives Nick time to reflect on his present and past. It is only toward the end of their journey that we hear an exchange between father and son, a brief dialog across two generations. Throughout the story, the description of the actual journey in the automobile is paralleled by another lengthier description of the mental journey that is taking Nick back to his days as a child. As I suggested earlier, in recounting earlier events, the narrative discourse sets up the interplay between the present of viewing and the remembered, and therefore the present of narration imports several embedded stories that constitute Nick’s past, making it tellable. In light of the protagonist’s new knowledge about his past, he can now understand and re-evaluate the relationship with his father. Perhaps more important is the way Nick runs time backward. He chooses to ignore the infinitely rich sensations evoked by the open countryside and begins “hunting the country in his mind as he went by” (380). As if racing mentally against time, Nick wants to circulate through the time loop between his early boyhood and later moments to relive events that continue to affect him. In a way, his duty of remembering and his imagination are part of a necessary process that can enable him to write about his past memories one day. Obviously, in this mental race, ordering events in time becomes almost impossible: indefinitely situated memories embedded in parallel virtual stories redefine temporality in Fathers and Sons. For example, time references like “when Nick was a boy” or “remembering the earliest times before things had gone badly” bring temporal indeterminacy into play. Nevertheless, time becomes indeterminate not only through imprecise textual phrases but also through a complex network of stories with apparently few connections. Nick remembers his father’s appearance and nature, his passions, and his practical lessons on hunting and fishing, but also his failure to give him sexual knowledge, his first sexual experience in the Indian camp, etc. In focusing on Nick’s past, the narrator calls into question the order of earlier and later events, and thus highlights the

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possibility of narrating in retrospect and indeterminately situating events in time. At this point, I will concentrate further on the matter of temporal indeterminacy in the broader context of our general conceptual apparatus. Narratologists who have begun to draw explicitly on ideas from the umbrella discipline of cognitive science argue that our general conceptual system is largely organized in terms of metaphorical connections or mappings between concrete and abstract domains. Key structured concepts (e.g. PHYSICAL ORIENTATIONS, OBJECTS, SUBSTANCES, SEEING, JOURNEYS, WAR, MADNESS, FOOD, BUILDING1), frequently occurring in metaphorical definitions, are used for defining abstract concepts (e.g. LOVE, TIME, IDEAS, UNDERSTANDING, ARGUMENTS, LABOUR, HAPPINESS, HEALTH, CONTROL, STATUS, MOBILITY), as Lakoff and Turner prove in their research: “[T]hey provide the right kind of structure to allow us to get a handle on those natural kinds of experience that are less concrete or less clearly delineated in their own terms.”2 This last point is especially important in order to interpret the thought pattern that connects the concrete domain of JOURNEYING and PHYSICAL ORIENTATION to the more abstract domain of TIME. Specifically, our interpretation of Fathers and Sons is based on the understanding of motion along a directed path. The straightforwardness of the path tells us that one thing is leading to another. The PATH image provides information on how characters interact with the narrative space, how they perceive and observe paths and surfaces, and how they represent abstract schematic image schemas arising directly from their interaction with the physical narrative world.3 Initially, in Fathers and Sons, most of the scenes in the story are structured in terms of the elementary PATH schema of movement, of forward motion toward the destination that soon approaches. The source from where the characters depart is “the center of the main street of this town” (my emphasis), with brick-paved streets, then the path goes onto the highway, through the open country, and through the cornfields, with Nick driving toward the immediate target or the town where he now lives, a town his father would not have known: “The towns he lived in were not towns his father knew. After he was fifteen he had shared nothing with him” (386). In this spatial story of the journey, there is a sequence of spatial situations that need to be considered: first, the directed path from source to target—in 1

Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 118. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 118. 3 Image schemas derive from the “embodied cognition” thesis claiming that the nature of our embodiment determines the nature of our concepts. 2

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the story, the journey follows a clear route, linking the unnamed town (“this town”) that the two characters depart and the town Nick wants to reach before night falls. However, the destination is not clearly specified in the text. Secondly, reaching the goal or the target is equally significant—Nick would like to spend time with his son in order to strengthen the father-son relationship and reduce the distance between them by first annihilating the distance in space. But this information needs to be rigorously integrated into our conceptual mechanism by projecting all this “image-schematic structure from spatial concepts onto abstract concepts.”1 Following on from the comments above, the action story of someone traveling is projected onto the non-spatial event of life. We routinely project a spatial physical story of moving along a path onto a story that is not spatial or physical—rather, it is a mental event. According to Mark Turner,2 meaning involves complex and dynamic cognitive operations of projecting one story parabolically or metaphorically onto another—“meaning is parabolic and literary.” Metaphorically, in Hemingway’s story, the physical locations are mental states. Nick Adams is driving through the unknown town, observing “the heavy trees” that have no effect on him and are not part of his heart, as he is a mere stranger passing through the town: that region “was not his country,” and so the trees are “only too heavy.” Strange, foreign locations produce feelings of aloofness, of not belonging. In fact, Nick strives to move forward to a different location, to a place that he knows well, which would automatically mean a transformation in his mental state, according to the cognitive operation claiming that a CHANGE OF STATE IS A CHANGE OF LOCATION. Indeed, Nick’s goal of reaching his destination and, at the same time, of being at peace with himself urges him to make further progress toward his goal, which involves physical movement toward his destination, and so he continues to drive “easily” through the country. Changes of location produce elation in his spirit, as we are told that “all of this country was good to drive through and to see” (380). In the remembered journey, Nick is moving toward a mental state and has it, as we do when we journey to a point near a physical object in order to grasp it. Years before, the protagonist walks from his family cottage (source) to the hemlock woods behind the Indian camp (target) on the path leading to the target, through the forest, and across the swamp. This journey takes the mental shape of an action story of reaching or arriving at a mature state in which he is sexually initiated by an Indian girl. Back then, he was traveling from home to the Indian camp in order to leave his family’s 1

Turner argues that abstract reasoning becomes possible due to this transfer. Turner, The Literary Mind, 18. 2 Turner, The Literary Mind, 106.

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restricted sexual values behind and experience those of the adult Nick. In this case, obtaining the desired state is similar to grasping a desired object (the action story of grasping an object is a body-action of manipulation of physical objects). Interestingly enough, in this case, our understanding of the conceptual pattern Action Is Grasping depends on mentally processing two stages: moving toward the object and grasping it. The failure of Nick’s father, Dr. Adams, to complete the education of his son by discussing sexual matters openly weakened the bonds between father and son, leaving the young Nick with the responsibility of self-initiation. For him, the discovery of the joy of human sexuality in the Indian camp meant that he was in possession of the desired object, his full adulthood. Enjoying his new-found sexual maturity shows that he finally obtained the state he had been longing for (Enjoying a State Is Grasping an Object). We can examine the process of Nick’s initiation according to the metaphorical projection of control over physical objects we possess onto control over mental conditions. Moreover, what he obtained as a young man has been treasured and appreciated as part of his journey of self-discovery; his success may also challenge him to bond with his son more than his father did with him. There is little evidence that, as a father, Nick will be able to maintain the values of “the object he grasped” as a young man, and that gave him the power to move away from restricted tradition and face the challenges of his adult life. The question is whether the adult Nick will ever be able to give his son the model of responsible adulthood. Back to their car trip, the son’s first words as he awakens startle Nick: “What was it like, Papa, when you were a little boy and used to hunt with the Indians?” (387). If this could be Nick’s opportunity to have a more open discussion with his son on sexual matters, exactly what his father had failed to do with him, Nick soon realizes that being a father is not easy. His sudden realization can be projected onto the path of their journey. As the discourse across generations becomes more and more difficult, their progress toward the destination appears to slow down. Unresolved impediments in the communication between father and son are soon transferred to impediments to movement toward the target, as IMPEDIMENTS TO ACTION ARE IMPEDIMENTS TO MOTION. Their rather disturbing exchanges reveal two different perspectives on family life, tradition, and continuity: when the son suggests that they should all be buried in one place and feels frustrated for never having prayed at the tomb of his grandfather, thus arguing for continuity across generations, Nick is more reserved, preferring only to explore his family heritage in memory, and this makes his promise to visit their family origins less credible in the end.

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4.2.2 A Canary for One In A Canary for One (1927, published in Men Without Women), readers are taken on a train journey and are presented with the story of a married couple traveling and sharing their compartment with an old American lady. During the journey, the conversation is not between the unnamed couple, as may be expected, but between the wife and the chatty American lady. As in the case of Fathers and Sons, the reader’s capacity to interpret this short story first involves grasping the increasingly complicated basic spatial-action story. The opening description of the surroundings gives the reader a detailed understanding of the source (the departure area)—“dusty trees and an oiled road and flat fields of grapes, with grey-stone hills behind them” or “the sea was only occasionally and far below against rocks” (252). In contrast with the car journey in Fathers and Sons, where Nick Adams drives “easily” through the open country, the train “passed very quickly” through the region before it first stops in Marseilles, and then Avignon. The fast motion of the train and the few stops before reaching the destination can be projected onto the multitude of states experienced by the characters, as physical locations change rapidly (CHANGE OF STATE IS CHANGE OF LOCATION). Changes in the story are thus understood by projecting onto them the image schema of moving along a path, leading from the source to the target destination. As it gets darker, and just before reaching another stop in Avignon, the characters see a farmhouse burning in a field and, for a brief moment, witness the devastation wreaked on the building and the belongings scattered on the field. To understand the nature of this image, readers should perform cognitive operations of projecting the devastated state of the physical location onto the disturbing condition of the couple’s relationship—the state of their marriage is a spatial location the actors can be in. In fact, there is no evidence in the story that something is dramatically wrong other than their lack of communication during the journey and the passive role of the husband who just sits aloof, looks through the train window, and gives only brief replies. The couple’s imminent separation in the very last sentence—“we were returning to Paris to set up separate residences” (256)—is just part of the iceberg implied. It is always the target story (the story we need to understand) that is never mentioned, or rather not mentioned overtly, but due to our capacity of recognizing story and projecting the overt source story onto the hidden target story, we can interpret the story and construct meaning. More specifically, in A Canary for One, readers should abstract meaning from several scenes in the storyworld in which the American lady repeatedly and overtly expresses her fear that the train might go off the tracks, a thing that will give her insomnia all through the night train journey:

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“in the night the American lady lay without sleeping because the train was a rapide and went very fast and she was afraid of the speed in the night” or “all night the train went very fast and the American lady lay awake and waited for a wreck” (253). At some point, the train actually passes three cars that had been wrecked, split open and their roofs collapsed, which again makes the American lady express her fear and promise to herself that she will never again take a fast train. These scenes submit to projection—the physical wreck they witness or the imagined wreck that recurrently appears in the dialog can be interpreted by projecting them to a larger, more abstract story, one that can be applied to how love is valued in the story. The projection of the physical story of the wreck onto the love affair in the story sheds new light on its meaning: the couple’s relationship is viewed as a vehicle being “off the tracks,” specifically a vehicle that has lost control. On a metaphorical level, their marriage is not under active control and is not going anywhere, just as a wreck would be unable to move any further. In this spatial story of the journey, the LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor focuses on the passive aspect of love, the emotions are not under the lovers’ control. Not surprisingly, the abstract concept of love can be expressed by a variety of conceptual metaphors, each of them highlighting one special emotional aspect of love. By opposition, love can be conceived of as COLLABORATIVE WORK that foregrounds the active aspect of love.1 In parallel, the American lady tells the unfortunate story of her daughter who fell in love with a foreigner, but the mother did not consent to their marriage: “They were simply madly in love” and “I took her away, of course” (254). Without any good reason, just by claiming that Americans only make good husbands, the American lady decided to interfere in her daughter’s love affair and immediately put an end to it. By doing this, she acts as an impediment to an intense love affair that is also the impediment to motion: in LOVE IS A JOURNEY, the progress toward the desired goal is stopped by impediments that come along the path leading to the destination. Love as a dysfunctional vehicle cannot go any further. It indicates that the end of the journey is also the end of love relationships. For the protagonists, the physical gate at the end of the platform is the final physical location in which they can be together, and behind that gate, two separate residences await them. In the end, there is a key bifurcation in the story: the branching of the narrative paths corresponds to the divergent directions of the two fictional destinies. Readers begin to speculate on how the lives of the two characters might be different from now on, and this 1

Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 141.

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special human cognitive capacity becomes essential to evaluate the effects of what has not yet happened in the larger accomplished fictional world. It is true that events that happened in chronological order constitute the engine of retrospective narrative (“what happened next?”), but, with Hemingway, we have to interpret the set of potentialities (events that might happen) and rigorously ascribe them the force to reconfigure actual events and situations in the storyworld.

4.2.3 Hills like White Elephants If in A Canary for One “divorce” or “marital discord” are the unstated words that are part of the iceberg implied, in Hills Like White Elephants (1927, published in Men Without Women), “abortion” is the word never mentioned openly though understood to be the cause of a failed relationship. Instead, the American man replaces abortion with “an awfully simple operation” or describes the operation as “they just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural” (200). Besides relying on the technique of the understated, Hemingway chooses not to name his characters: we only know the American couple as “the American” or “the man” and “the girl” or Jig, the girl’s nickname. They are clearly a modern, uncommitted couple, not subject to any socially imposed rules, a rootless couple, wandering far from home. The American man and Jig have now stopped to catch another train connection in a small railway station in Spain. However, no details of their journey are clearly specified: we do not know the start of their journey, nor do we know where they are going from there. Neither the source story nor the target story are detailed, and this may reinforce the effect of the transitory state of the couple, now apparently enjoying their conversation and experimenting with new drinks in a small café at the railway station. In this temporary location, the setting grows extremely important for the girl, whose fanciful description of the scenery reveals her restlessness, most probably stirred by her changed physical condition. To her, the hills in the distance look like white elephants: “I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn’t that bright?” (200). Perhaps her comparison hints to white elephants as worthless objects—similar to the worthless bull in the phrase “a bull in a china shop,” the white elephant is a physical object impossible to manipulate literally. In such stories of bodily motion where physical manipulation cannot be performed, actors experience intense states of frustration and dissatisfaction. The cause can be either in the inner quality of the object to be manipulated or in the ability of the actor to manipulate the object. Either way, actors fail to grasp the object while metaphorically

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they fail to obtain the desired state (FAILURE TO GRASP AN OBJECT IS FAILURE TO OBTAIN A STATE). If we dwell further on the conceptual pattern of ACTORS ARE MOVERS or MANIPULATORS, the manipulation of physical objects involves our ability to perform self-powered movements, such as going in the direction of the object, moving parts of our body, grasping the object, and finally manipulating the object. The failure to perform any of these stages will reduce our self-powered ability of movement. In her case, the American girl fails to be a self-powered manipulator, as she fails to grasp the object. In a parabolic transfer, she will not be able to “grasp” her condition or, put differently, she fails to take control over her mental state. Thus, the travel story that is literally spatial for the body of the traveler becomes metaphorical for her mind. It is, in fact, the story of the American girl’s mental trajectory. In her complicated mental journey, it is impossible to decide between incompatible courses of events, possibilities that are not yet realized, and situations that have not occurred. However, in the short exchanges between Jig and her partner, nothing significant happens at the narrative level, and this contradicts the logic of the retrospective story (“what happened next?”). Also, as shown by Uri Margolin, retronarratives exist “where the zone of indeterminacy is reduced to zero.”1 He further explains that it is precisely this indeterminacy, indecision, or lack of certainty that needs to be reinterpreted from an ontological perspective, not just as an epistemic contribution to the narrative mode. The impossibility to decide whether something happened in the story or to resolve doubts is not only caused by intentional gaps in the narrative, but it is motivated by our cognitive capacity to take hypotheses seriously and respond to our ontological desire for multiplicity and indeterminacy. In Hills, the reader enters the zone of possibilities and indeterminacies, which immediately turns the factive story into a chain of hypotheses and unconfirmed developments about the couple’s unstable love relationship. Relative to this framework of indeterminacy, the zone of indecision is entertained by the role of the female character. Obviously, she is not an active ACTOR-MANIPULATOR and cannot determine changes. From here, we can infer that events, rather than actors, can produce changes, according to the conceptual pattern EVENTS ARE MOVERS.2 Events can 1

Margolin, “Of What is Past,” 149. One special case of EVENTS ARE MOVERS is DEATH IS A MOVER AND MANIPULATOR: “[I]t comes upon you, and you become a physical object it manipulates. It takes you away, unless, of course, your friend Heracles owes you a favor, which he repays by physically preventing death from reaching you and seizing you and taking you away.” Turner, The Literary Mind, 47.

2

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produce different effects on us: they can help us, throw us into an unexpected situation, stop us in our tracks, or determine certain courses of action. By never using the word “abortion,” the narrator probably wishes to imply that the operation as such is again just “the tip of the iceberg.” Readers should probably wonder whether this is the event that has made the couple unhappy and whether the girl’s words should be believed straightforwardly: “That’s the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy” (200). The general conceptual pattern of EVENTS ARE ACTIONS can cast more light on Hemingway’s brief and compact story. We should start from the physical action of abortion, “an awfully simple operation,” as the male character sees it, either because he wishes to reassure the girl or because he has little regard for her feelings. However, the story of this physical action is more complex, as it is usually associated with the story of birth. In the storyworld, the girl walks to the end of the station and contemplates the Spanish countryside: she sees “fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees” (201). The fertility and the harvest clearly mirror the fertility of the woman. As these two stories are always represented in close proximity, the story of birth and the story of abortion are structured by the complex imageschematic knowledge of ONE THING COMING OUT OF ANOTHER: the mother is conceived of as a container with another body inside it. Nonetheless, the two bodily stories are separated as the next image schema emerges: according to MOTION ALONG A PATH FROM A SOURCE TO A GOAL, in the story of birth, the child is separated from the mother’s womb and moves along a path that is now outside the mother’s body. Meanwhile, in the story of abortion, the child goes through the separation, but the path stops there. It may be the sudden cessation of the path leading to a new target that is so disturbing for the mind of the mother. The American girl knows that CESSATION IS STOPPING, and she also knows that it is irreversible, which makes the decision even more difficult to take. And with this, we return to the point of indeterminacy and unconfirmed expectations. In this kind of action story, EVENTS are ACTIVE MOVERS,1 and the role of the actors is reduced to a minimum, making them appear vulnerable in the face of the more powerful events. In the story analyzed here, change plays an important role in the fate of the American couple. At first, they may seem to be enjoying the appealing facets of change, as they seek new 1

To illustrate, EVENTS are ACTIVE MOVERS in the expression “the market crashed” or “the building has fallen into disrepair.” Turner, The Literary Mind, 48.

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sensations and experiment with new drinks. When trying a new drink, Anis del Toro, the girl observes that “it tastes like licorice,” while the man bluntly replies: “That’s the way with everything.” The girl’s comment— “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe” (200)—may be the first hint that, in their relationship, changes can only be definitive. However, the more dramatic change they experience is the girl’s pregnancy, for which they are obviously not prepared. They both know that IMPEDIMENTS TO ACTION ARE IMPEDIMENTS TO MOTION, yet their interpretation of this conceptual pattern differs essentially. For the man, the unwanted pregnancy is the physical impediment to progress in their relationship. With the burden and the responsibility of parenthood, the lovers will not be able to move forward on the path of their love affair and will not be able to reach the destination of a carefree lifestyle. On the other hand, the girl’s constant questioning of her condition and also of the state of their relationship seems to view the man’s lack of commitment as the major impediment to her longing for a committed love relationship, which also involves the responsibility of parenthood. The tension in the condensed exchange between the two partners can be explained by their different approaches to the conceptual domain of JOURNEYING: if for the girl the path certainly leads to a precise destination where she can feel physically fulfilled and emotionally accomplished as a responsible adult, the man does not wish to project the literal journey they are both undertaking onto an abstract mental event that could signify a change in their relationship. Clearly, they have chosen different forking paths. They now exist in a state of confusion and indecision, of incompatible wishes and beliefs. On the other hand, we start to understand that temporally indeterminate events are not simply competing alternatives to the main story but genuine aspects that need consideration.

4.2.4 The End of Something In The End of Something (1925, published in In Our Time), Nick Adams and Marjorie’s love affair is most similar to the love relationship experienced by the couple in Hills like White Elephants: we get the story of a deteriorating love relationship, along with feelings of loss and emotional disconnectedness. Like other stories that deal with loveless relationships, the partners experience difficulty in articulating their feelings and solving problems that might be at the core of their troubled relationship. Nick’s and Marjorie’s failure to communicate is again reflected in the scarce, understated dialog. It is clear that the woman is the initiator of communication, but her questions

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receive unsatisfactory answers. As she senses that something has changed between them, Marjorie twice asks her partner, “What’s the matter, Nick?” but Nick’s answers remain unchanged: “I don’t know.” Then, for the rest of the evening, they fish and eat without talking much. Again, readers face the difficulty of not being able to say exactly whether they can anticipate the separation of the couple, as it is only toward the end of the story when Nick comments briefly on their failed relationship: “It isn’t fun any more.” But the evidence of this exists prior to the introduction of the two characters, when readers are presented with a detailed description of Hortons Bay, once a flourishing lumbering town. The very accurate presentation of this physical location gives the place the necessary concreteness to build the image of a desolate area: the broken limestone foundations of the mill showing through the swampy lake, a reminder of the days when the mill got broken apart, with the schooners loaded with the cuts of the mill and its removable machinery transported on board: “its open hold covered with canvas and lashed tight, the sails of the schooner filled and it moved out into the open lake, carrying with it everything that had made the mill a mill and Hortons Bay a town” (53). The bare roughness of the physical place ten years later when the story begins is the first clear indicator of the state of the characters and their relationships. We arrive at this understanding imaginatively by interpreting the travel for the body as literal and that for the mind of the traveler as metaphorical. We recognize the general pattern of projecting physical locations onto abstract mental states, as revealed in the common example of MENTAL STATES ARE SPATIAL LOCATIONS. Again, these are not mere figures of speech, as they are not limited to language, but reveal “mental processes of parable that show up in both everyday language and literary language because they are general cognitive patterns of projection,”1 as Turner reminds us in The Literary Mind. Therefore, being in a deserted place is being in a state that may yield feelings of sterility and distress. When the action begins, we see Nick rowing a boat with a girl called Marjorie along the shore of the lake near where the big mill once stood. Readers will know that BEING IN A STATE IS BEING IN A SPATIAL LOCATION, so they might anticipate potential conflicts in the love relationship. At the start of their short journey by boat, the two characters contemplate the “old ruin” and try to locate the mill in their memory: “They rowed on out of sight of the mill, following the shore line. Then Nick cut across the bay” (53). As they are trying to set night lines for trout, their slowly moving boat is indicative of the sort of journey they are undertaking: 1

Turner, The Literary Mind, 41.

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a journey that is taking them around the small area of the lake, along the shore, and along the edge of the channel-bank, where rapid motion would be detrimental to catching fish, and also where the submerged ruins of the mill might be dangerous for their fishing trip. They both take turns at rowing the boat, plant the troll into the water, then bring the boat to shore, and the boat journey stops here, as they will have to wait for the fish to feed on their bait. When their fishing adventure ends, the couple seem unable to communicate, even if they have an unsettling feeling that something is going wrong with their relationship. They show an inability to solve their problem. The unsettling tension in this story seems, in fact, to stem exactly from their difficulty with articulating their love discord. In this case, the completion of their journey would mean solving their communication problem. In other words, in the metaphorical mapping between the short boat journey and the couple’s lack of communication, readers make inferences that highlight a specific conceptual metaphor: MENTALLY SOLVING A PROBLEM IS JOURNEYING ALONG A PATH TO A DESTINATION. The understanding of the failed relationship lies in the impossibility of mapping the essential elements of the two domains, i.e. the domain of JOURNEYING and the domain of SOLVING PROBLEMS. First, the physical path is mapped onto the means of solving problems, but here readers experience a special case: the physical shortness of the path (the boat journey advances only along the short length of the shore) is projected onto the scarcity of the means of solving the problem: their communication problem is only met with a refusal to discuss it openly. As such, the short distance traveled along the path is mapped onto their failure to solve the problem: Nick and Marjorie have undertaken a very short journey on board, while metaphorically they are far from identifying the problem and reaching a solution to it. As Marjorie leaves Nick before the end of their “journey,” the conceptual pattern of journeying and solving problems lacks one essential element: no solution can be achieved as the physical destination vanishes with the woman’s departure. In effect, the end of this ruined relationship is the metaphorical projection of the characters’ failure to reach the physical destination of their journey. Through a combination of the narrator’s brief comments and character dialog, we get the feeling that the storyworld of The End is built on absent and negative things: the absence of the mill (“there was nothing of the mill,” 55) and the long series of negatives in phrases such as “I don’t feel like eating,” “Marjorie did not say anything,” “You don’t have to talk silly,” or the implied negative meaning of “without” in “They ate without talking” or “They sat on the blanket without touching each other” (55). On the one hand, all these negations are indicative of the couple’s shortage of solutions

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to save their love relationship. This all shows one essential aspect of human and human-like cognition: non-events and non-actions populate our mental universe. Perhaps more importantly, those who have studied counterfactual thinking (see Fauconnier and Turner1 for theoretical perspectives consistent with these findings) argue that non-events or non-actions have an essential role in the construction of counterfactual scenarios. The physical reality of the narrative space provides the material anchor for conceptual blends projected mainly from counterfactual spaces. Taking the narrator’s comment “They ate without talking,” we mentally blend elements projected from the space in which the protagonists are silent and reserved while the second counterfactual input contains lively communication. In the blended space, the contrast between the two spaces delivers new insight into Nick and Marjorie’s affair and has an essential role in their behavior from this moment on. When Nick finally acknowledges “It isn’t fun any more,” again he has the great mental flexibility of imagining a non-existing relationship, a yet unactualized affair that faces many impediments. This brief comment is perhaps meant to clarify his subsequent behavior in suggesting that his life, in a counterfactual relationship, is “not fun anymore.” This subsection, based on the analyses of Hemingway’s short stories, is in accord with research2 suggesting that abstract non-spatial stories are grounded in spatial or bodily stories. Thus, these stories provide readers with the blend of two journeys: the literal journey and its further projection into a parabolic journey, i.e. the story of a mental journey. Therefore, in order to understand and interpret the set of short stories discussed in this sub-chapter, we make use of two essential cognitive capacities: our bodily sense of spatiality (represented in the skeletal image schemas we use in our cognitive operations) and our powers of metaphorical projection. My main argument in this section is that reading Hemingway’s short fiction requires the use of conceptual metaphorical schemes of thought that define the way we think and reason in both everyday and literary discourse. As stated in several other places here, the link between ordinary thought and the everyday use of language and the figurative language in literary works is 1

Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think. “Our understanding of social, mental, and abstract domains is formed on our understanding of spatial and bodily stories. But plausibility is the most we can assert on this evidence. It is impressive and remarkable that we can always project from spatial and bodily stories onto social, mental, and abstract stories. It is equally impressive and remarkable that conversation about social, mental, and abstract stories will almost always elicit spatial and bodily projections.” Turner, The Literary Mind, 51.

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not meant to make them synonymous. It is, however, clear that the way we speak and think is not unlimited, but the special place that literature has received in our mind must result from the refined cognitive representations that literature generates, which heighten our conceptual processes and projections.

4.3 The theory of possible worlds. Private embedded narratives Sub-sections 4.1 and 4.2 explored the readerly use of spatial schemas to make sense of narrative time and physical space. I discussed spatial representations of time at length, in particular the conceptualization of time as a forking path. I then investigated the effects generated by these diverging paths and the structures of the mental worlds produced by branching roads. One of the main points made in these two sub-chapters is that the forking paths in the stories analyzed are not meant to meet again, which has paved the way to a discussion concerning the complexity of virtual mental constructs underlying human thought in general and narrative fiction in particular. The emphasis has been on the structure of a particular type of alternate world generated by the multiplicity of physical spaces (projected onto an abstract terrain of thought): the counterfactual. To provide further context, I tried to link research on counterfactual reasoning to narrative theories and thus contribute to a new approach to short fiction: short story worlds are regarded as mostly constituted of non-factual events, virtual alternatives, descriptions of desires and beliefs, non-actual states, anticipations, memories, and so on. These mental constructs do not reflect the real past or future of the narrative and are not integrated in a chronological order of events and states in the story. It is probably clear that this approach contradicts the widely accepted claim in narratological studies that suggests that the very nature of narrative stems from a chronologically ordered history. In this narrative model, however, non-narrative elements fail to contribute to the forward movement of the plot, while they remain vivid but simply ornamental. This contribution highlights another important issue facing theorists who attempt to outline new directions in the study of plot dynamics in narrative fiction: the idea that the concept of the storyworld or narrative universe needs to capture the ever-widening realities of nonactuality and encompass the infinity of understated states and unauthentic events.

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When it comes to explicating my approach to the world of narrative, I share the claims of a number of literary theorists such as Lubomír Doležel,1 Thomas Pavel,2 Doreen Maître,3 Marie-Laure Ryan,4 Ruth Ronen,5 and Elena Semino6. These scholars succeeded in creating a mutually shared theoretical terrain to address key literary issues by substantially profiting from a fascinating and successful interdisciplinary transfer. In an attempt to clarify the problem of reference in narrative (the relations between literature and the actual world), to search for explanatory models of fictional worlds and types of characters, to illuminate the interaction of competing fictional sub-worlds, these literary theorists show that changes can be generated by embarking on cross-disciplinary research. They have all been receptive to the influences of philosophical logic on literature and literary theories: the theory of possible worlds has supplied critics with the grounds for reorienting crucial literary questions, for instance, reference, ontology, or representation. Thus, to preview the section that follows, I will try to portray the way the theory of possible worlds has changed our views on narrative and on textual universes, beyond the restrictions of traditional literary theories. My intention is also to show how we can benefit from the findings of philosophical logic and apply them to the study of short fiction. I should stress that the authors previously mentioned have explored this general framework to offer new insights into general tendencies of literary studies without specifically applying them to short narratives. Therefore, in this book, I am particularly, if not exclusively, interested in the discourse of nonactual events and states of affairs as illustrated in Hemingway’s stories. The details offered by this theory will provide an overall picture of the importance of embedded narrative worlds. Different types of private narrative worlds are anything but simple constructs in the minds of characters but prove essential for their decisions, actions, and behaviors. They weave their ways through the narrative texture, whether they become actualized or simply remain virtual possibilities. By referring explicitly to the mechanisms of possible worlds, I provide a more rigorous framework for the findings presented in previous chapters with 1

Doležel, Heterocosmica. Pavel, Fictional Worlds. 3 Doreen Maître, Literature and Possible Worlds (London: Pembridge Press/Middlesex Polytechnic Press, 1983). 4 Ryan, Possible Worlds. 5 Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 6 Elena Semino, “Possible Worlds in Poetry,” Journal of Literary Semantics 25, no. 3 (1996): 189–225. 2

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regard to the question of narrative proliferation and will introduce several preliminary topics detailed in Chapter 5 (see, for instance, the theory of “cognitive mental functioning” and fictional minds). Following the route pioneered by logicians and philosophers of language who developed the theory of possible worlds by speculating on logical problems such as necessity or possibility,1 narratologists and literary theorists later borrowed this theory in order to deepen readers’ understanding of how fictional worlds are built. Specific aspects of philosophical origin have been adopted by literary theory, and they also borrowed terminology from logical philosophical frameworks (e.g. representation, world projection, crossworld identity, accessibility, possible state of affairs, etc.), a fact that reflects significant changes in orientation in the exchange between philosophy and literary theories. On the other hand, possible worlds serve an important purpose within philosophical studies themselves, as Ruth Ronen acknowledges when she speaks of the emergence of “epistemologically less restrained thinking about philosophical problems”2 and a growing interest in nonexistence or possibilism. Other related issues to the concept of possible worlds are accessibility among worlds, necessity and possibility, nonexistence, counterfactuality, cross-world identity, and epistemic worlds. Despite different approaches to possible worlds, the theory is generally premised on talk about events that are not actualized being talk about coherent and describable states of affairs. In her study on possible worlds and literature, Ronen makes the point clear: Despite the diversity of philosophical opinions about possible worlds, the idea common to all of them is that non-actual possibilities make perfectly coherent systems which can be described and qualified, imagined and intended and to which one can refer. Whatever the logical status of such possibilities, in all interpretations of possible worlds the non-obtaining or non-actuality of a state of affairs does not preclude or stipulate one’s ability to make propositions about this state of affairs. By attributing concrete content to our modal talk, that is, by showing that talk about things that are not actual is talk about possible worlds, philosophical discourse provides a convenient way to describe other non-actualized, yet coherent, describable systems.3

1

“Necessity can be defined in terms of propositions that are true in all possible worlds; possibility in terms of propositions that are true in at least one possible world; and impossibility in terms of propositions that are not true in any possible world.” Palmer, Fictional Minds, 33. 2 Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory, 19. 3 Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory, 25–26.

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In the realm of narrative studies, scholars now draw explicitly on the common ideas of non-actuality, non-existence, and counterfactuality to explore non-actualized alternatives, and perhaps more importantly, they aim to present fiction as one of the possible world gravitating around the actual world. In line with the theory of possible worlds, Lubomír Doležel1 maintains the assumption that fictional worlds should be treated as autonomous objects and not as representations of the actual world. However, the fictional world differs from the real world in two essential instances: first, the limits in fiction are constantly expanded by the immense power of fictional language, and second, all fictional worlds are ontologically incomplete. The ontological incompleteness of the fictional world stands in opposition to the fullness of the real world. Doležel examines the cause of this ontological difference as follows: “The incompleteness of fictional worlds results from the very act of their creation. Fictional worlds are brought into existence by means of fictional texts, and it would take a text of infinite length to construct a complete fictional world. Finite texts, the only texts that humans are capable of producing, necessarily create incomplete worlds.”2 This leads us to the conclusion that fictional worlds have actuality and full autonomy, which guarantees our immersion in a work of fiction. Literary theorist Marie-Laure Ryan, dwelling on David Lewis’ indexical theory,3 shares an interest in the power of narrative to create a state of immersion in the reader. She offers accurate explanations of the way we immerse ourselves in fiction: even if we are aware that the textual universe is an imaginary product or an alternative to reality, we behave as if the actual world of the textual universe were the actual world. Importantly, this happens by re-centering the realm of possibilities around the new actual world (presented as actual by the narrator). Ryan concludes that “this recentering pushes the reader into a new system of actuality and 1

Doležel, Heterocosmica. See also: Lubomír Doležel, “Fictional Worlds: Density, Gaps, and Inference,” Style 29, no. 2 (1995): 201–214. 2 Doležel, “Fictional Worlds,” 201. 3 In Lewis’ indexical theory, all possible worlds are real and can become actual: “Our actual world is only one world among others. We call it alone actual not because it differs in kind from all the rest but because it is the world we inhabit. The inhabitants of other worlds may truly call their own worlds actual, if they mean by actual what we do. […] ‘Actual’ is indexical, like ‘I’ or ‘here’, or ‘now’: it depends for its reference on the circumstances of utterance, to wit the world where the utterance is located.” David K. Lewis, “Possible Worlds,” in The Possible and the Actual. Readings in the Metaphysics of Modality, ed. Michael J. Loux (New York: Cornell University Press, 1979), 184.

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possibility.”1 As we discover this new actual world, a range of alternative possibilities simultaneously emerge and revolve around it. In outlining her hypothesis, Ryan defines “the semantic substance” of a text as the ability of the text to bring a world to life (the concept of the factual domain or actual world of the text instills in readers the feeling of actuality) and the ability to oppose factual or actual histories to a set of possible worlds. Ryan’s widening definition of the narrative universe can prove prolific for literary theory in that the fictional universe does not only comprise collections of established facts but accepts “any kind of meanings: statement of fact, generalizations, symbolic interpretations, subjective judgements expressed by the narrator, or formed by the reader.”2 In what follows, I propose to review the framework of possible worlds and elucidate the nature and the roots of the virtual in Hemingway’s short stories as a preliminary stage to the model of reading short fiction. Specifically, I want to test the hypothesis that readers are involved with the story as they are able to reveal the primary level conflict. This is created by clashes between the private worlds of a character and/or between the private worlds of different characters. Overall, I will argue that the virtual is a mental construct that exists in the human mind and in the thoughts of the characters, and that the relations and changes in private worlds can move the narrative forward. My discussion of private narrative worlds is not only an analytic exercise in the nature of possibility but, as suggested earlier, it is also motivated by the need to expand narrative models for evaluating short storyness. To this end, I endorse Ryan’s analysis of possible worlds and narrative theory and will also rely on her classification of narrative private worlds.

4.4 Living in the best possible world: The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio, Now I Lay Me, and A Way You’ll Never Be The plot of The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio (1933, published in Winner Take Nothing) is of great narrative interest and prompts a sort of cognitive entrapment for the reader whose attention is captured immediately and relocated from the actual textual world to the minds of the characters. The fictional mind is viewed as a place nascent with possible worlds. To put it more bluntly, our narrative interest resides in the text’s purely virtual

1 2

Ryan, Possible Worlds, 22. Ryan, Possible Worlds, 112.

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embedded narratives, seen by Ryan as “story-like constructs”1 inhabiting the private worlds of characters that may include dreams, fictions, or fantasies, but even more importantly, they may take the form of any type of representation of past or future events and states (plans, passive projections, desires, beliefs).2 Ryan argues that these representations may concern the history of the textual actual world and the private worlds of other characters. Equally crucial for the esthetic appeal of narrative is the possibility for these embedded narratives to enter into complex relationships with each other. In other words, the basic condition of narrative is to produce “textual richness and variety of the domain of the virtual,”3 and, on the other hand, to ensure the diversification of possible worlds (Ryan’s “principle of diversification”). This also means that rich alternativity in the characters’ worlds and incompatibility between these private worlds and the textual actual world can generate conflict in the narrative universe. Ryan stipulates that the theory of possible worlds can make a contribution to narratological theories, in particular to the theory of tellability. A key strength of this approach is that it addresses other alternate worlds that are dreamed of, imagined, wished for, or secretly planned, set apart from what “happens” in the world of the text. The explicit “reality” of the text is supplemented by a host of other non-actual alternative worlds or “counterparts”4 of the textual actual world that are mostly character-centered. Ryan5 speaks of several types of alternative discourses, namely the epistemic world determining knowledge worlds (K-worlds) and the axiological system determining wish worlds (Wworlds) and obligation worlds (O-worlds). In addition to what is known about the textual actual world (K-world) and what the world should be (Oworlds and W-worlds), we create true alternatives to the actual world as in our hopes, wishes, dreams, or pure fictions (fantasy worlds or F-worlds. Following on from the above, Hemingway’s The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio can be regarded as the sum of private embedded narratives or a set of alternate possible worlds. The world-creating properties of the story transport the reader to the underlying realities of the virtual in the private worlds of the three protagonists: Mr. Frazer (a writer), Cayetano Ruiz (the wounded luckless gambler), and Sister Cecilia. Confined to a hospital in Hailey, Montana, both Mr. Frazer and the Mexican gambler experience 1

Ryan, Possible Worlds, 156. Marie-Laure Ryan’s contention is that tellability intrinsically depends on a system of purely virtual embedded narratives. Ryan, Possible Worlds, 156. 3 Ryan, Possible Worlds, 156. 4 The term is used by cognitive poetician Peter Stockwell in Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. 5 Ryan, Possible Worlds, 111. 2

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pain, but also they share the banalities and routine of the place. With a broken leg, Mr. Frazer appears to suffer more from “tricky nerves” and finds help in the example set by the dignity with which Ruiz endures pain from a gunshot wound. Sister Cecilia is deeply sympathetic to human pain and suffering; she admires Ruiz, for “he never complains” (366) and “he doesn’t make a sound” (367), even if “he’s having a dreadful time” (367). As both patients have to cope with pain, Sister Cecilia compassionately tries to convince them that it would be a good thing to discuss their pain. She always comforts them, brings Mr. Frazer news of Ruiz every morning, and when they eventually meet, the nun observes them “happily.” As Flora notes, she is not only a source of brightness and genuine sympathy for the patients, but she is “the character in the story who makes things happen; she is essential to plot and theme.”1 True, the nun functions as a transition between characters and as a source of narrative energy and vitality. She energizes the story’s actual world. We may safely say that if it were not for her contribution to the plot, the narrative world would gradually disintegrate, and this is suggested by the very construction of the factual domain of the text. Let us now investigate what exists in the textual actual world, especially the situations and events that convey the feeling of indetermination and nonfixity that may contribute to the further disintegration of the plot. The story begins with the interrogation scene conducted by a detective who tries to find out the identity of Ruiz’s assailant. The detective and the other characters in the hospital take part in the opening scene with the desire to gain information and complete their knowledge worlds (K-worlds), but Ruiz refuses to reveal the identity of his assailant. Moreover, the interpreter’s inaccurate translation of Ruiz’s responses defines an area of lexical uncertainty that grows in intensity as the further development of the plot does not complete what the characters know at the beginning. Mr. Frazer’s inherently incomplete K-world is also left indeterminate until the end of the story. When the story ends, he does not “know” anything more. The fact that the nature of his K-world does not change indirectly reflects his unchanged medical condition: he remains the victim of his uncontrollable fits of weeping. In the factual domain, characters are not able to solve the “enigma” stemming from an incomplete K-world, and above all, they experience spontaneous errors. For instance, the Mexicans invited by Sister Cecilia to visit Ruiz Cayetano and comfort him with their music are the friends of his 1

Joseph M. Flora, Ernest Hemingway: A Study of Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), 70.

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assailant, and the doctor who tries to give Mr. Frazer a better view from his ward window overturns a lamp and knocks him unconscious. Besides the irony and humor that result from such situations, in the factual domain, there is nothing firm to hold onto: there is only indeterminate knowledge, temporary states, inconsistencies, and strange combinations. Hemingway builds these underdetermined experiences as dramatic expressions of the dark side of existence. They may reveal a world of ever-present violence, claustrophobic loneliness, numbing despair, and intense human sufferance. On the other hand, possible worlds deflect the discourse from the domain of textual factuality, thus enabling us to investigate relations between states of affairs—whether possible, actualizable, or impossible—that sprout in the characters’ virtual domain. Put differently, the theory of possible worlds enables us to explore the notion of alternativeness in fictional minds. Once the factual domain is completely clouded in an opium haze1 and the characters feel unsatisfied with what exists in this actual world, private worlds are woven into the narrative discourse. When Mr. Frazer starts to monitor random radio stations and broadcasts, he imaginatively transports himself from the textual actual world to a fantasy world. He flees banality and escapes into the ever-new realities of his fantasies and dreams. However, this is not simply a mere fit of imagination, as the protagonist, through the voice of the narrator, provides a full account of his imaginary constructs. He imagines the detailed picture of the “morning revelers arriving at the studio and picture how they would look getting off a streetcar before daylight in the morning carrying their instruments”—“he always pictured them with their instruments” (367). And then he imaginatively transports himself to the cities of the radio stations and “lives” there for the duration of the broadcasts: “He lived in Seattle from two o’clock on, each night, hearing the pieces that all the different people asked for” (373). Through the radio experiences, some cities become real to him, and so he “grows fond of Seattle, Washington,” but has no feel of Salt Lake City or Los Angeles from what he hears of these places. In a sense, the radio becomes his newly discovered opium, although “a cheap one,” as acknowledged by the narratorial voice. Mr. Frazer’s F-world is not just an 1 Mr. Frazer’s considerations on opium (rendered in indirect thought speech) become

relevant here: “Religion is the opium of the people. […] Yes, and music is the opium of the people. […] And now economics is the opium of the people; along with patriotism the opium of the people in Italy and Germany. What about sexual intercourse; was that an opium of the people? Of some of the people. Of some of the best of the people. But drink was a sovereign opium of the people, oh, an excellent opium. […] Ambition was another, an opium of the people, along with a belief in any new form of government” (379).

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imaginary construct but a complete universe, one that has been reached by a “recentering.”1 Therefore, metaphorically, his F-world may overtake the function of a full K-world and can become an authentic model of the world in which Mr. Frazer would like to live comfortably. In fact, this is the reason why he never returns to the present of his textual actual world. This story reminds us of other Hemingway stories, like those of Nick Adams in Now I Lay Me (1927, published in Men Without Women) and A Way You’ll Never Be (1933, published in Winner Take Nothing). Written as a first-person narrative, Now I Lay Me recounts Nick’s troubling state of sleeplessness and his need to keep thinking in order to avoid directly facing the trauma resulting from being wounded in the war. In a similar way, in A Way You’ll Never Be, Nick is mentally plagued by the world in which he is forced to live—a world of violence and disintegration, as suggested by the post-battle debris in the opening scene of the story When Nick travels through the grotesquely decaying landscape: In the grass and the grain, beside the road, and in some places scattered over the road, there was much material: a field kitchen, it must have come over when things were going well; many of the calf-skin-covered haversacks, stick bombs, helmets, rifles, something one butt-up, the bayonet stuck in the dirt […]; stick bombs, helmets, rifles, entrenching tools, ammunition boxes, star-shell pistols, their shells scattered about, medical kits, gas masks, empty gas-mask cans, a squat, tripodded machine gun in a nest of empty shells, full belts protruding from the boxes, the water-cooling can empty and on its side, the breech block gone, the crew in odd positions, and around them, in the grass, more of the typical papers. (310)

In both stories, the protagonist is obviously emotionally dislocated as his close encounter with death does not seem to stop on the battlefield but continues to haunt him to no end and looms terrifyingly over his nights and sleep. In trying to escape the psychotic presence of death, Nick fights to stay awake, as going to sleep would mean abandoning himself to his own death. When the story in Now I Lay Me begins, we hear the incessant munching of silkworms, a noise that becomes increasingly disturbing for Nick’s sleepless nights when he lays awake, paralyzed by fear, and, for that reason, unwilling to sleep in the dark: “I myself did not want sleep” (274). As he experiences intense anxiety, Nick searches for another place that can provide him with the privacy and security he has been longing for. From his viewpoint, it is clear that in the textual actual world, his desire cannot be fulfilled and his search for tranquility cannot be satisfied.

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Ryan, Possible Worlds, 119.

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The factual domain is certainly deficient, and this results in the creation of other, more accommodating fantasy worlds. Nick’s seemingly hallucinatory dreams and blurred memories are his mind’s creation: throughout the night he fishes “very carefully” in his mind and remembers all his favorite trout streams. As with Mr. Frazer’s private worlds from The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio, Nick Adams’ imaginary constructs are complete universes that are built with an almost obsessive care for minute details: he mentally fishes “under all the logs, all the turns of the bank, the deep holes and the clear shadow stretches” (274), and then he watches, as if through a magnifying glass, the insects he finds in rivers, with their different forms and sizes. More than that, Nick constructs his very private worlds by trying to control the pace of his mental activity: he fishes slowly and carefully, but when he fishes too quickly, he starts all over again and catches every trout he had missed before. In his possible worlds, teeming with activity and accommodating his every wish so harmoniously, all his dreams come true in the end. However, there are nights when he cannot fish, and because of this, he stays “cold-awake,” numb with fear and extremely anxious. Then he tries to trick his mind by starting a different type of journey that goes far back in time to his childhood. But the disturbing memories he remembers are so chaotic that, instead of giving him comfort, they intensify his inner turmoil. He reluctantly remembers his father’s ruined collection of arrowheads, his jars of zoological specimens, and his mother’s wedding cake rest in a tin box hanging from a rafter in the attic. This version of himself, as reflected in his chaotic and disjointed collection of memories, starts the other conflict within Nick’s domain of private worlds. This time the conflict occurs because of internally incompatible desires and inconsistencies in his private domain where Nick wishes to fish “carefully,” but troubling memories unsettle the “streams” of his dreams. As acknowledged by Ryan,1 the relations among the worlds of a narrative system are never static but are continuously changing. In order for this movement of the worlds to occur, there must be a conflict in the textual world. By this definition, in Now I Lay Me, the move occurs in several stages: first, the private world of the main character moves away from the textual actual world, as Nick begins to realize that the system of reality does not coincide with his beliefs and wishes. In a world that constantly reminds him of the fact of his death, Nick cannot find any correspondence between this reference world and what he believes to be true or what he holds to be probable. He expresses this incompatibility by the lack of an external source of illumination: “If I could have a light I was not afraid to sleep, because I 1

Ryan, Possible Worlds, 119.

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knew my soul would only go out of me if it were dark” (277). Metaphorically, the absence of this light may be paralleled with the non-realization of the protagonist’s W-world. The light as an intensely desired state is unattainable, and the result is the permanent conflict between his worlds, followed by his subsequent retirement to the deep seclusion of intensely private worlds. Since the distinction between the textual actual world and Nick’s private domain remains important throughout the story, the “true” reference world of the story turns out to be his own private world. It is here that a newly generated conflict starts to occur. When Nick can no longer fish as he wishes because he feels invaded by unwanted reminiscences of earlier times, he now intuits that one of his internal domains cannot be satisfied. That is the basic condition for the state of conflict: whenever one proposition in his private world remains unsatisfied, the whole internal system falls into conflict. On the semantic level, the conflict heightens Nick’s anxieties and traumatic experience, but for the overall organization of the text’s semantic substance, the conflict yields valuable insights into the very nature of the narrative. More specifically, on a pragmatic level, the purpose of creating alternate possible worlds is to make a point about the text’s actual world and to determine the character’s behavior. By exploring the link between short fiction and the theory of possible worlds, I pointedly wish to call into question the levels of actuality of the text. As I have already proven, the collection of possible worlds in Now I Lay Me (expressed in the protagonist’s dreams, hallucinations, or fantasies) is a complete construction and not simply a satellite world on the orbit of the textual actual world. This leads us to the conclusion that Hemingway’s text allows several levels of actuality: on the one hand, there is the actuality of the factual domain that exists independently, and on the other, the actuality that exists in the minds of the characters. Cognitively, in order for readers to understand the meanings of different actualities, they need to discover the multiple-level textual worlds and realize that there is no dominant version of actuality that may be in contrast with a less actual one. I argue, therefore, that the Hemingway narrative becomes something more than a chronological alternation of events and states of different degrees of actuality, but rather the actual narrative world harmoniously integrates into the larger realm of alternate possibilities generated by the virtual. To illustrate this latter part of my argument, let us focus on Nick’s awareness at the end of the story when, during his sleepless nights, he simply cannot recall the names of the girls he has ever known, which results in the blur of his memories. So, he has to give up on this new thought and keep fishing: “Finally, though, I went back to trout-fishing, because I found that I could remember all the streams and there was always something new about them”

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(280), acknowledging by this that his virtual world holds the permanent and reassuring reality. In A Way You’ll Never Be, the primary level conflict involves a straightforward inconsistency between Nick Adams’ obligation world (Oworld) and the textual actual world: Nick is sent to the Italian front during World War I to reassure the Italian army and persuade the Austrian enemy that American soldiers will soon arrive to reinforce the Italian troops. But, in effect, this is an absurd mission for Nick, who has been sent to display his American uniform so as to instill confidence and boost morale among the Italian troops: “‘I am supposed to move around and let them see the uniform.’ ‘How odd.’ ‘If they see one American uniform that is supposed to make them believe others are coming.’ […] ‘I’m sure your appearance will be very heartening to the troops’” (313). The uniform he wears should be regarded as the symbol of the army’s system of principles and values, but instead, Nick proves to be extremely frightened and with no control over his nerves and anxieties. Traumatized by the war and deeply shaken before every attack, Nick confesses openly to Captain Paravicini that he was so terrified before battles that he had needed to get drunk in order to be able to take part in the attacks. More than that, when many of his comrades were reduced to hysterics, he himself had to wear a chin strap to keep his teeth from chattering. Obviously, Nick is totally inappropriate for this mission, and this is immediately acknowledged by Captain Paravicini, who advises him to rest and refuses to let him cycle back to Fornaci alone. As he did not receive proper medical treatment, Nick is still in pain from his head wound, which must contribute to his rapidly deteriorating mental condition. His violently disturbed state is in striking contrast with the world of obligation and necessity he is doomed to live in: he knows his mission is an obligatory act, but he just cannot fulfill it. The conflicting nature of his obligations demonstrates that there is a deep incompatibility between his system of rules and the one of the army, and this is one of the main reasons why his mission cannot be accomplished. Likewise, Ruiz Cayetano’s private W-worlds in The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio remain purely virtual and unfulfilled. Ruiz plainly confesses that he has always been a professional gambler with no luck, but he will continue to wait for his luck to change. Similarly, Nick’s O-world will remain in debt until his obligations are fully satisfied (being able to accomplish his mission in the army), and Ruiz’s W-world will be theoretically unsatisfied until he gets in possession of his desired state (becoming a lucky gambler). As the story in A Way You’ll Never Be unfolds, Nick’s O-world remains unsatisfied, and this finally leads to his slow retreat to the privacy of his mental constructs. Evidently disturbed, traumatized, and shell-shocked during the war, Nick

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does not find comfort in his private worlds either. He also appears to be greatly affected by sleeplessness, as in the case of Nick Adams from Now I Lay Me. In both stories, in the aftermath of the battle, Nick is unable to sleep without a light at night (“I can’t sleep without a light of some sort,” 314), but if in Now I Lay Me Nick tries to find psychological comfort in his “night fishing,” Nick’s inner turmoil in A Way You’ll Never Be dramatically increases in the form of the obsessive and nightmarish recurrence of “the yellow house” in his dreams. Every time he has this nightmare, he awakens shaken and in a sweat. The narratorial voice describes Nick’s nightmare: “[T]here was a low house painted yellow with willows all around it and a low stable and there was a canal, and he had been there a thousand times and never seen it, but there it was every night as plain as the hill, only it frightened him. That house meant more than anything and every night he had it. That was what he needed but it frightened him especially when the boat lay there quietly in the willows on the canal, but the banks weren’t like this river” (315). As Nick himself intuits, “that house meant more than anything”: the shadowy presence of the house plaguing his nights and sleep suggests that Nick coordinates neither his virtual nor his actual domains. This means that, ultimately, the chaotic array of virtual universes or nightmarish hallucinations transports the protagonist to a world offering no escape from the violently disturbing actual world. On the contrary, the recurrent yellow house dream keeps reminding Nick of the realities of his factual world and also of his traumatized real self. If Nick in Now I Lay Me partially escapes from the terrifying actuality of the war and satisfies his Wworld in nocturnal mental fishing, Nick in A Way You’ll Never Be does not manage to re-center his world around the mental constructs of his dreams. In narrative semantics, his failure can be perceived as the failure of the text to provide alternativity, as the nature of Nick’s alternate world versions inherently renders a prior state of affairs consistently found in the factual domain of the text. This involves the impossibility of elevating one possible version to the status of an actual world. The weak virtuality infrastructure of Nick’s private worlds has little narrative power, thus losing against the actual domain. Literally and metaphorically, Nick cannot find the way leading to the yellow house.

4.5 Self-construal and identity. Preliminary concluding remarks The discussion above shows that a possible world framework can play a substantial role in the dynamics of character identity across narrative worlds. Upon closer analysis, it becomes necessary to distinguish between

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two types of character identity, as explicitly suggested by the three short stories analyzed in this sub-chapter. For the present context, I will make use of philosopher David Lewis’ concept of “counterparts.” In his groundbreaking study On the Plurality of Worlds, Lewis develops his counterpart theory that claims that every actual entity exists only in the actual world but has counterparts in an infinity of possible worlds, which are not identical to the actual object but are found in close resemblance.1 Applied to The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio, Now I Lay Me, and A Way You’ll Never Be, this theory can be used to a productive end in order to provide insight into narrative dynamics through an analysis of character identity and fictional counterfactuals. In these stories, the worlds of Mr. Frazer, Nick Adams in Now I Lay Me, and Nick in A Way You’ll Never Be are split between the actual domain and a set of virtual embedded universes that are potentially actualizable. As we have noticed, the greater the difference between the factual domain and the virtual one, the greater the protagonist’s ability to create mental constructs and develop them systematically. When the radio becomes the “opium” for Mr. Frazer, his inherently private universe wins against the textual factual domain and becomes the single actual world. Accordingly, within his private worlds, the character has the ability to alter his identity and create a different version of himself, in line with the prerequisites of his fantasy worlds. The Mr. Frazer of the actual narrative is bored and lethargic, whereas his fictional counterpart becomes animated by the “radio opium” and is truly willing to live in the complete and independent universe of his dreams and hallucinations. Nick in Now I Lay Me, serving on the Italian front, manages to partially alter his identity by his determination to stay awake and fish in every mental stream. Only then is Nick able to hold himself together and break free from war and from its physical and emotional burden. The nonidentical versions of Nick speak of the non-identity between his actual and virtual worlds, which eventually shows a particularly rich propensity for narrative alternativity in Hemingway’s text. By constructing a counterfactual self for the character, Hemingway changes the relations themselves between narrative worlds, which results in a productive conflict. Thus, describing identity changes that occur through transworld journeys is certainly a fruitful mode of describing the dynamics of the narrative. However, Now I Lay Me does not consistently deliver a conflicting version of identities for Nick Adams. Despite his insistence on and obsession with night fishing, Nick fails to carry on with this activity and occasionally goes back to his 1

David K. Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). See, in particular, Chapter 4: “Counterparts or Double Live?”

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actual emotional state. The annihilation of his counterpart identity and the subsequent identification with his prior identity version means that plot diversification is substantially reduced (see Ryan’s “diversification principle” above), and the semantic domain of the text also remains severely impoverished. If Nick Adams in Now I Lay Me can be regarded as demonstrating a sustained capacity to perceivably alter his psychological make-up and emotional disposition, Nick in A Way You’ll Never Be cannot occupy different worlds. He has no explicitly different characteristics when he tries to conjure up alternatives to the traumatizing factuality of war. The failure to make alterations to his identity is intrinsically caused by transworld identification: the ghostly yellow house of his nightmares and his absurd lecture on the American locust imply that, ontologically and structurally, his “dream” worlds and the factual world of war and destruction are not at all distinct. Finally, the character’s inability to activate independent possible worlds has far-reaching repercussions on the development of the plot: it means that the narrative conflict is solely determined by the intra-world organization of textual actuality, even though the protagonist cannot be totally confined to the centripetal forces of this world.

4.6 The world as it might have been: counterfactuals in Wine of Wyoming, The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife, and The Three-Day Blow This section proposes that there is scope for a more comprehensive approach to alternate narrative worlds and that there are good reasons to believe that our general mental capacity of simulation is the driving engine helping us to counterfactualize. If patterns of counterfactuality are applied to narrators and characters in fictional worlds, then the counterfactual thinking of fictional entities can provide insight into our human consciousness (see “the simulation effect” discussed in previous chapters). Using the concept of possible worlds, I will advance a narrative model that considers the contrastive effects between factual information and counterfactual propositions in an attempt to define the construction of fictional worlds in the reader’s mind. In view of this model, factual sequences of information are purposely changed in order to create an altered or imagined outcome that eventually gains influence over the factual domain of the text. It is this capacity to conceive possible courses of events that can change the actual textual world, i.e. counterfactuality can displace and subvert the realities of the fictional world. Such counterfactual scenarios are embedded in the narrative discourse, and it is up to the reader to distinguish between these

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worlds and establish their ontological hierarchy in the narrative space. What this sub-chapter aims to provide is an analysis of how concepts of possible worlds relate to strategies of counterfactualizing in three of Hemingway’s short stories. The study of the structure of fictional worlds in these stories is meant to reconstruct the process whereby the reader immerses himself or herself in the narrative world. Along the line of possible world theory, my purpose is to show that the weight of the text, and the place where readers untangle the knot of interpretation, lies in textual passages that raise our interest in non-existence and counterfactuality. By articulating this aim, I hope to demonstrate that the three stories in question belong to a pattern of non-actuality and non-existence. My own reasons for the order in which I will pursue my analysis are justified by the degree of the state of nonactuality that each text develops. In Wines of Wyoming, the idea of non-actuality as developed by the fictional minds is only manifested toward the end of the story when the counterfactual minds of the main characters try to rectify prior infelicitous situations in the story. The fact that the obligation world is sensed to be the most powerful discourse potentially leads to narrative conflict between what characters wish for and what they are obliged to fulfill in accordance with their moral principles and the regulations imposed by the narrative system. As the conflict increasingly intensifies, counterfactuality serves to help restore balance (though not in a definitive way) and stimulate affective responses (regret and self-blame). In The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife and The Three-Day Blow (specifically analyzed in this order), non-actual or unrealized worlds become more elaborate and prove to have an important effect on the relationships between characters. As these two stories abound in different forms of negation (negations routinely prompt counterfactual spaces, according to Fauconnier and Turner1), I argue that the narrative power of these short texts can be attributed to the non-actualized fictional system that populates the minds of their characters. However, contradictions do emerge as the state of non-actuality is counterfactual with respect to the settled narrative domain, but they point to one important aspect: the prolific pluralization of the narrative world. The details of the counterfactual spaces created in The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife and The Three-Day Blow can provide an overall picture of the functions of non-actual possibilities. Wine of Wyoming is one of the stories that have not enjoyed extensive critical interest if we only look at the standard critical sources, such as Linda Wagner’s Ernest Hemingway: Six Decades of Criticism and Jackson J. Benson’s The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays, which 1

Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 239.

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failed to include it. The only substantial discussion of Wine of Wyoming can be found in Joseph Flora’s Ernest Hemingway: A Study of Short Fiction and H. R. Stoneback’s ‘Mais Je Reste Catholique’: Communion, Betrayal, and Aridity in ‘Wine of Wyoming’. Flora sees the importance of this otherwise neglected story in its subject: marriage and the way it proclaims the values of the religiously conservative tradition of Catholicism. He then argues that the Fontans, the married couple, “represent the best of the Old World traditions. They believe that the married state is indeed the best course of life for most people, and they worry that American culture has underdetermined it, that their sons will be hard pressed to duplicate what they have found through marriage.”1 Stoneback’s extended critical commentary seeks to reposition the story from its current standing as “most certainly the key neglected Hemingway story” to “one of the most resonant stories dealing with the crucial matters of Hemingway’s expatriation, his attitudes toward America, his code of values, and his Catholicism.”2 I will devote more attention to this story since I believe, along with Stoneback, that Wine of Wyoming deserves a fair treatment. My analysis extensively examines the scene before the American narrator leaves Wyoming. He and his wife live in France and are now on a hunting trip in Wyoming. The Fontans, who are bootleggers, take an interest in the protagonist. who eats and drinks several times at the Fontans’ during his stay there. The night before the writer-narrator’s departure, Monsieur Fontan invites him to come back with his wife for a fête. The Americans are caught up with the preparations for the road, and so the protagonist and his wife fail to pay the expected visit. The next day, when they stop by to bid farewell, Fontan tries to get more wine from his cellar, as he had drunk up the wine the previous night because he had probably been profoundly disappointed with how the night turned out. He cannot provide the wine because his daughter-in-law has gone off with the key, and therefore more frustration and disappointment accumulate by the end of the story. The storyline and plot retold as such do not seem to arouse much interest. However, with the tools of a possible world framework, as applied to this story, I claim that the analysis can reframe the study of fictional minds and provide further context for the application of possible worlds to literary works.

1

Flora, Ernest Hemingway, 65. H. R. Stoneback, “‘Mais Je Reste Catholique’: Communion, Betrayal, and Aridity in Wine of Wyoming,” in Hemingway’s Neglected Short Fiction: New Perspectives, ed. Susan Beegel (Tuscaloosa/London: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 212– 213. 2

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The appreciation of the story involves relating the events in the factual domain to possible courses of action, prospective sequences of events, or unrealized behaviors that are not actual but intensely contemplated upon, wished for, or hypothesized by the characters. This dynamic combination of factual and counterfactual information will lead to a constellation of emotions (regret and self-blame) induced by counterfactual simulation, and that can be explicatory for the behavior of the characters in the last scenes of the story. In Wine of Wyoming, possible worlds function as exemplary models of the gradual formation and frustration of narrative worlds that do not become actualized. Just before the Americans leave Wyoming, they form a joint wish world (W-world) in which their desires are satisfied and their behavior is judged as acceptable. Exhausted from packing, they decide not to go to the Fontans’ fête, even if they know they are expected there: “We did not want a foreign language. All we wanted was to go early to bed” (360). However, the circumstances of the textual actual world prevent them from fully enjoying their accomplished desired state, as there is further conflict between their precarious W-world and their more powerful obligation worlds (O-worlds). Realizing the potentially conflicting state between their internal worlds, the protagonist and his wife acknowledge briefly: ‘We must go and say good-by to the Fontans,’ I said. ‘Yes, we must.’ ‘I’m afraid they expected us last night.’ ‘I suppose we could have gone.’ ‘I wish we’d gone.’ (360)

This very short excerpt involves the interweaving of various possible worlds and different versions of their recent past. First, the characters’ behaviors in their O-world should be compatible with the commitments, moral principles, and codes defined by the Fontans. Certainly, the Fontans expected them to show their presence at the fête, and their failure to do so generates narrative conflict. However, in order to gauge the situation more objectively, I believe H. R. Stoneback’s interpretation of the meanings of “fête” in the story can illuminate the context. The critic points out that this term is not an accurate synonym for the English “party,” but rather it resonates with the religious sense of the term “feast” no matter how social or cultural the “fête.”1 The deepest significance of the term concerning a sense of order and ceremony are revealing in the context of the small traditional Catholic community and their values: the Fontans run an orderly 1

Stoneback, “Mais Je Reste Catholique,” 218.

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place and establish their values and discipline for drinking (proper uses of wine and beer) according to a deeply ceremonial ritual that becomes even more complicated in the Prohibition era. Since in this case the commitments derive from sustained interpersonal contacts (the protagonist always returns to the Fontans’ for a drink), the protagonists’ O-worlds remain in debt. Despite the Americans’ good intentions (“We wanted to come last night. We intended to come, but we were too tired after the trip,” 360), things did not take the course they wanted, and therefore, as a last resort, they exploit the potential of an explicit upward counterfactual: “I suppose we could have gone.” / “I wish we’d gone” (360). As the research on counterfactuals reveals, the conditions of failure or negative outcomes are expected to provoke counterfactual scenarios. In their research on counterfactuality, Olson et al. maintain that “negative events are also more likely to capture the attention […] than positive events.”1 The characters’ counterfactual scenario in response to a negative context orchestrates the dissonance between the factual textual world (they did not take part in the ceremonial fête) and the altered outcome (they kept their promise and made an appearance), and above all else, it expresses not only wistful but also bitter regret. As I have proven elsewhere in this book, we construct upward counterfactuals at the expense of feeling worse: selfblame, regret, and disappointment are some of the emotions experienced in response to upward counterfactual thinking. The view that counterfactuals consist of “affect-provoking components” involves a variety of combinations of affect and control: for instance, upward counterfactuals may result in enhanced feelings of control, or, on the contrary, may not enhance control at all.2 In Wine of Wyoming, the most powerful emotional reactions are guilt3 and self-blame associated with mutations in the attitude of the American couple, as revealed in their obsessively repeated remark: “‘We ought to have gone last night.’ / ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘We ought to have gone’” (363). However, the counterfactual emotions of guilt and self-blame, driven by their wish to have visited even though they did not, can rectify the situation 1

Olson, Roese, and Deibert, “Psychological Biases in Counterfactual Thought Experiments,” 300. 2 McMullen, Markman, and Gavanski, “Living in Neither the Best Nor Worst of All Possible Worlds,” 158. 3 J. P. Tangney argues that upward counterfactuals lead to less negative affects when they enhance control. In this sense, guilt is a less powerful negative emotion than shame because it can rectify the situation through behavior while shame cannot. J. P. Tangney, “Assessing Individual Differences in Proneness to Shame and Guilt: Development of the Self-Conscious Affect and Attribution Inventory,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59, no. 1 (1990): 102–111.

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in part through the behavior of the characters. When they insist that the Fontans should not feel bad about the negative outcome (“Don’t feel bad about the wine,” “Don’t think about the wine,” 362), their highly apologetic attitude is meant to compensate for their absence the night before. The above discussion shows that the analysis of the specific emotional experiences in the last part of Wine of Wyoming can reveal one important aspect regarding the characters’ ability to simulate alternative courses so as to undo negative outcomes. For their part, the Americans are able to conceive a counterfactual scenario in which things are better than in reality. Their fictional minds can generate a particularly rich landscape of alternatives, among which the most important is certainly the counterfactual visit. By contrast, for the Fontans, the failed ceremony of the fête and the missed chance to share the wine are ultimately confirmed to be actual worlds. Ontologically, they live in radical actuality. The dominant (almost automatic) position of actual worlds in the Fontans’ minds does not make room for alternate possibilities, which means that they cannot engage in parallel mental scenarios. The fact that the French couple are simply unable to take transworld journeys between actual and possible worlds has an effect on their present state and mental condition: Monsieur Fontan feels “incoherent and crushed,” “disgraced,” “ruined,” and looks “very old”; Madame Fontan looks “sad” and has tears in her eyes. She feels bad for Monsieur Fontan. These brief remarks about their emotional states nonetheless indicate that the Fontans are not adept at manipulating counterfactual information that may involve alterations to their actual textual world. In this way, in the absence of a “what-might-have-been” scenario, they have become emotionally trapped into their best “possible” world: the actuality of the narrative world. In outlining my hypothesis that short fiction narrative development lies in the progression of virtual spaces, my aim is to emphasize the importance of bringing possible worlds and counterfactuality to bear on studies of the structure of fictional minds. I have already shown the productivity of possible worlds for the theoretical understanding of narrative conflict, and therefore, I intend to further explore the types of counterfactuals in Hemingway’s The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife and The Three-Day Blow and potentially translate the findings into more general ideas regarding the nature of fictional minds and their broad relevance for the study of consciousness in other disciplines. Taking the example of Wine of Wyoming, counterfactual thinking has explicit grammatical forms and structures (“explicit counterfactuals”), but counterfactuals are “more often unremarkable, their intricacy hidden from conscious sight,” as proposed by Fauconnier and

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Turner.1 Following their research on implicit counterfactual spaces, I aim to examine the roots of counterfactual thinking in The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife and The Three-Day Blow, and for this purpose, I will look at relevant examples that do not intuitively feel like counterfactual ones. To this end, I will turn to one main area of interest within this domain of inquiry, namely counterfactuals prompted by negations, absences, and non-things that have the power to create gaps in the (narrative) world. In particular, I wish to extend the study of counterfactuals beyond the confines of grammatical forms to encompass the view of what implicit counterfactuality has to say regarding the nature of fictional minds. In this sense, it is important to notice that the use of counterfactuality in both The Three-Day Blow and The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife gains strength as the conflict intensifies and the undercurrent of heightened tonalities builds gradually toward the explosive point. Critic W. E. Tetlow casts his analysis of these two short stories in the following terms: “[The Three-Day Blow and The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife are] less concerned with character development and plot than […] with a progression of tonal centers that build toward a moment of heightened awareness.”2 My claim is that, in such moments of intense narrative tension, characters make use of tools of counterfactuality to point to the deficiencies and absences of the actual world, and by doing so, they instantly create an altered version of this deficient world. The fact is that these alterations remain in a virtual state, and therefore in permanent non-actuality, which just adds more frustration and disappointment to the world of the characters. This conclusively proves that the protagonists are intrinsically absorbed in their own counterfactual space. The intensity of the textual actual scenes in The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife builds gradually and reaches the climactic point in the testy conversation between the spouses. Before exploring this emotionally charged scene, let us look at the previous sequence with the doctor’s argument with Dick Boulton. In the heated exchanges between the two men about the supposedly stolen logs, the doctor’s fear of physical confrontation intensifies, and his suppressed fury also grows in intensity: ‘All right. If you think the logs are stolen, take your stuff and get out.’ ‘Now, Doc-’ ‘Take your stuff and get out.’ ‘Listen, Doc.’ 1

Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 223.

2 Wendolyn E. Tetlow, Hemingway’s In Our Time: Lyrical Dimensions (London/Toronto:

Associated University Presses, 1992), 65.

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Chapter Four ‘If you call me Doc once again, I’ll knock your eye teeth down your throat.’ ‘Oh, no, you won’t, Doc.’ Dick Boulton looked at the doctor. Dick was a big man. He knew how big a man he was. He liked to get into fights. He was happy. […] The doctor chewed the beard on his lower lip and looked at Dick Boulton. Then he turned away and walked up the hill to the cottage. They could see from his back how angry he was. They all watch him walk up the hill and go inside the cottage. (48)

When Boulton plainly accuses the doctor of stealing the logs, he feels “very uncomfortable” and outraged. Obviously, he acts in self-defense against Boulton’s threat to his esteemed position in the community, but when he goes inside the cottage, his rage smoldering, the confrontation with his wife potentially becomes a more violent scene. In the short episode involving the doctor and his wife, the sequences develop by shifting back and forth between the various levels of the text in a rapidly rising crescendo. The two protagonists examine the space around them and notice apparently irrelevant details that, in fact, function as anchors for counterfactual constructs. For instance, upon entering his room, the doctor’s attention is captured by “a pile of medical journals on the floor by the bureau,” and then closely observes that “they were still in their wrappers unopened” (49). In the other “darkened” room where the wife is lying with “the blinds drawn,” the narrator focuses on the objects on the table next to her bed: her Bible, her copy of Science and Health, and her Quarterly. The striking contrast between their personal objects is not due to the current disjunction of their actual worlds but rather to the realization that their knowledge worlds (as reflected in their different reads) are committed to distinct beliefs and interests. Mentally and intellectually, they live in parallel universes. What follows in their terse conversation proves that they inhabit different mental spaces, not to mention that they cannot be together in the same physical space (the separating wall between their rooms as a physical distance is revealing in this sense). Equally crucial for demonstrating this point are the blanks and pauses in the protagonists’ brief exchanges. When the wife preaches from the scripture in order to uplift her estranged husband, the narrator remarks shortly: “Her husband did not answer” (49). When she gets no answer, the wife calls him again, and “then paused for a moment.” When the husband finally gives her a brief explanation for his anger and hostility, “his wife was silent” again (49). The unuttered words, the direct avoidance of answers, the long pauses, and the insistent breaks in their scant conversation all point to a universe of absent things. Such a belief is based on the supporting research conducted by Fauconnier and Turner that legitimately

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concludes: “We live in a counterfactual zoo of absent and negative things.”1 The scholars challenge a clichéd understanding of counterfactual thinking, namely that counterfactual spaces do not refer to reality. On the contrary, “when one is thinking about reality, counterfactuality is often a vital relation between spaces that involve some of the same people and the same events.”2 I now return to the couple’s conversation and to the “reality” of this emotionally charged scene. The husband’s unwillingness to give an answer and his wife’s intentional pauses and purposeful silences are in fact part of the text’s “reality,” but it involves building a counter-space in which we have the answer from the husband and comments from the wife, instead of pauses. In this counterfactual space with an imaginary base, there is an imaginary husband and an imaginary wife who discuss their problems openly and freely. In a counterfactual relationship, the couple imaginarily inhabit the same physical space, and perhaps more significantly, they harmoniously engage in a meaningful imaginary conversation. These are implicit counterfactual spaces automatically attached to the actual space focused upon by the two protagonists. The consequences of these unstated or implicit counterfactual spaces profoundly affect the “reality” of the textual world. Given the manifested contrast between the actual and counterfactual spaces, the characters prefer to “live” in the more spectacular scenario of effective communication and mutual understanding, but the effect of living in this imaginary space changes the settled space in a way that is dramatic for the couple’s relationship. If up to this moment the characters have tried to keep up the appearances and maintain a surface façade of control, now any sense of control is lost and the threat of terror and fear looms over the current scene. The doctor cleaning his shotgun is an extremely revealing scene for this point: “He was sitting on his bed now, cleaning a shotgun. He pushed the magazine full of the heavy yellow shells and pumped them out again. They were scattered on the bed.” And later: “The doctor wiped his gun carefully with a rag. He pushed the shells back in against the spring of the magazine. He sat with the gun on his knees. He was very fond of it” (49). His minute and careful manipulation of the shotgun shows the rage and fury of the protagonist, who cannot control his inner turmoil now that he has experienced the imaginary but literarily false space of counterfactuality. In this context, the purposeful repetition of the verb “he pushed,” involving forced physical action, coupled with the other action of pumping out “the heavy yellow shells,” exerting further force and pressure, shows that the character’s involvement with the external reality is 1 2

Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, vi. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 230.

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just a way of releasing more tension and displacing more stifled anger. At this point, the textual world splits into a factual and agonizing domain and a non-actualized domain that is created by the mental act of the spouses. The latter remains a possible world, but it never becomes actualized due to the present state of the textual actual world. Furthermore, the other set of negations (“‘No,’ said the doctor—repeated twice—, ‘Nothing much,’” “Her husband did not answer”; emphasis added) casts more light on the structure of their fictional minds. These passages illustrate the researchers’ emphasis on negation as a prolific source for counterfactual thinking.1 As negations prompt counterfactual thoughts, the absences, blanks, and gaps in the actual space inherit “thinghood” from the counterfactual space in which all other breaches and openings are filled consistently. As the text universe becomes stiflingly populated by non-things and non-actions, there is only one way out: the narrative exit—the doctor goes to the woods to shoot black squirrels. Perhaps not accidentally, the next activity he wishes to perform also has to do with exerting physical force and discharging an excess of pressure and tension. It seems that in The Three-Day Blow, implicit counterfactuality emerges as a phenomenon of ever greater intensity and scope. I am proposing that we develop a three-part analysis focused on three different sections of the text that highlight the juxtaposition of counterfactuals and negative occurrences. While the narrative conflict in The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife is prompted by the counterfactual potential of negative situations, in The Three-Day Blow, the resources for counterfactual thought become more diverse, which leads to the realization of intrinsically particular private worlds. As these alternate worlds become more independent and estranged from one another, there are great chances for forceful clashes between them. Ryan reminds us that this is the basic condition for plot advancement: “Conflict between distinct domains is the most productive situation for narrative development.”2 In brief, I will elaborate on my argument with a closer exploration of three different scenes in The Three-Day Blow: 1. the fall scene; 2. the breaking-up scene; and 3. the self-delusion scene. The “fall scene” opens the story. Nick Adams travels through a fall landscape, goes up through an orchard where he notices the picked fruit, and feels the “fall wind” blowing through the “bare trees”: “The rain stopped as Nick turned into the road that went up through the orchard. The fruit had been picked and the fall wind blew through the bare trees. Nick stopped and picked up a Wagner apple from beside the road, shiny in the 1

“Negation routinely sets up counterfactual blended spaces, which can be elaborated.” Fauconnier andTurner, The Way We Think, 239 2 Ryan, Possible Worlds, 122.

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brown grass from the rain” (59). As he moves forward out of the orchard, he sees a cottage “on the top of the hill” and focuses sharply on the “bare” porch and “the smoke coming from the chimney.” The bareness of the scenery and the winter seclusion configure a world of multiple absences and losses. They anticipate counterfactual mental representations of a fuller world in which trees bloom with fruit (instead of trees with “picked fruit”) and in which the porch is animated by human presence (instead of a “bare” porch). Nick Adams constructs a fantasy world of plenitude and abundance by initially reflecting on the absences in the actual world. Almost simultaneously, he runs the mental blend of two contradictory spaces: the factual bareness of the landscape and the counterfactual abundance of the scenery. The blend contains a non-event that plays a role in the further development of the story and in the behavior of the protagonist. To rephrase the last point, once Nick Adams begins to consider altered versions of the action, he constructs “behavioral counterfactuals” in which “alterations concern the story or character actions,” as defined by Hilary Danneberg’s theoretically informed study on counterfactual thinking.1 With the “fall scene,” Nick begins to make hypothetical alterations to other sequences of events, especially the ones concerning his ephemerally consumed love relationship with Marjorie (what his friend Bill ironically calls “the Marge business”). However, in order to create an altered version of courses of events, Nick’s personality needs to be amended accordingly.2 The fact that he barely recognizes his face in the reflection of the mirror is indicative of his change. He is now already in his friend’s house—this short passage makes the transition to the following relevant scene (“the breakingup scene”): “On his way back to the living room he passed a mirror in the dining room and looked in it. His face looked strange. He smiled at the face in the mirror and it grinned back at him. He winked at it and went on. It was not his face but it didn’t make any difference” (64). In the “breaking-up scene,” Bill and his friend discuss the reasons why Nick has broken up with Marjorie. The transition to this scene involves a sudden shift of tone “from a drink-induced loquaciousness to sober gravity,”3 as Bill tells Nick he was “very wise” “to bust off that Marge business” (65). Again, there is a gap 1

Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality, 120. Dannenberg makes the distinction between “behavioural counterfactuals” and “characterological counterfactuals.” In opposition to behavioural counterfactuals, characterological counterfactuals “alter character in order to create a counterfactual course of events, thereby creating a new version of that character.” Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality, 120. However, I argue that altered courses of events can directly change behavior and configure “a new version” of a character. 3 Tetlow, Hemingway’s In Our Time, 64. 2

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created by Nick and Marjorie’s separation that prompts an alteration or “undoing” of events of the factual world and the subsequent creation of a new counterfactual outcome. Both Bill and Nick get involved in the undoing of Nick’s break-up, but they alter this past event with their own different tools of counterfactuality. Bill chooses to use explicitly counterfactual operations, mostly in the form of grammatical conditionals, whereas Nick typically uses negation as a basic resource for implicit counterfactuality. Not surprisingly, the effects of their mental imaginative scenarios differ profoundly. They both know that the undoing of Nick’s relationship with Marjorie and the further consideration of counterfactual alternatives influence their affects and feeling of control. It is Bill who initiates the discussion of “that Marge business,” and because he sees their separation as a positive outcome, he starts to generate downward counterfactuals. According to McMullan et al., the purpose is to indirectly enjoy the desired state that has finally been attained after the couple’s break-up. It could be plausibly argued that people “generate downward counterfactuals in response to positive outcomes because of a desire to enjoy the present.”1 Obviously, Bill sees the end of Nick’s love affair as a favorable reality which exerts a powerful effect on his ease of imagining an extremely elaborated downward counterfactual. His line of reasoning is made more explicit by precisely counterfactualizing the information that is intimately related to the inner workings of the love relationship features. Such a mental achievement involves an imaginative feat accomplished through the agency of a complex image: “It was the only thing to do. If you hadn’t, by now you’d be back home working trying to get enough money to get married.” / “If you’d have married her you would have had to marry the whole family. Remember her mother and that guy she married.” / “Imagine having them around the house all the time and going to Sunday dinners at their house, and having them over to dinner and her telling Marge all the time what to do and how to act.” / “If you’d gone on that way we wouldn’t be here now.” / “Probably we wouldn’t even be going fishing tomorrow.” (65)

What is of particular interest here is not the effect of this long series of counterfactual conditionals on Bill’s affect (after all, he is only an external observer) but on how they influence Nick’s affective states. In response to Bill’s downward counterfactuals, Nick seems to feel relatively better and appears to enjoy his desired state of being free and uncommitted. On closer inspection, however, Nick’s brief noncommittal responses show the fact 1

McMullen, Markman, and Gavanski, “Living in Neither the Best Nor Worst of All Possible Worlds,” 142.

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that he does not feel prepared for the future: “Now he did not know what he was going to do” (66). “Nick said nothing,” the narratorial voice notices succinctly, and later we are made to observe Nick’s unwillingness to participate in the elaboration of the counterfactual alternative to his (in all probability, never consummated) affair: “Nick nodded” or “Nick sat quiet.” Nick’s physical retreat from Bill’s companionship is the first indication of his involvement in another parallel mental activity: Nick begins to reconsider his affair with Marjorie through a detailed construction of implicit counterfactuals. While Bill drives the conversation further, Nick remains uncommitted and tries to engage in a thorough examination of his sudden emotional turmoil as he strikingly realizes the truth of his love affair: “All of a sudden everything was over” (66). The cognitive mechanisms that come into play in response to Nick’s negative mood differ from the ones employed by his friend. More specifically, even though both protagonists generate downward counterfactuals, Nick’s powerfully negative emotions provide the sense that his authentic downward counterfactual experience can rectify the situation through his behavior. In the accurate indirect thought report, readers can appreciate the complexity of Nick’s affective responses to his imagined alternatives. The obsessive repetition of different negative forms illustrates Nick’s ability to imagine an implicit counterfactual space that is expected to have implications on his affects and behavior. It is perhaps worth dwelling on the theoretical remarks I have made in relation to The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife, namely that negations occur in a diversity of forms and complexities, yet they must be further acknowledged as a prolific source for counterfactual thinking. Negations in The Three-Day Blow are more productive than in The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife, due mostly to the narrator’s persistent and sustained reliance on the negative forms as the basis of Nick’s counterfactual thoughts. The following list of frequently used negation words or phrases summarizes the current position: “nothing” (repeated three times), “gone” (used five times), “never” (used twice), and the long series of negative verbal forms: “Bill wasn’t there,” “He wasn’t sitting in front of the fire,” “He wasn’t drunk,” “I don’t know why it was,” “I couldn’t help it.” The rapid accumulation of terms with intensely negative meanings expressing Nick’s ache of hollowness (“It was all gone, finished,” 65) prompts him to construct a large space of implicit counterfactuality. In this counterfactual alternative, negative occurrences are replaced by their counterparts: here, nothing is lost or gone, his love affair is not finished, and Nick and Marjorie continue to plan their trip to Italy together. The immediate implications of the blending of these counterparts (as in the blend of the factual space of “it was all gone now” and the counterfactual space of “everything has been saved”) determine a

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change in Nick’s actual affective state: “That was a thought. That made him feel better,” “He felt happy now,” “He felt lighter” (67). Additionally, Nick’s mental blends are also likely to determine changes in his anticipated behavior in the future: “There was not anything that was irrevocable. He might go into town Saturday night” (67). The fact that these fantasy worlds are clearly not actualizable as yet reveals a precarious mental space that remains for as long as Nick has the capacity to delude himself (hence the title of the last part—“the self-delusion scene”) into believing that “still he could always go into town Saturday night” (67). That is, his counterfactualizing capacity is “a good thing to have in reserve” (67). Nick’s counterfactual simulation of a solid relationship with Marjorie makes the event of being together seem more real, more probable, or possibly true. I will use the above example to briefly consider the usefulness of a possible world approach to narrative studies. With the context of The ThreeDay Blow in mind, I now wish to discuss counterfactual thinking in the broader context of imagination. Shelly Taylor and Lien B. Pham have convincingly advanced the view that counterfactual thoughts should be regarded as genuine exercises of mental simulation.1 In particular, the study demonstrates that mental simulation can strengthen the relation between action and goal-directed thought, and their findings are premised on three main reasons: 1. mental simulations make action seem real and true; 2. simulation provides information essential to planning; and 3. simulations produce intense emotional reactions. This theoretical information becomes clear in the analysis of the three short stories chosen for this sub-chapter. We may safely argue that the intense mental activity of counterfactuality that the protagonists in these stories seem to handle so expertly has a tremendous impact on their affective responses, their attitudes, and their behavioral decisions for the future. It is precisely the simulation effect of counterfactual thoughts that can serve several “adaptive functions”: ameliorate negative affects, modify attitudes, facilitate coping with negative events, and influence behavior.2 If the possible world theory has been applied to narrative discourse in order to account for the structure of the text’s universe and, perhaps more importantly, to account for the development of the plot, we can come to a fuller understanding of the fictional world, defined by Semino as “a dynamic combination of a textual actual world on the one hand, and different types of alternate possible worlds formulated by characters on the 1

Shelly E. Taylor and Lien B. Pham, “From Thought to Action: Effects of ProcessVersus Outcome-Based Mental Simulations on Performance,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25, no. 2 (1999): 250–251. 2 Gleicher et al., “With an Eye Toward the Future,” 300.

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other.”1 Characters’ mental simulation ultimately stimulates by repetition possible imagined alternatives to the factual domain of the text. Within the arena of alternate possibilities, the use of counterfactual mental simulation dictates affective responses, courses of events, and plans for future behavior. In this fashion, counterfactuality and mental simulation are emerging as phenomena of great intensity with a pivotal role in the full understanding of the narrative universe. More particularly, they allow readers to understand how fictional minds work and reason. This view links closely with Alan Palmer’s position that maintains: “The main semiotic channels by which the reader accesses fictional worlds, and the most important sets of instructions that allow the reader to reconstruct the fictional world, are those that govern the reader’s understanding of the workings of characters’ minds.”2 Fictional minds will benefit from further examination in Chapter 5.

1 2

Semino, “Possible Worlds and Mental Spaces,” 86–87. Palmer, Fictional Minds, 34.

CHAPTER FIVE FICTIONAL MINDS, MENTAL SPACES, AND THEIR COUTERFACTUAL CAPACITIES

5.1 Hemingway reconsidered In the previous chapters, I have shown how Hemingway’s short fiction exploits the resources of complex conceptual structures. Therefore, I needed to develop analytical tools to investigate the resources offered by short stories so as to examine the mental mappings that take place during reading. To this end, I have looked at several cases in which readers understand one particular concept in terms of another, a cognitive process known in specialized literature as “analogy.” It may be worth recalling Chapter 4, where I state that, in order to think metaphorically, readers need to be able to perform analogical connections. In the stories analyzed there, the analogical connections between journey and life, for instance, should not be understood as simple imaginative mappings or fanciful structures but as legitimate mappings that contribute to refining our system of connecting mental categories. In this sense, the cognitive revision seeks to remove the wrong claim that analogical connections are opposed to categorical connections. Rather, they are interdependent one upon another. Besides the categorical structures that are active and functional, countless alternative connections can be made, and, for this reason, Mark Turner shows that “analogies exist to unmask, capture, or invent connections absent from or upstaged by our category structures.”1 Due to the powers of analogy, our most entrenched category structures can be disturbed, restructured, or influenced. From this point of view, one should see our category structures as highly dynamic and subject to the changes imposed by new analogies. As indicated in Chapter 4, the conceptual metaphor theory (first introduced in sub-chapter 1.3) gives a new view on meaning formation— meanings are not fixed or stable, but primarily dynamic and active. Metaphorical thinking establishes mappings between two conceptual domains—a source domain and a target domain—while the projection of 1

Turner, Reading Minds, 122.

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the language between these two conceptual domains reinforces systematic relations or mappings that are stored in the long-term memory. Significantly, the conceptual metaphor theory analyzes stable or entrenched conceptual structures. For instance, in the conceptual metaphor “The committee has kept me in the dark about this matter,” Grady et al.1 analyze how the conceptual source domain of “vision” can be used to describe a situation of understanding in the target domain. First, relevant elements in the source and target domains are selected and then combined through a mapping that is stored in the long-term memory. In this particular case, the knowledge concerning vision and seeing corresponds to structures about knowing and awareness. Because this principled mapping associates the experience of literally being “in the dark” with stages of ignorance while the experience of visual perception is related to knowledge, we are now able to understand more fanciful connections, such as the one in the following statement: “You’d need an electron microscope to find the point of this article.” With the tools offered by the theory of conceptual metaphors, I have tried to address the nature of narrative meaning in a collection of short fictional texts and have looked at the linguistic and cognitive processes available for the reader in the construal of meaning. Cognitive and metaphorical theories have allowed me to simulate the workings of the reader’s mind and evaluate their experience of narrative time and space. The texts chosen configured as spatial stories afforded a two-level analysis that supports my interpretation: first, the emphasis has been on image-schematic structures set into motion to understand narrative space; second, the analysis focused on the metaphorical projections of these physical stories. I have found that one dominant pattern in the stories discussed in previous sections plays a key role in the conceptualization of narrative: “the forking path” conceptual metaphor. The representation of space as a “fork” means that characters have, literally, reached junctions in their road and, metaphorically, are confronted with the branching of possibilities and choices. In narratological terms, I have suggested that, in these cases, paths diverge from the textual factual world to events in counterfactual worlds, which leads us to the reconfiguration of narrative time. The diverging branches of time invite readers to contemplate hypothetical scenarios, unrealized possibilities, and unactualized courses of events that allow a more fluid perspective on temporality. The scope of this volume (as illustrated already in Chapters 3 and 4) has been to speculate whether the narrative powers of short fiction lie in the 1

Joseph E. Grady, Todd Oakley, and Seana Coulson, “Blending and Metaphor,” in Metaphors in Cognitive Linguistics, eds. Raymond Gibbs and Gerard Steen (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999), 103.

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contemplation of this virtual terrain nascent with alternatives. The detailed discussion of Hemingway’s texts has helped me to present evidence in support of this assumption. In connection with this, the theory of possible worlds (explored in sub-chapters 4.3-4.6) has paved the way toward examining the narrative world as a fully autonomous world and toward reinterpreting the notion of actuality with respect to the factual domain of the text. In a universe created by competing possibilities, the textual factual world loses out against other equally “actual” worlds. By taking the reader on a mental exploration of the fictional world, I demonstrated the short story’s immersive quality, i.e. the text’s capacity to capture the reader. In this sense, I considered the ways in which short stories simulate our bodily experience of physical space and our sense of temporality. In line with cognitive scientists (Johnson,1 Turner2), I argued that literature recreates our basic cognitive mechanisms for spatial orientation that are later mapped onto more abstract concepts (e.g. time). In sum, the discussion in the previous chapter has pointed to one important feature of short fiction: its complex narrative model is informed by the infinite potentialities of virtual, non-realized domains. I have further argued that the major narrative conflict that can move the plot forward emerges between clashing private worlds sustained by different characters and/or within conflicting worlds prompted by individual characters. Moreover, this observation not only has effects in a purely theoretical arena but plays an essential role in studies of counterfactuality. The analysis of counterfactual thinking in fictional characters simulates authentic human responses to concepts of alternativity, multiplicity, or possibility. If we view fictional characters as human-like subjects, I maintain that we have the key to an infinity of representations of “the mind in action.” The latter part of my argument challenges narratological studies to address a rather neglected topic within the field of inquiry: the study of the fictional mind. If we accept Alan Palmer’s thesis that “narrative fiction is, in essence, the presentation of fictional mental functioning,”3 then we can advance an established theory dealing with the centrality of fictional minds in literature. In the next section, I will return to the fascinating avenue of research into fictional minds. Before I reveal the full implications of the aforementioned assumption, I must first make a brief incursion into the theoretical territory that complements the perspective offered by the theory of fictional mind (detailed in section 5.2). First, I explore the roots of the mental space theory 1

Johnson, The Body in the Mind. Turner, Reading Minds. 3 Palmer, Fictional Minds, 5. 2

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(introduced in sub-chapter 1.4)—an influential cognitive theory of meaning formation developed by the leading researcher Gilles Fauconnier in two of his ground-breaking studies, Mental Spaces (1994) and Mappings in Thought and Language (1997). In sub-chapter 5.3, I will examine the more recent developments of the theory into the conceptual blending theory. Known simply as “blending,” it is generally regarded as a theoretical continuation of the mental space theory and was developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner in their pioneering work The Way We Think (2002). Due to their central concerns and inner architecture, both theories have mental spaces as integral parts of their structure and they both propose a dynamic approach to meaning construction. According to Fauconnier, in a discourse, we constantly build mental spaces and establish mappings between them. In his definition, mental spaces are “partial structures that proliferate when we think and talk, allowing a fine-grained partitioning of our discourse and knowledge structures,”1 fundamentally stipulating that mental spaces partition meanings into small conceptual “packets.” These conceptual spaces include specific information but, nevertheless, are constructed on the basis of generalized linguistic patterns and common cultural backgrounds. As mental spaces are constructed in on-line communication, they form temporary conceptual “packets” that are purposely set up for local understanding. More important, however, are the connections established between distinct elements in different mental spaces, since they play a crucial role in meaning formation. Fauconnier2 has identified three major types of mappings: projection mappings established between a source domain and a target domain (previously analyzed in relation to conceptual metaphors), pragmatic function mappings established between entities within the same frame of experience (metonymies are examples of pragmatic function mappings), and schema/frame mappings as the projection of a schema or frame onto a particular utterance. As shown in previous chapters, metaphorical or projection mappings play a crucial role in the study of the mind, and more specifically, in the study of meaning formation. In metaphorical utterances, the cross-domain mappings involve two domains of experience that display structural and systematic relations. By contrast, in the theories of mental spaces and conceptual blending, the basic unit of cognitive conceptualization is not the domain (correlated in our experience) but the mental space (Fauconnier3), which is a temporary mental representation, built online in the course of communication. The larger domains of experience used for understanding 1

Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language, 11. Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language. 3 Fauconnier, Mental Spaces. 2

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conceptual metaphors structure the more particular scenario of a mental space. Therefore, as opposed to domains, mental spaces are short-term constructs, smaller and more specific than domains, as argued by Grady et al.: If conceptual metaphor theory is primarily concerned with well-established metaphoric associations between concepts, and blending theory focuses on the ability to combine elements from familiar conceptualisations into new and meaningful ones, then conceptual metaphors are among the stable structures available for exploitation by the blending process. […] [C]onventional metaphors feed the blending process by establishing links between elements in distinct domains and spaces.1

For instance, in the example of “the committee has kept me in the dark about this matter,”2 a mental space would involve the introduction of a subject standing “in the dark.” In sum, according to the views held by mental space theory, meaning is always situated and context-dependent, and therefore any process of conceptualization can only emerge from language being used in context. In other words, language itself does not “provide” the meaning, but can only function as a prompter for the more complex mental representations that are always guided by the context in which we hear the discourse. Turner3 explains the process as follows: “Expressions do not mean; they are prompts for us to construct meanings by working with processes we already know. In no sense is the meaning […] of any utterance ‘right there in the words.’ When we understand an utterance, we in no sense are understanding ‘just what the words say’; the words themselves say nothing independent of the richly detailed knowledge and powerful cognitive processes we bring to bear.” The theories of mental space and conceptual blending prove prolific for the literary theorizing of larger units of language or discourse (texts) to show how they may become meaningful. In order to exemplify this theoretical point, I will set out to explore how these two theories of meaning may account for the construction of meaning in short fiction, in particular in Hemingway’s narrative discourse. The analysis of mental spaces as applied to literary texts can prove extremely useful with respect to several issues: firstly, as reading involves the construction of short-term interrelated mental spaces, an accurate description of the interplay between different types of mental spaces is likely to account for the literary effects of stories. Secondly, the representation of mental spaces not only emerges from “real”/factual 1

Grady, Oakley, and Coulson, “Blending and Metaphor,” 110–111. Grady, Oakley, and Coulson, “Blending and Metaphor,” 103. 3 Turner, Reading Minds, 206. 2

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information in the storyworld but can also be generated by what is “not real” in the story—for instance, the number of mental spaces created by the characters’ wishes, dreams, unrealized hypotheses, or alternatives that are only considered but never actualized. Given the shared aims of the two theories concerning the inner nature of meaning in literary discourse,1 I will try to build on their findings in order to examine how fictional minds work in the context of the narrative worlds they inhabit, whether actualized or not. The fact that I have decided to move the emphasis away from the reader’s mind and on to the fictional mind is due to the fact that I wish to provide further context for testing the assumptions proposed in earlier chapters. What I aim to stress is that the complexity of short fiction relies largely on the simulation effect of how humans come to grips with space, time, and counterfactuality. Hemingway’s modernist texts challenge the dominant factual world of the text and artfully render it within the complex realm of plurality and alternativeness. In the end, by extensively resorting to the theories of mental space and conceptual blending, I will address their narrative implications for how characters, with their fictional minds, are able to rationalize narrative events that might have happened, but have not. In short, I will pursue the analysis of cases of hypothetical thinking in the American writer’s short narrative texts and acknowledge them as fully articulated simulations of counterfactual thinking.

5.2. Emergence of fictional minds So far, I have focused on the representation of the virtual in the human mind engaged in acts of reading short fiction. It is an accepted view that alternative worlds are genuine constructs of the human mind, but this section and the ones that follow are premised on a less central assumption in narratological studies: characters in the narrative universe can produce and engage in non-actualized worlds. This approach is heavily indebted to Marie-Laure Ryan’s ground-breaking study on possible worlds and narrative theory, where she clearly points out: “The virtual in the narrative universe exists in the thoughts of characters.”2 A large part of the discussion of short stories in the following sub-chapters draws on this idea in order to explore the nature of the fictional mind and its characteristic features. Therefore, the point of departure will be a close introspection into the structure of the characters’ minds with an emphasis on two essential aspects: 1

For a practical application of the mental space theory, see, for example, Semino, “Possible Worlds and Mental Spaces,” 83–98. 2 Ryan, Possible Worlds, 110.

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the public and the private manifestations of the fictional minds. More specifically, with regard to the public aspect, I will attempt to examine the publicly available information that can say something valuable about the character’s consciousness; secondly, I will look at the wide pool of private mental spaces created in the fictional mind in order to explain one special mental feat: the ability to generate rich parallel mental scenarios. Before further developing my arguments, I will elaborate more on the need to bridge the gap between general cognitive theories and the science of narratology in order to explain the recent emergence of fictional minds in narratological studies. In light of the findings of cognitive scientists, narrative theories can become a rich and fascinating area of studying the conceptual powers of the mind, and in so doing, this continuing research can further strengthen the broader theory of mind (see the highly original applications of cognitive science techniques in the work of such scholars as Monica Fludernik, Catherine Emmott, David Herman, Manfred Jahn, Marie-Laure Ryan, Herman, Jahn, and Ryan1, etc.). This last point is especially important for the overall development of cognitive mental functioning, as this subject has been the focus of convergent research interests in various disciplines, clustered under the umbrella term of cognitive sciences. Whether we speak of the mental life of the actual individual or of the created figure in the literary texts, both approaches can prove beneficial for the overall study of the mind. In the long run, we can claim, as Palmer argues, that “there are ways of bridging the gaps between the two discourses of cognitive science and narrative fiction and that, if not cognitive scientists, then at the very least narratologists using the techniques of cognitive science, are ready to handle novels. However, if cognitive science terminology is to be integrated successfully into narrative theory, it will be necessary first to deepen and enlarge our understanding of the central role that fictional minds play in the functioning of narrative.”2 The key contribution of cognitive mental functioning to narrative studies can be applied to four narrative levels, as defined by classical narratology: the author, the reader, the narrator, and the storyworld participant. First, the author engages in cognitive work for processing fictional or factual 1

Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology; Emmott, Narrative Comprehension; Herman, “Cognitive Narratology”; Herman, Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences; Herman, Story Logic; Jahn, “Speak, friend, and enter”; Jahn, “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives”; Ryan, “Cognitive Maps”; Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality; Ryan, Possible Worlds; Herman, Jahn, and Ryan, The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory. 2 Alan Palmer, “The Mind Beyond the Skin,” in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. David Herman (Stanford, CA: CSLI, 2003), 327.

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information so as to produce a verbal text with its correlated story and storyworld. The reader processes the text in order to produce complex mental representations of the storyworld. On the next level, there are the other selves of the real author and reader—the implied author (Booth1) and the implied reader (Iser2). The implied author manipulates the information in the text in specific ways so as to create particular reactions, feelings, or attitudes in the implied reader. At the textual level, the narrator is supposed to comment on the storyworld or reflect on the relationship between participants. The fourth level, that of the storyworld participants, captures the totality of individuals interacting and forming their own mental representation of what they perceive in the storyworld. They can make inferences, formulate possibilities, reflect on past happenings, or construct their own virtual world. In essence, if we accept Margolin’s thesis, they can engage in “any conceivable cognitive activity.”3 However, it should be noted, as Margolin clearly points out in his study “Cognitive Science, the Thinking Mind, and the Literary Narrative,” that models and concepts developed by cognitive science (empirically tested on actual minds) can be applicable for literary minds on the condition that we are aware of “the confines of a make-believe world” in which we are operating.4 Here, we should pretend that storyworld participants are sufficiently human-like and may exist outside the text that actually creates them by semiotic signs and terms. Starting from this premise, storyworld participants perform actions on the basis of the cognitive analysis taking place in their fictional mind. With the powerful framework of cognitive science, narratology can use concepts and categories drawing on the broader discipline of the thinking mind with the purpose of mapping out the myriads of fictional minds, and also with the more promising purpose of advancing new theories of reading. Admittedly, fiction abounds in descriptions of inner speech, private thought, or introspective thinking, but post-classical narratology argues that it is this often hardly noticeable reality that has to be exploited more extensively. In the new science of fictional minds, studies move the emphasis away from the private and intensely subjective consciousness (direct thought, thought report, free indirect thought give the view of 1

Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983 [1961]). 2 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 3 Uri Margolin, “Cognitive Science, the Thinking Mind, and the Literary Narrative,” in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. David Herman (Stanford, CA: CSLI, 2003), 273. 4 Margolin, “Cognitive Science,” 273.

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fictional minds as enclosed private spaces). Quite the contrary, scholars trained at the cognitive school like Alan Palmer1, Uri Margolin2, or Lubomír Doležel3 interrogate our capacity for reconstructing the fictional mind in a specifically innovative fashion. Their studies are premised on the fact that the reconstruction process is intimately linked to the description of action. It is a widely accepted view that thoughts and mental processes always accompany action. It seems, therefore, that we should examine the physical context in which action takes place and where minds exist more closely. By closely linking minds and thoughts, post-classical narratology proposes a new view of the fictional mind: a “mind in action,” as Palmer calls it.4 What this means is that readers attribute cognitive mental functioning to narrators and characters by thoroughly inspecting both their behavior and speech. As in real life, readers observe “social minds in action” and collect cues to analyze the mental behavior of individual characters or narrators. Other studies have pointed out that reconstructing fictional mental functioning involves intense mental work of inference on the part of the reader, if we acknowledge that fictional characters are ontologically incomplete (see, for instance, Manfred Jahn5 and the integration of frames and implicit realworld knowledge in his narratological analyses). Palmer’s functionalist and teleological perspective on fictional minds considers “the purposive nature of characters’ thought,”6 whereby readers should explore the set of causal terms (motives, intentions, decisions, wishes, regrets, etc.) that sit at the roots of characters’ behavior and actions. Even when the text reveals little explicit information regarding the causal network that has generated the psychological motivation for physical events, readers should explore physical happenings in the story that have the potential to trigger changes in mental states and events. In fact, Palmer’s illuminating study on fictional minds is concerned more specifically with “the socially situated” (“intermental thinking”) or the “distributed nature” of cognition.7 In outlining his hypothesis, Palmer’s aim is not to underscore the importance of consciousness at the expense of public external behavior 1

Palmer, Fictional Minds. See also: Palmer, “The Mind Beyond the Skin.” Margolin, “Cognitive Science.” See also: Uri Margolin, “The Doer and the Deed: Action as a Basis for Characterization in Narrative,” Poetics Today 7, no. 2 (1986): 205–225. 3 Doležel, Heterocosmica. 4 Palmer, “The Mind Beyond the Skin,” 333. 5 Jahn, “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives.” 6 Palmer, Fictional Minds, 12. 7 Palmer, Fictional Minds, 15. For further analysis of these concepts, see sub-chapter 5.3. 2

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in his analysis of fictional minds. What he wishes to emphasize is that a clear-cut internal/external or private/public distinction can be an extremely simplistic perspective on mental functioning in fictional narratives. Instead, we can study “the whole mind.”1 In Palmer’s own parlance: “A postclassical perspective on the construction of fictional minds should be concerned with this complex relationship between the inaccessibility to others of a character’s thought and the extent to which the same thought is publicly available to others in the storyworld.”2 It is clear then that the reader’s knowledge of fictional minds is a combination of “observation of behavior” and “awareness of consciousness,” which means that thoughts can be publicly available (as expressed in physical actions) as well as private and inaccessible. What I aim for in the following sections is to supplement Palmer’s line of reasoning and highlight the ways in which it can be applied to Hemingway’s short fictional narratives where “the mind extends beyond the skin”3 to such a great extent that we are often given no direct access to his fictional minds. Hemingway tends to underrepresent his protagonists’ feelings while emphasizing their physical action to such a degree that it often seems to replace mental events. Hence, the reader is able to reconstruct the mind of a character from explicit behavior, and in so doing, the fictional thought becomes public and available. To use Palmer’s words, thought becomes “situated and purposive.” The first pattern of thought I propose is concerned with the analysis of behavior and action in order to prove that there are underlying mental realities beneath physical doings. For that, I will use Palmer’s concept of “behavioral narratives,” as applied to several short narratives by Hemingway. In connection to the first model of fictional thought, I will also consider the importance of third-person ascription in the American writer’s narratives. The following discussion takes into consideration another mode of fictional thinking (e.g. particular instances of indirect thought report) which anticipates one of my main arguments: I argue that in Hemingway’s texts, thought is not only public and available but also private and inaccessible. The remainder of this chapter will expand on the conceptual framework for the analysis of private fictional thought and will develop the model of “counterfactual narratives” extensively and in ways that will suggest that a good deal of fictional thought is virtual in nature. The stories to be analyzed will show characters spending time imagining altered versions of reality, simulating reality, and mentally rehearsing a version of the world that may

1

Palmer, Fictional Minds, 137. Palmer, Fictional Minds, 174. 3 Palmer, Fictional Minds, 139. 2

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remain unauthentic but nonetheless essential for their whole mental reality. Arguably, these alternate worlds empower the text’s surfaces. In the end, this chapter works on the central assumption that Hemingway’s short texts construct fictional minds by favoring one of the models of fictional thought I propose in this study. Accordingly, there are three types of narratives: “behavioral narratives” (with the emphasis on available thought), “transitional narratives” that can be regarded as a mixed form of relatively indirect or direct access to mental language, and a narrative favoring a combination of “observation of behavior” and “awareness of consciousness.” The third model (“counterfactual narratives”) constructs hypothetical event sequences, imagined alternatives, or encounters and situations not yet actualized. Such fictional narratives mimic our real-world inclinations of counterfactualizing. In view of these three models, fictional thoughts manifest substantially within either the physical or the virtual domains—this conceptualization can give us the preliminary basis for speculating on the nature of narrative conflict in Hemingway’s short fiction. Thus, to preview the sections that follow, I argue that conflict can be read in the clash between the set of motives or intentions behind physical action and the non-realization of the action. It can be read equally plausibly, however, in the clashes within the private embedded sub-worlds of the characters. I hope that the following analyses of selected texts will demonstrate the validity of this distinction between types of fictional minds in Hemingway. If narrative discourse is the representation of such complex and varied thinking minds, it is apparent that fictional cognitive functioning can provide us with countless forms for actual human minds. According to Margolin, the whole process happens like this: “[T]hrough a process of abstraction and generalization, such instances [mental functioning of nonfactual individuals] can and do serve for readers as a major factor in organizing and interpreting their beliefs about key aspects of actual human interiority, and in this way they can and do contribute at least to ‘folk psychology’, if not to cognitive science.”1 In truth, literature proves to be one special case of describing instances of working minds that are not yet explicit in scientific theory. That is why literature’s non-scientific mode of portraying the mind can serve as a reservoir for a sound theory of the mind.

1

Margolin, “Cognitive Science,” 285.

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5.3 Fictional thought in behavioral and transitional narratives: The Killers, Out of Season, and Up in Michigan This section will consider fictional minds in the context of the Hemingway story that most pushes our cognitive abilities to their limits and where we are required to restore many storyworlds with minimum information. Here, as elsewhere in my book, I prove that economy of narrative stimulates our cognitive capacity. This last point becomes especially important for the purpose of this sub-chapter: I seek to prove that “behavioral” and “transitional narratives” posit a mind of a public nature. The narrative models I propose primarily offer an externalist view of the mind. The differences between these narrative forms are not of essence but of degree. After starting with The Killers, a genuine behavioral narrative in which action replaces mental events, we analyze two other “transitional narratives” (Out of Season and Up in Michigan) that accommodate accounts of acts of introspection. I call them “narratives of transition” since they open the door to the analysis of the most dynamic and dramatic mind model revealed by Hemingway’s “counterfactual narratives.” I will devote the remainder of this chapter to the third and most important model for my purposes and theoretical intentions.

5.3.1 The Killers The Killers (1927, published in Men Without Women) will serve as the chief example of the first type of fictional thought. This story is significantly reduced to external action: two black-clad killers, Al and Max, enter a small lunchroom in a town in Illinois where the action takes place, threaten the owner of the place at gunpoint, tie up the cook and Nick Adams in the kitchen, and wait for the arrival of Ole Anderson, a prize-winning Swedish boxer. The killers are on the lookout for “the Swede” and plan to kill him as he had supposedly betrayed them, even if, in the words of one of the killers, “he [the intended victim] never had a chance to do anything to us. He never even seen us” (207).1 The Swede does not show up, and so the killers leave disappointed. Upon their departure, George, who runs the lunchroom, sends Nick to warn Ole of the threats. Nick is perplexed to find a passive fighter who refuses to fight or to take action. When he returns from Anderson’s place, Nick promptly decides to leave the town: “I’m going to 1

Ernest Hemingway, The Killers, in Ernest Hemingway. The Collected Stories, edited and introduced by James Fenton (London: Everyman’s Library, 1995), 204– 212.

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get out of this town” (212). This third-person narrative runs on short dramatic dialog that would eventually turn into a playscript. The content is largely action-oriented, as nearly every cue involves the immediate activation of the plot and the further movement of the action to the next stage. To illustrate, let us examine a short scene just after the gangsters’ exit when George sends Nick to warn the fighter of the dangers: ‘Listen,’ George said to Nick. ‘You better go see Ole Anderson.’ ‘All right.’ ‘You better not have anything to do with it at all,’ Sam, the cook, said. ‘You better stay way out of it.’ ‘Don’t go if you don’t want to,’ George said. ‘Mixing up in this ain’t going to get you anywhere,’ the cook said. ‘You stay out of it.’ ‘I’ll go see him,’ Nick said to George. ‘Where does he live?’ (210)

From the analysis of this short passage, it is clear that every external action and conflict is fully rendered in advance in the brief exchange between the three characters (George, Nick, and the cook). All the information is shared and all changes are controlled before they are turned into eventful action. George suggests a course of action (warning Ole), Nick agrees, but the cook warns Nick and tells him to think it over, George leaves Nick room for decisions, the cook gives another warning, but Nick finally takes the decision to go and take the suggested course of action. The tension created is primarily dynamic because it is generated by the alternating phases of anticipated action. Once the action is verbalized, the three characters are bound to put it into action. With this example in mind, it is important to make a few introductory remarks about the role of the narrator in the narrative discourse. In between the rapidly alert exchanges, the voice of the narrator is reduced to a minimum; for instance, the neutral reporting verbs do not indicate any value judgment on the part of the narrator, so we can read the unobtrusive comments: “Al said,” “George said,” “Al asked George,” “Max called,” “said Al from the kitchen,” etc. In addition, the narrator makes short unelaborated descriptions of the background and refrains from giving a personal and partial view that could influence our perception: “Outside it was getting dark. The street-light came on outside the window” (204) or “Outside the arc-light shone through the bare branches of a tree” (210). Given the narrator’s extremely reserved attitude and the role of the dialog to generate action and conflict, it could be plausibly argued that the construction of fictional minds is an impossible task in this explicitly action-oriented text. At the same time, however, there are some linguistic signals which, according to the implied iceberg theory, point to another dimension of the text: the observation of the characters’

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behavior. Pursuing the point further, I maintain that the surface descriptions of behavior in the storyworld have significant implications for the reconstruction of fictional minds. I argue that this is the clearest manifestation of how fictional characters of The Killers reason with their fictional mind. The following examples reinforce this last point. The study of the action as it is experienced by each character draws attention to the subjective elements in a story that mostly consists of impassive modes and impersonal tones. Despite the consistently reserved narratorial voice that lacks personal involvement and avoids viewpoints, characters still experience the narrative world from their own subjective point of view. True, readers do not get direct access to the characters’ private trains of thought, but their typical involvement in the story still bears their very personal mark. Hemingway’s detailed exploration of different modes of visual orienting in the storyworld is revealing in this respect. Cognitive psychologists Klein and Shore define visual orienting as “a set of processes used to give a region of space and the object in it preferential access to the visual and cognitive behavior that control behavior.”1 They distinguish between “overt” and “covert” orienting. In “overt orienting,” eye movements focus on a relatively small area that presents important targets. In contrast, “covert orienting” is not accomplished by a shift of gaze since it involves an internal selection of regions or objects that are preferred over others. Both overt and covert orienting can be environmentally stimulated by tactile, auditory, or visual factors, or they can be stimulated by the observer based on his/her “momentary intentions” and “enduring dispositions.”2 With the benefit of earlier observations regarding visual orienting, let us return to the scene when the two gangsters, Al and Max, invade the diner and when the focus switches to Nick who “from the other end of the counter […] watched them” (204). After the gangster characters order a meal, “George watched them eat” (205). Shocked by the unexpected action, both Nick and George use overt orienting to focus on the new visual target. Their visual orienting is controlled by environmental stimulation, in particular by a number of unusual aspects about the killers’ costumes. If gloves are part of the dress code for robbers (“he [Al] wore a silk muffler and gloves,” 204; “both men ate with their gloves on,” 205), there is something inappropriately strange about the black overcoats they both wear. The narratorial voice remarks succinctly that “both wore overcoats too tight for them” (204) and 1

Raymond M. Klein and David I. Shore, “Relations among Modes of Visual Orienting (Commentary),” in Control of Cognitive Processes, eds. Stephen Monsell and Jon Driver (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 195. 2 Klein and Shore, “Relations among Modes of Visual Orienting,” 195.

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later reveals a similar detail when Al’s shotgun “made a slight bulge under the waist of his too tight-fitting overcoat” (209). Their inappropriate attire evidently makes them less threatening and strengthens the vaudeville effect of a later scene when Max advises George to go to the movies to learn what to expect from mobsters: ‘Ever go to the movies?’ ‘Once in a while.’ ‘You ought to go to the movies more. The movies are fine for a bright boy like you.’ (207)

It may be that the circumstances overwhelm George with the first mixed feelings that things will turn out badly, and therefore he uses covert orienting to focus on a selected object in the lunchroom—“the clock on the wall behind the counter” functions as a sort of physical anchor that gives him the reassurance of reality. In a state of psychological tension, George’s visual fixation on the clock is strengthened in several places in the story: “George looked at the clock on the wall behind the counter” (204), and later the narrator obsessively remarks that “George looked up the clock” (208). We soon learn that the clock is twenty minutes fast and it is also the wrong time for dinner (when Al and Max want to order, they find out that meals are not yet available). These examples confirm the often-remarked mismatches between expectations and fictional reality in Hemingway’s storyworld. Edmund Sampson1 was among the first critics to note the “comedy of errors” and the irony beneath the harsh reality and the threatening atmosphere of rising tension. ‘That’s the dinner,’ George explained. ‘You can get that at six o’clock.’ George looked at the clock on the wall behind the counter. ‘It’s five o’clock.’ ‘The clock says twenty minutes past five,’ the second man said. ‘It’s twenty minutes fast.’ (204)

Perhaps more importantly, such a surreal atmosphere affects the behavior of the protagonists in several ways, and consequently the underlying mental reality. I again stress the need to examine the fictional mind in the physical context of the storyworld. If thoughts are not verbalized in forms of fictional introspection, it is reasonable to ask whether the fictional mind becomes manifested in surface behavior or whether the thought becomes public and available. For instance, George’s fixed gaze on the clock may explain his insistent concern with seeing and understanding. But the clock 1

Edmund C. Sampson, “Hemingway’s ‘The Killers,’” Explicator 11, no. 2 (1952): 4.

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does not give an accurate time measurement as George probably expects, which only increases his anxieties and the bizarre feeling that things have already failed to follow the “right” pace. George’s obsession with watching objects closely is shared by one of the mobsters: “Max watched the mirror and the clock” (209). What is perhaps most disturbing is not his close watching of the clock (Max expects Ole Anderson to show up any minute) but of his careful reflection in the long saloon mirror: “He didn’t look at George but looked in the mirror that ran along back of the counter” (206). Later he fixes his own appearance in the mirror with an intense stare: “Max looked into the mirror all the time he was talking” (207). In armed robberies, criminals are usually preoccupied with how to perfect the details of the action and not with such gestures that would seem futile in the context. This may be another mismatch between the required seriousness of the act and the killer’s bizarrely flirtatious looks in the mirror. Max’s strange stare into the mirror reminds us of the other inappropriate elements in the physical context (e.g. their too-tight overcoats). It is this combination of ascending tension and absurd details that gives the setting an air of artificiality. If we remember Max’s remark about clichéd movies featuring gangsters, there is an even more intensified sense of an artificially constructed place. In this view, the lunchroom can function as a movie set. It is a brightly lit place against the poorly lit street outside and against the descending night: “Nick walked up the dark street to the corner under the arc-light” (212). From the kitchen, Al gives orders to George and Max about where they should stand behind the counter, acting like a photographer arranging them “for a group picture” (207). In this movie set-like diner, the protagonists take on their assigned roles and begin to act. As far as identity is concerned, there are, on the one hand, their physical bodies acting in the artificially constructed setting, and on the other hand, they can see their reversed images reflected in the long saloon mirror. As they are the subjects of a double game of vision, George, Nick, Al, and Max are all active participants and passive spectators in the fabricated show. It is impossible for them to distinguish between their multiple absurd identities as it is equally difficult for them to differentiate between seeing and not seeing. Sometimes laughter helps them relax and recharge; the narratorial voice simply notes: “George laughed” (205). Sometimes they have brief realizations that they are playing in an absurd vaudeville show. For instance, when Nick recounts to Ole the seemingly tragic or threatening experience from Henry’s lunchroom, the narrator notes again: “It sounded silly when he said it” (210, emphasis added). In this instance, it is not clear whether this statement is an indirect thought report or just another external description of narrative action. Exhausted with the absurd acting, “the vaudeville team” exits the stage and

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goes offstage behind the metaphorical curtains, lit by the street spotlights (“the arc lights”), while “George watched them, through the window, pass under the arc-light and cross the street” (209). Up to this point in the story, Hemingway gives a special example of “intermental thinking,” that is, “joint, shared, or communal thought as opposed to intramental, or individual thinking.”1 Nick, George, and the cook possess a “group mind” which functions intermentally for the short period of their “vaudeville” experience. In the context of the storyworld, they have to act and think according to the dynamics of group solidarity and their shared identification. Nevertheless, the fragmentation of the group occurs upon Nick’s return from warning Ole Anderson when he realizes that the other members of the group do not share his serious concerns about the threat to Ole’s life. The cook refuses even to listen to what has happened to Ole and advises Nick to stay out of trouble. In his turn, George is only mildly preoccupied with what might happen to the Swedish fighter. When the disturbed Nick concludes his account—“They will kill him”—, George’s reply shows that they no longer belong to the same “group mind”—“I guess they will”—and advises Nick that it is better not to think about it. The open intermental conflict fires off in Nick’s mind, determining him to leave the place as soon as he can: “I’m going to get out of this town” (212).

5.3.2 Out of Season With Out of Season (1923, published in In Our Time), I intend to explore the second model of fictional mind I proposed at the beginning of subchapter 5.2 that dealt with the emergence of mind in narrative discourse. In general, critics have read this short story as the earliest example of Hemingway’s “marriage group” and have insisted that the couple’s quarrel is, in fact, the collapse of a marriage. The analysis here will broaden the perspective on fictional minds in the context of a story that does not develop an explicit behavioral narrative, in the fashion proposed by The Killers, but neither does it tap into a large source of direct or indirect fictional thoughts, as will be the case with Up in Michigan. For the moment, I preview my main argument by following the discussion of The Killers with Out of Season, which strikes a balance between “observation of behavior” and “awareness of consciousness” in the presentation of fictional minds. As we have seen, the third-person narratorial voice in The Killers is not meant to offer the representation of a totally objective world, and readers are thus able to acquire a taste of subjective experience from the particular manners 1

Palmer, Fictional Minds, 218.

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in which characters get involved in action and from their overt behavior. It seems far from accidental that Hemingway chooses to experiment with the intriguing perspectives of third-person narrative in two of his earliest short stories, Out of Season (composed in April 1923) and Up in Michigan (1923). I will return to this point later. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recalls that Out of Season was the first story he wrote after his now-legendary “iceberg” theory in which “you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”1 He claimed that the omitted part in Out of Season was the suicide of the fishing guide. However, many critical voices, including Carlos Baker,2 have said that the omitted suicide can hardly be inferred from Peduzzi’s behavior, which is too energetic to suggest a potential suicide. James Steinke suggests quite the contrary: he maintains that what is left out is not the real end but the quarrel the two spouses have at lunch. This omitted scene precedes the opening but has the great force to strengthen the story and will affect each character in part in the later course of the story: “the omitted quarrel has consequences for the wife and for the husband as well, and recognition of those consequences will keep us from too narrow and unsympathetic a view.”3 As I have already shown, Baker’s remarks recognize Hemingway’s first use of the theory of omission in Out of Season but, more importantly, show the metaphorical implications of the text’s central notion of being “out of season”: both the illegal fishing expedition and the couple’s marriage are “out of season.” He argues: “the metaphorical confluence of emotional atmospheres […] was what gave the story its considerable distinction.”4 The recent interest of theorists in the conceptual nature of metaphor is particularly relevant for developing Baker’s “metaphorical confluence.” In his discussion of “emotion concepts,” Kövecses explains that metaphors are “pervasive in the language we use to describe the emotions”5 and that our emotional scenarios are a reflection of experience. This last point means that the experiential knowledge encapsulated in emotions is modeled in propositional or image-schematic forms. For instance, the very fact that we 1

Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 71. Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 109. 3 James Steinke, “Out of Season and Hemingway’s Neglected Discovery: Ordinary Actuality,” in Hemingway’s Neglected Short Fiction: New Perspectives, ed. Susan Beegel (Tuscaloosa/London: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 64. 4 Baker, Ernest Hemingway, 109. 5 Zoltán Kövecses, Emotion Concepts (New York: Springer, 1990), 46. 2

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conceptualize love as “out of season” says a lot about the amount of experience packed into the cognitive scenario of this emotion. This particular conceptual metaphor capturing love in a specific way has clear consequences that can influence our thinking and behavior in contexts relevant to this emotional experience. An example would be the spatial language used to talk about this particular aspect of love as “out of season,” in particular the general conceptual metaphor of EMOTIONAL STATES ARE CONTAINERS. Human thought is inclined to apply a container form and structure to a range of concepts that do not have the clear shape of a container, as they have no definite edges or boundaries or do not have the limits of a container, as would be the case with the ordinary container form of a room. Indeed, emotions are definitely not containers, but we are used to imagining them in such terms because we are governed by existing familiar conceptual structures. Thus, when love is conceptualized as a container, two possibilities may arise: we are inside the container (“I’m in love”), meaning that we are deeply involved in the emotional state, or in contrast, we are outside the container (“She has fallen out of love with him”), and therefore the emotion ceases to exist. In summary, Hemingway’s conceptual metaphorical atmosphere flowing at the story’s deepest levels draws upon heavily entrenched conceptualizations. It is clear that the partners are now outside the container, which does not allow them to inhabit the bounded surface of LOVE AS CONTAINER. The husband realizes where they stand now in their relationship and, in light of this profound realization, allows his wife to return home even before the outing is over. What remains is the almost failed fishing expedition that will remind the man of the state of their love relationship: “Go on back, Tiny. You’re cold in this wind anyway. It’s a rotten day and we aren’t going to have any fun, anyway” (116). It becomes clear that both the author’s intentional omission of information and the heavy metaphorical undercurrent speak of complicated physical action in a storyworld that extends over the geography of the long fishing trip. But physical movement cannot occur without mental events. The philosophy of action makes this point clear: actions (and not simple doings) are always induced by mental events of intention, belief, desires, purposes, etc. In order to come to a fuller understanding of the fictional minds in Out of Season, I will try to show that the close relationship between physical action and mental events is fundamentally motivational in nature. Before further discussing this point, a brief summary of the heavily action-oriented story will bring us to the main concerns of this section. Hemingway creates the unsettling atmosphere of a fishing trip that takes place during the spring ban on fishing. The three characters, the unnamed

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“young gentleman” and his wife and an Italian guide called Peduzzi, the aging town drunk, set off to find a good spot for fishing. The husband and wife are now at odds with each other from the argument they had at lunch. Reluctant to go on the fishing outing but finally persuaded to, the wife is obviously out of sorts, lags behind the men holding the fishing rods (at her husband’s suggestion), and feels the physical discomfort of the chilly, rainy, “windy day.” The husband, who has unknowingly hired the characteristically drunken guide, feels unable to deal with him, and both he and his wife are afraid that breaking the law may have serious consequences for them. They find it impossible to communicate effectively with the Italian guide who speaks in German and Italian dialects, which literarily causes serious verbal confusion. As if trying to restore the regard he has lost in town because of his drinking, Peduzzi parades with the couple (he refers to the married woman as “Signora” or “Signorina” and repeatedly uses the familiar “caro” to talk to the husband) and invites the woman with flattery to join them: “‘Signorina,’ he called, winking at the young gentleman, ‘come up here and walk with us. Signora, come up here. Let us all walk together’” (113). On their way to the river, they are watched by groups of people that refuse to respond to Peduzzi’s cheerful and “elaborate” greetings: “Groups of three and four people standing in front of the shops stared at the three. The workmen in their stone-powdered jackets working on the foundations of the new hotel looked up as they passed. Nobody spoke or gave any sign to them except the town beggar, lean and old, with a spittle-thickened beard, who lifted his hat as they passed” (113). This memorable scene extensively dramatizes the couple’s experience. Completely unaware of what the “parade” may mean to Peduzzi and his possibility to recover social status, the couple continue to be exclusively preoccupied with the feelings from their argument. They try unsuccessfully to resolve their marital discord while stopping at a cantina where they buy Peduzzi the marsala he has requested. Finally, when they reach the “brown and muddy” river, the guide says they are a half hour’s walk from the fishing spot, which makes the wife turn back to the hotel. But unexpectedly, Peduzzi quickly changes his mind: “‘It is good here, too’, he says” (116). The men soon discover they have no “piombo” for bait, and so the expedition needs to be abandoned. In the end, the husband leaves light-heartedly, relieved that the whole thing is over, and makes no firm promise to Peduzzi for another expedition the following day: “‘I may not be going,’ said the young gentleman, ‘very probably not’” (118). This presentation has provided only a bare sketch of a densely packed story with eventful action and sustained movement. With this observation in mind, I set out to explicate how the fictional mind functions in the physical context of the story and how it is made visible in the heart of action.

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In brief, I will also analyze the fewer instances of introspective thought in order to see how they tie in with the more numerous behavioral patterns, by means of which thought is made available to readers. Within the narrative paradigm I am advocating, Out of Season makes the transition from “a social mind in action” to another narrative model of heavily introspective thinking. To pursue the point further, we have to study the seemingly objective thirdperson narration and the ways in which the narratorial voice deals with fictional thoughts. In the following short excerpt, Hemingway writes to John Atkins about how his preferred choices of perspective in narrative discourse influence his writing dramatically. The fact that he seems to prefer the “greatly extended range” of the third-person over the “intimacy” of the first-person is an illuminating overview of his theoretical predilections and practical writing techniques: “The first person gives you great intimacy in attempting to give a complete sense of experience to the reader. It is limited however and in the third person the novelist can work in other people’s heads and in other people’s country. His range is greatly extended and so are his obligations. I prepared myself for writing in the third person by the discipline of writing Death in the Afternoon; the short stories and especially the long short stories of ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and the ‘Snows of Kilimanjaro.’”1 What is of particular interest here is Hemingway’s reference to the discourse effects of the third-person on the mind. He writes: “in the third person the novelist can work in other people’s heads.” His early approach to writing and style is valuable for the immense success of his short stories written in a third-person narratorial voice. Importantly, he prepares his apprenticeship for writing short fiction by “the discipline of writing Death in the Afternoon.” It is clear that Hemingway does not wish to portray third-person ascription as an objective “realistic” perspective. In contrast, he claims that third-person discourse can be informative and reliable by allowing the novelist to “work in other people’s heads.” Essentially, third-person discourse can make the mind perfectly visible. In the opening of Out of Season, we are puzzled by two contradictory assessments of the day’s weather, just after we see Peduzzi and the young gentleman speak “mysteriously” of the fishing expedition: “It was a windy day with the sun coming out from behind the clouds and then going under in sprinkles of rain” (113), while the very next sentence reads: “A wonderful day for trout fishing.” If the first external description of the day is given by the narratorial voice, the second assessment is clearly filtered through 1 Hemingway qtd. in Susan Swartzlander, “Uncle Charles in Michigan,” in Hemingway’s

Neglected Short Fiction: New Perspectives, ed. Susan Beegel (Tuscaloosa/London: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 34.

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Peduzzi’s consciousness. He thinks it is a “wonderful day” since he feels elated about having a new job as a guide and not having to do his regular job, spading the hotel garden. Short segments of indirect thought reports give us further insight into Peduzzi’s mind: he feels “confident” and “mysterious” about his job. Having gained more self-confidence, he takes on the new challenging task of touring his clients through town, releasing energy and buoyant feelings. It is a chance for him to restore his social status in the community, so he takes every opportunity to do that: he tips his hat and “elaborately” greets everyone they meet. The focus is still on Peduzzi, since he acts as the main focalizer throughout the story: “he saw the young gentleman coming down the path” and later “Peduzzi saw the wife” (113, emphasis added). The excitable Peduzzi acts energetically, moves a great deal with vigor and vitality, and manages to remain in the foreground. He gestures, winks knowingly, nudges the wife in the ribs. Because he wants to make his own show, he talks “with much winking and knowingness,” and with his newly-acquired gallantry he wants the wife to stop lagging behind. The question is whether Peduzzi’s intensely energetic bodily movement can indicate something relevant about his fictional mind. How is his mind behind that energy? Leaving aside his drunken condition that may partly energize his spirit, Peduzzi’s mental state should accord with the physical outcome of his actions. The energy he invests in leading the tourists is doubled by his desire to show the townspeople that he can be trusted. By insisting on walking toward the river all “three abreast,” the guide is interested in being seen in the company of the respectful couple: “Peduzzi wanted them all three to walk down the street of Cortina together” (113, emphasis added). He wishes to demonstrate his good intentions and goodwill that translate into overt exciting fuss, impatient eagerness, and restless anxiety. Because he wants to change and be accepted, the guide fabricates his new dauntless identity, and so we hear him asking the young gentleman “for a favor” and calling him repeatedly with the familiar “caro.” When he successfully gets the “five lire” from the young man, he thanks him stylishly “in the tone of one member of the Carleton Club accepting the Morning Post from another” (118). Peduzzi’s insistence on being helpful and reliable is shown again when he advertises his good manners and offers to buy some “marsala” for the wife: “Marsala, you like marsala, Signorina? A little marsala?” But the wife responds “sullenly” to his increasingly anxious desire to please and entertain. To make matters worse, “The Speciality of Domestic and Foreign Wines shop” is locked, which ruins Peduzzi’s sudden aspiration to buy drinks from a respectful place where he goes “up the steps,” and not from an ordinary cantina. A passer-by “scornfully” tells him the closing hours of the shop.

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We read on: “He felt hurt” (114). By making Peduzzi’s feelings explicit, Hemingway wants us to reconsider the lively performance the energetic guide has just put on. The scorn of the passer-by, the wife’s reluctance, and the hostility of the public audience are all explicit physical events—they are ready and available to prove that Peduzzi has failed as a performer. But his regrets and awareness of his failure are just as much part of the story as these physical events. It seems that desiring to pursue his role has now become impossible. It is precisely in this moment that the effusive guide realizes the rapidly emerging gap between physical reality and his mental events, as Steinke1 acknowledges in his insightful commentary: Hemingway’s attitude includes a perception of the rather awful pathos of Peduzzi’s condition presented through Peduzzi’s eyes we follow his feelings more than, or as much as, those of the couple. In this attention Hemingway pays, there emerge some rather complicated feelings for old Peduzzi, and they include a wry compassion. The story, perceived this way, reveals a whole series of moments in which the reader and, gradually, fitfully, the husband and wife, see the distance between reality and Peduzzi’s view of it.

But rather than give up on his attempt to display his precariously built identity, the guide further imagines himself as the host of the couple to take them to the Concordia Hotel. This time, however, we are only left to guess at his reasons since he does not get to actually put his motivations to work. The young American man stops him outside the door and refuses to let him in by bluntly asking: “Was woollen Sie?” A short thought report follows informing the reader: “He [Peduzzi] was embarrassed” (114). Being genuinely shocked by the young man’s gesture, the gregarious guide is left uncharacteristically inarticulate: “Marsala, maybe. I don’t know. Marsala?” At the end of this scene, the narratorial voice portrays an apparently simple action description: “The couple went out the door. […] Peduzzi was walking up and down at the other end out of the wind and holding the rods” (115). This straightforwardly simple but functional statement derives its power from the physical local context. It is true that the causal network surrounding the action is not stated explicitly, but it is implied in the circumstantial evidence of this seemingly objective description. That Peduzzi does not wait at the door and has gone off to the “other end” of the building, “out of the wind,” is evidently a public action, but it appears to have an accompanying mental state. Having been excluded from the company of the American husband and his wife, Peduzzi feels anxious and disoriented: his walking “up and down” denotes a restless state of mind. The character might be 1

Steinke, “Out of Season and Hemingway’s Neglected Discovery,” 67.

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thinking that trying to stay “out of the wind” will keep him out of danger and trouble. Peduzzi is distant both physically and emotionally—he stands apart with aloof dignity and in emotional isolation. Later, on their way, the guide tries to amend the situation by reassuring the couple with his fabricated gallantry that “[n]o one will make any trouble for me in Cortina. I know them at the municipio. I have been a soldier. Everybody in this town likes me. I sell frogs. What if it is forbidden to fish? Not a thing. Nothing. No trouble. Big trout, I tell you. Lots of them” (115). But things continue to go wrong for Peduzzi; amid the townspeople’s disapproval, the wife’s resentment, and the young gentleman’s exclusion, the fishing guide is rejected by his own daughter. This network of events induces a plausible mental background. Physical and behavioral clues can help decipher mental events: “‘There,’ said Peduzzi, pointing to a girl in the doorway of a house they passed. ‘My daughter.’ […] The girl went into the house as Peduzzi pointed” (115). With no direct indication of what he might be thinking and no direct presentation of his consciousness, we must follow Peduzzi’s silent thoughts by closely following his steps as the action progresses. His dispositions are nonetheless accessible by observing his overt behavior in the following scene: we see the three characters “abreast” as “they walked down the hill across the fields,” although the husband and the wife have not been talking to the guide, who “talked rapidly with much winking and knowingness.” The shortage of communication may be caused by language barriers but also by the fact that Peduzzi has not been accepted as a guide and has failed to inspire confidence. Old Peduzzi engages in an absurd one-sided dialog, talks rapidly, rambles with a kind of affable verbosity, and renews his desperate attempt to conceal the genuinely pathetic condition of his mind. Further on their way to the promised river, the guide insistently pursues his illusions, unaware that the husband and wife are at odds with each other, and, for that matter, feels “shocked” when he realizes the wife has returned home. It is remarkable, however, how he persistently elaborates on his illusions even when he realizes they need to abandon the fishing expedition because the husband cannot provide lead for bait. He briefly acknowledges that his “day was going to pieces before his eyes” (117). However, his resilient thinking springs back to its deluding condition, and therefore Peduzzi continues to cling to his illusion of control over reality. His excited state of mind results in excited behavior and a positive focus. Without having privileged access to his mind, we may read the next statement as a straightforward thought report of his exhilarated mind: “The sun shone while he drank. It was wonderful. This was a great day, after all. A wonderful day” (117). According to the guide’s dynamic mind pattern, it is surprising to notice that more discontinuity to reality

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involves an increase in his energetic and buoyant state of mind. If we follow the movement of his eyes as they “glistened” in the context of physical exhilaration, Peduzzi’s very personal concluding remarks make total sense: “Days like this stretched out ahead” (117), “This was living,” “Life was opening out” (118). But the closing scene gives us more relevant details regarding his feelings and intentions: “‘Until seven o’clock then, caro,’ he said, slapping the young gentleman on the back. ‘Promptly at seven’” (118). When finally realizing the fiasco of the day, the young man says he may not be going. Peduzzi is taken aback and reacts: “‘What,’ said Peduzzi, ‘I will have minnows, Signor. Salami, everything. You and I and the Signora. The three of us’” (118). We can read Peduzzi’s mind in his excessively familiar gesture of slapping the young man on the shoulder as well as in his hurriedly made list with “everything” he can provide for their next fishing expedition. What these details render is the unchanged image of an undaunted performer, acting engagingly and improvising continuously. Having finished the tour inside Peduzzi’s mind, we assuredly know he will stay that way forever.

5.3.3 Up in Michigan Up in Michigan has a particularly interesting history given that it is Hemingway’s earliest story, begun in late 1921, during his apprenticeship in Paris, and neglected by publishers for fifteen years for fear of censorship. Nevertheless, the story appeared in a limited edition in his first collection, Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), along with two other stories, Out of Season and My Old Man. In 1925 Hemingway intended to add nine new stories to the three already published and alternate them with the interchapters from the in our time edition, but when his publisher, Horace Liveright, rejected Up in Michigan, he had to replace it with The Battler. Despite the author’s efforts to revise the story, especially the last scene that contains censorable sexual content, Hemingway finally gave up and produced another story. Following Liveright’s choice to reject Up in Michigan, Hemingway decided to change publishers: “Up in Michigan I am anxious to print—it is a good story and Liveright cut it out of In Our Time. That was the reason I did not want to stay there.”1 But Hemingway knew the story was a valuable one, and this is what he wrote in a letter to Max Perkins: “I know you will not publish it with the last part entire and if any

1

Hemingway qtd. in Swartzlander, “Uncle Charles in Michigan,” 32.

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of that is out there is no story.”1 Thus the short story was not published until 1938, fifteen years after it appeared in limited form, in the collected stories from The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, in a slightly revised version. The story’s much-disputed history has resulted in scant critical attention, while it is also clear that critics have not credited Hemingway for the value of his earliest story. There is general critical consensus emphasizing the simplicity of the plot and the story’s uninteresting subject matter dealing with the “brutal seduction” of a young romantic girl. Jim Gilmore seduces Liz Coates on the docks of Horton Bay near a lake, and immediately after, he just passes out inebriated. In his theoretically informed study on Up in Michigan, Jackson J. Benson has shifted attention from the story’s plot and action to its stylistic achievement and expressiveness.2 More recently, Susan Swartzlander’s essay3 successfully manages to offer a new perspective in the book Hemingway’s Neglected Short Fiction. In “Uncle Charles in Michigan,” Swartzlander shows Hemingway’s indebtedness to James Joyce, in particular to Joyce’s “Uncle Charles Principle,”4 an innovative technical device that allows Hemingway to experiment with narrative perspectives. While my analysis of Up in Michigan relies on Swartzlander’s analytically pointed study, I wish to foreground another important aspect of the story facing theorists who are interested in the issue of fictional minds. Following the analyses of The Killers and Out of Season, Up in Michigan outlines a new direction in the study of the mind in short fiction. I return to this point in the following paragraphs. At first sight, however, Up in Michigan appears to be the least problematic of the three stories. The omniscient narratorial voice shares everything with the reader: the protagonists’ feelings, intentions, and inner thoughts. So, we soon learn that Liz becomes infatuated with Jim and observe her “thinking about Jim Gilmore […] all the time now.” Still, Jim “didn’t seem to notice her much” (6). We also get full accounts of their actions: in the evenings, Jim reads the Toledo Blade and the Grand Rapids paper, goes out “spearing fish in the bay,” and in the fall he goes deer hunting; Liz works for Mrs. Smith and 1

Hemingway qtd. in Linda Wagner-Martin, ed., Ernest Hemingway: Seven Decades of Criticism (Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1998), 406. 2 Jackson J. Benson, “Ernest Hemingway as Short Story Writer,” in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays, edited by Jackson J. Benson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975), 272–310. 3 Swartzlander, “Uncle Charles in Michigan.” 4 “Uncle Charles Principle,” named after Uncle Charles in James Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, is a point of view which inherits a character’s subjective perspective in an omniscient third-person narrative.

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helps her in the kitchen. We get an accurate view of the idyllic scenery: a “steep sandy road” runs down the hill to the bay, a lake stretches out ahead, and the breeze blows from Charlevoix and Lake Michigan. We are informed about the history of the blacksmith shop: Jim came to Hortons Bay from Canada and bought the place from “old man Horton.” There are more examples, but the ones already given substantially prove that we are dealing with an omniscient perspective. So far in this sub-chapter, I have discussed two considerably different third-person narratives representative of Hemingway’s style to prove that fictional minds can be explored away from “the intimacy of first-person.” Within the models I have advocated, The Killers is a typical behavioral narrative, written in a narratorial voice that embraces action and never slips into the characters’ minds. Along with Alan Palmer’s theoretical specifications, I hope I have demonstrated that fictional minds can nonetheless be available in the behavior and action attributed to each character in part. In the second story I analyzed, Out of Season, the behavioral pattern has been supplemented by indirect thought reports, which systematically proves that in order to deal with the fictional mind, the public/private distinction is rather insignificant. Palmer suggests that we study “the whole mind,” thus opening the floor to minds that are both socially available and intrinsically private. If both The Killers and Out of Season demonstrate stylistic complexity and control, we are asking whether Up in Michigan can be an example of a story of equal craftsmanship. I refer explicitly to technical devices that can bring the mind to the surface. Can a third-person omniscient perspective broaden the context for studying minds? That is, can a single omniscient third-person voice reflect the inner workings of individual minds? A couple of scholars have already stressed Hemingway’s experimental, third-person narrative in Up in Michigan. Wendolyn E. Tetlow,1 in her Lyrical Dimensions, demonstrates that the story is written from a woman’s point of view, and Susan Swartzlander illustrates how Hemingway is able to experiment with “a third-person narrative voice that takes on the speech characteristics of various characters.”2 If readers have to reconstruct fictional minds with minimum information in The Killers and Out of Season, in Up in Michigan we are overwhelmed by numerous instances of thought reports underlying rich mental activity. The majority of thought reports are rendered indirectly (e.g. “She liked it the way he walked over from the shop”), but there is, however, one direct 1 2

Tetlow, Hemingway’s In Our Time, 135. Swartzlander, “Uncle Charles in Michigan,” 34.

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representation of Liz’s mental language: the young woman directly verbalizes her enthusiastic thoughts when Jim approaches her: “He’s come to me finally. He’s really come” (8). The point is not the scarcity of thought. Instead, the emphasis is on the potentially abundant flow of thoughts. In conclusion, the larger point is to differentiate among the individual voices that are all integrated in the dominant omniscient narrative voice, and finally to be able to evaluate the nature of each fictional mind. The further analysis is meant to focus on the alternating fictional minds that rapidly shift from one paragraph to another. In the opening sentences, the narratorial voice details the characters’ environment, with the emphasis on one of the protagonists and his short history in the town: “Jim Gilmore came to Hortons Bay from Canada. He bought the blacksmith shop from old man Horton” (5). The passage is clearly filtered through Jim’s consciousness since the details of the buying affair are best known by him, and his close relationship with “old man Horton” is illustrated by the term of endearment he uses. In the same vein, Swartzlander rightfully acknowledges that “only someone familiar with the area would speak of ‘old man Horton’.”1 The third larger paragraph switches to Liz’s point of view, and this can be viewed in the ways the female character anchors events and situations (including characters) in her own perceptual experience. Liz liked Jim very much. She liked it the way he walked over from the shop and often went to the kitchen door to watch for him to start down the road. She liked it about his moustache. She liked it about how white his teeth were when he smiled. She liked it very much that he didn’t look like a blacksmith. She liked it how much A.J. Smith and Mrs. Smith liked Jim. One day she found that she liked it the way the hair was black on his arms and how white they were above the tanned line when he washed up in the washbasin outside the house. Liking that made her feel funny. (5)

The focus on the mental behavior of the young inexperienced girl would appear to be a moment of direct access to Liz’s mental language, but the access is mediated through the process of narration itself. Nevertheless, the narration becomes “transparent,” as it is not difficult to identify the sources of the mental language in the paragraph above. In this sense, the obsessive repetition of the uncomplicated verb “liked,” used in particular in simple, awkward phrasing (e.g. “She liked it about his moustache,” emphasis added), reflects the woman’s poorly designed imagination and her excessively emotional behavior. Liz does not seem to be educated since the limited sources of her imagination do not allow her to express her feelings more effectively. She becomes involved in an excessively romanticized 1

Swartzlander, “Uncle Charles in Michigan,” 35.

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affair, which induces a similar sort of thinking. She is a dreamy thinker who is particularly and only interested in the details of Jim’s appearance. As a result, the focus is on the young woman’s abstract and highly emotional thoughts and not on her doings, which builds behavioral traits for this character. Since she has become infatuated with Jim, the man has been the focused object of her fantasies, and therefore her thinking needs to entertain his image “so she could take the way he looked up to bed with her” (7). The overall effect of the text arises from two main sources: first, the blending of the narratorial voice with indirect representations of the characters’ mental language; second, the interplay of different perspectives and vantage points. Up in Michigan and its omniscient narratorial voice help constitute a system of fictional thinking that alternates objective external perspectives with subjective attitudes. To illustrate, let us compare the following two extracts: All the time Jim was gone on the deer hunting trip Liz thought about him. It was awful while he was gone. She couldn’t sleep well from thinking about him but she discovered it was fun to think about him too. If she let herself go it was better. The night before they were to come back she didn’t sleep at all, that is she didn’t think she slept because it was all mixed up in a dream about not sleeping and really not sleeping. When she saw the wagon coming down the road she felt weak and sick sort of inside. (6) Jim began to feel great. He loved the taste and the feel of whiskey. He was glad to be back to a comfortable bed and warm food and the shop. He had another drink. (7)

As can be seen in the two fragments above, the perceptions vary according to the particular moment in the narrative when one character or another reflects upon a situation or an event in the storyworld. In the first extract, Liz reconstructs the atmosphere of the place and her behavior while Jim is away on a deer hunting trip: everything is “awful,” she cannot sleep, and she keeps on thinking of Jim all day. She feels anxious and overemotional, unable to take a firm hold of reality, and romantically engages in willful illusions, half dreaming and half awake. The account of her mental activity is internally focalized by Liz herself if we only look at the long, confusing syntax of her mental language. She feels even more confused upon Jim’s return from the hunting trip when she tries to mentally verbalize her state by using the indecipherable phrase “she felt weak and sick sort of inside” (emphasis added). In contrast, the second shorter excerpt reflects Jim’s perspective on the event following his return from deer hunting: he likes being home, enjoys the drinks and the “warm” food and his “comfortable bed.” His cool, clear mind expresses in short, curt sentences. The language

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of his mind does not betray any anxieties or romantic confusions. Jim is specifically intent on action while Liz engages in abstract imaginal constructions. As this particular variation of perceptions remains important throughout the whole text, the end of the story is marked by a clear separation, rather than a fusion of perspectives. The last scenes of the story largely reflect events filtered through the perspective of Liz, which means that the omniscient third-person narrative makes room for a predominantly internal mode of focalization. The unexpected turn in her relationship with Jim makes Liz experience a change of heart: her excessively sentimental and romanticized dreams vanish and are replaced by unpleasant physical feelings: she feels “terribly frightened,” “cold and miserable.” There is “a mist coming up from the bay” instead of the previous idyllic scenery with “the bay blue and bright” and the “steep sandy road.” Liz perceives and internalizes the background surroundings and then gives us a close-up view of her intensely physical sensations: the hemlock planks of the dock where the act is consummated feel “hard and splintery and cold.” It is clear that the perspective adopted generates corresponding cognitive properties. If readers were given the individualized perspective of another character, the text would generate quite different cognitive properties. Lastly, in Up in Michigan, readers reconstruct the text through a shifting perspective or through a variation in the protagonists’ perceptions: from Liz’s emotional involvement to Jim’s cold distance. Hemingway’s esthetics results in innovative ways of using “distributed focalization.” According to narratologist David Herman, “this term is meant to imply how changes in perspective-taking are not merely incremental or additive, with one vantagepoint giving way to another in sequence, but rather synergistically interrelated, constituting elements of a larger, narratively organized system for thinking.”1 What I have sought to show in my analysis is that characters have an individualized perspective on events, which can be noticed either in indirect recounts of acts of introspection or in seemingly impartial descriptions. I should stress that the characters’ subjective perspective is always doubled by substantial cognitive activity. The great merit of this short story is precisely this subtle interplay between subjective and objective elements in an omniscient narrative. The order in which Hemingway chooses to alternate representational mental states construes what Herman

1 David Herman, “Regrounding Narratology: The Study of Narratively Organized Systems for Thinking,” in What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, eds. Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2003), 311.

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calls a “narratively organized system for thinking”1 that can be a reliable resource for cognition.

5.4 Blending and the study of narrative The analysis of The Killers can yield remarkable results for the study of minds and mental functioning in literature. Even if this story is written in a genuinely behavioral pattern, especially in its manner of portraying characters, and offers no information about what characters might be thinking, readers still attribute mental properties to them. It is thus necessary to make sense of Nick’s intentions to go and warn Ole of the gangsters’ threats and of his attempts to hypothesize about Ole’s decision to remain passive at hearing the news. Equally important are the minds of the other protagonists for Nick’s final thoughts of leaving the town. His decision is influenced by George’s choice to remain indifferent and unsympathetic to what may potentially turn into a tragic story. This consistent tendency of reconstructing characters’ mental motivation around their doings has been recognized as fundamental continuity between hypothesizing on the minds of fictional agents and trying to make sense of our own and others’ minds. Cognitive psychologists’ theory of mind (Baron-Cohen2, Carruthers and Smith3) has been designed to account for this human ability to scrutinize behavior in terms of desires, motifs, intentions, plans, and purposes. One main implication of applying this theory to the complexity and variety of fiction, specifically to the wide array of non-actual individuals, is that it would give us unrestricted access to the “mind in action,” with its ability to perceive, represent, and relate to events in the storyworld. I agree with Uri Margolin that the refusal to ascribe minds to fictional characters can have profound consequences for current theories of reading or reception and also for theories discussing the content aspect of narrative: “A refusal to do so in the name of philosophical purism runs counter to every single readerly experience and deprives narratology of the ability to handle a major component of all storyworlds, essential for making sense of any action sequence.”4 Starting from the cognitive theory of mind, whereby humans attribute mental functioning to both themselves and to other real or world-like 1

Herman, “Regrounding Narratology,” 317. Simon Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 3 Peter Carruthers and Peter K. Smith, Theories of Theories of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 4 Margolin, “Cognitive Science,” 274. 2

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individuals, Herman1 also argues that what is really at stake here is our “common-sense” understanding of thinking and the “rough-and-ready heuristics” to which we resort in “thinking about thinking itself.” If we take this point further, it can be argued that stories are about “thinking about thinking itself,” especially if one defines stories as the progressive developments of various fictional minds. Remember Palmer’s radical view on narrative: “Narrative is in essence the presentation of fictional mental functioning.”2 In this sense, what I have termed “transitional narratives” in the previous section draws attention to one important aspect, i.e. the storyworld is not only structured by physical facts and events, but it also comprises virtual mental spaces characters imaginatively conjure up and juggle with. Characters create their own alternate or sub-worlds since they need to imagine various possible facets of their fictional reality. They need to envision the future and reflect on ways to interfere with the present according to their beliefs, intentions, or illusions. Hemingway’s characters are no exception. They spend a lot of time working on the lattice of their very personal counterfactual narratives. Their private virtual domain may remain non-authenticated (an invented fantasy world), or it may become possible in the actual domain of the texts. Either way, the blending of fantasy and real elements essentially impacts the deepest levels of the story. What I wish to concentrate on in the remainder of this chapter is this dynamic mental construct resulting from the blending of mental spaces: the blended space with an “emergent structure” of its own. Fauconnier and Turner’s concept of “conceptual integration network” or “blending”3 provides a useful account of the sort of cognitive process Hemingway’s readers need to attribute to his characters, and therefore go through themselves, in order to make sense of the wide array of mental functioning within his stories. One cannot ignore the issue of the cognitive force of blending theory, particularly as an adequate account of fictional mental functioning. The theory of blending and its applications to the study of short narratives were first introduced in this book in sub-chapter 1.3 and also used in the preliminary arguments of this chapter. In sub-chapter 1.3, some general remarks concerning the theory seem necessary for the methodology used, or rather for the core theoretical assumptions of this volume. I will very briefly summarize the central arguments put forward in the introductory part and briefly announced in the preview for Chapter 5. They will be reflected on in the sub-chapters to follow as well.

1

Herman, “Regrounding Narratology,” 318. Palmer, Fictional Minds, 177. 3 Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think. 2

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Turner and Fauconnier observe that this operation of mental blending is not typically noticeable on the surface, and hence it requires special analysis for locating and revealing its inner workings: “conceptual integration typically works below the horizon of observation. It is a general cognitive operation with many functions and a wide application. It is routine, cognitively cheap, and not restricted to exceptional examples.”1 But nevertheless, “it is indispensable to the poetics of literature because it is fundamental to the poetics of mind.”2 If they are right, the application of the conceptual integration model may be a valid method to reveal the intricacies encountered in Hemingway’s complex discourse—an underrepresented discourse for which mental mappings are more difficult to establish, but which is nonetheless an increasingly challenging discourse for the reader’s imaginative powers. Another advantage of the application of blending theory is that it will enable cognitive processes and representations to be attributed to fictional characters that are central to the mental lives of human and human-like beings. More specifically, as readers have to construct the blend in order to assess the mental lives within the storyworld, this will lead them to inferences regarding each character’s identity, emotional states, and relations with other story participants. In this light, I argue that the stratification of the storyworld into dynamic mental constructs is able to produce more effects than the standard view on narrative as a chronological sequence of events in time. Cognitive theorists have emphasized the force of characters’ private worlds in the course of a story. For example, Herman speaks of “embedded or second-order storyworlds in terms of which each character has come to understand the past.”3 Ryan’s concept of “embedded narratives”4 (detailed in section 4.3) conveys the point that there is a larger source of information available for the reader in order to make sense of the text’s overall meaning. Palmer extends Ryan’s “embedded narratives” by highlighting the “aspectual” subjective feature of the narrative: “The storyworld is aspectual in the sense that its characters can only ever experience it from a particular perceptual and cognitive aspect at any one time.”5 The approach captured by “embedded narratives” or “aspectual storyworlds,” which necessarily but indirectly refer to conceptual integration, has underpinned and informed my approach in many places in this book. In 1

Turner and Fauconnier, “A Mechanism of Creativity,” Poetics Today 20, no. 3 (1999): 408. 2 Turner and Fauconnier, “A Mechanism of Creativity,” 417. 3 Herman, “Regrounding Narratology,” 326. 4 Ryan, Possible Worlds, 156. 5 Palmer, Fictional Minds, 184.

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the bulk of sub-chapter 4.2, I paid meticulous attention to forms of metaphorical spatialization of time and showed (by means of the stories analyzed) that the conceptual metaphor theory involves mental projections from more concrete domains onto abstract mental spaces. Both the conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual integration involve systematic projections of language. Specifically, the conceptual metaphor of A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY, applied to a series of short stories in sub-chapter 4.2, has had profound implications for how characters structure their physical space but also for how this common conceptual schema penetrates their consciousness. Drawing on the pre-existing image of the forking schema, the conceptual metaphor of LIFE IS A JOURNEY in sub-chapter 4.2 opens the door to the idea of spatial multiplication and mental plurality. Sub-chapter 4.3 proposed another model to refine the idea of multiplicity and alternativeness, dwelling on the theory of possible worlds. Before I strengthen several of the most important tenets and findings of possibilism in relation to the study of narrative, and in the current light of the blending issue, let us briefly look at the theories of blending and of conceptual metaphor to see what they share and how they differ. Whilst the conceptual metaphor theory establishes projections between two mental domains, the theory of blending involves a four-space model: two input spaces, one generic space that accumulates generic information about the two inputs, and a blend in which information from the two input spaces is combined and refined. Therefore, by using projections from one space to another, theorists of conceptual metaphor assume that metaphors are “direct, one-way, and positive.”1 In contrast, the promoters of conceptual integration, Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, argue that concepts may blend in more than one direction: the input spaces project properties to the blend, which does not mean that the projection can only go from source to target, as in the case of metaphors. Another essential difference is that conceptual metaphors work on entrenched conceptual relationships, whereas blending operates as an on-line process and resorts to temporary mental spaces. Blending primarily involves the process of “composition” (the projection of the content from each of the inputs) and two supplementary processes of “completion” (the use of information from long-term memory), and “elaboration” (the simulated mental performance of the event in the blend). A further particular trait of conceptual blending is that the blend can project back to the input space. Occasionally, the resulting blend may project back to more than one input space, i.e. a multi-directional blend. Another feature of blended spaces is that the emergent structure resulting 1

Turner, The Literary Mind, 60.

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from the blend is free from the restraints of the input spaces, meaning that the blend is not a simple combination of the projected properties. Despite the blending theory and the conceptual metaphor theory being treated as competing theories, many scholars have now gathered evidence to prove that these two conceptual frameworks are largely complementary. The results of the theoretically informed and empirically rich study conducted by Grady et al. conclusively point to this direction: “metaphoric and non-metaphoric conceptualisations alike rely on selective projection from two or more input spaces into a blended space, the establishment of cross-space mappings, structuring the blended space via processes of composition, completion, and elaboration, and subsequent projection of structure from the blended space to the inputs. By treating all sorts of mappings as formally identical at a certain level we can understand the transfer of structure in metaphor as fundamentally similar to the transfer of structure in non-metaphoric instances.”1 Many scholars interested in both linguistic and literary studies have been attracted by the theory of conceptual integration and have tried to draw benefits from the fruitful applications of this theory. In the recent book Blending and the Narrative Study, the volume’s co-editor, Ralf Schneider,2 writes an insightful introduction to blending and to its immense impact on narratological studies since the 1990s when Turner and Fauconnier launched their joint project on conceptual integration. Schneider convincingly proves the tremendous influence of blending for the study of metaphor, which explains the numerous blending-oriented analyses of poetry. As a result, prose has been less in the focus of scholars interested in blending. Still, the laudable efforts of a number of leading scholars have shown there is a wide range of approaches to the link between narrative and conceptual blending. The recent research in Blending and the Narrative Study: Approaches and Applications illustrates the fascinating and rapidly growing area of blending-oriented approaches to narrative. Their line of research builds on earlier studies increasingly receptive to conceptual integration networks and genuine narratological concerns, such as those of Oakley, Coulson, Dancygier, Semino, Tobin and Freeman3. A special issue of Language and 1

Grady, Oakley and Coulsen, “Blending and Metaphor,” 120. Ralf Schneider, “Blending and the Study of Narrative: An Introduction,” in Blending and the Study of Narrative: Approaches and Applications, ed. Ralf Schneider and Marcus Hartner (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 1–31. 3 Todd Oakley, “Conceptual Blending, Narrative Discourse, and Rhetoric,” Cognitive Linguistics 9, no. 4 (1998): 321–360; Seana Coulson, “Reasoning and Rhetoric: Conceptual Blending in Political and Religious Rhetoric,” in Research and Scholarship in Integration Processes, eds. Elzbieta H. Oleksy and Barbara 2

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Literature (vol. 15, no. 1, 2006), edited by Barbara Dancygier, also reflects its broad relevance to research on blending and narratology. The general view advanced by these illuminating studies is that blending ought to be investigated on a larger scale than individual metaphors or other small-scale conceptual integration networks. Their analyses go a step further in applying blending to larger macro-textual structures such as narrative time and space, story and plot, character and character formation/identity, fictional minds, narration, narrative perspectives and focalization, discourse coherence, reader response, literary genres, etc. Moreover, Schneider points out that the larger point of such studies is that “the very production and understanding of fictional—and particularly narrative—worlds relies heavily on the ability of the mind to perform blending. Fictional worlds include an element of the counterfactual in so far as they are creations of the mind, and there must be a capacity of the mind to produce and receive scenarios that feel ‘as if’ they were real.”1 Lastly, a blending analysis highlights our very capacity for blending—a human cognitive ability that helps us produce and appreciate the creativity of art (in a diversity of forms!) and the immense power of imagination. As I suggested earlier, literature has begun to draw benefits from the findings of the blending theory, but it can also be suggested that literary studies themselves can be an important tool for how humans perform mappings between mental spaces and integrate them successfully. In this sense, Margaret Freeman is hopeful that such a conceptualization can foster Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (Lodz, Poland: Lodz University Press, 2003), 59–88; Seana Coulson, Semantic Leaps: Frame Shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Dancygier, The Language of Stories; Barbara Dancygier, “Narrative Anchors and the Processes of Story Construction. The Case of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin,” Style 42, no. 2 (2007): 133–152; Barbara Dancygier, “Blending and Narrative Viewpoint: Jonathan Raban’s Travels Through Mental Spaces,” Language and Literature 14. no. 2 (2005): 99–127; Elena Semino, “Blending and Characters’ Mental Functioning in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Lappin and Lapinova’,” Language and Literature 15, no. 1 (2006): 55–72; Vera Tobin, “Cognitive Bias and the Poetics of Surprise,” Language and Literature 18, no. 2 (2009): 155–172; Vera Tobin, “Ways of Reading Sherlock Holmes: The Entrenchment of Discourse Blends,” Language and Literature 15, no. 1 (2006): 73–90; Margaret H. Freeman, “Blending: A Response,” Language and Literature 15, no. 1 (2006): 107–117; Freeman, “Cognitive Mapping in Literary Analysis,” 466–483; Margaret H. Freeman, “Poetry and the Scope of Metaphor: Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics,” in Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads: A Cognitive Perspective, ed. Antonio Barcelona (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000), 253–281. 1 Schneider, “Blending and the Study of Narrative,” 11.

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research in conceptual integration: “It may well be that some of the questions that still vex blending theory, such as which cognitive processes and criteria are involved in the ability of humans to select the ‘best’ mappings from all possible ones to achieve ‘successful’ integration, may be illuminating by studying literary texts.”1 In line with the latest interdisciplinary research in and studies of blending and narrative, I am concerned with the ways in which the blending theory can add to our understanding of short literary fiction. Within the perspective advocated, short fiction has only benefited from a number of isolated examinations,2 and to the best of my knowledge, blending has not been yet tested consistently within the work of one particular short story writer. A preview of my intended contribution is primarily directed toward several main points. First, prose narrative needs to be examined for further theoretical perspectives on blending theory (if only to counterbalance the focus of blending on poetry!). The main area of interest (short fiction) has been selected on the grounds of our interaction with short literary texts. In order to make mental representations of such texts, readers have come to bear on an absolute minimum of necessary information, which pushes our cognitive ability to its furthest limits. The concept of blending and its flexible tools seem particularly useful for the analysis of texts of a fragmented nature. Equally plausibly, therefore, the research on short prose narratives with the cognitive framework of the blending theory leads us to the deepest sources of our representations and imagination. Specifically, I wish to consider more systematically the notion of counterfactual blends as an application to fictional minds. Various theories of counterfactuality have already been advanced in this book (e.g. causation in counterfactuals, downward and upward counterfactuals, consequences for the experience of regret, relief, guilt, self-blame, exceptional and controlled events as mutable for counterfactual operations, etc.), especially in relation to possible worlds. The specific link between counterfactuality and blending is further meant to offer a new perspective on mental simulation.3 1

Freeman, “Blending,” 111. Mark Turner’s website on “Blending and Conceptual Integration” is a helpful resource: http://markturner.org/blending.html. 3 “Mental simulation is the foundation of imagination, and considering or even hearing about what might have been can lead people to see a different world […]. Counterfactuals not only consider what was almost possible but also create new possibilities on time’s horizon.” Elaine M. Wong, Adam D. Galinsky and Laura J. Kray, “The Counterfactual Mind-Set: A Decade of Research,” in Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation, ed. Keith D. Markman et al. (New York: Psychology Press, 2009), 172. 2

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In the next sections, I use the concept of “counterfactual narratives” to further frame the study of Hemingway’s short fiction. This concept shares aims with “embedded” or “aspectual” narratives in many key points. The emphasis will be on intricate textual properties and the text’s tendency to generate virtual and irreal spaces or areas of non-actuality. However, what I specifically intend to do is to supplement the views of Ryan’s “embedded narratives” or Palmer’s “aspectual narratives” with the convincing explanations offered by the blending theory regarding key mental mappings run in elaborating virtual narrative spaces. So far, I have only sporadically resorted to the concept of conceptual integration (for instance, in the analysis of metaphorical mappings), but I have not provided a solid demonstration of the concept. The evidence gathered until now is that metaphorical thinking and counterfactual reasoning can be explained by the complex and dynamic mental event of blending. Consequently, Hemingway’s characters appear to have the mental capacity for advanced conceptual integration, i.e. the ability to create mental alternatives and to blend these mental spaces with other scenarios prompted by the textual actual world. In outlining this hypothesis, my aim is to broaden the research on “seeing-asif” mental spaces. In his illuminating study What Science Offers the Humanities, Slingerland points out that these “as-if” spaces are special in that they are “clearly delineated from both the input spaces and perceptual reality.”1 Indeed, this human ability to run blends in “a safely segregated” space from perceptual or historical reality allows us to create complex counterfactuals and conditionals. Thus, we can safely infer that counterfactual thinking is the key to causal reasoning, the formation of scientific hypotheses, and everyday decision-making, among many other endeavors.2 In what follows, I will pay meticulous attention to instances of counterfactuality in a number of short stories—Big Two-Hearted River, The Sea Change, Cat in the Rain, and Soldier’s Home—which I have chosen based on their degree of sustained simulation effect of counterfactual thought. I will be looking at linguistic structures in particular (e.g. linguistic counterfactuals or conditionals) in order to address subtle and less explicit counterfactuals. The latter type, not grounded in grammar, often goes unnoticed. In cases of intricately invisible blends, conceptual integration networks are connected in order to build counterfactuals, but outside the blend, the network, or its counterfactuality. My aim is to reveal this underlying terrain of intense human thought. I devote the following sections to a thorough investigation of the far-ranging implications of this mode of 1 2

Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities, 183. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 217–247.

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thinking. In conjunction with the findings of the possible world theory, I further claim that virtual worlds (produced by characters or narrators and acknowledged by readers) far outnumber the worlds prompted by the factual domain of the text and that actualizable, possible worlds make room for an inviting analysis to investigate particular cognitive abilities essential for dealing with virtuality.

5.5. Double-scope identity blends: blending and deblending the counterfactual self. Big Two-Hearted River, The Sea Change, Cat in the Rain, and Soldier’s Home This section works on the assumption introduced in the previous subchapter, i.e. cognitive blending regulates our general creative mechanisms and imaginative resources but also mediates our interaction with (short) narratives. Blending has been chosen for very pragmatic reasons: it provides the analysis with the technical tools and adequate vocabulary to explain parts and processes of Ernest Hemingway’s model of the mind (and, by extrapolation, a model of the mind advanced by short fiction). Firstly, I will briefly refer to the conceptualization of counterfactuality as introduced and developed in prior chapters and sub-chapters: in particular, in Chapter 3 (sub-chapter 3.4) and Chapter 4 (sub-chapters 4.1, 4.2, and 4.6). In the bulk of these sections, counterfactuals are regarded as having a forking structure. This conceptualization has been premised on the branching of physical space and on the routes leading to diverging destinations that, through transfer to non-physical abstract spaces, stimulate the tendency to speculate on alternate worlds and their alternative outcomes. It is clear that such alterations are not only a matter of simple changes in the text’s actual world but effectively influence the “real” world out of which they are constructed. This assumption becomes clear in the demonstrations proposed by the subchapters with the focus on counterfactual reasoning. Furthermore, it is interesting to note how the blending theory refines and enlarges our views on counterfactuality. My assumption is closely linked to Hilary Dannenberg’s position that sees counterfactuals as “binary branching structures,” contrary to the popular conception that they “do not create discrete and separate worlds but blend spaces.”1 The examples of counterfactual blends discussed by Mark Turner in his study “Conceptual Blending and 1 Hillary Dannenberg, “Fleshing Out the Blend: The Representation of Counterfactuals

in Alternate History in Print, Film, and Television Narratives,” in Blending and the Study of Narrative: Approaches and Applications, eds. Ralf Schneider and Marcus Hartner (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), 125.

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Counterfactual Argument in the Social and Behavioral Sciences” are also relevant here. In light of this new conceptualization, blends in counterfactuals do not diverge—they are in fact the complex emergent structure of different input spaces. If we look at the two proposed conceptualizations of counterfactuality (the first one emphasizing its branching structure and the second highlighting the blend of distinct input spaces), we encounter “a strange paradox,” as Danneberg observes.1 On the one hand, we have a counterfactual with a forking path structure, and on the other, a counterfactual blend with an emergent structure that differs structurally from its initial input spaces. Which is the right definition, then? Which one can be better applied to Hemingway’s short texts? What I wish to show is that some texts advance the structure of “forking pathways” in a direct unmediated way whilst others are examples of more subtle and less direct blends. A blending analysis applied to Big Two-Hearted River, The Sea Change, Cat in the Rain, and Soldier’s Home can prove that these four texts display a much more complex line of counterfactual reasoning, to which we can apply the second conceptualization of counterfactuality. Before I expand on this conceptual framework and state my argument, I now wish to mention several critical perspectives on the four short stories to be discussed later in this sub-chapter. Critical responses to these four stories identified give voice to the complex humanity of existential strife: ruined relationships, the power of love shifting into problems of love, loss of love, endings of affairs, inability to communicate, male characters’ fear of bonding, marriages disintegrating, marriage as an infringement of personal freedom, difficulty to express feelings in emotionally restrained private moments, and so forth. Characters are confronted with unsettling dilemmas, faced with tragic situations or the reality of their failed relationships. Seen in this light, Hemingway’s stories deplore “the death of love in the modern world,”2 as Flora rightly acknowledges. Many critics took this point even further and proved that the theme of loss in love affairs or in dramatic situations helps give the unity of In Our Time. However, Debra A. Moddelmog finds another argument that is expected to bring these stories together: the unifying consciousness of Nick Adams and the state of his mind.3 Her argument is based on the presumption that 1 Dannenberg, “Fleshing Out the Blend: The Representation of Counterfactuals in Alternate History in Print, Film, and Television Narratives,” 125–126. 2 Flora, Ernest Hemingway, 34–35. 3 Debra A. Moddelmog, “The Unifying Consciousness of a Divided Conscience: Nick Adams as Author of In Our Time,” in New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, ed. Jackson J. Benson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 17–32.

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Nick is both the central character in most of the short stories in In Our Time and the creator of his alter ego in the non-Nick narratives. Her assumption is premised on the narrative evidence that the character Nick Adams pursues a writing career. She analyzes Hemingway’s original ending to the short story Big Two-Hearted River, presenting Nick’s interior monologue and his particular reflections on writing,1 and concludes that Nick has actually written two of the stories: Indian Camp and My Old Man. However, by seeing Nick as the implied author of the stories, the critic does not wish to introduce the much-debated postmodern topic of intentional authorcharacter confusion, nor does she want to discuss the topic of fiction and autobiography that has led many critics to identify Hemingway too closely with Nick. Instead, she wants to resolve “many confusions about the book’s unity, structure, vision, and significance”2 by stating that Nick Adams’ writing career and postwar history can make him the implied author of the whole series, and not only of the two stories explicitly mentioned in the interior monologue of the first unpublished variant of Big Two-Hearted River. Moddelmog may be right to assume that Nick Adams could be the implied author of In Our Time and that the series may be considered “the product of his experiences and imagination,”3 if only based on one short but crucial excerpt from the story Big Two-Hearted River, which has Nick as its focalized consciousness. The highlighted fragment presents Nick’s hiking trip away from the town of Seney and toward the river: “Nick felt happy. He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back to him” (144).4 In his very private fishing journey, the mature Nick tries to escape the realities of the complicated world he has met during the Greco-Turkish War or the traumatic experience of his unstable life immediately following World War I, so he tries not to think at all or simply ignore his rising fear that accompanies the sight of the 1

The last nine pages of Big Two-Hearted River were removed by Hemingway. He explains his artistic option in a letter to Robert McAlmon, written in November 1924, three months after he had finished the story: “I have decided that all that mental conversation in the long fishing story is the shit and have cut it all out. The last nine pages. The story was interrupted you know just when I was going good and I could never get back into it and finish it. I got a hell of a shock when I realized how bad it was and that shocked me back into the river again and I’ve finished it off the way it ought to have been all along. Just the straight fishing.” 2 Moddelmog, “Unifying Consciousness,” 18. 3 Moddelmog, “Unifying Consciousness,” 20. 4Ernest Hemingway, Big Two-Hearted River, in Ernest Hemingway. The Collected Stories, edited and introduced by James Fenton (London: Everyman’s Library, 1995), 143–150.

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“dark swamp.” In Big Two-Hearted River (Part I & II), after a strenuous hiking trip up the hill, Nick finds a safe place to camp, but this temporary “home” he has made for himself is surrounded by the threatening swamp. Wary of the physical swamp, Nick is automatically aware of potential fears and threats—the focalized narrative gives evidence of this fact: “Across the river in the swamp, in the almost dark, he saw a mist rising” (149) or “Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire, when the night wind blew on it. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly quiet” (150). Arguably, the image of the “dark swamp,” present in many Nick-narratives and not only there, indicates a rich psychological history of the authorcharacter, probably richer than his actual history. As stated by Moddelmog, our main interest is in Nick’s psyche.1 In truth, many critics have associated the physical swamp with Nick’s “mental swamp,” and some authors credit it as the potential source for many negative experiences, such as fear (for instance, fear of marriage or fatherhood), loss, disaster, or death. Ultimately, these experiences outline the image of a very troubled way of seeing the world, hence the character’s need to escape and his desire not to enter the unstable world. It is precisely in this violent world that ideals, companions, freedom, and love have been lost and are gradually replaced with violence, fear, death, senselessness, and disillusionment. I do not wish to question the general validity of these critical approaches to the reading of the “mental swamp” as the symbolic image for feelings of horror, frustration, and escape. Quite the contrary, it provides a preliminary basis for and a good introduction to some of the questions in this book. It is worth dwelling on the critics’ insistence to prove that we may come to a deeper and fuller understanding of Hemingway’s texts if we proceed to examine Nick’s psyche. Indeed, viewed with a cognitive lens, Nick’s private world is nascent with infinite possibilities. With the benefit of the earlier discussion, I propose to further investigate the blend as a double-scope story for identity in Big Two-Hearted River, The Sea Change, Cat in the Rain, and Soldier’s Home. Turner defines double-scope networks in the following terms: “A conceptual integration network is double-scope if different input frames are blended into a blended frame whose organizing frame-level structure includes at least some organizing structure from each of the two input frames that is not shared by the other”2 (emphasis in original). Endowed with the capacity for blending, the protagonists of these four stories fuse fictionally real and fanciful 1

Moddelmog, “Unifying Consciousness,” 20. Mark Turner, “Frame Blending,” in Frames, Corpora, and Knowledge Representations, ed. Rema Rossini Favretti (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2008), 15.

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elements to build their new blended self. They create meaning in their lives from opposed and seemingly incompatible input frames, hence the concept of “double-scope identities.” Therefore, the study of the protagonists’ blending activity is meant to have significant implications for their identity. In each of these four texts, Hemingway uses an arresting type of “mirror imagery,” presenting readers with the most dramatic moment of identification of the self with the blended image in the mirror. The female character in Cat in the Rain and Harold Krebs in Soldier’s Home will prove unable to live outside the “blend in the mirror,” which means that they do not have the capacity to de-blend their identities. In the end, they are both trapped in the blend but for different reasons: the girl is a naïve believer in the force of the blend, whereas Krebs is unable to recognize the identity connectors that could repair his split self (the result of his traumatizing war experience). The Nick Adams of Big Two-Hearted River proves to be more adept at blending and de-blending his self. It is only the male character in The Sea Change who successfully manages to de-blend his newly acquired identity and live freely outside the blend. The question of identity in these short stories is related to the characters’ capacity for de-blending and, afterward, the possibility of living outside the blend. I will clarify these preliminary specifications in what follows.

5.5.1 Big Two-Hearted River A key moment in Big Two-Hearted River (1925, published in In Our Time) is when Nick Adams seeks his own reflection in “the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom” (143) as he insistently watches the trout. Later, he turns back to the river, looks down the stream, and then the narrator draws observes that “it was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout” (143). This particular image becomes increasingly significant in the context of the story: Nick’s intense solitude resulting from his traumatizing war experience changed him dramatically and intensified his fears, disillusionments, and feelings of sudden loss. With this emotional burden on his troubled mind, revealed through its obsessive repetition of the physical burden on his shoulders (“it was too heavy. It was much too heavy. […] He walked along the road feeling the ache from the pull of the heavy pack,” 144), Nick finally catches a glimpse of his reflection in the “the glassy convex surface of the pool” (144). What he is likely to get is a potentially distorted image of himself, formed through the water surface that is “pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge” (144) and extremely blurred by the gravel and sand raised by the current. In all probability, the image of the self recovered from

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the undulating water differs from the image Nick would normally associate with himself. This specific act of differentiation is cognitively decisive for his consciousness. At this point in the story, readers get two representations of the character: the fictionally “real” Nick Adams taking the fishing trip and the other, counterfactual Nick, whose reflection can be briefly glimpsed in the undulating stream. The blend of identity follows a twofold process of differentiation and identification. In order to run the blend successfully, the protagonist needs to find the elements identical to or different from his identity in the fictionally true storyworld. Only by first performing the act of identification is Nick Adams able to further perform an act of differentiation. Both acts of identification and contrastive differentiation are necessary for the emergent structure of Nick’s blended version of self. First, Nick performs an examination of the image of the real-world Nick Adams in a scene where, looking onto the water from the bridge where he stands, Nick gets an incomplete view of his whole body. It reflects his face, as would a stirring of the waters, and that reflection is enough for his act of self-identification. Nick’s mental work is not surprising, as usually in pictures, photographs, or paintings, we point to faces by constructing a mental network in which the whole body of the individual is mapped into his/her most salient part—the face. In this blend, the face (projected from one input) and the body (projected from another input space) are fused, and the face becomes the individual’s personal identity. The mental link that connects the part to its whole (face-whole body), each coming from two separate inputs, will transform the individual into a “unique” being in the blend. The outer-space part-whole relation, known as a “vital relation,” is compressed through blending into “uniqueness” (see Fauconnier and Turner1 for more detailed discussions of types of outer-space connections). Applied to Big Two-Hearted River, the part-whole relation is compressed in the counterfactual blend into a Unique being: the Nick Adams in the blend is different from the Nick Adams in the text’s actual world, and this distinction is revealed by the fact that his reflection in the water does not correspond to the ordinary representation of himself; this may be the reason why he barely recognizes himself in the reflection. Clearly, the distorted image that slowly emerges in the stream is far from the current representation of the character in the actual storyworld, where Nick Adams actively engages in practical activities: he sets up camp in the forest, fishes with confidence, cooks dinner. These intense physical activities and engagement with immediate action show that he takes great satisfaction

1

Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 88–102.

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from minor tasks of little apparent significance. Physical activity and ordinary sensations can bring satisfaction: Inside the tent the light came through the brown canvas. It smelled pleasantly of canvas. Already there was something mysterious and homelike. Nick was happy as he crawled inside the tent. He had not been unhappy all day. This was different though. Now things were done. There had been this to do. Now it was done. He had made the camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in a good place. He was in his home where he had made it. Now he was hungry. (148)

Nevertheless, his intensified focus on the present moment and insistence on exciting positive motion could signal that the character is attempting to keep his mind and thoughts under control. He may try to forget his distorted image in the water in the same way that he tries to ignore the threatening presence of the swamp, and at the very least, deflect the confrontation with the dangers and fears arising from it. The narratorial voice concludes pointedly: “[I]n the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it. He did not want to go down the stream any further today” (161). But the process is much more detailed: the story’s present circumstances will serve as a material anchor to construct more elaborate mental spaces. It is true that this place teeming with physical activity may appear able to protect the character, but as pointed at by other details in the story, Nick is still not completely safe. Increasingly perilous images loom in the background: the sight of the burned-over country, heavily destroyed by the war, the sootstained grasshoppers, the physical pain after the day’s uphill walk, the mist rising from the swamp, the physical shock given by the freezing cold stream. To a considerable degree, these recurrent disturbing images prove that Nick’s psyche is still in the course of healing. But again, humans or humanlike figures never inhabit one single mental space, so Nick starts to elaborate on physical anchors to create a more comfortable counterfactual mental space for his identity. There, he only preserves the features that can give him the necessary disposition to renew his burnt self: the fertile country (“a long undulating country with frequent rises and descents, sandy underfoot and the country alive again,” 145) and the image of Hopkins, a dear war companion lost in the battle (Nick pays tribute to Hopkins by making coffee “according to Hopkins” and by remembering the plans they had made together to go fishing in summer and cruise along the north shore of Lake Superior). The sorrow caused by this absence is assuaged by honoring the way Hopkins would have done things like making coffee. It is an accepted fact that the factor of differentiation plays an important role in the cognitive process of counterfactual blends, which reinforces the

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forking structure of counterfactuals. Nick Adams knows his counterfactual self is distinct from the same with his actual self, even if, through a cognitive lens, the counterfactual is a blend of two mental spaces. As Nick becomes dependent on his counterfactual self, he loses interest in the actual version of his identity, leading to his final decision to live in neither of these spaces. He will therefore inhabit his private mental world, resulting from the blending of his own reality with counterfactual virtual elements he has invented. The blended space has an emergent structure of its own and introduces Nick Adams as a unique being with features from both input spaces: he is excited and threatened, isolated and close to his companions, dejected and joyous, energetic and lethargic. It may be that the unclear reflection Nick glimpses in the water mirrors this impossible blend: his mixed troubled self. The sharp disanalogy between the inputs showing Nick’s distinct selves has been projected to the blended space, which now displays a unique Nick Adams yet unaccustomed to his new blended self. From an identity perspective, Big Two-Hearted River is double-scoped in that it blends sharply different aspects of the identity of Nick’s former and present selves, co-existing in a now different man in the aftermath of his war experience.

5.5.2 The Sea Change Like Nick Adams in Big Two-Hearted River, Phil, the central character of The Sea Change (1931, published in Winner Take Nothing), undergoes a series of changes in the course of a very short narrative. The story is supposedly based on a true conversation Hemingway says he overheard in a bar between a man and a woman leaving him for another woman: “In a story called ‘The Sea Change,’ everything is left out. I had seen the couple in the Bar Basque in St. Jean-de-Luz and I knew the story too well, which is the squared root of well, and use my well you like except mine. So I left the story out. But it is all there. It is not visible but it is there.”1 Like in the real-life story, supposedly, the two “tanned” partners, looking “out of place” in Paris, sit together at a table in an almost empty café and talk openly about the woman’s decision to separate. The man moves from the desire to kill his competitor to the sudden realization that the woman has already made a choice and her decision is not within his control. Therefore, at the end of the story, he takes the decision to let her go and sends her off to her new lover, while they both know that one day they may be reunited. As agreed, the woman leaves quickly without looking back while the man watches her go. 1

Hemingway qtd. in Bennett, “That’s Not Very Polite,” 228.

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At first sight, it may appear that the woman’s changed sexuality is the focus, but, as the woman leaves the scene, the reader is made to realize that the change in “the girl” (consistent denomination used by the narrator here and in other stories, e.g. Hills Like White Elephants) is probably less dramatic than the man’s inner metamorphosis. Immediately after the woman exits the scene, we read the narrator’s omniscient comments: “He was not the same-looking man as he had been before he had told her to go” (309). As happens with very dramatic events, Phil’s psychological metamorphosis can also be seen in the transformation of his physical features: he feels different and he knows he is a different man now: “His voice sounded very strange. He did not recognize it. […] His voice was not the same, and his mouth was very dry” (309). Consequently, Phil feels the urge to share the news of his sudden transformation, so he readily goes to the bar in shock and tells the barman that he is a different man, repeatedly: “You see in me quite a different man” (309). At this point in the story, it becomes clear that the sudden transformation of the character challenges the reader to build and connect separate mental spaces that have one central male character, who is one and the same but, interestingly enough, who also appears differently within each of the mental spaces. Clearly, the male character in one mental space is “identical” to the character in the other input space, despite the differences involved in the construction of a new mental space. Readers are able to negotiate this by connecting the mental space centering around the man in a relationship, accepted and shared by both partners, to another mental space, in which their love affair is ruined, followed by the couple’s parting. Despite this apparently straightforward mental connection performed to link the two mental spaces, readers are able to establish identity connections across mental spaces that attribute different roles to the same character. Identity connections can link elements that refer to the different roles humans or human-like figures may have at one specific time. In The Sea Change, the male character plays distinct roles at different times in the story: first, he is the partner in a settled and committed emotional and sexual love affair, while later he is forced into becoming a single man, with a new role, dumbfounded by his former partner’s sexual orientation change and troubled by the few options left for him now. Even if it is clear that the man in the first mental input is “identical” to the man in the second input, the identity connections involve interesting differences. In The Sea Change, the major differences are triggered by the changes of roles in the life of the male character. Readers will notice that the man’s attributes in the two mental spaces are remarkably different, but despite this, they will be able to establish identity connections across inputs. That is why, even in markedly different

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situations, it is possible to identify the man by using the personal pronoun “he.” In addition, the character himself obsesses about his visible physical changes (“‘I’m a different man, James,’ he said to the barman. ‘You see in me quite a different man,’” 309), which indicates the type of mental connection performed by the reader. In this case, readers can link distinct mental spaces without using the mental tools of objective and evident resemblance, but the connection still seems straightforwardly simple. This form of mental work looks uncomplicated under formal analysis but is an extremely refined mechanism of the imagination. As stated in many places in this book, such an apparently simple mental event is the outcome of intensely creative and imaginative work. In the rapidly unfolding storyline, Phil’s psychic change is realized literally and metaphorically in his reflection in the mirror at the bar. The similar scene in Big Two-Hearted River where Nick Adams finds his reflection in the water suggests the unclear image they both glimpse is a psychic self-image with altered physical manifestations. They both see in their reflections a different inner “reality” that makes each “a different man” (309). In the very last part of this story, the character’s realization (in the form of indirectly reported thought) that he has undergone a radical change (his symbolic “sea change”) sets up another mental space: “As he looked in the glass, he saw he was really quite a different-looking man” (309). This space is also acknowledged by the bartender, James, who immediately confirms: “You’re right there, sir” (309). Nevertheless, James is more than a narrative device, which may explain the earlier focus on his center of consciousness. This is illustrated in the following excerpt: “The barman was at the far end of the bar. His face was white and so was his jacket. He knew these two and thought them a handsome young couple. He had seen many young handsome couples break up and new couples form that were never so handsome long. He was not thinking about this, but about a horse. In half an hour he could send across the street to find if the horse had won” (307). Warren Bennett convincingly argues that Hemingway’s indirect introspection into the barman’s thoughts endows James with “some artistic function in relation to Phil.”1 James is “a further development of the mirror imagery and reflects, in an ironic dédoublement, the sea-changed Phil.”2 Thus, the sea-changed self-image that Phil fully acknowledges is doubly reflected in the mirror behind the bar and in the extended mirror developed by James: “Looking into the mirror he saw that this was quite true” (309, emphasis added). It is precisely this reinforced realization that creates the 1 2

Bennett, “That’s Not Very Polite,” 241. Bennett, “That’s Not Very Polite,” 241.

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need to set up another mental space—one that can ideally accommodate the psychic trouble occurring in the depths of Phil’s identity. Readers need to blend the man’s counterpart selves—the fulfilled partner engaged in a love relationship and the dejected single man abandoned by his partner—in a new counterfactual blended space that can be metaphorically glimpsed in the reflecting surfaces of the mirror. However, more imaginative work is needed: given the two distinct roles of the character, readers need to manufacture identity connectors between the two spaces and then compress them in one blended space. The blend has some characteristics of the two spaces but also several other particularities of its own. The spontaneous reactions of the character, now a “different-looking man,” are triggered by the rapid and unexpected turn of the situation with effects emerging in the new blended space. In order to run effectively, the blend makes possible a series of matches that correspond to no prior experience of the character. In the imaginative blended space, the differentlooking man already hates the woman, and therefore he will try to stop her from coming back to him, despite their envisaged reunion in the first input space. The new meaning emerging in the blend has to do with the man’s newly developing feelings for the woman who has just left him—bitterness, disillusionment, dejection. In making sense of the male character’s speech and thoughts, we need to observe the paradox in his emergent state of mind that strikingly contradicts his previous effort at understanding and reconciliation. What is really at stake here is the man’s capacity to perform and control blending that only becomes effective if followed subsequently by the process of de-blending or decompression. Without de-blending or running “backward projection” from the blend into the input spaces, the emergent structure in the blend cannot affect the counterpart elements of the two input spaces. Fauconnier and Turner explain the importance of decompression: “The effect of blending and deblending, compressing and decompressing, is to create much richer networks, with the greater flexibility of going from outer space to inner space and back; but this does not incapacitate or overwhelm the mind because we can still work in one blend at a time.”1 In The Sea Change, Phil is able to manipulate the imaginative scenario of the blend, and equally importantly, he is aware of its connections to the outer mental spaces (real and counterfactual). In blending terminology, he is able to project back to the two input spaces with great flexibility. This process is essential for outlining his identity, finally proving that he can distinguish between himself in the blend and himself outside the blend. By contrast, Nick Adams in Big Two-Hearted River has 1

Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 392.

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no such ability and cannot recognize the identity connectors that link the subject to the various versions of his split self. In the same vein, the other two examples of double-scope identity blends, Cat in the Rain and Soldier’s Home, demonstrate the failure of the protagonists to decompress.

5.5.3 Cat in the Rain As in many other short stories, in Cat in the Rain (1925, published in In Our Time), Hemingway keeps the narrative storyline extremely short and simple. Nothing much seems to happen in the storyworld: an American couple spends their holiday in an Italian hotel. In the hotel room, the husband keeps himself busy reading while the wife stands at the window and looks for more excitement in the square opposite their room. The wife, also called the American girl, sees a cat wandering about in the dripping rain and suddenly decides to fetch the cat and care for it. In the reception lounge she meets the receptionist, they exchange a few words, and then she goes out into the courtyard, but the cat has already gone. While she is still looking for the missing cat, an umbrella opens behind her. The hotel keeper sends a maid to attend to the wife; his gesture may be triggered by the official standard of the hotel, assisting clients, but it may also be a sign of implicit friendship. In the short exchange between the wife and the hotel’s maid, the American girl repeatedly stresses her utmost desires: ‘Ha perduto qualche cosa, Signora?’ ‘There was a cat,’ said the American girl. ‘A cat?’ ‘Sì, il gatto.’ ‘A cat?’ the maid laughed. ‘A cat in the rain?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘under the table.’ Then, ‘Oh, I wanted it so much. I wanted a kitty.’ (108)

First, the wife uses the word “cat,” then “kitty,” normally used by children, implying that she herself needs more protection and attention, as a child would. When both the wife and the maid return to the hotel lounge, “the padrone bowed from his desk.” Here, there is a change of focus on the American girl’s thoughts, revealing how she feels when the hotel’s owner bows “from his desk”: “Something felt very small and tight inside the girl. The padrone made her feel very small and at the same time really important. She had a momentary feeling of being of supreme importance” (108). Then, the girl starts indulging in momentary fantasies, imagining herself an important figure for someone, signaling a search for an alternative identity for herself. It is this contradictory feeling—a mix of ordinariness and self-

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importance—that suddenly changes her perspective on her identity. Her attitude greatly resembles the behavior of a child in the same circumstances. She is no longer the wife but “the American girl” who apparently feels attached to the hotel keeper, the only one to offer her some comfort. Back in the hotel room, the wife finds her husband engrossed in reading. She tells him how much she wants to have a cat and several other things: “‘I wanted it so much,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I wanted it so much. I wanted that poor kitty. It isn’t any fun to be a poor kitty out in the rain’” (108), but the husband does not reply and readily resumes his reading. The description of the wife’s and the husband’s behavior is indicative of their emotional setup and emphasizes how their reactions mirror the actual state of their marriage. In the short discussion with the husband, the intense tension builds up gradually, indicating that the woman’s desire to have “that poor kitty” is not altogether a whim. There is a perceived similarity between the male character of The Sea Change and the wife of Cat in the Rain, clearly rendered in the “mirror scene.” This resemblance is stronger when the wife engages in a one-sided dialog with herself in front of the mirror. At some point in her increasingly idiosyncratic monologue, she seeks confirmation from her husband that he shares her fantasy, but she does not really listen to his brief and uninteresting answers. Afterward, the wife willfully resumes her rather absurd thoughts by making suggestions, as to herself, of changes in her life: a series of apparently futile transformations (her hairstyle, dinner by candles and with silverware, new clothes, a kitty to look after) that eventually reveal distinct clashing mental spaces in her private world. This scenario detailedly constructed by the female protagonist persists throughout the storyworld as a private mental space shared only by the wife and the reader. The girl is aware of the incongruity between, on the one hand, the input space where she experiences the sterile boredom of her married life and her husband refusing to respond sympathetically and satisfactorily, and, on the other hand, the second input space where she is the American girl, now demoted from her role as a “wife,” longing for radical changes in her emotional life. It is important to notice that the first input space is causal for the second one, i.e. the first input is the actual mental image of an unsatisfactory marriage that triggers changes in the wife’s behavior and language and eventually leads to the construction of a counterfactual space where the seemingly unengaged American girl uses the language of a child, feels attached to the padrone, and seeks protection from adults. Here, cause-effect and change are the vital outer-space relations connecting one input to another: the unsatisfactory development of their marriage is causal to the wife’s demoting transformation into “the American

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girl.” These types of mental links show that mental inputs are highly dynamic, even in the case of mental spaces that are connected by an outerspace identity link. In Cat in the Rain, for example, the wife who changes into a girl remains the same person, but the reader is required to recognize features of sameness or identity across individual mental spaces, which illustrate contrasting differences in the evolution of the character. In one input space, the main character is the adult wife whose marriage has reached a standstill and also a point where questions cannot be answered by either of the two partners. It is in this space that the wife realizes that her marriage has deteriorated to the point of irreversible disintegration. Therefore, the second input space proposes a complete change: the wife is now “the American girl” who cannot cope with the demands and standards of her married life. In her new role of an immature “girl,” the wife refuses to become involved in a marriage that forces her to take responsibilities and be committed at an age that is normally suitable for another lifestyle. The schematic structure of this mental space develops by recruiting relevant background knowledge regarding conventional features of marital life. Conceptual integration can capture the dynamic cross-mappings in Cat in the Rain that connect the adult and the child. More specifically, several distinct features of the input spaces of adult and child are projected onto the blend by compression. Readers need to creatively extend the blend by projecting to the blended space the frame of marriage that comes from the space inhabited by the adult wife. In the blend, the wife is a girl engaged in a dysfunctional marriage—a mental scenario that is outside social and moral standards. Thus, the blended mental space introduces the American girl speaking in the language of a child (e.g. the use of “poor kitty” instead of “cat”) and expressing wishes that normally make the difference in a young person’s life: “And I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. And I want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes” (109). The woman’s new blended identity is constructed as a fusion of two input spaces, regarded as counterparts of each other. In this fashion, the features of the female character and those of a child are fused and compressed into one and the same individual: the desires are those of a child, but she still has the body and mind of an adult. The new meaning emerging in the blend arises from the unsettling marriage of a male adult to a child, which becomes possible only in the imaginary blend. The result of the integration of the two input spaces is a “double-scope” identity blend, since the two input spaces have different structures both in terms of personality and activities performed by the wife vs. the “American girl.” This genuine double-scope blended story, like many other stories, becomes

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meaningful by inheriting structure from each of the two mental spaces. By living out her impossible blended marriage, the female character starts to experience feelings that are not clearly attached to any other previous mental spaces: the fear and anxiety caused by the mismatch in her marriage. The story ends with a knock on the hotel door—a maid is sent by the hotel keeper to offer the wife a cat. The wife accepts the offering, aware that she will not be able to get the cat she saw outside. It is not accidental that Hemingway places the offering at the very end of his story—the maid is sent to the wife after she has fully experienced the blended space and has juggled with its emergent meaning. Since the narration develops the wife’s “intramental thinking,”1 the conceptual integration network becomes entrenched only in her mind and not in the mind of her husband, which reveals the wife’s isolation and the husband’s apparent emotional aloofness and lack of involvement. The wife’s deep sense of alienation leads to her inability to perceive herself outside the reflecting surfaces of intersecting mirrors (the window’s and the mirror’s glass)—a place obliquely inhabited by her blended identity. Her discomfort is expressed via the metaphorical transfer triggered by projecting the woman’s act of bodily movement toward the window and her physical manipulation of the mirror—“She laid the mirror down on the dresser and went over to the window and looked out” (109)—onto the following lengthier scene in which the wife longs for changes in her life (Hemingway stresses the female character’s desires by persistently using the verb “want” eleven times). The story of literal movement and the physical grasping and manipulation of objects is projected onto an abstract story of manipulation. In her imagined blended story, the wife takes over the new role of an ACTOR MANIPULATOR, adept at manipulating her mental states. In Turner’s terms, “an actor in a nonspatial story of thinking is understood by projection from a spatial action-story of moving and manipulating.”2 By becoming a self-empowered manipulator, the wife is able to activate and run the blend effectively until the end of the story, and the reader perceives the events in the story exclusively through the female protagonist’s eyes and consciousness, as her husband is emotionally distant and not available for introspection. In his illuminating remarks on double-scope stories, Turner argues that human beings are able to simultaneously imagine conflicting scenarios that run counter to our present/actual story without possibilities for confusion. 1 Alan Palmer distinguishes between “intramental” and “intermental” thinking. In his view, the difference is between joint, socially shared thoughts and individual thinking. Palmer, Fictional Minds, 218–230. 2 Turner, The Literary Mind, 43

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This makes the mental operation of blending “a basic part of what makes us cognitively modern.”1 The scholar further explains: “We might have expected evolution to build our brains in such a way as to prevent us from activating stories that run counter to our present circumstances, since calling these stories to mind risks confusion, distraction, disaster. Yet we do so all the time. A human being trapped inescapably in an actual story of suffering or pain may wilfully imagine some other, quite different story, as a mental escape from the present.”2 Hemingway’s female character resorts to this essential mental activity all the time and to such a great extent that she might seem to be on the point of annihilating the other “real” story, which may or may not see her live within the imaginary confines of her fantasy world. As the wife progressively and laboriously develops her blend, she is at all times mentally aware of her private blended space. Her husband is only part of the fictionally real space—a space his wife progressively loses touch with. The possibility of their coming apart increases as the husband is not involved in his wife’s imaginary mental spaces, and perhaps more importantly, as the blend occupies a central place in the wife’s private life. What this shows is that the wife proves unable to decompress her identification of self with the “girl in the mirror,” which eventually leads to her increased inability to experience life “outside the blend in the mirror.” She is a naïve believer in the life within the blend.

5.5.4 Soldier’s Home The reader of Soldier’s Home (1925, published in In Our Time), with Big Two-Hearted River as a point of reference, would have a strong indication of the main character’s “mental swamp,” even if the central character is not Nick Adams, but Harold Krebs. However, Harold can be seen as Nick’s alter ego. Like the story of Big Two-Hearted River, Soldier’s Home shows the impact of war on Harold’s traumatized psyche, an ex-soldier who returns to his home town and community later than his companions. Critics highlight the character’s sense of loss and disillusionment and his inability to integrate back into a community that makes no effort to understand the changes his mind has suffered. Harold’s inner turmoil resembles the trauma Nick Adams experiences in many “Nick narratives.” It can be argued that both Harold Krebs and Nick Adams are prototypes for Hemingway’s short fiction: traumatized by war, failed lives with unresolved conflicts, doomed 1

Mark Turner, “Double-Scope Stories,” in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. David Herman (Stanford, CA: CSLI, 2003), 121. 2 Turner, “Double-Scope Stories,” 118.

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to live out but not escape their shattered existence, and finally condemned to withdraw. In stories such as Soldier’s Home or Big Two-Hearted River, the emphasis is on the protagonists’ traumatic experiences and on their constant attempts to find an escape route. My analysis in terms of conceptual integration, as applied to the doublescope blended story, goes to the roots of the mental functioning of characters and builds the blend as part of the ongoing construction of the characters’ mental lives. I argue that this is a valid method of in-depth exploration of mental spaces emerging from the “real” story, since, as Turner argues, “for any story, we can develop a great variety of mental spaces.”1 If the focus of the story is the “soldier’s home” (the actual world of the character), then critics may be right to assume that this place is a reversed home, which makes Harold Krebs search for another place free of fear, disillusionment, and sense of loss. What I am suggesting here is that we need to consider the underlying narrative mental stories triggered by the experience of the exsoldier, firstly and most importantly, the large mental space inclusive of his community and family. True, Harold does not actually “live” in his “home” or in the midst of the community. He feels psychologically rejected and neglected by his people, who are not interested in hearing his stories about war. It is only when he fabricates more interesting war stories or when he assumes other soldiers’ more exciting feats that people truly listen to him: “Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it” (87). For Krebs, coming home is not a time for welcoming heroes, but a time when the lies he has to tell are the only form of communication with a community that has lost interest and respect for him, and in his turn he wishes to flee. His constant need to fabricate exaggerated and untrue war stories literarily triggers a nauseating sensation which reappears every time he has to deal with his family’s insensitive behavior: “Krebs felt sick and vaguely nauseated” (93). Having to live in this unfriendly place, it is no wonder that Harold Krebs cannot feel “at home.” If we remember, along with Turner, that “we do not live in a single narrative mental space, but rather dynamically and variably distributed over very many,”2 then Harold enjoys the mental ability that allows him to indulge in fantasies, fabricate delusions, and explore alternatives. He is thus able to develop a conceptual integration network with two differing input spaces and an overall blended construction.

1 2

Turner, The Literary Mind, 132. Turner, The Literary Mind, 136.

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Typically, in double-scope blended identity stories, profoundly incompatible mental spaces clash: whilst nothing significant happens to Harold in the “actual” world, hence the feeling of a boring and unsettling world, in Harold’s alternative mental space, everything happens. While he is adept at setting up counterfactual mental scenarios, he does not do this only by making minor changes in his actual real world but by counterfactually manipulating his identity and dispositions. The scene where he sits on the front porch of his house watching young girls as they walk on the opposite side of the street is very revealing. In the lengthy description of this scene, Hemingway repeatedly and persistently uses two verbs: “he liked” and the negative form “he did not want,” which is illuminating for the sharp disanalogy between Harold’s developing mental spaces: the mental space triggered by his actual world and his satisfactory alternative to his “reality.” The latter counterfactual mental space accommodates his desires: He liked to look at them, though. There were so many good-looking young girls. Most of them had their hair cut short. When he went away only little girls wore their hair like that or girls that were fast. They all wore sweaters and shirt waists with round Dutch collars. It was a pattern. He liked to look at them from the front porch as they walked on the other side of the street. He liked to watch them walking under the shade of the trees. He liked the round Dutch collars above their sweaters. He liked their silk stockings and flat shoes. He liked their bobbed hair and the way they walked. (88, emphasis added)

It may be the insistence on minute details, such as the pattern of the sweaters or the almost tactile sensation of the silk stockings or the shade of the trees that outline this intensely sensorial mental space. A range of almost surreal details, unfathomable relations, and strange characteristics coalesce in a single private space, allowing Harold Krebs to achieve a satisfactory alternative that exists only in his mind and is clearly kept separate from the actual narrative world. The separation becomes apparent in the following indirect thought presentation: “[H]e did not want them [the girls] themselves really. They were too complicated. There was something else. Vaguely he wanted a girl but he did not want to have to work to get her. He would have liked to have a girl but he did not want to have to spend a long time getting her. He did not want to get into the intrigue and the politics. He did not want to have to do any courting. He did not want to tell any more lies” (89, emphasis added). The increasing tension between his desires and what he is able to deal with is, in fact, the tension between his two clashing mental spaces: on the one hand, the mental space in which Harold is psychologically rejected, hence his fear of relationships and commitment (he did not want to play by the community’s standards and rules) and, on the other hand, the

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alternative mental space overlapping with a counterfactual scenario in which he is able to communicate with the community and his family, thus feeling fully integrated and accepted. However, the character lives in neither of these. He lives in the blended space of the two inputs. Due to the disanalogy between the mental space projected by the soldier’s home and the other counterfactual mental scenario with respect to the character’s actual world, it is only the blend that can absorb the incompatibilities between these two spaces. It seems that Harold Krebs lives in the impossible blend, a conflicted space that involves a wide range of mental operations: projecting elements from the existing input mental spaces, blending and integrating them in the activated blended space. This blended mental space is probably the most robust and “realistic,”1 and it is also central to the way he thinks. He creates by selecting elements from both input spaces, but he acknowledges the emergent structure in the blend, too. Contrasting elements from both inputs are integrated in the blend to strengthen this double-scope story of identity: Harold’s facetious war stories his community wishes to hear and the desire to tell the truth of how he had been “badly, sickeningly frightened all the time” by war (88). He conceives his hypothetical recognition as a war hero in his community and feels aggrieved that this blend is permanently counterfactual because the respect and appreciation for war heroes is already a thing of the past. Nevertheless, this non-event becomes actual in the blend. Only in the counterfactual blend can Harold be honest and tell people what really happened to him in wartime; only in this blended space does his family feel genuinely sympathetic to him and take a real interest in his life as a soldier. From the outside, or rather from the “actual” input, this event has the characteristics of a gap, as there is no corresponding real action for such an event. In fact, people “did not want to talk about the war at all” (87). Despite this, the nonexistent event inherits particular features from the counterfactual space in which Harold openly talks about his fear of war and explains how he really felt at that time. In the blend, non-events become events. Cognitive scientists show that humans have an advanced mental ability to build a rich and wide-spanning pool of non-events that serve as building blocks for our cognition. Harold Krebs is no exception. He activates elements from both inputs by recruiting only potentially useful aspects to 1

According to Turner, blended spaces are the most “realistic” ones as they show that life, like meaning, is never contained within just one mental space but involves mental operations running over many activated mental spaces: “life is never contained within a single story space or even a collection of such spaces whose corresponding generic space tells us everything we want to know. The real is in the blend.” Turner, The Literary Mind, 136.

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build his preferred mental space. He knows the blend is counterfactual with respect to the settled input, and false. However, the “falsity” of this space is irrelevant because the compressed elements in the blend can cast new light on the input spaces. The mechanisms of this double-scope story are at work throughout Soldier’s Home. Specifically, in Harold’s blend, the inner-space counterfactual or false compression in the blend decompresses into true outer-space relations between the source inputs. The structure in the inputs is preserved, but the counterfactual blended scenario systematically operates over this structure through backward projection, i.e. the blend and its emergent structure are projected back to the input spaces. Put differently, the inputs are modified by the blend. By “unpacking” or disintegrating the blend, the blended elements are separated and then projected back to the inputs. In Harold’s blend, his state of mind, dispositions, and desires are sympathetically shared by his family and community, and they seem to think and feel alike. In the end, the similarities in the blend are projected back to the inputs so as to reveal more sharply the dissimilarities or disanalogies between them. By performing backward projection,1 the elements in the two mental inputs will be altered substantially by blending. As such, the fortunate Harold Krebs of the blend, at peace with himself and the world around him and acknowledged as a war hero, is projected back to the input spaces only to experience the community’s indifference and harm more radically. The disanalogy between the inputs becomes increasingly more powerful, and this further affects the character’s disposition and identity. Blending delivers new insight into Harold’s identity. From an identity perspective, Soldier’s Home is a radical double-scope identity blend, as it brings to the fore different aspects of Harolds’ identity. Another point to discuss is the difference of frames that each input contains. In the first input, the HOME frame, normally connected with peace and harmony, is ironically reversed into an unfriendly place that constantly rejects Harold, thus further contributing to the split in his identity. In the second input, the other distinct frame relating to VISION provides him with the space for physical contemplation (the scene when he watches girls walking on the other side of the street), but also with the space for imaginary contemplations (as in Harold’s fantasies, dreams, and wishes). In this alternative input, Harold’s identity is markedly changed according to how he would like to be in a counterfactual world. In sum, the blend of identities brings about a considerable psychological transformation of the character that is projected back to his “actual” self and identity. At this point in the 1

Fauconnier and Turner speak of the capacity of blends to provide “backward projection to the inputs of inferential and other structure.” Fauconnier and Turner, “Conceptual Integration Networks,” 363.

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story, the reader deals with a character whose identity has been blended and de-blended by creatively operating over a series of mental spaces. He is a character that has learned more about his “actual home”—a place which has now become too narrow and unaccommodating, hence Harold’s decision to further live in the blend, as “he wanted his life to go smoothly” (93). Harold Krebs’ decision to live in the blend has much to say concerning his intricate and creative mental life. The application of blending theory to the series of “counterfactual narratives” selected for analysis has hopefully illustrated the far-ranging theoretical and analytical potential of the concept in the context of fictional minds. My primary aim has been to highlight the relevance of cognitive approaches in narratological studies interested in the investigation of characters. In this particular chapter, the dynamic nature of conceptual blending is extremely appropriate for the description and analysis of fragmented texts. Hemingway’s short narratives are suitable examples of such a fragmented and underrepresented mode of cognition, especially for the construction of characters. Therefore, the central concern of this section has been to unravel the cognitive mechanisms involved in the construction of Hemingway’s characters. The analysis of complex cognitive processes, cross-space mappings, partial and backward projection, and blend activation gives an insight into a comprehensive understanding of fictional characters and their minds. As a result, characters prove to have an extraordinary capacity to construct a counterfactual image of themselves, finally showing that they are always able to reinvent themselves creatively and imaginatively. Their dual perspective of what they truly are and how they could evolve in a counterfactual world offers them the possibility to fabricate their most creative self. They always have counterfactuality available and use it as a valuable mental resource. This chapter has shown that a complex arriving at the meaning in literary texts is not a linear process, nor is it the sum of all elements and aspects contained in the input spaces. In this view, the character emerges primarily from the new structure in the blend, one that is not the sum of all aspects concerning the character in the story but a result of the partial and relevant projection of the input spaces.1 Understanding the thinking in the Hemingway

1

“The input spaces give rise to selective projection. In other words, not all the structure from the inputs is projected to the blend, but only the matched information, which is required for purposes of local understanding. […] [M]uch of the structure in the inputs is irrelevant to, or even inconsistent with, the emergent meaning under construction. This type of information is therefore not projected into the blend. Selective projection is one reason why different language users, or even the same

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story means reconstructing his fictional minds along with their inner inclination to fantasize and imagine alternative mental spaces that counter fictional reality. In an attempt to define narrative conflict in Hemingway’s underrepresented texts, I have proposed a theoretical framework that allows a detailed examination of the deepest levels of the text, where mental spaces undergo constant transformations and enter into conflict with each other. In particular, double-scope identity blends show that blending operates effectively over the clash triggered by the disanalogy between the inputs, which further leads to the blend activation. It is true that conceptual integration may not be available for ordinary readers, but it is “an idealized version of comprehension,”1 occurring off-line and not in real time, and is a worthwhile and promising enterprise in “the post-classical age” of narratology.

5.6 Compression of vital relations: A Very Short Story In his ‘A Very Short Story’ as Therapy, Scott Donaldson writes: “A Very Short Story ranks as one of Hemingway’s least effective stories. Behind a pretense of objectivity, it excoriates the faithless Agnes. Even four years after the jilting, he was too close to his subject matter to achieve the requisite artistic distance. But he does seem to have dissipated his bitterness against her in the process.”2 According to the critic, the lack of merit is the result of Hemingway’s source material, too heavily-loaded with autobiographical details that the writer did not manage to refine for a more effective esthetic impact. Hemingway met Agnes von Kurowsky, a Red Cross nurse, in a hospital in Milan, and fell in love with the attractive woman, despite the difference in their ages. They planned to get married, but Hemingway returned to the States and, after a short while, received a letter from Agnes with the bad news that it would be impossible to continue their affair as she was soon to marry an Italian officer. It took Hemingway four years before he could write about this emotionally devastating affair, while the manuscript itself went through at least three versions. In his final draft, language user on different occasions, can produce different blends from the same inputs.” Evans and Green, Cognitive Linguistics, 409. 1 Jennifer Riddle Harding, “Metaphors, Narrative Frames, and Cognitive Distance in Charles Chesnutt’s Dave’s Neckliss,” in Blending and the Study of Narrative: Approaches and Applications, eds. Ralf Schneider and Marcus Hartner (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 249. 2 Scott Donaldson, “A Very Short Story as Therapy,” in Hemingway’s Neglected Short Fiction: New Perspectives, ed. Susan Beegel (Tuscaloosa/London: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 105.

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Hemingway managed to render the story in an excessively impersonal tone through an indirect account of the love affair and the absence of dialog. Contrary to Donaldson’s arguments, I argue that this short story is both stylistically effective and emotionally distressing for its readers. A cognitive blending analysis can do justice to A Very Short Story (1924, published in In Our Time) in terms of the breadth and complexity of its mental space networks. This book aims to revisit Hemingway’s short story to prove not only the richness of connections in the network but also the variety of mental compressions that bring together disparate scenarios and relations. This can show how mental compressions of outer-space are connected into innerspace relations in the blend (compression of Cause and Effect, Time, Space, Identity, and Change). Mental mappings (also known as “matchings”1 or “vital relations”2) connect counterpart elements in distinct input spaces, creating “outer-space relations” (vital relations based on the frequency with which they appear in conceptual integration networks). Compression may appear when the outerspace relations are tightened or compressed by blending. To put it differently, the distance between counterparts in the outer-space relation is compressed and transformed into an “inner-space relation” in the blend.3 The significant role played by compression is to reduce complexity to human scale or “to achieve human scale.”4 Blended spaces are therefore created at “human scale” in order to be perceived and easily apprehended by means of familiar frames. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner5 propose a detailed taxonomy of vital relations and convincingly demonstrate various ways of compression. By selectively projecting elements from separated mental spaces and integrating them in the blend, humans need to perform intense processes of compression. For instance, blending may perform temporal compression, which means that the time distance in the outer-space relation between two distinct events can be compressed so as to reduce the distance and view both events simultaneously (vital relation of Time). Blending may perform compression over separated geographical spaces so that two differently located events may occupy a unique location (vital relation of Space). We perform compressions of cause and effect that are generally bundled with the vital relation of Time and Change. Also, a Part-Whole relation can be compressed under blending. The outer-space vital relation of Analogy can

1

Evans and Green, Cognitive Linguistics, 419. Fauconnier and Turner, “Mental Spaces, 340. 3 Evans and Green, Cognitive Linguistics, 420. 4 Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 383. 5 Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think. 2

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be compressed into Identity, and conversely, Disanalogy can be compressed into the inner-space relation of Change. Blending in A Very Short Story allows the protagonists to achieve a “human scale” reality in their private worlds. I will focus on one important question: how compression is achieved through blending in this particularly short text and how it can affect the reception of the story. Like in many blends analyzed in prior sections, the narrative in A Very Short Story emerges in the mind of the reader from four main sources: two input spaces, a generic space, and a blended construct. Fauconnier and Turner define a generic space being when “the structure that inputs seem to share is captured in a generic space.”1 Selective information from the generic space is projected onto the blend via the input spaces. In A Very Short Story, the generic space contains this type of generic information: a couple, a location, other minor characters, objects of value, and a purposeful action. In the first of the two input spaces, the two protagonists, an unnamed “he,” and “Luz,” the female character, meet in a hospital in Padua before “the armistice.” The nurse “stayed on night duty for three months” (83) in order to care for the patient with whom she started an affair. The patient is taken to hospital to recuperate from his wounds and, once on crutches, checks the other patients’ temperatures so “Luz would not have to get up from [their] bed” (83). The other patients know about their affair, but very few know that they intend to get married. Before the male protagonist has to return to the front, they pray together in the Duomo. They cannot yet marry due to unsatisfied bureaucratic conditions: they cannot produce birth certificates and have no time for the marriage vows—“they wanted to get married” (83)—but their wish to be united in marriage is yet to be realized. Let us call this input space “the impossible marriage.” The second input space is prompted by their intense desire to get married (“they wanted to get married,” emphasis added) and their prompt decision to escape the inconvenient bureaucracy and other social impediments that hinder progress in their relationship. The next brief thought report accounts for the need to build this particular input space: “They felt as though they were married, but they wanted everyone to know about it, and to make it so they could not lose it” (83, emphasis added). Neither in this space nor in the “impossible marriage space” is marriage an actualized event. This second mental space is clearly different, as Luz and her partner feel and behave “as though” they were already husband and wife. Their marriage (regarded mainly as a change of social status) is a non-event that can determine unpredictable alterations of identity and changes in their beliefs and can 1

Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 48.

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open new avenues in their experience. In the context of the counterfactual marital relationship, Luz and the male protagonist are acknowledged as a couple and are fully accepted by the community. In this desired mental space (let us call it “the desired marriage”), Luz and her husband are the counterparts of the nurse and the patient in “the impossible marriage” space, and the man’s friends in New York are the counterparts for the patients in hospital in the first input space. In contrast, in “the desired marriage” space, the husband and the wife have succeeded in producing birth certificates and overcoming all the impeding conditions that did not allow them to get married. The setting is New York (their “home”), and the time period is “after the armistice.” This counterfactual space, clearly not yet possible in “real” time, fulfills all the established pre-conditions: the male character’s obligation to get a job and to quit drinking on his return home. Both objective impeding conditions (lack of birth certificates) and more subjective pre-conditions (having a job, quitting drinking, not meeting his friends) are successfully met in this second space. Hemingway’s emotionally packed story delivers yet another mental space exactly when the two protagonists decide to enter an agreement: “After the armistice they agreed he should go home to get a job so they might be married” (83). This unexpected turn in their relationship is modeled by Luz alone, who “would not come home” (83), given her partner’s inability to meet the conditions of their agreement, so she decides to carry on with her work in Italy (very soon she is expected to open a hospital there). By means of this future projection, partially anticipating the unfortunate outcome of their relationship, we can explain the quarrel “in the station at Milan” just before their separation and the romance Luz engages in with an Italian major. A Very Short Story combines two main stories of “impossible” and “desired” marriages, taking place before and after the armistice. By performing selective projection from both input spaces, the reader is able to construct a blend with an emergent structure of its own. However, we are at all times aware that “not all elements and relations from the inputs are projected to the blend,”1 and therefore only the directly relevant information will be used to structure the blend. In the counterfactual blend of the story, we match the times, locations, and individuals. In accordance with the overall frame of “marriage,” we match the nurse with the role of the wife and the patient with the role of the husband. In the blend, we match different time periods, the time before and after the armistice, and different places, the hospital and the “home” in New York. Various “vital relations” are 1

Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 47.

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compressed in the blend, and these compressions are mainly triggered by changes in the characters’ identities or shifts occurring in time and space. All these vital relations have to be compressed into uniqueness in the blend. The very troublesome existence during wartime causes the “desired marriage” input space in which the couple seeks counterfactual reunion. The act of compression also applies to physical space. The matching between the nurse in the “impossible marriage” and the husband in the “desired marriage” spaces is facilitated by space compression. After they decide that he should return to the States to get a job, the spatial distance between them increases considerably, but in the “desired marriage” input space, they are already united in marriage. The matching is again made possible by space compression. There is a time distance between when the characters cannot produce the official documents in the “impossible marriage” space and when this condition is met in the “desired marriage” input space, but this time interval has been compressed into an extremely short moment (a condition that cannot be met in reality). Despite the protagonists’ awareness that the rapid realization of the prerequisites in “the desired space” is incompatible with the real space of the “impossible marriage,” they still become involved in counterfactual scenarios as if rehearsing their roles in marriage for when the war is over. Mental spaces that are clearly distanced in time and space are thus compressed into the blend, enabling interpreters to imagine narrative events otherwise impossible to envisage.

CONCLUSIONS

James Thurber’s A Unicorn in the Garden, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths, Leo Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyitch, Ernest Hemingway’s Indian Camp, Vladimir Nabokov’s Spring in Fialta, Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory, Stephen Crane’s The Blue Hotel, Raymond Carver’s Cathedral. These short stories hold a special place among my literary preferences. We all have a list of stories and books that we love above all others. But what exactly makes them significant and memorable to us? What is the essential quality that brings them together? Readers often explain that they feel and suspect there is something significant in the depth of implication but just cannot pinpoint exactly what it is. Critics often speculate on a story’s nuances and complexities with no solid concluding evidence. The text reveals but a myriad of possible interpretations. Arguably, the reality encapsulated in a story is immensely more ample than a simple anecdote read and recounted in a short sitting. The short story’s apparently plain content and structural brevity have vexed and intrigued generations of readers and critics alike. Still, the short stories of our very personal collections live on within us and resurface in our memory with unequaled emotional force and intensity. The short story overthrows expectations, has undefinable but captivating effects, arouses irresistible fascination, pulsates and throbs ceaselessly, suspends motion, emphasizes vigorous nuances, never exhausts the subject, focalizes an experience, throws into doubt firm ideas, defamiliarizes our assumptions, reaches into our depths, engulfs and snares us. The short story is intuitive, mythic, antisocial, immaterial, fragmentary, intense, mysterious, unusual, misleading, oral, lyrical. The short story can be all this. Or it can be nothing like this. It delights into indeterminacy and resists definition. The short story is “a dissident form of communication,”1 as Paul March-Russell argues. A short story is a photograph. South American writer Julio Cortázar insists that, like a successful photograph, the story dissects a fragment of reality in order to explore its physical limitations, but paradoxically, the fragment acts “like an explosion which fully opens a much more ample reality, like a dynamic vision which spiritually transcends the space reached

1

Paul March-Russell, The Short Story: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), ix.

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by the camera.”1 This introductory metaphorical comparison is pertinent since it helps us realize that the discussion of the short story must begin with the notion of its physical limits. It is important to note that both photographers and short story writers use that physical limitation esthetically. Cortázar adds that, by delimiting the image or the event, they must choose something meaningful that projects imagination toward a realm beyond the visual or literary anecdote in the photograph or in the story. In this way, the story has the mysterious quality to “illuminate something beyond itself.”2 In a similar vein, in Chapter 3, I tried to show that this essential quality of structural brevity has not only served experimental writers but increases the effects of tension and intensity in the story. Having explored a number of essential features that define short fiction, the story’s need for economy ought to be regarded not as a limitation but as an essential literary device that allows the achievement of the overall esthetic effect. In contrast to the novel’s tendency to render the full-length of life, the short story communicates a significant fragment of life. Nonetheless, within the restraints of limited space, the fragment is lifted to the status of an intense awareness of our own deepest experiences. The story’s tendency toward fragmentation and textual density has been discussed in the context of the modernist short story, which greatly explores the relation between the fragment and the whole. Writers of short stories experience an inherent paradox in their writing, more so than even modernist novelists: the fragment, as a part detached from the whole, completes the whole but remains the most memorable and autonomous segment of the text. Not surprisingly, the story’s fragmented nature and disjointed discourse suited modernity and its disordered subjectivity in a world that slowly but surely became more disarticulated against a background of sprawling quantities of tittered fragments. In line with this argument, Nadine Gordimer defines the story as “fragmented and restless form, a matter of hit and miss, and it is perhaps for this reason that it suits modern consciousness—which seems best expressed as flashes of fearful insight alternating with near-hypnotic states of indifference.”3 I then moved on to prove that the story’s shortness, resulting in apparent lack of completion, firmly establishes the short form as an autonomous genre. In this sense, I tried to avoid speculations regarding the story’s 1 Julio Cortázar, “Some Aspects of the Short Story,” trans. Aden W. Hayes, in The New Short Story Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1994), 246. 2 Cortázar, “Some Aspects of the Short Story,” 247. 3 Gordimer, “Flash of Fireflies,” 265.

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adjacency to or dependency on the more “legitimate” longer form, i.e. the novel. While I considered the asymmetrical relations between the two genres, my intentions were not to single out either or to point out structural differences but to prove that they propose two distinct modes of thinking and imagination. It is only logical for the short form to rely on implication, suggestion, and in-depth understanding. The tension created by economy and fragmentation, ellipsis, the impulse toward depersonalization, the fragile dialogs, the single effect, and the suspension of motion in linear narrative are characteristically inherent devices sustained by modernist short texts. In an attempt to capture its meaning, myriads of minds turn the text over and around, speculate, play out interpretations, and construct others anew. Overall, Chapter 3 suggests that the short story’s use of vigorous compression and fragmentation replenishes, rather than exhausts, nascent sources of textual meaning. By drawing attention to this sense of the short text as having a relief in depth, I specifically attempted to capture the movement of thought in the act of reading short fiction. In Chapters 4 and 5, I elaborated on this argument with a closer examination of the cognitive operations readers must engage in when experiencing short fictional worlds. I will return to this point below. Beneath the delusively incomplete surface of the short text lies a deeper structure of potential significance which primarily requires intense work of the imagination and the engaged participation of the reader. Lyrical poetry is often brought in to demonstrate how short prose enters in harmonious dialog with the other similarly short genre. Unfortunately, this very challenging comparison has been relatively underexplored in this book, but further studies may yield remarkable results from a cognitive perspective. Still, however indirectly, I hinted at this comparison in Chapter 4 (subchapter 4.2), in which I largely dwell on the implicit metaphorical dimension of Hemingway’s short stories. The metaphorical undercurrent circulating at the depths of his short fiction seems to stem from his large reliance on lyric potentiality. As the short story abounds in narrative forms that deal with the mysterious and ambiguous dimensions of life, studies begin to illuminate the boundaries between the lyrical form and the short fictional genre. To illustrate, Frank O’Connor1 regards the short story as “the nearest thing I know to lyric poetry,” while Ian Reid’s2 comparison stresses other distinct features of the genre: “In its normally limited scope and subjective orientation [the short story] corresponds to the lyric poem as the novel does 1 Frank O’Connor, “The Art of Fiction,” The Paris Review, no. 19 (1957). https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4847/the-art-of-fiction-no-19–frankoconnor. 2 Ian Reid, The Short Story (London: Methuen, 1977), 28.

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to the epic.” In an attempt to clarify the differences between the long and the short forms, Charles May1 insists on a significant binary opposition: “While the novel is primarily structured on a conceptual and philosophical framework, the short story is intuitive and lyrical.” Drawing on the similarities between poetry and short fiction, Robert Penn Warren’s straightforward claim that Hemingway “is essentially a lyric rather than a dramatic writer”2 sounds intriguing enough to invite reconsideration. In effect, the critic’s bold statement points to a paradox: Hemingway’s conspicuous technique of emotional understatement, objective style, and his sparse use of adjectives or ornamental language are not generally the prerequisites of lyrical discourse. Moreover, as has been suggested already, there is one major factor that can resolve the apparent conflict, and that is the author’s deliberate strategy of leaving out the largest part of his texts and thus providing only the absolute minimum of information. Perhaps not accidentally, Hemingway himself uses the metaphorical construct of the iceberg to define his original style. Subchapters 3.5 and 3.6 explored the mechanisms and effects of Hemingway’s most famous theory of omission in depth. There, I explained that the metaphorical movement of the iceberg toward the deepest parts of the text, leaving only the tip of the iceberg visible on the surface, involves a reorientation of the search for meaningful implicatures. The text’s deep dimension of indeterminacy allows an emotional, symbolic reception, guided by lyrical undertones. These details provide an overall picture of the importance of placing Hemingway against the modernist literature of his time that was quick at capturing the fragmented character of modern life and the abrupt changes in the modern subject, now involved in distant observation, reserved commentaries, and the pursuit of the authentic self. These dramatic transformations profoundly affected the prose writers of the inter-war period in one essential aspect, i.e. they begin to employ new cognitive strategies that are most akin to what Keuen sees as “a more reflexive attitude that produces statements on the fragmented condition of modernity […]. All the problems of modernity, including the often neglected moral fragmentation, become relevant all at once.”3 Hemingway was not a stranger to the new modernist sensibility, but still, his special 1

May, “The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction,” 133. Robert Penn-Warren, “Ernest Hemingway,” in Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Ernest Hemingway, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005), 28. 3 Bart Keuen, “Living with Fragments: World Making in Modernist City Literature,” in Modernism, eds. Astradur Eysteinsson et al. (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007), 280. 2

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“marginal sensibility” makes him a unique and exceptional case. PennWarren1 sees the author’s “marginal sensibility” in his style of playing down feeling by locating “the poetic, the pathetic, or the tragic” in the “unpromising” individual (e.g. the soldier, the bullfighter, the gangster, the revolutionist, or the sportsman) in an anti-romantic situation. Throughout the book, and Chapter 3 in particular, I justified my choices selected from Hemingway’s canonical short stories. Firstly, I showed that even extremely popular literature is not a closed case when it comes to interpretation, despite Hemingway’s texts being in the limelight of critical analysis for as long as they have been in existence. While I would have liked to follow a comprehensive approach to the American writer’s short fiction, the limitations of length here have only afforded the selection of the few above, which are sufficient to prove that a cognitive framework can be a theoretical approach in its own right, and lastly, they helped me construct Hemingway differently. Before I provide an in-depth summary of the grounds of my theoretical position, let us dwell on the merits of reconstructing Hemingway. The purpose of this book, formed with a close reading of Hemingway’s short fiction, is the identification of a paradoxical tension in his writing: the emotional intensity of his short stories generated via a carefully restrained and objective style. While critics are generally willing to admit this, I also wanted to recast this paradox in different terms. If the paradox lies in the nature of Hemingway’s style, it is reasonable to argue that it is engendered by the act of reading and can only be solved by consciously revisiting our responses to Hemingway and his short fiction. In a way, this is our belated response to his invitation to discover what lies beneath the surface of his iceberg. In storyworlds orchestrated by distant narrators, the reader’s involvement in the text is not immediate and is always indirect. If information is withheld, delayed, and suspended, how are readers able to deal with such a text and elucidate its meaning? How are they able to apprehend Hemingway’s texts, some of the most resistant to the meaning-making process? What do they make of the large gaps intentionally created by the author? I think these questions present sufficient validity for narrative theories to take account of them. To achieve my goals, I have given an overview of the literary theories relevant to this book’s aims and attempted to formulate the preliminary coordinates of a theory that could explain how human cognitive processes can breathe life into literary texts. It is not that I have been looking for “solutions” to the intriguing puzzles of the text, but rather I have proposed a new way of reading what the text itself encourages 1

Penn-Warren, “Ernest Hemingway,” 39.

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and stimulates. Once on the “right” track of the text, I focused on the very process of reading to give an insight into its most intimate ways of functioning. To this end, I selected a cognitive framework that seemed best suited to support the point made by Jens Eder regarding cognitive reception theories. He claims: “narration implies communication, communication implies reception, and reception implies cognition.”1 My argument is not that a cognitive orientation for literary studies is the “right” or the “only” approach, but that it has immense benefits for our reading activities. And perhaps more importantly for my book’s primary objective, it has allowed me to profile the general mode of communication between text and reader when it comes to Hemingway’s texts. My broad aim has been to understand the reasoning required in the act of reading short fiction. The last part of this concluding chapter will present my findings. It is important to emphasize that the cognitive demonstrations on Hemingway’s texts are designed to have potentially larger implications for the short story’s general mode of knowing. This has been premised on my deliberate choice to examine the strength of Hemingway’s short fiction that engulfs and snares us into the depths of his texts with the kind of power of lyrical movement. I argue that this makes Hemingway’s short fiction an exemplary work that defines the field. As I have shown in Chapter 2, reading short literary texts with a cognitive lens is not an on-line conscious activity. Admittedly, ordinary readers never stop to reflect on the cognitive processes that have facilitated their reading, and cognitive scientists acknowledge that most of our cognitive processes happen below the level of conscious awareness. For this reason, it would be completely unnatural to stop and analyze the intricate connections taking place in the deep strata of our unconscious mind in the act of reading. This is the role of the scholar interested in cognitive science and in its close allies, cognitive poetics and cognitive narratology. These two relatively new literary sciences are able to account systematically for the unconscious processes during our experience of reading and can contribute with their particularly valuable results to a reconsideration of the essential questions posed by literary theory and to rich reconceptualizations of the science of the mind. Cognitive poetics and cognitive narratology have been considered in sub-chapters 2.3 and 2.4 through a theoretical overview of their main tenets and by offering illustrations and examples of their practical applications. Subsequently, I intermingled illustrative samples with theoretical snippets from both cognitive poetics and cognitive 1 Jens Eder, “Narratology and Cognitive Reception Theories,” in What is Narratology?

Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, eds. Tom Kindt and HansHarald Müller (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2003), 282.

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narratology. Since I regard their enterprises as complementary, my study benefits greatly from their tools and conceptualizations. However, I accept that some of my analyses are closer to linguistics (via cognitive poetics) while others are more indebted to narratological concerns (via cognitive narratology). While I do admit that switching from one theory to another may often have been potentially distracting, my primary focus has been to give a demonstration of how disciplines under the umbrella term of cognitive sciences can stimulate cross-disciplinary dialog. What brings cognitive poetics and cognitive narratology together is their common view on literary reading: in essence, reading reflects the interaction between humans and the text. To cognitive poetics, more indebted to the tenets of cognitive linguistics, the reader is, above all, a human being, in a human body, with a human mind. The commonalities of our bodies are reflected in our shared cognitive mechanisms and shared experiences. Scholars rest on the assumption that there are standardized mental mechanisms, shared cognitive information, and relatively constant mental responses that affect both feeling and meaning. This conceptualization informs their views of literary texts: literature is a significant product of the mind, endowed with shared cognitive architecture. Unlike other traditional theories of reception, cognitive theories hold that mental representations play a central role in the reception of literary texts, and hence all essential narrative elements (characters, events, narratorial entities, narrative space and time, etc.) enter into the complex process of representation. What I wish to stress in relation to short literary works is that we have to run mental representations of incomplete storyworlds, often deriving from implicit statements. In the context of modernist texts, this last argument becomes increasingly relevant. In his analysis of a modernist poem, Barrett Watten gives an insightful definition of the act of reading in modern times, which he regards as “an exercise in construction predicated on a fundamental absence at its core.”1 Cognitive science steps in and provides models of essential mental faculties involved in the creation of represented stories. Cultural frames, encyclopedic knowledge, inferences, contextual clues, mental schemas (detailed in section 1.5) all influence and contribute to the process of production and reception. Similarly, cognitive scientists argue that our standardized tendencies of perception, reasoning, and emotion (as the ones reflected in our common image-schematic knowledge, shared conceptual metaphors) are equally important. Accordingly, texts activate cognitive and 1

Barrett Watten, “Modernism at the Crossroads: Types of negativity,” in Modernism, Vol. XXI, eds. Astradur Eysteinsson et al. (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007), 219.

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emotional processes that shape the outline of the story in our imagination. Having established what methods and elements fall under the scope of poetics and narratology with a cognitive orientation, I employed particular methods in the applied part of my book and to demonstrate its premises. Chapter 2 surveys these methodological tools and concepts, taken from both cognitive poetics and cognitive narratology. Another significant feature of the model proposed for practical analysis is that it harmoniously combines textual information, mental representation, and more general inferences into a dynamic whole. I hope that I have shown convincingly that, for both pragmatic and theoretical reasons, literary studies have much to gain from the intersection of various cognitive disciplines. Drawing from both cognitively oriented poetics and narratology in equal measure, this book draws attention to a general tendency of literary studies to omit (or take for granted!) the basic sources of our mental representation and imagination. We need to investigate specifically what structures our interaction with literary texts. In this sense, my interest, and I hope contribution, has been to develop the idea of simulation1 and stimulation with regard to short fiction. I first discussed the idea of simulation in relation to the text’s capacity of emulating our major cognitive operations in making sense of time and physical space. Sections 4.1 and 4.2 explored the mind’s capacity for representing time and space. But phrased in these terms, this endeavor does not seem to be particularly adventurous. However, if we consider the narrative economy of the short story, these texts not only simulate our cognitive abilities but also stimulate them to a considerable degree. Within the paradigm I advocate, short stories push our cognitive powers to their furthest limits. Chapter 4 proposed a more ample discussion of time and space in narrative, basic categories of human thought, whose cognitive re-evaluation, I claim, is a worthwhile enterprise. Sections 4.1 and 4.2 function in conjunction in order to show that the temporal dimension does not manifest by itself but always in relation to physical coordinates (see Marie-Laure Ryan’s concept of a “space-time continuum”2). In both of these sub-chapters, I resorted to image-schematic knowledge to show the effects of the cognitive simulation of the bodily experience of space and time in a number of short stories (see the cognitively informed analyses of 1

My idea of simulation has much to share with Stockwell’s concepts of “literary empathy” and “identification” and with Ryan’s notion of “immersion.” See Stockwell, Texture; Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality. 2 Marie-Laure Ryan, “Narrative Cartography: Toward a Visual Narratology,” in What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, eds. Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 335.

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The Snows in Kilimanjaro, Fathers and Sons, A Canary for One, Hills Like White Elephants, and The End of Something). In line with cognitive theorists, I have proven that image-schematic structures sit at the roots of our experience of time and space. Understanding our experience in terms of orientation and directionality leads to the conceptualization of space as active movement through time. The short stories analyzed in these subchapters allowed me to take full advantage of this theoretical conceptualization since they are all centered around the concept of journeying. Section 4.2, in particular, focuses on the spatialized representation of time and details several of its spatial metaphors of time using the valuable theory of the conceptual metaphor (detailed in sub-chapter 1.8). In sum, I have explored how textual understanding is formed by approaching the micro-structures of image schemas and conceptual metaphors that have been applied to the temporal and spatial dimensions of the storyworld. Concepts of cognitive poetics (image-schematic knowledge, metaphorical structures, frames, conceptual domains, mental spaces, etc.), coupled with narrative theories, have helped me deepen the process of reading narrative worlds. A key strength of Chapter 4 is the conceptualization of time as a forking path. Firstly, starting from the textual evidence gathered from the short stories analyzed, I reached several important conclusions: spatiality and temporality are not interpreted in terms of links in a chain, but rather as forking or diverging pathways. In the spirit of subverting modern times, Hemingway’s modernist texts have the “awareness of the roads not taken.”1 Secondly, the branching of the physical space automatically changes the linear directionality of time, and the backward-forward movement becomes more fluid. Thirdly, the physical journey leads us into a virtual past and a tentative future. I argue that this is an essential challenge for the reader: the multiplicity of visions and perspectives generated by hypothetical scenarios, unrealized possibilities, or unactualized courses of events in the storyworld. This fundamental discontinuity created between possibility and actuality can be attributed to the modernist tension, generated “between an esthetics of the finished product and an alternative poetics of process,”2 in Dirk Van Hulle’s terms. The remainder of Chapter 4 explored the notion of alternativeness, the logic of incompleteness, and inconsistency in short fiction with the help of the theory of possible worlds. In this regard, I feel most indebted to Ryan’s

1

Dirk Van Hulle, “Modernism, Consciousness, Poetics of Process,” in Modernism, Vol. XXI, eds. Astradur Eysteinsson et al. (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007), 335. 2 Van Hulle, “Modernism, Consciousness, Poetics of Process,” 332.

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“semantic domain”1 of the text, which outlines an actual world, surrounded by a multitude of alternative possible worlds. In this light, the theory of possible worlds enabled me to question the ontology of the narrative universe, the status of imaginary entities, the relationships between different states of affairs, and ultimately, to relativize the notion of actuality in short fiction. Approaching the worlds of competing possibilities of The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio, Now I Lay Me, A Way You’ll Never Be, Wine of Wyoming, The Three-Day Blow, and The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife with the framework of possible worlds not only assumes that humans are prone to counterfactualizing activities but can demonstrate that short fiction mentally and cognitively stimulates human imagination and our experience of counterfactuality. The approach to counterfactuality underpinned many of my arguments in Chapter 5. The following discussion will summarize some of the points made there in order to extend the focus of interest to narrative events and storyworld participants. As far as narrative accounts for our experience of time and space, it also provides accounts of the experiences of characters. The point I stressed in this chapter is that short narrative affords a form of imagination that stimulates our interest in fictional minds. In the context of Palmer’s “social minds in action,”2 I show that readers attribute mental properties to participants in the storyworld in the same way they engage in comprehending their own or others’ behavior in everyday interactions. By means of the literary examples provided in this chapter, I prove that, on the one hand, the virtual exists in the mind of the reader, and on the other, the minds of fictional characters have this extraordinary capacity of juggling alternatives. At the end of Chapter 5, I argue that this is the most effective immersive quality of the text. The analysis of the short stories I provide in this chapter enabled me to construct the major profiles of fictional minds. Specifically, I have looked into the texts’ degree of simulation as regards counterfactual effects. “Behavioral narratives” are poor examples to engage the mind in counterfactual activities, since they emphasize the publicly available thought. Therefore, in Hemingway’s action-oriented narratives (The Killers), the fictional thinking is distributed and socially extended; the behavioral traits are reliable sources for working toward a model of the fictional mind. The second model I propose, “transitional narratives,” is a mixed form of observation of behavior and awareness of private thought. Out of Season and Up in Michigan perfectly illustrate this model and point to the third and most dramatic profile of the fictional mind: the result is what 1 2

Ryan, Possible Worlds. Palmer, Fictional Minds.

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Conclusions

I call “counterfactual narratives.” This third model of the fictional mind benefits from a more sophisticated awareness of the capacity of “doublescope blending.” I have attempted to show how the construction of anthropomorphized minds draws on the operation of conceptual blending. The majority of short stories analyzed there dwell on implicit types of counterfactual networks (not prompted for grammatically). The application of mental space theory and, to a more considerable degree, of blending theory in this chapter (sub-chapters 5.4, 5.5, and 5.6) assisted with illustrating the powerful theoretical and analytical effects of these theories in the context of fictional minds. Firstly, the characters’ mental ability to construct “double-scope stories” leads to inferences regarding their identity, emotional states, and relationships with other storyworld participants. Secondly, their mental alterations (e.g. “seeing-as-if” scenarios) are not just a matter of simple changes in the text’s actual world but have the power to exert influence on the actual world, which they have outgrown. These conceptualizations led me to a complete remapping of the storyworld: at the core of the short text is a virtual terrain nascent with alternatives. Finally, by expanding the blending theory to the short narrative, I extended my analysis to structures larger than micro-textual elements (e.g. metaphors). In addition to a branching structure, counterfactuals, as seen in Chapter 5, are complex blends. Throughout this chapter, the literary blending analysis aimed to show how we establish mental spaces, activate cross-space mappings, and how we grasp the “message” in the blended space. However, in offering these demonstrations of blending analysis, I also recognize the plurality of other mental networks that may come from the text and lead to its meaning. On the other hand, many readers will share many of these networks. The argument rests again in our largely shared cognitive architecture. As stated in various places in this book, what interests me is a definition of “short storyness” with its cluster of features that enable readers to recognize short stories. In identifying the story’s essential features, I intended to show how short texts mediate their meaning and which cognitive strategies come into play for that purpose. In other words, I aimed to identify the reader’s mode of thinking engaged in the act of processing short literary texts. It goes without saying that, once one has allowed for exceptional instances, we may generalize that the short story speaks to us about deletion, compression, fragmentation, suggestion, limited point of view, suppression of plot, controlled selection of details, indirectness, management of tone, implication, nonlinearity, stylistic economy, outward characterization, control of mood, impoverished information, fragile dialog, ellipsis, disorder, etc. In this context, I suggest an account of reading short

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fiction in terms of the blending theory, i.e. the mixing of the source’s imaginative structures. Reading short fiction is primarily “reading in the blend.” In the construction of this higher-level blend-based reading practice, input spaces are two distinct types of imagination, while the blend is the whole reading. This “new” reading in the blend inaugurates new perspectives on the processing of short fiction. It allows us to be more precise about readers’ reception and to unravel new forms of mixtures of imagination. It suggests that reading short fiction results from a blend of imaginations, and when they meet in the blend, the full complexity of the reading process sparks off with intensity. Blending allows us to focus on the interaction between the “imagination of absence” and the “imagination of counterfactuality.” The first settled input space includes elements of absence (the essential features identified above) that clash with the other mental space of counterfactual imagination. While the first input space is never “full,” the other clashing input space magnetizes the imagination and has the force to continue the “absent” story in the mind. This is a counterfactual space since it has the lucidity of the possible and the spontaneity of the hypothetical. Surprisingly, this counterfactual space gives the short story its actuality. It is the actuality of the lyric that tends to stir emotion, play with creative metaphors, and advertize self-reflexivity. In the course of reading short fiction, we activate the blend with its emergent structure, that is, the structure created through the interaction of the two forms of imagination. This brings us to a concentration of imagination embodied in every short story in part. Short fiction stimulates a hybrid form of thinking which can explicate the infinite movement of thought, emotion, and action in the text as we read and engage with it. Nonetheless, regardless of the findings of this book, there is still a need to employ cognitive theories in the study of literature to a more significant degree. In addition to existing research, new avenues of research and practice and emerging topics can be offered in the field of cognitively-oriented literary studies.

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* Earlier versions of some of the chapters of this study have appeared in article form in: Tucan, Gabriela. “A Cat in the Rain and in the Reader’s Mind.” In Romanian Journal of English Studies 7, no. 2 (2010): 116–126. Tucan, Gabriela. “Cognitive Poetics: Blending Narrative Mental Spaces. Self-Construal and Identity in Short Literary Fiction.” Enthymema 8 (2013): 38–55. Tucan, Gabriela. “Double-Scope Identity Blends: Blending and Deblending the Counterfactual Self–Ernest Hemingway’s Short Stories as Case Studies.” In Constructions of Identity 7 Conference Volume (2014): 445–458. Tucan, Gabriela. “Ex-centric Cognitive Mind.” In ExCentris. Marginali, excentrici, rebeli, edited by Cristina Chevere‫܈‬an, Ciprian Vălcan, 133– 147. Timi‫܈‬oara: Editura Universită‫܊‬ii de Vest, 2012. Tucan, Gabriela. “From Memories to Counterfactuals: A Conceptual Journey in Ernest Hemingway’s Snows Of Kilimanjaro.” Romanian Journal of English Studies 12, no. 1 (2015): 103–109. Tucan, Gabriela. “O perspectivă cognitivă asupra studiilor literare (I). O analiză a studiilor privind receptarea literaturii în secolul al XX-lea.” Analele Universităаii de Vest din Timiúoara: Seria ùtiinte Filologice 50 (2012): 147–156. Tucan, Gabriela. “The Reader’s Mind Beyond the Text–The Science of Cognitive Narratology.” Romanian Journal of English Studies 10, no. 1 (2013): 299–308. Tucan, Gabriela. “What is a Short Story Besides Short? Questioning Minds in Search of Understanding Short Fiction.” Romanian Journal of English Studies 11, no. 1 (2014): 144–151.