The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach 9783110365658, 9783110278170, 9783110552997

Citation preview

Marco Caracciolo The Experientiality of Narrative

Narratologia

Contributions to Narrative Theory Edited by Fotis Jannidis, Matías Martínez, John Pier, Wolf Schmid (executive editor) Editorial Board Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik, José Ángel García Landa, Peter Hühn, Manfred Jahn, Andreas Kablitz, Uri Margolin, Jan Christoph Meister, Ansgar Nünning, Marie-Laure Ryan, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Michael Scheffel, Sabine Schlickers, Jörg Schönert

Volume 43

Marco Caracciolo

The Experientiality of Narrative

An Enactivist Approach

ISBN 978-3-11-027817-0 e-ISBN 978-3-11-036565-8 ISSN 1612-8427 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

For Cécile

“O frati,” dissi “che per cento milia perigli siete giunti a l’occidente, a questa tanto picciola vigilia d’i nostri sensi ch’è del rimanente non vogliate negar l’esperïenza, di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente.” “O brothers,” I said, “who, in the course of a hundred thousand perils, at last have reached the west, to the brief wakefulness of our senses that remains to us, do not deny the chance to experience— following the sun—the world where no one lives.” Dante Alighieri, Commedia, “Inferno,” Canto XXVI

Cognitivism cannot explain fun. Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Marieke Rohde, and Hanne De Jaegher, “Horizons for the Enactive Mind”

Acknowledgments Publishing this book was quite an experience, but that is probably true of all books ever published (and most of those unpublished). So I will spare my reader the experiential details, only mentioning my relief and delight when this project finally found a home in the Narratologia series. I can only hope that my account of narrative experientiality will be seen as living up to the high standards of scholarship set by many other volumes in the series. I would like to thank the series editors (and particularly Wolf Schmid) and the project editor at De Gruyter, Stella Diedrich, for their efficient handling of this manuscript. Thanks also go to two external reviewers for their extremely perceptive comments and suggestions. Many readers, colleagues, and friends have left a mark on this book over the years. For their invaluable feedback and stimulating conversation I am especially grateful to Jan Alber, Porter Abbott, Lars Bernaerts, Marco Bernini, Federico Bertoni, Monika Fludernik, Luc Herman, Daniel Hutto, Manfred Jahn, Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Karin Kukkonen, Anežka Kuzmičová, Donata Meneghelli, Jim Phelan, Marie-Laure Ryan, Ralf Schneider, and Bart Vervaeck—all of whom have read and helped improve this manuscript (or parts thereof). I owe the largest debt of gratitude to David Herman, who has read and commented on countless drafts of this manuscript with unflinching generosity and characteristically keen insight. I dedicate this book to my wife, Cécile Guédon, who has shaped my thinking in more ways than I can name or imagine. Several chapters of this book originate from previously published papers. Chapter 4 is based on an essay first published in Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative, edited by Lars Bernaerts et al. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 81– 106. Copyright 2013 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Chapter 5 contains material from “Fictional Consciousnesses: A Reader’s Manual,” Style 46, no. 1 (2012): 42– 64. Chapter 7 builds on “The Reader’s Virtual Body: Narrative Space and Its Reconstruction,” Storyworlds 3 (2011): 117– 138. In chapters 2 and 7 I use passages from “Notes for A(nother) Theory of Experientiality,” Journal of Literary Theory 6, no. 1 (2012): 141– 158. I would like to thank the editors of these essays and their respective publishers for granting me permission to draw on these materials. I brought this manuscript to completion during a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Groningen. I gratefully acknowledge the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO, grant number 446-11-024) for making this possible.

Contents  . . . . .. .. .. .

Introduction 1 1 Out of Which Hat Why Experience, and Why This Book 8 11 Why This Book Is Not an Empirical Study 16 Cognitive Science: A Thumbnail Sketch 16 From Computational Models to Enactivism Conceptual Thought and Embodiment 19 The Self, Folk Psychology, and Phenomenology 23 Outline of Chapters

Part I:

21

Notes for a Theory of Experientiality

 . . .

Not So Easy: Representation, Experience, Expression From Representation to Expression 33 38 On Characters’ Experiences 41 Expressive Devices

 . . .. .. ..

The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background 52 The Network of Experientiality Focus on the Experiential Background 55 Opening Moves 55 56 Mapping the Background Narrative and the Background 64

 . . . .

Experience, Interaction, and Play in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch 75 Dewey and Winnicott on Experience A Third Possibility 80 Other Paths: Beyond Vertical Transcendence 82 87 Bringing the Strands Together

Part II:  .

29

45

72

From Experiential Traces to Fictional Consciousnesses

Blind Reading: Bodily and Perceptual Responses to Narrative 97 The Enactivist Theory of Experience

93

XII

Contents

. . .

Enacting Narrative Space 100 Enacting Characters’ Bodily-Perceptual Experiences 103 105 Enacting Qualia Through Metaphorical Language

 . . . .. .. ..

Fictional Consciousnesses: From Attribution to Enactment 110 115 Consciousness-Attribution Enacting Benjy: A Slow-Motion Analysis 118 122 Consciousness-Enactment What Is Consciousness-Enactment? 122 Triggers of Consciousness-Enactment 125 Mental Simulation as the Cognitive Basis for Consciousness129 Enactment



Fictional Consciousnesses: Self-Narratives and Intersubjectivity 133 135 Narrative Selves? 139 Focus on Self-Narratives Engaging with Characters: Between Primary and Secondary 142 Intersubjectivity Readers and Characters in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach: A Case 144 Study

. . . .

Part III:  . . . . .  . . . .

Embodied Engagements and Their Effects

Embodiment, Virtuality, and Meaning in Readers’ Reconstruction of 155 Narrative Space From Mental Simulation to Fictionalization 159 Fictional Anchors: Forster’s Deputy Focalizor and “Strict” 162 Focalization Virtual Presences: “Empty Center” and Aperspectival Texts 168 173 A Scale of Fictionalization The Embodied Self and Beckett’s Company 174 Mental Myopia: Narrative Patterns and Experiential Texture in Vladimir Nabokov’s The Defense 181 184 From Chess Consciousness to Experiential Blindness The Moves of His Life 188 Beyond? 194 200 Three Functions of Narrative: Overreading The Defense

Contents



Conclusion: Where to Go from Here?

Works Cited Index

227

209

206

XIII

0 Introduction 0.1 Out of Which Hat In his 1836 essay “Maelzel’s Chess Player” Edgar Allan Poe attempted to expose the hoax of a machine which, according to its owner, Johann Mälzel, could play chess against a human opponent without any kind of human intervention. A simple Wikipedia search would tell us that, since the 1770s, the alleged automaton had sparked quite a furor on both sides of the Atlantic, defeating—among others—Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Reading Poe’s text is another story, however, and a less straightforward one. At first, carried along by the narrator’s exact description, we witness Mälzel performing the strange ceremony of opening all the compartments of the machine (every time in the same order) to convince us that there could be no one hidden inside. And yet, at a certain point, the narrator grabs our hand and shows us where exactly the human player is hidden at every stage of Mälzel’s demonstration of the machine. “It is quite certain that the operations of the Automaton are regulated by mind, and by nothing else” (1982, 424), the narrator tells us, articulating his persuasive argument. But there seems to be more at stake in Mälzel’s machine than the narrator recognizes. In an age where chess-playing machines are hardly remarkable, and published as it is among Poe’s literary works, “Maelzel’s Chess Player” almost invites an allegorical reading. What is really implicated in the silent struggle between Mälzel and the narrator, in their contrasting attempts at “laying bare the device”—to use the phrase popularized by Russian Formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky (1991)? I cannot resist viewing this text as telling us something about our engagement with literature in general, and with fictional characters in particular.¹ Couldn’t the debate between Mälzel and the narrator hinge on whether fictional characters are to be thought of as machines, or as human beings? Today, machines can play chess; what they still cannot do is have subjective experience. They can respond to stimuli, but without being conscious of those stimuli. For—it is generally assumed—only sentient living creatures can have consciousness, can experience the world. In John Searle’s words, consciousness is “an inner, first-person, qualitative phenomenon”; it “refers to those states of sentience and awareness that typically begin when we awake from a dreamless sleep and continue until we go to sleep again, or fall into a coma or die or otherwise become ‘unconscious’” (1997, 5). It also involves having subjective experience, since you cannot have an experience without being conscious of it. In  See Wilcocks (1994) for an alternative, psychoanalytic reading of Poe’s essay.

2

0 Introduction

turn, you cannot be conscious of anything without experiencing it somehow. For instance, if Mälzel’s automaton had really been an automaton, he would have been unconscious of the natural wood grain of the pieces on the chessboard. Which is to say, he wouldn’t have experienced their visual and textural features—their qualitative properties or “qualia,” as philosophers of mind would put it.² But where do fictional characters belong? Are they textual machines, as Mälzel seems to suggest, which only appear to be conscious, while in fact being nothing but pieces of sophisticated machinery? Or do they really contain a human being hidden inside (albeit bent in a contorted posture), as the narrator wants us to believe? Who, ultimately, is the illusionist here, Mälzel or the narrator? On the one hand, we all know—even without being literary theorists—that characters do not have subjective experiences, that they are just “word-masses,” in E. M. Forster’s (1985, 44) term. On the other hand, the narrator seems to put his finger on a tendency that we all have, at least sometimes, in our engagement with fictional characters. Consider these remarks on Hamlet’s “to be, or not to be” soliloquy by distinguished philosopher of mind Owen Flanagan: It is in virtue of being conscious in the way that he is that Hamlet experiences his life as at this choice point. Being the kind of conscious creature he is enables Hamlet both to feel the weight of his past and to contemplate the uncertainty of the future. And it is the progression of conscious thinking that takes him from the brief comforting thought of death as eternal restful sleep to the concern that his woes might continue even after he has been released from his body—even after he has shuffled off “this mortal coil”—so long as he, even though dead, continues to experience things, so long as he continues to dream. (2000, 2)

Are we to conclude that Flanagan made a blunder when he referred—as he unambiguously does—to Hamlet as a “conscious creature,” one capable of having experience? (And note that here Flanagan is commenting on Shakespeare’s character, not on someone’s stage performance.) If we take a Mälzelian stance, yes. There is nothing in Shakespeare’s play that warrants the conclusion that Hamlet really is a conscious being; there are only pieces of textual machinery similar to those Mälzel exhibits. By contrast, the narrator would insist that Flanagan must be right, and that no machine can seem to have conscious experience in the way Shakespeare’s character does. Who are we to trust here? Both of these claims have merit: Mälzel and the narrator embody two contrasting aspects of our engagement with fictional characters. Mälzel’s ceremony hints at the rational belief that a “word-mass” cannot be conscious—while the

 I will have more to say about qualia in section 4.4.

0.1 Out of Which Hat

3

narrator’s compelling (but slightly fanatical) argument is tantamount to an attribution of consciousness. Read allegorically, then, the whole text lays bare the psychological mechanisms behind our engagement with characters, suggesting that Flanagan attributes to Hamlet an experience while being perfectly aware that Hamlet is not capable of having an experience. This formulation reveals the paradoxical nature of people’s encounters with fictional characters. But it leaves us with a question—and this is the point I have been driving at from the very beginning. The question is: if characters only seem to be conscious, where does the experience that Flanagan attributes to Hamlet come from? Out of which hat has Flanagan pulled the rabbit of Hamlet’s experience—the existential condition Shakespeare’s “to be, or not to be” soliloquy seems to capture? As far as I can see, there is only one possible answer. Flanagan has pulled the rabbit out of the only hat lying around: his own. The experience that Flanagan attributes to Hamlet is, as a matter of fact, the experience that he (Flanagan) has undergone while reading Shakespeare’s text. It is Flanagan who is faced with the dilemma that Hamlet seems to be caught in; and the reason why this dilemma is experiential—rather than purely intellectual—is that Hamlet’s question bears importantly on Flanagan’s own existence, concerning nothing less than the value of life. This kind of rabbit-pulling is the topic of the present study, and “why do stories offer themselves, at least sometimes, as experiences to be undergone (and attributed to characters)?” is the kind of question I will try to answer. Needless to say, we need the right tools for the job I have undertaken in this project. Some of the necessary tools will be provided by the theory of narrative, and especially by those narratologists who have turned their attention to the “experientiality” (Fludernik 1996) or “consciousness factor” (Herman 2009a) of stories. These scholars have demonstrated that research on real minds can yield penetrating insights into two different but related issues: on the one hand, the psychological processes of fictional characters and the textual strategies for their presentation (Palmer 2004; 2010); on the other hand, the psychological processes that underlie readers’ engagements with narrative texts—and with characters in particular (Zunshine 2006; Herman 2011a). Other tools that I will use have been developed by philosophers of mind. Experience and consciousness have always been privileged objects of philosophical investigation, but in the last thirty years they have come into the spotlight of an emerging, increasingly influential area of inquiry—cognitive science—which has provided philosophers with much-needed empirical evidence and with an interdisciplinary market on which to offer their theories. This integration of philosophical ideas into the broader research program of cognitive science has led to a revival of interest in experience and consciousness, on which I will capitalize in this book.

4

0 Introduction

In particular, I will tap into two sources. Firstly, I will build on the work produced in the 1990s by philosophers of mind such as John Searle, Daniel C. Dennett, Michael Tye, David Chalmers, Tim Crane, and Daniel D. Hutto. Secondly, I will focus on the new wave in cognitive science that goes under the name of “enactivism,” which—I will argue—can yield novel insights into our experiential engagement with stories. I will say more about enactivism in section 0.4 (where I will give a bird’s eye view of cognitive science); here, I would like to briefly touch on its distinguishing features. The enactivist project was launched by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch in their The Embodied Mind (1991), and over the last two decades has gradually gained ground on its biggest competitor, the computational approach to the mind developed by first-wave cognitive scientists. In their recent enactivist manifesto, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Marieke Rohde, and Hanne De Jaegher explain that the “five highly intertwined ideas that constitute the basic enactive approach” are “autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment, and experience” (2010, 37). With the exception of autonomy, I will take advantage of all these ideas in my study of the experiential dimension of narrative (“experientiality,” as I will call it), insisting on the situated, embodied quality of readers’ engagement with stories and on how meaning emerges from the experiential interaction between texts and readers. In a nutshell, I will argue that stories offer themselves as imaginative experiences because of the way they draw on and restructure readers’ familiarity with experience itself. I will say that engaging with stories can be an imaginative experience to account for the difference between engaging with the world and engaging with narrative, but I do not think there are two kinds of experiences in a strong sense: what characterizes an experience, any experience, is its structure—and this structure seems to straddle the divide between the real world and fiction. This point about the structured nature of experience applies both to low-level, sensory experience (e. g., smelling coffee) and to higher-order, culturally and conceptually influenced experience (e. g., falling in love). Consciousness is not a passive taking in of sensory information from the outside world, but a structure of interaction between embodied subjects and the environments that they negotiate. As O’Regan, Myin, and Noë argue in their enactivist theory of perception, sensory feels or “qualia” are a product of the perceiver’s exploratory activity, of his or her “being-engaged-in-the-process of manipulating the sensory input” (2005, 373). Moreover, this engagement is always projected against what I will call the “experiential background”—a repertoire of past experiences and values that guides people’s interaction with the environment. The way we deal with the world and with other subjects is always dependent on the history of our “structural coupling” (as the enactivists would say) with the world.

0.1 Out of Which Hat

5

Of course, the characters and events represented by fictional texts and the experiences they afford may differ significantly from what is possible or likely in the real world, as stressed recently by the advocates of so-called “unnatural narratology” (see Alber et al. 2010). Fictional storytelling can (and often does) break the laws of “reality,” whether by representing physically or naturally impossible states of affairs or by challenging representational conventions and socio-cultural assumptions about the real world. But while the imaginative contents and experiential qualities of reading fictional narrative may deviate from real-world engagements, the underlying structure of interaction is the same: readers respond to narrative on the basis of their experiential background. Two psychological mechanisms play a role in this process: the first is the triggering of memories of past experiences—experiential traces, as they are known in the psycholinguistic literature. The second is mental simulation, which allows readers to put together past experiential traces in novel ways, therefore sustaining their first-person involvement with both fictional characters and the spatial dimension of storyworlds. All in all, there is a two-way movement between the background and narrative: like experiential machines, stories need experiential input, but also produce some output, since they can bring about a restructuring of each reader’s experiential background by generating new “story-driven” experiences. As we will see in chapter 2, this effect can be produced at different—but interrelated—levels of experience. At the perceptual level, stories can evoke vivid mental imagery, turning our sketchy imaginings into memorable, and sometimes unsettling, sensory experiences. At the emotional level, narratives can provoke emotional reactivity: for example, watching a film may make us cry because we (more or less consciously) recognize the film as dealing with values that are part of our own experiential background. Finally, engaging with a narrative can leave a mark on readers at the level of their more self-conscious—and culturally mediated—judgments about the world. Many literary narratives seem to produce this kind of effect. For instance, Flanagan’s comments on Hamlet’s soliloquy show that reading it has brought into play the philosopher’s familiarity with profound questions concerning life and death, having an effect on how he sees those questions: “Hamlet asks the most frightening existential question,” Flanagan writes (2000, 2). Contacts of this sort between readers’ experiential background and the experiences they undergo while engaging with stories are at the basis of second-order, more or less self-conscious judgments like the one expressed by Flanagan in this passage. Even interpretation as an academic, literary-critical practice originates in the interaction between stories and interpreters’ experiential background. By taking this path, I will try to narrow the divide between non-professional readers’ emotional and “immersive” engagements with narrative and more self-conscious literary-critical ap-

6

0 Introduction

proaches—that is, between imagination and forms of meaning-making mediated by propositional thought and by socio-cultural appraisals. This overall aim explains why I have decided to concentrate on written, and especially literary narratives, even though a similar case could be made for other storytelling practices. Our engagement with literature is doubly imaginative, because—perhaps more clearly than other art forms—it invites us to entertain both sensory imaginings (mental imagery) and propositional imaginings, imaginings that something is, fictionally, the case.³ As I will show in chapter 4, sensory imaginings work by simulating perception and its sensorimotor, embodied patterns through the activation of experiential traces. Thus, written narratives in particular can provide important insights into the experiential dimension of interpreters’ imaginative engagement with narratives in general, highlighting the continuity between the embodied simulation of perception and conceptual, propositional thought. In his Mindsight, Colin McGinn argues that propositional, “cognitive imagination continues and extends what the humble [mental] image had already initiated—a flight from the world of perceived reality” (2004, 138).⁴ In a way, our engagement with literature makes visible what McGinn calls “the imagination spectrum”—the continuum between embodied simulation and higher-order forms of meaning-making (see chapter 7). To borrow a term from one of the leading philosophers associated with enactivism, Daniel D. Hutto (2012), my study spans the continuum between sensory imagination and conceptual thought by advocating an “E-approach” to the experientiality of narrative—where the “E” stands for “embodied, embedded, enactive, engaged,” and also (this is my addition to Hutto’s list) “evaluative.” Despite my focus on literary narratives, I believe that many of the arguments offered here—and especially the theoretical framework developed in Part I—can be applied to other narrative media with only minor modifications. In the relevant parts of this book, I will flag the claims that have this broader, transmedial scope by referring not to “authors” and “readers,” but to medium-neutral “story producers” and “story recipients” (or alternatively “interpreters”). By contrast, other aspects of my argument—I am thinking of the stylistic and narrative strategies that I will examine in Parts II and III—are specific to literary narratives. They could have interesting parallels in other media, but I will not attempt to draw direct comparisons in the context of this book.

 For the distinction between sensory and propositional imaginings, see Lopes (2003).  Along similar lines, in the introduction to their The Way We Think Fauconnier and Turner argue that the imagination is “the central engine of meaning” (2002, 15).

0.1 Out of Which Hat

7

A brief note on the choice of my case studies. The texts that I will discuss in this book are fairly standard specimens of Western, late nineteenth-century to early twenty-first century literature. They range from Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, originally published in 1869, to Ian McEwan’s 2007 novella On Chesil Beach. Has this particular selection of texts influenced my claims? Would a corpus of stories that are historically and culturally remote from the Western canon lead to a different understanding of the experientiality of narrative? Again, it is worth disentangling two dimensions of my argument. The network model of experientiality presented in chapter 2 operates at a sufficient level of generality to account for narrative engagements that extend well beyond my case studies: the tension between the story and the experiential background of recipients is, arguably, at the core of any form of narrative interaction. At the same time, my model can accommodate historically and culturally circumscribed modes of reception and interpretation via particular shapes this tension can take. The experiential background of recipients includes the sociocultural contexts that frame their encounters with narrative, and literature constitutes one of these contexts: the upshot is that the recipients who share the same background practices will respond to a story within the boundaries defined by those practices (even if they do not respond in exactly the same way). Therefore, some aspects of my argument explore particular configurations of the network of experientiality—configurations that may be specific to modern and contemporary narrative practices and even, to some extent, to my case studies. The most distinctive common feature of the texts I will discuss is their focus on the qualitative “feel” of characters’ experiences. My analyses of these stories and of the devices through which they affect readers’ responses are keyed to a contemporary readership, and are therefore less generalizable than my claims about experientiality. The emphasis on phenomenology that characterizes these texts is rooted in modernist narrative practices (see Herman 2011c)—and in fact some of the novels I will discuss belong to the modernist canon: James Joyce’s Portrait, Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Despite having been published much later, other texts—such as Samuel Beckett’s Company, José Saramago’s Blindness, and McEwan’s On Chesil Beach—follow in the same tradition of consciousness-focused narration.⁵ Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch and Vladimir Nabokov’s The Defense (discussed respectively in chapters 3 and 8) have a somewhat special status, in that they deal with experience and experientiality at the thematic level. The idea here is that, by exploring the theme of experience, literary

 See subsection 5.3.2 for more on the concept of “consciousness-focused narration.”

8

0 Introduction

stories can have an impact on readers’ conceptualizations of experience, exemplifying my theoretical claims. At the same time, my thematic readings point to the continuity between literary-critical interpretation and more basic modes of engagement with texts. Some of these methodological issues will be examined more carefully in the next pages, which attempt to position this book in the landscape of today’s cognitive narratology (section 0.2) and address the key question of the epistemological status of my claims (section 0.3).

0.2 Why Experience, and Why This Book The last twenty years have seen a steady rise of “cognitive approaches” to narrative and to literature in particular (see Herman 2009b for an overview). Broadly speaking, these approaches bring to bear on (literary) stories ideas and—to some extent—methodologies grown out of fields such as cognitive and evolutionary psychology, psycholinguistics, neuroscience, and the philosophy of mind. In following this wider trend, this book seeks to adapt to literary investigation the theoretical framework known, in the mind sciences, as “enactivism.” I say “adapt” because there is a good deal of fresh theorization involved in the process: if my project shares some assumptions and, especially, some concerns with enactivism, it also attempts to take enactivist intuitions about embodiment and basic experience far beyond their comfort zone. I do so by applying these ideas to readers’ engagement with literary stories—an experience that is by all accounts non-basic, and where readers’ bodies seem to play a comparatively minor role. Making a case for the involvement of bodily experiences in the reading process will force me to address the larger issue of how narrative can tap into readers’ past experiences (broadly conceived) and provide new, “story-driven” experiences on the basis of their experiential background. Only recently have enactivist philosophers started to highlight the need to extend the enactivist framework to non-basic, socio-cultural forms of cognition (see Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher 2010). This is where my book picks up on the existing philosophical literature, seeking to develop the enactivist project in a new direction—one that comes to grips with a socio-culturally layered activity such as reading literature. I will therefore adopt an approach close to what Marie-Laure Ryan has called the “convergence method,” which “consists of quoting scientific research in support of more or less independently developed theses concerning the reading process” (2010, 487). Overall, what enactivism does for my argument is provide an integrative theoretical model: its focus on experience, embodiment, and interaction underlies all of my claims about readers’ engagement with narrative. I find the comprehensiveness of this framework particularly

0.2 Why Experience, and Why This Book

9

important, given that one of the risks of interdisciplinary dialogue—especially for a relatively new line of investigation like cognitive literary studies—is that of creating an “interdisciplinary Frankenstein”⁶: in this scenario, the analyst borrows theories from the cognitive sciences on a case-by-case basis and without paying much attention to their consistency with one another. By contrast, the neo-phenomenological outlook of enactivism can help literary scholars bring together different aspects or levels of readers’ engagement with narrative. It should be pointed out that my emphasis on experience resonates with a “native” interest of narrative studies: I am thinking of Monika Fludernik’s (1996) “natural” narratology, which revolves around the concept of “experientiality,” and of the body of research on strategies for consciousness presentation in narrative texts—from Dorrit Cohn’s (1978) seminal work to Alan Palmer’s influential studies (2004; 2010). How is my book positioned vis-à-vis this area of cognitive-narratological research? What does it bring to the table of existing accounts of text-reader interaction? The main contribution I will make consists in an attempt to rethink the representationalist foundations of narratology. Stories, it is widely assumed, work by representing events, situations, characters, and mental processes: on Porter Abbott’s minimal definition, for example, narrative is “the representation of an event or a series of events” (2008, 13). Yet the enactivists urge that experience is not a matter of representation, but rather an interaction with the world guided by the values that permeate the subject’s experiential background. How is it possible to reconcile this insight with the assumption that stories are representational devices? To begin with—and I would like to spell this out clearly, as this line of argument is likely to raise a few eyebrows—I do not deny that literary stories and language itself are inherently representational. The enactivists make a compelling case that basic, bodily experience does not need mental representations, but their anti-representationalism cannot be transferred “as is” to conceptually and socio-culturally nuanced forms of experience. I am ready to grant that engaging with literary texts involves representations in both the semiotic and the cognitive-scientific sense (more on this distinction in the next chapter). Besides, even radical enactivists like Hutto and Myin concede that some “cognitive activity—plausibly, that associated with and dependent upon the mastery of language—surely involves content” (2012, xviii). Since here “content” refers to the propositional kernel of a mental representation (for example: believing that tomorrow is Monday involves a mental representation whose content is “tomorrow is Monday” [see Pitt 2008]), Hutto

 Anne Harrington coined this phrase at the 2011 CASBS workshop on cognitive science and the humanities (Stanford University, August 2011).

10

0 Introduction

and Myin are arguing that mental representations are part and parcel of higherorder cognitive functions such as linguistic comprehension. However, this does not imply that the enactivist theory of experience is fundamentally useless for an account of readers’ engagement with representational artifacts such as stories. Semiotic and mental representations do play a role in readers’ interaction with literary stories, but they are not the whole picture—for the experience readers get out of this interaction cannot be reduced to mental representations. The complex dynamic whereby readers respond to stories involves mental representations at several levels without being representational through and through. I will try to clarify this point in the next chapter, where I will distinguish between representation (a reference to a spatio-temporally locatable event or existent) and experience (as a way of responding to the world). At the same time—and this is another aspect of my argument that I want to stress in order to avoid misunderstandings—I will contend that representation and experience are usually bound up in people’s engagement with language. Therefore, I think the enactivist anti-representationalism about basic experience has to become a “more-than-representationalist” position when it comes to theorizing story-driven experiences. It may be wondered what is the pay-off of all these moves for narratology, and literary narratology in particular. As I argued above, one of the fundamental assumptions of narrative theory is that stories work by representing events and existents. But they surely do more than this. As both reader-response theorists and rhetorical narrative theorists in Wayne Booth’s (1983) tradition have long recognized, stories have an impact on readers, they provoke their reactions in the form of mental imagery, emotional responses, moral and aesthetic judgments, socio-cultural evaluations. These responses reflect substantially different psychological processes, and it would be difficult to capture the complexity of their interaction in an experimental setting (e. g., in a psycholinguistic study). Yet these responses come together in interesting and often surprising ways in the reading experience. In Part III, for example, I will try to show that readers’ bodily involvement can strengthen their engagement with a story at the level of socio-cultural meanings. More generally, the idea behind this book is that experience and experientiality can provide an integrative framework capable of accounting for all levels of readers’ interaction with narrative, bridging the gap between narrative’s representational devices and the responses they induce. At the same time, I believe my approach is in a good position to bridge another gap: that between more or less shared modes of experiencing the world like perception—which fall under the remit of the mind sciences—and relatively idiosyncratic forms of engagement based on people’s socio-cultural meanings and values.

0.3 Why This Book Is Not an Empirical Study

11

In an article where he warns against the pitfalls of bringing together scientific theories and humanistic concerns, Tony Jackson concludes by asking: “Can you make a legitimate use of the science without requiring literary interpretation to be judged by the criteria of scientific methods?” (2003, 204). I think the way this question is phrased—and indeed the way in which Jackson sets up his argument—is misleading. The aim of cognitive approaches to literature is not to prove scientifically readers’ interpretive responses to stories; rather, it is to show that those socio-culturally nuanced responses can be placed on a continuum with more basic modes of interaction with the world (the proper objects of study of the mind sciences). My investigation into the experientiality of narrative makes a step in this direction. Moreover, far from being a passive recipient of ideas grown out of other fields, the account of storytelling developed in this study can, by cross-pollinating narratology and enactivism, make a contribution to the philosophical debate. The philosophers associated with enactivism have been focusing their attention on basic experiencing—i. e., on simple, non-conceptual forms of cognition that humans share with non-human animals. On the other hand, the same philosophers—Hutto himself, Richard Menary, and others—have shown interest in narrative as a key component in secondary intersubjectivity and in the construction of the self (see chapter 6). The divide between these two areas of inquiry, however, has not been explicitly addressed in the philosophical literature: how does narrative—a practice that involves linguistic competence as well as mental representations—relate to basic experiences? This is yet another gap that I would like to bridge in my study by formulating the following hypothesis: engaging with stories can trigger imaginative responses that simulate more basic modes of interaction with the environment, thus digging below mental representations and higher-order cognition.

0.3 Why This Book Is Not an Empirical Study One of the most exciting innovations in recent cognitive approaches to narrative and literature is the adoption of empirical methods: the last ten years have seen important monographs by Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon (2002) and David Miall (2006), along with a handbook (Van Peer, Hakemulder, and Zyngier 2007) co-authored by Willie Van Peer, one of the pioneers of empirical literary studies. Although the vast majority of articles and books published under the heading of “cognitive narratology” or “cognitive literary studies” is still based on speculative hypotheses or—at best—on indirect empirical evidence, it is legitimate to ask why this study of the experientiality of narrative sidesteps the

12

0 Introduction

issue of empirical verification altogether. The question may appear more pressing in light of the specificity of many of the claims that I will advance in the following pages: when I write that “readers do this” or “we do that,” there should be no doubt that those generalizing “readers” and “we” reflect speculative hypotheses based on my own intuitions about how reading a particular text affects readers’ responses. And, my critics could argue, those intuitions just cry out for empirical testing. While I am ready to grant that this is a limitation of the model I propose here, I do not think it should be considered a fundamental flaw. There are two reasons for this: the first is methodological, while the second reflects the nature of the phenomenon that I intend to explore—and the current status of cognitive-scientific research on experience. Let us start with methodology. It is fairly naïve to think that one can do empirical research without theoretical back-up. For all their sophistication, today’s cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics (not to mention neuroscience) have to stick to a piecemeal approach that breaks down the complexity of the textreader interaction into a series of more or less discrete psychological processes. This is a condition imposed by the experimental method itself, which forces researchers to use short and often artificial texts, manipulating one variable at a time in order to study a specific kind of reader-response (see Ryan 2010, 480). Yet the big picture—the theoretical background against which researchers’ hypotheses take on their relevance and importance—cannot be provided through empirical means. Of course, cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics have their own theoretical models, but it seems misguided to believe that these constructs would work “out of the box” in radically different fields such as narrative theory or literary studies. For example, we cannot expect cognitive scientists to deal with the problem—crucial for a narrative or literary theorist—of how to relate cognitive-level processes with readers’ judgments of relevance and thematic interpretations. Remember the danger of the “interdisciplinary Frankenstein” that I have identified in the previous section: interdisciplinarity requires a good deal of adaptation and restructuring of disciplinary frameworks if it is to produce significant insights (see Klein 2010, 18 – 19). But pulling off this feat without speculation is almost impossible. Thus, the many speculative claims contained in this book should be seen as paving the road for empirical work. The answer reader-response theorist Wolfgang Iser gave Norman Holland (another well-known reader-response theorist) thirty years ago in a famous interview still seems perfectly valid to me: If there is no reference in my book [Iser 1978] “to an actual reader actually reading,” this is because my aim was to construct a heuristic model of the activities basic to text-processing… I must stress the fact that I have constructed this model, not for its own sake, but

0.3 Why This Book Is Not an Empirical Study

13

in order to provide a framework which would permit assessment and evaluation of actual readers’ responses to a literary text. (Iser, Holland, and Booth 1980, 61)

I believe Iser is fundamentally right in defending the importance of speculation as a heuristic tool. Empirical work can confirm or disconfirm hypotheses derived from a theoretical model, but it cannot by itself replace the theoretical model; all it can do is encourage scholars to advance a new model, or revise existing ones. The theory I formulate here reflects a paradigm shift occurring in narrative and literary studies—namely, the “cognitive turn.” This explains why my network model of experientiality (see chapter 2) is significantly different from Iser’s classical theory of literary reading in The Act of Reading (1978). My model is consistent with empirical research in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, and could be used to generate new empirical hypotheses in these and other fields. However, for these hypotheses to fit into a larger research program we need an integrative, interdisciplinary framework, which only theorization can provide—and which this book seeks to provide by building on consciousness studies and enactivist philosophy. But there is more: when Iser remarks in the interview quoted above that in his work there is no reference “to an actual reader actually reading,” he is in a sense wrong—for there is at least a reference to Iser’s intuitions about his own reading experience. And these intuitions should not be discarded as useless or irrelevant. Indeed, the interpreter’s introspection is a valuable tool for exploring texts and their impact on readers. As Ryan puts it, if “there is such a thing as cognitive narratology, it is much less a matter of borrowing ready-made concepts from the cognitive sciences and applying them in a top-down way to texts than a matter of trusting the ability of our own mind to figure out how the mind creates, decodes and uses stories” (2010, 489). The close readings I will offer throughout this book are predicated on this assumption. In some cases, all my argument needs is that a story could impact readers in the way I describe, even if this effect cannot be generalized across all readers. In other cases, it is the structure of readers’ responses that interests me more than the exact content of those responses, which can vary substantially from reader to reader: my claim is, therefore, that the story-driven experience works in this particular way for me—and that it works in a structurally similar way for other people.⁷ I also explore aspects of the story-driven experience that may not be self-evident to some, perhaps most readers. I am thinking in particular of my claims about the embodiment

 As stressed by Gallagher and Zahavi (2008, 26), phenomenology is concerned not so much with the content, but with the structure of experience.

14

0 Introduction

of reading: the bodily responses I describe may remain submerged under other, stronger responses, or may form a pre-reflective backdrop to other forms of engagement with stories. All I ask from my readers in this case is that they pay close, unbiased attention to their own story-driven experiences. In general, it is important to stress that I may be wrong about how reading works for others (and, possibly, also for myself). This is why other people’s reports of their story-driven experiences are valuable data for a phenomenology of reading. To quote Marie-Laure Ryan again: “The third method [for studying readers’ mental processes] is the least rigorous, but probably the one from which cognitive narratology has the most to learn. It consists of asking readers to describe, in their own words, their experience of a story” (2010, 480). Norman Holland attempted something along these lines in 5 Readers Reading (1975), and I believe it would be extremely interesting to revisit his work in light of today’s mind sciences. Although this book does not have much to offer in this respect, it can at least point to intersubjective corroboration (see Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 28) and dialogue as means of negotiating the reading experience, inviting readers to engage critically with my case studies. These considerations about the phenomenology of reading take us to the second reason why this book isn’t an empirical study. The first, methodological reason can be summarized as: “this book isn’t an empirical study because empirical studies cannot go very far when they are not backed up by a theoretical model; and a theoretical model of the reading experience is badly needed in the interdisciplinary arena of cognitive approaches to narrative and literature.” The second reason is at the same time more practical and more specific. Saying that this book could be an empirical study implies that its focus—experience, and in particular the experientiality of narrative—lends itself to empirical investigation. But this is far from uncontroversial if we look at the recent (and not so recent) history of scientific psychology and cognitive science. Experience is with us from the first to the last instant of our lives. And yet, it is extremely elusive and difficult to pin down scientifically. The problem of how to relate physical states of the brain with conscious mental states is known in the philosophy of mind as the “hard problem of consciousness” (see Chalmers 1995). Several attempts have been made at reconciling phenomenology with a third-person, scientific method—Dennett’s (1991) “heterophenomenology,” Varela’s (1996) “neurophenomenology,” Shaun Gallagher’s (2003) “front-loaded phenomenology”—but no consensus has been reached yet, and this line of research appears to be very much in its infancy. Reporting on one’s experience requires introspection, whose use in scientific psychology has been widely criticized both by behaviorists (Watson 1913)—as a reaction against the introspectionism of Wilhelm Wundt—and later on by the cognitivists Nisbett and Wilson (1977) in a famous paper. One of the few psychologists to have devoted most of his career to the scien-

0.3 Why This Book Is Not an Empirical Study

15

tific study of experience, Russell Hurlburt, describes the situation as follows: “If it seems strange to have to remind ourselves that inner experience is important, it is because the science of psychology has banned inner experience from scientific discourse so thoroughly that for the last half-century the term ‘introspection’ doesn’t even appear in textbooks of psychological method” (Hurlburt and Akhter 2006, 272). It is no coincidence that most of the ideas I will discuss in this book have been advanced by philosophers of mind, not by psychologists or neuroscientists. The functionalist foundations of cognitive science do not allow room for an extensive, in-depth exploration of experience: mental processes are seen in terms of their role in shaping behavior or in interacting with other mental processes (see chapter 5 and Chalmers 1996, 15), but the experiential “feel” of those processes is either taken for granted or explained away. The rise of consciousness studies and E-approaches to cognition has put experience on the agenda of cognitive science, but we are far from having the “mature science of experience” that Hurlburt has been lobbying for since his early studies in the 1970s (see Hurlburt 2011). This state of affairs has clear implications for the study of the experientiality of narrative. Cognitive psychologists and psycholinguists can investigate the mental processes that “allow readers to have rich narrative experiences,” as psychologist Richard Gerrig puts it (2011, 37). But can they investigate those experiences themselves? Not really. The processes that fall under the remit of cognitive psychology are mostly subpersonal (i.e., unconscious): they may underlie experiences, but they are not—in themselves—experienced. Even if these processes are experienced, they are described by psychologists in functionalist terms, with little or no attention paid to their experiential qualities. The upshot is that the more experimental disciplines within the cognitive sciences do not have sophisticated tools to deal with experience. If we want to take experience and experientiality seriously, we have to stick to readers’ introspective reports, but we cannot do so without proper preparation. This is where the philosophy of mind and neo-phenomenological approaches within the cognitive sciences can help. And this is why claiming that this book should have been an empirical study means underestimating the difficulties and pitfalls involved in the empirical investigation of experience. While such investigation may become possible going forward, it needs a theoretical model such as the one I am proposing here. Before getting to the heart of my argument, however, I would like to provide a thumbnail sketch of recent developments in cognitive science, insisting in particular on the shift away from the computational view of the mind and on the rise of E-approaches. This sketch will provide readers with a rough map of the territory covered

16

0 Introduction

by my study; however, readers who are already familiar with these topics may want to proceed directly to section 0.5, where I will give an outline of this book.

0.4 Cognitive Science: A Thumbnail Sketch 0.4.1 From Computational Models to Enactivism Cognitive science is the umbrella discipline that turns on the study of the mind/ brain, embracing philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence (AI), linguistics, and anthropology. The sketch I will draw here foregrounds the distinction between first-generation and second-generation cognitive science, allowing readers to understand where cognitive science as an interdisciplinary “cloud” comes from, and where it is headed. The distinction between first-generation and second-generation cognitive science was first traced by Lakoff and Johnson (1999), but it can be made to overlap with Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s (1991) tripartite classification: first-generation cognitive science includes Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s “cognitivism” and “connectionism,” since both are based on the mind as computer metaphor. Second-generation cognitive science (corresponding to Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s “enactivism”) is, as we will see, concerned with embodiment and with the interaction between the organism and its environment—two aspects largely neglected by first-generation cognitive science, because of its adoption of a computational model of the mind. Historically, there is a close link between the emergence of cognitive science in the 1950s (1956 is, according to Varela, Thompson, and Rosch [1991, 40], its conventional birth year) and the dawning of cybernetics in the same decade. This correlation prepared the ground for the core claim of first-generation cognitive science—namely, the idea that the mind/brain is a computational device. According to this view, cognition is the manipulation of abstract symbols (or mental representations, as they are called), which have a propositional, language-like form. In fact, beginning with his seminal The Language of Thought (1975), Jerry Fodor—one of the most ardent advocates of the computational model—has argued that natural languages are anchored to a language of thought or “mentalese,” which provides the basis for cognition. As Kim Sterelny puts it, on Fodor’s account “our capacities to think depend on a representational system, in which complex representations are built from a stock of basic elements; the meaning of complex representations depend [sic] on their structure and the representational properties of those basic elements; and the basic elements reappear with the same meaning in many structures” (1999, 452). A text-

0.4 Cognitive Science: A Thumbnail Sketch

17

book example of this approach is Stephen Kosslyn’s (see, e. g., Kosslyn, Thompson, and Ganis 2006) claim that mental images—despite their sensorial content—are actually stored in symbolic form. Likewise, the visual images we see on a computer screen are never directly manipulated by the machine: all a computer can do is process a sequence of 0s and 1s stored in its memory. In another milestone of first-generation cognitive science, David Marr’s Vision (1982), the author applied the computational approach to the study of human vision, examining the information processing mechanisms that allow us to extract a three-dimensional model of the world from the two-dimensional retinal image. As we will see more in detail in the next chapter, the concept of mental representation is of primary importance in the computational theory of cognition. Mental representations are symbolic structures. They carry “content” by representing “many different kinds of objects—concrete objects, sets, properties, events, and states of affairs in this world, in possible worlds, and in fictional worlds as well as abstract objects such as universals and numbers” (Von Eckardt 1999, 527). All in all, the representational theory of mind is so deeply rooted in the computational approach to cognition that the two labels have been used almost interchangeably: the term “mental representation” is generally associated with the information processing view of the mind/brain, according to which representations are abstract, symbolic, and sub-personal (i.e., not available to our consciousness). There are many reasons, however, for resisting the computational theory of cognition. For example: it is well-known that today’s computers are perfect Mälzelian machines, since they play chess better than most humans. Indeed, computers are very proficient at sequential, rule-based, highly abstract activities such as chess. But despite the efforts of AI scientists, they seem poorly suited to carry out tasks that are relatively simple for humans, such as driving a car or (for that matter) making sense of a story. Of course, these limitations might be overcome with time and technological advancement, but they seem to point to the conclusion that the human mind is fundamentally different from computers. This difference is one of the core claims of second-generation cognitive science—and given the part mental representations played in the computational theory of the mind, it is not surprising that second-generation cognitive science should have launched an attack against the concept of mental representation itself. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) have offered one of its most radical critiques. To begin with, they distinguish between a weak and a strong sense of the term “representation.” In the weak sense, representation is anything that stands for something else. This is relatively uncontroversial. However, talk about mental representations in the strong sense commits us to the view that “(1) the world is pregiven; (2) our cognition is of this world—even if only to a

18

0 Introduction

partial extent, and (3) the way in which we cognize the pregiven world is to represent its features and then act on the basis of these representations” (1991, 135). According to Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, these are the (often tacit) assumptions of first-generation cognitive science, and they go hand in hand with the age-old idea that the mind is a mirror of the world (objectivism). This view has been counterbalanced, throughout the history of Western philosophy, by the opposite view that the world is constructed by the human mind (subjectivism). However, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch challenge both positions on philosophical grounds: building on the Buddhist doctrine (typical of the Mahayana tradition) of the “codependent arising” of subject and object, they argue that all attempts to ground our knowledge either in the self or in the world are misguided. Rather, we must find a “middle way” between the two poles of subjectivism and objectivism. The authors suggest to look for it in the simple interaction between an organism and its environment. Unlike computers, organisms are not defined by “external mechanisms of control (heteronomy),” such as instructions and programming languages, but by their “internal mechanisms of self-organization (autonomy)” (1991, 139 – 140). It is through the interaction (which the authors term “structural coupling”) between the organism and the environment that the organism’s environment constitutes itself as such. In turn, the organism is constituted (both ontogenetically and phylogenetically) by the history of its structural coupling with the environment that it helps co-fashion. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch make a case for this by presenting the example of Bittorio, a “cellular automaton” of their invention. Bittorio does not represent a pregiven world; instead, because of its internal closure on the one hand, and because of the specificity of its structural coupling with the environment on the other, Bittorio enacts its world. In this connection, it is worth quoting in full one of the key passages of The Embodied Mind: [Over] time this coupling selects or enacts from a world of randomness a domain of distinctions … that has relevance for the structure of the system. In other words, on the basis of its autonomy the system selects or enacts a domain of significance. We use these words significance and relevance advisedly, for they imply that there is some kind of interpretation involved in the encounters. In the case of Bittorio, this interpretation is obviously a far cry from the kinds of interpretation that depend on experience. Nevertheless, we can say that a minimal kind of interpretation is involved, where interpretation is understood widely to mean the enactment of a domain of distinctions out of a background. (1991, 155 – 156)

This insistence on the hermeneutic dimension of the structural coupling between an organism and its environment is a hallmark of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s enactivism. They even invoke the name of Hans-Georg Gadamer (2004), and his view

0.4 Cognitive Science: A Thumbnail Sketch

19

of interpretation as “the enactment or bringing forth of meaning from a background of understanding” (1991, 149). In Steven Torrance’s words, cognition, “conceived fundamentally as meaning-generation, arises from the sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment” (2005, 358). By using the word “sensorimotor,” Torrance hints at another chief concern of enactivism: the emphasis it lays on the embodied nature of our interaction with the world. This crucial aspect, already present in The Embodied Mind, has been thoroughly explored by Erik Myin, Alva Noë, and Kevin O’Regan in their enactivist account of perception (see O’Regan and Noë 2001; Noë 2004; O’Regan, Myin, and Noë 2005). I will return to this theory in chapter 4, where I will provide an enactivist account of the reader’s imagination. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s argument against mental representations and the computational theory of cognition is not purely philosophical, however. It is supported by research carried out within cognitive science, and—slightly ironically—within AI itself, the stronghold of the computational model. For instance, Rodney Brooks (see, e. g., 1991) built a series of robots which are able to avoid hitting things: they do not have a perceptual system and an action system, but are designed around what Brooks refers to as a “subsumption architecture”—a series of “layers” or patterns of sensorimotor interaction with the environment. Indeed, these robots do not need to form an internal model of the world—as Brooks’s famous slogan goes, “The world is its own best model” (1991, 15). The behavior of these robots is coherent not because it has been previously programmed, but because it emerges from their structural coupling with the environment. According to Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, Brooks’s design strategy shows that the “enactive approach … is no mere philosophical preference but the result of forces internal to research in cognitive science, even in the case of those hard-nosed engineers who desire to build truly intelligent and useful machines” (1991, 212).

0.4.2 Conceptual Thought and Embodiment The interest in the embodied interaction with the environment has grown in second-generation cognitive science quite apart from Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s enactivism. There is an increasing tendency in cognitive science to acknowledge that cognition is embodied and situated—in other words, inseparable from the subject’s body and from the context in which it is situated. In his comprehensive overview of the cognitive-scientific literature on embodiment, Raymond Gibbs writes: “Embodiment may not provide the single foundation for all thought and language, but it is an essential part of the perceptual and cognitive processes by which we make sense of our experience in the world” (2005a,

20

0 Introduction

3). The enactivists have focused on basic cognitive activities like perception and action, whose relationship with the body is obvious. However, even higher-order mental capacities such as conceptualization and language are now associated with embodiment, often through the mediation of perception, in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics. In this context, researchers have explored how issues of embodiment play out differently in connection with concrete versus abstract concepts. On the one hand, psycholinguistic research has shown that the understanding of concrete concepts (such as “chair”) involves the activation of neural patterns broadly corresponding to those activated during perception, through a simulative mechanism (Barsalou’s [1999] theory of “perceptual symbols”). Similarly, according to Rolf Zwaan’s (2004) “Immersed Experiencer Framework,” the comprehension of a descriptive sentence relies on an embodied simulation of the described scene (more on this in chapter 7). Simulations seem to depend on the “affordances” of objects, i. e., on the ways in which we can physically interact with them in the world (see Kaschak and Glenberg 2000). These affordances are built into linguistic comprehension: for example, in reading the sentence “Tom used a chair to replace the light bulb” readers are likely to infer that Tom climbed on the chair on the basis of their familiarity with both chairs (which afford climbing) and light bulbs (which can be hard to reach). On the other hand, cognitive linguists (Lakoff 1987; Johnson 1987; Turner 1996; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Johnson 2007) have insisted on the role image schemata play in structuring abstract concepts. In Johnson’s definition, image schemata are “basic structures of sensorimotor experience by which we encounter a world that we can understand and act within” (2007, 136). Images schemata like containment, source-path-goal, center-periphery, balance, and link enable us to handle abstract concepts. Consider this sentence, from an article on cognitive approaches to literature appeared in the New York Times: “The road between the two cultures—science and literature—can go both ways” (Cohen 2010). This way of speaking is so familiar to us that we barely notice its metaphorical nature. Yet it is an excellent example of the link and path image schemata: the relationship between science and literature (two abstract entities) is envisioned as a road on which we can travel back and forth. Thus, this sentence maps the relationship between two abstract concepts onto a concrete scenario in which an implied subject interacts with an environment. Mark Turner would call this kind of scenario a “small spatial story.” As he puts it, “[nonspatial] stories and their further projections are always grounded in spatial and bodily stories” (1996, 51): in this case, the non-spatial story of the relationship between two cultures is mapped onto the spatial and bodily story of people traveling along a road.

0.4 Cognitive Science: A Thumbnail Sketch

21

All in all, through conceptual metaphors, even abstract language points to our embodied interaction with an environment. A common objection against this view is that most evidence for it comes from the introspective analysis of how language is used, and such evidence—it is claimed—is not sufficient to make a conclusive argument for the embodiment of abstract concepts. Summarizing this line of criticism, Gibbs writes that many “cognitive scientists believe that trying to infer aspects of conceptual knowledge from an analysis of systematic patterns of linguistic structures make these theories appear post hoc” (2005a, 119). However, the evidence from brain imaging studies for the embodiment of abstract concepts has been growing over the years (see Gallese and Lakoff 2005; Rohrer 2005; Johnson 2007, 167– 170), so there may be ways to ground cognitive-linguistic hypotheses in neuroscientific research going forward.

0.4.3 The Self, Folk Psychology, and Phenomenology Another set of problems that cognitive psychologists and philosophers of mind have sought to address within the broader framework of second-generation cognitive science concerns the self, personal identity, and how we come to understand the behavior of other people. The view popularized by psychologist Jerome Bruner (1990; 1991; 2003)—namely, that narratives are instrumental in shaping our personal identity—is an important precedent here. More recently, cognitive scientist Richard Menary (2008) and phenomenologist Dan Zahavi (2007a) have traced the self to its bodily roots—an argument that is meant to complement, rather than replace, Bruner’s account (see chapter 6). The debate on the so-called “problem of other minds” centers on the question: what is the core mechanism whereby we make sense of other people’s intentional behavior? This debate has traditionally been dominated by the disagreement between theory theorists and simulation theorists: the former hold that we come to understand the actions of other people by way of inference from an acquired (Churchland 1991) or innate (Carruthers 1996) theory known as “folk psychology.” By contrast, philosophers such as Robert M. Gordon (1996) and Alvin Goldman (2006a) insist that we explain other people’s behavior by “putting ourselves in their shoes”—i. e., by running mental simulations of their mental states. Some versions of simulation theory are based on neuroscientific evidence, in particular on evidence linking mental simulations with the firing of so-called “mirror neurons” (see, e. g., Gallese 2005). Although simulation theory appears, on the whole, closer to enactivism than theory theory, neither is fully compatible with it. In The Phenomenological Mind (2008), Gallagher and Zahavi suggest a way out of this dilemma. In the first

22

0 Introduction

place, they argue that, as far as primary, bodily intersubjectivity is concerned, there really is no “problem of other minds,” since—as phenomenologists have long pointed out—we have direct access to other people’s bodily intentionality. Our interaction with other people at this level involves neither an inferential process nor a simulation, but simply a form of bodily attunement—an “elementary mind minding,” as Hutto (2011b) calls it. Gallagher and Zahavi’s explanation of higher-order or secondary intersubjectivity falls back on Hutto’s (2007; 2008) “Narrative Practice Hypothesis.” Hutto developed Bruner’s conception of narrative as basis for the self into a developmental hypothesis: children acquire a “folk psychology” by being constantly exposed to the narratives told by adults. This points to the conclusion that stories play an important role in understanding other people’s behavior. As Gallagher and Zahavi put it, in “the case of someone’s puzzling action, a narrative can facilitate understanding by filling in a ‘rationale’ when this is not immediately obvious” (2008, 194). Even apart from his views about narrative, Hutto will be a key player in the chapters that follow, since as one of the most ardent advocates of “radical” enactivism he has written extensively on consciousness and experience, launching a barrage of criticisms against the representational view of the mind (Hutto 2000; Menary 2006; Hutto and Myin 2012). Gallagher and Zahavi’s work exemplifies the close relationship between second-generation cognitive science and philosophical traditions such as phenomenology and pragmatism, which were largely ignored by the computational theory of cognition. As Gallagher and Zahavi note, during the twentieth century “there [was] very little communication going on between analytic philosophy of mind and phenomenology” (2008, 2). The situation has changed because second-generation cognitive science places an emphasis on concepts (such as experience, consciousness, embodiment) which have always been at the core of phenomenological investigation. Gallagher and Zahavi’s work is a deliberate attempt at linking cognitive-scientific research on consciousness, the self, perception, action and the understanding of other people’s mental states with the insights offered by philosophers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. Another philosophical antecedent of the situated cognition hypothesis is John Dewey (see Gallagher 2009), whose view of experience as the interaction between an organism and its environment seems to anticipate Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s concept of “structural coupling.” As we will see, Dewey’s Art as Experience (2005)—originally published in 1934—provides the groundwork for my reading of Cortázar’s Hopscotch in chapter 3. Another name frequently invoked in this connection is that of William James. For instance, in a chapter of The Meaning of the Body (2007), Johnson uses James’s work to reflect on the way concepts are intertwined with perception. Johnson makes the following comment on the pragmatist philosophy of James and Dewey: “If logic doesn’t merely fall

0.5 Outline of Chapters

23

down from the Platonic heavens above, then it must surely rise up from our bodily experience as functioning organisms within changing environments. Better than anyone before or since, James and Dewey say that the recognition of this fact requires a serious reconsideration of the very nature of human concepts, thinking, reasoning, logic, and mind” (2007, 102). Johnson’s words indicate the extent of the paradigm shift that is occurring within cognitive science.

0.5 Outline of Chapters My study is divided into three main parts, with Part I setting out the theoretical framework on which the book as a whole relies. It is commonly assumed that stories are representational artifacts, i.e., that they provide semiotic cues to imagine a set of existents (characters, objects, and places) arranged in a temporal sequence of events and actions. Chapter 1 attempts to position this representational dimension of storytelling vis-à-vis the experiences undergone by recipients while engaging with narrative. I draw on the debate surrounding mental representation and experience in the philosophy of mind, arguing that both mental representations and semiotic representations are implicated in what Hutto calls the “objectbased schema”: representation works by referring to a spatio-temporally locatable entity such as an existent or an event. By contrast, experience is a field of interactions and evaluations that cannot be adequately described in object-based terms. This argument has two major implications for narrative theory: first, the relationship between stories as representational artifacts and recipients’ experiences is more complex than is usually thought. After arguing that the concept of “expression” is important in bringing into contact these two dimensions, I look at the expressive devices through which narrative can produce experiential responses in recipients. Second, stories cannot represent the characters’ experiences, but only events and actions whose experiential dimension is supplied by readers through their own familiarity with experience. In chapter 2, I propose my network model of the experientiality of narrative, arguing that the experience created by engaging with stories (the “story-driven experience,” as I call it) exists at the crossroads of two tensions: a tension between story recipients’ experiential background and the textual design; and another tension between consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment. Saving the discussion of the latter tension for chapter 5, I focus in chapter 2 on the former, which I regard as primary, and in particular on one of its poles, the experiential background. My argument is that recipients respond to stories on the basis of their experiential background, and that the diversity of their backgrounds reflects itself in the diversity of their responses to stories—even as

24

0 Introduction

the process of engaging with stories can impact the backgrounds in terms of which they are interpreted. In attempting to map such backgrounds, I argue that experiences fall into three broad categories—bodily, perceptual, and emotional—and that all of them are informed by higher-order cognitive functions (propositional imagination, memory, and language) and socio-cultural practices. In chapter 3 I turn my attention to the tension between a subject’s experiential background and the textual design, arguing that it reflects the structure of any experience. This provides the basis for what I call the “structural resemblance” between everyday experiences (those people get out of their interaction with the real world) and story-driven experiences. My sources here are the protoenactivist views of experience advanced by two thinkers, pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott, and a novel, Hopscotch by Cortázar. On my interpretation, Cortázar’s text presents a clear illustration of both Dewey’s experience-as-interaction and Winnicott’s experience-as-play, suggesting that experiences exist only in the interaction between the subject and an object (or “worldly offering,” in Hutto’s term). Another lesson that readers may draw from Cortázar’s novel is that by engaging in playful, creative experiences they may expand their experiential background, achieving what Mark Johnson has called “vertical transcendence.” Part II spans the divide between our basic, bodily-perceptual responses to stories and our higher-order, socio-culturally mediated engagement with characters. I start out, in chapter 4, by extending the enactivist theory of perception to account for the reader’s embodied imagination, with some help from the psycholinguistics of Rolf A. Zwaan and colleagues. My argument is that, despite common assumptions to the contrary, the perceived world is as sketchy and “gappy” as the mental imagery generated during the reading of narrative texts. This brings grist to the mill of my account of the structural resemblance between real experiences (perception) and story-driven experiences (imaginings). I show how this resemblance plays out in connection with readers’ reconstruction of narrative space, arguing that they do not need to produce a continuous, pictorial mental image in order to experience the spaces of a storyworld. I then discuss how readers cope with characters’ experiences at the bodily-perceptual level, pointing out that this kind of imaginative engagement is not fundamentally different from readers’ engagement with narrative space in the absence of perceiving characters, since it exploits the same tension between the experiential background and textual devices. Finally, I offer some remarks on how stories can convey the phenomenal qualities (or “qualia”) of bodily-perceptual experiences through the use of metaphorical language. Chapter 5 examines the other tension built into my network of experientiality. This tension, I argue, concerns recipients’ engagement with the experiences of fic-

0.5 Outline of Chapters

25

tional characters. Despite the growing body of research on character in narrative and literary theory, the issue of readers’ engagement with their consciousness and subjective experience has not been fully dealt with. My intuition is that, at the basic level, the experiences “of” characters are attributed to them by readers on the basis of the expressive cues provided by stories. Our default stance toward fictional characters is, therefore, “consciousness-attribution.” In special circumstances, however, readers may become closer to characters, attributing them aspects or parts of their own story-driven experience. The overlap between consciousness-attribution and readers’ own experience is at the core of the stance I label “consciousness-enactment.” In the second part of the chapter, I examine the devices through which authors can trigger consciousness-enactment, placing those devices on a continuum that ranges from the word level to the level of whole texts. I also propose a hypothesis concerning the cognitive underpinnings of consciousness-enactment, linking it with a simulative mechanisms but at the same time uncoupling the simulation theory of our engagements with fictional characters from the simulation theory of other minds (see subsection 0.4.3). Chapter 6 deals with a global strategy that authors may implement in order to encourage consciousness-enactment throughout a text: the narration of what I call the “self-narrative” of a character. In the most general terms, a self-narrative is a story that, by relating the events that shaped a character’s personality, constructs his or her personal identity or self. In presenting this case I look at the problem of the narrativity of the self, taking issue with radical narrativist views, according to which the self is a narrative construct through and through. Following the enactivist and neo-phenomenological accounts of Dan Zahavi and Richard Menary, I argue instead that the self is—at one level—embodied and fundamentally pre-narrative. And yet, stories do play a role in constructing our personal identity in secondary intersubjectivity—that is to say, in our public engagements with other people. It is because of their continuity with intersubjective engagements that, on my account, the self-narratives of characters can serve to strengthen recipients’ empathetic relationship with them. My test bed for these ideas is a short novel by Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach, which intertwines the self-narratives of two characters—a newly-wed couple—while staging a breakdown in their intersubjective relations. The problem of the reader’s embodiment, raised in chapter 4, is further explored in Part III, which is concerned with the interrelation between two kinds of responses to stories: the reader’s bodily-perceptual imaginings on the one hand, and his or her evaluative, interpretive responses on the other hand. Here I seek to show that the bodily-perceptual level of the experiential background is intimately bound up with people’s socio-cultural meanings and values. In chapter 7 I develop this argument by demonstrating that stories can elicit evaluative responses

26

0 Introduction

via readers’ enactment of the bodily-perceptual experiences of characters. Specifically, I suggest that some texts prompt more than an overlap between the storydriven experiences of the interpreters and the experiences attributed to characters: they prompt an overlap between the readers’ “virtual body” and the characters’ fictionally actual body—a phenomenon that I call the “fictionalization” of the reader’s virtual body. After exploring the idea of the virtuality of the body, I set up a scale of fictionalization, in which I place the passages examined throughout the chapter, and move on to what is—I argue—a special case of fictionalization, Samuel Beckett’s novella Company. On my interpretation, Company attempts to restructure our experiential background by putting into practice a phenomenological intuition about the bodily roots of the self. The last chapter of the book is devoted to a reading of Nabokov’s The Defense. What makes this novel especially interesting is that it consistently implements strategies for consciousness-enactment in order to invite readers to engage with a consciousness—the protagonist’s—that is disrupted and eventually undermined by his obsession with chess. I show that in the second half of the novel these chess-themed distortions enter the self-narrative of the character, who starts seeing his own life as a series of chess moves. Through its focus on the protagonist’s lack of reflective self-consciousness—his “experiential blindness” or inability to attend to the felt qualities of his own experience—Nabokov’s text enables me to illustrate and sum up many of the points raised in my discussion of the network of experientiality. Moreover, by staging the tension between the character’s quasi-narrative chess patterns and the experiential texture of people’s contacts with the world—to which he becomes completely blind—The Defense points to a larger narrative dynamic: the tension between the creation of an experiential texture (the expressive function, as I call it) and the organization of the flux of experience (the abstractive function). These tendencies are at the core of storytelling, finding a point of equilibrium in a third function of narrative—namely, evaluation. This three-dimensional model enables me to position the experiential dimension explored in this study vis-àvis the other forces that dominate the uses of storytelling.

Part I: Notes for a Theory of Experientiality

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

1 Not So Easy: Representation, Experience, Expression Intuitively, we all know that representation can be uncoupled from experience. Instrumental music calls forth strong experiential (bodily and affective) reactions without representing any state of affairs—i. e., without necessarily inviting listeners to think about a storyworld with its constituent elements (some characters, a spatiotemporal setting, a storyline). But in the case of people’s engagement with narratives it can be difficult to tease out these two dimensions, since stories are representational artifacts. How does representation relate to the experience undergone by readers and more generally by recipients while engaging with narrative? The purpose of this chapter is to problematize the relationship between representation and experience, opening up a set of questions that are often sidestepped in literary studies and especially in narratology— whose theoretical foundations are permeated by representational talk. In order to do so, I will try to show why the discussion surrounding mental representations in cognitive science is highly relevant to narratology. We will see that bridging the gap between representational talk in narrative studies and the cognitivescientific notion of “mental representation” involves some pitfalls. At the same time, I believe that it can yield important insights into people’s engagement with narratives—and into how the representational dimension of this engagement relates to its experiential dimension. The concept of “mental representation” was the Swiss army knife of firstgeneration, AI-inspired cognitive science. As William Ramsey puts it in his systematic study of cognitive representationalism, “one of the most distinguishing (and to some degree defining) hallmarks of cognitivism has been a strong commitment to internal representations as an explanatory posit. This assumption is so deeply ingrained that … some cognitivists consider it folly to even question the explanatory value of representational posits” (2007, 223). Yet, together with other fringes of contemporary cognitive science, enactivism is taking part in an assault against this entrenched concept. There are at least two aspects to this debate: one concerns the existence of mental representations; the other has to do with their explanatory value. On the one hand, as we know from subsection 0.4.1, the notion of mental representation had a clear theoretical status— and did genuine explanatory work—in classical computational models of the mind. On these accounts (see, e. g., Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988), a mental representation is a symbolic structure similar to a cluster of 1 s and 0 s in a computer. According to enactivists like Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991), the problem with this view of mental representation is that the model of the mind on

30

1 Not So Easy: Representation, Experience, Expression

which it is predicated is empirically false. In other words: talk about mental representations (in this computational sense) may be coherent; but these mental representations do not exist. On the other hand, as Ramsey points out, newer approaches within cognitive science (especially in the fields of neuroscience and cognitive psychology) have turned their back on computational models but keep talking about “mental representations” in a theoretically impoverished sense. These “mental representations” refer to phenomena that, while playing a functional role, are not at all representational (Ramsey 2007, xiv–xv). Either way, it seems that cognitive representationalism is running into trouble. I am convinced that this paradigm shift occurring within cognitive science gives us an opportunity to rethink the concept of “representation” as it is used by students of aesthetics, literary criticism, and—more importantly for us—narrative theory. Hence, in this chapter I would like to develop some conceptual tools which will make my more-than-representationalist approach to narrative more intelligible and also, I hope, more compelling. In particular, I will advance two theses: first, recipients’ engagement with narrative involves representations but cannot be equated with them. The story-driven experience, as I will call it, exists in a network of responses that includes recipients’ past experiences as well as the text itself (section 1.1). Second, characters’ consciousness and experiences cannot be represented as such by narrative texts; what we commonly call the “representation of an experience” is the representation of an event in which a person (e. g., a fictional character) undergoes an experience (section 1.2).¹ These may sound like tricky claims to make, since they involve bridging the gap between two usages of the word “representation” (one cognitive-scientific, the other broadly speaking semiotic) that are not necessarily synonymous. In what follows, I will argue that this gap can be bridged by showing that both mental and semiotic representations are deeply implicated in what Hutto calls the “object-based schema,” whereas experience and consciousness cannot be adequately accounted for in object-based terms. Representation works by referring to object-like entities (such as events, people, and things), while experience is a complex texture created by people’s biological make-up and past experiences; it has to do not just with what is experienced, but with the how, with the ways in which people respond to the world. The upshot is that my critique of representationalism in connection with what is known as “the representation of consciousness” is not merely terminological. Saying that characters’ conscious-

 Here and elsewhere in this chapter, the term “event” should be taken in a broad sense, as including both mere occurrences (the door is pushed open by the wind) and intentional actions (someone opens the door in order to go into the room).

1 Not So Easy: Representation, Experience, Expression

31

nesses are not represented in texts is shorthand for arguing that there is a profound—indeed, essential—difference between “representing” experience and representing objects or events. What really counts is the difference, not the label in itself. If I seem to target representational talk about characters’ consciousnesses and experiences, it is only because I find it potentially misleading—because it obscures the fact that experience is a field of embodied, practical, evaluative interactions and not simply a “thing” that can be referred to. The concept of expression plays a major role in my account of how experiences can be conveyed by semiotic, and thereby representational, artifacts. In section 1.3 I will examine some of the “expressive devices” through which narrative can have an experiential impact on readers, encouraging them to respond to the represented events and existents. Indeed, depending on the interplay between readers’ experiential background and the expressive strategies implemented by the author, the same set of existents, linked together in the same sequence of events, may lead to markedly different experiences, in terms of vividness and memorability of recipients’ imaginings, emotions aroused, and more self-conscious interpretive responses. The thrust of this chapter is that a narrow focus on stories as representational artifacts prevents scholars from doing justice to narrative’s experiential dimension. Hence my “more-than-representationalism” about recipients’ interaction with stories: in order to refine our understanding of reception processes and formulate a more comprehensive “cognitive reception theory” (Eder 2003), we need to know more about the ways in which the representational properties of stories connect with readers’ experiential background—and with their experiential responses. Language has both representational and expressive properties: it provides instructions to imagine some object-like entities (events and existents) and at the same time it invites readers to respond to these entities in certain ways, thereby creating the story-driven experience. Thus, the imaginings evoked by narrative have an intentional, representational dimension, since they are directed at the represented events and existents, but they can also take on an experiential quality, depending on the tension between readers’ experiential background and the expressive strategies implemented by the author. In this way, readers’ imagination reflects the intertwining of representation and experience (via expression). This study thus calls attention to both representation and expression as dimensions of narrative artifacts—an insight that will be further articulated at the end of chapter 8. My study is less ambitious when it comes to defining narrative, and falls back on existing definitions, particularly multidimensional accounts of the kind proposed by Wolf (2003), Ryan (2005), and Herman (2009a). According to these scholars, “being a story” is in fact an interpretation based not on a single criterion but on a range of factors (“narratemes” or “basic elements,” as Wolf

32

1 Not So Easy: Representation, Experience, Expression

and Herman respectively call them). A semiotic object is likely to be understood as a story when 1. it prompts recipients to construct a storyworld populated by characters and structured around a specific temporal-causal logic (plot); 2. it possesses a certain degree of thematic coherence; 3. it relates events that deviate from recipients’ expectations, thus acquiring “tellability” (see Baroni 2013); 4. it focuses on the experiences and evaluations of one or more anthropomorphic entities. These narratemes cut across the distinction between representation and experience, with factors 1. and 2. seemingly leaning toward representation, factor 3. siding with experience, and factor 4. somewhat in between. Clearly distinguishing between representation and experience enables us to grasp how complex and multifaceted recipients’ engagement with narrative artifacts is, accounting for a broad range of responses and interpretive patterns. This is, in a nutshell, the conception of narrativity that underlies this book.² Before moving on it is worth saying a few words about why we respond experientially to events and existents that we know to be non-actual (i. e., fictional or at least not physically present in the discourse context, as in conversational narratives). As often in this book, my answer turns on the idea of “mental simulation.” Keith Oatley (1999) suggests that a “play or a novel runs on the minds of the audience or reader as a computer simulation runs on a computer. Just as computer simulation has augmented theories of language, perception, problem solving, and connectionist learning, so fiction as simulation illuminates the problem of human action and emotions” (1999, 105). In other words, our experiential responses to non-actual events and existents depend on a simulative mechanism whereby we use our cognitive resources in an “off-line” mode (see Currie 1997; Currie and Ravenscroft 2002), reacting to them as if they were actual. I will argue in chapter 3 that this “as if” is rooted in the structure of experience, which enables readers to cross successfully the divide between the real world and storyworlds. Further, in chapter 2 and more extensively in section 8.4 I will add another piece to the puzzle by showing that the implication of readers’ values in their engagement with narrative is instrumental in triggering experiential responses: the interplay between the experiential and the representational dimension of narrative is thus enriched by a third, evaluative dimension.

 As the next chapter will argue more in detail, in adopting this multidimensional definition of narrative I part ways with Fludernik, who equates narrativity with a single factor—namely, experientiality.

1.1 From Representation to Expression

33

1.1 From Representation to Expression Suppose you are reading a passage from Italo Svevo’s 1923 novel Zeno’s Conscience. The first-person narrator is rambling on about his addiction to cigarettes: At that time I didn’t know whether I loved or hated cigarettes, their taste, the condition nicotine created in me. But when I came to realize that I hated all of those, it was worse. And I had this realization at the age of about twenty. Then for some weeks I suffered from a violent sore throat accompanied by fever. The doctor prescribed bed rest and absolute abstention from smoking. I remember that word, absolute! It wounded me, and my fever colored it. A great void, and nothing to help me resist the enormous pressure immediately produced around a void. (Svevo 2003, 10)

Maybe you have never smoked a cigarette in your life, and have always looked at cigarette smokers with a mixture of disdain and incomprehension. Maybe you have smoked a few cigarettes when you were a teenager, only to rapidly lose interest and decide that no, definitely smoking is not for you. Or maybe you are like the narrator: a passionate smoker, desperately needing his daily intake of nicotine despite hating almost everything about cigarettes. Whatever your relationship to cigarette smoking (and there are many more possibilities than I could mention here), reading this passage will evoke some associations. You will be vaguely reminded of the taste of cigarettes—or of their characteristic odor, if you have never smoked one. You will understand what it means to have “a violent sore throat,” because you know what it feels like when your throat aches so much that you cannot swallow. Possibly, you will recognize the “feel” of addiction, the sense of being deprived of something that is vitally important for you. All of these associations, of course, may be triggered with varying degrees of intensity in the flow of reading, depending on a variety of factors—including your relationship to cigarette smoking. But at least you will realize that this passage deals with a subject-matter that is familiar, that matters to you (again, to varying degrees) because you have been exposed to sensory qualities like the taste of cigarette or the pleasure of indulging in an addiction, because you are acquainted with the feelings of love and dislike, and because you know how smoking cigarettes can impact your well-being. These are the threads that run through, and at the same time create, the reading experience. How are we to understand these psychological threads? It could be argued that reading invites us to think about these things. But this is hardly consistent with the phenomenology of engaging with this passage—with the way it feels like, from the reader’s (or at least this reader’s) subjective viewpoint. We have no need to think about pleasure, or the taste of cigarettes, or any other of the experiences implicated in this text, because in fact they are seamlessly and as if automatically associated with

34

1 Not So Easy: Representation, Experience, Expression

the character’s words. The difference I am alluding to is one between thinking about something in a direct, focused way (as you do when I ask you to think about someone smoking a cigarette), and having one’s past experiences entangled in the process of reading about the narrator’s addiction to cigarettes. The latter phenomenon is subtler, and more elusive—this is why I was forced to use vague terms like “associations,” “recognize,” “be familiar with.” It has to do with the indefinable, the implied, what goes without saying and yet permeates all our encounters with the world. It has to do, in one word, with experience. One of the most salient features of experience is that it is irreducibly rich and complex. It is made up by many threads (in Latin “complexus” means “woven together”). It is layered and multidimensional and yet somehow gives rise to a feeling that is like an undivided whole—the sense of being alive to and conscious of the world.³ Interestingly, the Svevo passage hints at this idea through the indication that the word “absolute,” as pronounced by the doctor, “wounded” the narrator, and that it was “colored” by his fever. Such metaphors suggest that experience is a unified field, where all our modes of engagement with the environment—the pain caused by the prescription, the consciousness altered by the fever—converge. This complex interaction cannot be reduced to the narrator’s thinking about the prescription, because it brings in its wake a number of past interactions (such as memories of smoked cigarettes), sensory qualities (the taste of cigarettes, the pleasure that the narrator derived from them), and more or less self-conscious evaluations about the importance of cigarettes. Svevo’s character is responding to an event on the basis of past experiences and values that are entangled in his engagement with the world—and there seems to be a crucial difference between this entanglement and the simple mental event of thinking about something. Another, more technical way to frame this idea is to argue that experience cannot be equated with what cognitive scientists call “mental representations,” because there is always more to one’s experience than the objects to which one is intentionally directed at. Let me clarify this point. First of all, what is a mental representation and what does it mean to be intentionally directed at something? In Beyond Physicalism (2000), Hutto argues that any kind of representational talk in cognitive science is implicated in an “object-based schema.” On his definition, this schema

 Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel (2007) has explored the issue of the “richness” of experience, but in his account this concept refers to the simultaneous presence of experiential stimuli in different sensory modalities (for example, can you pay attention to these words and at the same time be aware of your left foot in your shoe?). By contrast, in my discussion the term “richness” is diachronic rather than strictly synchronic: it is the richness of the experiential stream as it unfolds in time, involving qualitatively different states and modes of consciousness.

1.1 From Representation to Expression

35

includes not only objects in the common sense, but anything that can be referred to or thought about by virtue of its being a spatio-temporal entity: thus, people and events can be encapsulated in the object-based schema (needless to say, an event is a spatio-temporal entity because it unfolds in a specific time and place). In the terms afforded by this schema, an inner representation is a physical state of the brain that stands in for something else—for example, the water bottle on my table. Another way of putting this point is to say that my mind is directed, through the physical state of my brain, toward the water bottle on the table— a directedness that, since Franz Brentano’s 1874 Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1973), goes under the name of “intentionality” in the philosophy of mind.⁴ The terms “representation” and “intentionality” are thus interchangeable, with the key difference that the former tends to designate a physical state (and therefore is more common in neuroscience and cognitive psychology), the latter a mental state (and therefore is typically used by philosophers). On Jerry Fodor’s (1975; see subsection 0.4.1) computational view of the mind, mental representations are thought to have a propositional, language-like content—one that can be expressed in a that-cause. For example, my belief that there is a water bottle on my table is a mental representation whose propositional content is “there is a water bottle on my table.” Yet my experience of the bottle cannot be reduced to either a stand-in for the bottle or a mental state directed at it, because experience has to do with how things are experienced, with the field of possible interactions that surrounds the bottle (drinking from it, refilling it, angrily throwing it at the wall). It is this field of interactions—evaluative and embodied—that creates the sense of complexity of experience that I have highlighted through the Svevo passage. The water bottle on my table may be a thing, an object, but my experience of it is not, because it is caught in a background—an experiential background, as I will call it—of past experiences, evaluations, and bodily engagements. Note that this argument does not commit me to the view that mental representations do not exist—it only entails that experiences are not just mental representations. The enactivists provide good reasons to think that basic, pre-conceptual experience is not representational. And yet, as discussed in section 0.2, even radical enactivists like Hutto and Myin (2012) are ready to concede that languagebased cognition does involve mental representations. This is why a psychologically realistic theory of narrative cannot do without mental representations. But what

 According to G. E. M. Anscombe (2002), the word “intentionality” comes from the Latin “intendere,” to aim at something—the underlying metaphor being that the mind can be aimed, like a bow, at an object. On intentionality, see also Crane (2001; 2003).

36

1 Not So Easy: Representation, Experience, Expression

about the experiences that we undergo while engaging with semiotic—and representational—artifacts like stories? We already know that narrative can implicate recipients’ familiarity with experience. But by leveraging recipients’ past experiences it can do much more than that: it can elicit emotional responses from them; it can engage their imagination, transporting them to imaginary places; it can invite them to reconsider their deep-seated beliefs and values. My suggestion here is that such vital aspects of our engagement with stories cannot be made sense of in representationalist terms, since they are inherently—and irreducibly—experiential: they have a qualitative “feel” and they involve an element of evaluation that is, at least in part, devoid of propositional content.⁵ How do linguistic representations draw on recipients’ experiential background, and how do they create new story-driven experiences? We need another concept for what I have called the entanglement⁶ of recipients’ past experiences in their engagement with narrative, and Wittgenstein’s late work on the philosophy of psychology can provide us with one (see Hutto 2000, 120 – 131). For Wittgenstein, the key to this issue lies in the concept of “expression.” Warning against the tendency to imprison experiential states in an object-based schema, he writes that the “main difficulty arises from our imagining the experience (pain for instance) as a thing for which of course we have a name and whose concept is therefore quite easy to grasp” (1992, 43e). Instead, Wittgenstein suggests that the experiential dimension of language should be understood not in object-like terms but as a form of expression. Unlike representation, which works by referring to a self-contained object, expression is deeply embedded in the context in which an experience occurs. When a heavy object falls on my foot, I experience pain and may let out a yell. The yell is an expression, not a representation, of pain because it is a way of reacting to an experience that is inextricable from its context.⁷ To return to Wittgenstein, “what [an expression] expresses is not explained through our being able to replace it by this and that but

 This doesn’t mean, of course, that all evaluations are devoid of propositional content. Many— indeed, most—evaluations involve mental and semiotic representations, but the values to which those evaluations ultimately point (see subsection 2.2.2) are, in themselves, non-representational. A straightforward example: I may use language and conceptual thought to get out of a lifeor-death situation, but my attachment to my life—my placing value on it—is an instinctual drive that I have in common with creatures incapable of linguistic cognition.  The entanglement metaphor comes from Wolfgang Iser (1978)—see section 3.1.  One way of putting this is to use Peirce’s (see, e. g., 1998) well-known distinction between symbols, indices, and icons. My yell, as an expression of pain, would be close to the index: it is, in Peirce’s words, “a reactional sign” (1998, 163) because it is directly connected with an experience. But it is important to stress that the distinction is not so clear-cut when it comes to language-based cognition, where representation and expression are typically bound up.

1.1 From Representation to Expression

37

through its surroundings. For it is in them that what [I say (in my example the yell)] appears expressive. For what appears expressive to us would not be called expressive by someone who is so to speak unfamiliar with its implications” (MS 130, 58; quoted in Schulte 1993, 44– 45). The same holds true for more elaborate linguistic expressions of one’s experience; these can be understood only if one has found oneself in a sufficiently similar situation. Thus, we can express an experience only by inviting someone to imaginatively respond to something on the basis of his or her past experiences. Often these responses cannot be avoided: when we see a heavy object falling on someone else’s foot, it is not uncommon to experience something very similar to pain, usually with behavioral consequences (e. g., we twitch our mouth as if in pain). Such a reaction signals that we are imaginatively experiencing the other person’s pain (see Osborn and Derbyshire 2010). But the same can happen when someone linguistically describes how his or her foot was crushed by a heavy object. In the latter case the speaker’s words will inevitably involve linguistic representations, since they will refer to the foot, the heavy object and its fall as spatio-temporal entities—and they will have a propositional content. The experiential quality of his or her words, however, will emerge from those object-like representations without being interchangeable with any of them. The experience does not lie in the foot, nor in the heavy object, nor in the fall, but in the way these objects interact with the subject and with his or her neural wiring. Likewise, the listener’s imaginative re-experiencing of the reported events does not lie in any of the words the speaker uses, but in the way they leverage the listener’s familiarity with pain in order to create a network of responses that involves the words themselves, the represented objects, and the listener’s past experiences. Expression is therefore a double-sided concept: it ties together the subject’s experience (which is expressed) with the experiential background of other subjects (who interpret an utterance as an expression). This analysis points to an important conclusion: in linguistically mediated contexts, representation and expression (as indicative of—and conducive to—experience) are typically bound up. As Wittgenstein saw very well, this co-occurrence of representation and experience is at the root of representational and object-based views of experience. But this does not imply that representation as reference to an object and experience are the same thing. For example, I may ask you to imagine a spider crawling up a wall. Or I may ask you to imagine a spider crawling up your arm. Finally, I may ask you to imagine the hairy legs of a large spider softly padding up your arm.⁸ In itself, the difference in the represented

 Cf. a similar thought experiment, involving a spelunking expedition, in Walton (1997, 39).

38

1 Not So Easy: Representation, Experience, Expression

objects (a wall or your arm, just “a spider” or a large spider with hairy legs) does not explain the difference in your responses: in all cases you are directing your consciousness at an object that has certain representational features. Why should the last scenario bring about a stronger response than the first? Simply put, it is because our responses to these scenarios are experiential. The point is that in imagining a spider crawling up a wall we may keep a safe distance from the object of our imaginings; our experiential background—in this case, our fear of spiders— is activated only to a limited extent. But as the spider draws closer to us, and as our imaginings take on more detail, our imaginative experience—that is to say, our response to the representations—becomes stronger. Presumably, this reaction derives both from an evolutionary predisposition and from a process of cultural learning (see Gerdes, Uhl, and Alpers 2009). Note that, despite being triggered by a representational mental state (our imagining that a spider etc.), our response is not—in itself—representational. Our fear of the imagined spider does not have a representational, propositional content: we do not fear that the spider might bite or attack us; we just have a gut reaction to the spider as soon as we imagine it crawling up our arm. What is remarkable about this phenomenon is the way mental and semiotic representations can draw on a level of our engagement with the world that is pre-linguistic and non-representational. In sum, representation and expression are different layers or aspects of the same process of engaging with texts. Language is inherently representational, because it asks interpreters to think about—or direct their consciousness to— mental objects like events and existents. But it is also experiential, because it can express experiences by constantly referring back to the past experiences of the interpreters, and by inviting them to respond in certain ways. Note that representation does not come in degrees: something is representational or not (and language always is). By contrast, the experiences created by stories vary considerably in intensity, depending on the strength of interpreters’ responses, which in turn reflect the tension between their past experiences and the textual design (more on this in the next chapter).

1.2 On Characters’ Experiences The argument developed so far does not warrant the conclusion that fictional consciousnesses and experiences cannot be represented in the semiotic sense. When literary scholars, and especially narratologists, talk about the representation of experience, or subjectivity, or consciousness, they are not specifically interested in the experience of recipients (which was the topic of the previous section). Rather, they are referring to the representation of experiences undergone

1.2 On Characters’ Experiences

39

by the characters inhabiting a storyworld. In other words, they are dealing with the textual figuration of fictional experiences that are, it is assumed, distinct and autonomous from the recipients’. For example, it is customary to say that the passage from Zeno’s Conscience quoted above represents the narrator’s problematic addiction to cigarette smoking, and a number of other experiential states including his sore throat and his emotional reaction to the doctor’s recommendation to abstain from smoking. Can we challenge this assumption by contending that characters’ experiences are not in the strong sense representable—and therefore represented by texts? A lot depends, of course, on the definition of representation that we adopt. Yet there are good reasons to believe that representational talk in aesthetics and related disciplines is implicated in the “object-based schema” whose limitations Hutto has exposed in the philosophy of mind. If we can prove that there is a conceptual connection between mental and semiotic representations, then we may reasonably argue that fictional experiences are not represented by narrative texts—that there is a key difference between “representing” fictional experiences and representing object-like entities. In order to make a case for this view, I would have to show that when one talks about a “representation” (in the semiotic sense) one always has in mind a thing—a sign—that stands in for a spatio-temporally locatable entity such as an object, a person, or an event. And this is relatively easy to do. Consider Nelson Goodman’s classic theory of representation: The plain fact is that a picture, to represent an object, must be a symbol for it, stand for it, refer to it; and that no degree of resemblance is sufficient to establish the requisite relationship of reference. Nor is resemblance necessary for reference; almost anything may stand for almost anything else. A picture that represents—like a passage that describes—an object refers to and, more particularly, denotes it. Denotation is the core of representation and is independent of resemblance. (1976, 5, emphasis in the original)

While severing the link between representation and mimesis, Goodman seems to openly endorse the object-based view of representation. For something to be a representation of something else, it must refer to or denote it as an object. Likewise—and despite the differences between his theory of representation and Goodman’s—Kendall Walton (1990) argues that a representation is any object that serves as a prop in a game of make-believe, prescribing some imaginings. In Walton’s famous example, a tree stump stands in for a bear in a children’s game of make-believe—which means that the tree stump can be understood (within the world of the game the children are playing) as a representation of a bear. But since both the tree stump and the bear are spatio-temporally locatable entities, semiotic representations seem to be inextricably bound up with object-based language, just like mental representations.

40

1 Not So Easy: Representation, Experience, Expression

There is another strategy for demonstrating the tight link between semiotic and mental representations. As discussed above, on a Fodorian view of the mind mental representations are thought to have a propositional (i. e., language-like) content. In this sense, then, it could be argued that mental representations are inherently semiotic. For instance, the sentence “the water bottle is on my table” (or its counterpart in Fodor’s “mentalese”⁹) provides a building block for my belief that the water bottle is on my table—a belief that is, in itself, a mental representation. And this—let me reiterate this point—is perfectly acceptable; I do not want to deny that semiotic and mental representations exist. The problem, rather, is that experience cannot be represented in the same sense as existents and events are represented, because it is neither object-like nor propositional (although, as we will see in the next chapter, some forms of experience are penetrated by propositional thought). Consider again these words from the Svevo passage: “The doctor prescribed bed rest and absolute abstention from smoking. I remember that word, absolute! It wounded me, and my fever colored it.” Aren’t we fully justified in saying that this sentence represents the narrator’s emotional response to the doctor’s prescription—a mental state possessing an experiential quality (discontent at being barred from the object of one’s addiction)? At first sight, we would be tempted to answer in the positive. But on reflection the question appears more complicated than this. What does it mean that this sentence represents the narrator, the doctor, and the doctor’s prescription? It means that it invites readers to think about a situation in which two non-existing or at any rate non-actual people interact in a certain way. The narrator, the doctor, and also the event of the doctor’s giving this recommendation are object-like entities readers can think about; but can we think about the narrator’s painful experience in the same sense? Of course not, because pain is not an object-like entity; it is a phenomenal “feel” that people can have (when they are in pain), attribute to other people (when they interpret their behavior as expressive of pain), or imaginatively undergo on the basis of past experiences of pain. What if we argue that this sentence does not represent “pain,” but “the narrator’s pain”? This line of response is very revealing about what we mean when we say that experiences can be linguistically represented. For what is represented here is the event of the narrator being in pain—and that event is something that we can think about without feeling in pain: it is a mental object and, in this sense, object-like. Hutto puts it this way: “Linguistically competent creatures can refer to experiences as events or happenings—I can do this with respect to either my experiences or yours. To deny this would be absurd … But we must be careful

 On Fodor’s language of thought or “mentalese,” see subsection 0.4.1.

1.3 Expressive Devices

41

in understanding what such acts of reference involve. There is, on the one hand, the having of an experience (by some creature) and the quite separate act of referring to such events” (2006a, 125). These references to “experiential events” do not provide a firm basis for an account of the experientiality of narrative. In fact, readers would have no clue as to how the narrator feels in the situation represented here if they were not familiar with the phenomenal qualities of pain and addiction through having found themselves in sufficiently similar situations beforehand. Thus, a principled account of the experientiality of narrative has to start from how stories can play on recipients’ past experiences in order to bring about certain effects on them. We will see in chapter 5 that there are two mental mechanisms behind what is usually known as the “representation of characters’ experiences.” Crucially, these mechanisms are more than representational, since they may involve linguistic and mental representations at some level, but they also rely on recipients’ familiarity with experience as a field of evaluative and embodied interactions with the world. The first of these mechanisms is what I will call “consciousness-attribution,” the simple “recognition” that a particular event referred to by the story is experiential (I have shown how this process works in my reading of the Svevo passage). The second mechanism—“consciousness-enactment”—is more sophisticated, since it consists in empathizing with or mentally simulating the experience that we attribute to a fictional character. In this case, there is a partial overlap between the character’s consciousness and the story-driven experience undergone by the reader in a first-person way. Both modes of readerly engagement show that characters’ experiences can only be made sense of in terms of other experiences (the reader’s)—and that neither the characters’ nor the reader’s experiences should be equated with representation as reference to an object-like entity. When we say that an experience is “represented” in a text, we are actually saying that the text refers to the event of someone undergoing a certain experience.

1.3 Expressive Devices So far I have argued that experience is irreducible to an object-based view of representation, even though the two are deeply intertwined in linguistically mediated cognition (including our engagements with narrative). Yet the question remains of how exactly mental and semiotic representations connect with experience, and with the story-driven experience in particular. A good starting point here is the idea that some representational and stylistic choices are especially effective at eliciting experiential responses from readers by tapping into their experiential background. These devices can give readers’ engagement with the text a distinct experi-

42

1 Not So Easy: Representation, Experience, Expression

ential “feel,” often drawing on a level of readers’ interaction with the world that is pre-linguistic and non-propositional. Since, as we have seen above, expression can provide a key link between representation and experience, I would like to call these representational and stylistic choices “expressive devices.” In Narratives & Narrators (2010), Gregory Currie has advanced a similar concept, that of “framework.” He explains that story “and framework are distinct things, and they correspond to the answers we give to two distinct questions: ‘what happens according to the story?’ and ‘in what ways are we invited to respond to those happenings?’” (2010, 93). The framework, he adds, is not so much represented as “expressed in the process of representing the story” (2010, 86). When story recipients adopt the authorial framework, they respond to the story in a way comparable to that of the producer, for example by having similar emotional reactions or by making similar evaluations. Thus, Currie (see 2010, 87) grounds his framework concept in a joint-attention account of narrative, whereby we engage with stories by coordinating with the experiential responses of their producers.¹⁰ There are good reasons to think that joint attention—the sharing of an experience with another subject—does indeed structure people’s narrative engagements (see Herman 2008; Caracciolo 2012a). At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that story recipients’ experiential background also plays an important role in shaping their story-driven experiences: frameworks or (in my term) expressive devices can make some reader-responses more likely without, however, completely determining those responses. This means that the same expressive device can trigger reactions that are different both in quality and in intensity, depending on readers’ experiential background. At what level do expressive devices operate? First of all, at the story level: some events and existents are more likely than others to generate experiential responses, because of evolutionary, cultural or personal predispositions. Take, for instance, a story where an animal dies from an infected wound. The narrative as a whole may express (and therefore elicit) a number of different responses; but the description of the animal’s festering wound will probably leave most readers with a feeling of disgust—one of Paul Ekman’s (1973) basic emotions. Of course, readers’ disgust may vary in intensity (depending on a variety of factors, including habituation), but in most cases it will be part of their response, because of the universality of this emotional reaction (see subsection 2.2.2). Here, then, the choice to represent something is almost inevitably bound up with a certain way of reacting to that representation. In other scenarios it is a cultural pattern that heightens the experiential profile of a story. Consider the

 On joint attention, see Tomasello (1999) and Seeman (2011).

1.3 Expressive Devices

43

many “masterplots” that circulate in our culture, “playing a powerful role in questions of identity, values, and the understanding of life” (Abbott 2008, 236). For example, the “rags to riches” story where a character of humble origins rises to power and wealth is a masterplot that underlies many Western narratives. It could be argued that any instantiation of these masterplots is, in itself, an expressive device because of the importance placed on them (and on the values they convey) by story recipients belonging to that culture. In other words: by resonating with the socio-cultural background shared by a group of recipients, the stories that draw on these masterplots will tend to elicit stronger responses from them. Finally, some representational choices function as expressive devices because they tie in with the personal experience of individual recipients. Sometimes narratives affect readers more deeply when they represent a situation in which they have found themselves before, especially if this situation has shaped their self-concept or understanding of themselves: a divorce story can have a stronger experiential impact on readers who have had a difficult childhood because of their parents’ troubled relationship. Other expressive devices operate at the level of discourse. To begin with, the author’s or narrator’s explicit evaluation of the story he or she is telling may be considered an expressive device. In William Labov’s words, through evaluative statements storytellers “say to us that this was terrifying, dangerous, weird, wild, crazy, or amusing, hilarious, wonderful, more generally that it was strange, uncommon or unusual, that is, worth reporting” (1972, 371). All of these adjectives reflect the teller’s attitude toward the events and existents being represented, thereby expressing his or her experience. We have seen above that expression links the undergoing of an experience (a heavy object falls on my foot) with other people’s understanding of that experience on the basis of their experiential background (other people interpret my yell as an expression of pain). Along similar lines, authorial evaluations index the teller’s experience and encourage recipients to take a stance by either sharing the teller’s evaluation—as in Currie’s (2010) joint-attentional account of narrative—or by reacting to it. (We will in section 8.4 that the evaluative function of storytelling is closely related to experience.) Authorial evaluations occur in both conversational storytelling and literary narrative practices (where they are generally attributed to a fictional narrator). Other expressive devices are more typical of, although by no means exclusive to, literary stories. For one thing, stylistic choices can influence readers’ experiential engagement with narrative. Through a series of psycholinguistic studies Miall and Kuiken (1994) have shown that strategies of stylistic “foregrounding” (such as creative or unusual linguistic forms) can significantly affect readers’ responses: “the degree to which foregrounding is present in the segments of a story is a predictor of both reading times and readers’ judgements of strikingness

44

1 Not So Easy: Representation, Experience, Expression

and affect” (1994, 394). A more complex case is that of stylistic choices pointing to a subjectivity other than that of the author—the one readers attribute to fictional characters. Starting with Roger Fowler (1977), stylisticians have used the term “mind style” to designate a set of linguistic markers that reflect a character’s mental predispositions and worldview, thereby inviting readers to process a text as mediated by that character’s subjectivity. In section 5.3 I will have more to say about these strategies and the specific kinds of responses that they elicit (consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment). For now it is sufficient to argue that mind style is, in itself, an expressive device—with the key difference that the experiences and evaluations being expressed (and therefore coupled with readers’ reactions) are not those of the author, but those attributed by readers to a fictional character. Finally, narrative structure can function as an expressive device. It is wellknown that in narrative the temporality of the events being represented (story) differs from the temporality of the act of representation or discourse (see Abbott 2008, 16– 20). This double temporality of storytelling can be exploited by authors in order to elicit emotional reactions from recipients, giving rise to what Meir Sternberg (1992; 1993) calls “narrative universals”—suspense, curiosity, and surprise. For example, when a text switches to a different story line after placing a character in a difficult predicament, this particular discourse structure has an expressive function: it generates suspense in the reader, who is left uncertain about the character’s fate. By contrast, surprise is triggered when an event or state of affairs is silently omitted from the narrative, only to be revealed much later in discourse time, thus forcing readers to reinterpret past events. Curiosity depends on a similar mechanism—except that the “gap” in the telling is thematized, so that readers are likely to try to infer the missing event or state of affairs. As Sternberg (2003) himself has extensively argued, all these responses are experiential as well as cognitive (in the sense of AI-inspired cognitive science), since they are driven by readers’ emotions, therefore possessing a distinctive emotional “feel.” Further, it is important to stress that suspense, surprise, and curiosity are far from being specific to narrative: people can feel them toward real events, too, and in fact the double temporality of storytelling seems to build on the human mind’s capacity to detach itself from the here and now, projecting itself either into the future (suspense) or into the past (surprise and curiosity). I will return to this capacity to “unstick” meanings and values from the here and now in chapter 3, where I will argue that it is fundamental to any form of playful engagement with the world. Before going into that, however, we need to know more about experientiality, or the relationship between narrative and people’s experiential background.

2 The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background Consider the following passage from James Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man: [Stephen] watched [the birds’] flight; bird after bird: a dark flash, a swerve, a flash again, a dart aside, a curve, a flutter of wings. He tried to count them before all their darting quivering bodies passed: six, ten, eleven: and wondered were they odd or even in number. Twelve, thirteen: for two came wheeling down from the upper sky. (2000, 234)

Readers with an adequate linguistic and literary competence will have no difficulties understanding that this passage focuses on the character’s perceptual activity, and on the thought process of his counting the birds in flight. But how does this understanding come about in readers, and what unconscious mental operations does it involve? An explanation inspired by first-generation cognitive psychology could appeal to concepts like “frames,” “scripts,” and “schemata” to account for readers’ comprehension of this passage (see Schank and Abelson 1977; Eco 1979; Jahn 1997). Firmly grounded in a computational view of the mind, frames, scripts, and schemata are mental representations that enable us to make sense of the world by serving as models of specific situations or activities. For example, it could be argued that readers of this passage understand the character’s actions by drawing on two scripts, “perceiving” (or perhaps “perceiving a moving object”) and “counting.” In first-generation cognitive science, these knowledge representations were generally thought to be propositional and disembodied, to the extent that they were meant to be programmed on computers in order to simulate human forms of cognition. Of course, this dream of an “Artificial Intelligence” never came true: frames, scripts, and schemata remained purely theoretical constructs, and computers are still far from understanding much simpler texts than the Joyce passage just quoted. Whatever the mental operations through which readers understand these words, they must involve significantly different kinds of knowledge structures than AI-inspired frames, scripts, and schemata. As Gerrig puts it, “research in cognitive psychology motivates a shift away from the longstanding emphasis on the static, bounded memory representations typified by schemas” (2011, 39). Indeed, psycholinguistic and cognitive-psychological research has shown that the knowledge readers bring to bear on texts is much more experiential than it was thought before, since it reflects our past experiences as they are stor-

46

2 The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background

ed in long-term memory.¹ Reading the Joyce passage activates something akin to actual memories of seeing birds in flight and counting moving objects, not some abstract “recipe” for carrying out these activities. Gerrig (2011) proposes to call these knowledge structures “memory traces,” whereas Rolf Zwaan and his colleagues (Zwaan and Madden 2005; Zwaan 2008) prefer the term “experiential traces”—the phrase I will use throughout this study. Why are they traces rather than full-fledged memories? Because reading this short text does not remind us of a specific occurrence of seeing birds in flight or counting moving objects (although this might happen in some cases). Instead, it triggers the sensory residue left by a large number of past occurrences. The key difference between these traces and their AI-inspired predecessors lies in the words “experiential” and “sensory.” As discussed in section 0.1, computers cannot have any subjective experience of the world: accordingly, frames, scripts, and schemata were envisaged as amodal representations, which are not encoded in any specific sensory modality; they are as abstract as a sequence of 1s and 0s in the memory of a computer. By contrast, readers’ engagement with narrative texts is shot through with sensory images, emotions, evaluations—the stuff our experiences are made of, and that cannot be adequately accounted for within a computational model of the mind. The intuition behind this book—an intuition fostered by research such as Gerrig’s or Zwaan’s—is that readers bring to bear on the stories they read all their past experiences in a way that gives rise to new, “story-driven” experiences. Let us exemplify this point through the Joyce passage. These sentences would not make sense to us if we were not familiar with perceptual experience, with its qualitative “feel,” and with the way it works in our coping with the world. For one thing, the vague, almost abstract description of the arcs traced by the birds seems to express the character’s inability to make out fast-moving objects. Note that it would be difficult to understand the words “a dark flash, a swerve, a flash again, a dart aside, a curve, a flutter of wings” through a “perceiving a moving object” script: what the comprehension of these disparate images implies is our experiential knowledge that rapidly moving objects can appear blurry and seem to constantly change shape. Moreover, this passage contains no overt reference to the character’s head and eye movements, and yet it is scarcely imaginable without them. No reader would say that Stephen’s gaze is rigidly fixed on a portion of the sky, since count-

 On the role of memories and personal experiences in reading narrative, see Seilman and Larsen (1989), Larsen and László (1990), and Hálasz (1991). Miall (1989) was the first psychologist to theorize this move “beyond the schema” in his approach to emotion and reader-response.

2 The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background

47

ing a flock of birds in flight involves tracking them with one’s head and eyes. Ultimately, this passage seems to rely on the reader’s familiarity with the “corporality” and “alerting capacity” of vision—to name the two distinctive features of perceptual experience according to enactivist theorists O’Regan, Myin, and Noë (2005). “Corporality” refers to “the fact that when you move your body, incoming sensory information immediately changes” (2005, 374). In this passage, the character’s bodily movements are not directly represented but reflected in or implicated by the linguistic material (“six, ten, eleven … “) that intervenes between the beginning and the end of his action of counting the birds. This stylistic and expressive strategy heightens readers’ awareness that they are imagining what they take the character to be perceiving. Indeed, in most situations we do not consciously attend to our own bodily movements while we make them, and the same seems to happen here: since the character does not pay attention to his bodily movements, they are not represented but only performed imaginatively by readers while enacting Stephen’s consciousness (more on this in chapters 4 and 5). Finally, the last sentence, where two birds appear suddenly in Stephen’s visual field, points to the other distinctive feature of perception according to O’Regan, Myin, and Noë, its “alerting capacity”: abrupt changes in the environment “trigger local motion detectors in [our] low-level visual system” (2005, 375), causing our eyes to saccade (i. e., move quickly). Yet the imaginative experience created by reading Joyce’s passage is not equal to the sum of the experiential traces that it involves. Stephen’s counting the birds may be based on an experience of Joyce’s, and may stir up similar memories in readers, but neither the author nor the readers can be said to have counted these birds before. Joyce or the readers may have found themselves in a similar situation, but the experiences they undergo are to some extent novel because of the tension between the linguistic structures they engage with and their own past experiences. This tension—which I call “experientiality”—constitutes the focus of the present study. As it turns out, all readers familiar with narrative theory will know that there already is something referred to as the “experientiality” of stories in narratological circles. This term was introduced by Monika Fludernik in her Towards a “Natural” Narratology to designate narrative’s “quasi-mimetic evocation of real-life experience” (1996, 12). Yet Fludernik’s definition seems to construe experientiality as a property of narrative rather than as something that “happens” in the text-reader interaction, like the tension I have just alluded to. Of course, setting Fludernik’s words in the context of her study would enable us to see that her narratological model is, as a matter of fact, highly reader-dependent. But my

48

2 The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background

hunch is that the implications of this reader-dependency for experientiality can be explored more fully.² Thus, despite being continuous in some respects with Fludernik’s account, the view of experientiality that I put forward in this study adopts a significantly different tack. Perhaps the strongest link between my model and Fludernik’s is provided by our common focus on embodiment: Fludernik herself writes that the “feature that is … most basic to experientiality is embodiment … Embodiedness evokes all the parameters of a real-life schema of existence which always has to be situated in a specific time and space frame, and the motivational and experiential aspects of human actionality likewise relate to the knowledge about one’s physical presence in the world” (1996, 30).³ In the years after the publication of Fludernik’s book the evidence for the embodiment of higher-order thought (including our conceptual apparatus) has become even more persuasive, as we have seen in section 0.4; indeed, in hindsight, Fludernik’s posing the question of embodiment with regard to narrative appears nothing short of groundbreaking. Where my account differs substantially from Fludernik’s, however, is in her avowed representationalism about experience and experientiality. As already noted, Fludernik characterizes experientiality as the “quasi-mimetic evocation  I am not the only one to take issue with Fludernik’s treatment of experientiality. In their close scrutiny of Fludernik’s model, Jan Alber (2002) and Nilli Diengott (2010) have already pointed out that it contains some theoretical flaws: in particular, Diengott has highlighted the inconsistencies in Fludernik’s model (loose terminology and insufficient theoretical rigor), criticizing the English-language reviewers of Towards a “Natural” Narratology for failing to see them. Other scholars have convincingly argued that, contrary to what Fludernik suggests, experientiality cannot be straightforwardly equated with narrativity (Sternberg 2001, 122; Wolf 2003, 181; Ryan 2005, 4; Herman 2009a, 211). Accordingly, while exploring the complexity of the relationship between narrative and experience, this study takes on board the idea that it won’t do to tie the knot too tightly by arguing that narrativity and experientiality are, in effect, the same thing (see also the introduction to chapter 1).  Another feature that my approach to experientiality shares with Fludernik’s (1996) is that both are in important ways indebted to the three-tiered theory of mimesis Paul Ricoeur put forward in his monumental Time and Narrative (1984; 1985; 1988). It is well known that Ricoeur distinguished between mimesis1 or “prefiguration,” mimesis2 or “configuration,” and mimesis3 or “refiguration.” Broadly speaking, the first can be defined as people’s intuitive pre-understanding of actions and action structures in the real world; the second as the narrative representation of events and existents (the “storyworld”); the third as the ways in which the reader’s own world is affected by the representations. In my conception of experientiality, these would correspond— respectively—to story recipients’ experiential background, the text (with the stylistic and narrative strategies adopted by the story producer), and the feedback effect of the text on the background itself. Just like Ricoeur’s three-tiered approach, my model shows that our engagement with narrative representations can only be understood within an experiential network that includes both our background and our reactions to stories.

2 The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background

49

of real-life experience” (1996, 12). Further, she contends that realism “closely corresponds to a mimetic representation of individual experience that cognitively and epistemically relies on real-world knowledge” (1996, 28). And she adds: “If the model which I am proposing goes beyond Stanzel’s dichotomy, it is in the sense of reversing the emphasis in the teller-vs.-reflector mode dichotomy, by grounding narrativity in the representation of experientiality” (1996, 28). I have attempted to deal with the question of representation and experience in chapter 1, arguing that, even if engaging with narrative does involve mental representations of some sort, its experientiality cannot be understood in representational, object-based terms. Instead, we should think of experientiality as a kind of network that involves, minimally, the recipient of a narrative, his or her experiential background, and the expressive strategies adopted by the author. At the root of experientiality is, then, the tension between the textual design and the recipient’s experiential background. Why tension and not, simply, relationship or interaction? In my account, the terms “tension,” “relationship,” and “interaction” belong to the same conceptual constellation and will be often used interchangeably (we will see that “interaction” is particularly important for enactivism). One of the reasons for my favoring the term “tension” in this context will become clear in chapter 3, where I will examine John Dewey’s account of the tension between the “live creature” and its environment. But more generally this term designates a relationship that develops over time, giving rise to unstable—and always reversible—configurations instead of creating “end products.” A tension can, therefore, be seen as a condition of possibility for a dynamic interaction. Stories dwell in this process of reciprocal exchange and transformation, since they can change us in the same breath as they build on our familiarity with the physical and socio-cultural world. Moreover, as I will try to show in Part II, in typical scenarios the tension between the experiential background and the text is crisscrossed and complicated by another kind of tension: that between the attribution of an experience to a character and its enactment or imaginative simulation on the recipient’s part (see Figure 1). It is useful to think of this dynamic as a tension because consciousness-enactment always involves an element of consciousness-attribution: consciousness-attribution brings in its wake a third-person stance toward a character, but in enacting a character’s experience readers imaginatively “try it on” without completely giving up their third-person perspective (since the character always remains another subject). In chapter 5 I will argue, following Amy Coplan (2004, 150), that in consciousnessenactment the self-other differentiation is preserved, thus generating an intersubjective tension between being oneself (attributing an experience to another subject) and being another (enacting his or her experience).

50

2 The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background

Figure 1: The network of experientiality; the story-driven experience arises from the double tension between recipients’ experiential background and textual design (vertical axis), attributing a consciousness to a character and enacting it in a first-person way (horizontal axis).

Let us have a closer look at Figure 1. What I call the story-driven experience flickers between the four nodes of this network. It has an interstitial existence, one that results from the double tension between the recipient’s background, the story, and its characters. Just like story-driven experiences, the experientiality of a story cannot be pinned down in any of its nodes; but whereas the story-driven experience is created by the interaction between the story and the experiential background of an individual recipient, experientiality is a broader concept: it refers to the capacity of a story to tap into—and have a feedback effect on—the background of different recipients. In abstract terms, we may therefore think of experientiality as the sum of all possible story-driven experiences. What the model represented in Figure 1 does not capture is that the tension between the four nodes comes in varying degrees of intensity. Sometimes engaging with a story can draw on our background, but have very modest effects on us. In this case the arrow that goes from the background to the text seems to disappear, since the story doesn’t elicit strong responses from us. In other cases a story can have a dramatic effect on the recipient’s background, triggering (for example) emotional reactions of various kinds. The intensity of the story-driven experience is affected by the degree of the tension between each node of the network. Therefore, experientiality comes in different degrees, depending both on the story’s capacity to recruit experiential traces, meanings, and values that are

2 The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background

51

part of interpreters’ background and on the strength of interpreters’ responses to the story and to its characters. To put this point otherwise: if a story draws on recipients’ background in a way that prompts them to react very strongly (through sensory imaginings, emotions, and socio-cultural evaluations), then the story will score high on a scale of experientiality. This and the next chapter attempt to build a general framework for my account of experientiality by bringing into focus the tension between the background and narrative—a tension that may produce the “existential burn” mentioned in the title of this chapter. Capitalizing on Dewey’s insight that aesthetic experience is characterized by a rhythm of activity and passivity, the next chapter will attempt to ground this tension in the dynamic relationship between an organism and its environment. As for the present chapter, section 2.1 introduces the concept of the “network,” arguing that for a first pass at experientiality we should focus on the cases in which the experiences involved in the network are the real experiences of the teller and the interpreters (thus bracketing the issue of fictional experiences for the moment). This will bring up the problem of conversational storytelling and, at the same time, provide the basis for my discussion of fictional narrative practices. The cognitive priority assigned to “natural” narrative constitutes, therefore, another point of continuity between my account of experientiality and Fludernik’s. In section 2.2 I will take my cue from what John Searle has called “the Background” in order to outline a view of the experiential background against which every act of storytelling projects itself. In subsection 2.2.1 I will point out that not only story-driven experiences but every experience has a network structure, thus highlighting the “structural similarity” between our experiential interaction with the world and our engagement with narrative (an idea explored more in detail in chapter 3). In subsection 2.2.2 I will make a rough sketch of the experiential background, distinguishing between its “regions” (as I will call them) while trying to explore their complex interrelations and interdependencies. This will allow me to touch on the vital issue of the relationship between higher-order, culturally shaped experience and more basic, bodily experience. Finally, in subsection 2.2.3 I will focus both on how stories can tap into our experiential background and on how we react to stories on the basis of our background. Again, what is crucial here is the tension and interaction between the narrative-to-background direction of flow (how stories draw on our background) and the background-to-narrative direction of flow (how our responses to stories are influenced by our background). We’ll see that both flows can resonate with different regions of our experiential background—and have a potential for leaving a mark on them.

52

2 The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background

2.1 The Network of Experientiality What does telling a story about one’s experience in face-to-face interaction involve? Surely, it involves representing some spatio-temporally locatable objects and events. But there is much more than that. From an evolutionary perspective, Michelle Scalise Sugiyama argues that, for our ancestors, storytelling functioned “as a virtual reality, enabling [them] to acquire knowledge useful to the pursuit of fitness without undertaking the risks and costs of first-hand experience” (2001, 223– 224). The phrase “risks and costs” is key here. Experience is not simply about reproducing the world as if from a detached, observer position. It is an online, engaged, embodied evaluation of “what is at stake” in the world for creatures like us. Accordingly, conversational narratives extract contextually valuable information from the world, and put it together in a contextually valuable way. Indeed, stories were, for our ancestors, adaptive because they enabled them to bring to light the significance of experience. For instance, they could convey information as to what the members of a tribe should or should not do: if someone told you a story about how he or she narrowly escaped death by getting too close to the camp of an enemy tribe, you would think twice before committing the same mistake. There are two dimensions to this process of narrative sense-making that I would like to tease out here. First of all, stories can make sense of the world by imposing a coherent order on it through what I will call their narrative patterning—the “rhythm” of “first this happened, then that happened, and finally that happened.” This is the aspect emphasized by most theorists. For example, Richard Walsh, the scholar who has most extensively reflected on narrative meaning-making within the framework of his pragmatic account of fictionality, adopts a rhetoric strongly reminiscent of Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1966) Course: the world out there is in perpetual flux, and narrative reduces “the chaos of sense data to comprehensible terms” (Walsh 2007, 110).⁴ The core notion of Walsh’s account is articulation: narrative articulates the continuous flux of experience into a series of discrete events in order to highlight the change between what went on “before” and what went on “after.” These remarks boil down to the age-old idea that narrative makes sense by imposing an order—a narrative order—on the undifferentiated stream of experience.⁵ In this connection, David Herman has examined several

 On Saussure’s treatment of the flux of perception, see Thibault (1997, chap. 7).  This concept of narrative as a means for sense-making is well represented by Robert Musil’s famous words: “[T]he basic law of this life, the law one yearns for, is nothing other than that of narrative order, the simple order that allows one to say: ‘First this happened and then that happened…’ It is the simple sequence of events in which the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is represented, in a unidimensional order, as a mathematician would say, stringing all

2.1 The Network of Experientiality

53

strategies through which narratives allow us to organize our world: they divide experience “into units that are bounded, classifiable, and thus more readily recognized and remembered” (2003, 173); they help us pinpoint the cause or causes of an event; they provide templates for human behavior; and so on. All this sounds perfectly right. And yet, my sense is that the equation between order (or organization) and meaning will not take us far in defining narrative meaning-making. The problem is that “order” cannot be defined absolutely, but only with respect to a context and a purpose. A shopping list that takes into account the spatial layout of a supermarket is, in a sense, more meaningful than one arranged alphabetically, because it fulfills its purpose more effectively. As philosopher Ruth Millikan puts it, “what something means, or is meant for, or is meant to do has to do with its purpose” (2004, ix). But since both the alphabetical list and the spatially arranged one follow an organizing principle, the difference in meaningfulness between them cannot be captured at the level of organization alone. Likewise, I am ready to grant that engaging with stories can exercise—and boost—our narrative organizational skills, as Walsh suggests. But this is not very helpful if we do not ask how narratives can have (or take on) meanings in the first place. The answer has to do with values and evaluations. Walsh himself comes very close to this idea when he writes that “the investment of interpretative effort in the process of reading a fiction requires an ongoing sense of relevance” (2007, 31) and that fiction achieves “relevance globally … through the implication of various cognitive interests or values” (2007, 30).⁶ Leaving aside the issue of fiction for the moment, I would like to insist on the image of the “implication” of values. In order to fulfill their cognitive function, stories have to key the narrative representation of some events to values shared among the teller and the audience. The first of these values is, of course, self-preservation: when one of our ancestors told a story about his or her close encounter with an enemy tribe, the audience listened attentively because they were very much alive both to this possibility and to the dangers it involved. The value of self-preservation is entangled in this narrative pattern, since both the teller and the audience can readily understand that this is “what is at stake” in the story.⁷

that has occurred in space and time on a single thread, which calms us; that celebrated ‘thread of the story’, which is, it seems, the thread of life itself” (1995, 708 – 709).  See also this statement by Walsh: “Rhythmic entrainment, … as an effect common to narrative and music, may mark the beginnings of a shared context of values that could be described as cultural” (2011, 61– 62).  The notion of “what is at stake” in a story has a direct counterpart in Labov’s (1972) and Polanyi’s (1989) concept of “evaluation.” I will discuss the relationship between evaluation, experience, and narrative organization in section 8.4.

54

2 The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background

In its simplicity (and perhaps oversimplification), my example of the primordial storytelling situation illustrates well the point I would like to press here. Stories allow us to make sense of the world not only because they create order (as argued by Walsh) and organize experience through the strategies examined by Herman, but also because they are evaluative—they bring in their wake and involve at several levels the values held by human cultures. Yet these values are not always as biologically basic as self-preservation; they can be much more sophisticated and culturally layered. Consider another instance of everyday storytelling: I may tell you about an important, life-changing experience I have had in my childhood. Far from representing a past experience as a stand-alone narrative sequence that bears no relation to the here and now, my story tries to capture how some events shaped my meaning-making—that is to say, evaluative—processes. What is more, the way I tell this story will be inevitably bound up with my present circumstances, values, worldview. In Ochs and Capps’s words: “Prototypical narratives of personal experience articulate events in the past that are relevant to both the present and the future” (2001, 197). In short, there is no way to relate this experience independently of my current experiential stance.⁸ Ochs and Capps again: “In … narrative interactions, a past experience is treated not as self-contained and complete but rather as an unfinished business that kindles a (re)thinking of possible and anticipated experience” (2001, 197). As I pointed out in the previous chapter, experience is not a static, object-like entity that can be embedded in a story; it is a field of relations that surrounds the experiencer. Fludernik seems to know this quite well when she writes that in “narrating … experience … after-the-fact evaluations become important as a means of making narrative experience relevant to oneself and to others” (1996, 29). However, I fail to see how this idea would mesh with Fludernik’s claim that the experientiality of narratives is a matter of representation. On the contrary, experientiality depends on stories’ involvement in the larger experiential project of one’s life—on their being embedded in (rather than embedding) experience by recruiting the values that emerge from our structural coupling with the world. If this claim is true, storytelling creates a network that involves at least the represented events and existents (the “text” of Figure 1), the context in which the story is told, and the values it is entangled with. As I will show in my next section, these values are part of what I call the “experiential background.”

 This brings up a well-known narratological problem: the difficulty of drawing a line between the story level and the discourse level in first-person contexts (see, e. g., Jahn 1996, 245 – 246; Shen 2002, 230).

2.2 Focus on the Experiential Background

55

2.2 Focus on the Experiential Background 2.2.1 Opening Moves Engaging with narrative has an experiential “feel” not only because it activates traces of our past interactions with the world, but also because it reproduces the network structure of any kind of experience. To put the same point otherwise: the tension between some spatio-temporally locatable entities and our experiential background underlies our engagement with the real world as well as our engagement with narratives (in chapter 3 I will refer to this feature of stories as their “structural similarity” to everyday experience). Consider, for example, two dramatically different experiences, seeing a glass full of liquid and losing a long-time friend. Their diversity in phenomenology and magnitude should not prevent us from realizing that they are based on the same basic structure: both in seeing a glass full of liquid and in coming to terms with the death of a close friend our experience is drawn into a dense web of presuppositions, values, and memories of past interactions with the world. In the simple perceptual event of seeing a glass, the background consists in our familiarity with glasses, their function, the way they can be handled, and so on—whereas the emotional aftermath of the loss of a friend exposes our most deep-seated assumptions about the meaning of friendship, memory, life. Despite the stark contrast between these subjective experiences, they both project themselves onto a background of past experiences. What is more, both these experiences are fundamentally evaluative. Such evaluative nature is made obvious by the emotional stance we take toward our friend’s death. On the enactivist account, our emotions are pre-reflective, embodied evaluations of a situation—a claim that collapses a traditional distinction in first-generation cognitive science: that between the cognitive, inferential “appraisal” and the bodily “arousal” that co-occur in emotions, with the “arousal”—the affective component—being caused, as a side-effect, by the appraisal (see Scherer, Schorr, and Johnstone 2001). By contrast, for the enactivists emotions involve responding to situations that have a bearing on the organism’s well-being. In Giovanna Colombetti’s words, “bodily arousal is not merely a response to the subject’s evaluation of the situation in which he or she is embedded. It is rather the whole situated organism that subsumes the subject’s capacity to make sense of his or her world” (2010, 157). Along similar lines, Evan Thompson argues that an emotion is “a response that creates and carries the meaning of the stimulus for the animal. This meaning reflects the individual organism’s history, state of expectancy, and environmental context” (2007a, 368). We respond emotionally to an event because we feel that it puts at stake a fundamental value such as our own well-being—or that of the people we are attached to. Usually, in humans emotional evaluations are modulated by high-

56

2 The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background

er-order, culturally constructed value systems; think of the afterlife of religion, for example: believing that our friend will survive after death enables us to make sense of that tragic event by setting it in a wider value landscape.⁹ As we will see in the next subsection, these cultural evaluations do not override but build on more basic forms of sense-making. But how does seeing a glass full of liquid involve an evaluation? Here again the key is what surrounds an experience, the experiential network of which it is part. Consider, for example, my seeing a glass full of water after running a halfmarathon in the summer heat. My thirst—a biological drive conducive to self-preservation—will cause me to attach great significance to the glass. And even when one is not thirsty, looking at a glass full of liquid might be a way of judging its design quality (for a design expert) or of deciding whether it is worth throwing the liquid at the person in front of oneself (in the midst of an argument). In short, as we will see more in detail in chapter 4, perception is not about constructing internal representations of the world; rather, it consists in engaging with a world that is always already in a meaningful—that is to say, evaluative—relationship to the perceiver. Seeing a glass involves evaluating its function (usually, but not necessarily, in a pre-conceptual way) within a larger context of human interactions and projects. Martin Heidegger made a similar point when he wrote that “the thing at hand which we call a hammer has to do with hammering, the hammering has to do with fastening something, fastening something has to do with protection against bad weather. This protection ‘is’ for the sake of providing shelter for Da-sein [the human being], that is, for the sake of a possibility of its being” (1996, 78). What Heidegger is suggesting here is that engaging with a hammer involves evaluating what role the hammer may play in an ongoing human project— for instance, self-preservation. This is the “value” of the hammer. In the next subsection, I will explore the relationship between these values by mapping out the experiential background with which they are intertwined.

2.2.2 Mapping the Background The idea of the Background—with a capital letter—goes back to John Searle’s Intentionality (1983), and in particular to his account of the “conditions of satisfaction” of intentional mental states such as desires or speech acts. In his The Rediscovery of Mind Searle expanded the idea of the Background into a general theory of the non-representational presuppositions that guide our coping with

 On religion and the emotions, see Fuller (2007).

2.2 Focus on the Experiential Background

57

the world: “Think of any normal slice of your waking life: You are eating a meal, taking a walk to the park, writing a letter, making love, or driving to work. In each case the condition of possibility of the performance is an underlying Background competence” (1992, 195). Searle explains that the background includes both capacities like running, tracking a moving object or moving one’s arm, which are “common to all normal human beings in virtue of their biological makeup” (1983, 143 – 144), and culturally determined “skills, stances, preintentional assumptions and presuppositions, practices and habits” (1983, 154).¹⁰ Indeed, the background—the experiential background, as I will call it—is not an undifferentiated whole, but a field that is variously and continuously shaped by the biological make-up, culture, social positioning, and personal experience of every individual. Therefore, we may draw a line between levels or “regions” of the background, each of them containing experiences of a markedly different kind. Since every experience—including story-driven experiences— can resonate with and produce a feedback effect on different regions of the experiential background, it is crucial to get the relationship between these regions right. Figure 2 makes a preliminary reconnaissance of the experiential background. Bodily experience occupies the center of the background because of its cognitive basicness; it includes bodily sensations like pain, proprioception, and kinesthesia. Somehow I “know” the position of my legs even without looking at them: proprioception refers to this kind of awareness. By contrast, kinesthesia refers to my consciousness of my body in motion.¹¹ In a phenomenological and enactivist framework, proprioception and kinesthesia are closely bound up with pre-reflective consciousness, since the body structures experience right from the start: “The body is not a screen between me and the world; rather, it shapes our primary way of beingin-the-world” (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 137). What does “pre-reflective self-consciousness” mean? In Gallagher and Zahavi’s words, “all of my experiences are characterized implicitly by a quality of mineness, that is, as having the quality of being experiences that I am undergoing or going through” (2008, 50). Even if I do not attend to the mineness of my experience in a reflective way (as I do when I write about it), I still have the sense that my experience belongs to me. This sense is my pre-reflective self-consciousness, and it forms the basis of my identity or self—a kind of “minimal” or “core” self (Gallagher 2000; Damasio 2000). As

 For recent updates to Searle’s theory, see Pred (2005) and Hutto (2012).  The potential of the concept of “kinesthesia” for literary analysis has been explored by Guillemette Bolens in her The Style of Gestures (2012).

58

2 The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background

Figure 2: The experiential background and its “regions”; embodiment as a biological, cognitive, and existential condition spans the whole background.

my analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Company will show (section 7.5), the “minimal” self is firmly grounded in proprioception and kinesthesia. The arrows that depart from bodily experience in Figure 2 highlight the centrality of embodiment as a biological, cognitive, and existential condition: from the materialist perspective of modern science all of people’s emotions, deliberations, memories, imaginings, and concepts—in short, all mental phenomena—depend on biochemical processes that are physically realized in our living bodies. But there is more. As theorists of embodiment such as Lakoff and Johnson (1999), Anderson (2003), and Gibbs (2005a) have pointed out, our physical make-up and sensorimotor capacities inform all the other levels of our experience. This means that not only mental processes are made possible by our body, but that the structure of our body has a profound influence on the way we perceive, feel, and think about the world. Human cognition cannot be replicated in non-human bodies. In Gibbs’s words, people’s “subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action provide part of the fundamental grounding for language and thought. Cognition is what occurs when the body engages the physical, cultural world and must be studied in terms of the dynamical interactions between people and the environment” (2005a, 9). As seen in subsection 0.4.2, image schemata and conceptual metaphors are among the cogni-

2.2 Focus on the Experiential Background

59

tive tools through which humans “recycle” their bodily experience in order to construct higher-order, linguistically and conceptually mediated meanings (see Slingerland 2008, 151– 170). In turn, socio-cultural practices can shape people’s experience of their own body, but only within the constraints set by the bodily resources and predispositions that they share with any other human being. Moving one level up in my diagram, the body also plays a crucial role in perception, and not only in the trivial sense that the workings of perception are hardwired in our sense organs and nervous system: on the enactivist account, perception is an active exploration of the world that relies primarily on bodily movements. Such “sensorimotor patterns,” as the enactivists call them, are specific to each sensory modality: the movements that make vision possible, for example, are different from the movements that accompany auditory perception. Sensorimotor patterns always involve bodily—and especially proprioceptive and kinesthetic—feedback, which explains why bodily and perceptual experience are closely integrated. Hence, I will often bundle together the first two regions of the background in this book. We will see that readers’ familiarity with bodily-perceptual experience is highly instrumental in imagining narrative space (chapters 4 and 7). Just like perception, emotion has a qualitative “feel”: there is a way it is like to be sad or angry with someone. In Jesse Prinz’s (2004) phrase, emotions are “gut reactions”—embodied and evaluative responses to situations that seem significant for the well-being of an organism. They are also means of expressing one’s experience that precede language both phylogenetically and ontogenetically: higher animals can show anger as well as humans, and babies can express their happiness before learning to speak. In the wake of Paul Ekman’s (1973) influential work on facial expressions, it is customary to distinguish between basic and non-basic emotions: since the former—anger, fear, disgust, sadness, happiness, and surprise was Ekman’s original sextet—are shared by all human cultures, they are thought to be the outcome of our evolutionary history. By contrast, non-basic emotions are socio-cultural constructions that ride piggyback on more basic emotions: for example, fear has evolved as a trigger to “fight or flight responses” to events that involve dangers for the organism’s survival; but sociocultural factors can hijack the same neural circuitry in order to produce feelings of anxiety—e.g., anxiety about speaking in public (see Bishop 2007). Higher-order cognitive functions are abilities such as long-term memory, propositional imagination, conceptual thought, language, and narrative understanding. Finally, the last circle contains the socio-cultural scaffolding of our encounters with the world, people, and artifacts: beliefs, values, social structures, cultural conventions (including artistic and literary conventions), and so on. Although these abilities and socio-cultural apparatuses are not experiential in the strict sense (i. e., they have no qualitative “feel,” they do not involve sensorimotor pat-

60

2 The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background

terns), they are integral to people’s background assumptions about what humans can do—and they shape in crucial ways their engagement with the world. This point seems to raise an important question regarding the concentric circles that I have traced in the experiential background. As signaled by the arrows in Figure 2, all the regions are tightly interlinked. The last three decades have seen the rise of a position known as “social constructionism”—the view, promoted by post-structuralist thought and gender studies, that key aspects of our existence are socio-cultural constructions with no basis in “objective,” scientific reality.¹² The range of what has been claimed to be socially constructed includes things as diverse as “reality” (as in Berger and Luckmann [1966], one of the earliest formulations of this position), gender, mental disorder, and the body itself (Butler 1993). I would not go as far as this. Socio-cultural practices (the last circle of my experiential background) do have a role in shaping human experience, and they can influence the way people conceptualize their biological make-up—but they cannot override it. By contrast, we know that embodiment plays an especially important role in pre-structuring other modes of engagement with the world. (In my diagram of the experiential background this is shown by the fact that the arrows pointing outward, from bodily experience to the other levels, are bigger than the arrows pointing inward.) Since evolutionary history has an exponentially larger scale than cultural history, there is no reason to think that the human body and perceptual systems have changed significantly over the last tens of thousands of years. At a basic level, then, the way humans perceive the world is essentially similar to the perceptual modes of the first specimens of Homo Sapiens.¹³ However, this point does not imply that perception cannot be exploited in substantially different ways by higher-order cognitive functions and socio-cultural practices. There is some evidence suggesting that language affects our perceptual capabilities. For example, Winawer et al. (2007) found that native speakers of Russian—a language that has two distinct words for “light blue” and “dark blue”—perform better than English speakers on a color discrimination task,  See Hacking (1999) for a critical perspective.  This formulation may seem to collapse differences between individuals: don’t physical impairments and disabilities impact the way people experience the world? Of course they do, but disabled subjects still share with other subjects a small set of sensorimotor skills and a familiarity with bodily-perceptual “feels.” As Noë puts it in responding to a similar line of objection: “Paralyzed people can’t do as much as people who are not paralyzed, but they can do a great deal; whatever the scope of their limitations, they draw on a wealth of sensorimotor skill that informs and enables them to perceive” (2004, 12). The point, in other words, is not that all human beings experience the world in exactly the same way; it is rather that people’s bodilyperceptual experience is sufficiently similar to allow them to make sense of others’ experiences in terms of their own.

2.2 Focus on the Experiential Background

61

i. e., that they are quicker at discriminating between light blue and dark blue. This kind of experiment does not show that English speakers see any of these shades of blue in a different way from Russian speakers. All it demonstrates— as the authors explicitly acknowledge—is that “linguistic processes are normally involved when people engage in all kinds of seemingly nonlinguistic tasks (e. g., simple perceptual discriminations that can be accomplished in the absence of language)” (2007, 7784). In sum, perception (the second circle of my experiential background) may depend directly on our biological make-up and evolutionary history, but it can also interact with higher-order cognitive functions and socio-cultural practices in real-life situations, producing different behavioral responses. For instance, people may react in different ways to the same food, depending on their beliefs and tastes, even if their taste receptors are not sending qualitatively different signals to their brain. Emotions seem to interact with cultural practices in even more complex ways—something that has led many scholars to talk about “non-basic” emotions. Interestingly, building on James Russell’s (1991) theory of emotions, Goldie (2000) explains the cultural component of emotional experience in terms of the different narrative patterns into which emotions fall. He writes: “the paradigmatic narrative structure for an emotion could vary across cultures, depending in part on the interests which are peculiar or special to that culture” (2000, 92).¹⁴ In particular, Goldie contends that some elements of these narrative structures do not seem to vary across cultures (facial expressions, the phenomenal “feel” of an emotion together with its neural and biochemical underpinnings), whereas others do. The difference between the narrative script of “rage” and that of “annoyance” should account for the different ways in which we conceptualize—and experience—these emotions in our society, although both of them may be related to the basic emotion of “anger.” What this discussion shows is that even basic perceptual and emotional experience has some socio-cultural plasticity, such that it can be put to various uses by cultures, embedded in different narrative scripts, and so on. Although our evolutionary history and genetic make-up are fundamentally similar to those of any other human being, we are also “developmentally open,” in Goldie’s (2000, 98) phrase: evolution and neurobiology leave ample room for changes that occur through exposure to the environment, and especially to culture. The neurophysiological basis of this developmental openness is a principle known as “neuroplasticity” (see Shaw and McEachern 2001): in the most general

 By contrast, Hogan (2003) argues that at least some narrative prototypes of emotions (i.e., prototypical stories of anger, happiness, etc.) are cultural universals.

62

2 The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background

terms, neuroplasticity reminds us that the configuration of the brain is not completely predetermined from birth, but evolves constantly during an individual’s lifetime in response to learning, habits, and experience. The conclusion is that experience is open to—and can be penetrated by—socio-cultural practices, but it cannot be constructed all the way down, because it has a firm grounding in our bodily make-up, which in turn depends on our genome and on our evolutionary history. This explains why it still makes sense to distinguish between, say, perceptual experience and emotion in my diagram of the experiential background; at the same time, we should keep in mind that these “regions” are both permeable and highly interrelated. Maurice Merleau-Ponty arrived at a similar idea when he wrote that everything “is both manufactured and natural in man, as it were, in the sense that there is not a word, not a form of behaviour which does not owe something to purely biological being—and which at the same time does not elude the simplicity of animal life” (2002, 220). If this is true, then we may conclude that the experiential background is in part shared among all of our conspecifics, in part shared among those who grew up in comparable cultural, environmental, and historical circumstances, in part unique to every individual’s history of structural coupling with the world. There is one last point that I would like to make before moving on to describing the dynamic relationship between narrative and the background. I have argued above that experience is always an evaluative engagement with the world. We must therefore see the experiential background represented in Figure 2 as permeated by the “values” that guide people’s interaction with the world. Following enactivists like Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher (see, e.g., De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007; Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher 2010), we may call this evaluative engagement “meaning-making,” but with an important caveat: the “meaning” referred to here is not necessarily propositional and linguistic, since it includes biologically basic values such as self-preservation and reproduction.¹⁵ As such, meaning is firmly grounded in the brain’s reward system—i.e., in the brain structures that produce pleasurable effects through complex neurochemical processes (see Bozarth 1994). On this view, anything that gives us satisfaction because of evolutionary hardwiring is inherently meaningful—for example, drinking a glass of water when thirsty. But this reward is only a by-product of the biological “value” of water—namely, selfpreservation.

 In their theory of “autopoiesis” (one of the building blocks of enactivism), Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1980) argue that self-preservation is even more basic than reproduction, since the latter, Varela writes, “is essential for the longterm viability of the living, but only when there is an identity can a unit reproduce” (1997, 76). In other words, reproduction is a value, but only because it serves the primary function of preserving our (genetic) identity.

2.2 Focus on the Experiential Background

63

Higher up the scale of cognitive complexity we find values that are increasingly remote from the here and now, and from the fulfillment of metabolic needs (Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher 2010, 70 – 71). Indeed, values are whatever an organism places significance on, because of evolutionary and cultural predispositions: food for bacteria swimming up a sugar gradient, survival for the gazelles fleeing from predators, adulthood for young people undergoing an initiation ritual in traditional societies, career prospects for our contemporaries, and so on. Still, many cultural values are so deeply entangled with biological values that it becomes impossible to drive a wedge between the two: pregnancy, marriage, personal success, politics—all these aspects of people’s lives interact at various level with their biological drives, propelling them toward self-preservation, well-being, individual and societal flourishing. Owen Flanagan has conducted a detailed mapping of the value landscape of contemporary Western culture in a book significantly titled The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (2007). Drawing on Nelson Goodman’s classic Ways of Worldmaking (2001), Flanagan isolates what he calls a “Goodman sextet” comprising art, science, technology, ethics, politics, and spirituality. It is by tapping into these six conceptual spaces, Flanagan argues, that we can “make sense of things, orient our lives, find our way, and live meaningfully” (2007, 12). Each individual traces a highly complex—indeed, unique—trajectory through these spaces, as a result of both individual choices and group pressure. Flanagan views this process as a creative gesture, a “psycho-poetic performance that is made possible by our individual intersection, and that of fellow performers, with the relevant Space of Meaning” (2007, 14). Flanagan’s insistence on the public and performative dimension of meaningmaking fits perfectly with the interactionist and socially situated account of conversational narrative developed by social psychologists such as Michael Bamberg (see, e. g., 2004; 2007). The idea behind this research program is that telling a story in conversational interaction always involves positioning oneself vis-à-vis some ideologically loaded values—many of which are propagated through the master narratives of our culture and times (see Horsdal 2012, chap. 10 – 11). Indeed, as I have argued above, stories allow us to make sense of the world because they attract and bring in their wake the values that permeate our experiential background. Here we run again into the tension between narrative and the experiential background—one of the centerpieces of the network of experientiality (see Figure 1), and the topic of the next subsection.

64

2 The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background

2.2.3 Narrative and the Background Reader-response and possible-world theorists have conceived the experiential background as the “cultural encyclopedia” (Eco 1979) or “repertoire” (Iser 1978) readers use to integrate textual information with extra-textual knowledge. But note that this “filling in the blanks” is not just a matter of conceptual knowledge; it involves being familiar with what is at stake in human experience, what it means to be in love, despondent, ill, what is desirable and what is not, what people should and should not do in certain situations—the things children learn both through experience and through a constant exposure to culture. All stories arise from and are projected onto this background of experience, but each of them does it in a different way. Consider the following joke, taken more or less at random from the Internet: A security man has a dream that the plane his boss is supposed to take the next day is going to crash. When he wakes up he calls his boss at home and tells him. Insanely enough, the boss listens to him and decides not to take the plane. The next day, according to the young man’s words, the plane crashes. The relieved boss calls the young man to his office and gives him a reward—and then fires him. Curious as to why he is fired, the man asks his boss. The boss replies, “You were sleeping on the job.”

As simple as it sounds, this story contains references to various aspects of the experiential background: its irony emerges from the conflict between some expectations (if someone saves another’s life, he or she should be rewarded) and others (if someone neglects one’s duty at work, he or she risks being fired), against the background of certain cultural assumptions (dreams can foresee the future, bosses can be harsh). What is at stake in this story is, clearly enough, the biological but culturally penetrated value of self-preservation, endangered both by the plane crash and by the security man’s dismissal. Someone who was not familiar with the experience of dreaming and its cultural significance, who did not know that having a job is highly desirable, or who did not understand the value of life would miss this joke completely—and this is why the task of programming a robot so that it smiles after reading a short text like this seems to border on the impossible. We have already seen that the experiential background of each of us is only partly shared with all our conspecifics, since it reflects both our cultural upbringing and our personal history of interactions with the world. To the extent that the recipients of a story share the same background, the story-driven experiences that they undergo while engaging with it will be essentially similar. But past a certain point every recipient’s personal experience will start to matter, account-

2.2 Focus on the Experiential Background

65

ing for individual responses to the story. Indeed, as I have argued above, both the story-driven experience and, more generally, the experientiality of a story should be thought of as a kind of tension: while drawing on interpreters’ experiential background, their engagement with narrative can have a feedback effect on their background by eliciting responses on their part. In other words: the experience and experientiality of narrative lie in the dynamic relation between the familiar experiences on which it draws and the reactions it provokes. The key advantage of my sketch of the experiential background (Figure 2) is that it can help us pinpoint both the experiential traces “indexed” by narratives and the reactions it produces. In turn, this allows us to assess the impact of the story-driven experience on interpreters’ background—i. e., what level or levels of their background are affected by their engagement with a specific story. Our most basic response to narrative consists in producing sensorial imaginings of the events and existents that it represents (see Scarry 2001). This kind of imagination—I will call it, following Goldman (2006a; 2006b), “enactment imagination”—simulates a hypothetical perceptual experience, and therefore relies on our familiarity with the “feel” of perception and with its sensorimotor patterns (the second circle of the experiential background). Through these sensorimotor patterns, the story-driven experience is grounded in recipients’ pre-reflective, bodily experience—the deepest area of the background. It is therefore possible to bundle together the first two circles of Figure 2, as both perception and its imaginative simulation involve, to varying degrees, a core of embodiment. As we will see in chapter 4, the reader’s familiarity with perception is always implicated in his or her engagement with narrative, and can be put to various uses by stories: for example, narrative can produce imagery so vivid that it leaves a mark on the background itself (in the form of memories of settings, characters, and plots). After reading Zola’s Germinal, I cannot recall any exact words from the novel but I can easily imagine the mine where most of its climactic scenes take place (I will analyze a passage from this novel in chapter 7). In other cases, stories tap into the background at the emotional level. When they read that a character is angry, for example, readers know what it is like for him or her to be angry because they are familiar with the phenomenal qualities of anger, with its cultural connotations, with the scenarios in which anger can be embedded. On the other hand, stories can also trigger emotional reactions in their recipients. In some cases such responses are directed at discourse-level phenomena such as style and narrative structure: for instance, a story’s aesthetic qualities can create a certain mood in recipients (see Carroll 2003). In other cases these emotional responses are produced through recipients’ imaginative engagement with fictional characters—an engagement that constitutes the second axis

66

2 The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background

of my network of experientiality (see chapter 5).¹⁶ We can react to the situations in which fictional characters find themselves by feeling for them, as if from the outside—a phenomenon usually known as “sympathy.” Amy Coplan explains that sympathy “involves caring about another individual—feeling for another. It does not as such involve sharing the other’s experience… [It] means having concern for another’s well-being” (2004, 146). By contrast, empathy is a form of imaginative engagement where people “enact” the emotional experience that they, at the same time, attribute to a fictional character. Sympathy and empathy for characters (together with the related stances that I will call “consciousness-attribution” and “consciousness-enactment”) can be modulated through sophisticated expressive techniques. In other words, recipients’ emotional reactions do not depend only on the representational layer of the story (what characters are represented and in what situations), but also on the expressive handling of the linguistic medium. Meir Sternberg’s (1992; 1993) three “narrative universals” (suspense, curiosity, and surprise) are a telling example of how the recipients’ affect can get caught in the temporal dynamic of narrative and interact with the characters’ emotions. In Sternberg’s own words, “where the order of telling distorts that of happening-and-feeling, happening as feeling, our response to the enacted subjects, high or low, negative or positive, may undergo anything from mild to violent change in the tortuous process of discovery about them” (2003, 375). All in all, readers’ emotional responses to fiction arise from the complex interplay between the representational instructions of the narrative (and in particular the characters and the situations in which they are involved), its expressive form, and readers’ own background. Moving on to the level of higher-order cognitive functions: it is hardly surprising that propositional imagination, memory, linguistic and narrative comprehension should all be implicated in our engagement with stories. Psychological (and in particular psycholinguistic) research investigates our engagement with narrative at this level. Though this topic exceeds the scope of my discussion, let me venture three remarks in this connection. Firstly, it is by harnessing higher-order cognitive skills that stories can invite us to simulate lower-order experiences: through readers’ linguistic comprehension, narrative provokes reactions that are cognitively more basic than language itself—for example, mental imagery or emotional responses. Secondly, not all stories put the same amount of strain on our cognitive capacities. Some of them pose significant challenges

 Cf. in this respect film theorist Ed Tan’s (1996) distinction between artifact emotions (Aemotions) and represented-world emotions (R-emotions): the former are directed at the aesthetic qualities of an artifact, the latter at the events and existents that it represents.

2.2 Focus on the Experiential Background

67

for recipients’ linguistic and narrative understanding—challenges that may be used by authors to create specific effects: for example, to streamline recipients’ enactment of a character’s mental state or condition. In Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000), the main events of the film are shown in reverse order, from the most recent to the earliest, resulting in the spectators’ effort to reconstruct the chronological sequence in which they occurred. The key to this non-linear narrative structure, however, is that it is meant to reflect the mental condition of the protagonist, who is affected by a severe form of anterograde amnesia and cannot form new memories. Thus, the illness of the main character has a direct counterpart in the puzzlement of the spectators of Memento and in their difficulties in making sense of the film—a technique that encourages recipients’ empathy for the character. Thirdly, stories, by exercising interpreters’ higher-order cognitive skills, have the potential for enhancing them in important ways—for example by alerting readers to the values that are implicated in situations (see Walsh 2007, 106; Boyd 2009, 192– 193).¹⁷ Finally, the outer circle of my sketch of the experiential background contains socio-cultural practices—and these practices include everything from social conventions and institutions to philosophical theories to widely held beliefs and scientific ideas. There is no doubt that narrative has to do both with socio-cultural practices and with the values these practices are bound up with. We can respond to stories at this level through moral and aesthetic judgments, or through literarycritical interpretations. In Experiencing Fiction, for instance, James Phelan describes the reader’s experience in terms of the interplay between the ethical judgments we form about characters and the temporal dynamic of narrative: “As key elements of narrative experience, narrative judgments and narrative progressions are responsible for the various components of that experience, especially the significant interrelation of form, ethics, and aesthetics” (2007, 3). On my account, narrative progressions would depend directly on the textual design, whereas readers’ ethical judgments would be influenced in important ways by their background of socio-cultural practices (and, additionally, by their emotional reactions).¹⁸ But there is more to be said about the interaction between narrative and socio-cultural meanings: stories can have a feedback effect on interpreters’ experiential background at this level by inviting them to revise—in a more or less self-conscious way—their views and outlook on the world. Narrative can affect people not only imaginatively and emotionally, but also cognitively and culturally, providing, in Eileen John’s phrase, a “source of cognitive stimulation”

 For psychological evidence on the benefits of engaging with stories, see Oatley (2011, 155– 175).  On the connection between emotion and moral reasoning, see, e. g., Damasio (2007).

68

2 The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background

(2005, 331).¹⁹ John Gibson has attempted to shed light on this process in making a case for what he calls “literary humanism”—“the conviction, however imprecise and pre-theoretical, that works of literary fiction can illuminate reality” (2007, 13). Gibson starts from a Wittgenstein-inspired critique of the concept of “representation” similar to the one I have offered in the previous chapter. Stories, he argues, trade not only in representations, but also in the standards and criteria by which representations are judged. Gibson’s “standards and criteria” are a close approximation to what I have called “values” in the foregoing discussion. Literary stories—and, I would add, all stories, albeit to different degrees—can reveal the values that are entangled in everyday experience. They can do so through representational and expressive devices designed to direct our attention toward the socio-cultural practices that fall within the outer circle of the experiential background. In other words, narrative can invite interpreters to pay attention to the cultural values implicated in our exchanges with the world in a more self-conscious way than is possible or likely during these exchanges. Beside revealing our socio-cultural practices, engaging with stories can also have a significant impact on them, influencing our meaning-making processes (see Caracciolo 2012b). It is well-known, for example, that some stories have become part of literature as an institution—and thus taught in schools—because of the ideological values that, on a certain interpretation, they reveal and can therefore instill in their readers.²⁰ Like any other form of social interaction, storytelling has a capacity to change people’s worldview by encouraging them to triangulate their value system with that of the author and with the institutional practices that transmit a given text (see Caracciolo 2012a). Shifts in worldview and values are the main effects that storytelling can have on recipients’ experiential background at the socio-cultural level.²¹ It is important to highlight the close link between this revelation/restructuring of the socio-cultural background and interpretation as a literary-critical, scholarly activity. An interpretation is nothing but an attempt at showing how a story can leave a mark on the background of its recipients by interacting

 Few theorists have described this process—the restructuring of the experiential background—as precisely as Wolfgang Iser in his classic The Act of Reading. Building on Edmund Husserl’s work and on the phenomenological criticism of Georges Poulet, Iser uses terms strikingly similar to mine: “As the new, foregrounded theme can only be understood through its relation to our old, backgrounded experiences… it follows that our assimilation of the alien experience must have retroactive effects on that store of experience” (1978, 155). For a cognitivist reappraisal of Iser’s work, see Hamilton and Schneider (2002).  This discussion is premised on the “institutional” theory advanced by Lamarque (2008, 57– 68).  On this point see Hakemulder (2000).

2.2 Focus on the Experiential Background

69

with their biological and cultural values. The “meanings” of a story are, therefore, the ways in which it draws on—and has a feedback effect on—the interpreter’s socio-cultural background. In the case of highly idiosyncratic, creative interpretations, the interpreter aims to show how his or her own background was revealed and restructured by engaging with a story. In most cases, however, the interpreter is interested in how a story can affect the socio-cultural background shared among its recipients in a given culture and time. Consider, for instance, these comments by a reviewer of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006): [N]ot even Hemingway touches the human desolation in scenes like the one in which the father, very practically, must instruct his son in how to shoot himself in the head. He doesn’t, but it’s a testament to the book’s darkness that we’re never sure he shouldn’t. Death has always been McCarthy’s major subject, but here he reaches beyond that into the “the crushing black vacuum of the universe.” What he finds there, ultimately, is a spark of humanity that won’t be snuffed out. (Gehrke 2007, 152)

Very clearly, the reviewer brings out the relevance of McCarthy’s novel by trying to capture the ways in which it interacts with values shared among the recipients. McCarthy does this not through an argument, but by implicating some values (in this case, the biologically basic value of self-preservation) in the events and existents that the story represents: in a de-humanized world ruled by cannibals, a man can redeem the value of human life by teaching his son how to commit suicide. By contrast, the reviewer’s interpretation has an argumentative structure: it seeks to show that a specific understanding of the “relevance” of the story (of the way it interacts with our socio-cultural background) has a firm support in the linguistic texture of the story itself. This is obtained through what Tony Jackson calls “an experimental bringing together of [an interpretive] hypothesis with a text” (2003, 199). Importantly, the reviewer’s intellectual and self-conscious response to the story is no less evaluative than the emotional reactions readers may have while engaging with the McCarthy passage, since both turn on the values that are put at stake by the father’s instructions to his son. However, emotional and interpretive responses resonate with different—but closely related—levels of recipients’ background, relying on distinct capacities (emotional and empathetic sensitivity for affective reactions, argumentative skills and literary-critical expertise for interpretation). Table 1 sums up the various aspects of narrative’s entanglement with recipients’ experiential background that I have examined in the previous paragraphs. In line with my representation of the network of experientiality (Figure 1), I distinguish between a narrative-to-background direction of flow (how stories tap into our experiential repertoire) and a background-to-narrative direction of flow (how our back-

70

2 The Existential Burn: Storytelling and the Background

Table 1: How responses to narrative vary across the regions of the experiential background Level of the experiential background

Direction of flow Narrative to background Background to narrative (how recipients respond (how stories tap into to stories on the basis recipients’ background) of their background)

Bodilyperceptual

Familiarity with the perceptual “feel” of experience and with the sensorimotor patterns of specific sensory modalities. Familiarity with the “feel” of emotions and with the narrative scripts in which they are embedded.

Emotional

Higherorder cognitive functions

Sociocultural practices

Stories rely on higherorder cognitive functions such as propositional imagination, memory, linguistic and narrative comprehension. Familiarity with social institutions and conventions, cultural history, belief systems, and so on. Familiarity with the values that are entangled with these practices.

Recipients respond to the text by producing sensory imaginings that simulate perception.

Long-term effects on the background

Vivid imaginings may leave a mark on recipients’ memory, persisting well beyond their engagement with the text.

Intense emotions may leave a mark on recipients’ memory, persisting well beyond their engagement with the text. Engaging with stories can Recipients respond to narratives by using these enhance recipients’ higher-order cognitive skills. skills.

Emotional responses to the text and its storyworld.

Self-conscious interpretive responses to narrative, such as ethical judgments, aesthetic evaluations and literarycritical interpretations.

Engaging with narrative can reveal—i. e., direct recipients’ attention in a self-reflective way to—the socio-cultural practices that are part of their background. Engaging with narrative can also, in some cases, restructure recipients’ socio-cultural background by shaping the values that guide their interaction with the world.

ground primes us to respond to narratives). It should be noted that the story-driven experience exists only in the tension—and interaction—between these directions of flow—a tension that has possible consequences for the background itself (as shown in the last table column). Crucially, the interactions between the two directions of

2.2 Focus on the Experiential Background

71

flow occur not only within each level, but also across levels. This means that stories can tap into the background at the perceptual level and at the same time elicit a response at the emotional or socio-cultural level. These cross-level interactions play a key role in our engagement with narratives—especially with sophisticated, artistic narratives that have a potential for making an impact on our socio-cultural background. Memento and The Road are good examples of this kind of narrative, since they intertwine imagination, emotion, and socio-cultural values in complex—indeed, unique—ways. In the third part of this study I will examine two other stories that work by knitting together levels of the experiential background (adding the complication of the tension between consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment—see Figure 1): Samuel Beckett’s Company and Vladimir Nabokov’s The Defense. In particular, these narratives use the recipient’s familiarity with low-level, bodily-perceptual experience as a way of amplifying their effect on the socio-cultural background.

3 Experience, Interaction, and Play in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch In the last chapter I have focused on the interpreter’s experiential background as one of the poles of the tension that creates the story-driven experience. This chapter seeks to provide another perspective on that experiential tension by taking a step backward and looking at what I will call the “structural resemblance” between everyday experience and story-driven experiences. As anticipated in subsection 2.2.1, it is not just people’s engagement with stories that has a network structure in which their experiential background interacts with something that is “out there,” in the world—a “worldly offering,” as I will also call it following Hutto (2008, 50). Rather, on an enactivist account every kind of experience is based on an interaction: we experience the world not (just) by mentally representing it but by engaging with it in an embodied and hands-on way. Since it brings into play the “values” that are entangled in our experiential background, this engagement is always already evaluative, offering itself as a kind of tension between our biological and cultural identity and the world. An experiencing subject is not immersed in the world as an object can be immersed in water, since he or she is integrally linked to the world by multiple, and constantly evolving, evaluative threads. Importantly, it is this structural resemblance between story-driven experiences and everyday experiences that enables them to integrate seamlessly in people’s lives, at every level of the experiential background. Before presenting the enactivist theory of experience (in the next chapter), I would like to zoom in on the structural resemblance between everyday and storydriven experiences by introducing the ideas of two forerunners of enactivism, John Dewey and Donald W. Winnicott. I will draw on two sources, two milestones, respectively, in pragmatist philosophy and psychoanalysis: Dewey’s 1934 Art as Experience and Winnicott’s 1971 Playing and Reality. Despite their different backgrounds and historical contexts, these thinkers have defined experience in comparable terms, as a form of interaction (Dewey) or play (Winnicott). In short, what these conceptions of experience have in common is that, by insisting on interaction and play, they collapse dualistic boundaries between subject and object, self and world: being in a world means interacting or playing with it at any of the levels of our experiential background—in other words, it involves an embodied and evaluative engagement with reality. To some readers this point about experience as interaction may sound “trivial” in the philosophical sense— too obvious to be argued. I do not have much to respond to these enlightened readers, except that the trivial is still worth looking into, when a large chunk of the Western philosophical tradition is founded on the (entirely non-trivial,

3 Experience, Interaction, and Play in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch

73

but arguably false) idea of a sharp demarcation between the experiencing subject and the world. It is important to stress that my appeal to Dewey and Winnicott in this chapter reflects my shift from our engagement with narrative across the board to our engagement with literary or artistic narratives. By addressing some key cultural concerns and questions (see Olsen 1987), literary stories take on a heightened sense of experientiality for those who participate in literature as an artistic practice. In particular, literary narratives are those that—in a given culture and time—are seen as having the highest potential for revealing and restructuring readers’ background at the socio-cultural level. Guy Cook (1994, 191) has made a somewhat similar argument, claiming that literary discourse can “refresh” the reader’s cognitive schemata, creating new ones or forging connections between existing ones.¹ However, the distinction between literature and non-literary fiction is an extremely complex one: following Peter Lamarque’s (2008, 57– 68) “institutional” account of literature, literariness does not depend only on the negotiation of schemata between an individual reader and a text but also on the socio-cultural practices and meanings that frame our encounters with literature. I will therefore avoid drawing a clear-cut line between literature and non-literary narrative, talking interchangeably about “aesthetic experience” and “story-driven experience” not because I believe they are necessarily the same thing, but because they seem to overlap significantly in readers’ engagement with narratives that they perceive as literary (and therefore artistic) against a backdrop of socio-cultural assumptions. Dewey’s Art as Experience argues for two different but closely related approaches to aesthetics. The first is an aesthetics of clarification and intensification, wherein “the work of art operates to deepen and to raise to great clarity that sense of an enveloping undefined whole that accompanies every normal experience” (2005, 203). In my terminology, this effect of art corresponds to the capacity of narrative to increase recipients’ awareness of the values that are interwoven with their background. Dewey’s second aesthetics is one of expansion: artworks create new experiences, which feed back into interpreters’ experiential background and are therefore capable of revealing and restructuring it. Dewey writes: “‘Revelation’ is in art the quickened expansion of experience” (2005, 281). At the most abstract level, what art can reveal is the interactive structure of any experience—the rhythm of “doing and undergoing” (2005, 221), activity and passivity, that permeates both real and aesthetic experience, thus showing their structural similarity. Dewey’s rhythm is a close parallel to what I have characterized as the “tension” between recipients’ experiential background and the textual de-

 For discussion of Cook’s work, see Emmott and Alexander (2011).

74

3 Experience, Interaction, and Play in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch

sign. To the extent that our engagement with narrative is guided by the representational and expressive strategies adopted by the story producer, we are passive recipients (this is the “narrative-to-background direction of flow” of Table 1). But since our responses depend in crucial ways on our experiential background, we also have an active role in the creation of the story-driven experience (“background-to-narrative direction of flow”). The bi-directionality of this exchange is also captured by Winnicott’s conception of experience as play. Investigating the relationship between the child and its mother, Winnicott advances the theory of the “transitional phase” of the child’s development. In a first phase children do not understand the distinction between self and world, whereas later on they appear to fully grasp it. The transitional phase occurs between these stages, when the boundaries between subject and object are already in place, but they seem highly porous and flexible. Play is the activity that enables children to experiment with these boundaries, laying the groundwork—Winnicott claims—for any creative activity. Being precariously balanced between subject and object, play opens up an “intermediate area between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived” (Winnicott 1982, 3). This area or “potential space,” as Winnicott calls it, is populated by “transitional” objects that seem to hover uncertainly between the child’s subjectivity and reality. A “good-enough mother,” Winnicott explains, should never confront the child with this ambiguity, which is the source of the excitement and creative potential of play. What is interesting for us is that the precariousness of play bears a close resemblance to our responses to stories, which are both subjective and guided by the strategies that make up the text as a semiotic object. Winnicott reminds us that, rather than attempting to break down this process, we should see it in terms of a creative interaction between interpreters’ own experiential background and the story producer’s choices. Moreover, by staging the tension between the two poles of my network of experientiality (Figure 1), Winnicott’s potential space becomes a physical and spatial realization of experientiality. In sections 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4 I will be concerned with a number of these physical embodiments of experientiality. I will call them “spatial allegories” because they seem to provide a material stand-in for the immaterial processes that are involved in our engagement with stories, spreading them out in space (much like Figure 1 does). The most prominent of these allegories is the game of the hopscotch that lies at the center of Julio Cortázar’s 1963 Hopscotch. Indeed, I would like to explore the connection between experience, interaction, and play obliquely, through a reading of Cortázar’s novel. On my hypothesis, Hopscotch reveals the structural similarity between everyday and story-driven experiences by pointing—metafictionally—to Dewey’s pattern of activity and passivity and to Winnicott’s potential space. Cortázar’s novel presents experience as a

3.1 Dewey and Winnicott on Experience

75

hands-on, playful engagement with things, which promises a “horizontal transcendence” (in Mark Johnson’s phrase), an expansion of the reader’s world that can reveal and restructure his or her experiential background. Only through creative experience can the protagonist of Hopscotch breathe new meaning into an existentially impoverished reality. What he learns in the process is that meaning does not derive from a superior, metaphysical plane of existence: it is to be created and discovered at the same time (this paradox underlies Winnicott’s conception of the transitional object) in our embodied and playful engagement with reality—and with artworks. The potential space of creativity becomes, then, a bridge that straddles the divide between everyday and story-driven experience, allowing for a smooth transfer of meanings between them. Before turning to my interpretation of Hopscotch, however, I need to engage in a more detailed examination of Dewey’s and Winnicott’s accounts of experience.

3.1 Dewey and Winnicott on Experience In recent times, there has been a revival of interest in Dewey’s philosophy, largely because it resonates with “second-generation” (i.e., embodied and situated) approaches to cognition, including enactivism.² In fact, insisting on the continuity between ordinary experience and aesthetic experience, Dewey argues that if we want to understand art, we should examine ordinary experience, and in particular the way organisms are embedded in their environment. The first chapter of Dewey’s Art as Experience is meaningfully titled “The Live Creature.” Going against the grain of the Cartesian tradition, Dewey points out that there is no subject prior to (and independent from) our encounters with the world. This is why the embeddedness of an organism in its environment cannot be described as an immersion: “life—he writes—goes on in an environment; not merely in it but because of it, through interaction with it” (2005, 12). How are we to interpret Dewey’s notion of interaction? He describes it as the rhythm or pattern of activity and passivity that characterizes the interchange between the organism and its environment. For instance, the organism relies on the environment for nourishment, but this in turn exposes it to certain dangers, such as falling prey to other organisms. If this “reaching out into the environment” is successful, a balance between the organism and its environment is attained (2005, 12). But this goal can only be achieved temporarily, since the initial tension (e. g., hunger) will build up again. How-

 See Gallagher (2009), Johnson (2007, 10 – 11), and Hutto (2010) for the parallel between enactivism and Dewey’s theory of experience.

76

3 Experience, Interaction, and Play in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch

ever, “the recovery is never mere return to a prior state, for it is enriched by the state of disparity and resistance through which it has successfully passed” (2005, 13). This means that the live creature grows out of the “temporary alienation” it has suffered. In short, the interaction between the organism and its environment is a “relationship between doing and undergoing” (2005, 221). Without quoting Dewey, in The Embodied Mind (1991) Varela, Thompson, and Rosch have outlined a strikingly similar view of the organism’s embeddedness in its environment (or “structural coupling,” as they call it). By appealing to the Buddhist doctrine of the “codependent arising” of subject and object, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) argue that an organism can be defined only in relation to its environment, and against the background of its evolutionary history (see subsection 0.4.1). In turn, the environment does not exist in abstraction from the sensorimotor possibilities of the organism. John Stewart puts it very vividly: “a snow-covered mountain becomes an entirely different place if you have skis on your feet (and if you know how to ski!)” (2010, 28). James J. Gibson’s (1979) concept of “affordance” is clearly relevant here: the possibilities of interaction afforded by an environment change as a function of the bodily make-up, evolutionary history, and experiential background of each organism. “Knowing how to ski” would surely fall in the bodily-perceptual region of my representation of the background (Figure 2). The problem, however, is how to move “up” in the background: for if Dewey successfully grounds aesthetic experience in basic forms of interaction with the environment, he seems to stop at the bodily-perceptual level. Taking into account our engagement with visual artworks, for example, he insists on the integration of subject and object in the act of perception, which falls into “a rhythm of intakings and outgivings” (2005, 58). What is not clear is how his account of experience extends into and deals with more complex—and socio-culturally nuanced—forms of structural coupling. Broadly speaking, there are two complementary strategies for meeting this challenge. The first, which I have already implemented in chapter 2, involves bringing in the “values” that permeate all the levels of our background: as emphasized by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, experience is inextricably related to evaluation or—as they prefer to call it—“meaning-making” (see subsections 0.4.1 and 2.2.2). An organism has a world because it interacts with it, and this interaction has an evaluative nature: it is guided by the biological and cultural values that permeate all the levels of our experiential background. Any kind of interaction with the physical and social world—from going for a run in the park to wanting to marry someone—is guided by these values, and at the same time affirms them. In other words: people’s personal and social identities are influenced by biological, evolutionary, and socio-cultural values, but the way these values are selected and organized in each individual’s background is uniquely

3.1 Dewey and Winnicott on Experience

77

the result of his or her history of structural coupling with the world. We find another instantiation of Dewey’s rhythm of “doing and undergoing” here: experiencing the world involves taking what it hands down to us (our physical make-up, sensorimotor possibilities, socio-cultural milieu) while at the same time engaging with it in a creative and proactive way. This points to the second strategy for extending Dewey’s account to socio-culturally influenced experience: arguing that interaction—the pattern of activity and passivity described by Dewey—forms, in fact, the backbone of experience itself, at any of the levels of the background and regardless of whether the “world” readers are engaging with is the actual one or a story-driven imaginative construct. In this connection, we may turn to Wolfgang Iser, whose phenomenological description of the “reader’s continual oscillation between involvement and observation” (1978, 128), while being strongly reminiscent of Dewey’s account of experience, can help us anchor it more firmly to story-driven experiences. Iser calls “Gestalten” the reader’s online meaning constructions—the evaluations that he or she performs while engaging with a story—and “alien associations” those textual elements that cannot be integrated into the Gestalt of the moment, since they call forth new evaluative responses. It is the dynamic synthesis between Gestalten and alien associations that “enables the reader to dwell in the living world into which he has transmuted the text” (1978, 128), just as—for Dewey—experience involves a pattern of “reaching out into the environment” (activity) and “temporary alienation” (passivity). In sum, the reader’s “entanglement” in literary works (Iser 1978, 127) has the same underlying structure of simple organismic interactions with the environment. But this structure, as we know from the last chapter, is both reactive and evaluative. Indeed, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s insistence on the meaningful dimension of the encounter between the organism and the environment allows us to bridge the gulf between Dewey’s description of the “live creature” and Iser’s phenomenological analysis of the act of reading.³ Both of them sit well with my account of experientiality as a tension between the text and recipients’ background. Engaging with stories requires us to adapt our responses (Iser’s “Gestalten”) to the incoming flux of textual data (Iser’s “alien associations”)—and, as we know from chapter 2, we do this by drawing on our experiential background. This results in a mutual and complex interpenetration between our own background and the semiotic artifact we are

 Interestingly, Iser himself turned to Varela’s (1979) theory of the recursive interaction between an organism and its environment in his The Range of Interpretation (2000). In that book, however, Iser’s focus is not on the act of reading but on the interpretation of culture.

78

3 Experience, Interaction, and Play in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch

dealing with—a pattern of interdependence that is structurally analogous to Dewey’s rhythm of doing and undergoing. This blurring of the boundaries between recipient and text brings me to Winnicott’s conception of play. Just like Dewey and the enactivists, Winnicott’s thought breaks with the Cartesian tradition of seeing the subject as an autonomous “soul pearl”—in Dennett’s (1991) phrase—that pre-exists the world. By contrast, Winnicott argues that the subject/object boundary is one acquired by infants in the process of their enculturation—and one that play enables them to continuously redraw and challenge. The distinction between “play” (as a free, creative activity) and “game” (as a rule-governed practice) is relevant here: “Games and their organization must be looked at as part of an attempt to forestall the frightening aspect of playing,” Winnicott writes (1982, 50). However, as my reading of Hopscotch will show, this is not so much a clear-cut distinction as a polarity: play is an essential aspect of games, and yet it may be stifled by their rule-governed nature. Likewise, in his 1961 Man, Play and Games (2001, 27– 34) Roger Caillois placed games on a continuum between paidia and ludus, where the former is a spontaneous, open-ended, playful attitude, the latter a competitive form of engagement in which the player attempts to exploit the rules of a game in a skilful way. According to Winnicott, the roots of play (Caillois’s paidia) lie in the transitional phase of the child’s development, which occurs in between the “subjective and conceptual world” of the first phase and the second phase, in which “objectivity and perceptibility” are possible (1982, 151). Indeed, play can be characterized as the interplay, or interaction, between inner psychic reality and the external world. In the early days, for the infant everything is “me”; at a later time, there is a clear distinction between “me” and “not me.” The transitional phase is the no man’s land between these stages, and the function of play is to smooth the transition: it mediates between the inner world and reality by opening what Winnicott calls, metaphorically, a “potential space.” Winnicott’s central proposition is that this space survives into adult life as the source of creativity: art, religion, and more generally playful activities seem to take us back to this intermediate zone. In Winnicott’s words, there “is a direct development from transitional phenomena to playing, and from playing to shared playing, and from this to cultural experiences” (1982, 51). Play reflects the structure of experience itself: “on the basis of playing is built the whole of man’s experiential existence… We experience life in the area of transitional phenomena, in the exciting interweave of subjectivity and objective observation, and in an area that is intermediate between the inner reality of the individual and the shared reality of the world that is external to individuals” (1982, 64). Thus, there is a clear similarity between Dewey’s experience-as-interaction and Winnicott’s experience-

3.1 Dewey and Winnicott on Experience

79

as-play: just like for the enactivists, for both thinkers experience is a practical, interactive engagement with the world. Further, Winnicott’s theory of the potential space allows us to understand the function of play and creative activities in general. Again, we need to take on board the idea that people’s engagement with the world is evaluative. As I have argued in subsection 2.2.2, the biologically basic value of self-preservation fuels drives such as thirst or hunger. But, of course, the values held by humans go well beyond the fulfillment of metabolic needs, being intertwined with sociocultural practices and with cognitive capacities that enable them to project themselves into the future as well as into the past. Therefore, according to Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher’s (2010) enactivist manifesto, one of the main features of the human value landscape is its high degree of mediacy: we do not act only for immediate rewards, for satisfactions that can be had in the here and now. Crucially, Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher regard play as the activity in which we learn to experiment with the mediacy of our values: “Play becomes a way of substitution for real satisfaction and a way of dealing with an insurmountable mediacy. Soon the value-generating properties of play become evident and the activity is done for its own sake” (2010, 77). Despite being a fully embodied activity, play puts at stake values that are not given in the here and now: a toy gun does not kill people; yet if we pretend that it does we can experience a thrill of the real thing. Therefore, play helps us forge a connection between our embodied and online engagement with reality and values that are removed from the here and now. In other words, it develops our “capacity to ‘unstick’ meanings from a given situation and ‘stick’ novel ones onto it (to put it graphically), or, generally, [our] capacity to influence meaning generation” (Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher 2010, 76). Engaging with stories enables recipients to practice precisely this manipulation of meanings or values. As we know, the interpreter’s responses to narrative can have a feedback effect on his or her socio-cultural background, revealing and restructuring values that are implicated in the process of producing and receiving a story. Storytelling is grounded in people’s playful engagement with the world, and like other creative activities it can bring into play non-actual values. My network of experientiality is, then, closely related to Winnicott’s potential space. One of the reasons for this is that they both stage a tension between two poles—the interpreter’s experiential background and the text, the subject and an object—whose boundaries are continuously renegotiated in the interaction. We will see in a moment that these points are well exemplified by the spatial allegories of Cortázar’s Hopscotch.

80

3 Experience, Interaction, and Play in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch

3.2 A Third Possibility Dewey’s and Winnicott’s twin accounts of experience resonate deeply with Cortázar’s novel, which can be read as a reflection on creativity and on the interactive structure of experience itself. Thus my focus here (and again in chapter 8, where I will offer a reading of Nabokov’s The Defense) is on the ways in which experience and experientiality can be thematized by stories. In particular, I will argue that Cortázar’s concept of “reader-accomplice” hints at Dewey’s pattern of “doing and undergoing” (in this section), and that he uses a number of spatial allegories for experience, including the hopscotch of the title, which can be seen as an embodiment of Winnicott’s “potential space” (in section 3.3). Finally, in section 3.4, I will examine a climactic scene in which these two strands are brought together: the structure of experience that underlies the figure of the reader-accomplice is associated with a space (the plank bridge crossed by Talita) that acquires an allegorical meaning, standing for play and creativity as the driving force behind both everyday and aesthetic experience. Hopscotch is divided into three parts: the first is set in Paris, the second in Buenos Aires, whereas the third is more sketchy and fragmentary and includes, to use the author’s own term, the “disposable” chapters. The sense in which they are disposable is specified in the “Table of instructions” prefixed to the novel. Stating that this “book consists of many books, but two books above all” (Cortázar 1966, iii), the author outlines two reading strategies: in one, we read the novel linearly from chapter 1 to chapter 56, ignoring the third part of the novel (the “disposable chapters”); in the other, we read those chapters in the same order, but intertwining them with the “disposable chapters,” in a back-and-forth movement between the first two parts of the novel and the third. It is in one of the (often self-reflexive and metafictional) fragments of the third part that the fictional writer Morelli traces a distinction between the “reader-accomplice” and the “female-reader” (1966, 397– 398). The latter term raised a storm of controversy because of its sexist implications, forcing the author to apologize profusely for this label (see Garfield 1981, 117). But the chief focus of my own analysis lies elsewhere: I would like to draw out the metafictional implications of Morelli’s note (and of Cortázar’s novel as a whole) in order to show that the theory of experientiality they hint at is convergent with the one I am developing in this study. One way of interpreting Morelli’s distinction is by equating it with a distinction between active and passive readers: for instance, Sharkey (2001) seems to use the terms “lector activo” and “lector cómplice” interchangeably. However, I would like to resist this claim, since Morelli’s “reader-accomplice” appears to be both active and passive. In fact, the fictional writer poses the problem of the experientiality of narrative as follows:

3.2 A Third Possibility

81

In this sense the comic novel must have an exemplary sense of decorum; not deceive the reader, not mount astride any emotion or intention at all, but give him rather something like meaningful clay, the beginning of a prototype, with traces of something that may be collective perhaps, human and not individual. Better yet, give him something like a façade, with doors and windows behind which there operates a mystery which the reader accomplice will have to look for (therefore the complicity) and perhaps will not find (therefore the co-suffering). What the author of this novel might have succeeded in for himself, will be repeated (becoming gigantic, perhaps, and that would be marvelous) in the reader-accomplice. As for the female reader, he will remain with the façade and we already know that there are very pretty ones among them, very much trompe l’œil … (Cortázar 1966, 398)

There is no doubt that the reader-accomplice is defined both by his or her activity (exploring the space beyond the façade of the novel) and by his or her passivity (undergoing the author’s experience, suffering with him). Thus, the distinction between the reader-accomplice and the female-reader is less clear-cut than it could appear at first. If the female-reader is passive (she will “remain with the façade”), whereas the reader-accomplice is, at turns, both active and passive, then Morelli’s distinction must be tripartite—it must be a distinction between a passive reader (the femalereader), an active reader (not named by the text, but mistaken by most interpreters for the reader-accomplice), and a reader that can be both active and passive (the reader-accomplice). It is no chance, then, that the reader-accomplice is introduced by the words: “A third possibility: that of making an accomplice of the reader, a traveling companion” (1966, 397). The similarity between the theory of experientiality that I have put forward in the previous chapters and Morelli’s (and Cortázar’s) ideas about the “reader-accomplice” is striking: their “meaningful clay” and “beginning of a prototype” seem to hint at the textual pole of my network of experientiality. Moreover, they clearly suggest the possibility of an experiential exchange between the story producer and the recipients (see Caracciolo 2012a): “Thus the reader would be able to become a coparticipant and cosufferer of the experience through which the novelist is passing” (1966, 397). Do we find any actual embodiment of the reader-accomplice in Cortázar’s novel? According to Sharkey (2001), the dichotomy between active and passive readers is built into the first, “non-disposable” half of the novel through the characters of Horacio Oliveira, the protagonist, and his partner, La Maga. We know that La Maga favors traditional, immersive novels like Benito Pérez Galdós’s Lo prohibido. In chapter 34, where Horacio starts browsing through Lo prohibido, some lines from the novel are interspersed with Horacio’s thoughts about La Maga’s reading habits: “I’d find you [La Maga] stuck by the window with one of … these fat novels in your hand and sometimes you’d even be … crying, yes, don’t deny it, you’d be crying because they’d just … cut somebody’s head off, and you’d hug me as hard as you could” (1966, 192). In the terms of my own network of experientiality, we

82

3 Experience, Interaction, and Play in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch

could see La Maga as not offering enough resistance to the text’s expressive strategies: her experiential background is too easily “played on” (at the emotional level) by the author’s cheap tricks. We may therefore spot a dangerous passivity in her attitude. By contrast, the whole chapter 34 exemplifies Horacio’s (hyper)active reading: he deliberately ignores Pérez Galdós’s words, isolating some phrases and using them as a pretext for his own stray thoughts. Just like La Maga, but perhaps less obviously so, Horacio is a poor reader, and I would disagree with Sharkey in seeing him as the fictional counterpart of Cortázar’s reader-accomplice. It should be more than obvious that he is not “a coparticipant and cosufferer of the experience through which the novelist is passing.” On the contrary, if Cortázar’s novel shows that experience falls in between the poles of activity (Horacio) and passivity (La Maga), it is only because it asks its readers to adopt this stance. The reader-accomplice is an interactive reader in the sense that Dewey attaches to the word “interaction” in his Art as Experience—he or she follows a rhythm of activity and passivity, paying close attention to the textual design but at the same time responding to it on the basis of his or her own experiential background. Although no such reader appears in the storyworld of Hopscotch, this figure is foreshadowed in one episode of the second part of the novel, in which a plank bridge is built between Horacio’s and his friend Traveler’s rooms in Buenos Aires. In this scene Cortázar has put into practice the conception of experience implied in Morelli’s idea of the “reader-accomplice,” and linked it with a spatial allegory (that of the bridge). Before analyzing this episode in section 3.4, however, I would like to discuss two other allegories that Cortázar’s novel associates with creative experience, pointing to Winnicott’s theory of the potential space: the paths and the game of hopscotch.

3.3 Other Paths: Beyond Vertical Transcendence Cortázar’s Hopscotch—and the personal quest of its protagonist—can be read as an investigation into both the limits and the potential of the human condition. The fundamental question raised by the novel concerns the possibility of going beyond the here and now, reaching an existentially fuller state—what Horacio calls “the Yonder.” On my interpretation, art and, more generally, creative experience are part of the answer. As we have seen in section 3.1, playful activities allow for the manipulation of socio-cultural meanings and values, thus enabling us to reveal and restructure our background—or, as Dewey would put it, to expand our experience. Hopscotch explores these ideas through a number of spatial allegories for creative experience, which tie in with Winnicott’s theory of

3.3 Other Paths: Beyond Vertical Transcendence

83

the potential space on the one hand, and with Mark Johnson’s view that art affords a “horizontal transcendence” on the other. One of these allegories turns on the image of the paths (“caminos”). Consider the long passage at the end of chapter 17. Horacio is in a Paris apartment listening to jazz music with his friends of the “Club de la Serpiente” (Snake Club). In the last paragraph of the passage (a two-page tirade) the narrator defines jazz as a cloud without frontiers, a spy of air and water, an archetypal form, something from before, from below, that brings Mexicans together with Norwegians and Russians and Spaniards, … shows them that perhaps there have been other paths and that the one they took was maybe not the only one or the best one, or that perhaps there have been other paths and that the one they took was the best, but that perhaps there were other paths that made for softer walking and that they had not taken those, or that they only took them in a halfway sort of way, and that a man is always more than a man and always less than a man, more than a man because he has in himself all that jazz suggests and lies in wait for and anticipates, and less than a man because he has made an aesthetic and sterile game out of this liberty, a chessboard where one must be a bishop or a knight, a definition of liberty which is taught in school, in the very schools where the pupils are never taught ragtime rhythm or the first notes of the blues, and so forth and so on. (1966, 70 – 71)

Jazz seems to hint at a space where a number of paths can be traced, and reminds those who listen to it of the paths that the musicians chose not to trace. As Standish explains, “a large part of the appeal of jazz for Cortázar came from its improvisational qualities, its freedom to take off in whatever direction one fancies” (2001, 73). The freedom of jazz improvisation is an obvious pointer to the dimension of play or, in Caillois’s term, paidia. At the same time, this passage seems to contrast the unbounded creativity of jazz with games as a rule-governed practice (Caillois’s ludus). Chess is the quintessential example of this kind of games: like a “definition … taught in school,” it is something that curtails the creative freedom of play. This is how Caillois himself frames the distinction: the “frolicsome and impulsive exuberance [of paidia] is almost entirely absorbed or disciplined by a complementary, and in some respects inverse, tendency to its anarchic and capricious nature: there is a growing tendency [ludus] to bind it with arbitrary, imperative, and purposely tedious conventions” (2001, 13). But there is another, deeper layer to Cortázar’s passage. The rule-governed nature of games turns them into a symbol of all that limits opportunities for human flourishing. “Man” becomes “less than a man” when he blindly accepts the rules of the game—when he sees his own life as a game where one “must be a bishop or a knight,” without any possibilities for growing out of one’s existential condition (as I will show in chapter 8, a similar fate befalls the protagonist of Nabokov’s The Defense, chess champion Luzhin). Likewise, in the aesthetic domain, Cortázar’s passage warns readers against art’s becoming “sterile” when it keeps to establish-

84

3 Experience, Interaction, and Play in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch

ed conventions without embracing the creativity of jazz improvisation. By contrast, jazz and the playful engagement that it promotes seem to hold a promise of existential fullness and realization: man is “more than a man” because of the possibility of transcending the here and now through aesthetic experience. In a sense, Cortázar seems to be playing with the double meaning of the verb “to interpret” here. The paths—which clearly signify the interpreters’ (i.e., the musicians’) choices—could stand for the interpretive responses we make whenever we engage with a work of art. The space in which these paths are traced becomes, then, an allegory for Winnicott’s potential space: play is thrilling because it brings us back to the transitional phase of our development, blurring the boundaries between subject and object, challenging our conventions and assumptions but at the same time pointing to an otherwise unachievable fulfillment. Despite the powerful sense of liberation jazz brings to its listeners, Horacio initially fails to realize that play is the answer to his existential anxieties. Indeed, he is obsessed by another reality—something akin to Plato’s intelligible world or Kant’s noumenon, but understood more literally, as a mythical place where things are themselves, in themselves, overflowing with existence. This “Yonder,” as Horacio calls it (Cortázar 1966, 444), is in stark contrast with the shadowy reality that seems to engulf him in the Paris section of the novel (the first section, titled “From the Other Side”). Consider this passage: “This cannot exist, we cannot really be here, I cannot be someone whose name is Horacio … how can we be meeting tonight if it is not a mere play of illusions, of rules that are accepted and agreed upon, a deck of cards in the hands of an inconceivable dealer” (1966, 49). Again, a rule-governed activity such as a game of cards stands for the utter conventionality of the reality where we live—a skeletal reality, stripped of all existential flesh. In order to be truly meaningful, games must always make room for the freedom of play—which is largely absent in the first section of the novel. In fact, Horacio soon discovers that prefabricated Yonders (those nourished by religion, for instance) are no less illusory than his unreal reality. This idea flashes through his mind only in the last chapter of the Paris section, where he imagines the Yonder as a kibbutz, “colony, settlement, taking root, the chosen place in which to raise the final tent” (1966, 203). But this place—he suddenly realizes— is too far away to be reached “with the soul of the West or with the spirit” (1966, 204). Immortality is a mere illusion, and he “would die without ever reaching his kibbutz” (1966, 204). This sudden thought crushes Horacio’s hopes of transcending the limitations of his life by disentangling himself from the here and now. What we may call “vertical transcendence” is deemed impossible, and the Yonder—conceived of as a superior plane of existence—is shown to be not only out of reach, but non-existent. Hence, Horacio concludes that “his vague search had been a failure and that perhaps victory was to be found in that very fact” (1966, 204).

3.3 Other Paths: Beyond Vertical Transcendence

85

Horacio’s quest, of course, does not stop here. What are we supposed to make of the words “victory was to be found in that very fact”? It means, in short, that the acknowledgment of the non-existence of the Yonder is the preliminary step toward the creation of the Yonder—and here is where play comes in: the kibbutz, we learn, is “a citadel that could only be taken with the aid of arms contrived in fantasy” (1966, 204). But there is more: the creation of the kibbutz (of the Yonder) coincides, paradoxically, with its discovery in the here and now. The painter Étienne draws attention to this convergence in the following passage: “What we call reality, the true reality that we also call Yonder … is not something that is going to happen, a goal, the last step, the end of an evolution. No, it’s something that’s already here, in us. You can feel it, all you need is the courage to stick your hand into the darkness. I feel it when I’m painting” (1966, 445 – 446). To be sure, Étienne’s “darkness” could be another allegory for what Winnicott calls the potential space of human creativity: it takes courage to stick one’s hand into the darkness because play collapses the distinction between subject and object, thus opening the door to the precariousness and unpredictability of pure, unbounded experience. The creation/discovery of the Yonder in the here and now could also be related to the paradox Winnicott sees in the intermediate phase of the child’s development: “the baby—he writes—creates the [transitional] object, but the object was there waiting to be created” (1982, 88). A good-enough mother, Winnicott explains, never asks her child whether the object was created or found; it is both at the same time. As discussed in section 3.1, the reason for this paradox is that in play the values that guide our engagement with the world are blended with a bodily activity in a “safe,” offline mode—i. e., without being actually at stake: just as Étienne’s hand plunges into the darkness, play allows us to manipulate meanings that are not given in the here and now. It is this kind of imaginative feat that makes possible the creation/discovery of the Yonder: through creativity, we “stick” new values and thus rediscover what is already in the world. In turn, Winnicott’s paradox reflects itself in the tension—a tension that is at the heart of my network of experientiality—between something that is out there (the text) and recipients’ own experiential background. Along similar lines, Peter Lamarque argues that our engagement with literary stories seems to fluctuate between the creation and the recovery of meanings from the text; in his words, making sense of literary narrative “either discovers something about a work, through the intentions or creative processes behind it or through its implied meanings, or it creates a new perspective on the work, a new way of making salient or reorganizing its elements” (2008, 159 – 160). To return to Cortázar’s novel, the creation/discovery of the Yonder takes place on a horizontal plane, and this explains why I have called attention to

86

3 Experience, Interaction, and Play in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch

the allegory of the paths in the excerpt about jazz. There is one passage at the end of the Paris section of the novel in which Horacio explicitly contrasts the vertical road to transcendence with the horizontality of the paths: you would come onto the road leading to the kibbutz of desire, no longer rising up to Heaven (rise up, a hypocrite word, Heaven, flatus vocis), but walk along with the pace of a man through a land of men towards the kibbutz far off there but on the same level, just as Heaven was on the same level as Earth on the dirty sidewalk where you played the game, and one day perhaps you would enter that world where speaking of Heaven did not mean a greasy kitchen rag, and one day someone would see the true outline of the world, patterns pretty as can be, and, perhaps, pushing the stone along, you would end up entering the kibbutz. (1966, 216).

This passage alludes, of course, to the game of hopscotch, played on a “dirty sidewalk” by kicking a stone toward the last square marked on the ground—a square called in the Argentinean version of the game “Heaven,” whereas the initial square is called “Earth.” What the game of hopscotch accomplishes is, precisely, a horizontalization of the vertical axis, in two stages: the pars destruens sums up Horacio’s rejection of vertical transcendence—and therefore of traditional, metaphysical Yonders—by emphasizing the vacuity of the expression “rising up to Heaven.” By contrast, the pars construens puts forward the idea of a horizontal transcendence, highlighting the collective aspect of the effort (“the pace of a man through a land of men”)—which, of course, resonates with the idea that jazz brings people together—and foregrounding the dimension of play. It is by embracing creative experience that Heaven, the Yonder, can be created and discovered “on the same level as Earth,” in as unlikely a setting as a sidewalk. But how can this be? For the hopscotch is, obviously enough, a game, and as such it is governed by rules (for instance, the naming of the squares). The key is that Cortázar himself plays with the meanings of this game, using it as a metafictional allegory, a physical embodiment of Winnicott’s potential space—the space of play, creativity, and art. The hopscotch thus points to the playful dimension of our engagement with the world. This passage invites us to rethink the problem of transcendence by devising another means of dispelling the illusions reality seems to be steeped in (including those of traditional, “vertical” transcendence): rather than escaping to another, fuller reality, we should attempt to infuse with meaning the one we discover out there, in the here and now. This revelation and restructuring of our experiential background is brought about through play and art. But since these are human activities, founded on the recognition of human limits, and thus on the impossibility of vertical transcendence, we may call the opportunity that they afford “horizontal transcendence,” borrowing a term from Mark Johnson’s The Meaning of the Body (2007). As we have seen, such horizontality reflects itself in Cortázar’s novel through the spatial allegories of the paths and of the hopscotch.

3.4 Bringing the Strands Together

87

According to Johnson, horizontal transcendence springs from a recognition of “the inescapability of human finitude” (2007, 281), allowing us to go beyond our immediate situation by playing with the meanings that are part of our experiential background. “Our aspirations for transcendence—Johnson explains— must be realized not in attempts to escape our bodily habitation, but rather by employing it in our ongoing efforts to transform ourselves and our world for the better” (2007, 283). And this is precisely the solution to the problem of transcendence that Hopscotch seems to propose through the quest of its main character. In the next section, I will show how the spatial allegories associated with the idea of “horizontal transcendence” relate to Dewey’s and Winnicott’s parallel accounts of the structure of experience.

3.4 Bringing the Strands Together There is one episode in which the interactive, playful structure of experience (embodied by Cortázar’s reader-accomplice) is thematically interwoven with a spatial allegory. This episode belongs to the second part of the book (titled “From This Side”), set in Buenos Aires after Horacio’s return to Argentina, where he joins his long-time friend Traveler. One afternoon, in the sweltering heat, Horacio asks Traveler for some nails and “yerba mate” (a South American plant used to make infusions). His friend’s window faces his own, but since Horacio is too lazy to climb down and up again three flights of stairs to fetch what he needs, Traveler suggests to “look for a board in the pantry and make a bridge with it” (1966, 239). Taking up his friend’s idea, Horacio leans another board against the window in order to tie it with Traveler’s. But the delicate job of crossing the bridge has to be carried out by a third person while the two friends hold the boards steady: the choice comes down to Traveler’s wife, Talita, who has to crawl out to the middle of the bridge, tie the rope, and eventually hand over to Horacio a package with some nails and yerba mate. The scene, which is more than twenty pages long, is arguably one of the most memorable of the novel, and it would be pointless to try to summarize it in few lines. Indeed, as Standish points out, in this almost autonomous episode Cortázar saw himself as having “given in to the drama and intensity of the moment” (2001, 107). We should not read this as a special concession to the female-reader, however. The scene is depicted with intense and vibrant brushstrokes, but it does not indulge in the pathos that would cater to La Maga’s hopelessly sentimental tastes. Rather, the overall mood is—paradoxically—light-hearted and solemn at the same time: “It had occurred to her [Talita] that it would be very funny to drop the package so that it would fall … But she didn’t really think it

88

3 Experience, Interaction, and Play in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch

would be funny because she could feel that other bridge stretched out above her, the words that passed back and forth, the laughs, the hot silences. / ‘It’s like a trial’, Talita thought. ‘Like a ritual’” (1966, 248). But why do the characters get into such an absurd situation, with Talita risking her life for some nails and yerba mate? It is as if Talita’s being perched on the bridge was filled with a meaning that remains uncertain and yet whose presence can almost be physically felt: “Talita lowered her head and her hair flowed down over her forehead to her chin. She had to keep on blinking because the sweat was getting into her eyes. Her tongue felt salty and covered with something that could have been sparks, little stars running back and forth and bumping into her gums and the roof of her mouth” (1966, 249). Horacio’s partner, Gekrepten, gives us an important clue as to what is going on here: “Are you going to play much longer?” (1966, 258), she asks. Indeed, this episode neatly captures the way in which creative, playful activities can generate meaning by infusing the here and now with new values through a feat of the imagination. As Winnicott (1982, 50) points out, play is so exciting because it is precarious, just like Talita on the plank bridge. If the characters seem to go in circles, taking a risk for no apparent reason, it is because Cortázar wants to put on display the value of the activity in which they are engaging—how play can turn a routine situation into an existentially fulfilling experience. In other words, the author embraces and puts into practice the idea that creative experience affords readers a horizontal transcendence: the episode can reveal and restructure readers’ experiential background at the socio-cultural level by giving them an insight into the function and value of play. But there is another point worth stressing here. A few pages before the bridge scene, Horacio was already entertaining a fantasy in which he transfigured the sweltering heat of Buenos Aires into the freezing cold of the steppes: “by three o’clock the whole place was covered with snow, he would let himself freeze until he got to that sleepy state described so well and maybe even brought about in Slavic stories, and his body would be entombed in the man-killing whiteness of the living flowers of space. That was pretty good: the living flowers of space” (1966, 234). There is a degree of continuity between Horacio’s imaginative play and the characters’ elaborate ritual in the bridge scene. Yet, despite its poetic ambitions, Horacio’s make-believe falls short of the existential fullness of that episode. One of the reasons for this is that his imaginings do not “stick” to the world but seem to transport him to another, solipsistic dimension—a dimension that perpetuates the comforting illusions exposed in the first part of the novel. By contrast, the scene with Talita and Traveler takes place in the public world of perception, promoting an intense engagement with reality rather than a flight from it. The shared imaginings that the characters entertain do not cancel

3.4 Bringing the Strands Together

89

out reality but seem to intermingle productively with it. Significantly, their experience has a collective, intersubjective aspect: Talita brings Horacio and Traveler together, creating a link that has a deep significance in the last chapters of the novel (where Horacio, after kissing Talita, challenges Traveler to what appears as a lighthearted, but highly symbolic, duel). In Standish’s words, “the bridge episode is about communication, about transition to otherness” (2001, 108). On my reading, this thematic focus shows that experience is fundamentally intersubjective, and that the Yonder of Horacio’s personal quest can only be created/discovered in and through interpersonal relations.⁴ What is more, the form of creative engagement portrayed by the bridge scene is fully embodied and situated: it is by interacting with the world in a hands-on way that Horacio, Traveler, and especially Talita exploit the meaning-making potential of play. The scene as a whole can be seen, then, as a graphic illustration of the structure of experience that the fictional writer Morelli associates with the reader-accomplice, and that Dewey describes as a rhythm of “doing and undergoing,” activity and passivity. This meaning of the episode seems to coalesce around Talita: being exposed to the scorching sunlight while Horacio and Traveler ramble on about her, she is a passive participant in the scene as much as she has an active role in turning it into a creative, playful experience. Interestingly enough, soon after the bridge scene Horacio explicitly links Talita with the figure of an accomplice: “‘And you two [Talita and Traveler] … have accomplices’. ‘Accomplices?’ ‘Yes, accomplices. First me, and then someone who’s not here. You think you’re the pointer on the scales, to use your pretty image, but you don’t know that you’re leaning your body over to one side. You ought to be aware of it’” (1966, 266). Who is the “someone who’s not here”? The immediate answer is, of course, La Maga, Horacio’s one-time partner. But this allusion could also be read as a wink, on Cortázar’s part, at the real reader. The connection between the bridge episode, creativity, and Dewey’s account of experience is strengthened, a few pages later, in this passage about Talita’s dreams: She was being taken to an art show in an immense ruined palace, and the pictures were hung at giddy heights, as if someone had turned the prisons of Piranesi into a museum. And so to get to the paintings one had to climb up some archways where one could get footing only on the carvings, go through galleries that went to the edge of a stormy sea with leadlike waves, climb up spiral staircases to see finally, always poorly, always from

 And see also Horacio’s words: “the problem of reality has to be established in collective terms… I feel that my salvation, supposing I can reach it, must also be the salvation of all, right down to the last man” (1966, 445).

90

3 Experience, Interaction, and Play in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch

below or from one side, the paintings in which the same whitish splotch, the same coagulation of tapioca or milk was repeated to infinity. (1966, 274)

The bridge that Talita has helped building becomes, in her dream, the path of archways and spiral staircases that leads to a collection of paintings. This scene, of course, contains another spatial allegory, another variation on Winnicott’s “potential space.” What is interesting, however, is that unlike the hopscotch and the plank bridge (and like the paths in the jazz passage) this allegory seems to be specifically directed at our engagement with art: the distance between the spectator and the pictures in Talita’s imaginary museum points to the tension that I consider fundamental to experientiality—that between the textual design and the experiential background of its interpreters. And here again we find Dewey’s pattern of activity and passivity: on the one hand, the artist paves the way for Talita, being both her guide (“She was being taken”) and the designer of the maze-like structure of the museum (“as if someone …”). On the other hand, it is entirely up to the character to make the dangerous journey to the paintings themselves. Because of its focus on art, and because of its obvious connection with the bridge scene, Talita’s dream brings aesthetic experience into contact with the experience she has had on the bridge. In turn, this reveals what I have called the “structural similarity” between ordinary and aesthetic (or story-driven) experience. Any encounter with the worlds of both reality and art enters an experiential network wherein interpreters are affected by, and at the same time respond to, some events and existents on the basis of their experiential background. When embraced freely and fully in creativity and play, this tension represents the condition of possibility for achieving, in Johnson’s phrase, a “horizontal transcendence.”

Part II: From Experiential Traces to Fictional Consciousnesses

The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life—that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience. Henry James, Theory of Fiction

4 Blind Reading: Bodily and Perceptual Responses to Narrative In front of a class of about three hundred students, professor F. K. Stanzel invited the listeners to imagine a man running across a square. He then asked if the man wore a coat and a hat, but no one knew how to answer. The students had imagined the man without deciding whether the man had a coat and a hat or not.¹ Stanzel’s story confirms the widespread view that mental images are indeterminate—a view espoused, among others, by Iser (1978, 137– 139). This chapter attempts to explain why the students thought that the man may have worn a coat and a hat only after Stanzel’s question, and why they did not fill in the gap beforehand. It does so by zooming in on the bodily-perceptual level of my diagram of the experiential background (Figure 2), examining closely the dynamics that tie together readers’ familiarity with perception and their imaginative responses to stories. These low-level and almost automatic responses play a crucial role in my model of experientiality, since—as we will see more in detail in Part III—they can interact with and to some extent guide higher-order, socio-cultural responses. First of all, what is a mental image? One possibility is to say that the imagination works by representing absent or non-existent entities. My imagining that there is a tiger in my room is a representational mental state because it has propositional content—the sentence (in itself a semiotic representation) “there is a tiger in my room.” Philosophers have a term for this kind of imaginings: they call them “propositional imaginings” (see Lopes 2003). However, people’s imaginings can also take on a sensory aspect, resulting in what is commonly known as “mental imagery” or “sensory imagination.” For example, in imagining that there is a tiger in my room, I may have a quasi-perceptual experience of the tiger. Despite being triggered by a representational mental state, my experience of the tiger does not have propositional content. (The idea, again, is that intentionality and experience are bound up without being the same thing.) As I will show in the following sections, my imaginative experience of the tiger is based on the simulation of a perceptual experience, and perception—on the enactivist account—does not involve mental representations. Sensory imagination or mental imagery is, therefore, a non-representational (experiential) “side effect” of a representational mental state. But this “side effect” can be foregrounded by narrative texts through specific expressive devices: in this way, readers’ imaginings come to have a distinct experiential (bodily-perceptual) “feel” as well as a representational aspect. The link between readers’ imaginings

 This anecdote was told by Monika Fludernik at the 2010 IALS conference in Genoa.

94

4 Blind Reading: Bodily and Perceptual Responses to Narrative

and perception is provided by Alvin Goldman’s (2006a, 149 – 151; 2006b) concept of “enactment imagination,” on which I would like to say a few words here. In the current philosophical debate on how we understand the mental states of other people, Goldman’s approach falls within the camp of “simulation theory.” As such, it would seem to go against the grain of the enactivist project: we know from subsection 0.4.1 that, by stressing the direct, embodied nature of our access to other minds, the enactivists downplay the importance of both theoretical knowledge and internal simulations in our engagement with other people.² Gallagher and Zahavi’s (2008, 177– 181) critique of the concept of “simulation” is helpful here.³ They argue that there are two senses of the word “simulation”: a “pretence definition,” according to which simulating means pretending to do something, and an “instrumental definition,” in which a simulation is a model “that we can use or do things with so we can understand the real thing” (2008, 179). However, Gallagher and Zahavi go on, the implicit, sub-personal simulations that are invoked by simulation theorists—for instance, the firings of mirror neurons on Vittorio Gallese’s (2001) version of simulation theory—do not qualify as simulations in either sense. Gallagher and Zahavi’s argument is sound, and yet for our purposes I suggest uncoupling the so-called problem of other minds from simulation. For surely, not all simulative processes are directed at the mental states of other people—and whereas the role of simulation in understanding other minds is hotly disputed, the term can be used in a far less controversial sense. On this view of simulation—which I will adopt throughout this study—performing a mental simulation involves, simply enough, imagining undergoing an experience (Currie 1997; Currie and Ravenscroft 2002). Note that this conception of simulation fits both Gallagher and Zahavi’s definitions. It could be argued, for example, that simulating or imagining what it is like to ride a rollercoaster is related to pretending that one is riding a rollercoaster. Moreover, my simulation of a rollercoaster ride is, to some extent, a model of the real thing, one that can be used to understand what it is like to have this experience (for instance, because I am afraid and want to convince myself that nothing can go wrong). Since Goldman’s account of “enactment imagination” brings into play simulation only in this non-controversial sense, I take it to be fully compatible with enactivism (as the label itself suggests). Goldman clarifies what he means by “simulation” in two steps: first, he argues that “mental simulation is the simulation of one mental process by another mental

 See Herman (2011b) for a defense of the enactivist position on the problem of other minds within narrative theory.  See Stitch and Nichols (1997) for another critique of the concept of “simulation.”

4 Blind Reading: Bodily and Perceptual Responses to Narrative

95

process” (2006a, 37). Second, he explains that there must be some kind of resemblance between the two processes: “visualizing the ocean might substantially resemble an episode of seeing the ocean, either an actual one or a hypothetical one” (2006a, 38). But where does the resemblance lie? One option would be to argue that our sensory imaginings resemble the objects of our imagination, just like the picture of a bottle can be said to resemble a bottle. I will argue at the end of section 4.1 that this strategy is doomed to fail: mental imagery does not involve perceiving the pictorial representation of a situation, it involves experiencing this situation as absent. Enactivism offers another, more effective solution to the issue of resemblance. What a perceptual experience and a simulated perceptual experience have in common is a structure of sensorimotor patterns—and here’s again the “structural resemblance” examined in the previous chapter: people simulate a perceptual experience through their familiarity with the sensorimotor patterns of perception, by drawing on memories of past interactions with the world (“experiential traces,” as I called them in chapter 2). In the case of spatial descriptions in narrative, for example, readers respond to the text by enacting in their imagination the movements that accompany perception. These considerations underlie the enactivist account of mental imagery that I will put forward in this chapter—an account that has an important precedent in Nigel Thomas’s enactivist work (1999; 2010). I will focus almost exclusively on the bodily-perceptual level of readers’ experiential background, making a parallel between the enactivist theory of perception and sensory imagination—which I will define as the active exploration of a non-existent environment. In section 4.1 I advance the main theses of the enactivist approach to perception. Building on Goldman’s (2006a; 2006b) and Thompson’s (2007b) work, I argue that sensory imagination acts by simulating (or enacting) a hypothetical perceptual experience on the basis of one’s experiential background, and that this accounts for its experiential quality. In the following sections I turn to the reader’s engagement with narrative, developing an enactivist model of the reader’s imagination and suggesting (in section 4.2) that spatial descriptions in narrative invite readers to enact the storyworld by simulating the sensorimotor patterns that accompany perception. Anticipating the discussion of the next chapter, in section 4.3 I explain how readers can simulate the bodily-perceptual experience of a character. Finally, in section 4.4 I offer some speculations on the relationship between narrative, qualia (the intrinsic, ineffable qualities of experience), and metaphorical language. The analogy that steers me through this argument is that, in their engagement with narratives at the bodily-perceptual level, readers are like blind people tapping their way around with a cane. Every tap of the cane points to the reader’s embodied exploration of a non-existent environment.

96

4 Blind Reading: Bodily and Perceptual Responses to Narrative

A similar analogy has been used by Catherine Emmott in her Narrative Comprehension (1997): having worked for several years with blind people, Emmott has compared the reader’s monitoring of fictional contexts with the way a blind person keeps track of a conversation between a group of sighted people. Like a blind person, she explains, “the reader receives only intermittent signals of the presence of the characters from the text and must therefore monitor the fictional context mentally” (1997, 118). Despite using roughly the same analogy, my account differs from Emmott’s in two respects. On the one hand, Emmott’s approach is (broadly speaking) psycholinguistic, whereas I draw on a tradition of research within the philosophy of mind—namely, enactivism. On the other hand, I use the “blind reading” metaphor to stress not the cognitive, information-processing aspect of reading, but the experiential “feel” of the reader’s imaginings. This is why I insist on the structural similarity between perceptual and imaginative experiences—a similarity grounded in readers’ familiarity with the sensorimotor patterns of perception. To make a case for my argument, I offer some readings of passages from José Saramago’s Blindness (1999) throughout the chapter. In this novel, the government of an unknown country tries to combat an epidemic of “white blindness” (a mysterious blindness that makes people see white) by quarantining the sufferers in a mental asylum. Because of the way it problematizes the characters’ bodily-perceptual experiences, this novel is especially suitable for highlighting the similarity between perception and sensory imagination, and thus the experientiality of the reader’s bodily-perceptual engagement with narratives. Within the larger context of this study, the function of this chapter is to provide a link between the two key elements of my network of experientiality (Figure 1): the tension between the text and recipients’ background—which I have discussed in the preceding chapters—and the tension between consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment (the topic of the next chapter). Section 4.2 examines the reader’s interaction with externally focalized spatial descriptions, in which the tension between the text and the experiential background cannot be coupled with a consciousness-attribution because of the absence of perceiving characters. However, in sections 4.3 and 4.4 I try to show that the same dynamic between the experiential background and the textual design underlies interpreters’ engagement with the bodily-perceptual experience of characters. In developing this account, I argue that consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment are dependent on the tension between the experiential background and the text, although the two tensions typically co-occur. To put the same point otherwise: stories usually invite readers to engage in meaningful ways with the experiences of characters; but in itself this relationship originates in—and is sustained by—the interplay between readers’ experiential background and the text.

4.1 The Enactivist Theory of Experience

97

4.1 The Enactivist Theory of Experience Let us return for a moment to Stanzel’s informal experiment. In a way, it could seem that the students, who had been asked to imagine a man running across a square, had not noticed whether the man they imagined wore a coat and a hat. By contrast, it is widely assumed that when we see (as opposed to imagine) a man running across a square, we cannot help noticing whether he wears a coat and a hat. On this account, perception yields a continuous and highly detailed image of the world, where there is nothing similar to Iser’s “blanks.” However, this traditional view of perception has been effectively challenged by the proponents of the enactivist theory, such as Alva Noë, Kevin O’Regan, and Erik Myin (see O’Regan and Noë 2001; Noë 2004; O’Regan, Myin, and Noë 2005). This theory grows out of the larger enactivist project initiated—as we know from subsection 0.4.1—by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in The Embodied Mind (1991). The main thrust of enactivism is that experience, far from being the computational process whereby we construct an internal model of the environment, is an embodied, evaluative exploration of the world. Consider an already classic experiment by Daniel Simons and Cristopher Chabris (1999), in which the subjects were asked to watch a video recording of some people playing basketball, and to count the number of passes made by each team. In a version of the experiment, someone disguised as a gorilla walks through the scene—but half of the subjects (when asked if they had noticed anything unusual in the video) did not report seeing it. This phenomenon (known as inattentional blindness) shows that perception is much more attention-dependent than it was thought before: we do not always see everything that is in our visual field. The subjects of the experiment were too concentrated on counting the passes to spot the gorilla. Consequently, it is reasonable to suppose that we may see a man running across a square without noticing whether he wears a coat and a hat, just as Stanzel’s students may have overlooked that detail in their imaginings. In Action in Perception (2004), Alva Noë uses inattentional blindness (and other, similar phenomena) to dispel the illusion that the perceived world is like a gap-free and highly detailed photograph (he calls it the “snapshot conception” of perception). In the case of vision, it is well-known that our retinal image is full of imperfections: apart from being upside-down, it has few cones at the edges (so that we are almost color-blind at the borders of our visual field) and it contains no photoreceptors where the optic nerve passes through it (this is the so-called “blind spot”). Together with the experiments on inattentional blindness, these findings show that the “snapshot conception” of perception is illusory. Where, then, does the sense that the perceived world is gap-free come

98

4 Blind Reading: Bodily and Perceptual Responses to Narrative

from? Traditionally, computational theories of perception (such as the one advanced by David Marr in Vision [1982]) insisted that we make up for the shortcomings of our retinal image by constructing an internal model of the world. By contrast, the enactivists hold that there is no need to posit the existence of these “mental representations” as far as perception is concerned. We perceive the world as gap-free because we move our body, head, and eyes; subjectively, there are no gaps because, in whatever direction we look, the world is there. Thus, retracing the footsteps of phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (see subsection 0.4.3), the enactivists focus on the sensorimotor patterns that people trace while interacting with the environment.⁴ For example, Noë calls attention to the sensorimotor patterns typical of vision: the “visual field … is not the field available to the fixed gaze. The visual field, rather, is made available by looking around… It is no part of our phenomenological commitments that we take ourselves to have all that detail at hand in a single fixation” (2004, 57). In fact, as O’Regan and Noë (2001, 1015) explain, virtual or potential movements play a role in maintaining the illusion of the continuity of the perceived world. To clarify this point, let us consider how blind people explore the environment with their cane.⁵ In order to do a reconnaissance of the space around them, blind people need to tap around with their cane. But even if they are not waving the cane, the world feels present to them all the same, because a simple movement would give them access to the spatial information they need. This view of perception is closely connected with the assertion that experience cannot be separated from the environment with which the experiencer interacts; experience is not “in the head.” Hutto has highlighted this point in his critique of the “object-based schema” (Hutto 2000, chap. 4; 2006a; 2006b). According to Hutto, cognitive scientists should abandon their quest for the “neural correlates” of conscious experience, since experiences are not spatio-temporal objects—they are embodied interactions between the subject and the environment. The following passage from Hutto’s work is worth quoting in full: The only way to understand “what-it-is-like” to have an experience is to actually undergo it or re-imagine undergoing it. Gaining insight into the phenomenal character of particular

 I avoid speaking of “sensorimotor knowledge” here, since this concept—introduced by O’Regan and Noë—has been, I believe, rightly criticized by Hutto (2005). According to Hutto, the enactivism of O’Regan and Noë is not as “radical” as it sounds, since their talk about “sensorimotor knowledge” is inherently suspect of representationalism. As Hutto puts it, “despite advertisements and avowals of anti-intellectualism, the account as presented seems to rest on a tacit appeal to ‘inner representations and rules’ after all” (2006b, 64).  This is Noë’s favorite illustration of how perception works, and it has antecedents in both Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002) and Gregory Bateson (1972).

4.1 The Enactivist Theory of Experience

99

kinds of experience requires practical engagements, not theoretical insights. The kind of understanding “what-it-is-like” to have such and such an experience requires responding in a way that is enactive, on-line and embodied or, alternatively, in a way that is re-enactive, off-line and imaginative—and still embodied. It involves undergoing and/or imagining experiences both of acting and of being acted upon. (2006b, 52)

We will have to bear in mind these remarks, for they will play a very important role in the next section. However, I have to take issue with a possible interpretation of Hutto’s claim. The imagination is not necessarily re-enactive in the sense that it is forced to re-enact past experiences, as when one hits the replay button on an electronic device. On the contrary, the kind of imagination that I am interested in depends on memories and knowledge structures that are part of our experiential background (“experiential traces,” as psycholinguists like Zwaan [2008] call them), but only insofar as it can use them as raw material for story-driven experiences that are, to some extent, unprecedented. Consider this passage from Saramago’s Blindness: “It was a long room, like a ward in an old-fashioned hospital, with two rows of beds that had been painted grey, although the paint had been peeling off for quite some time” (1999, 71). When I read these lines, my imagination draws on conceptual knowledge (what a ward is) and past perceptual experiences (what peeling paint looks like), but it doesn’t re-enact a past experience, for the obvious reason that I have never been to this place. On the contrary, as we have seen in chapter 2 (commenting on a passage from Joyce’s Portrait) reading these lines feels almost like experiencing this place for the first time. Following Goldman (2006a; 2006b), I would argue that the imagination required to experience this place is an “enactment imagination”: “To enactively imagine seeing something, you must ‘try’ to undergo the seeing—or some aspects of the seeing—despite the fact that no appropriate visual stimulus is present” (2006b, 152). In short, enactment imagination consists in the simulation of perception (and, on Goldman’s account, of other mental states—but this need not concern us here).⁶ It is the similarity between perception and imagination (which is supported by extensive empirical evidence, both behavioral and from brain imaging studies)⁷ that accounts for the experiential “feel” of sensory imaginings, the fact that they strike us as experiences at the bodily-perceptual level. This is a structural similarity: it has its roots in the active, embodied, evaluative nature of perception and enactment imagination alike; it has little to do with their content, since imagining is enacting seeing, not seeing a picture-like mental image.

 For the link between imagination and the simulation of perception, see also Currie (1995).  For a review of these studies, see Kosslyn, Ganis, and Thompson (2001; 2006).

100

4 Blind Reading: Bodily and Perceptual Responses to Narrative

When I experience the room described by Saramago’s passage, I do not inspect a picture-like mental image; I experience the room as absent by drawing on my past experiential traces and using my sensorimotor skills to interact with it in a way that leads to no significant behavioral consequences (i.e., actual movements). This amounts to saying that the pictorial conception of the imagination is, just like the view that we perceive the world by constructing an internal model, fundamentally flawed. Hence, according to Thompson, mental images are “had” or “undergone,” as a byproduct of one’s imaginings, but never inwardly seen (2007b, 156). Remember Hutto’s point that experience has to do not just with what we experience, but with how we interact with the world (Hutto 2000, 135; quoted in section 0.2): it could be argued that mental imagery is the means through which one reaches toward a non-actual situation. What really matters is the experiential character of our imaginings; as Thompson writes, in imagination “we do not experience mental pictures, but instead visualize an object or scene by mentally enacting or entertaining a possible perceptual experience of that object or scene” (2007b, 138). And, according to the enactivist work I have just surveyed, experience is a field of interactions; it is an embodied exploration of the world. In what follows, I will expand on the relationship between sensory imagination and enacted, embodied experience, with particular emphasis on our engagement with narrative texts.

4.2 Enacting Narrative Space Our sensory organs are not like built-in cameras: they do not shoot a series of photographs that our brain rearranges in an internal, seamless image of the world. There is no need to do that, as we get all the information we need by way of bodily movements. In order to ground my theory of the reader’s sensory imagination in the enactivist account of experience, I will have to make the case that, in their imaginative engagement with narrative texts, readers do not need to construct a picture-like mental image. Of course, they do use internal models, such as “fictional contexts” (Emmott 1997, chap. 4) and “situation models” (see, e.g., Van Dijk and Kintsch 1983; Zwaan and Radvansky 1998), to keep track of the states of affairs described by the text. However, these sketchy and non-pictorial models are constructed through a process that simulates perception, since it is not only cognitive, but also experiential. Accordingly, while reading a text, readers enact the storyworld by relying on the virtuality of their movements, and usually without noticing the “gaps” in the presen-

4.2 Enacting Narrative Space

101

tation of narrative existents.⁸ I will therefore try to show that the reader’s engagement with narrative texts, despite being mediated by language, can simulate the on-line, embodied responding that characterizes our basic interaction with the real world; this similarity explains the bodily-perceptual dimension of our sensory imaginings. Let us start by examining another passage from Saramago’s Blindness. The scene is set inside the asylum, where all the internees (who suffer from a mysterious form of blindness) are asleep. As a consequence, the readers are left by themselves; in the storyworld, there is no act of perception to which their imaginings can be anchored. Some [of the internees] had covered their heads with a blanket, as if anxious that a pitch-black darkness, a real one, might extinguish once and for all the dim suns that their eyes had become. The three lamps suspended from the high ceiling, out of arm’s reach, cast a dull, yellowish light over the beds, a light incapable of even creating shadows. (1999, 70 – 71)

This short passage does give readers an idea of what it is like to experience a space such as this. In other words, this space has a distinct phenomenal character—an experiential “feel” that cannot easily be reduced to the linguistic meaning of the text. As the phrase “out of arm’s reach” implies, this spatial description is tailored to the body and sensory systems of a human being, so that, even if we could train a machine to understand the linguistic meaning of the text, it would not be able to make sense of it. It would miss the experiential “feel,” and fail to see why this is a spatial description as opposed, for instance, to a list. And yet, we are hard pressed to form a picture-like mental image of the space described, since the objects seem to float about in a sea of indetermination. Any attempt at making a sketch of this space would reveal the vagueness of the description: we would have to decide, among other things, how many of the internees have covered their heads with a blanket, what the shape of the lamps is, and more generally what the spatial arrangement of the dormitory is like. This filling-in process can be very lengthy and, it seems to me, readers do not have the time for it while reading: they get the experiential “feel” well before having formed a spatially coherent mental image. It is at this point that the “snapshot conception” of the imagination breaks down. But then, we may ask, where does the experiential dimension of this description come from? In brief, it has its roots in the structural resemblance between readers’ imaginative engagement with this passage and perception (conceived of as an active exploration of the

 Of course, I am not talking about Meir Sternberg’s (1993) “gaps” in the telling of past events here, for which a kind of filling-in is, obviously, needed.

102

4 Blind Reading: Bodily and Perceptual Responses to Narrative

world): reading these lines invites us to respond by enacting the sensorimotor patterns we are familiar with through perception. Let us return for a moment to the image of the blind person making his or her way through an environment with the help of a cane. To those who see, the world of the blind seems a vast expanse of indeterminacy—and yet, if we think about it, there is no “gap” in the world of blind people that they cannot fill in by moving their body, arms, and cane. This means that, subjectively, these gaps are only marginally relevant—what really matters is that the tip of the blind person’s cane makes repeated contacts with the world. The blind person’s world is “enacted” or “brought forth” through a pattern of “meaningful”— that is to say, evaluative—interactions, as Varela, Thompson, and Rosch would write (see, e. g., 1991, 156). The “gaps” that remain lie outside the scope of the meaningful, just as there was no point for Stanzel’s students to decide if the man wore a coat and a hat or not—hence, they did not notice any gap at all in their imaginings until Stanzel asked the question. (Remember the experiment on inattentional blindness.) The reader’s consciousness works like the blind person’s cane, coming into contact first with the internees, then with the blankets that cover some of the heads, then again with the three lamps, and finally with the light projected onto the beds. From the reader’s subjective viewpoint, there are no gaps between these objects, since they are the only ones that the text presents as meaningful. Like the blind person’s cane, or the beam of a flashlight in a dark room, the reader’s consciousness explores the storyworld—except that it is not completely free, since it is guided by the authorial design.⁹ We assume that what is left outside the text is just not interesting enough to repay attention. Moreover, it can be hypothesized that the series of contacts between the reader’s consciousness and the described situation simulates the bodily movements that accompany perception: Saramago’s description invites readers to imagine visually scanning the dormitory by drawing their attention to the heads of the internees, to the blankets that cover some of the heads, then (with an upward movement) to the lamps that hang from the ceiling. Finally, with a downward movement, following the light that falls from the lamps, the reader’s attention comes to rest on the beds. Thus, readers of this passage run an embodied simulation of this circular motion, enacting the movements that would be required to perceive a similar scene by reactivating past experiential traces.¹⁰ Keeping in mind Noë’s claim

 On this point see Herman (2008) and Caracciolo (2012a).  This hypothesis is consistent with the findings of Richardson et al. (2003) and Bergen et al. (2007).

4.3 Enacting Characters’ Bodily-Perceptual Experiences

103

that the sense of the presence of the world depends on the virtuality of our movements (the fact that we could move, even if we do not actually do so), I would add that the illusory presence of the storyworld goes hand in hand with the reader’s virtual (simulated, enacted) movements.¹¹ The upshot is that the simulation of bodily movements is highly instrumental in engaging with spatial descriptions like Saramago’s. This point finds support in the ample empirical evidence for the role that embodied simulations play in language understanding.¹² In turn, these simulations are responsible for the bodily-perceptual “feel” of our imaginings. Readers can enact narrative space by simulating a hypothetical perceptual experience, even in the absence of fictional characters to which they could attribute that experience.

4.3 Enacting Characters’ Bodily-Perceptual Experiences What happens, however, when the text invites the reader to engage with the bodily-perceptual experience of a fictional character? In this section I will argue for the continuity between imaginative engagements with characters’ experiences and readers’ imaginings in the absence of perceiving characters, since both presuppose a tension between the experiential background and the textual design. However, anticipating the more detailed discussion of this problem in the next chapter, I will also add that, in figural narrative situations (Stanzel 1984)— i. e., when readers’ access to a storyworld is mediated by a character’s experiencing consciousness—readers can attribute some aspects of their own story-driven experience to the character, enacting (to varying degrees) his or her experiences. Consider another passage from Saramago’s Blindness. A few lines after the description of the dormitory, one of the characters (a professional car thief) attempts to crawl out of bed despite his severely injured leg: Very slowly, resting on his elbows, the thief raised his body into a sitting position. He had no feeling in his leg, nothing except the pain, the rest had ceased to belong to him. His knee was quite stiff. He rolled his body over on to the side of his healthy leg, which he allowed to hang out of the bed, then with both hands under his thigh, he tried to move his injured leg in the same direction… Resting on his hands, he gradually dragged his body across the mattress in the direction of the aisle. (1999, 71)

 Kuzmičová (2012) outlines a similar argument, adding that textual allusions to characters’ object-directed movements can increase readers’ sense of “presence” in a fictional world by providing a basis for their simulated movements.  See, e.g., Zwaan (2004); Zwaan and Taylor (2006); for a useful review of the literature on the embodiment of language comprehension, see Fischer and Zwaan (2008) and Kaschak et al. (2009).

104

4 Blind Reading: Bodily and Perceptual Responses to Narrative

This passage is centered on the character’s proprioception—that is, on his “nonobservational … awareness of [his] body in action” (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 143)—and on bodily sensations such as pain. As we will see in the next section, pain is the quintessential example of the private character of experience. It follows that the second and third sentences of this description are likely to be processed by readers as internally focalized. Thus, in accordance with Jahn’s (1997) “primacy preference rule,” readers are likely to retain the frame of internal focalization and interpret the whole passage as internally focalized. Further, a number of empirical studies (Tversky 1996; 2009) have shown that, when confronted with internally focalized passages, readers tend to adopt the perspective of the reflector-character.¹³ This is a valid interpretation of the experimental findings, but it requires qualification. First of all, having a spatio-temporal, emotional, and evaluative perspective on the world is another way of saying that one has a consciousness or subjective experience (see Crane 2001, 4). The problem with the idea that readers adopt the character’s perspective is that it can seem to reify the character’s experience by presenting it as an object that pre-exists the reader’s interaction with the text. On the contrary, I would argue that the character’s perspective can only be simulated, or rather enacted, by the reader while reading. Because of the involvement of representation in the objectbased schema (see chapter 1), passages such as this cannot be said to represent, in the strong sense, the character’s experience. There is no stand-in for the character’s experience here, but only linguistic—expressive—pointers that cue readers into attributing an experience to a fictional being because of their own familiarity with bodily experience. Saramago takes for granted that his readers can relate to the character because they can put together memories of their past bodily interactions with the world (what pain feels like, what it means to have a numb leg) in order to simulate the character’s experience at this level. In a sense, then, readers enact the character’s consciousness just as they enacted narrative space in the passage I have analyzed before—by simulating a hypothetical bodily-perceptual experience on the basis of both their experiential background and the textual cues. The difference, as we will see in the next chapter, is that in this case the story-driven experience is coupled with a consciousness-attribution. But this discrepancy should not lure us into the trap of viewing the character’s perspective, experience, and consciousness as stand-alone objects: they are the shape taken by readers’ imaginative engagement with the text, and this engagement is based on their own experiential background. Thus, I would argue that the excruciating quality of the description of the thief’s movements

 See Coplan (2004, 142– 143) for a comprehensive survey of this literature.

4.4 Enacting Qualia Through Metaphorical Language

105

(which goes on, meticulously, for almost six pages, till he is shot down by a guard) depends on the fact that the reader is no mere spectator. This passage encourages interpreters to run embodied simulations of the actions described,¹⁴ and these simulations are hardwired in their own body. In other words, on my hypothesis the effectiveness of Saramago’s passage is intimately connected with the involvement of the reader’s own body through the mediation of mental simulations. In sum, the reader’s engagement with narratives, despite being linguistically mediated, can simulate the directness of basic perceptual acts. Of course, I do not deny that it is of some practical utility to talk about the perceiving character’s perspective, experience, and consciousness as if they were items we could relate to. I am not arguing against the common use of these terms. I am suggesting that there is a sense in which this use overlooks an important aspect of our imaginary engagement with narrative texts: the character’s perspective, experience, and consciousness are not given anywhere in the text; they are not objects. The experiences attributed to characters mirror the reader’s story-driven experiences, which underlie both the internally focalized passage just quoted and the description of the dormitory (characterized by the absence of fictional consciousnesses).

4.4 Enacting Qualia Through Metaphorical Language This section explores the relationship between narrative and “qualia”—the intrinsic, ineffable properties of experience. Herman addresses this issue in Basic Elements of Narrative (2009a, chap. 6); I would like to follow up on his discussion by drawing attention to the role metaphorical language plays in enabling the reader to simulate the ineffable qualities of a bodily-perceptual experience.¹⁵ Again, my focus will be on the reader’s experience, and on how readers can run embodied simulations of experiences while at the same time attributing them to characters. It would be impossible here to provide detailed coverage of the philosophical debate on qualia, which Daniel Dennett characterizes as “a tormented snarl of increasingly convoluted and bizarre thought experiments” (1991, 369). The problem with qualia is that this term has been used in at least three distinct senses. Following Michael Tye’s (2009) reconstruction, a mental state has qualia, in the broadest sense, when it has a phenomenal character, when there is some-

 Along similar lines, Zwaan et al. (2004) suggest that language understanding involves dynamic mental simulations.  Cf. my discussion of “phenomenological metaphors” in Caracciolo (2013c).

106

4 Blind Reading: Bodily and Perceptual Responses to Narrative

thing it is like for you to be in that mental state. In this sense, it is hard to deny that there are qualia, since “to have qualia” is almost interchangeable with “to have subjective experience” and “to be conscious.” In another, stronger sense, qualia are intrinsic, non-intentional qualities of our experience. A case in point is that of bodily sensations such as pain, which are sometimes said to possess a qualitative character without being intentional states—i. e., without being directed at a mental object. The existence of qualia, in this sense, is controversial—Crane (2001, 78 – 83), for instance, denies it. Finally, some philosophers (see, e. g., Dennett 1991, 373) highlight the link between qualia and the ineffability of experience. Herman’s (2009a) chapter deals with qualia in the broadest sense, whereas I will focus on ineffability in order to complement my account of the reader’s enactment of bodily-perceptual experiences. In Frank Jackson’s (1982) famous thought experiment, Mary grows up in a black-and-white room, with her body painted black and white, watching blackand-white television. Nevertheless, she becomes the world’s leading authority on color vision. She comes to know everything there is to know about the physics of colors, and about the physiology and psychology of color vision. Does she come to know something new when she finally sees red? The answer to this question has been hotly disputed, with Jackson’s thought experiment having been generally used as an argument against physicalism (the doctrine that mental states are identical with physical states of the brain, i.e., states that come under the jurisdiction of physics). However, its “intuitive starting point wasn’t just that physics lessons couldn’t help the inexperienced to know what it is like. It was that lessons couldn’t help” (Lewis 1999, 281, emphasis in the original). In other words, as Hutto puts it, the experience of red cannot “be stated and fully captured propositionally” (2006b, 62). In a way, then, Jackson’s thought experiment shows that experiences are ineffable: no matter how hard you try, it is impossible to describe the experience of seeing red to someone who has never seen red. This is, of course, undeniable. And yet, as suggested by David Lodge (2002, 13), narrative and literature have a special tool for showing readers how to enact a given experience: metaphorical language. Through metaphors and similes,¹⁶ the reader is invited to imagine experiences “both of acting and of being acted upon” (Hutto 2006b, 52) and to associate them with the target experience, thus being provided not with the experience itself, but with a good approximation of it. To the put the same point another way: literary texts can convey a sense of what it is like to have a given experience by metaphorically associating another experience with it. Here I follow in the footsteps of Dorrit

 I follow most recent theories of conceptual mapping in bundling together metaphors and similes (see, e. g., Fludernik, Freeman, and Freeman 1999, 385).

4.4 Enacting Qualia Through Metaphorical Language

107

Cohn, who described this technique under the term “psycho-analogy” (1978, 37), arguing that it is used to render consciousness at the pre-verbal, subliminal level. Because of its private (and, according to some, non-intentional) nature, bodily pain is the quintessential example of the ineffability of experience.¹⁷ Consider a variant on Jackson’s thought experiment in which there is someone who, suffering from a rare condition called “congenital insensitivity to pain,” does not know what it is like to be in pain. For whatever reason, he or she has never seen anyone in pain either. This person would lack the qualia of pain, in all the three senses discussed above. Suppose that this person is asked to read the following passage from Saramago’s Blindness, in which the thief, after getting out of bed, feels an intense pain in his leg: “The pain came back instantly, as if someone were sawing, drilling, and hammering the wound” (1999, 71– 72). In order to describe the phenomenal character of this pain, the text invites the reader to imagine someone inflicting damage on the already injured limb. In the simile, the felt quality of the pain is rendered through the activities (sawing, drilling, hammering) that would cause a similar pain. It is easy for the reader to imaginatively perform these actions (which are shared, external happenings), and at the same time relate the pain they would cause to the character’s mental state, as suggested by the simile. However, in a sense, it is the sequence of actions itself, and not only the pain these actions would cause, that ends up being associated with the thief’s experience. Pain is externalized as damage caused to the body. Interestingly, this ties in with one of the intentionalist approaches to pain on the market, Tye’s theory that pains are “sensory representations of tissue damage” (1997, 333, emphasis in the original). Thus, those who read these lines without having ever felt pain would probably come to know something about pain: they would not be able to imaginatively enact pain, but they would be able to imaginatively enact bodily damage and associate the two states (one of which is internal, the other external). Even on a non-representationalist view of pain (such as the one I am inclined to endorse), it could be argued that the fierceness of the damage inflicted on the human body would still inform the subject of our thought experiment about the subjective quality of pain. Of course, this would be a far cry from undergoing the experience of pain, but it would still be a clue as to what pain is like. Leaving aside my thought experiment, the more general point I would like to make here is that readers may form a precise idea of what it was like for the character to feel this pain by imaginatively enacting the content of the simile. In fact, interpreters are given the chance to enact the pain that they attribute to the character: the thief’s consciousness, experience, pain may be accessed via a simula-

 Scarry has made a case for the non-representability of pain in her The Body in Pain (1985).

108

4 Blind Reading: Bodily and Perceptual Responses to Narrative

tive mechanism (see subsection 5.3.3). Moreover, through a metaphorical mapping, the text invites the reader to associate the qualia of the character’s pain with external, bodily activities, confirming the enactivist view that experience is, centrally, an active engagement with the world (or, in this case, with one’s body), not a mental object. This process involves a highly sophisticated “play” on the reader’s experiential background. We have seen in chapter 1 that language can point to bodily-perceptual experiential traces, implicating them in readers’ engagement with the story. Metaphorical language adds a layer of complexity to this indexing process: in order to convey the qualia of a bodily-perceptual experience, it points to another experience (usually, but not necessarily, at the same level of the background), asking the reader to conflate the two. The qualia conveyed to the reader correspond to what Fauconnier and Turner (2002) would call the “emergent meaning” of the metaphorical mapping—the value added that results from blending the two experiences. What we have is, therefore, an especially complex interaction between a higher-order cognitive function (linguistic comprehension) and the bodily-perceptual background: metaphorical language picks up two experiential traces and weaves them together into a new, surprising, and sometimes unsettling expression that can have a key influence on the interpreter’s story-driven experience. Consider the following passage from Saramago’s Blindness: “Like a pack of wolves suddenly roused, the pain went through [the thief’s] entire body, before returning to the dark crater from which it came” (1999, 71). The ripples of pain that spread across the character’s body are seen through the dynamic image of a pack of wolves: the text draws on the reader’s familiarity with pain and merges it with the cultural connotations of ferocity attached to these animals, thus revealing the sensory qualities of this particular pain. Part of the effectiveness of the simile depends on the fact that it invites us to think about an experience we are all, to some extent, acquainted with in new and unfamiliar terms—to use Viktor Shklovsky’s (1991) term, it brings about a defamiliarizing effect. But why is this? Why does the effectiveness of metaphorical language go hand in hand with its ingenuity? I suggest looking for an answer in my sketch of the network of experientiality (Figure 1). Experience, I have argued, dwells in the tension between some worldly offerings—the situations represented by a story, in the case of story-driven experiences—and our experiential background. The higher the tension between these poles, the more an experience will affect us (as discussed in chapter 2, experientiality varies according to the intensity of recipients’ responses to narrative). If a worldly offering—for example, something that happens to us—is strikingly at odds with our background, it will take on a distinct experiential quality. To return to the examples used in chapter 2, losing

4.4 Enacting Qualia Through Metaphorical Language

109

an old-time friend is—in one sense of the term—more of an experience than seeing a glass full of liquid. Metaphorical language, when used creatively, can exploit this effect: by bringing together two strikingly different phenomena (in our case, pain and a pack of wolves), it increases the strain on readers’ experiential background, thus exerting a stronger impact on it and creating a precise experiential “feel.” This is at least the beginning of an explanation of why Saramago’s simile works as an expressive device, boosting the effectiveness of this passage in conveying the qualia of the character’s pain. But there is more: the correlation between the creativity of metaphorical language and the insights it can afford readers into bodily experience reflects how, as Winnicott points out, experience is fundamentally creative (see chapter 3). We do not engage with a pre-given world, but we create our world in our engagement with it, through its interaction with our experiential background. Metaphors and similes like Saramago’s can deposit themselves in the socio-cultural background of their interpreters, shaping their evaluative responses to the world. After reading Saramago’s lines, the reader may come to realize that pain can really feel “like a pack of wolves suddenly roused.” And this, of course, is just an example of how creative, metaphorical language can structure people’s engagement with reality, penetrating into the “deeper” layers of the background (bodily-perceptual and emotional) and bringing about the revelation and expansion of their experience envisioned by Dewey. My conclusion is that metaphors and similes are one of the expressive devices through which stories invite readers to enact the felt qualities of specific experiences in a way that—because of its inventiveness—can have a deep impact on their background. I will argue in the next chapter that, when coupled with a consciousness-attribution, these devices can reinforce readers’ tendency to empathize with the experience of a character.

5 Fictional Consciousnesses: From Attribution to Enactment The tension between recipients’ experiential background and the textual design does not by itself account for the full range of our responses to narrative. As anticipated in chapter 2, there is another dimension that gives depth to the story-driven experience—a dimension that has to do with our engagement with the experience or consciousness of characters and, since I will be dealing with literary stories, of fictional characters in particular. I will argue in this chapter that this engagement oscillates between two poles, which I will call “consciousness-attribution” and “consciousness-enactment.” We should not conceive these as alternative strategies, but rather as complementary: in consciousness-enactment, the recipient’s story-driven experience is made to overlap, if only partially, with the experience attributed to a character. Consciousness-enactment, therefore, creates a tension between the first-person undergoing of an experience and its second- or third-person attribution to a fictional being. In my model of experientiality (Figure 1), this tension crisscrosses the other tension between the story and recipients’ background, giving rise to the story-driven experience. As I pointed out in the previous chapter, however, our engagement with characters can never be uncoupled from the other tension, which is constitutive not only of the experientiality of narrative but of experience across the board (via what I have described as the structural resemblance between everyday and story-driven experiences). This chapter turns, therefore, to the dimension of experientiality on which narratologists have mostly focused, to the point that Fludernik (1996) has used it as the mainstay of her “natural” narratology: the representation of characters’ experiences. Yet I will argue in the following pages that, despite the recent surge of interest in what David Herman has called the “nexus of narrative and mind” (2009a, 137– 160), scholars have only begun to explore the issues raised by readers’ relationship with fictional consciousnesses and experiences. Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine have published two important monographs, Fictional Minds (2004) and Why We Read Fiction (2006), which Herman himself lists under the heading of “Issues of consciousness representation” in the entry “Cognitive Narratology” for the de Gruyter Handbook of Narratology (2009b). On a broad understanding of the word “consciousness,” Herman’s label is perfectly fitting. However, if we run a quick search for the word “representation” in Palmer’s and Zunshine’s books, we find out that it is almost never used in tandem with “consciousness.” What Palmer and Zunshine focus on is the reader’s attribution of mental states to the characters; they do not seem to devote special attention to the reader’s engagement with consciousness proper.

5 Fictional Consciousnesses: From Attribution to Enactment

111

David Chalmers’s (1996) distinction between “two concepts of mind” can clarify what I mean here. One may want to explore the mind’s role in influencing behavior, and admit of the existence of mental states only in so much as they can cause people’s actions. Or, one may focus on the subjective quality of our experience. The former is a disciple of functionalism, whose object of study is what Chalmers (1996, 12) calls “the psychological mind.” The latter is interested in “the phenomenal mind” or, simply put, in consciousness or subjective experience (I have already explained on several occasions why these terms are internally related). Do Palmer and Zunshine come to grips with the problem of fictional consciousnesses? Palmer, for one, does talk at length about the non-verbal properties of consciousness, linking them with “qualia” (2004, 97– 98). He also devotes some space to the ways in which readers relate to fictional consciousnesses, introducing the concept of “continuing-consciousness frame”—i.e., the strategy through which readers “fill in the gaps” in the presentation of a character’s consciousness (see Palmer 2010, 44). And yet, despite its considerable merits, Palmer’s discussion appears to downplay the difference between the psychological and the phenomenal mind: in most if not all cases, Palmer seems to use the phrases “fictional consciousnesses” and “fictional minds” interchangeably. In one passage, Palmer (2004, 87– 91) openly declares his allegiance to functionalism—the doctrine that, according to Chalmers, underlies the investigation of psychological (as opposed to phenomenal) mental states. One of the reasons for Palmer’s equating the psychological and the phenomenal is that the “externalist” slant of his study leads him to place a premium on complex interactions between the characters—and on how readers deal with those intersubjective relations. These mental happenings can be captured within a functionalist framework because they unfold in the public, shared world, and are therefore inherently social in nature. What Palmer does not explore fully (at least not on my understanding of his model) is the ways in which readers engage with the subjective, qualitative “feel” that arises from characters’ coping with the physical and social world.¹ At what point in the reader-text interaction does that “feel” come in, how is it handled by textual strategies and how does it latch onto recipients’ own experiences? These questions are left unanswered by Palmer’s discussion of fictional consciousnesses.

 It is worth noting in this connection that Palmer’s focus on intersubjectivity and on intermental thought complements, rather than contradicts, my insistence on subjective experience. Internalist and externalist approaches are mutually irreducible, as Gallagher and Zahavi explain: “The second- (and third‐) person access to another person differs from the first-person access to my experience, but this difference is not an imperfection or a shortcoming. Rather, the difference is constitutional. It is what makes my experience of the other, rather than a selfexperience” (2008, 187).

112

5 Fictional Consciousnesses: From Attribution to Enactment

The same reasoning applies to narratological approaches that make use of the concept of “mental modeling” in order to explain how readers keep track of the psychological traits and attitudes of fictional characters. Herman himself, for example, argues that readers “build up a model of the characters’ minds on the basis of textual cues” (2007, 251). Along analogous lines, Ralf Schneider (2001) examines the dynamic of readers’ categorization and evaluation of characters with respect to their personality, social background, adherence to a literary “type,” and so on. But none of these approaches tackles explicitly the reader’s engagement with characters’ consciousnesses. If they do talk about fictional consciousnesses, most narratologists seem to use this term synonymously with fictional minds, thus collapsing any difference between consciousness and mind. Of course, we should not drive a wedge between our attitude toward characters’ experiences and our attitude toward their psychological mind (in Chalmers’s sense): these aspects are inevitably bound up, and my network of experientiality tries to accommodate both of them within the tension between consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment. More specifically, readers’ mental modeling of the psychological life of characters is related to the second- or third-person stance of consciousness-attribution. We use the same psychological language to describe the personality of characters and that of the people we encounter in intersubjective interactions (although arguably readers’ engagements with characters are affected by other, non-psychological factors such as literary conventions). But again this consideration does not suffice to explain how readers relate to the experiential substratum of characters’ behavior: even in the external stance of consciousness-attribution, the characters’ experience slips out of the grasp of functionalist concepts, because experience always has a subjective, qualitative “feel.” Let us rehearse Searle’s definition: consciousness is “an inner, first-person, qualitative phenomenon”; it “refers to those states of sentience and awareness that typically begin when we awake from a dreamless sleep and continue until we go to sleep again, or fall into a coma or die or otherwise become ‘unconscious’” (1997, 5). Philosophers of mind love to talk about zombies—beings identical to us from a functionalist viewpoint, but which (unlike us) have no subjective experience. Just as functionalism has led to important scientific discoveries, defining fictional characters in functionalist terms has yielded deep insights, well exemplified by the approaches mentioned in the previous paragraphs. Yet it is important to keep in mind that readers do not just attribute mental states to fictional characters—they attribute mental states with a qualitative aspect or with qualia in the broad sense (see section 4.4). In short, they attribute a consciousness. This is the angle from which I will approach fictional characters in this and in the next chapter.

5 Fictional Consciousnesses: From Attribution to Enactment

113

My model bears on two longstanding narratological issues: first, how narrative strategies such as internal focalization and Dorrit Cohn’s (1978) modes of thought presentation can modulate readers’ stance toward characters; second, the claim that narrative fiction is unique in that it gives us direct access to the experience of people other than ourselves (a view advanced by Käte Hamburger [1957] and Cohn herself [1978]). With regard to the first issue, I will develop a nuanced account of the relationship between expressive techniques and the reader’s story-driven experience. Readers can enact a fictional consciousness, they can perform it on the basis of textual cues—but this phenomenon, which I will call consciousness-enactment, cannot be simply identified with either internal focalization or other storytelling techniques. No narrative strategy can force the recipient to enact the character’s consciousness, because the recipient’s own experiential background is a factor at play. Moreover, I will contend that reading fiction harnesses readers’ folk-psychological skills, so that there cannot be any downright “uniqueness” of fiction. As Hutto puts it, “when dealing with certain kinds of narratives, ‘like it or not’, consumers of fiction will bring the same sorts of skills (or at least a subset of them) to bear that they use when dealing with actual minds” (2011a, 278). Both consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment are, as a matter of fact, strategies that readers derive from their interaction with real people.² However, I would like to leave the door open for the idea that readers’ access to other consciousnesses can be more direct when dealing with fictional characters than with real people. My proposition is that our engagement with fictional consciousnesses differs in degree, but not in kind, from our engagement with real ones, in particular when it comes to consciousness-enactment: we can enact the experience of another person in real life too—that is to say, empathize with him or her—but we do not do it as often (and as intensely) as in reading texts that exhibit some of the properties examined in section 5.3. Indeed, this difference in degree between readers’ access to fictional minds and their access to real minds may become (or be perceived as) a difference in kind, leading to claims about the “exceptionality” of fictional minds. Herman (2011b) has argued against this socalled “exceptionality thesis,” insisting on the continuity between real-world intersubjectivity and engaging with fictional characters. Without denying this continuity, I have made a case elsewhere that the illusory transparency of (some) fictional minds depends on the ease with which readers may empathize with them—or enact their consciousnesses—without incurring the psychological and ethical “costs” of real-world empathy (see Caracciolo 2014). A version of the exceptional-

 In turn, readers’ engagements with characters may influence their interaction with real people, along the other “direction of flow” in my network of experientiality.

114

5 Fictional Consciousnesses: From Attribution to Enactment

ity thesis can therefore be defended from a psychological (and phenomenological) perspective. As Herman’s (2009b) section heading (“Issues of consciousness representation”) suggests, it is somewhat of an accepted notion within narrative theory that consciousness and experience can be represented in and by stories. A lot hinges, of course, on the definition of representation that we are adopting—as my previous chapters have indicated. The enactivists argue that experience and consciousness are not, fundamentally, a matter of mental representations—of internal states directed at the world—but rather depend on how our embodied and evaluative engagements with the world connect with our experiential background. As discussed in section 1.1, a representation is to be understood (in both the cognitive-scientific and the semiotic sense) as a reference to a spatio-temporal entity—event or existent, real or imaginary. By contrast, an experience can be expressed only by reference to another, prior experience, which in turn involved some worldly offerings (spatio-temporal entities) and an experiential background—so that there is no way out of this network: experience can never be reduced to spatio-temporal entities (or their representations). The distinction is, then, one between representation and expression: stories are representational artifacts because they work by representing—i.e., by referring to—a set of events and existents. However, insofar as stories draw on, and have an effect on, the experiential background of recipients, they can also express an experience by having recipients respond to the represented events and existents in certain ways. The present chapter studies how literary narrative can leverage expressive resources to cue two such responses—consciousness-attribution and consciousnessenactment.³ In section 5.1, I will argue that fictional consciousnesses are (just like the consciousnesses of real people) attributed on the basis of external signs, such as gestures and psychological language, which we take as expressive of an experience. Consciousness-attribution is thus readers’ most basic strategy for dealing with fictional consciousnesses. I will then turn to the more complex issue of consciousness-enactment. Section 5.2 will present a case study—the beginning of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury—in order to examine how consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment can work together in the course of the reader’s engagement with a character. Finally, in section 5.3 I will zoom in on consciousness-enactment, arguing that it involves an overlap between readers’ story-driven experience and the experience that they attribute to a char-

 Along similar lines, Mellmann (2010) argues that focalizing characters are “psycho-poetics effects” brought about by stories on their recipients.

5.1 Consciousness-Attribution

115

acter. After proposing a model of the stylistic and narrative devices that story producers can use to encourage consciousness-enactment, I will suggest that this reading strategy exploits our real-world empathetic skills—i. e., our ability to mentally simulate the experience of other human beings.

5.1 Consciousness-Attribution Consider this question: do dogs have a consciousness? I take for granted that most readers will answer in the positive. Following Dennett (1991), we can deny that consciousness is a binary phenomenon, and ask the subjects of a hypothetical experiment to position various “things” on a scale of consciousness: I believe that they would tend to place dogs very close to humans—closer than, say, trees or lobsters. And yet, what reasons do we have to attribute consciousness to dogs? There are, of course, external signs such as tail-wagging or jumping around, which we usually interpret as expressing happiness. But this is a risky strategy, since we have no independent means of verifying that a tail-wagging dog is subjectively experiencing happiness. For all we know, the dog could be a robot (or, as philosophers of mind say, a zombie) programmed to express happiness in order to gratify his master. And consider the person sitting next to me in the library: unlike dogs, she expresses her happiness not only through bodily signs (such as smiling), but also through language. She may say: “I’m happy today.” Am I to take her statement as a clear, incontrovertible proof of consciousness? Hardly so. She may be lying—and even if she is not, I cannot demonstrate that she feels happy today. The upshot is that, in Hutto’s words, “when faced with the question of whether or not another being is conscious, we do not, and cannot, settle the issue by appeal to reasoning, criteria, theories or the like… We do not ascribe consciousness to dogs or mice on reasoned grounds” (2000, 51– 52). Nor do we to humans; as Hutto explains later on, Wittgenstein “has reminded us that in treating others as conscious beings, we are always engaged in an interpretative project, broadly conceived—one which is informed by our form of life” (2000, 130). If attributing consciousness to real people involves embarking on an “interpretative project,” where do we draw the line between real people and fictional characters? Aren’t we constantly engaged in an interpretative project with regard to fictional characters as well? These questions may seem silly, and to some extent they are. But, for all the self-evidence of the distinction between real people and fictional characters, we should not forget that the boundary line is porous: just as we do not attribute consciousness to real people on reasoned grounds (because there is, simply enough, no way to demonstrate that the person sitting next to me has

116

5 Fictional Consciousnesses: From Attribution to Enactment

conscious experience), so we do not attribute consciousness to fictional characters on reasoned grounds. In both cases, our attributions are based on our firstperson understanding of what having a consciousness or subjective experience involves. Consider this passage from the fourth (externally focalized) section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury: Dilsey answered [to Mrs Compson’s call] and ceased clattering the stove, but before she could cross the kitchen Mrs Compson called her again, and before she crossed the diningroom and brought her head into relief against the gray splash of the window, still again. (1995, 267)

There are relatively few hints of subjectivity (either of the narrator’s or of the characters’) in this passage—but readers are likely to attribute a consciousness to both Mrs. Compson and Dilsey while they read it. The description of the characters’ gestures (and, possibly, the fact that they are given a name) is enough to invite readers to make a consciousness-attribution. No doubt, this is due to the irresistible lure of the anthropomorphic (or mimetic, in Phelan’s [1989] term) view of fictional characters, according to which characters are like real people. If asked about it, however, readers would still deny that characters can be conscious in the way real people are. But notice that the spontaneous and apparently irrational nature of our consciousness-attributions to characters matches up with the spontaneous nature of our consciousness-attributions to real people. Of course, there are (it seems) good reasons to believe that real people are conscious, whereas there are none for having the same belief about characters. But we tend to attribute consciousness to both nevertheless. Why is that? To answer this question, we will have to carefully consider why we believe that real people are conscious. We have already seen that dogs (are thought to) express their happiness by wagging their tail or jumping around. Like dogs, humans can express their conscious states through bodily movements. Unlike dogs and other non-human animals, however, they can use a more powerful tool to express themselves: language. In Hutto’s words, one’s “linguistic utterances of pain are natural extensions of, or replacements for, [one’s] earlier ways of expressing pain—i.e., shouting, bawling, and the like. [They are a] development of more primitive, nonconceptual forms of response that we share with animals” (2000, 128). Thus, language is commonly considered to be a telltale sign of consciousness. It enables us to express our experience with a level of detail that is beyond the reach of non-verbal animals. A yell is a coarse-grained way of expressing pain; through language, we can characterize a pain as piercing, burning, throbbing, and so on. But then, consider these words from the beginning of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever

5.1 Consciousness-Attribution

117

it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul … —then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can” (1994, 21). If these or similar words were repeated to you by someone in a bar, you would not have any problems interpreting them as expressive of consciousness. We easily grasp the meaning of the words “a damp, drizzly November in my soul” because we are familiar with the gloomy mood they express; we think we have felt like that in the past, and we regard the stranger’s words as expressing the way it is like for him to be in that mood. Hence we can see why we, just as naturally, attribute a consciousness to the fictional character whom we imagine speaking these words. These lines seem to express an experience, and thus a consciousness. Of course, it could be objected that they only seem to do so, whereas if they were spoken by a real person they would express a consciousness. But this objection misses the target, since every linguistic statement only seems to express a consciousness; there is no way to prove that another human being (real or fictional) is conscious. In sum, consciousness-attributions to fictional characters are an inevitable consequence of our tendency to interpret some bodily and verbal signs as expressive of consciousness.⁴ There is an element of interpretation involved both in my attributing a consciousness to the person sitting next to me (she could be a robot, she could be a zombie) and in my attributing a consciousness to Melville’s Ishmael (he could be a textual mechanism, someone like Mälzel could insist—see my reading of Poe’s story in section 0.1). This is because, as Hutto points out, consciousness-attributions are not based on reasoning, but on the identification of expressions of consciousness. And, as I have argued in section 1.1, an expression indexes the experience of its producer by pointing to the experiential background of the receiver. In other words, a child’s crying counts as a sign of distress because those who hear it are familiar with the way the emotional “feel” of distress is typically bound up with crying. Consciousness-attributions in literary narratives work in a similar way, except that the originating experience—the character’s—is created by readers in their interaction with the text. We are thus brought back to my network of experientiality: the story producer’s design can leverage experiential traces belonging to the background of recipients, inviting them to respond in certain ways. In this case, however, the response consists in attributing an experience to a fictional being—and this provides the basis for the tension between consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment, which I will continue to explore in the next sections.

 Therefore, consciousness-attribution aligns closely with what Palmer (2004, 137– 147) calls “third-person ascription” of psychological states—except that my term explicitly addresses readers’ attribution of mental states with a qualitative “feel.”

118

5 Fictional Consciousnesses: From Attribution to Enactment

5.2 Enacting Benjy: A Slow-Motion Analysis So far, I have argued that fictional consciousnesses are attributed by readers to all the fictional existents that seem (through represented gestures or language) to express a consciousness. Thus, consciousness-attribution involves the adoption of what phenomenologists would call a third-person perspective (see, e. g., Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 40); it involves imagining the characters from the outside—just as we see real people from the outside, and attribute them a consciousness. But it could be argued that in some cases readers share a character’s experience of the fictional world, imagining the character’s mental states from the inside. We can map the distinction between imagining from the outside and imagining from the inside onto Peter Goldie’s (2003) distinction between acentral and central imaginings: central imaginings involve imagining from a fictional character’s perspective. What does it mean to imagine from someone’s perspective, however? Since, as Tim Crane (2001, 4) points out, having a consciousness equals having a perspective on the world, imagining from someone’s perspective and imagining from someone’s consciousness are roughly the same thing. But understanding how this feat is possible is far from straightforward, for two reasons: first, it requires bridging the gap between the third-person approach of consciousness-attribution and the first-person approach (having a consciousness).⁵ Second, despite visual metaphors such as point of view and perspective, a consciousness is not a place from which we experience the world—it is, first and foremost, the medium through which we experience it (Hutto 2000, 135). As I have argued in my critique of representationalism with respect to experience and consciousness (see chapter 1), a consciousness is not an object-like entity; it cannot be reduced to a spatio-temporal position from which we imagine some events and existents. But then, how do readers manage to experience a fictional world through a consciousness different from their own? The brief answer is that fictional consciousnesses can be enacted by readers if the text invites them to attribute to a character at least one aspect or component of their story-driven experience. The upshot is that consciousness-enactment is al-

 My statements about the need to bridge the gap between first-person and third-person approaches to consciousness could seem to run counter to the enactivist project, since, according to radical enactivists like Hutto, there simply is no gap to bridge in our basic engagement with others (or “mind minding,” as Hutto [2011b] calls it). However, denying the existence of this gap in more sophisticated cases of interaction with others seems to me completely counterintuitive (see Caracciolo 2014). Readers’ engagement with fictional characters, being linguistically and conceptually mediated, is surely one of such cases.

5.2 Enacting Benjy: A Slow-Motion Analysis

119

ways coupled with consciousness-attribution. This way of putting the matter is, of course, too elliptical. I will show in more detail how this process works by analyzing one of the canonical consciousness-focused texts of 20th century literature, Benjy’s monologue from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. The beginning of Benjy’s section of the novel reads: “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting” (1995, 1). Because of the first-person pronoun, these words are easily interpreted by readers as indicative of a consciousness. Thus, we attribute to the character who says “I” the visual experience of a fence, and of some unnamed characters beyond the fence, surrounded by flowerbeds, hitting something as yet undetermined. The reader’s imaginings tend to be sketchy, and—at this early stage—they do not have a distinct first-person character; indeed, the indeterminacy in which this sentence is steeped (who are “they”? what are they doing?) is likely to induce readers to distance themselves from the fictional character, as if they were standing in front of a stranger who is about to disclose some important details of his story. In sum, even if narratologists would label this sentence “internally focalized,” readers tend to imagine the character from the outside. This is why they are prone to engage in consciousness-attribution, adopting a second-person stance toward the character. The next sentence begins to dispel the indeterminacy: “They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence” (1995, 1). In Ruth Ronen’s (1994, 137) term, these words further “definitize” the fictional world, since both the spatial relations and the “hitting” of the previous sentence are brought into focus: on the one hand, the verb “coming” establishes a character-centered spatial framework (see Herman 2009c), suggesting that the flag is closer to Benjy’s position than the unnamed men; on the other, readers may infer that these men are playing golf. The second part of the sentence invites the interpreter to visualize the character’s movement along the fence, but it is as yet unclear whether at this point we are imagining someone moving along a fence or imagining moving along a fence. Following Manfred Jahn (1997), I would argue that readers are more likely to retain the frame they have used to make sense of the previous sentence, imagining the character from the outside. Starting from the next paragraph, however, things begin to change: Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass. “Here, caddie.” He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going away. (1995, 1)

120

5 Fictional Consciousnesses: From Attribution to Enactment

In this passage, there is both a definitization of “they” (readers may infer that they must be two men, and that the character who says “I” is already familiar with one of them, named Luster) and a strengthening of the opposition between “I” and “they.” It is true that, at one point, all the characters move in unison, but the short-livedness of the first person plural (“we”) ends up widening the rift between Benjy and the other men. This rift (which could be easily interpreted as a metaphor for the narrating character’s mental disability) has a fictional anchor in the fence that physically separates the “I” and “they.” In a way, readers realize that the fence functions as the dividing line between perceiver and perceived, subject and object, “I” and “they.”⁶ This demarcation gradually reduces the indeterminacy of their sensory imaginings: it becomes more evident that they imagine standing on this (the narrating character’s) side of the fence, or that they are attributing to Benjy their own story-driven experience. Even if the character is still imagined to some extent from the outside, the reader’s imaginings seem to move toward the character’s perceptions—an effect maximized by the circular insistence on the character’s vision—both at the beginning (“I could see them hitting”) and at the end (“I … watched them going away”) of this paragraph—and by the correlation between “coming toward” and “going away,” which firmly establishes the narrating character as the deictic center⁷ of this beginning. The following paragraph marks an important stage in the “interiorization” of the reader’s imaginings. Interestingly, this coincides with an intersubjective contact between the character who says “I” and Luster: “Listen at you, now.” Luster said. “Aint you something, thirty three years old, going on that way. After I done went all the way to town to buy you that cake. Hush up that moaning. Aint you going to help me find that quarter so I can go to the show tonight.” (1995, 1)

Here Luster scolds Benjy for his loud moans. The difficulty of this text is that readers did not know that Benjy was emitting moans while moving along the fence and observing the golfers. They infer it from Luster’s words. This inference may reinforce interpreters’ impression of being confined to Benjy’s consciousness, which is their only means of access to the storyworld. We have seen that, as the character’s monologue begins, readers’ imaginings are likely to flicker between two possibilities: imagining seeing Benjy seeing people through a

 As Butte (2004, 28 – 29) points out, Merleau-Ponty used a similar metaphor (the wall) for intersubjectivity.  On deictic centers and deictic shifts, see Duchan, Bruder, and Hewitt (1995) and Herman (2002, 271).

5.2 Enacting Benjy: A Slow-Motion Analysis

121

fence; and imagining seeing people through a fence. The former is an acentral imagining, in Goldie’s (2003) term; it consists in attributing a visual experience to the character on the basis of his words. The latter is a central imagining, and involves enacting the character’s consciousness—undergoing an imaginative perceptual experience on his behalf. So far, I have cautiously argued that there is no need for readers to entertain “internal” imaginings; but Luster’s words seem to tip the scale in the opposite direction. It is very hard to see how we could imagine the character from the outside and still not hear his moans. By contrast, it is more likely that we are unconscious of Benjy’s moans (and learn about them from Luster’s line) because there is an overlap between our story-driven experience and the experience that we attribute to him— the character himself being unconscious of his moans. As a matter of fact, Benjy never says anything like “I was moaning.” This lack of self-consciousness on the character’s part may paradoxically make readers more conscious of their attempts at integrating—by way of inferences—the information Benjy has omitted. All in all, it is as if the reader and the character were engaged in teamwork, with the reader’s inferential work making up for the character’s limitations. This process, of course, sharpens the sense that our story-driven experience matches up with the experience we attribute to the character, at least up to a point—since we remain fully aware of the partiality of the character’s experience. Berys Gaut (1999) makes a similar claim in connection with his concept of “identification.” As he puts it, “identification is always aspectual (and therefore partial), [so that] it cannot be an objection to identification that the correspondences between what the audience is feeling and what the characters are fictionally feeling are only partial” (1999, 208). Moreover, not only do readers quickly adjust to the frame implied by this passage (which I will call “consciousness-enactment”), but they allow it to reinterpret the previous sentences, in accordance with Jahn’s (1997) “recency preference rule”: in other words, it may seem as if readers had enacted the character’s consciousness all along. ⁸ And yet, interpreters do not lose sight of their initial consciousness-attribution. They enact some aspects of the character’s consciousness, but at the same time they attribute this consciousness to another person (a fictional character). The foregoing analysis has raised a number of critical points, which I would like to discuss before moving on to a fuller account of consciousness-enactment. To start with, it is worth stressing that mine is a slow-motion analysis, and I cannot prove that readers would pay attention to the details on which I have decided

 Jahn’s (1997) primacy and recency preference rules are based on Ray Jackendoff’s (1987) account of the “preference rule system” in cognitive linguistics.

122

5 Fictional Consciousnesses: From Attribution to Enactment

to focus, such as the opposition between “I” and “they,” the function of the fence, or even Luster’s revealing words. But neither was this the purpose of my reading. Rather, I aimed to highlight, in a condensed, manageable form, some aspects of the reader’s sensory imagination that typically manifest themselves during engagements with much longer texts. One of these aspects—as we know from the last chapter—is the sketchy nature of our imaginings. “Internal focalization” is a useful label, but when it is applied to the tension between the reader’s imaginings and the perceptions of a fictional character it only predicts a response to the text which may be delayed, and may not be produced at all (more on this in the next section).⁹ I have argued that, in the passages quoted above, our enactment of Benjy’s consciousness is likely to become the preferred response only after realizing that we are unconscious of what the character is unconscious of. In short, most consciousness-focused texts are ambiguous, and it is only by applying Jahn’s primacy and recency preference rules and by examining the overall context that we can hypothesize whether readers are likely to enact some aspects of the consciousness of a fictional character. These remarks, however, do not solve the larger problems posed by my analysis of Benjy’s monologue. They can be summarized in three questions: what exactly does it mean to enact a fictional consciousness? What are the triggers of consciousness-enactment? Lastly, what real-world cognitive skills does it harness? I will try to address these key questions in the next section.

5.3 Consciousness-Enactment 5.3.1 What Is Consciousness-Enactment? I have already pointed out that consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment should not be conceived of as alternative reading strategies. Consciousness-attribution does not necessarily involve consciousness-enactment, but the reverse is not true: consciousness-enactment is always coupled with consciousness-attribution. As explained above, consciousness-enactment creates a tension between readers’ undergoing of an experience (the story-driven experience) and their attribution of that experience to a fictional character. Denying this—denying that consciousness-attribution plays an important part in consciousness-enactment—amounts to arguing that the interpreter’s consciousness can become

 Among the scholars who have highlighted the reader-dependence of focalization are O’Neill (1992), Jahn (1996; 1999a), and Bortolussi and Dixon (2002, 166 – 199).

5.3 Consciousness-Enactment

123

the consciousness of a character, and this is obviously too strong a claim. Rather, this process is best thought of as a merging of readers’ story-driven experience and of the experience attributed to the character. The overlap between these experiences is, strictly speaking, the character’s experience as enacted by interpreters (see Figure 3). Again, the key to this idea is what Gaut (1999) calls—in the

Figure 3: Consciousness-enactment as an overlap between consciousness-attribution and recipients’ story-driven experience.

passage quoted above—the “aspectual nature” of our engagement with characters. Jens Eder’s (2006; Eder, Jannidis, and Schneider 2010) work on character is also pertinent here. Both Gaut and Eder suggest that our identification with characters is not a binary phenomenon but a complex, multifaceted process: we can be “close to” a character—in my terms, enact his or her experience—in some respects but not in others. Therefore, the overlap between the story-driven experience and consciousness-attribution in Figure 3 can never be complete: insofar as readers’ engagement with narrative depends on their experiential background, their responses to a text (their story-driven experience) will always transcend the experience attributed to a character. This aspectual dynamic can be illustrated by referring to my conceptualization of the experiential background in chapter 2. In responding to the text, readers may undergo an experience that is sufficiently similar to the one they attribute (on the basis of the text) to a character. In this case, readers can be said to enact the character’s consciousness at the perceptual level—as I have shown in

124

5 Fictional Consciousnesses: From Attribution to Enactment

section 4.3. But at other levels readers’ responses may differ significantly from the character’s experience, or this experience may be underspecified by the text. The same applies to the other “regions” of the experiential background (bodily, emotional, cognitive, and socio-cultural): enacting a character’s experience at one level of the background does not necessarily draw in the other levels, too. In the case of Benjy’s monologue, for example, consciousness-enactment seems to stop at the boundaries of the perceptual background; in terms of higher-order cognitive skills, the interpreter’s responses to the text do not coincide with the character’s experience but rather complement it through a series of inferences. We will see in a moment that consciousness-enactment tends to build over time in the presence of the appropriate textual cues: it is a cumulative process that can spread across different “threads” of our experiential engagement with narrative (more on this in Part III)—although it can never involve the whole of our story-driven experience at the same time. The upshot is that consciousness-enactment comes in degrees: the extent of the overlap between readers’ story-driven experience and the experience attributed to a character varies as a function both of their experiential background and of the textual design (here is the interaction between the tensions that make up my network of experientiality). Two factors seem to operate here. One is the degree of similarity or consonance between our story-driven experience and the experience that we attribute to the character. Ultimately, this similarity depends on the experiential traces activated by the text: it is easier for us to enact a character’s experience if our experiential background resonates deeply with it, either because we have found ourselves in a similar situation or because we share some of the character’s evaluations. Gregory Currie puts this point as follows: “it might be that people who have actually experienced a situation relevantly like that depicted in the fiction will have a richer and more quickly accessible stock of relevant background information to assist their simulation and make it more affect-inducing” (1997, 75). On the other hand, if the experiences that readers are invited to attribute to a character are at odds with their experiential background, consciousness-enactment may be unlikely or even impossible. Ethical judgments are a good example of this: it can be difficult for recipients to empathize with a character whose ethical evaluations are in stark contrast with their own.¹⁰ The other factor that contributes to the intensity of consciousness-enactment is the level of detail (or granularity—see Herman 2007, 252) of the textual cues. We know that experiences have a bodily, perceptual, and emotional “feel” which makes up the textural richness of people’s contacts with the world. As representa-

 This is a version of the so-called “paradox of imaginative resistance”; see Gendler (2000).

5.3 Consciousness-Enactment

125

tional tools, semiotic systems have a tendency to abstract away the vividness of experience: saying “I saw a bridge on a river” is hardly as experientially rich and patterned as seeing a bridge on a river (more on this point in section 8.4). Again, readers’ familiarity with the experiences indexed by the text can help them restore part of this lost texture, but as we have seen in the last chapter sensory imagination is a “lazy machine” (see Eco 1994, 28) and does not have the time to “fill in” the detail beyond what is made strictly necessary by the text. On the contrary, it is up to the author to flesh out interpreters’ imaginings through the use of expressive devices. Contrast the sentence “I saw a bridge on a river” with the following words, taken again from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (and in particular from the second monologue, Quentin’s): “The bridge was of gray stone, lichened, dappled with slow moisture where the fungus crept. Beneath it the water was clear and still in the shadow, whispering and clucking about the stone in fading swirls of spinning sky” (1995, 112). It is easy to see how the finegrained quality or texture of this description adds perceptual “depth” to the reader’s imaginings. As argued in section 4.4, the use of metaphorical language (“slow moisture,” “the fungus crept,” the water “whispering and clucking,” and so on) is one of the strategies through which stories can create a precise experiential “feel,” compensating for the representational abstraction of language. In a figural narrative situation, a stylistically marked passage can facilitate consciousness-enactment by sharpening readers’ sense that they are sharing the idiosyncratic experience of a fictional being—an experience that, as a matter of fact, they are attributing and enacting at the same time. Hence, the overlap between consciousness-attribution and the story-driven experience tends to be directly proportional to the textural complexity of readers’ imaginings—which in turn is likely to reflect the level of detail of the textual cues.

5.3.2 Triggers of Consciousness-Enactment What are the most common “triggers” of consciousness-enactment in literary narratives? We can set up a scale that ranges from the micro-level of analysis of words and sentences to the macro-level of pages and chapters (see Figure 4). The rationale of this diagram is that expressive devices at the micro-level of analysis—the base of the triangle—occur frequently in narrative texts. However, it is only the accumulation of these devices (i. e., when a story gives sustained attention to a character’s experience) that primes consciousness-enactment: a coordinated set of low-level triggers constitutes a higher-level trigger, inviting interpreters to enact a character’s consciousness throughout a larger textual unit. This process culminates in what I call “consciousness-focused narration”—the

126

5 Fictional Consciousnesses: From Attribution to Enactment

Figure 4: Triggers of consciousness-enactment at different levels of analysis.

apex of the triangle and the largest-scale strategy authors can use to encourage consciousness-enactment. At the word level, consciousness tags like proper names, pronouns, and experience verbs (“he thought,” “I saw,” and so on) invite readers to attribute an experience to a fictional being, representing a necessary condition for consciousness-enactment. Punctuation and layout choices can also be taken as expressive of a consciousness: for example, an exclamation mark may have emotional connotations, or a line break may imply that the experiencing character has lost consciousness (we will find a similar effect in Nabokov’s The Defense in chapter 8). The accumulation of these tags tends to predispose readers toward consciousness-enactment. But language can help create the illusion that we are sharing a character’s experience in more sophisticated ways: anything from the choice of a word reminiscent of the character’s idiolect to the use of phenomenological metaphors—Cohn’s (1978) “psycho-analogies” (see section 4.4)—can be interpreted as strongly expressive of a character’s experience, giving rise to what stylisticians term a “mind style.”¹¹ Of course, even these stylistic features are not sufficient, by themselves, to trigger consciousness-enactment, since their overall effect depends on the context in which they appear.

 A “mind style” is a set of stylistic markers that bears a character’s unique cognitive signature (see Fowler 1977, 76). On the relationship between metaphorical language and mind style, see Semino and Swindlehurst (1996) and Caracciolo (2013c).

5.3 Consciousness-Enactment

127

Moving higher up in the scale of consciousness-enactment triggers, we find the narratological category of “internal focalization.” It is well-known that this term, coined by structuralist narratologist Gérard Genette (1980), has been at the center of a heated debate within narrative theory. In their critique of Genette, Jesch and Stein (2009) have made a convincing case that his treatment of focalization actually conflates two non-overlapping concepts, one of which has to do with the withholding of narrative information, the other with the tension between the act of narration and acts of perception occurring within the storyworld. The perceptual view of focalization seems to have had the upper hand in the narratological literature (see, e. g., Jahn 1996; 1999a; Prince 2001; Bortolussi and Dixon 2002; L. Herman and Vervaeck 2004): Uri Margolin, for example, argues that “focalization in narrative involves the textual representation of specific (pre)existing sensory elements of the text’s story world as perceived and registered (recorded, represented, encoded, modeled and stored) by some mind or recording device which is a member of this world” (2009, 42). However, some theorists interpret “perception” in an extended sense, as referring to any kind of mental event: in Jahn’s words, “who perceives? is still not broad enough to cover all facets of focalization” (1996, 244). I will not go into this problem here, although I side with Jahn in seeing as internally focalized any passage that focuses on a character’s experience. Indeed, our experiential background is so closely integrated that by restricting focalization to perception proper we would miss out on many of the crucial interactions and interrelations between the “regions” of our background (see subsection 2.2.2). The experiential view of focalization that emerges from this narratological work is obviously relevant to my discussion of consciousness-enactment. In my terms, (internal) focalization can be seen as the merging of some represented events and existents—Margolin’s “(pre)existing sensory elements of the text’s story world”—with textual features that readers take as expressive of a figural consciousness. The more a text foregrounds these indices of consciousness, the more it reduces the “distance” between readers’ imaginings and the experiences that they attribute to a character, paving the way for consciousness-enactment. However, as my analysis of Benjy’s monologue has shown, even “internal” focalization leaves recipients some wiggle room: we are never forced to simulate the character’s experience from the inside. On the other hand, it is unlikely that consciousness-enactment will be triggered in the “behaviorist narratives” that exemplify Genette’s (1980) “external focalization”: in this case, being denied any direct access into the characters’ mental life, readers are strongly encouraged to take a third-person stance toward them. Internal focalization—in the broad, experiential sense defined above—can be implemented through a number of textual devices. According to Cohn’s

128

5 Fictional Consciousnesses: From Attribution to Enactment

(1978) classification, these devices fall into three “modes of thought presentation,” all of which can function as triggers of consciousness-enactment, operating roughly at the same level of analysis as internal focalization (see Figure 4). In Cohn’s “psycho-narration,” the character’s experience is reported by the narrator (usually in an abridged, compressed fashion) without any direct quotation of the character’s verbal stream of thought but through the extensive use of consciousness tags. Cohn points out that this technique is especially suitable to convey pre-verbal experiences (see, e. g., 1978, 52), whereas for Alan Palmer (2004, 76) it serves an instrumental role in linking the character’s thoughts with the surrounding environment. By contrast, in the situation Cohn terms “quoted monologue” the character’s words are quoted directly, often (but not necessarily) through the technique of the so-called stream of consciousness, which attempts to mimic the fluid and erratic nature of people’s thought processes. Finally, we have Cohn’s “narrated monologue,” which is another name for free indirect discourse (see Fludernik 1993): as a hybrid between psycho-narration and quoted monologue, it fuses the narrator’s voice with the character’s mind style. All of these modes of thought presentation can trigger consciousness-enactment, and I will not try to make predictions as to which is more likely to elicit this response from readers. Needless to say, psycho-narration, quoted monologue, and narrated monologue are theoretical abstractions: consciousness-enactment depends, ultimately, on how these techniques are deployed by specific texts and on how they interact with the experiential background of each interpreter.¹² Yet, even if none of these devices can automatically lead to consciousnessenactment, it is their accumulation that makes a difference. Indeed, the reason why it has been so difficult to isolate consciousness-enactment in the passages I have examined in the previous subsection is that it usually correlates with larger portions of text, since it needs some time to build up in the reader’s own consciousness. In my analysis of the beginning of Benjy’s monologue, I have tried to emphasize this aspect of the reader’s engagement with fictional consciousnesses: we do not enact a consciousness from the very beginning; consciousness-enactment is a gradual process, driven by the accumulation of textual clues. As we read into Benjy’s monologue, we feel that we are penetrating deeper into the character’s consciousness, that we are increasingly familiar with his mental processes. But a fictional character has no mental processes, and only seems to be conscious: in fact, our illusion is produced by the overlap between  In her review of the narrative techniques that have been related to empathy, Keen (2007, 92– 99) comes to the same skeptical conclusions about the possibility of establishing neat correspondences between specific textual strategies and readers’ empathetic responses. (See below for the relationship between consciousness-enactment and empathy.)

5.3 Consciousness-Enactment

129

consciousness-attribution (it is as if the character who says “I” had a consciousness independent from ours) and our story-driven experience—an overlap corresponding to what I call consciousness-enactment. All in all, the consciousness-enactment triggers described above seem to be more effective when used repeatedly over a large stretch of text. Intuitively, this can be explained by appealing to the notion that readers “become acquainted” with characters through prolonged exposure to their thought processes, and are therefore more likely to enact their experience whenever the occasion arises. I call “consciousness-focused narration” a global textual strategy that can be implemented by authors across a whole text (this is why it occupies the apex of Figure 4) in order to prompt consciousness-enactment. In short, consciousness-focused narration consists in the orchestration of lower-order triggers which, through their joint action, encourage readers to enact the consciousness of a specific character whenever the text indexes his or her experience. The result of this orchestration is, as I will argue in detail in the next chapter, a “self-narrative”: a story through which interpreters may make contact with the character’s self or identity. Taken as a whole, Benjy’s monologue—like the other monologues of The Sound and the Fury—can be read as constructing a narrative of this sort.

5.3.3 Mental Simulation as the Cognitive Basis for Consciousness-Enactment By determining an overlap between the story-driven experience (undergone by readers in the first person) and some of the experiences attributed to a character, consciousness-enactment enables us to bridge the divide between the first-person and the third-person approach to consciousness. This, it is often claimed (Lodge 2002; Herman 2009a, 147), is one of the distinguishing features of narrative. However, unlike Cohn, who famously argued that fiction “is the only literary genre, as well as the only kind of narrative, in which the unspoken thoughts, feelings, perceptions of a person other than the speaker can be portrayed” (1978, 7), I follow Herman (2011b) in insisting on the continuity between our engagement with fictional characters and our engagement with other people’s minds. After all, everyday interactions with other people force us to speculate, tell stories about, and more generally take into account mental states different from ours. We can imagine what it is like to be another person through a mechanism known in philosophy and psychology as “empathy.” Consciousness-enactment as a reading strategy builds on our real-world empathetic skills, even if fictional texts can invite readers to empathize with characters more often (and more intensely) than with other people in everyday interactions. In turn, this invitation may create a sense that we can be “closer” to characters—or have a

130

5 Fictional Consciousnesses: From Attribution to Enactment

more direct access to their mental life—than to flesh-and-blood people. If the “distinction” of fictional minds is conceived in these terms, as a potential difference in our stance toward them, then a psychologically oriented version of Cohn’s exceptionality thesis can be defended (see Caracciolo 2014). What exactly do I mean by empathy, however? This is a key question, given that the term has wide currency in social psychology, but in a sense that is too broad for my present purposes. By contrast, philosophers have only recently begun to revisit this concept, which is usually traced back to the “Einfühlung” theorized by German philosopher Theodor Lipps at the end of the 19th century. In his Rediscovering Empathy, writing from within the tradition of analytic philosophy, Karsten Stueber describes the situation as follows: “Under the heading of empathy, social psychologists have investigated whatever they have tended to regard as the psychological basis of social cohesion and as the basis of genuine altruistic behavior… [Empathy] seems to refer to a bundle of sometimes different capacities and attitudes of one person toward the states of mind and situations of another” (2006, 27). The extensive psychological literature on empathy has already been brought to bear on narrative theory by Suzanne Keen (2007), whereas my usage of the term draws on the tradition of philosophers like Alex Neill (1996), Gregory Currie (1997; Currie and Ravenscroft 2002), Amy Coplan (2004), and Stueber himself. In a nutshell, I regard empathy as a simulative mechanism, one that allows us to understand other people’s mental states by “putting ourselves in their shoes”— by imagining how we would react if we found ourselves in their situation. There are two corollaries to this definition, both of which can help underscore contrasts between philosophical theories of empathy and social-psychological accounts. The first is that empathy is not restricted to emotional experience, since it can be directed at any mental state that falls within the experiential background. As Neill puts it, empathy involves “understanding how things are with” another person (1996, 183), or “coming to know what it is like to have certain beliefs, desires, hopes, and doubts” (1996, 184). Moreover, my definition drives a wedge between empathy and sympathy—two terms that are often conflated in social-psychological work on “empathy.” Unlike empathy, which entails feeling with another or sharing his or her experiences, sympathy involves caring for another individual in an external, third-person way. Consciousness-enactment harnesses the empathetic skills that people use in their daily engagement with other minds—with the obvious difference that the yardstick for readers’ simulations is not another person’s real mental state, but the text itself. Moreover, since consciousness-enactment is always aspectual, readers’ empathetic engagement with characters may be complemented by other, non-empathetic attitudes, for example sympathy: my empathetic understanding of the dilemma in which a character is caught can provide the basis for my feel-

5.3 Consciousness-Enactment

131

ing pity for her. Empathy and sympathy may work in tandem, just like empathy and moral judgments about a character’s conduct, for the simple reason that the former is a non-totalizing phenomenon: while being simulated in a first-person way, the other’s experience is also recognized as another’s (in our case, a fictional character’s), thus leaving room for one’s own non-empathetic responses. In other words: the “self-other differentiation” (Coplan 2004, 150) is preserved because empathy, as the mechanism underlying consciousness-enactment, is always accompanied by consciousness-attribution. A few final remarks on simulation. I have already discussed this concept at some length in relation to the reader’s bodily-perceptual responses to stories. Since empathy is a form of mental simulation directed at other people’s mental states, and since consciousness-enactment builds on our empathetic skills, mental simulation becomes one of the most important mechanisms involved in our engagement with stories. As noted in chapter 4, this view is consistent with the psycholinguistic work of Zwaan and colleagues (see Pecher and Zwaan 2005; Zwaan 2008), where the concept of “mental simulation” plays a pivotal role. However, my commitment to mental simulation should not be taken as an implicit endorsement of so-called “simulation theory” within the current theory of mind debate. I do think enactivist philosophers like Hutto, Gallagher, and Zahavi (see Zahavi 2007b; Gallagher and Zahavi 2008; Gallagher and Hutto 2008) have raised strong objections against both theory theory and simulation theory. The core claim of simulation theory is that mental simulations—and therefore empathetic engagements—are the central mechanism whereby we come to know other people’s mental states (see subsection 0.4.3). Yet following the enactivists in arguing against this claim does not entail denying that mental simulations exist, and that they can be highly instrumental in activities such as readers’ engagement with stories. To put this point another way, the simulation theory of how we understand other people’s mental states and my own simulation-based account of our engagement with narrative have a common basis in the concept of mental simulation, but they have different explanatory ambitions. Therefore, they can be uncoupled. Despite being himself an advocate of simulation theory in the folk-psychological sense, Currie makes a similar move when he suggests that mental simulations may, for example, “be important for strategy-planning” (1997, 72), and that our engagement with stories could harness these planning skills rather than our folk psychology. I will not pursue this line of reasoning here, but I do hope to have shown convincingly that my position—mental simulations play a role in readers’ interaction with stories—does not go against the grain of the enactivist project. On the contrary, it is through mental simulations that stories can establish contact with the bodily, pre-linguistic forms of engagement in which the enactivists are especially in-

132

5 Fictional Consciousnesses: From Attribution to Enactment

terested. Indeed, as neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese puts it, mental simulation is embodied “not only because it is neurally realized, but also because it uses a pre-existing body-model in the brain, and therefore involves a non-propositional form of self-representation” (2005, 42). Mental simulations are thus grounded in the reader’s body. In a sense, then, in consciousness-enactment, when readers empathize with the bodily-perceptual experience of a fictional character, there is an overlap between their real body and the fictional body of the character. I will have more to say about this overlap in chapter 7.

6 Fictional Consciousnesses: Self-Narratives and Intersubjectivity This chapter zooms in on an aspect of readers’ engagement with fictional characters that underlies the tension between consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment. I have already mentioned in subsection 0.4.3 that over the last thirty years, in the wake of Jerome Bruner’s (1986; 1991) work among others, philosophers and social psychologists have begun to see a connection between storytelling practices and what we call the self, or the subject of our experience. This has led to a number of different and often controversial claims about the narrativity (or narrative basis) of the self. Although I will refer often to this debate, it would be impossible to do it justice in the context of this chapter. Rather, I aim to carve out a path through this diverse territory by insisting on the role stories play in our social interactions with other people. If stories are instrumental for intersubjectivity, then the fact that fictional characters are constructed through stories could explain why readers’ stance toward them is grounded in intersubjective transactions with real people. This argument will enable me to extend the framework developed in the previous chapter by mapping consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment onto forms and patterns of realworld intersubjectivity. As discussed above, consciousness-focused narration is the set of expressive strategies an author can adopt throughout a text to encourage consciousness-enactment. In this chapter I would like to explain why the story of a character’s life is an important factor in consciousness-focused narration—why the author’s extended focus on a character’s experience can prime readers to enact his or her consciousness. Alan Palmer offers some help through his concept of “embedded narratives”—this was the term he used in Fictional Minds (2004)—or “cognitive narratives,” as he prefers to call them in Social Minds in the Novel (2010) in order to avoid confusion with the embedded (i.e., “frame”) narratives associated with shifts of narrative level (see Palmer 2010, 12). For Palmer a cognitive narrative encompasses “the total perceptual and cognitive viewpoint [of a character]; ideological worldview; memories of the past; and the set of beliefs, desires, intentions, motives, and plans for the future of each character in the story as presented in the discourse” (2004, 183 – 184). However, it is not clear in what sense Palmer’s cognitive narratives qualify as narratives: a set of beliefs, values, memories, intentions is not a narrative on even the most liberal definitions of the concept. Therefore, I would like to expand the scope of Palmer’s “cognitive narratives” by including the events that affect a character and the actions that he or she performs within a larger text—events and actions not taken in themselves but in relation to the

134

6 Fictional Consciousnesses: Self-Narratives and Intersubjectivity

character’s experiential responses to them, according to the “thought-action continuum” that Palmer (2004, 210 – 218) so productively describes. The key problem with Palmer’s discussion of cognitive narratives is that he passes on the opportunity to explore what I regard as a major implication of his argument. Indeed, just after introducing this term Palmer makes a defensive move and points out that it “is important to distinguish my use of the new term cognitive narrative to describe a character’s mind from the much wider debate about the nature of consciousness and, in particular, whether people in real life regard their lives as narratives” (2010, 12– 13). And he concludes, somewhat surprisingly: “Calling fictional minds narratives does not have any relevance to the entirely separate point about whether or not real minds can be regarded as narratives” (2010, 13). I do think Palmer is missing out on something important here. The point at issue is not whether real or fictional minds are narratives, which would be an extravagant claim for even the most diehard supporter of the narrative view of the self, but rather the role storytelling plays in our engagement both with our past experiences and with other people. And from this angle Palmer’s decision not to explore the narrativity of minds or selves seems somewhat hasty. I have argued in subsection 5.3.3 that both consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment exploit readers’ real-world folk-psychological skills. But if there is a continuity between people’s engagement with real and with fictional minds—a thesis that, I believe, Palmer himself would accept, and that constitutes the premise of much of today’s cognitive narratology (see Margolin 2003; Herman 2011b)—then I do not see why we should deny that continuity where it is most obvious: namely, in the storytelling practices through which we make sense of both real and fictional minds. To put the same point otherwise: if we accept that stories are involved in our social, intersubjective engagements with other people—and with their minds—then the fact that fictional characters are encountered through stories cannot be dismissed as irrelevant. On the contrary, it is because storytelling practices straddle the divide between our engagement with real and with fictional minds that our exposure to what I will call a character’s “self-narrative” can facilitate consciousness-enactment by strengthening our empathetic connection with him or her. In the next section (6.1), I would like to set for the stage for my discussion of self-narratives by arguing—along the lines of Dan Zahavi’s and Richard Menary’s neo-phenomenological and enactivist approaches—that the self should not be thought of as a monolithic entity: we must make room for an embodied, experiential self that subtends language and narrative itself, emerging from the evaluative interaction between each living creature and its environment. This does not entail denying any connection between narrative and the self, however. I will therefore opt for a stripped-down version of the narrative view of the self,

6.1 Narrative Selves?

135

contending that stories do play an important role in performing our identity in social interaction. I will then turn to the concept of self-narrative (in section 6.2), describing it as a sequence of actions and events that, because of their experiential underpinnings, define the identity or personal self of a certain character. Engaging with self-narratives, I will argue, invites readers to “try on” large parts of the character’s experiential background by imaginatively tweaking their own background—which, in turn, can prime them to enact the character’s experiences whenever they are indexed by the text. Section 6.3 attempts to systematize some of the ideas advanced in both the previous and the present chapter concerning how our engagement with fictional characters relates to our intersubjective engagement with real people. I will therefore distinguish between primary and secondary intersubjectivity, linking them with consciousness-attribution and self-narratives, and examining how consciousness-enactment (as mental simulation) may bridge the gap between them. Finally, in section 6.4 I will illustrate some of these points through a case study, Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. What is especially interesting about McEwan’s novel is the way it makes us aware of our intersubjective engagement with the two protagonists by thematically focusing on the interpersonal difficulties between them.

6.1 Narrative Selves? Palmer (2010) is right in sensing that many of the claims about the narrativity of the self are so controversial that we might be better off uncoupling stories about fictional minds from stories about real minds. Galen Strawson’s trenchant critique of narrative views of the self in “Against Narrativity” (2004)—referenced by Palmer—is a good example of how the debate has often led to extremism on both sides. But we should not forget that the relationship between narrative and the self (our own, other people’s) need not be an exclusive or totalizing one, as if narration were the necessary and sufficient condition for having a self. And while Strawson seems to pick the easy targets—sweeping claims about our being the narratives we tell about ourselves—I suspect that he would have a harder time dismissing some of the more sensible arguments advanced in this connection. Again, the enactivists can help us make the problem of the narrativity of the self more tractable by reminding us that what we call a self (the center or subject of one’s experience) emerges from embodied and intersubjective interactions—and that narrative, as a socio-cultural practice, is an important factor in the latter kind of interactions. But first of all allow me to discuss some passages from the thirteenth chapter of Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1991; and see also Dennett 1992), one of the classical—and most radical—formulations of the narrative view of the self.

136

6 Fictional Consciousnesses: Self-Narratives and Intersubjectivity

On Dennett’s account, people’s sense that their experience revolves around a central, unified subject or “self” is an illusion produced by language and by narrative in particular.¹ Indeed, a high number of processes co-occur in our brain without our realizing it. If consciousness appears sequential it is only because we can linguistically report on our experience—and, by doing so, produce a linear stream of consciousness: getting “something into the forefront of your consciousness is getting it into a position where it can be reported on” (1991, 336). Hence, Dennett equates consciousness with a “Joycean machine” (1991, 275), implying that human experience is constituted (rather than expressed) by a sequence of words resembling the supposedly Joycean technique of the “stream of consciousness.” But then the self to which all of our experiences seem to belong must be, in itself, a construct—and Dennett singles out narrative as the material of which it is made: Each normal individual of [Homo sapiens] makes a self. Out of its brain it spins a web of words and deeds, and, like the other creatures, it doesn’t have to know what it’s doing; it just does it. This web protects it, just like the snail’s shell, and provides it a livelihood, just like the spider’s web, and advances its prospects for sex, just like the bowerbird’s bower… Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others—and ourselves—about who we are. And just as spiders don’t have to think, consciously and deliberately, about how to spin their webs, and just as beavers, unlike professional human engineers, do not consciously and deliberately plan the structures they build, we (unlike professional human storytellers) do not consciously and deliberately figure out what narratives to tell and how to tell them. Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source. (1991, 416; 418)

Part of the problem with Dennett’s argument is that, as many commentators have noted (see, e.g., Chalmers 1996, 30; Hutto 2000, 102), it fails to account for basic bodily, perceptual, and emotional experience. It is simply unbelievable that nonhuman animals and infants do not have any experience of the world because they cannot verbally report on their unconscious brain processes (see Lockwood 1993). Along similar lines, thinkers related to enactivism such as Dan Zahavi and Richard Menary have raised serious objections against the radical narrativism of Dennett and others. Writing in the phenomenological tradition of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Zahavi concedes that “narratives play an important role in the constitution of a certain dimension or aspect of selfhood. However, I would oppose the exclusivity claim, that is, the claim that the self is a narratively constructed entity and

 Strawson (2004) would argue that only some people—the “diachronics,” in his term—have such a sense.

6.1 Narrative Selves?

137

that every access to self and other are [sic] mediated by narratives” (2007a, 184). For Zahavi, there is a phenomenological “core self” (he borrows this term from Damasio [2000]) that corresponds to the first-person givenness of our conscious experiences and cannot be reduced to the narrative self, since it pre-exists—both phylogenetically and ontogenetically—language and narrative. For his part, Menary calls attention to the embodiment of the self, arguing that “the self is constituted both by an embodied consciousness whose experiences are available for narration and narratives themselves” (2008, 63, my emphasis). From the perspective of embodied cognitive science, people do not just have a body: they are bodies, and they would not be able to tell stories about themselves if they were not living bodies in a concrete and fundamentally pre-narrative world. The radical narrativism targeted by Strawson (2004) thus asks too much from narrative. Saying that our self is constituted by the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to other people, is an obvious overstatement. On the other hand, Zahavi and Menary acknowledge that there is something true about the narrative view of the self—so that both Strawson’s article and Palmer’s cautious stance toward this problem appear to throw the baby out with the bath water. There is no obstacle to exploring the relationship between narrative and the self, as long as we keep in mind that, to quote Zahavi again, “it is an unacceptable oversimplification to assume that the self is a univocal concept, as if there is only one type or level or aspect of self to reckon with” (2007a, 185). In fact, Zahavi himself suggests a good point of departure for our exploration, which consists in grounding the narrativity of the self in intersubjectivity. I argued earlier that a minimal experiential self is given in all of our experiences (because of their first-person character), and that we can access it through phenomenological means. As pointed out in subsection 2.2.2, this embodied and pre-reflective self-consciousness falls in the inner level of my experiential background.² Zahavi argues that narrative may have an important role in defining each of us as a person: “After all, what is being addressed by a narrative account is the nature of my personal character or personality; a personality that evolves through time and is shaped by the values I endorse and by my moral and intellectual convictions and decisions” (2007a, 193). But the key move comes when Zahavi points out that persons “do not exist in a social vacuum. To exist as a person is to exist socialized into a communal horizon, where one’s bearing to oneself is appropriated from the others” (2007a, 194).

 See also my reading of Beckett’s Company (in section 7.5) as a text that lays bare the embodied roots of the self.

138

6 Fictional Consciousnesses: Self-Narratives and Intersubjectivity

This claim implies that our personal self is shaped by our intersubjective, and therefore culturally nuanced, interactions with other people. Selfhood finds a genuine common ground with narrative in the processes and practices bound up with intersubjectivity, or intersubjective experience. Arguing that I am constituted by stories is overstating the case; arguing that the stories that I—and other people—tell about myself have a bearing on my public identity seems to be much more readily acceptable. After all, this is what social psychologists like Michael Bamberg have in mind when they write that “narratives, irrespective of whether they deal with one’s life or an episode or event in the life of someone else, always reveal the speaker’s identity… By offering and telling a narrative, the speaker lodges a claim for him/herself in terms of who he/she is” (2004, 227). Here, however, we must be careful not to draw a rigid distinction between our private self (possibly to be equated with Zahavi’s phenomenological self) and our public, narrativized person, as if they were two independent entities. This kind of apriorism about the self lies at the root of many misconceptions, including Strawson’s idea that being a self involves “apprehending myself specifically as an inner mental presence” (2004, 433). Talk about “inner mental presence” has a distinct Cartesian flavor, against which the enactivists would urge that the self emerges from an interaction, either with the physical world (phenomenological self) or with the cultural and social environment (personhood), on the basis of one’s experiential background. Indeed, narratives have a key role in shaping us as persons because they can blend together an external “landscape of action” with an internal “landscape of consciousness” (Bruner 1986) by revealing that these two sorts of landscape are inextricably entangled in our interaction with the world. The implication is that the dichotomy between “internal” and “external” is not a given but the artifact of a philosophical tradition (see Menary 2010; and Herman 2011c for an application to narrative theory). The power of stories lies in their capacity to compress internal and external events into a spatio-temporal continuum of interaction from which the self of a person can emerge. The self in question may either be the storyteller’s, as in Bamberg’s conversational narrative, or a character’s, in the case of fictional narrative practices, but the dynamic that underlies the process is identical: it is an experiential dynamic because it turns on the embodied and evaluative encounters between a minded creature and some worldly offerings. Even though Palmer seems to hold back from this decisive step, I believe this intuition is at the core of his discussion of “cognitive narratives.” The ideas I am advancing here are directly related to the hypothesis proposed by another enactivist thinker that has figured significantly in the preceding chapters, Daniel Hutto. I am referring to Hutto’s “Narrative Practice Hypothesis” (2007; 2008), which originates as a developmental theory about how children acquire a

6.2 Focus on Self-Narratives

139

folk psychology, i.e., a framework for “predicting, explaining, and explicating [other people’s] actions” (2007, 44). According to Hutto, young children’s exposure to storytelling practices in intersubjective engagements with adults provides them with a scaffolding that they can use to understand other people’s reasons for action. In other words, stories teach children how to relate actions that unfold in the public world with people’s invisible motives and beliefs by mastering the “norms associated with social roles that pervade our everyday environments” (Gallagher and Hutto 2008, 31). This narrative competency enables children to learn the ropes of what falls under the heading of “secondary intersubjectivity”—a higher-order form of intersubjectivity that is mediated by language and socio-cultural practices. (By contrast, as I will explain more in detail in section 6.3, “primary intersubjectivity” refers to the forms of bodily attunement and coordination with other people of which children are capable almost from birth.) Hutto’s developmental claim translates itself into a more general point about the importance and role of narrative competency in secondary intersubjectivity. Through storytelling practices, we come to understand not only the “internal” mental states of other people, but how their mental processes are embedded in larger contexts of physical and social interaction: “I encounter the other person, not abstracted from their circumstances, but in the middle of something that has a beginning and that is going somewhere. I see them in the framework of a story in which either I have a part to play or I don’t” (Gallagher and Hutto 2008, 33). These frameworks are what I propose to call “self-narratives” in connection to readers’ engagement with fictional characters.

6.2 Focus on Self-Narratives The term “self-narrative” has been used by several scholars—most notably, by Marya Schechtman (1996; 2007) in the exposition of her “narrative self-constitution view.” Here I will apply the term to the relation between readers and characters: a self-narrative is the result of the implementation of consciousness-focused narration on the part of the author; it is a thread of a larger story that focuses specifically on the interplay between a character’s behavior and his or her mental states, allowing (a version) of his or her identity or self to emerge. Despite the “self-” prefix, my label does not necessarily imply that a “self-narrative” is a story the character tells about him- or herself. It may be told by someone else (the narrator, another character)— what matters, however, is that the story makes claims about the character’s experiences, values, and motives, linking them to the way he or she interacts with a physical and socio-cultural world over the course of a larger text. As narrative theorists

140

6 Fictional Consciousnesses: Self-Narratives and Intersubjectivity

know very well, we should not always give priority to the character’s own self-narrative, for this can be unreliable. The whole point of the label “self-narrative” is that it enables the analyst to isolate the strands of a text that deal with the experience of a character—and to examine the way in which they interact with the self-narratives of other characters, and even with alternative self-narratives of the same character. Indeed, some texts seem to foreground the existence of many competing self-narratives about a character. For example, Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim (1988), originally published in 1900, juxtaposes two self-narratives about the protagonist, Jim, in a way that leaves readers with a feeling of uncertainty about the character’s real identity. In the first, Jim neglects his duties as first mate of a ship by abandoning it (and its passengers) in order to avoid a shipwreck that, as it turns out, never happens. In the second self-narrative, Jim has redeemed himself—incognito—as the romantic savior of the land of Patusan. Of course, we could think about the transition between the first and the second self-narrative in terms of the character’s psychological development; but the imperfect overlap between the two self-narratives seems to be responsible for Jim’s elusiveness. Texts can also intertwine the self-narratives of different characters. In a novel like Lord Jim the protagonist’s self-narratives occupy center stage; however, in other texts we may find that the self-narratives of different characters are given the same importance (this is the case with Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, my case study for section 6.4). We may also wonder about the effects of a self-narrative on readers’ overall engagement with a character. My hypothesis is that, as they follow a character’s self-narrative, readers are increasingly likely to enact the experiences that they attribute him or her. Another way of putting this is that the triggers of consciousness-enactment examined in the previous chapter are more effective when they are woven together into a self-narrative through what I have called “consciousness-focused narration.” The reasons for this increased efficacy should be clear by now: in secondary intersubjectivity, hearing the stories of other people and telling stories about them are the principal means whereby we come to understand the experiential nexus between their outward situation and their mental activity. The more often we are exposed to someone’s stories, the deeper we can penetrate into his or her experiential background—into the beliefs, values, and memories that shape the course of their structural coupling with the world. In turn, this intersubjective attunement facilitates our capacity to empathize with another person by enabling us to imagine with a higher level of detail—and accuracy—how he or she would behave in a certain situation. But if this is true, it comes as no surprise that engaging with a character’s self-narrative should make it easier for interpreters to enact his or her experiences throughout a text. By familiarizing themselves with the experiences that have shaped a char-

6.2 Focus on Self-Narratives

141

acter’s self, readers can imagine more accurately and vividly what undergoing a particular experience means to him or her. In Eder’s (2006) term, readers become “closer” to the character, and are therefore more likely to enact his or her experiences at any level of the experiential background. The fact that interpreters can or are more likely to adopt the stance of consciousness-enactment, however, does not imply that they are forced to do so, for we know that their own experiential background plays a significant role in this process: sometimes, no matter how closely a text follows a character’s self-narrative, readers will just refuse to enact his or her consciousness because of an incompatibility between their own background and the one they attribute to the character.³ The point here is that stories can go beyond inviting readers to ascribe single experiences to characters on the basis of their own background; by focusing on a character’s self-narrative, they can ask readers to attribute him or her a whole experiential background. Indeed, in the most general sense a self is a background; it is a constantly evolving repertoire of biological and socio-cultural values—and of past experiential traces—that influences our structural coupling with the world and at the same time emerges from it (see Varela 1997). Through their engagement with self-narratives, therefore, readers come to see characters as beings endowed with an identity—a personal self—that gives coherence to their experiences. In a way, then, enacting a character’s consciousness over a long text involves making slight adjustments to our own background until it resembles the background that we attribute to the character. This process, of course, can never be completed: as we have seen in section 5.3, consciousness-enactment is always in tension with consciousness-attribution, or interpreters would become the person whose consciousness they are enacting (as in some delusional disorders in psychiatry). And yet, the possibility of “trying on”—if only partially and temporarily—the background of a fictional being explains much about the imaginative power of fiction. This is how Gregory Currie puts it: “To be critical of our own outlooks and to be willing to see advantages in the outlooks of others might be a useful thing. But to appreciate those advantages we might need to try on for size the perspectives from which they derive. Indeed, we might need to be willing to try on perspectives we don’t initially find very attractive” (1997, 73). We thus return to Dewey’s (and Mark Johnson’s) idea that art enables interpreters to expand their experience by transcending the limitations of their own experiential background. Via self-narratives, authors encourage consciousnessenactment, promoting readers’ direct involvement with a character’s experience and therefore inviting them to reflect on their own values and past experiences in

 On this point see Caracciolo (2013b).

142

6 Fictional Consciousnesses: Self-Narratives and Intersubjectivity

a self-conscious way. As Hakemulder has argued in The Moral Laboratory (2000), empathy for characters is the principal means whereby literary stories have an impact on readers’ beliefs and on their self-concept or understanding of themselves (see Hakemulder 2000, 86). Crucially, this restructuring of interpreters’ background is made possible by the fact that stories can confront readers with other ways of spinning “a web of words and deeds” (Dennett 1991, 416)—with self-narratives and self-concepts different from their own.

6.3 Engaging with Characters: Between Primary and Secondary Intersubjectivity So far I have followed two different but convergent paths for bridging the divide between our engagement with real people and our engagement with fictional characters. The first has to do with consciousness-enactment—which, I have argued in subsection 5.3.3, depends on our capacity to empathize with others by mentally simulating their experiences. The second path is related to narrative competency as the basis for understanding how the experiences of both real people and fictional characters coalesce into an identity or personal self. These paths are convergent because, as I pointed out above, engaging with a self-narrative can prime consciousness-enactment. How is it possible to expand these remarks into a more nuanced account of the relations between people’s transactions with characters and their ability to participate in forms of social cognition or intersubjectivity? The distinction between primary intersubjectivity and secondary intersubjectivity, mentioned above, proves helpful here. According to the model first proposed by Colwyn Trevarthen (see, e.g., Trevarthen 1979) within the field of developmental psychology, and later brought to bear on philosophical debates by Hutto, Gallagher, and others, primary intersubjectivity enables us to grasp another person’s intentions in an embodied, online way through face-to-face interaction, without any need to infer them via a theory or by running mental simulations. This capability is closer to perception than to higher-order cognitive processes: several studies have shown that children as young as ten months are skilled at following another person’s “eyes, [perceiving] various movements of the head, the mouth, the hands, and more general body movements as meaningful, goal-directed movements” (Gallagher and Hutto 2008, 21). Primary intersubjectivity points to our ability to understand other people’s minds as directly accessible through their bodily behavior (for example, facial expressions and gestures). As we have seen in section 5.1, the concept of “expression” is key here: as Zahavi puts it, building on Max Scheler’s phenomenology, “affective and emotional states are not simply qualities of subjective experience, rather they are given in expressive phenomena” (2007b, 30). And

6.3 Engaging with Characters: Between Primary and Secondary Intersubjectivity

143

again: “In seeing the actions and expressive movements of other persons, one already sees their meaning… Expressive behaviour is soaked with the meaning of the mind; it reveals the mind to us” (2007b, 32). What happens, however, when this kind of direct intersubjective engagement breaks down or is otherwise impossible? Hutto’s answer would be that we start telling stories about the behavior of other people, evaluating it in light of the norms and standards handed down to us by our culture. This narrative competency is, according to Hutto, the central mechanism behind secondary intersubjectivity. While I embrace this general view, I have also emphasized that storytelling need not be the only mechanism for understanding other people in intersubjective interaction. There is a third device that we can use to make sense of other people’s minds, and that takes on an added importance in readers’ encounters with fictional characters—namely, empathy as mental simulation. My strategy in subsection 5.3.3 has been to disentangle my use of this term from so-called “simulation theory” within the philosophy of mind: maybe we do not need to take another person’s perspective in order to understand what he or she is feeling (as simulation theorists would have it), since embodied intersubjectivity and folk psychological narratives can do most of the work alone. Yet the fact that we do not usually understand other people through mental simulation does not imply that we never adopt their perspective, or that we are incapable of the imaginative feat of simulating their experiences through what I have called “empathy.” Even if this kind of mental simulation is not the principal means whereby we come to understand other people’s mental states, it can still play a key role in engaging with characters through consciousness-enactment. How can the distinction between primary and secondary intersubjectivity be brought to bear on readers’ relationship with characters? Narrative-mediated secondary intersubjectivity seems to pose the least problem, since fictional characters are always tied to forms of “narrative scaffolding,” in Herman’s (2009d) term, both in the sense that their identities emerge through what I call “self-narratives” and in the sense that recipients place them in socio-cultural narrative frames (generic conventions, master plots, and so on). What about primary intersubjectivity, however? This would correspond to the process that I have labeled “consciousness-attribution,” wherein we attribute an experience to a character on the basis of (semiotic) signs that we take as expressive of his or her bodily experience. Finally, “consciousness-enactment” builds on real-world empathetic skills, since it allows interpreters to experience, with varying degrees of intensity, the mental state that they attribute to the character. What is especially interesting here is the way consciousness-attribution, consciousness-enactment, and self-narratives form a dynamic system (see Figure 5). We know that consciousness-attribution enters into a tension with conscious-

144

6 Fictional Consciousnesses: Self-Narratives and Intersubjectivity

Figure 5: Relations between consciousness-attribution, consciousness-enactment, and selfnarratives; consciousness-enactment mediates between primary intersubjectivity (which corresponds in narrative engagements to attributions of consciousness to fictional characters) and the secondary intersubjectivity of characters’ self-narratives.

ness-enactment, and that self-narratives can alter this balance by triggering the reader’s enactment of a character’s experiences. Because of its link with both consciousness-attribution and self-narratives, consciousness-enactment seems to straddle the divide between the embodied interactions associated with primary intersubjectivity and the socio-culturally penetrated layer of secondary intersubjectivity. In less abstract terms: consciousness-enactment allows readers to simulate both experiences that they would normally access through primary intersubjectivity and experiences which—falling within the outer, socio-cultural circle of the experiential background—tend to be negotiated through secondary intersubjectivity. In this way, consciousness-enactment can provide continuity within readers’ engagement with characters—and more generally with stories. This linking function is important in explaining why enacting a character’s experience at the bodily-perceptual level can have a feedback effect at the socio-cultural level of recipients’ background, as I will show in Part III.

6.4 Readers and Characters in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach: A Case Study My case study in this chapter—Ian McEwan’s 2007 novella, On Chesil Beach—will help me exemplify the points made in the previous sections. This short novel has already generated some interest within cognitive narrative theory (Herman 2009d; 2012) because of the way it intertwines the stories and the psychologies of its protagonists, Edward and Florence—a newlywed couple spending their first night in a hotel on the southern coast of England in the early 1960s. Both Herman’s interpretation of the novel and its theoretical underpinnings are consonant with the account of self-narratives I have offered in the previous pages: “the text—Herman writes— points to the need for narrative construction to make sense of the central conflict in

6.4 Readers and Characters in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach: A Case Study

145

the novel, namely, that between Edward’s and Florence’s attitudes toward the wedding night and all that it entails” (2009d, 61). I will try to further complicate this picture by looking at how the characters’ self-narratives interact with expressive devices that encourage readers to enact the characters’ experiences. McEwan’s novel is ideally positioned to illustrate how these processes work because it holds a mirror up to the reader by staging a tragic failure in the intersubjectivity of the protagonists. While calling forth empathetic and sympathetic responses on the part of readers, McEwan’s story foregrounds the characters’ inability to establish a harmonious interpersonal relationship. Through a sophisticated design, readers’ para-intersubjective⁴ engagement with the characters is therefore thrown into relief by the repeated misunderstandings that trouble the relationship between Florence and Edward. This translates itself into a series of ironic gestures on the part of the author—gestures through which McEwan attempts to create a complicity with the reader by signaling that they (i. e., McEwan and the reader) both know the characters better than they could have ever known each other. At the same time, however, the author manages to avoid too self-consciously ironic tones by convincingly presenting his characters’ communicative failure as the product of their social milieu, of the historical conjuncture, and—in particular—of their personalities: Florence’s complex about sex (perhaps tied to a childhood trauma) and Edward’s conventionality and unimaginativeness. The feat McEwan accomplishes is that his characters remain poised between the status of puppets in a semi-comic experiment that he carries out jointly with the reader, and their being creatures whose all-too-human interpersonal fiasco stirs the reader’s sympathies and emotions. It is on this subtle balance that the overall effect of McEwan’s novel depends. To unpack these ideas, let us consider a selection of passages where the relationship between Edward and Florence is shown to be shallow or defective. The very first sentences of the novel introduce this motif: “They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy” (2007, 3). The phrase “they lived in a time” expands the timescale of the novel, positioning the act of narration in a moment closer to the reader and to the contemporary world than to pre-sexual liberation England (the novel is set in 1963). The narrator’s distancing maneuver from Florence and Edward is the first of a long series of remarks aimed at putting the characters’ prob-

 The term “para-social interaction” has wide currency in communication studies, where it designates the one-way—and therefore para-social—relationship between media users and media figures such as characters and celebrities (see, e. g., Giles 2002).

146

6 Fictional Consciousnesses: Self-Narratives and Intersubjectivity

lems into perspective by establishing a complicity with readers, or at least with those readers who share with the narrator a set of cultural norms and values that were unavailable and even unthinkable during the characters’ wedding night. Following Rabinowitz (1977), we may call this group of readers a “narrative audience,” although it is difficult to draw a line between this audience and the “authorial” audience: since the only information we have about the narrator is that he lives in a (broadly speaking) contemporary world, we may be tempted to take his voice as a stand-in for the author’s. The impossibility of establishing a dialogue about sexuality, as signaled by the opening sentence, is the first hint of the broken or obstructed intersubjectivity of the characters—of the restraints and silences that are at the root of their interpersonal failure. But it is the second sentence that is even more revealing of the narrator’s attitude: the fact that “it is never easy” implies that it is still difficult to talk about these matters, even in the new cultural climate that the narrator shares with the audience. These words are ambiguously balanced between a compassionate and a condescending tone—an ambiguity that permeates the whole novel. Either way, the narrator’s stance toward the characters is markedly external and third-personal, making it likely that readers will engage in consciousness-attribution in this part of the novel. As the narration of Edward and Florence’s honeymoon dinner unfolds, however, these authorial comments are compensated by the extended use of consciousness tags and internal focalization, which tend to be correlated with consciousness-enactment. The upshot is that readers’ attitude toward the characters is likely to become more nuanced, mixing first-person (empathetic) and third-person elements. Crucially, readers’ increasing familiarity with Edward and Florence is accompanied by a crescendo in the interpersonal difficulties between them: during the dinner, the characters’ unease about the night they will spend together is so profound that it stifles the conversation between them, forcing them to listen to the sound of a news program coming from a television downstairs. Feeling all the awkwardness of the situation, Edward decides to take the initiative, but this leads to a series of misunderstandings: “Bound to world events by their own stupidity! It could not go on. It was time to act. Edward loosened his tie and firmly set down his knife and fork in parallel on his plate. ‘We could go downstairs and listen properly’” (2007, 32– 33). This passage nicely exemplifies Palmer’s (2004, 210 – 218) thought-action continuum by connecting the character’s thoughts (presented through free indirect discourse, or Cohn’s narrated monologue) first with his physical actions and then with his speech act. But once pronounced Edward’s words sound differently from what he had intended:

6.4 Readers and Characters in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach: A Case Study

147

He hoped he was being humorous, directing his sarcasm against them both, but his words emerged with surprising ferocity, and Florence blushed. She thought he was criticizing her for preferring the wireless to him, and before he could soften or lighten his remark she said hurriedly, “Or we could go and lie on the bed,” and nervously swiped an invisible hair from her forehead. To demonstrate how wrong he was, she was proposing what she knew he most wanted and she dreaded. (2007, 33)

What Edward had meant as an ironic remark—one that would break the ice of their anxieties—is read by Florence as a bitter accusation, prompting her to “raise the stakes” by proposing that they go to their bedroom. There is a double irony here: if Edward obtains what he wants, it is only because of the mismatch between his speech act and his intention—it is only because, misunderstanding his words, Florence sacrifices her own feelings in an attempt to please him. In turn, Florence’s proposal gives rise to an even larger misunderstanding on Edward’s part, since—we find out—he is thrilled at the fact “that it was Florence who had suggested lying on the bed. Her changed status had set her free” (2007, 34). Edward could not be more wrong—and readers know it because the author’s skilful handling of consciousness tags and mind style invites them to attribute to each character experiences of which the other remains unaware. Another misunderstanding arises in the long internally focalized passage that follows. Here the narrator invites interpreters to enact Florence’s disturbing experience of kissing—or, rather, being forcefully kissed by—Edward. Readers have already been primed by the narrator’s remarks on Florence’s overwhelming fear of being “penetrated”; when they engage with the detailed account of the kiss scene, they may easily empathize with her as she feels Edward’s “tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her” (2007, 35). This close-up description of the kiss goes on for almost three pages, in an emotional climax that culminates in Florence’s extreme thought: “she could only shrink and concentrate on not struggling, not gagging, not panicking. If she was sick into his mouth, was one wild thought, their marriage would be instantly over” (2007, 36). The impact of this passage depends on its transfiguring what is—for most readers—an innocent kiss between two lovers into a harrowing experience where Florence’s personal space is brutally invaded by Edward. To put the same point otherwise: McEwan’s description draws on readers’ familiarity with what should be a romantic, loving gesture but defamiliarizes it by inviting them to empathize with Florence’s plight.⁵

 On the relationship between empathy for characters and defamiliarization, see Hakemulder (2000, 23).

148

6 Fictional Consciousnesses: Self-Narratives and Intersubjectivity

During all this, Edward is utterly unaware of his wife’s feelings. When finally she does give a sign that betrays her serious discomfort, the focalization switches to Edward—inviting readers to simulate his own thoughts and feelings. But these point to another misapprehension, which produces an ironic anti-climax to Florence’s emotional turmoil: “When he heard her moan, Edward knew that his happiness was almost complete. He had the impression of delightful weightlessness, of standing several inches clear of the ground, so that he towered pleasingly over her” (2007, 37– 38). This failure of the characters’ primary, embodied intersubjectivity marks the beginning of a series of even more catastrophic misunderstandings. For example, we have another comical moment when Edward gives Florence a small hint of sexual pleasure by stroking her inner thigh. Again, the narrator notes that this was the result of pure chance rather than of Edward’s expertise; it is not difficult to detect a touch of restrained irony in the narrator’s accurate rendition of events that occur at an almost microscopic scale: “It must have been accidental, because [Edward] could not have known that as his hand palpated her leg, the tip of his thumb pushed against the lone hair that curled out free from under her panties, rocking it back and forth, stirring in the root, along the nerve of the follicle, a mere shadow of a sensation” (2007, 107). The subsequent pages describe how this sensual pleasure begins to unfold in Florence’s mind, until she comes, for the first time, to associate “her love for Edward … with a definable physical sensation,” forming “the beginnings of desire” (2007, 108). This moment would seem to bode well for the characters’ first fullfledged sexual encounter, but again Edward does not take advantage of the opportunity—no doubt, because of his superficial knowledge of female sexuality, as he himself admits: “The perturbation [in Florence’s leg] beneath his hand could easily be a telltale sign that anyone could have told him how to recognize and respond to—some kind of precursor to female orgasm, perhaps” (2007, 110). Edward’s guess is correct, as both the narrator and the audience know behind his back, but his next thought turns him into an even easier target for ridicule: Equally, it could be nerves [to cause the spasm in Florence’s leg]. There was no telling, and he was relieved when it began to subside. He remembered a time, in a vast cornfield outside Ewelme, when he sat at the controls of a combine harvester, having boasted to the farmer that he was competent, and then did not dare touch a single lever. He simply did not know enough. (2007, 110 – 111)

The juxtaposition of Florence’s body and a “combine harvester” is, of course, hardly flattering, and most readers will take it as a sign of the characters’ narrow-mindedness, or at least of his tendency to engage in inappropriate and off-target analogies. But, more importantly, the mention of the harvester points to the complete disconnection in the emotional and bodily experiences of Edward and Florence—a discon-

6.4 Readers and Characters in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach: A Case Study

149

nection that gives rise to a comparison that is hard not to impute to McEwan’s implicit irony. Appropriately enough, the scene’s tragicomic vein bursts open when Florence’s touch causes Edward to reach a premature orgasm: How could she have known what a terrible mistake she was making? Had she pulled on the wrong thing? Had she gripped too tight? He gave out a wail, a complicated series of agonized, rising vowels, the sort of sound she had heard once in a comedy film when a waiter, weaving this way and that, appeared to be about to drop a towering pile of soup plates. (2007, 130)

In this case, the comparison has explicitly slapstick tones, revealing the ironic undercurrent that flows through the whole scene. However, it will not do to present a too one-sided picture of McEwan’s treatment of Florence and Edward, since his implicit irony is carefully counterbalanced by what appears as a genuine— and sympathetic—interest in the characters. Indeed, while Edward and Florence slide toward their botched sexual encounter, the narrator weaves in and out of their past lives, reconstructing their social milieu, their upbringing, and the circumstances in which they met. By intertwining the characters’ self-narratives, McEwan facilitates readers’ empathetic engagement with Florence and Edward in the wedding night scene that occupies the foreground of On Chesil Beach. Interpreters become more involved with the characters because they have the feeling of knowing better the unique combination of historical, socio-cultural factors, and personal experiences that has shaped their identity. At the same time, however, these self-narratives warn readers that the characters’ interpersonal troubles extend beyond the embodied level of primary intersubjectivity, affecting both their empathetic skills and their capability to engage with the other’s life narrative. We learn that Florence, a passionate violinist, cherishes the dream of playing with her quartet in the Wigmore Hall. And yet, when she shows Edward through that prestigious venue, he fails to empathize with her: “She led him out onto the stage and asked him to imagine the thrill and terror of stepping out to play before a discerning audience. He could not, though he did not say so” (2007, 152).⁶ More generally, the dialogue between the characters appears to be so shallow and conventional that they are never seen exchanging the self-narratives that the narrator puts on display for readers’ benefit. In yet another misunderstanding, Florence thinks: “[Edward] had always been reticent about the girls he had made love to, but she did not doubt the wealth of his experience” (2007, 126). When she finally realizes that they “barely knew each other, and never could be-

 Cf. Herman (2009d, 60) for a different, but convergent, reading of this passage.

150

6 Fictional Consciousnesses: Self-Narratives and Intersubjectivity

cause of the blanket of companionable near-silence that smothered their differences” (2007, 180) it is far too late for the couple to reconcile. Yet, by highlighting the impossibility of an intersubjective engagement between the characters, the text increases readers’ awareness of their own intersubjective access to the characters’ experiences. This process has two steps: in the first, interpreters are invited—through a number of textual strategies, from internal focalization to the deployment of the characters’ self-narratives—to enact the experiences of both Florence and Edward, shuttling back and forth between them in following the author’s cues. This is made especially evident by passages like the description of the kiss, which works by defamiliarizing readers’ experiential background via their imaginative, simulative engagement with Florence. All in all, the reader has the illusion of being more intimate with each of the characters than they themselves could ever be because of their social and historical milieu and because of their respective life stories. In the second step, interpreters’ closeness to the characters is balanced by distancing devices. We have already seen two of these devices: the comical effect of some scenes and the constant reminders of the cultural values and norms that the narrator shares with readers behind the characters’ back. But McEwan seems to implement two additional strategies that invite readers to maintain an ironic distance: one is thematic and consists in repeated allusions to the spatial backdrop of the wedding night, and in particular to the sea that rumbles within hearing distance from the hotel, serving as a counterpoise to the characters’ struggles. Edward himself considers this idea: “The sound of waves collapsing onto the shore at regular intervals broke in on his thoughts, as though suddenly switched on, and filled him with weariness; the relentless laws and processes of the physical world, of moon and tides, in which he generally took little interest, were not remotely altered by his situation” (2007, 159 – 160). It could be argued that the sea performs here the same symbolic function as in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse ⁷—one of the classical modernist texts that McEwan’s novella often self-consciously harks back to. The rhythmic motion of the waves hints at a temporality in comparison to which Florence’s and Edward’s anxieties—and their whole life trajectory—look minuscule: “thousands of years of pounding storms had sifted and graded the size of pebbles along the eighteen miles of beach” (2007, 23). This elemental temporality seems to put into perspective the characters’ vicissitudes, functioning as a distancing device that may reduce the intensity of readers’ emotional engagement with the characters.

 I have explored this aspect of Woolf’s novel—the conflict between human efforts and the temporality of nature—in Caracciolo (2010).

6.4 Readers and Characters in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach: A Case Study

151

The other distancing device—the use of counterfactual scenarios or “the disnarrated,” in Gerald Prince’s (1988) phrase—is more ambiguous. We find an especially striking example of this strategy in the novel’s ending, where the narrator suggests that there was a chance for Florence and Edward to get back together, but they did not seize it: “[Edward] did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as [Florence] ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back” (2007, 203). What is interesting about this finale is the way it is precariously suspended between a sentimental and an ironic interpretation. On the first reading, the narrator reinforces readers’ sympathetic attitude toward the characters—and therefore their affective involvement—through what we may think of as the emotional “script” of the lost opportunity: there is a possibility for a happy ending, but the characters do not see it and find themselves in a dysphoric situation—which in turn elicits an emotional response from readers. Yet the counterfactual ending could also be interpreted as “laying bare the device” and revealing the author’s control over the characters’ narrative: by telling readers that the story could also have ended otherwise—although it did not— McEwan appears to attract attention to himself and to his role as puppeteer. Are Florence and Edward part of a metafictional experiment with intersubjectivity, or are they full-fledged fictional beings with whom interpreters should empathize? Is the impossibility of a dialogue between the characters the inevitable outcome of the historical, socio-cultural, and personal factors that the narrator so explicitly identifies and explores? Or is it rather McEwan himself who stands in the way? McEwan’s novel draws its force from these and other, equally unanswerable questions. But this effect is made possible in the first place by the interplay between the characters’ self-narratives and the other textual strategies that promote readers’ intersubjective engagement with Florence and Edward. All in all, McEwan seems to play with the dynamic system represented in Figure 5: through the use of self-narratives, he involves interpreters in the characters’ bodily, perceptual, and emotional experiences, thus melding together primary and secondary intersubjectivity. At the same time, however, he controls consciousness-enactment through implicit irony and other distancing devices that invite recipients to assume a third-person stance toward the characters (consciousness-attribution). The fundamental ambiguity of On Chesil Beach depends, then, on the equilibrium it establishes between the mechanisms whereby readers can engage with characters’ experiences: namely, consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment.

Part III: Embodied Engagements and Their Effects

[It] is precisely [our] automatic reactions to words themselves that enable those who manipulate words to control thought on a mass scale. William S. Burroughs, The Job

7 Embodiment, Virtuality, and Meaning in Readers’ Reconstruction of Narrative Space This chapter explores a particular configuration of the experiential network— one in which stories channel higher-order meanings through readers’ imaginative engagement with the text at the level of bodily-perceptual experience. This is, therefore, a striking case of cross-level interaction between the two directions of flow of the network of experientiality (see subsection 2.2.3): by leveraging interpreters’ bodily-perceptual experience (the inner circles of the experiential background), stories can elicit an evaluative response at the outer, socio-cultural level. I would like to illustrate this point by focusing on the phenomenon I call the reader’s imaginative projection into fictional worlds, and in particular on the role of such projective acts in the reconstruction of narrative space. The entanglement of socio-cultural meanings with bodily-perceptual experience in readers’ interaction with narrative space reveals that embodiment is closely bound up with socio-cultural practices. In turn, this correlation opens up an opportunity to reflect on recent—and not so recent—theorizations of embodiment within both the humanities and second-generation cognitive science. Bodies have been under the lens of humanistic scrutiny for some decades— when cognitive scientists were still grappling with the idea that the mind is a piece of software running on a piece of hardware, the brain (see subsection 0.4.1). In 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty published his Phenomenology of Perception (2002), a book that is now quoted at length in any serious attempt to come to terms with the ways in which perceptual systems are embodied. After that, phenomenological investigation gave way first to structuralism and then to poststructuralist thought, with the second wave of French theorists discussing the body as disciplined by societies, and finally with feminist and queer approaches to embodiment. At the heyday of “social constructionism,” as it came to be known, Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the lived experience of the body, taxed with essentialism, was replaced by the view that people’s bodies are shaped by societal, political, and—ultimately—discursive forces. These are sweeping generalizations, no doubt, but they still reflect with some accuracy the way those positions have been received and evaluated during the slow ebbing of poststructuralist thought (see Slingerland 2008, 74– 98). Anthropologist Thomas Csordas, for example, argues: It has come to the point where the text metaphor has virtually … gobbled up the body itself— certainly we have all heard phrases like “the body as text,” “the inscription of culture on the

156

7 Embodiment, Virtuality, and Meaning

body,” “reading the body.” I would go as far as to assert that for many contemporary scholars the text metaphor has ceased to be a metaphor at all, and is taken quite literally. (1999, 146)

Csordas was writing in 1999, in a critical historical moment, when poststructuralist thought still held some sway but at the same time neo-phenomenological and embodied approaches were making their first steps within cognitive science. In the same collection where Csordas’s essay appeared—a collection titled Perspectives on Embodiment—we find an essay by one of the main proponents of embodied cognition, Hubert Dreyfus. His piece, co-authored with Stuart Dreyfus, is significantly titled “The Challenge of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment for Cognitive Science” (1999). A few pages earlier, in a thorough study of the body as a site of resistance in Foucault and Bourdieu, David Couzens Hoy (1999) provides a neat statement of the philosophy of embodiment that was— and perhaps still is—mainstream in the humanities. Discussing the possibility that there might be bodily “invariants”—structures and patterns of bodily interaction shared by all human beings regardless of their culture—Hoy concedes: It is not necessary for Foucault to deny that there are invariants. Surely all human beings, whatever their culture or time, have felt pain. The more interesting question is how they have interpreted the experience of pain. And maybe the experience of pain is so conditioned by the cultural-historical interpretations of it that there is little more that can be said about it than that it is generally aversive. The point is that invariance need not be denied altogether, but the very universality of such invariants may be so thin as to make them uninteresting, or too thin to answer the more interesting critical questions. (1999, 7)

If such pronouncements have become increasingly problematic in the years since the publication of Hoy’s essay, it is also because of the arguments articulated by philosophers and cognitive scientists working within the embodied cognition hypothesis. As we have seen in section 0.4 and throughout this book, these arguments include those developed by psycholinguists Lawrence Barsalou and Rolf Zwaan, cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, philosophers Andy Clark, Shaun Gallagher, and Alva Noë, and even AI scientist Rodney Brooks. It is important to stress, however, that this work does not deny that a full story about human embodiment would have to take on board the socio-cultural and political elements on which poststructuralist thinkers were concentrating.¹ I would like to emphasize this point, as it is one of the most misunderstood aspects of cognitive approaches to the humanities—and of cognitive science in

 See Zunshine’s (2010) edited collection for an attempt to bring together cognitive approaches to narrative and cultural studies.

7 Embodiment, Virtuality, and Meaning

157

general. The level at which cognitive theories of embodiment operate is, surely, that of what Hoy calls the “invariants” of our bodily experience: the neural wiring, sensory apparatuses, and sensorimotor capacities that we tend to share with our conspecifics, falling into the inner region of the experiential background. These are invariants, of course, only from a human perspective, for we all know that the biological substratum of our bodies is subject to another kind of history—evolutionary and not cultural. But the reason why I take issue with Hoy is that these invariants seem to me far from unimportant, or uninteresting. Indeed, the intuition behind cognitive approaches to embodiment—the intuition, at any rate, that we can draw from them—is that our fleshy, living body is as much a product of our cultures as a constraint on them. When we talk about grasping the meaning of a sentence, for instance, we are modeling a cognitive process on a physical gesture. Other languages may not use this particular metaphor, but the pervasiveness of bodily metaphors for conceptual activities shows that the sensorimotor possibilities of our body inform human cultures almost to the same extent as cultures inform our body (see Gibbs 2005b; Johnson 2010; and subsection 0.4.2 above). To capture this complexity, Mark Johnson (2008) isolates five dimensions of human embodiment: the biological dimension, comprising the largely unconscious biochemical processes that sustain us; the ecological dimension, or the body in its relation with the environment; the phenomenological dimension, or the way we experience our body and its states; the social dimension, or the body as implicated in intersubjective encounters with other bodies; and finally the cultural dimension, or the body as a result of cultural learning and conditioning. These levels of analysis are, Johnson argues, irreducible to one another; but they are also deeply intertwined, since every one of them depends in important ways on the others. How does one go about examining all these aspects of embodiment in their interaction and interrelation? The answer that I outline in this chapter is that Johnson’s dimensions come together in our lived experience of the body in socio-cultural contexts—and that our engagement with narrative provides one of such contexts. It is interesting that in recent times both embodied cognitive science and some areas of the humanities have turned to phenomenology as a means of bridging the gap between the materiality of our bodies and their socio-cultural situatedness. On the one hand, we know that embodied, second-generation cognitive science explicitly acknowledges its debt to phenomenological thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty (see subsection 0.4.3). On the other hand, feminist thought has been going back to its phenomenological roots in reaction to poststructuralist views of the body as discourse (see Lennon 2010). For instance, Iris Marion Young—entering into a dialogue with Toril Moi (1999)—ar-

158

7 Embodiment, Virtuality, and Meaning

gues for the utility of the concept of “lived body.” “Gender—she writes—is … lived through individual bodies, always as personal experiential response and not as a set of attributes that individuals have in common” (2005, 26). Along similar lines, Csordas sees in bodily experience a meeting ground for biological processes and socio-cultural meanings: whereas poststructuralist thought tended to reduce experience, including the lived experience of one’s body, to representation and discourse, his own “cultural phenomenology” seeks to explore “embodiment as the existential ground of culture and self” (1999, 154). These ideas tie in with my diagram of the experiential background and with my claim that experience is, at the same time, both a unified field and a highly diversified one (see subsection 2.2.2). While having its roots in simple forms of embodied engagement with the world, experience is profoundly shaped by emotional reactions, cognitive processes, and socio-culturally produced meanings. It is no accident that Johnson’s five dimensions of embodiment span the whole range of our experiential background, from biological processes to socio-cultural practices. In a way, then, it could be argued that the body has a pivotal role in bringing different levels of the experiential background into contact and interaction. From the standpoint of cognitive linguistics, philosopher Peter Woelert (2011) comes to similar conclusions. Embracing the Husserlian view of the body as a “site of conversion,” Woelert argues that our body allows for communication between basic, bodily experiences and our conceptual apparatus. I would go even farther than that and suggest that embodiment is a reminder of the living connection between our physical bodies and the body of our culture. This also explains why I do not see cognitive approaches to embodiment as fundamentally opposed to the humanistic approaches that preceded them. On the contrary, I believe that going forward analysts should aim to mesh together these two lines of investigation. Hence, this chapter seeks to explore the ways in which readers’ familiarity with bodily and perceptual experience can be used by authors to bring into play higher-order, socio-cultural meanings and values. My terminology for this process is that stories can draw on the deeper circles of the experiential background in order to produce a “feedback effect” on the outer circle of socio-cultural practices, inviting readers to respond to the text at this level. In particular, I am interested in how this dynamic interacts with the tension between consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment. As we know, readers may be invited to enact the experiences of fictional characters, causing an overlap between their own story-driven experience and the experience that they attribute to characters. In this chapter I will look at another, related aspect of consciousness-enactment: how it can prompt readers to take on, in their imaginative engagement with the story, the fictional body of a character. For the reasons that

7.1 From Mental Simulation to Fictionalization

159

I will discuss in the next section, I call this phenomenon “fictionalization of the reader’s virtual body.” In section 7.2 I will examine two cases of fictionalization. In one, a description from Émile Zola’s 1885 novel, Germinal, readers are invited to align their virtual body with the fictionally actual body of a character. In the other, a passage from E. M. Forster’s 1924 novel, A Passage to India, the fictionally actual body belongs to someone who is more a tourist than a permanent inhabitant of the fictional world—an anonymous visitor. Both strategies of fictionalization can be used by story producers to facilitate readers’ engagement with the socio-cultural meanings implicated by texts. In section 7.3 I turn to two texts in which the fictionalization of the reader’s virtual body is more or less explicitly denied. The first text is a passage from one of the interludes of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a novel that was originally published in 1931 and that provides a prototypical instance of Monika Fludernik’s (1996) “figuralization”—the reader’s projection into the storyworld in the absence of fictional characters. The second text is an “aperspectival” description from Gustave Flaubert’s 1869 novel, L’éducation sentimentale. Section 7.4 presents the results of these case studies by placing all the passages on a scale of fictionalization: at one end of the scale the overlap between the reader’s virtual body and a fictional body is maximal; at the other end, fictionalization becomes impossible and the reader’s body is a purely virtual presence. Finally, section 7.5 focuses on a text—Samuel Beckett’s novella Company—that uses fictionalization in a very special way: by having readers imaginatively project themselves into the body of a character, Beckett invites them to dig below linguistic and narrative conceptions of the self in order to explore its bodily sources.

7.1 From Mental Simulation to Fictionalization As discussed previously, readers’ engagement with stories at the bodily-perceptual level relies on a simulative mechanism, whereby readers imagine some experiences on the basis of the text and their own experiential background.² This tension crisscrosses the other tension between undergoing an experience in the first person (consciousness-enactment) and attributing it to a character (consciousness-attribution). But there is another variable—closely related to consciousness-enactment—that I would like to introduce in this section. The body

 Nearly all attempts to investigate the embodiment of reading make appeal to mental simulations (see Esrock 2004; Wojciehowski and Gallese 2011; Kuzmičová 2012). See also my discussion of this concept in Caracciolo (2013a).

160

7 Embodiment, Virtuality, and Meaning

enjoys the somewhat special status of being both the center of our experience and an object-like entity in the shared world. Therefore, enacting a character’s bodily-perceptual experience can bring about another overlap: that between the fictionally actual body of a character and what I will call readers’ “virtual body,” giving interpreters the illusion of being transported to the fictional world. My term for this phenomenon is “fictionalization of the reader’s virtual body.” The relation between consciousness-enactment and the fictionalization of the reader’s virtual body can be described as follows: enacting a character’s experience at the bodily-perceptual level can prompt readers to imaginatively project themselves into the character’s fictional body. This phenomenon is clearly related to what has been described as “being transported” by Richard J. Gerrig (1993, 2– 17), “fictional recentering” by Marie-Laure Ryan (2001, 103 – 105), or “deictic shift” by Duchan, Bruder, and Hewitt (1995) and David Herman (2002, 271– 274). For instance, Ryan defines her idea of “fictional recentering” in these terms: “consciousness relocates itself to another world and … reorganizes the entire universe of being around this virtual reality” (2001, 104). No doubt, these authors are on the right track, but they seem to stop short of examining the phenomenon I have in mind. For the reasons stated in the foregoing chapters, I have serious doubts that consciousness can “relocate itself,” since consciousness is not a spatio-temporally locatable entity. Even when an organism moves to a different sector of an environment, its consciousness cannot be said to move, but only to change as a function of the affordances of the environment. Consciousness is not a thing—it is a qualitative “feel” that emerges from an embodied and evaluative exploration of an environment. Thus, I would modify Ryan’s formulation by arguing that narrative texts draw on the reader’s memories of bodily movements (experiential traces) as part of the process of co-constructing fictional worlds. It is readers’ body, not their consciousness, that can be imaginatively transported to the storyworld. To understand why, we will have to consider again the question of the structural resemblance between imagination and perception. According to the prevailing view, mental imagery uses part of the same neural resources of perception (Kosslyn, Ganis, and Thompson 2001). This is shown by the so-called Perky effect: we are significantly less effective at processing visual stimuli when they are presented in the same part of our visual field where we are instructed to imagine something (see Bergen et al. 2007). The interference of mental imagery on visual perception suggests that these two psychophysiological processes are directly connected. Yet if mental images rely on our perceptual system, they must be subject to the same constraints of perception, and thus have the same internal structure. If perception is embodied (as argued by the enactivists—see chapter 4), then mental imagery must be embodied too; it must be

7.1 From Mental Simulation to Fictionalization

161

deeply rooted in our real body and in memories of our past sensorimotor interactions with the environment. Even when readers are required to make a “deictic shift” (that is, to imagine another world with a different set of space-time coordinates), they bring along a virtual counterpart of their real body. What does talking about the virtuality of our bodies mean or imply, however? The phrase “virtual bodies” triggers associations with cyborgs and posthumanism (see Hayles 1999). What is perhaps less known is that Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body hinges on the idea of “virtuality.” It is not the position we occupy in geometrical space that delimits our body, Merleau-Ponty explains, but the intentional threads linking us to the world—the actions and movements that we could perform. Hence the body as a “virtual center of action” (2002, 121, translation modified). This means that our body is defined by its virtual access to the world— a formulation that captures neatly the essence of our interaction with both the real world and fictional worlds. As discussed in chapter 4, Alva Noë’s (2004) enactivist account of perception similarly hinges on virtuality: we have no need to store all the visual details of the world—he argues—because they are already in the world, ready to be retrieved by simple eye and body movements. Likewise, the comprehension of a narrative text grants readers virtual access to a fictional world by drawing on their familiarity with the sensorimotor patterns that accompany perception (through the activation of experiential traces). A few clarifications on the term “virtual,” as I will use it in this chapter, are needed. Following Pierre Lévy (1998) and Marie-Laure Ryan (2001), I suggest distinguishing between the real versus the fictional on the one hand, and the actual versus the virtual on the other. The distinction between the real and the fictional has to do with the difference between everyday contexts of physical and social interaction and the imaginary domains created by fictional storytelling practices. By contrast, the actual is what is thought to be true within a world—be it real or fictional. Finally, the virtual is the potential, what could be true but is not (yet). At the beginning of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for example, the death of Hamlet’s father, the king of Denmark, is actual, while Hamlet’s revenge on his uncle is only virtual. The relationship between the actual and the virtual is dynamic: virtuality, Lévy (1998) argues, always contains a tension toward actualization. Yet readers can never be actually transported to a fictional world. Their presence is bound to remain virtual: the sense of “being there” that some immersive novels give readers is, it seems to me, an illusion founded on the sense that they could be there. Thus I will speak of a “virtual” body only in order to capture the ontological boundary that divides fictional worlds from the real world, and how reading enables interpreters to visit another world without physically leaving their own. Through imagination and mental simulation, our real body can be used to bridge the ontological gap between reality and fiction; its virtual-

162

7 Embodiment, Virtuality, and Meaning

ity consists precisely in the way it can be detached from the here and now, and projected into another here and now. Of course, arguing that the embodiment of readers’ imaginings always matters would be overstating the case. Perhaps in most cases it does not make any difference. And yet, I would say that, when it does, it can have important consequences on readers’ responses to texts at the socio-cultural level. Here I will explore this problem in connection with readers’ imaginative engagement with narrative spaces—an engagement in which, I will argue, the embodiment of their imaginings becomes especially evident either through its overlap or through the lack of overlap with fictionally actual bodies. Indeed, given the structural resemblance between our virtual access to the real world and our virtual access to fictional worlds (see chapter 3), readers’ reconstruction of narrative space is mediated by the same cognitive strategies they adopt to apprehend real space. In what follows, I will refer to two projective cognitive strategies (see Herman 2002, 280 – 281), labeled by cognitive scientists “gaze tour” on the one hand, and “body tour” (or “walking tour,” or “route”) on the other. Both these spatial frameworks—known respectively as “relative” and “intrinsic” (Tversky 1996; Levinson 2003)—rely on the presence of a perceiving subject; but whereas in the relative system the perceiver’s body stands still, and his or her eyes roam around the scene (gaze tour), in the intrinsic system it is the perceiver’s body that moves through space (body tour).

7.2 Fictional Anchors: Forster’s Deputy Focalizor and “Strict” Focalization According to Rolf Zwaan’s (2004) “Immersed Experiencer Framework,” in order to comprehend narrative texts, interpreters need to construe them—that is, to process them so that they can be mentally simulated. A “construal” typically includes: a continuous period of time, a spatial region, a perspective (defined as “the spatio-temporal relation between the experiencer and the situation” [Zwaan 2004, 43]), some referents, and those referents’ features. Of special interest here is that, according to Zwaan, perspective is “necessarily and therefore routinely encoded during comprehension” (2004, 58), even when it is not explicitly mentioned by the text. This means that readers always simulate narrative space from the position they occupy in their imagination. The degree to which this position is encoded by the text varies considerably, as recent focalization theory has shown. Manfred Jahn (1999a), for instance, distinguishes between “strict” focalization, which employs an individuated reflector-character, and “ambient” focalization, where the reader can choose between a range of different perspectives, all more or less compatible with the text.

7.2 Fictional Anchors: Forster’s Deputy Focalizor and “Strict” Focalization

163

Of course, the presence of a fictionally actual body can help the reader position his or her virtual body within the fictional world, giving rise to the phenomenon I term “fictionalization of the reader’s body.” However, fictionalization is not a matter of presence/absence, but can rather be understood as a “scalar phenomenon” (Herman 2002, 326), as I hope to make clear with the diagram I will discuss in section 7.4 (Figure 7). At one end of the scale, the reader’s virtual body is fully fictionalized: readers are encouraged to anchor their virtual body to a fictionally actual one. At the other end, the text does not cue readers to anchor their virtual body to a stand-in of this sort. The fictionally actual bodies into which readers are invited to project themselves can be of two kinds. Usually, they belong to fictional characters. Sometimes, however, the reader’s embodiment is mediated by a persona (typically an anonymous visitor, or traveler), who has access to the fictional world without being a character of the story. I will suggest that these fictional personas (“deputy focalizors” is my term for them) allow for the highest degree of fictionalization of the reader’s virtual body, even higher than full-blown characters. This is why I begin my analysis with the following excerpt from Forster’s A Passage to India, where a deputy focalizor is evoked: The caves are readily described. A tunnel eight feet long, five feet high, three feet wide, leads to a circular chamber about twenty feet in diameter. This arrangement occurs again and again throughout the group of hills, and this is all, this is a Marabar cave. Having seen one such cave, having seen two, having seen three, four, fourteen, twenty-four, the visitor returns to Chandrapore uncertain whether he has had an interesting experience or a dull one or any experience at all. He finds it difficult to discuss the caves, or to keep them apart in his mind, for the pattern never varies, and no carving, not even a bees’ nest or a bat, distinguishes one from another. Nothing, nothing attaches to them, and their reputation—for they have one—does not depend upon human speech. It is as if the surrounding plain or the passing birds have taken upon themselves to exclaim “Extraordinary!” and the word has taken root in the air, and been inhaled by mankind. They are very dark caves. Even when they are open towards the sun, very little light penetrates down the entrance tunnel into the circular chamber. There is little to see, and no eye to see it, until the visitor arrives for his five minutes, and strikes a match. Immediately another flame rises in the depths of the rock and moves towards the surface like an imprisoned spirit; the walls of the circular chamber have been most marvellously polished. The two flames approach and strive to unite, but cannot, because one of them breathes air, the other stone. (1989, 138)

It is important to note that the caves are not readily described at all (in the novel, the description goes on for another half-page). Initially, the narrator throws a few numbers at the reader: the space of the caves is hastily measured and reduced to geometrical shapes (a straight tunnel, a circular chamber). Then, he adds—ready

164

7 Embodiment, Virtuality, and Meaning

to move on—that the caves are all like that. But this brief account gives us only a very vague sense of “what it is like” to visit the caves, and if the description had stopped before the appearance of the unnamed visitor, it would have been legitimate to regard it as rather uninteresting. As Marie-Laure Ryan argues in a study of how people map out the spatial dimensions of storyworlds, “people read for the plot and not for the map” (2003, 138), tending to ignore the spatial setting when it does not add to the meanings of a text. If, in contrast, this description appears particularly interesting, it is because the narrator hesitates and introduces an anonymous visitor. By engaging with the visitor’s bodily-perceptual experience, readers get the experiential “feel” of exploring this space, which was stripped down to the minimum—that is to say, left entirely to their imagination—in the first part of the description. Furthermore, there is no doubt that the visitor has direct access to the fictional world of A Passage to India, and this is why this description cannot be regarded as an instance of Herman’s “hypothetical focalization,” which entails an explicit “appeal to a hypothetical witness, a counterfactual focalizor” (2002, 311). The character’s visit to the caves is neither hypothetical nor counterfactual. On the contrary, it should be understood as fictionally real, since the reader has to rely on the anonymous character’s experience in order to make sense of Adela Quested’s subsequent visit to the caves (more on this soon). It should be underscored, however, that this character is a stranger to the story of Forster’s novel. He is instrumental in conveying a clear sense of the experience of visiting the Marabar caves, but the narrator dismisses him as soon as his purpose is achieved. Thus, past the point where my quotation ends, the second paragraph of the description concludes: “The cave is dark again, like all the caves” (1989, 139). And the visitor vanishes, never to be seen again. This final disappearance of the anonymous visitor takes on a deeper meaning in light of the distinctive character of his experience in the caves. Moreover, I submit that readers can fully grasp this higher-order, interpretive meaning only through their enactment of the visitor’s bodily-perceptual experience, and in particular through the overlap between their virtual body and the visitor’s fictionally actual one. Above I suggested that the fictionalization of the reader’s body leads to an increased experiential “feel.” It is therefore ironic that Forster’s unnamed visitor should wonder whether visiting the caves amounts to an experience at all. But this is precisely the point: what the visitor discovers is the irreducibility of that experience to a linguistic and narrative account. The caves, and the experience that they offer, seem to defy human comprehension, just as they seem to slip from the grasp of human language: “their reputation … does not depend upon human speech.” This ineffability explains why the Marabar caves cannot be mapped, as the narrator had tried to do at first: the experience they offer

7.2 Fictional Anchors: Forster’s Deputy Focalizor and “Strict” Focalization

165

has to be enacted by the reader through a fictional persona. But what does happen in the caves? The two flames “that approach and strive to unite, but cannot” are deeply symbolic of the relations between the British and the Indian population. They point to the conclusion of the novel, where the narrator says: “the horses didn’t want [the friendship between Fielding and Aziz, Europeans and Indians] … the earth didn’t want it … the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House … they didn’t want it” (Forster 1989, 316). Actually, it is remarkable that the caves do not appear in this list, since it is because of Adela Quested’s visit to the caves that the relationship between the British and the indigenous population deteriorates. Having entered one of the caves alone, Adela unjustly accuses Aziz of sexually assaulting her. We know absolutely nothing about Adela’s visit to the caves; it is a sort of blind spot, or gap, in the narration. But we do know something about the kind of experience she has gone through; and we know it because—by the time we read of Adela’s visit and its grave consequences—we have already undergone that experience ourselves, as readers, through the mediation of the anonymous visitor. How can this experience be characterized? In a few words, it is an experience of nothingness, a brush with the non-meaning that lies at the heart of Forster’s novel. In our closest encounter with this core of non-meaning we learn that, “whatever is said” inside one of the caves, “the same monotonous noise replies … ‘Boum’ is the sound as far the human alphabet can express it, or ‘bou-oum,’ or ‘ou-boum’—utterly dull” (1989, 159). This strange phenomenon is highly indicative of the threat the caves pose to human language. But the threat does not stop here, since the utter negativity of the caves seems to expand in all directions, swallowing up the world: “one of them is … a bubble-shaped cave that has neither ceiling nor floor, and mirrors its own darkness in every direction infinitely” (1989, 139). To return to our anonymous visitor and his sudden disappearance, it is as if he were swallowed up by the caves. Further, the expanding nothingness is not meant to stop at the boundaries of the fictional world. It invites readers to respond to the text at the level of their socio-cultural background by using the non-meaning associated with the caves as lever for an interpretation of the whole novel. On such an interpretation, it is this core of non-meaning—conveyed to the reader through the overlap between his or her own virtual body and the visitor’s—that tilts the storyworld of the novel toward its deeply pessimistic conclusion about the impossibility of a dialogue between the natives and the colonizers. Although readers could arrive at this interpretation through other, more conceptual routes, their enactment of the bodily-perceptual experience of the visitor may encourage them to attach a deep significance to the Marabar caves. This effect is magnified by Forster’s use of a character who does not have a distinctive identity of his own, since he cannot influence the course of the story. Indeed, I would

166

7 Embodiment, Virtuality, and Meaning

make a distinction between enacting the experience of a full-fledged fictional character and enacting the experience of Forster’s anonymous traveler. We know that consciousness-attribution is integral part of consciousness-enactment. However, this attribution is less conspicuous when readers engage with a character whose only narrative function is to stand in for their own embodied presence in the storyworld (and this is why I call this character a “deputy focalizor”). Therefore, readers’ bodily-perceptual identification with deputy focalizors can become stronger than with other characters. Another way to put this point is to say that the reader and the visitor share a defining feature: they are granted imaginative or perceptual access to the fictional world, but cannot act on it. This similarity invites readers to enact the visitor’s experience without attaching too much weight to consciousness-attribution; the upshot is that his body becomes a more direct fictionalization of the reader’s virtual body than a character’s could be. To sum up: I have suggested that the second part of Forster’s description foregrounds the reader’s experience of the fictional world by anchoring his or her virtual body to the fictional body of the anonymous visitor. The experiential “feel” associated with—or recoverable from—the description is thus increased. I have also argued that the overlap between these two bodies facilitates the reader’s responding to the text at the level of the socio-cultural background: it is because the reader enacts the visitor’s experience of the Marabar caves that he or she can come into contact with the non-meaning around which the plot of the novel revolves. Of course, anonymous visitors like Forster’s are not always used to provide readers with experiential access to fictional worlds. Thus, I now turn to the identification between the reader’s virtual body and the fictionally actual body of a full-fledged character—via the technique that Jahn (1996) terms “strict focalization.” Readers’ enactment of the bodily-perceptual experience of a fictional character can also produce a feedback effect on their socio-cultural background, prompting them to construct higher-order meanings. But the first question we have to answer is: how is the fictionalization of the reader’s virtual body brought about in this scenario? Here an old-fashioned narratological category, Jean Pouillon’s (1946, 69 – 114) “vision avec” (“vision with”) can set us on the right track: readers tend to use the body of a perceiving character as a prop for their own mental simulations. A fictionally actual body lends itself to the reader. Consider this excerpt from Zola’s Germinal: Maheu had the worst of it. Up at the top the temperature reached thirty-five degrees; there was no circulation of air, and the suffocating atmosphere was potentially fatal. In order to see what he was doing he had to hang his lamp from a nail, just by his head; and the continued heat of the lamp on his skull eventually raised his body temperature to fever level. But it was the wetness that made life particularly difficult. The rock above him, just a few centimeters from his face, was streaming with water, and large drops of it would keep fall-

7.2 Fictional Anchors: Forster’s Deputy Focalizor and “Strict” Focalization

167

ing in regular, rapid succession, always landing with stubborn insistence on exactly the same spot. Try as he might to twist his neck or bend his head back, they splattered remorselessly against his face and burst. After a quarter of an hour he would be soaked through, and with his body also bathed in sweat he steamed like a wash-tub. That particular morning a drop of water was continually hitting him in the eye, and it made him curse. He didn’t want to stop hewing, and as he continued to hack fiercely at the rock, his body shook violently in the narrow space, like a greenfly caught between the leaves of a book and about to be squashed completely flat. (2004, 40)

This passage describes the appalling working conditions in a coalmine in northern France. The rhetorical and ideological appeal to the reader is even stronger if we note that, as the imperfect tense in the original makes clear, this is no special day, but the character’s routine. If all we have is the English translation, this realization comes as a shock when we read the words “that particular morning” and work backward to reconstruct the temporal aspect of the passage. In any case, despite narrating Maheu’s toil, the character is a patient, not an agent, as the opening sentence highlights: the narrow tunnel in which Maheu is forced to work impinges on his body. The few actions he does accomplish (hanging the lamp, twisting his neck, swinging his pickaxe) end up aggravating his position. All in all, what strikes us is not what Maheu does, but the way his body is affected by the surrounding space and the natural forces that permeate it. This passage constructs a perceptual space centered on the worker’s body. The reader’s virtual body is not inert, however. The simile that closes the excerpt is quite clear in this respect: the image of a bug crushed between the pages of a book does not belong in the mental world of the (illiterate) character. In the context of Maheu’s perceptual flow, it sounds out of place, incongruous. Rather, the simile looks like a more or less concealed wink to the reader by Zola. This simile forces Maheu’s position on readers by calling attention to the object that is closest to them: the book they are holding in their hands. What would it be like to be a bug crushed between these pages? Like the temporally punctual sentence (“that particular morning”), then, this image recapitulates the larger purpose of the passage, in case it wasn’t already clear to the reader. The text reaches its rhetorical peak if the reader positions him- or herself inside the worker’s body. In a way, the menace of being “squashed completely flat” that closes the passage is intended for the reader as well. Maheu’s toil is not externally constructed so much as imposed on the reader, who has to undergo it “from the inside” through consciousness-enactment. In sum, the text invites readers to blend their virtual body with the character’s fictionally actual one. Interestingly, such readerly projections into the bodies of characters have received experimental confirmation. Barbara Tversky describes a series of experiments in which subjects read a narrative engineered

168

7 Embodiment, Virtuality, and Meaning

so that they could “choose” between an external, observer perspective and an internal, character-centered one. The conclusion was that “readers readily take the perspective of either a character or an object central in a scene, even when the character or object is described in the third person” (1996, 476; see also Tversky 2009). What I would like to add here is that, in passages such as the ones I have examined in this section, perceptual information seems to be inextricably linked to the higher-order meanings the text prompts us to construct. By inviting readers to enact the bodily-perceptual experience of the character, Zola seeks to leave a mark on the socio-cultural background of his bourgeois audience, largely unaware of miners’ working conditions, in an attempt to warn them that it was not “too late for social changes that could placate the working class” (Aliaga-Buchenau 2003, 20). It is worth pointing out in this connection that the effect of Zola’s passage on readers’ socio-cultural background is dependent on their engagement with the text as a whole: read in isolation, and without any awareness of the thematic focus of Germinal, these lines about Maheu’s perceptual experience may not elicit any socio-cultural evaluations from readers. In accordance with Meir Sternberg’s (1982) “Proteus Principle,” the exact function and effect of a narrative technique depend on the wider context in which that technique is used. Bodily-perceptual imaginings cannot, by themselves, produce specific meanings, but they can strengthen those that are already implicated in readers’ engagement with a text at another level of the background. The process I am trying to describe here is, therefore, one of mutual interference and interchange between two strands of the reading experience, rather than a case of unidirectional causation—where readers’ bodily involvement automatically leads to higher-order responses. Thus, the leveraging of readers’ experiential traces in embodied imaginings can encourage their engagement with the text at the level of socio-cultural meanings.

7.3 Virtual Presences: “Empty Center” and Aperspectival Texts So far, I have examined two cases where the reader’s virtual body takes a fictional shape, one involving what I have termed a deputy focalizor and the other a fullfledged character in the storyworld. What happens, however, when the text explicitly denies readers a fictional body in which to ground their imaginings? In this section, I will examine two passages where the reader’s presence is purely virtual—that is, unsupported by the presence of a fictionally actual body. The first is an instance of Fludernik’s “figuralization” (1996, 192– 207). Fludernik introduces this concept while discussing Ann Banfield’s reading of the descriptive interludes in Woolf’s The Waves. In Banfield’s words, the “unspeakable sentences” of the interludes pres-

7.3 Virtual Presences: “Empty Center” and Aperspectival Texts

169

ent “a deictic centre … without any explicit or implicit representation of an observer” (1987, 273). The sentences at issue are situated around a deictic center but do not contain “subjective elements and constructions implying the mental states of a personal subject” (1987, 273). Still, Fludernik argues that “the empty centre, if it remains empty, a mere centre of perception, can induce reader identification, allowing a reading of the story through an empathetic projection of the reader into the figure of an observer ‘on the scene’” (1996, 198). Consider the following passage from The Waves, a prototypical example of Fludernik’s figuralization: The sun struck straight upon the house, making the white walls glare between the dark windows. Their panes, woven thickly with green branches, held circles of impenetrable darkness. Sharp-edged wedges of light lay upon the window-sill and showed inside the room plates with blue rings, cups with curved handles, the bulge of a great bowl, the criss-cross pattern in the rug, and the formidable corners and lines of cabinets and bookcases. Behind their conglomeration hung a zone of shadow in which might be a further shape to be disencumbered of shadow or still denser depths of darkness. (Woolf 2000, 112)

What strikes me while reading these lines is the way the narrator uses sunlight as a stand-in for human vision. Despite the absence of human observers on the scene, it is fairly easy to imagine the situation described here. This happens because readers follow the sunbeams in a movement that takes them from an outside view of the house (seen from a certain distance), to a close view of the window, and eventually to an inspection of the kitchen (from the window, through which sunlight peers). The movement is gradual, and it is not hard to accommodate it in our imagination. Indeed, this passage seems to support Scarry’s (2001) claim that light is one of the principal means used to set our mental images in motion (she calls this technique “radiant ignition”). Somewhat paradoxically, despite there being no fictional bodies with which the reader’s virtual body can overlap, we are carried on a “body tour” by sunlight itself. Thus, Woolf’s passage illustrates how spatial descriptions can be built around the absence of any fictional counterpart for the reader’s virtual body. This point can be further clarified by a comparison with Gaetano Kanizsa’s (1955) famous triangle (see Figure 6): in that case, we perceive the illusory contours of a triangle that is not there because the geometrical shapes arranged around it appear occluded. In Fludernik’s figuralization, we project ourselves into the empty deictic center in order to fill a gap the text has left for us. To be sure, in these descriptive interludes there is no fictionally actual body to which we can anchor our virtual presence. Yet this absence is so conspicuous that we almost automatically see it as indicative of our own (virtual) presence, just as we naturally perceive Kanizsa’s triangle—even if it is not there. What is more, just as visual illusions like Kanizsa’s triangle are said to lay bare

170

7 Embodiment, Virtuality, and Meaning

Figure 6: Gaetano Kanizsa’s (1955) triangle (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kanizsa_ triangle.svg; Creative Commons license).

the workings of perception, instances of figuralization seem to expose the way the reader’s embodied imaginings can anchor themselves to the body of a fictional character—since, in this case, there are no actual bodies in the storyworld. However, we should not forget that figuralization is a fairly uncommon device. Most descriptive passages that are “aperspectival” (to use Franz Stanzel’s [1984] term) do not revolve around the reader’s virtual presence—and some of them seem to challenge it. Take, for instance, this passage from Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale, a spectacular example of what Jahn calls “ambient focalization”: [The] sun set and a cold wind was whirling up clouds of dust. The drivers sank their chins into their neck-cloths, the wheels started to turn faster, rasping on the asphalt, and off the carriages went down the avenue at a brisk trot, wheel to wheel, swerving, overtaking, and finally dispersing at the place de la Concorde. Behind the Tuileries the sky turned slategrey; in the garden the trees formed two huge clumps topped with indigo; the gas jets were lighting up and the Seine, greenish in colour over its whole expanse, was shredded into shimmering silver against the piers of the bridges. (2000, 26)

7.3 Virtual Presences: “Empty Center” and Aperspectival Texts

171

It is extremely difficult to produce a global mental image of the scene described in this passage. The difficulty stems from the lack of any explicit criterion of spatial organization (hence the impression of disconnectedness we get from this description). Although Frédéric Moreau is present on the scene, in Peter Brooks’s words “there is no compelling reason for [attributing to him this view], since we are given no indication of his personal investment in the seen [sic]” (1985, 182). Thus, connecting the various settings mentioned in the passage is entirely up to the reader.³ I take this text to describe three different settings: the avenue (in real-world Paris, the “avenue des Champs-Elysées”) leading to place de la Concorde, the axis along which the carriages move; the Tuileries and their garden (again, readers rely on real-world information to associate the garden mentioned here with the Tuileries; otherwise, they could be led to consider it a fourth setting); and the Seine. The problem is that we do not know how to relate these elements: it is not clear, for instance, whether this scene invites use of the cognitive strategy of the “gaze tour” or else that of the “body tour” or route. In a gaze tour, the reader would imagine seeing this scene from a fixed position, turning his gaze from one setting to the other. In a body tour, the reader would imagine moving within the fictional world. The reason why both solutions are unsatisfactory is that neither the relative positions of the settings (in a hypothetical gaze tour) nor the reader’s virtual movements (in a body tour) can be easily inferred from the text. This is an elliptical description: in Zwaan’s (2004) terms, there seems to be insufficient overlap between various “attentional frames” (or settings). Yet Flaubert’s passage is far from being unimaginable: with some work, readers can still visualize the scene. According to Tversky, “consistency of perspective within a discourse can provide coherence to a discourse, rendering it more comprehensible. Switching perspective carries cognitive costs, at least for comprehension” (1996, 469). Of course, the cost is even higher if the transitions between different perspectives are suppressed. Now, the question is: does running a mental simulation of the scene described here force the reader to decide on the relative position of—say—the Seine and the avenue? As I have explained at length in section 4.2, probably not: mental images are far more indeterminate than picture-like images, and it is possible that, while reading these lines (especially within the context of Flaubert’s novel), readers acknowledge the presence of the three settings constructed by the text without feeling the need to map out the spatial relationships among them. The Seine, the avenue, and the garden seem to hover in the

 I use the word “setting” in the specialized meaning proposed by Ronen (1986). In short, “a setting is distinguished from frames … in being formed by a set of fictional spaces which are the topological focus of the story” (1986, 423).

172

7 Embodiment, Virtuality, and Meaning

reader’s imagination; we know they are there, somewhere, but we would be hard pressed to say where exactly they are to be found. Arguably, though, despite the indeterminacy we do experience the space this text constructs. Noë’s (2004) enactivist theory of perception suggests how such spatialization of the storyworld is possible. As discussed in chapter 4, Noë raises serious objections against the snapshot conception of perception, contending that the “visual field … is not the field available to the fixed gaze. The visual field, rather, is made available by looking around… It is no part of our phenomenological commitments that we take ourselves to have all that detail at hand in a single fixation” (2004, 57, emphasis in the original). The world feels “present” to us because we “take ourselves to have access to that detail, not all at once, but thanks to movements of our eyes and head and shifts of attention” (2004, 57). How does all this bear on the passage from Flaubert? Noë’s approach suggests that the linearity or sequentiality of the text seems to compensate for the lack of information concerning the exact whereabouts of the various “attentional frames.” Like a blind person tapping his way with his cane, the reader is immersed in an indeterminate environment, and is shown—in sequence—carriages going down an avenue and separating at place de la Concorde, the sky behind the Tuileries, their garden, and the Seine beating against the pillars of the bridges. It does not really matter whether this is a gaze or a body tour. Interpreters do not even have the time for this sort of question: they stick to the awareness that they are experiencing this space somehow. But how? It is at this point that the structural resemblance between perception and readers’ imaginings comes into play (see chapters 3 and 4): just as perception is virtual access to perceptual detail, sensory imagination can be seen as virtual access to a non-actual space. This definition implies that we experience the space constructed by this description because we know that we could, at least in principle, specify the relations between the settings by way of bodily movements. For instance, we could imagine the Tuileries and their garden visible far behind the place de la Concorde, with the Seine to our right. We have no need to imagine this, as long as we know that the scene is imaginable—and it must be so, since there are no glaring inconsistencies in the way it is presented. Thus, while reading a description such as this, the reader’s body is a purely virtual presence. It almost does not seem to count, but it does count, given that (in Walton’s words) “all imagining involves a kind of self-imagining” (1990, 29). Just like perception, sensory imagination is grounded in our sensorimotor skills, in the movements we could perform in order to gain access to actual imaginative detail.

7.4 A Scale of Fictionalization

173

7.4 A Scale of Fictionalization I would like to conclude this discussion by positioning the passages I have analyzed so far on a scale of fictionalization (see Figure 7). Flaubert’s passage is the only one that completely denies the fictionalization of the reader’s virtual body. Thus, it represents a “zero degree” of fictionalization—the lower end of the

Figure 7: A scale of fictionalization of the reader’s virtual body; the diagram shows how different narrative devices (and the passages examined in this chapter) can be positioned on the scale.

scale. In Flaubert, the reader has a hard time running a mental simulation of the scene, because of the juxtaposition of several (at least three) settings or “attentional frames,” and because of the insufficient “overlap” (connections) among them. However, as I have pointed out, interpreters can still experience this space through purely virtual—non-actualized—bodily movements. Instances of figuralization (such as the brief passage I have quoted from one of the interludes of Woolf’s The Waves) are only superficially similar to Flaubert’s description. However paradoxical this might sound, they hint so strongly at the reader’s virtual presence that this presence becomes almost actual within the fiction. To clarify this point I have drawn a comparison between the reader’s virtual body in Woolf’s passage and Kanizsa’s triangle: in both the text and the figure, everything is so artfully arranged that we see the virtual body and the triangle, even if they are not actually there. Again, this is a purely virtual presence; but it tends toward actuality within the fiction, and this is why on a scale of fictionalization like the one represented in Figure 7 passages such as Woolf’s would score higher than Flaubert’s description. Moving on to Zola, we cross the boundary between virtual and actual presence. There is no doubt that in the passage from Germinal the reader uses the character’s fictionally actual body as a prop for his or her imaginings. This does not mean that the reader’s virtual body ceases to be virtual, since virtuality

174

7 Embodiment, Virtuality, and Meaning

is an integral part of both perception and imagination. It means, rather, that there is a temporary overlap between the reader’s virtual body and the character’s actual body, and that this overlap facilitates the reader’s production of sensory imagery. Finally, in Forster’s passage the actualization of the reader’s virtual access to the fictional world is even more evident, since the anonymous visitor has a defining characteristic in common with the reader: he is granted access to the fictional world but, unlike characters such as Zola’s Maheu, he cannot act on or within it. The mysterious character’s visit to the Marabar caves has no impact whatsoever on the plot of A Passage to India. However, the deputy focalizor’s presence prepares the reader for the unsettling experience of the caves, leading to the novel’s turning point, the trial against Aziz. Deputy focalizors such as Forster’s unnamed visitor (or the “traveler” at the beginning of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir), must be placed near the upper end of the scale represented in Figure 7, since they are, just like the reader, temporary residents of the storyworld: both are given perceptual or imaginative access to the fictional world without playing a part in the story. Because of this similarity, the actualization of the reader’s virtual body within the fictional world reaches a maximum in the presence of a deputy focalizor. But even in this case, the actualization is not complete, since the reader cannot actually be transported, qua reader, to a fictional world. Virtuality is our only mode of transportation to fictional worlds.

7.5 The Embodied Self and Beckett’s Company The last section of this chapter is dedicated to a reading of Samuel Beckett’s Company, a novella originally published in 1980. The reason why I would like to discuss this text here is that it is provides a striking illustration of the effects that the fictionalization of the reader’s virtual body can have on his or her experiential background. We have already seen in section 7.2 how socio-cultural meanings can be channeled via the reader’s enactment of the bodily-perceptual experience of a fictional character—and in particular via the overlap between the reader’s virtual body and the character’s fictionally actual one. The operation Beckett attempts in his novella is even more complex. In a nutshell, by inviting his readers to enact the embodied consciousness of a character, Beckett attempts to reveal the way in which our sense of self emerges not only from socio-cultural practices like language and narrative (and therefore from the outer circle of the experiential background) but also from basic, bodily experience—the deepest level of the background. To put this point otherwise: Company can be read as an illustration of Zahavi’s view, presented in the previous chapter, that there are several layers to the sense of self. Through a kind of phenomenological reduction, Beckett brackets out secondary

7.5 The Embodied Self and Beckett’s Company

175

intersubjectivity and its linguistic and narrative self in order to put a spotlight on our minimal, embodied self. What is more, he does so by actively involving the reader’s virtual body in the creation of a higher-order meaning (the self has roots in bodily experience) which points to the core of our experiential background. In terms of the scale of fictionalization proposed in the previous section, Company would fall between Forster’s use of a deputy focalizor and the strict focalization of the passage from Germinal. Overall, the character into whose body Beckett’s reader is invited to project him- or herself is more individuated than Forster’s anonymous visitor: we are afforded some glimpses into (what we suppose to be) his past, so that he appears to have a narrative trajectory in his own right. On the other hand, the weak narrativity—or better the anti-narrativity (see Richardson 2005)—of the novella creates a divide between Beckett’s creature and more standard fictional characters like Zola’s Maheu. The character seems to serve as a probe in Beckett’s experimentation with and exploration into the self: in this respect, because of his instrumentality, he is closer to Forster’s visitor than to most novelistic characters. One of the features that Beckett’s character shares with Forster’s visitor is that they are never given a name. Indeed, the protagonist of Company is constantly referred to as “one” by the narrator; even when he is addressed in the second person by a mysterious voice, his name is never pronounced. What readers do know about the character is his current situation: he is lying on his back in the dark. But where he is and how he got into that situation remain unspecified. Despite this indeterminacy, the novella seems to invite interpreters to project themselves into the character’s body right from the first words: “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine” (1996, 3). Commenting on these words, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan asks: “Is ‘Imagine’ a quotation of the voice’s appeal to the ‘one’, or is it addressed to the reader by the extradiegetic narrator? This ambiguity establishes from the start a parallel between the position of the one and the reader” (1996, 94). Second-person narration has accustomed us to this kind of ontological ambiguity (Herman 2002, chap. 9; Richardson 2006, chap. 2): the verb “Imagine” could be read both as an address to a character in the storyworld and as an apostrophe to the flesh-and-blood reader. However, Beckett’s novella gives a further twist to the ambiguity of secondperson narration by directly involving the imagination of both the character and the reader. Is the narrator asking the “one” or his own audience to imagine? Needless to say, there is no way to answer this question—and the text thrives on its undecidability. The reader and the character seem to meet halfway and blend in the ambiguous space of reference created by the narrator’s instruction to imagine. Through this strategy, Beckett foregrounds the way in which readers’ imaginings function as the linchpin of their projection into the body of characters. This becomes more evident as the unnamed protagonist starts to imagine other bodily po-

176

7 Embodiment, Virtuality, and Meaning

sitions. Since readers imagine the character’s experiences by drawing on their own familiarity with bodily experience, the connection between the one’s imaginings and readers’ is further strengthened. My suggestion is to read Rimmon-Kenan’s “parallel between the position of the one and the reader” literally, as if the character’s imaginings of bodily positions—and thus his lived experience of his body—were made to coincide with readers’, encouraging them to project into the character’s body. In turn, the text uses the fictionalization of the reader’s virtual body as leverage for bringing about an unsettling effect on the reader. In order to describe this effect, we need to know more about what is at stake in Beckett’s novella. The voice that addresses the protagonist—or the reader?—in the second person either outlines his current situation or describes scenes from his past: “As for example when he hears, You are on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said. But by far the greater part of what is said cannot be verified. As for example when he hears, You first saw the light on such and such a day” (1996, 3). These second-person tableaux are interlaced with the character’s ramblings, presented in the third person by a heterodiegetic narrator: “Another trait [of the voice is] its repetitiousness. Repeatedly with only minor variants the same bygone. As if willing him by this dint to make it his. To confess, Yes I remember” (1996, 10). As we read these ramblings, we often get the feeling that the “one” is making up things out of the need for company. For instance, he hypothesizes that the voice is not directed at him, but at another person who—like him—lies on his back in the dark, and that he just overhears it. He also refers to other figures: a “cankerous other” (possibly corresponding to the heterodiegetic narrator), a “crawling creator,” a “deviser.” Even Rimmon-Kenan—the critic who has devoted most space to a detailed analysis of these characters—has to own up that the easiest way out of this confusion is to say that the “one” on his back in dark “has invented the creator (the cankerous other) as a devised deviser, as well as the voice and himself” (1996, 97). To be sure, this is a possibility the “one” himself seems to recognize at one point: “Deviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself. Deviser of himself for company. Leave it at that. He speaks of himself as of another. He says speaking of himself, He speaks of himself as of another. Himself he devises too for company” (1996, 18). The critical consensus is that this dizzying profusion of personae serves to probe the problem of subjectivity. Carla Locatelli argues that Company represents the “I” as a linguistic fiction kept up by the dialogic interplay of several selves. In fact, we find in this text a “mixing of systems of designation converging on the same referent” (1990, 172)—the protagonist, who is deviser (of the hearer, of his creator, of himself) and devised (by his creator, by himself) at the same time. More recently, Debra Malina (2002) has focused her attention on the relationship between metalepsis and the construction of the subject in Beckett’s oeuvre. Her

7.5 The Embodied Self and Beckett’s Company

177

point of departure is the view that the self is a linguistic, and in particular a narrative construction. Beckett, she contends, was well aware of this. The protagonists of his texts attempt, by way of metalepsis, to break the narrative frame— only to generate more narrative: “the subject engenders narrative, which in turn engenders the subject; Beckett’s narrators are thus perpetually reborn in spite of themselves—they cannot die so long as language remains possible” (2002, 57). In Company, Beckett forces this idea on his readers by entrapping them in a “fluid narrative level” (2002, 54) where there is no escape from storytelling—apart from the end of language itself. Indeed, “Alone” is the last word of Beckett’s novella, and an explicit acknowledgment that the character has made up everything, including himself (his self). I very much agree with the claim that Beckett’s Company asks questions about subjectivity. In a sense, the position taken by both Locatelli and Malina is analogous to the radical narrativist view (discussed in the previous chapter) that the self is a narrative construction through and through. The problem with Locatelli’s and Malina’s readings, however, is that they seem to downplay the importance that the protagonist’s body has in defining his (sense of) self—and the imaginative work readers have to do in order to come to terms with the salience of the protagonist’s embodied being. As I pointed out at the end of section 7.2, the involvement of the reader’s body can interact with—and reinforce—meanings produced by texts through other, more conceptual strategies. Here the novella’s thematic focus on subjectivity—correctly identified by Locatelli and Malina—is complicated by repeated references to the body, which strongly encourage readers to project their virtual body into the character’s. As the protagonist explains at the very beginning, among the statements made by the voice only those about his bodily position cannot be falsified, since they coincide with his own proprioceptive awareness of his body. This would seem to create a conflict between the protagonist’s tendency to confabulate, scattering his identity across a handful of fictional personae, and his embodiment. But, as we read, it becomes clear that the protagonist’s imagination is increasingly dominated by the body. After making up a character who has his own posture, he asks: “Is not one immovable enough? Why duplicate this particular solace? Then let him move. Within reason. On all fours. A moderate crawl torso well clear of the ground eyes front alert” (1996, 33 – 34). In addition, the “one” cannot stop thinking about which position might be the most “companionable”: “Let him for example after due imagination decide in favour of the supine position or prone and this in practice prove less companionable than anticipated. May he then or may he not replace it by another? Such as hud-

178

7 Embodiment, Virtuality, and Meaning

dled with his legs drawn up within the semicircle of his arms and his head on his knees. Or in motion. Crawling on all four” (1996, 19). The character’s bodily imaginings emphasize the pivotal role of his body as—to quote again Merleau-Ponty—a “virtual center of action” (2002, 121, translation modified). In other words, Beckett’s insistence on the character’s embodied imagination serves to highlight the imagistic thinking that precedes—both ontogenetically and phylogenetically—linguistic thinking.⁴ In turn, the foregrounding of the character’s bodily imaginings in Company reveals how the imaginings through which readers engage with the “one” are, in themselves, embodied. We respond to the character’s imaginings of bodily positions by imagining them on the basis of our own experiential traces, and this process replicates the ambiguity of the “Imagine” prefixed to the text. The fictionalization of the reader’s virtual body is thus laid bare. But there is more. Remember Locatelli’s and Malina’s claim that the central theme of the novella is the self. The embodiment of Beckett’s character reveals a dimension of the self that runs deeper than the linguistic and narrative constructions on which these critics focus their attention. More specifically, Beckett seems to explore the idea that the virtuality of the body is the basis for our minimal or “core” self (see Damasio 2000; and section 6.1 above). Interestingly, this idea is echoed in a paper by Vittorio Gallese and Corrado Sinigaglia (2009), who have argued that, rather than being tied to a static image of the body, the embodied self is defined by our possibilities of interaction with the world: “the body—they write—is not only something that is always already given to us, but it is primarily given to us as ‘source’ or ‘power’ for action, i. e., as the variety of motor potentialities that define the horizon of the world in which we live” (2009, 746). In a way, it is this aspect of the self that the protagonist lays bare by imagining bodily positions he (or others) may assume. Furthermore, the character’s embodiment opens up the possibility of breaking the narrative circle denounced by Malina in her reading of Beckett’s oeuvre—the proliferation of language and narrative that seems to allow no escape for Beckett’s creatures. Toward the end of Company, the character’s movements seem to shift from the imaginary to the real: “Simultaneously the various parts set out. The arms unclasp the knees. The head lifts. The legs start to straighten. The trunk tilts backwards. And together these and countless others continue on their respective ways till they can go no further and together come to rest” (1996, 44– 45). In

 On the relationship between linguistic and imagistic thinking, see Hutto (2008, 84): “The kind of cognition that relates to hominid tool manufacture certainly bears this [imagistic] stamp. It looks likely to have been achieved through mental rehearsals involving acts of visual-motoric perceptual reenactments. Images and icons—not propositions—could serve as the links in the chains of such nonlogical thinking.”

7.5 The Embodied Self and Beckett’s Company

179

the space of few lines, Company comes to an end, as if there was nothing to add to the character’s story after his shift of position. The linguistic and narrative fictions maintained by the character’s imagination—his fragmented selves, as RimmonKenan would put it—give way to the silence (and loneliness) of bodily self-coincidence. Incidentally, it is worth noting that this reading of the conclusion of Company is convergent with recent work in Beckett scholarship, which has placed a strong emphasis on the phenomenological body in Beckett’s work. For example, Ulrika Maude argues: “In Beckett’s writing, prereflective physicality becomes progressively more prominent” (2009, 4).⁵ More importantly, however, what Beckett’s text implies about the nature and scope of the embodied self can be reached through the reader’s own embodied engagement with the character. As shown by Marco Bernini (2014), Beckett’s work puts into practice a number of phenomenological intuitions, actively involving the reader in the exploration of a cognitive issue—in this case, the embodied roots of the self.⁶ The mechanism that underlies this exploration in Company is, as we have just seen, interpreters’ imaginative enactment of the character’s bodily experience—and especially their projection into his body through a process of fictionalization of their virtual body. Malina characterizes the reader’s involvement in Company as an “entrapment” (2002, 54). Indeed, what is disconcerting about this text is the way it can entrap readers’ imagination in the character’s body, imposing on them an experience of pure embodiment. Thus, not only does Company elicit our responses at the bodily level (while we simulate the character’s experience), but it conveys through these bodily reactions a higher-order, evaluative response, whereby we come to see our own body as inextricably bound up with subjectivity. This process weaves a complex pattern through our experiential background, sewing together bodily experience and our understanding of the self: by stripping down the self to a core of embodiment, Beckett’s novella affords readers an insight into subjectivity that can restructure their experiential background at the socio-cultural level. Unlike philosophy or cognitive science, however, it does so not through an argument or empirical research, but experientially—by

 Maude also stresses that—despite their similarities—Beckett’s treatment of the phenomenological body differs from Merleau-Ponty’s in that Beckett does not see the body as “a new locus of meaning” (Maude 2009, 22). I think this reading is correct: even though, by reducing the character’s (and the reader’s) narratively constructed self to a core of embodiment, Beckett’s Company offers us an escape from narrative, we should not see this liberation as a meaningful, existentially fulfilling act. It is, rather, a stripping down of meaning—a process that is, to quote a passage from the novella, “lapped as it were in its meaninglessness” (1996, 45).  My discussion of Company in this section owes much to my conversations with Bernini and to his Beckettian expertise.

180

7 Embodiment, Virtuality, and Meaning

manipulating language, style, and literary form in a way that deeply implicates readers’ experiential background in their responses to the text.

8 Mental Myopia: Narrative Patterns and Experiential Texture in Vladimir Nabokov’s The Defense Like my interpretation of Cortázar’s Hopscotch in Part I, this chapter explores the ways in which experience and experientiality are thematized by a particular text—Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Defense. The reading I will offer is, therefore, a record of my own engagement with the experience of its protagonist, the chess grandmaster Luzhin. In the context of this study, this chapter serves a dual function. On the one hand, the first three sections are meant to illustrate and recap the key points raised in the foregoing discussion of the network of experientiality, with special emphasis on the intertwining of bodily-perceptual and interpretive responses to the character’s experience. I will show that Nabokov skillfully exploits the tension between consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment in order to guide the reader’s interpretation of the novel. I will also show how the other tension between the textual design and my experiential background (in this case, ironically, my preoccupation with experience and consciousness) has led me to offer an interpretation that is centered on the character’s progressive “experiential blindness.” On the other hand, the last section of the chapter uses Nabokov’s novel as a probe to investigate the relationship between what I will call the “abstractive” and the “expressive” functions of storytelling. The first has to do with narrative as an organizational principle that breaks down and articulates the stream of experience through the representation of some object-like entities (events and existents). The second points to the expressive strategies that—by entering into tension with recipients’ background—attempt to recover the experiential detail lost in the abstraction. In this way, I will position the experiential dimension explored so far vis-à-vis the other components of storytelling. First of all, let me spell out what makes Nabokov’s novel relevant to my investigation of the experientiality of narrative. In an interesting (and rare) foray into literature, Dennett has made a few perceptive comments on The Defense. He writes: “We see three stages in the development of [Luzhin’s] consciousness: his boyish mind (before his discovery of chess at about age ten), his chess-saturated mind (up until his nervous breakdown), and the sorry remains of the first two stages after his breakdown, when, imprisoned by his wife in a world without chess … his mind reverts to a sort of spoiled infantile paranoia, brightened by stolen moments of chess … but ultimately curdling into chess obsessions that culminate in

182

8 Mental Myopia: Narrative Patterns and Experiential Texture

his ‘sui-mate’” (1991, 298).¹ In other words: The Defense does more than invite readers to attribute a consciousness to Luzhin; it asks them to engage with a consciousness that is disrupted, distorted, and—ultimately—undermined by the character’s obsessions. At the same time, it increases interpreters’ awareness of the experiential “costs” of Luzhin’s deep fascination with chess and its abstract patterns. In a way, then, it is consciousness itself that takes center stage in this novel, yielding insight into what critics—taking their cue from a remark by Véra Nabokov (quoted in Boyd 1999, 253)—have seen as the central theme of Nabokov’s oeuvre: the “beyond,” or a metaphysical dimension that transcends experience. Nabokov’s interest in the “beyond”—or “otherworld,” as Vladimir Alexandrov (1991) calls it—provides a point of contact with my interpretation of Cortázar’s Hopscotch in chapter 3. Readers will recall that the protagonist of Hopscotch, Horacio, strives for a metaphysical dimension—the “Yonder”—substantially similar to Nabokov’s “beyond.” Over the course of the novel, Horacio finds out that this Yonder can only be discovered in the here and now, through creative experience and play. In a number of passages, forms of playful engagement with the world are contrasted with the rigidity of rule-governed activities such as games—including chess. Indeed, Horacio’s and Luzhin’s narrative trajectories are so diametrically opposed that it is difficult to miss the connection between them: what Horacio discovers about the potential of creative experience is precisely what Luzhin becomes completely blind to as a result of his fascination with chess. Yet readers of the Defense know better than to follow the character in his self-destructive path. As we witness Luzhin’s fall into a solipsistic chess world, we are free to read against the grain of the character’s condition, coming to understand that Nabokov’s solution to the problem of the “beyond” resonates deeply with Horacio’s (and Cortázar’s): if there is such a dimension beyond experience, it can be reached only through experience. But while Cortázar places a premium on playful experience, Nabokov’s recipe for the beyond involves paying close attention to what it means to be alive and sentient. In this way, Nabokov hints at an intensification of our reflective self-consciousness—i. e., the state of being conscious that one is an experiencing subject (see Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 47– 49). By contrast, Luzhin suffers from what I will call an “experiential blindness”: he seems to lose consciousness of his own self—and of his being conscious (in a pre-reflective way) of the world. Even though he will continue to experience the world through his chess patterns, he is increasingly unable to attend to his own experiences and therefore to value the gift of consciousness.

 “Sui-mate” is, obviously, Nabokov’s chess pun for Luzhin’s suicide (2000a, viii).

8 Mental Myopia: Narrative Patterns and Experiential Texture

183

Readers arrive at this conclusion behind Luzhin’s back, but their engagement with the character is not purely external or third-personal. Through a carefully constructed consciousness-focused narration, Nabokov invites readers to enact the character’s consciousness at the bodily-perceptual level, feeling the effects of his experiential blindness in a first-person way. It is through their handson exploration of the distortions that affect Luzhin’s perception, memory, and narratively constructed self that readers become aware of the dangers that lie in his experiential blindness. We will see that these distortions result in two “experiential breakdowns,” which give readers the chance to reflect on the character’s narrative trajectory: at the end of chapter 8, Luzhin collapses in a Berlin park after a physically and mentally exhausting match with Italian grandmaster Turati. The character’s fainting conveniently divides Luzhin’s life, and the novel itself, into two halves, to which I will refer as the “first half” and the “second half” of the novel. The second breakdown comes at the end of the novel, when Luzhin commits suicide by hurling himself out of the window of his Berlin apartment. I will speak of Luzhin’s “experiential breakdowns” in a quasi-technical sense, since (as we know) experience inevitably involves having a consciousness or being conscious, whereas in both cases Luzhin loses consciousness. The difference is, of course, that the second loss is permanent. Before proceeding with my reading of Nabokov’s novel, I would like to show how my portrait of Luzhin compares with those drawn by Nabokov critics in the past. Broadly speaking, interpretations of The Defense tend to fall into two categories: metafictional/otherworldly readings and psychological readings. On the one hand, some interpreters have explored the connection between Luzhin and the “beyond,” either as a metafictional reflection of the author’s world or in the form of a quasi-mystical otherworld. Pekka Tammi (1985) and Eric Naiman (1998) have turned Luzhin into a champion of ontological metalepsis² bravely fighting against his own maker, whereas Alexandrov has depicted Luzhin as a chess artist who—through the patterns of chess—dimly senses a superior plane of reality. Finally, Brian Boyd’s interpretation (1987) construes Luzhin as an unsuspecting victim of his father’s and grandfather’s otherworldly schemes. On the other hand, critics like Julian W. Connolly (1992) and Leona Toker (1989) have stressed the psychological aspects of Luzhin’s obsession with chess. In one of the most balanced perspectives on the novel, Connolly has exposed Luzhin’s fundamental misunderstanding of the chess patterns he sees everywhere, while Toker has insisted on the ethical dimension of Nabokov’s novel, portraying Luz-

 On ontological metalepsis, see Ryan (2006, 207– 211).

184

8 Mental Myopia: Narrative Patterns and Experiential Texture

hin almost as an Oblomovian character who breaks off any contact with reality in order to retire into the sterile art of chess. All in all, the ambiguity of Nabokov’s novel lies in the semantic indeterminacy of Luzhin’s obsession with chess, which seems to waver between a metafictional/otherworldly reading (Luzhin averts his eyes from reality to glance at a superior plane of existence) and a psychological reading (Luzhin finds in chess a solipsistic “defense” against the external world, which he can’t control).³ My own reading tries to navigate between these two poles. In section 8.1, I will follow in Toker’s footsteps, bringing to the fore Luzhin’s experiential blindness and examining the expressive techniques through which it is conveyed to the reader. The progress in Luzhin’s condition is paralleled by a development (highlighted by Connolly [1992, 93]) in his relationship with chess, which leads Luzhin to discover chess patterns everywhere and eventually to see his own life in terms of chess positions and moves—so that chess can be said to penetrate into Luzhin’s selfnarrative (my topic for section 8.2). The result is Luzhin’s suicide—his definitive parting from experience. As anticipated above, I believe that otherworldly readings are not wide of the mark—except that they should concentrate on Luzhin’s failure to reach the “beyond.” In section 8.3, drawing on some passages from Nabokov’s autobiography, and building on Boyd’s work (1987; 2001), I will show that, for Nabokov, our window onto what is beyond human consciousness is, paradoxically, the heightening of self-consciousness. Thus, Nabokov’s otherworld could be bound up with the ineffable aspect of our experience of this world, and Luzhin’s experiential blindness could trace a via negativa to the otherworld. Finally, in section 8.4 I will give yet another turn to the interpretive screw by arguing that it is possible to read The Defense as an allegory of two functions of narrative, the abstractive (corresponding to Luzhin’s patterns) and the expressive (which creates the experiential texture to which the character is increasingly blind). I will also suggest that the tension between abstraction and expression is resolved on a third level, that of evaluation. Nabokov’s novel becomes, then, a springboard for building a three-dimensional model of narrative.

8.1 From Chess Consciousness to Experiential Blindness As an initial step in my exploration of The Defense, I would like to draw attention to the textual cues that invite readers to engage with what I will call Luzhin’s ex-

 See Tammi (1985, 142) and Connolly (1992, 99) on this ambiguity.

8.1 From Chess Consciousness to Experiential Blindness

185

periential blindness—his lack of self-consciousness. This condition has three stages: the onset is marked by what I will call a “chess consciousness,” where chess seems to compete with the character’s ordinary perception, lending itself as an alternative way of experiencing the world. In the second stage, chess becomes more ingrained in the character’s ordinary consciousness, resulting in a series of (increasingly pathological) chess-related distortions in his perceptual experience. Finally, chess “blocks out” Luzhin’s perception, preventing him from attending to his own experience in a reflective way. The birth of the character’s chess consciousness is registered in the scene in which, after a number of defeats against an expert chess player, young Luzhin secures his first draw: “Luzhin perceived something, something was set free within him, something cleared up, and the mental myopia that had been painfully beclouding his chess vision disappeared” (2000a, 30). Note that Luzhin’s talent for chess is described in visual terms, as if it were in direct competition with his perceptual experience—and in fact Luzhin’s vision is the first sensory modality to fall under the disruptive influence of chess. Visual chess patterns are everywhere in the first half of the novel, and seem to intensify as we approach the fateful game against Turati: a lime tree and a telegraph pole (2000a, 63), a white tablecloth and a frosted cake (2000a, 80 – 81), a pattern of light and shadow on the floor (2000a, 84)—all these innocent objects bear, in Luzhin’s view, the indelible mark of chess. However, the most striking examples of Luzhin’s chess consciousness come from pain (“his head ached strangely, not all of it but in parts, in black squares of pain” [2000a, 83]) and memory: “in the darkness of his memory, as in two mirrors reflecting a candle, there was only a vista of converging lights with Luzhin sitting at a chessboard, and again Luzhin at a chessboard, only smaller, and then smaller still, and so on an infinity of times” (2000a, 89). These quotations give a precise idea of how deeply rooted chess has become in Luzhin’s consciousness: Luzhin’s initial contact with chess had been visual, and the narrator had described the birth of his chess consciousness as the vanishing of “mental myopia.” Now chess seems to have gone up Luzhin’s optic nerve, affecting pain and memory (themselves captured through visual metaphors, reflecting the visual origin of the character’s chess consciousness). Further stages in this process of “interiorization” of chess are reached when chess expands into Luzhin’s awareness of his own body (as we will see at the end of this section) and when it invades Luzhin’s narrative self, in the second part of the novel (examined in section 8.2). Together with the extensive use of internal focalization, this proliferation of consciousness tags serves as a trigger of consciousness-enactment (see subsection 5.3.2), asking readers to enact the chess-themed experiences that they attribute to Luzhin.

186

8 Mental Myopia: Narrative Patterns and Experiential Texture

The perceptual distortions to which the narrator makes frequent allusions in the first half of the novel are, in themselves, very effective triggers of consciousness-enactment.⁴ By stressing the difference between the character’s non-ordinary mental state and ordinary perception, references to the character’s altered consciousness can strengthen readers’ empathetic relationship with the character. Indeed, because distorted experiences have a distinct first-person and even idiosyncratic quality, being invited to imagine such experiences as undergone by a character is likely to contribute to the illusion that we are perceiving with the character rather than perceiving what he perceives from an observer position. Some of these distorted experiences precede Luzhin’s encounter with chess, serving as premonitions of the character’s self-destructive obsession: for instance, in two childhood scenes, Luzhin’s vision is clouded over by tears (2000a, 5, 11). Two other passages are even more explicit in establishing a link between chess consciousness and altered perception. In the first, Luzhin comes down with a fever, and in the hallucinations that ensue his fresh memories “participated in his delirium and took on the semblance of a kind of monstrous game on a spectral, wobbly, and endlessly disintegrating board” (2000a, 41). In the second passage, an optical illusion (technically, a phosphene) created by the physical stimulation of one of Luzhin’s eyes turns into a chess move: “With one shoulder pressed against [Luzhin’s] chest [Luzhin’s fiancée] tried with a cautious finger to raise his eyelids a little higher and the slight pressure on his eyeball caused a strange black light to leap there, to leap like his black Knight which simply took the Pawn if Turati moved it out on the seventh move, as he had done at their last meeting” (2000a, 76). Readers’ stance is likely to shift from consciousness-attribution to consciousness-enactment as they read these words: while at first we tend to imagine Luzhin’s eye from the agentive position of his fiancée (the subject of the first sentence), we seem to slide into consciousness-enactment as her finger presses Luzhin’s eyelid, with the resulting chess-themed illusions— which, we suppose, are not accessible to anyone but Luzhin himself. Yet, while imagining Luzhin’s bodily and perceptual experiences, readers become increasingly aware that the character’s chess consciousness comes at a cost, since it widens the “fissure between Luzhin’s inner world and the external world” (Connolly 1992, 85). Indeed, as we read further in The Defense, we detect many symptoms of Luzhin’s blindness to the phenomenological “feel” of his contacts with the world—symptoms that invite us to complement our enactment of the character’s experience with a more external, third-personal stance. To

 Interestingly enough, Nabokov produced a catalog of his own hallucinations in his autobiography (2000b, 16 – 17).

8.1 From Chess Consciousness to Experiential Blindness

187

begin with, it is no coincidence that Luzhin derives deep pleasure from playing chess while blindfolded: “one did not have to deal with visible, audible, palpable pieces whose quaint shapes and wooden materiality always disturbed him and always seemed to him but the crude, mortal shell of exquisite, invisible chess forces,” he thinks (2000a, 57). It is the abstractness of chess that diverts the character’s attention away from the qualitative, phenomenological “feel” of perception: chess reduces the complexity of the experienced world to a set of immaterial rules and relations (remember Cortázar’s tirade—analyzed in section 3.2—about the “sterility” of chess and other rule-governed practices). In another, remarkable passage, Luzhin is reminded of his existence only by his shortness of breath and by other disruptions in the flow of his chess consciousness: “Only rarely did he notice his own existence, when for example lack of breath—the revenge of a heavy body—forced him to halt with open mouth on a staircase, or when he had toothache, or when at a late hour during his chess cogitations an outstretched hand shaking a matchbox failed to evoke in it the rattle of matches” (2000a, 60). In other words, it is only when his interaction with the world breaks down that Luzhin awakens to the qualitative “feel” of experience. This process is dramatized during the game against Turati, when Luzhin is suddenly distracted by a pang of pain coming from a match, “which he had lit and forgotten to apply to his cigarette. The pain immediately passed, but in the fiery gap he had seen something unbearably awesome, the full horror of the abysmal depths of chess” (2000a, 92). This statement has been used to contrast the artistic depth of Luzhin’s chess playing with the two-dimensionality of the reality shared by the other characters (see Naiman 1998, 16), but I prefer to read the abyss in psychological terms, as a metaphor for the character’s progressive blindness to the phenomenological qualities of perception: only a strong sensation such as pain can disrupt the character’s absorption in the immaterial world of chess. In effect, Luzhin’s flash of intuition is immediately canceled out: “There was horror in this, but in this also was the sole harmony, for what else exists in the world besides chess? Fog, the unknown, non-being” (2000a, 92). Note how in this passage the character’s denial of non-chess reality goes hand in hand with his inability to attend to the world in a reflective way (i. e., to be conscious of his own experiences). While being given access to Luzhin’s aberrant thoughts, readers are made intensely aware of the limitations of his experiential perspective, so that their stance continuously shuttles along the continuum between consciousness-enactment and consciousness-attribution. This dynamic reaches a climax after the adjournment of the game with Turati: being under severe nervous and physical strain, Luzhin finds himself in the chess club, unable to move from his chair, surrounded by phantoms (or so, we learn, the bystanders appear to him). Luzhin’s vision goes black, and the char-

188

8 Mental Myopia: Narrative Patterns and Experiential Texture

acter feels “in check,” as if he had been turned into a chess piece: “His vision became darker and darker and in relation to every vague object in the hall he stood in check” (2000a, 93). In the space of a sentence, Luzhin’s perception gives way to an extended chess consciousness whereby chess is no longer superimposed on the world, as a distortion filter, but projected onto it, in an occluding way: there are attacks “developing in every corner—and pushing aside tables, a bucket with a gold-necked glass Pawn sticking out of it and a drum that was being beaten by an arched, thick-maned chess Knight” (2000a, 93 – 94). The opacity of the narrator’s phrasing here is such that we cannot discern what these movements and shapes really stand for, in the world that Luzhin’s chess vision is so irreversibly disfiguring. As readers, we are entrapped in Luzhin’s point of view, condemned to enacting his chess-themed hallucinations; at the same time, we realize how fundamentally wrong he is about the world around him—and how chess, from being an alternative way of perceiving the world, has become an opaque screen between the character and the world. More hallucinations are to come: after managing to get up from the chair, Luzhin starts making his way home, feeling that “it was necessary to hurry. At any minute these chess growths might ring him in again” (2000a, 94). And, finally, a few lines before his collapse (and the abrupt end of the chapter), Luzhin’s chess consciousness gets hold of the only sphere that, in the recent past, had painfully reminded him of his human, non-chess existence—his body: “His legs from hips to heels were tightly filled with lead, the way the base of a chessman is weighted” (2000a, 95). Chess penetrates the innermost core of Luzhin’s experiential background—namely, his “non-observational proprioceptive and kinaesthetic awareness” of his own body (see Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 143). By this stage, the experiential black-out is unavoidable, and Luzhin falls to the ground in a faint: “He stretched out a hand to the fence but at this point triumphant pain began to overwhelm him, pressing down from above on his skull, and it was as if he were becoming flatter and flatter, and then he soundlessly dissipated” (2000a, 95).

8.2 The Moves of His Life So far I have examined the way Luzhin’s obsession with chess fatally undermines his reflective awareness of his own experience. I have also described some of the strategies through which Nabokov’s text invites readers to engage with the protagonist’s distorted experience, oscillating between the poles of consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment. In this section I will deal with Luzhin’s experiential blindness on a larger scale, considering how the dis-

8.2 The Moves of His Life

189

tortions penetrate into his self-narrative through a number of mysterious “combinations” and “repetitions.” Many commentators have noted that Luzhin’s passion for chess is a passion for pattern (see, e. g., Boyd 1987). However, whereas in the first half of the novel these patterns are abstract designs taken in through perception, in the second half they assume a narrative form: Luzhin starts envisioning his own life as a series of chess moves. But even before Luzhin explicitly recognizes these patterns in his self-narrative, it is possible to detect their effects on the character’s memories. This effect becomes clearly evident in an episode in the first half of the novel that establishes a correlation between Luzhin’s mania for patterns and his blindness to story-driven experiences. Interestingly, the episode involves a prolepsis, a temporal leap to “twenty years” later—the time period covered by the second half of the novel, after Luzhin’s Berlin breakdown. This is a passage about young Luzhin’s favorite books, Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days and an unidentified novel from Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series (probably The Sign of the Four, given the allusion to cocaine): [There] were two books, both given him by his aunt, with which he had fallen in love for his whole life, holding them in his memory as if under a magnifying glass, and experiencing them so intensely that twenty years later, when he read them over again, he saw only a dryish paraphrase, an abridged edition, as if they had been outdistanced by the unrepeatable, immortal image that he had retained. But it was not a thirst for distant peregrinations that forced him to follow on the heels of Phileas Fogg, nor was it a boyish inclination for mysterious adventures that drew him to that house on Baker Street, where the lanky detective with the hawk profile, having given himself an injection of cocaine, would dreamily play the violin. Only much later did he clarify in his own mind what it was that had thrilled him so about these two books; it was that exact and relentlessly unfolding pattern: Phileas, the dummy in the top hat, wending his complex elegant way with its justifiable sacrifices, now on an elephant bought for a million, now on a ship of which half has to be burned for fuel; and Sherlock endowing logic with the glamour of a daydream, Sherlock composing a monograph on the ash of all known sorts of cigars and with this ash as with a talisman progressing through a crystal labyrinth of possible deductions to the one radiant conclusion. (2000a, 14)

The prolepsis links with chapter 10, when—still in the sanatorium, recovering from his nervous collapse—Luzhin “read Fogg’s journey and Holmes’ memories in two days, and when he had read them he said they were not what he wanted—this was an incomplete edition” (2000a, 112). Almost one hundred pages after the prolepsis, the narrator reiterates that these books do not look quite the same to Luzhin’s adult self. In itself this piece of information is hardly surprising, and Luzhin’s feeling may even strike us as familiar: we all know with what intensity we savor books in our childhood, projecting fictional stories and characters into our own experience, using them as stepping stones for our

190

8 Mental Myopia: Narrative Patterns and Experiential Texture

imaginary worlds. Returning to these books as grown-ups, we may find that they haven’t aged well, either because our tastes have become more sophisticated, or because we have lost the capacity to devour them with the same enthusiasm and undivided attention. Luzhin does not launch into an explanation of the difference between his childhood and his grown-up readings; what, however, he does attempt to explain “much later” (presumably, after having recovered from his Berlin collapse) is the reason for his youthful excitement at these books— and it is here that his account comes across as particularly problematic. At the root of Luzhin’s passion for these novels there is, we read, the character’s deep interest in patterns—an interest that, in retrospect, the adult Luzhin traces back to his younger self. These patterns are explicitly identified as narrative patterns. However, the chess-like qualities of Luzhin’s explanation should not go unnoticed: Phileas Fogg’s “sacrifices” hark back to the move that goes under the same name in chess; the Russian word for elephant, “slon” (Nabokov 1979, 42), also refers to the bishop in chess, with a pun that did not make it into the English version of Nabokov’s novel; and Sherlock Holmes’s progression “through a crystal labyrinth of possible deductions” reminds one of Luzhin’s wandering through “entrancing and terrible labyrinths” of continuations (2000a, 92) during his match with Turati. But since Luzhin hadn’t been introduced to chess yet when he first read these two novels, his explanation seems a little suspect of distortion, as if the character’s memory had retroactively incorporated his later passion for patterns (and for chess patterns in particular) into his boyish readings. This phenomenon bears a resemblance to Genette’s (1980) “paralepsis”: the text provides more information than would be available to the focalizing character (in this case, Luzhin’s younger self). This could be another of the distortions caused by Luzhin’s chess consciousness, after all. What is even more interesting is that Luzhin’s explanation for his childhood passion for these books appears, on a careful reading, inconsistent with his finding them dull in his adulthood. If young Luzhin had been so attracted to these books because of the narrative patterns traced by their protagonists, why exactly does he find them unexciting later on? Two things we know for sure: Luzhin’s interest in patterns does not flag in the second half of the novel (as I will discuss in a moment); and the novels have remained unchanged, preserving their precious patterns completely intact. Thus, the older Luzhin’s indifference to the novels remains unclear, and the reader’s (at least, this reader’s) suspicions about the character’s later “clarification” grow. In my view, the older Luzhin’s lack of interest in the books should be accounted for not at the level of pattern, but at the level of experience. When he returns to his one-time favorite novels, Luzhin is simply incapable of “experiencing them [as] intensely” as he had done during his youth because of his lack of self-consciousness: he cannot pay attention to

8.2 The Moves of His Life

191

experiences (in this case, the story-driven experiences he has undergone while reading these novels as a boy) in a reflective way. It seems that the character’s mental myopia hasn’t benefited from his hospital treatment, or from the loving care of Mrs. Luzhin. All Luzhin sees is an “exact and relentlessly unfolding pattern”: far from being a “magnifying glass,” his memory is a distortion mirror that inserts a chess-like, abstract pattern where there had once been experiential texture. Likewise, the number of occurrences of the word “experience” and of feelings like pleasure or pain dwindles down in the second half of the novel, as if experience had been systematically repressed.⁵ By contrast, patterns abound after Luzhin’s recovery from his breakdown, to the point that he starts seeing his whole life as a “combination” of chess moves, or a series of “repetitions.” Consider, for example, what happens when the newlywed couple returns home from a ball. Luzhin has just run into an old acquaintance of his, a schoolfellow, and he is so shaken by this chance meeting that he cannot fall asleep: “But it was not the meeting itself that was frightening but something else—this meeting’s secret meaning that he had to divine. He began to think intensely at nights, the way Sherlock had been wont to do over cigar ash—and gradually it began to seem that the combination was even more complex than he had at first thought, that the meeting … was only a continuation of something, and that it was necessary to look deeper, to return and replay all the moves of his life until the ball” (2000a, 138). The name of Sherlock Holmes, of course, may ring a bell with the reader, reminding him or her of the distortions created by Luzhin’s chess memory in the passage we have just examined. In a way, this is what the second half of the novel is about: Luzhin rewrites both his present and his remote past in something akin to chess notation, with past events becoming moves, and his reaction to life’s unexpected developments being organized (or so the character thinks) into a defense. “But from that day on there was no rest for him—he had, if possible, to contrive a defense against this perfidious combination, to free himself of it,” we read (2000a, 148). Needless to say, the textural richness of conscious experience is lost as life is translated into the intangible patterns of chess. As the story progresses, the cause of Luzhin’s great apprehension becomes increasingly clear: he notices an uncanny similarity between his life after recovering from the nervous collapse and his childhood. The similarity lies in frequent

 I have counted thirteen occurrences of the word “experience” (in both the noun and the verb form) in the first half of the novel (that is to say, before Luzhin’s Berlin collapse), only one occurrence in the second part. The validity of this kind of quantitative analysis is necessarily limited, but the results remain impressive, especially because they are consistent with my interpretive study.

192

8 Mental Myopia: Narrative Patterns and Experiential Texture

“repetitions,” and is taken by Luzhin to reveal an attack (a “combination”) that an unknown opponent is carrying out against him. Tammi (1985, 138 – 139) has drawn up a comprehensive inventory of the correlations Luzhin discovers between his childhood (and, more generally, the first half of the novel) and the events told in the second half. For instance, the doctor—the first person Luzhin sees when he regains consciousness after his breakdown—reminds him of the peasant who had once returned him to his parents, foiling the child’s attempt to escape to his parents’ country house (2000a, 107). But the resemblance between these two characters does not end at their black beards; it involves the repetition of a whole narrative sequence. After the adjournment of the match with Turati, Luzhin trudges out of the chess club, incoherently mumbling that he should head “home.” Unmistakable textual markers, spotted by previous commentators (see, e. g., Boyd 1987, 585), indicate that Luzhin confuses his walk through Berlin with his ancient flight to the country house. Thus, the resemblance between the doctor and the peasant runs deeper than it may seem at first (Luzhin sees both as interrupting his flight “home”), concerning the characters’ structural function within a narrative sequence. This conclusion gives us a heads-up about the nature of Luzhin’s “repetitions.” What, exactly, is being repeated? There is more to these repetitions than the re-emergence, in different parts of Luzhin’s life story, of characters (Luzhin’s former tutor, Valentinov, makes a comeback in the second part of the novel), objects (at the hospital, Luzhin suddenly remembers his buried chess set [2000a, 107]) or situations (both Luzhin’s French governess and his wife’s Soviet visitor disappear after having entered an elevator [see 2000a, 111, 152]). In short, and this brings us back to one of the major thematic concerns of The Defense, what is repeated is a pattern, as spelled out by this passage: “Just as some combination, known from chess problems, can be indistinctly repeated on the board in actual play—so now the consecutive repetition of a familiar pattern was becoming noticeable in his present life” (2000a, 147). But observe the difference between these chess patterns and those of the first half of the novel, which were more often than not visual patterns: here, the “combinations” and “repetitions” that Luzhin seems to see in every corner of his life are, specifically, narrative patterns. In this connection, Tammi has drawn an interesting parallel between Luzhin’s chess conception of his life and a passage from an essay by Viktor Shklovsky: plot patterns, Shklovsky writes, “correspond to gambits, i.e. the classical moves of [chess]” (Shklovsky 1973, 70; quoted in Tammi 1985, 135). The same correspondence is established by Luzhin (see Connolly 1992, 93) and by Nabokov himself in the foreword to the novel (2000a, vii). My interpretation is that the distortions caused by Luzhin’s chess consciousness have grown more severe, penetrating into the narrative that makes up the character’s self—his self-narrative, as I called it in chapter

8.2 The Moves of His Life

193

6. Let us take a small step backward. There is one sphere of Luzhin’s experience that was preserved intact by his mental myopia—his childhood memories. These memories, completely suppressed in the first part of the novel (where, as we have seen, Luzhin remembers only “sitting at a chessboard … an infinity of times” [2000a, 89]), flood Luzhin’s mind after his recovery from the nervous breakdown, partly because of the “flight home” mechanism triggered by the character’s delirium, partly because of the doctor’s direct questions about his childhood: “constantly nudged by such interrogations, his thoughts would return again and again to the sphere of his childhood” (2000a, 110). However, Luzhin’s relief at the discovery of a pristine area of his experience (one left untouched by his experiential blindness) is shortlived, since a new, and possibly more dangerous illness strikes him: after affecting his perception, the distortions get to his narratively constructed self. Thus, what happens in the second half of the novel is that Luzhin’s chess patterns break into his self-narrative, wreaking havoc on his psyche, and eventually leading him (as a last-ditch defense) to “drop out of the game” (2000a, 176) by committing suicide. Yet Tammi’s claim that Luzhin “strives to structure the raw materials of experience according to his particular talent” (1985, 143) sounds highly dubious. Instead, I tend to see things the other way around: Luzhin’s talent structures him, distorting his experience and blinding his self-consciousness—and this is the underlying cause of the character’s ruin. If Luzhin could really exert control over his experience (as Tammi argues), he would not see his life as a chess game played against a mysterious opponent. He would not find the repetitions “so frightening that he was tempted to stop the clock of life, to suspend the game for good, to freeze” (2000a, 148)—a passage in which Luzhin seems to be wholly unaware that the temporal structures of experience are not the rules of chess. And yet, at the same time, it is striking how close Luzhin gets to a true understanding of the narrativity of the self. As discussed in section 6.1, in his analysis of the self Dennett writes that “we (unlike professional human storytellers) do not consciously and deliberately figure out what narratives to tell and how to tell them. Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us” (1991, 418). By viewing his life as a sequence of chess moves, and by positing the existence of someone who plays against him, Luzhin almost hits upon the idea that we are sometimes spun (or, as he would say, we are played) by the stories we tell (or by the moves we make)—to the point that our own stories seem to be told by someone else. But the key word here is “almost,” since Luzhin never comes to a full realization: with a perverse, and characteristically Nabokovian twist, Luzhin unconsciously shows that we are unconsciously shaped by the narrative patterns we trace in our engagement with the world (in his case, his talent for chess). The reader is, of course, the (possibly conscious) beneficiary of Luzhin’s chance discovery.

194

8 Mental Myopia: Narrative Patterns and Experiential Texture

My double “unconsciously” should not be read as unlikely homage to the “Viennese [i. e., Freudian] delegation” (2000a, ix), which Nabokov never missed a chance to disparage, but as an allusion to the centerpiece of my argument, Luzhin’s negation of experience. It is because of his lack of self-consciousness, I submit, that Luzhin stops short of an important realization about the narrativity of the self. For the same reason, metafictional interpretations of Luzhin’s achievements seem to me fundamentally flawed. I will explore this issue in more detail in the next section, before looking into the problem of Nabokov’s otherworld.

8.3 Beyond? Usually, interpreters of the metafictional/otherworldly stripe bundle together Luzhin’s chess playing and artistic pursuits. Tammi, for instance, enthusiastically applauds the “the rare spectacle of a fictive hero trying to ‘defeat’ his maker by constructing an imaginative structure of his own” (1985, 143). The aim of this section is to find out whether Luzhin’s intense involvement with chess does lift him out of the two-dimensional reality the other characters are immersed in, as Naiman (1998) would have it—and whether it does enable him to glance at an “otherworld.” Suppose that my interpretation is correct, and that Luzhin really is unable to attend to the phenomenal qualities of experience: by the end of the novel, all he can see is a chess-like pattern, a sequence of abstract moves made by an unnamed opponent. It may be argued (and it has been argued, albeit in different terms) that Luzhin’s experiential blindness is more than compensated by his “sixth sense,” an intuitive grasp of the dimension beyond experience itself. On this account, chess is—“because of its link to art” (Naiman 1998, 16)—Luzhin’s means of access to an invisible world, envisaged either as the world of its creator, via an ontological metalepsis, or as a quasi-mystical “otherworld.” Both metafictional (Tammi 1985; Naiman 1998) and otherworldly (Boyd 1987; 2001; Alexandrov 1991) readings share the conviction that, through chess, Luzhin somehow senses a reality beyond the physical world experienced by the other characters. But of course the similarity ends here. I will begin by outlining the case for metafiction, and turn to otherworldly readings in the second part of this section. In general terms, the argument for metafiction revolves around the idea that the “opponent” Luzhin tries to defeat in the second half of the novel is the author himself, and that the threatening narrative patterns he senses around him are those of Nabokov’s own story. Indeed, critics like Tammi and Naiman have pointed out that the “combinations” and “repetitions” are not just products of Luzhin’s deranged mind (of the distortions created by his chess consciousness)—they are really there, as part of Nabokov’s novel. Thus, these narrative

8.3 Beyond?

195

patterns seem to be read by Luzhin as clues about the narrative situation in which he is placed. Consider the scene in which Luzhin finds himself alone with the sulky son of his wife’s Soviet visitor, in the study of his Berlin apartment (2000a, 149 – 151). This sequence bears an eerie resemblance to the initiation into chess of young Luzhin, himself a sulky child, in his father’s study, some one hundred and thirty pages before (2000a, 19 – 21). Luzhin is on the point of showing a chessboard to his young guest when he has a sudden flash of recognition: “His terrible little double, little Luzhin, for whom the chess pieces had been set out, crawled over the carpet on his knees … All this had happened once before … And again he had been caught, had not understood how exactly the repetition of a familiar theme would come out in practice” (2000a, 151, ellipses in the original). Quite apart from Luzhin’s rampant paranoia, readers are likely to notice the marked similarity between these two scenes. It could well be, then, that the mists of Luzhin’s experiential blindness have encouraged him to turn his gaze elsewhere, achieving an understanding of his own character status: like the reader, he is able to gesture toward the author who has perversely entrapped him in the “combinations” and “repetitions” of a novel, The Defense. However, despite the indirect textual evidence, it clearly will not do to overstate the case for metafiction. I am not denying that a metafictional interpretation of the novel may suggest itself to readers, of course: insofar as it establishes a connection between Luzhin’s chess patterns and its narrative structures, The Defense does seem to self-reflexively flaunt its fictional—and artifactual—status. The view with which I take issue here is that this metafictional interpretation suggests itself to Luzhin, blurring the boundaries—via ontological metalepsis—between the storyworld and the real world. Indeed, I have tried to phrase my statements as cautiously as possible in the last paragraph, but they still seem a little far-fetched when compared with what goes on in the novel. The problem is, yet again, Luzhin’s lack of reflective consciousness. Tammi has gone as far as to argue that, since some of the “repetitions” occur beyond Luzhin’s awareness, then “perhaps Luzhin’s fears are not entirely baseless after all … Perhaps reality—in the sense of the narrated reality of this specific novel—indeed is a game manipulated outside the hero’s range of perception” (1985, 139). That storyworlds are externally controlled by an author is a truth that, of course, no reader needs this particular novel to find out. The real question here is whether Luzhin finds out that he is entangled in such a storyworld— and this is why Tammi’s list (1985, 139 – 141) of the “repetitions” of which Luzhin remains unaware cannot help the case for metalepsis. Rather, it seems to reinforce the contrary view that Luzhin is barred from a full insight into his nature—however close he comes to it.

196

8 Mental Myopia: Narrative Patterns and Experiential Texture

In this respect, what counts is not that some passages of The Defense seem to hint, more or less subtly, at the author’s intervention (see Naiman 1998, 17– 36), but that Luzhin never once considers the possibility of his being a character in a novel. All he sees, even in the second half of the novel, is a series of chess patterns. I cannot but wholeheartedly agree, then, with Connolly’s conclusion that, even though Luzhin’s “perception of the influence of an intangible intellect in his world … displays a tantalizing apprehension of authentic reality,” the character “has misunderstood the specific nature of this higher power. Locked into the psychology of chess maneuvers, he can only imagine the entity in terms of chess, and thus he plunges to his death without discovering his true ontological status” (1992, 99). So much for metafictional interpretations of Luzhin’s achievements. At first sight, the evidence for the otherworldly reading is even more limited. It is true that, while blindfolded, Luzhin plays as “in a celestial dimension, where his tools were incorporeal quantities” (2000a, 57) and that (in his stupor after the match with Turati) Luzhin detects “some subtle ruse on the part of the chess gods” (2000a, 95); but the reference to “a celestial dimension” is little more than a trope for Luzhin’s delight at the abstraction of chess, whereas the allusion to “chess gods” cannot be taken out of the context of Luzhin’s hallucinations. In any case, this is not enough to turn Luzhin into a “man attuned to the otherworld” (Boyd 1992, 478). Luzhin is not more alert to an otherworld than he is to his author’s world: at most, following Boyd’s (1987) interpretation, he can be said to be subjected to an otherworld of which he remains unaware.⁶ Indeed, if The Defense can be seen as illustrating a point that borders on the mystical, it is only ex negativo—against the grain of the protagonist’s achievements. Nabokov’s novel may hint at a mystique (if not at a mystical conception) of experience through the distortion mirror of Luzhin’s experiential blindness. An important clue is provided by this passage from Nabokov’s autobiography: “It is certainly not then—not in dreams—but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits” (2000b, 30). And later on, Nabokov adds: “Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world … the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me” (2000b, 77). Even though Nabokov’s specific target in these passages is sleep, it is possible to generalize from his words. The path to a higher form of con-

 Actually, Boyd argues that Luzhin’s suicide implies his belated recognition of the otherworld, but this is where I part ways with Boyd’s interpretation and endorse Connolly’s (1992, 99) view that Luzhin never becomes aware of it.

8.3 Beyond?

197

sciousness, Nabokov suggests, cannot be found outside consciousness itself— and this is why Luzhin, with his experiential blindness and his lack of self-consciousness, is doomed to failure, no matter how “divine” the game of chess is. It is by intensifying our reflective self-consciousness—by giving careful attention to our own experience and to its phenomenal qualities—that we can push back the boundaries of human experience. As Boyd writes, a “possible hint of something larger than human consciousness is likely to come when consciousness is already working at its alertest, when mystery is met by acuteness” (2001, 87). No wonder that Luzhin cannot reach this state of heightened awareness: his life story seems to move in the opposite direction, toward the character’s loss of self-awareness, culminating in his two experiential breakdowns. This conclusion is confirmed by Nabokov’s clever use of consciousness-enactment triggers in the transition between chapter 8 and chapter 9—where the author’s criticism of the experiential blindness of his creature becomes quite explicit. In order to understand this point, we need to read “in slow motion” (as I did in section 5.2, vis-àvis Benjy’s monologue) the transition between Luzhin’s fainting after the match with Turati, at the end of chapter 8, and the beginning of chapter 9. These are the last lines of chapter 8: [Luzhin’s] legs from hips to heels were tightly filled with lead, the way the base of a chessman is weighted. Gradually the lights disappeared, the phantoms grew sparser, and a wave of oppressive blackness washed over him… He stretched out a hand to the fence but at this point triumphant pain began to overwhelm him, pressing down from above on his skull, and it was as if he were becoming flatter and flatter, and then he soundlessly dissipated. (2000a, 95)

As pointed out above, in the first sentence we witness the character’s obsession with chess penetrate into the inner core of his experiential background—his proprioceptive awareness of his own body. But readers are more than external observers of Luzhin’s transfiguration into a chess piece, and of his final fainting. Being incapable of imagining what is beyond the distortion filter of the character’s perception, they have to stick to his altered consciousness—and are therefore likely to enact the experience that they, at the same time, attribute to the character. At this point the chapter ends. Appropriately enough, the character’s losing his senses coincides with an interruption to the reader’s engagement not only with the character, but with the text itself. This is another trigger of consciousness-enactment, of course, since it signals that the reader’s only access to the storyworld is provided by the character’s consciousness. Chapter 9 begins by presenting the consciousness of someone who tumbles down, tries to stand up, and tumbles down again: “The sidewalk skidded, reared up at a right angle and swayed back again” (2000a, 96). Our first impulse is to

198

8 Mental Myopia: Narrative Patterns and Experiential Texture

read these lines through a “continuing-consciousness frame,” in Palmer’s term (see the introduction to chapter 5): linking this bodily experience with Luzhin, we infer that the character has regained his senses and that he is trying to get to his feet. In accordance with Jahn’s (1997) primacy rule, readers’ tendency is to retain the frame through which they had read the conclusion of the previous chapter, enacting an experience and attributing it to Luzhin at the same time. However, interpreters soon realize that there is something wrong with this attribution. The next sentence reads: “Günther straightened himself up, breathing heavily, while his comrade, supporting him and also swaying, kept repeating: ‘Günther, Günther, try to walk’” (2000a, 96). Who is Günther? We have never seen this name—or character—before, and through a garden-path structure (see Jahn 1999b) we have been tricked into enacting his consciousness instead of Luzhin’s. As we read further in the chapter, we learn that Günther is part of a brigade of Berliners who, after a drinking binge, run into Luzhin’s unconscious body, initially mistaking him for one of their companions. Despite their alcoholic haze, they heave Luzhin into a taxi and send him to the address written on the postcard he carries in one of his pockets, his fiancée’s house (much to her dismay). What is comical about this misunderstanding is that, of course, there is all the difference in the world between the blunted self-consciousness of a chess artist like Luzhin and the most lackluster of all altered states—alcoholic stupor. Or perhaps I would better say that there should be all the difference in the world. For Nabokov’s handling of the transition between the two chapters seems to cast doubt on this idea. Why are we unwittingly flung from Luzhin’s consciousness into the consciousness of a (previously unknown) drunkard? My hunch is that there is a considerable element of mockery in the sudden shift. The object of Nabokov’s attack is, once again, Luzhin’s experiential blindness—which is here maliciously equated with sloppy drunkenness. Being a hopeless romantic, steeped in readings “that Nabokov did not respect” (Naiman 1998, 9; see Nabokov 2000a, 67– 68), Mrs. Luzhin “could not bear to think that everybody had taken [Luzhin’s] mysterious swoon for the flabby, vulgar sleep of a reveler” (2000a, 101). But readers may see through Mrs. Luzhin’s sentimentality: remembering the perverse pleasure with which the narrator had lingered on Luzhin’s “limply floundering body” (2000a, 97), they may conclude that his “swoon” is not in the least less vulgar (or more arcane) than the German revelers’. The implication is that, for Nabokov, if there is anything beyond human experience (and he is notoriously elusive in this regard), it can be sensed only by intensifying our attention to experience itself. Luzhin, like the German drinkers—but with an ironic twist, given the great potential of his chess patterns— is on the wrong track. Crucially, consciousness-enactment accompanies and consolidates this interpretation. The pattern is similar to the one discussed in the

8.3 Beyond?

199

last chapter: an interpretive response dealing with socio-cultural meanings is made more forceful by the reader’s engagement with Luzhin’s (and Günther’s) altered perception. As they realize that they have been enacting the consciousness of an unknown character instead of Luzhin’s, readers are likely to be thrown into a third-person stance, and from there they may tease out the hermeneutic implications of Nabokov’s silent transition between the two consciousnesses. To put the same point otherwise: there is a sudden shift in readers’ engagement with the characters, which in turn invites readers to respond to the text by constructing an interpretive meaning. Therefore, a movement along the horizontal axis of the network of experientiality (Figure 1)—from consciousness-enactment to consciousness-attribution—has a feedback effect on the vertical axis, which connects the textual design with readers’ experiential background. In this case, this process seems to invite readers to reconsider the idea of transcendence—which, the text suggests, has to be accomplished in experience and not through its deformation or denial. Although I can only gesture toward this idea here, it is interesting to note that, for a writer like Nabokov, heightening one’s self-consciousness also involves trying one’s hardest to capture what, more than everything else, seems to resist being captured in words: the ineffable properties of experience, or qualia (see section 4.4). Nabokov repeatedly expressed his loyalty to experience and consciousness—“the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all,” he wrote (2010, 137). In an interview, he added: “the main favor I ask of the serious critic is sufficient perceptiveness to understand that whatever term or trope I use, my purpose is not to be facetiously flashy or grotesquely obscure but to express what I feel and think with the utmost truthfulness and perception” (1990, 179). I read this remark as bearing testimony to Nabokov’s attempts at circumventing the limitations of language, encapsulating in words experience itself—and there is certainly a mystical aspect to this endeavor. Even from this perspective, Luzhin could not be more different from his creator—Luzhin who, looking back at his childhood through the mists of his experiential blindness, has only the letters and numbers of chess notation at his disposal: “It was impossible to express his recollections in words—there simply were no grown-up words for his childish impressions—and if he ever related anything, then he did so jerkily and unwillingly, rapidly sketching the outlines and marking a complex move, rich in possibilities, with just a letter and a number” (2000a, 110). Here, again, chess reduces the textural complexity of experience to a series of abstract, non-experiential patterns. It should not go unnoticed, however, that Luzhin’s “childish impressions”— for which the character can find “no grown-up words”—are vividly described by Nabokov in the first chapters of the novel. Beside asserting the author’s superiority over its creature (see Connolly 1992, 96), Nabokov’s strenuous efforts to

200

8 Mental Myopia: Narrative Patterns and Experiential Texture

convey the phenomenal qualities of experience are a counterbalance to Luzhin’s experiential blindness. In a way, the feat Nabokov achieves in The Defense is to impress on the reader’s imagination both Luzhin’s chess-induced hallucinations and the glory of the “universe embraced by consciousness” (2000b, 165), which the character so spectacularly fails to see. Even the German drinkers seem to do better than Luzhin, with their eyes admiringly fixed on “the wonderful, pale, nebulous abyss, where the stars flowed in an arc” (2000a, 97). The contrast between the abstraction of chess patterns and the experiential richness of people’s contacts with the world is at the basis of the three-dimensional model of narrative that I discuss in the next section.

8.4 Three Functions of Narrative: Overreading The Defense In his Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (2008), Porter Abbott makes a useful distinction between “underreading” and “overreading.” An interpreter “underreads” when he or she does not do justice to some aspects of a story that other interpreters regard as important or even crucial. By contrast, “overreading” involves making too much of an aspect of a story at the expense of others. Abbott argues that intentional interpretation—which ascribes some communicative intentions to the author or creator of a story—should strive to “reduce both underreading and overreading to a minimum” (2008, 84). The following paragraphs are a deliberate attempt at overreading Luzhin’s story as an allegory of the relationship between narrative patterns and experience. I doubt that this idea ever crossed Nabokov’s mind, and even if it did it would be irrelevant here: to borrow another distinction from Abbott (2008, chap. 3), my reading falls within the domain of what he calls “adaptive interpretation”—in other words, it offers a creative interpretation that puts Nabokov’s novel in the service of a theoretical argument. In particular, I will use The Defense as a means to raise a more general point about narrative. The reason why Luzhin is so irresistibly attracted to chess patterns is that they bring an order to which the protagonist can cling in the face of an incomprehensible reality.⁷ We have seen above that these patterns are explicitly presented as narrative patterns in the second half of the novel. Likewise, in section 2.1 I have referred to the position—taken, for example, by Herman (2003) and Walsh (2007)—that storytelling enables people to organize experience by breaking it down and stringing its component parts (existents and

 Cf., for instance, Toker’s claim that Luzhin “finds a mode of harmony that can provide him with an escape [from reality]: chess” (1989, 73).

8.4 Three Functions of Narrative: Overreading The Defense

201

events) into a spatio-temporal pattern. This operation bears a resemblance to what Hayden White (see, e. g., 2005)—building on Ricoeur’s (1985) “mise en intrigue”—calls “emplotment,” or the transformation of a series of events into an organized sequence with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Taking our cue from Mar and Oatley, we may call this the abstractive function of narrative: “stories model and abstract the human social world” (2008, 173), they write. Having a lower level of detail, models are more easily manageable than the modeled objects, and therefore they can be especially effective in fulfilling certain purposes, including that of explaining other people’s behavior—as suggested by Hutto’s narrative practice hypothesis (see Hutto 2008; Herman 2009d, 51– 54; and section 6.1 in this study). To understand this point about the utility of modeling, consider the following Borgesian-sounding thought experiment: we may imagine a self-narrative that coincides perfectly with a person’s life, narrating it second by second, down to the least detail. (This, assuming that all of our experiences can be smoothly rendered into linguistic terms—which I do not think is the case, but more on this point in a moment.) Such a self-narrative would be so unwieldy as to be completely useless, since recipients would have to lay aside their own life in order to engage with it. The abstractive function of narrative prevents this proliferation by “chunking” (Herman 2003) the flux of experience and including in the story only what is relevant in a given context. Hence, we may argue that the tendency toward modeling and abstraction is built into storytelling, reflecting the principle “break down experience and combine its parts into an organized whole.” As I suggested in chapter 1, representation works by referring to a set of spatio-temporally locatable events and existents. Pursuing this line of thinking, it can be argued that abstraction is the principle behind narrative representation, being responsible for both the discreteness and the organization of the represented entities. As Luzhin’s own obsession with patterns shows, however, part of the experiential texture of our interaction with the world is lost in the process of abstracting our experience. As “models of action sequences” (Herman 2009d, 46), stories are inevitably less rich in texture and detail than the actions that they model. Why is this? In an interview, Nabokov famously declared that “[you] can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable” (1990, 11). Another way to put this is to say that there is no single narrative model that can encapsulate experience, since

202

8 Mental Myopia: Narrative Patterns and Experiential Texture

what defines experience is precisely its openness to modeling.⁸ Experience is irreducibly rich because it is amenable to several non-overlapping models or patterns—which, in turn, reflect the complexity of the interactions between one’s experiential background and some worldly offerings. Luzhin’s chess patterns are a powerful reminder of how his background shapes the world as he sees it. The upshot is that authors must work hard to flesh out the texture that is lost through narrative modeling: my comparison between the sentence “I saw a bridge on a river” and Faulkner’s description of the act of seeing a bridge on a river in subsection 5.3.1 seeks to demonstrate this phenomenon. On the basis of the argument advanced in chapter 1, we may call this aspect of narrative its “expressive function.” Stories can express experience via the tension between recipients’ experiential background and the expressive devices examined in section 1.3 and in subsection 5.3.2: using a variety of devices, from evaluative statements to stylistic choices, story producers can invite recipients to respond experientially to the text. The core principle here is “create experiential texture through expressive devices.” What it is important to stress in this connection is that, just as the distinction between representation and experience is a non-categorical one (representation and experience are bound up in language—see section 1.1), abstraction and expression should be thought of as different aspects or dimensions of the same process. In some cases, narrative creates experiential texture at the expense of abstraction, i. e., through devices that are not story-advancing because they do not accelerate the textual movement that takes the story from an initial state to an end state.⁹ For instance, a highly expressive (consciousness-focused) narrative like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is less abstract than a factual report, such as a summary of the novel itself: even though the two texts exhibit the same narrative patterns, extracting them from Woolf’s novel takes much more effort from readers. The Defense stages a conflict between the abstractive and the expressive function of narrative: the former is embodied by Luzhin’s chess patterns, the latter by the phenomenal qualities of experience, which become invisible to the character despite figuring prominently in the texture of Nabokov’s novel. But in other cases abstraction and expression work in tandem, to the point that the narrative organization seems to be geared toward producing an effect on recipients. Meir Sternberg’s (1992; 1993) “narrative universals” of suspense, curios-

 Along similar lines, Van Heusden (2009, 614– 615) argues that “cultural cognition” springs from the recognition of a difference between the patterns through which humans attempt to make sense of reality and the continuously changing patterns of reality itself.  These “story-advancing” elements correspond to what Paul Werth (1999) calls “functionadvancing propositions” in his text-world model of discourse comprehension.

8.4 Three Functions of Narrative: Overreading The Defense

203

ity, and surprise are a telling example of how readers’ responses—and therefore the experiential texture created by stories—can depend on narrative’s organizational dynamic: when a story arouses readers’ curiosity by omitting important information, it shapes their experience of the text via an emotional response. The phrase “important information” suggests that there is another function of storytelling that should be taken into account in this discussion. What is it that makes a piece of information “important”? I argued in section 2.1 that stories can be used to make sense of experience not only by organizing what goes on but also by implicating or drawing in the stakes of what goes on—the biological and cultural values that guide our interaction with the world. This entanglement of experiential values in stories is at the core of what I call narrative’s evaluative dimension, whose central principle—akin to Grice’s (1989) maxim of relevance—is: “address problems, themes, or topics that you consider important in a given context.” Thus, recipients determine what counts as important in a story on the basis of the interaction between the story itself and their experiential background. But there is more: this kind of evaluation has a major role in linking narrative organization with the experiential texture created by stories. Indeed, narrative patterns are always keyed toward an evaluation, since the way people articulate the continuum of their experience—through narrative selection and combination—depends on the values that permeate their experiential background. When we tell a story, both the details we include and those we omit reflect an organizing principle that is not just logical but axiological (i.e., evaluative). Likewise, on the reception side, when readers engage with a story they constantly evaluate it in light of their own experiential background. But we should not forget that, as I argued in chapter 2, evaluation is an essential aspect of experience. It is because of the key role of evaluation that a certain type of narrative articulation of the flux of experience can bring about an effect on readers (therefore conveying an experience). For example, on Sternberg’s model, readers can feel suspense or curiosity or surprise because they place value on an element that is being exploited or “played with” in a certain way by the narrative organization: in suspense, readers anticipate two or more possible outcomes of an emotionally charged action sequence; in curiosity, they wonder about a piece of information that has been omitted by the story; in surprise, they are struck by an unexpected twist of the events. In all these cases, evaluation meshes together abstraction and expression by establishing a link between a principle of narrative organization and recipients’ experiential responses. This complex system of interactions between the abstractive, the evaluative, and the expressive functions of narrative is visualized in Figure 8. Some narratives can be said to place a premium on only one of these functions: summaries or factual reports seem to favor abstraction, consciousness-focused stories put the emphasis on expression, whereas conversational storytell-

204

8 Mental Myopia: Narrative Patterns and Experiential Texture

Figure 8: A three-dimensional model of narrative; the diagram shows how the abstractive, expressive, and evaluative dimensions of narrative work and interact, and how they relate to the representation vs. experience distinction traced in chapter 1.

ing tends to highlight the evaluative dimension. This is, however, a considerable simplification: all three functions are inextricably bound up in narrative; indeed, what is especially interesting is how they interact within individual stories, giving rise to complex configurations that can vary substantially from story to story. The Defense is, again, a good test case for this three-dimensional model. On my reading, the Nabokovian interest in the “beyond” occupies the evaluative pole: through Luzhin’s life, the author illustrates the dangers of an infatuation with patterns, suggesting that this infatuation can take us away both from experience and from the dimension that is beyond experience itself. How is this evaluation realized in Nabokov’s novel? In brief, it springs from the divide between abstraction and expression, which Nabokov seems to foreground at the same time as he magnifies it. On the one hand, abstraction is thematized by Luzhin’s passion for chess patterns, which are abstract and immaterial and take on a narrative form in the second half of the novel. Abstraction tends toward order and organization—which seem to offer Luzhin a defense against the messy world of experience and social interaction—but also toward a lack of specificity and particularity. On the other hand, the expressive function has to do with the way in which textual strategies like consciousness tags and internal focalization are implemented by Nabokov, giving experiential depth to the storyworld. The reader is

8.4 Three Functions of Narrative: Overreading The Defense

205

asked to engage with Luzhin’s experience—powerfully conveyed, in its alterations and distortions, by Nabokov—even while the character becomes increasingly unable to pay attention to it in a reflective way. In other words, the expressive function of the novel seems to run counter to the abstraction of Luzhin’s patterns, and in the tension between these poles there arises the author’s evaluation. Overall, The Defense can be read as an allegory of how the expression of experience and the abstraction of representation (through narrative patterning) interact in stories, reflecting the storyteller’s evaluations and opening the door to recipients’ own evaluative responses. In terms of the larger project undertaken in this book, the ideas developed in this section help us position the representational dimension of stories in relation to their experiential dimension. I argued in section 1.1 that in storytelling representation, conceived of as the reference to a set of events and existents, is intertwined with expression. Just as the abstractive function points to the representation of a discrete series of events “cut out” from the flux of experience, the expressive function is related to the creation of an experience. Both of them find a common ground in the evaluative function. The strength of the impact of narrative depends on the extent to which our engagement with its representational and expressive devices can reveal and restructure what is at stake in our background of experience—the meanings and values that we negotiate in our embodied interactions with the physical, intersubjective, and socio-cultural world.

9 Conclusion: Where to Go from Here? As one of the first readers of this book remarked, it is almost ironic that a study of narrative experiences should feel so abstract, so remote from the experiential richness of reading narrative, as this study sometimes does. No doubt, my diagrams and the language of “tensions,” “experiential background,” and “consciousness-enactment,” can seem stiff and overly general when compared to the wide range of readers’ responses to narrative. Whether my model is as reductive as this reader depicts it is open to debate, but I think his comment raises a broader concern, which has to do with the pitfalls inherent in the project of experiential investigation that I have undertaken here: should the emphasis fall on individual experiences, described at a relatively idiographic level through case studies? Or should we rather examine classes and structures of reader-response in abstraction from particular texts, and collapsing differences across large numbers of readers? I have tried to strike a balance between detailed accounts of story-driven experiences—obtained through introspection—and more generalizing aims and methods, but integrating these dimensions hasn’t always been easy or straightforward, and may leave some readers with a sense of dissatisfaction. Many key questions remain open, particularly with regard to the problem of validation (how does one move from textual design to experiential structures?), intersubjective corroboration (how do we handle differences across readers?), and the divide between unconscious cognitive processing and experience (how can scientific psychology contribute to the study of experience?). It would be unfair to blame the limitations of this study on the status quo of cognitive approaches to narrative and literary narrative in particular. Yet it would also be a mistake, I think, to fail to see how some of the questions raised here reflect the problematic positioning of the field that we call “cognitive narratology.” Opening a dialogue with the mind sciences has greatly enriched narrative theory, but it can also be seen to destabilize the primacy of the text as an object of narratological analysis. In itself, reformulating narrative representation—the link between some textual cues and a storyworld—in psychological terms involves an important shift in the way we conceptualize narrative. But as soon as we transition from representation to experience—as I have tried to do in this book—things become exponentially more complicated. The project of reconciling narratology with reader-response theory and psychological studies of literary reading may seem the logical development of (a particular strand within) today’s cognitive approaches to narrative; yet it also poses epistemological and methodological challenges that would have been unthinkable within the paradigm of classical narrative theory. Taking experience seriously means reckoning

9 Conclusion: Where to Go from Here?

207

with a large number of variables, methodological constraints, and interpersonal differences which threaten to make the text and its structures look disconcertingly small. Characters, plots, narrative spaces become unstable entities, flickering between the text and readers’ experience, constantly developing as readers engage with and reflect on narrative on the basis of their experiential background. There are considerable theoretical gains to be reaped by meeting these challenges. Experience, as I have argued in this book, is a powerfully integrative notion, spanning a wide gamut of responses, from bodily awareness to the expanse of perception to the intricacies of social interaction and cultural interpretation. All these dimensions converge in recipients’ experience of narrative: teasing them out and investigating their correlations would give us a firmer grip on the psychological processes through which narratives (including, but not limited to, artistic and literary varieties) enter people’s meaning constructions and shape their cultural and personal identity. Bringing to light these processes requires a genuinely interdisciplinary approach and methodology, possibly embracing not only narratology and the mind sciences but also narrative studies in the social sciences. This book may only have scratched the surface of this interdisciplinary dialogue, but it at least points to a way forward for the theory of narrative, one that takes Monika Fludernik’s notion of narrative experientiality into a “second generation” of embodied, enactivist approaches: it shows how narrative engagements are always projected against a horizon of biological and socio-cultural evaluations; how experiential traces may be conjured up and recombined by storytelling into novel imaginative experiences; how recipients can extend themselves into imaginary spaces and enact the consciousnesses of fictional characters. A lot remains to be done, of course: this book examines the tension between consciousness-attribution and consciousness-enactment in readers’ interaction with characters, typically in contexts of internal focalization, but shifting the focus to first-person narrators and the dynamics of narrative unreliability could greatly complicate the picture offered here. At another level, it would be worth looking at how narrative macrostructure influences the temporal progression of storydriven experiences, giving rise to rhythms, moods, and feels that tinge readers’ engagement with narrative over long stretches of text. Finally, much more could be said about the link between story-driven experiences and how we recall, reflect on, and interpret narrative after our engagement is over. This book leaves these questions—and the more methodological questions listed above—open, but it at least tries to build a vocabulary and a theoretical framework with which we may address them going forward. It argues, above all, that experience matters: we value storytelling because its experiential texture can encapsulate—and at the same time alert us to—the structural depth, richness, and complexity of our interactions with the world. As always, I want to stress that this “encapsulation” is structural,

208

9 Conclusion: Where to Go from Here?

not naïvely mimetic: fictional worlds can deviate significantly from the real world, even though engaging with both falls into the same structure of experience—namely, negotiating worldly affordances in terms of our experiential background, and attributing consciousness to others while, sometimes, imagining what it is like to be them. A more detailed investigation of how relating to literary characters and narrators can prompt interpretive strategies that are unlikely in everyday intersubjectivity will have to wait for another time.

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter. 2008. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alber, Jan. 2002. “The ‘Moreness’ or ‘Lessness’ of ‘Natural’ Narratology: Samuel Beckett’s ‘Lessness’ Reconsidered.” Style 36 (1): 54 – 75. Alber, Jan, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson. 2010. “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models.” Narrative 18 (2): 113 – 136. Alexandrov, Vladimir. 1991. Nabokov’s Otherworld. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Aliaga-Buchenau, Ana-Isabel. 2003. “Reading as the Path to Revolt? Emile Zola’s Germinal.” Postscript 20 (3): 14 – 23. Anderson, Michael L. 2003. “Embodied Cognition: A Field Guide.” Artificial Intelligence 149 (1): 91 – 130. Anscombe, G. E. M. 2002. The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature. In Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception, ed. Alva Noë and Evan Thompson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bamberg, Michael. 2004. Narrative Discourse and Identities. In Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism, ed. Jan Christoph Meister, Tom Kind, and Wilhelm Schernus, 213 – 237. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Bamberg, Michael, ed. 2007. Selves and Identities in Narrative and Discourse. Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Banfield, Ann. 1987. Describing the Unobserved: Events Grouped Around an Empty Center. In The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature, ed. Nigel Fabb, Colin MacCabe, Derek Attridge, and Alan Durant, 265 – 285. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Baroni, Raphaël. 2013. “Tellability.” The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/tellability (19 March 2014). Barsalou, Lawrence W. 1999. “Perceptual Symbol Systems.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22: 577 – 660. Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Beckett, Samuel. 1996. Company. In Nohow On. New York: Grove Press. Bergen, Benjamin K., Shane Lindsay, Teenie Matlock, and Srini Narayanan. 2007. “Spatial and Linguistic Aspects of Visual Imagery in Sentence Comprehension.” Cognitive Science 31: 733 – 764. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Bernini, Marco. 2014. “Gression, Regression and Beyond: A Cognitive Reading of The Unnamable.” Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 26. Bishop, Sonia J. 2007. “Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Anxiety: An Integrative Account.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11 (7): 307 – 316. Bolens, Guillemette. 2012. The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Booth, Wayne C. 1983. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

210

Works Cited

Bortolussi, Marisa, and Peter Dixon. 2002. Psychonarratology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyd, Brian. 1987. “The Problem of Pattern: Nabokov’s Defense.” Modern Fiction Studies 33 (4): 575 – 604. — 1992. “Review of Nabokov’s Otherworld.” Modern Fiction Studies 38 (2): 447 – 448. — 1999. Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Princeton: Princeton University Press. — 2001. Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness. Second edition. Christchurch, New Zealand: Cybereditions. — 2009. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bozarth, Michael A. 1994. Pleasure Systems in the Brain. In Pleasure: The Politics and the Reality, ed. David M. Warburton, 5 – 14. New York: Wiley. Brentano, Franz. 1973. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Ed. L. McAlister. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Brooks, Peter. 1985. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage. Brooks, Rodney A. 1991. Intelligence Without Reason. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Report. Cambridge, MA: MIT. http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/AIM-1293.pdf (19 March 2014). Bruner, Jerome. 1986. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. — 1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — 1991. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18: 1 – 21. — 2003. Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York and London: Routledge. Butte, George. 2004. I Know that You Know that I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll Flanders to Marnie. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Caillois, Roger. 2001. Man, Play, and Games. Trans. Meyer Barash. Champaign and London: University of Illinois Press. Caracciolo, Marco. 2010. “Leaping into Space: The Two Aesthetics of To the Lighthouse.” Poetics Today 31 (2): 251 – 284. — 2012a. “On the Experientiality of Stories: A Follow-up on David Herman’s ‘Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance’.” Partial Answers 10 (2): 197 – 221. — 2012b. “Narrative, Meaning, Interpretation: An Enactivist Approach.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11 (3): 367 – 384. — 2013a. “Embodiment at the Crossroads: Some Open Questions Between Literary Interpretation and Cognitive Science.” Poetics Today 34 (1 – 2): 233 – 253. — 2013b. “Patterns of Cognitive Dissonance in Readers’ Engagement with Characters.” Enthymema VIII: 21 – 37. — 2013c. “Phenomenological Metaphors in Readers’ Engagement with Characters: The Case of Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” Language and Literature 22 (1): 60 – 76. — 2014. “Beyond Other Minds: Fictional Characters, Mental Simulation, and ‘Unnatural’ Experiences.” Journal of Narrative Theory 44 (1). Carroll, Noël. 2003. “Art and Mood: Preliminary Notes and Conjectures.” The Monist 86 (4): 521 – 555.

Works Cited

211

Carruthers, Peter. 1996. Simulation and Self-Knowledge: A Defense of Theory-Theory. In Theories of Theories of Mind, ed. Peter Carruthers and Peter K. Smith, 22 – 38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chalmers, David J. 1995. “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3): 200 – 219. — 1996. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Churchland, Paul M. 1991. Folk Psychology and the Explanation of Human Behavior. In The Future of Folk Psychology: Intentionality and Cognitive Science, ed. John D. Greenwood, 51 – 69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, Patricia. 2010. “Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know.” New York Times, March 31. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/books/01lit.html# (19 March 2014). Cohn, Dorrit. 1978. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Colombetti, Giovanna. 2010. Enaction, Sense-Making, and Emotion. In Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science, ed. John Stewart, Olivier Gapenne, and Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, 145 – 164. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Connolly, Julian W. 1992. Nabokov’s Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conrad, Joseph. 1988. Lord Jim. London: Penguin. Cook, Guy. 1994. The Discourse of Literature: The Interplay of Form and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coplan, Amy. 2004. “Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2): 141 – 152. Cortázar, Julio. 1966. Hopscotch. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Pantheon Books. Crane, Tim. 2001. Elements of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. — 2003. The Intentional Structure of Consciousness. In Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Aleksander Jokic and Quentin Smith, 33 – 56. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Csordas, Thomas J. 1999. Embodiment and Cultural Phenomenology. In Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, ed. Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber, 143 – 162. New York and London: Routledge. Currie, Gregory. 1995. “Visual Imagery as the Simulation of Vision.” Mind and Language 10 (1 – 2): 25 – 44. — 1997. The Paradox of Caring: Fiction and the Philosophy of Mind. In Emotion and the Arts, ed. Mette Hjort and Sue Laver, 63 – 77. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. — 2010. Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Currie, Gregory, and Ian Ravenscroft. 2002. Recreative Minds. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Damasio, Antonio. 2000. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. London: William Heinemann. — 2007. “Neuroscience and Ethics: Intersections.” The American Journal of Bioethics 7 (1): 3 – 7. Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. London: Penguin.

212

Works Cited

— 1992. The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity. In Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, ed. Frank S. Kessel, Pamela M. Cole, and Dale L. Johnson, 103 – 115. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Dewey, John. 2005. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Books. Diengott, Nilli. 2010. “Fludernik’s Natural Narratological Model: A Reconsideration and Pedagogical Implications.” Journal of Literary Semantics 39: 93 – 101. Van Dijk, Teun A., and Walter Kintsch. 1983. Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academic Press. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Stuart E. Dreyfus. 1999. The Challenge of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment for Cognitive Science. In Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, ed. Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber, 103 – 120. New York and London: Routledge. Duchan, Judith F., Gail A. Bruder, and Lynne E. Hewitt, eds. 1995. Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Von Eckardt, Barbara. 1999. Mental Representation. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, ed. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Eco, Umberto. 1979. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. — 1994. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Eder, Jens. 2003. “Narratology and Cognitive Reception Theories.” In What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, ed. Tom Kind and Hans-Harald Müller, 277 – 301. Berlin: de Gruyter. — 2006. “Ways of Being Close to Characters.” Film Studies 8: 68 – 80. Eder, Jens, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider. 2010. Characters in Fictional Words: An Introduction. In Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media, ed. Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider, 3 – 64. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Ekman, Paul. 1973. Cross-Cultural Studies in Facial Expression. In Darwin and Facial Expression: A Century of Research in Review, ed. Paul Ekman. New York: Academic Press. Emmott, Catherine. 1997. Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Emmott, Catherine, and Marc Alexander. 2011. “Schemata.” The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/schemata (19 March 2014). Esrock, Ellen J. 2004. “Embodying Literature.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (5 – 6): 79 – 89. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Faulkner, William. 1995. The Sound and the Fury. London: Vintage. Fischer, Martin H., and Rolf A. Zwaan. 2008. “Embodied Language: A Review of the Role of the Motor System in Language Comprehension.” The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 61 (6): 825 – 850. Flanagan, Owen. 2000. Dreaming Souls: Sleep, Dreams, and the Evolution of the Conscious Mind. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. — 2007. The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Works Cited

213

Flaubert, Gustave. 2000. A Sentimental Education: The Story of a Young Man. Trans. Douglas Parmee. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fludernik, Monika. 1993. The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness. London and New York: Routledge. — 1996. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London: Routledge. Fludernik, Monika, Donald C. Freeman, and Margaret H. Freeman. 1999. “Metaphor and Beyond: An Introduction.” Poetics Today 20 (3): 383 – 396. Fodor, Jerry. 1975. The Language of Thought. Sussex: Harvester. Fodor, Jerry, and Zenon W. Pylyshyn. 1988. “Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis.” Cognition 28: 3 – 71. Forster, E. M. 1985. Aspects of the Novel. San Diego: Harcourt. — 1989. A Passage to India. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fowler, Roger. 1977. Linguistics and the Novel. London: Methuen. Fuller, Robert C. 2007. “Spirituality in the Flesh: The Role of Discrete Emotions in Religious Life.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75 (1): 25 – 51. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2004. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London and New York: Continuum. Gallagher, Shaun. 2000. “Philosophical Conceptions of the Self: Implications for Cognitive Science.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4: 14 – 21. — 2003. “Phenomenology and Experimental Design: Toward a Phenomenologically Enlightened Experimental Science.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 10 (9 – 10): 85 – 99. — 2009. Philosophical Antecedents of Situated Cognition. In The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, ed. Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede, 35 – 51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gallagher, Shaun, and Daniel D. Hutto. 2008. Understanding Others through Primary Interaction and Narrative Practice. In The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity, ed. Jordan Zlatev, Timothy P. Racine, Chris Sinha, and Esa Itkonen, 17 – 38. Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. Abingdon: Routledge. Gallese, Vittorio. 2001. “The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons To Empathy.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (5 – 7): 33 – 50. — 2005. “Embodied Simulation: From Neurons to Phenomenal Experience.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1: 23 – 48. Gallese, Vittorio, and George Lakoff. 2005. “The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-Motor System in Conceptual Knowledge.” Cognitive Neuropsychology (22): 455 – 479. Gallese, Vittorio, and Corrado Sinigaglia. 2009. “The Bodily Self as Power for Action.” Neuropsychologia 48 (3): 746 – 755. Garfield, Evelyn Picón. 1981. Cortázar por Cortázar. Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana. Gaut, Berys. 1999. Identification and Emotion in Narrative Film. In Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, 200 – 216. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gehrke, Steve. 2007. “Review of The Road.” The Missouri Review 30 (1): 151 – 152. Gendler, Tamar Szabó. 2000. “The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance.” The Journal of Philosophy 97 (2): 55 – 81.

214

Works Cited

Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. J. E. Lewin. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Gerdes, Antje B. M., Gabriele Uhl, and Georg W. Alpers. 2009. “Spiders Are Special: Fear and Disgust Evoked by Pictures of Arthropods.” Evolution and Human Behavior 30 (1): 66 – 73. Gerrig, Richard J. 1993. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. — 2011. “Conscious and Unconscious Processes in Readers’ Narrative Experiences.” In Current Trends in Narratology, ed. Greta Olson, 37 – 60. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Gibbs, Raymond W. 2005a. Embodiment and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — 2005b. Embodiment in Metaphorical Imagination. In Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking, ed. Diane Pecher and Rolf A. Zwaan, 65 – 92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibson, James J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gibson, John. 2007. Fiction and the Weave of Life. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Giles, David C. 2002. “Parasocial Interaction: A Review of the Literature and a Model for Future Research.” Media Psychology 4: 279 – 305. Goldie, Peter. 2000. The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. — 2003. Narrative, Emotion, and Perspective. In Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. Matthew Kieran and Dominic Lopes, 54 – 68. London: Routledge. Goldman, Alvin I. 2006a. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. — 2006b. Imagination and Simulation in Audience Responses to Fiction. In The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction, ed. Shaun Nichols, 41 – 56. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. — 2001. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Gordon, Robert M. 1996. “Radical” Simulationism. In Theories of Theories of Mind, ed. P. Carruthers and P. Smith, 11 – 21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grice, Paul. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hakemulder, Jèmeljan. 2000. The Moral Laboratory: Experiments Examining the Effects of Reading Literature on Social Perception and Moral Self-Concept. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hálasz, László. 1991. “Emotional Effect and Reminding in Literary Processing.” Poetics 20 (3): 247 – 272. Hamburger, Käte. 1957. Die Logik der Dichtung. Stuttgart: Klett. Hamilton, Craig A., and Ralf Schneider. 2002. “From Iser to Turner and Beyond: Reception Theory Meets Cognitive Criticism.” Style 36 (4): 640 – 658. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Works Cited

215

Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press. Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. — 2003. Stories as a Tool for Thinking. In Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. David Herman, 163 – 192. Stanford: CSLI Publications. — 2007. Cognition, Emotion, and Consciousness. In The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, ed. David Herman, 245 – 259. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — 2008. “Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance.” Partial Answers 6 (2): 233 – 260. — 2009a. Basic Elements of Narrative. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. — 2009b. Cognitive Narratology. In Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, 30 – 43. Berlin: de Gruyter. — 2009c. Beyond Voice and Vision: Cognitive Grammar and Focalization Theory. In Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization: Modeling Mediation in Narrative, ed. Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, 119 – 142. Berlin: de Gruyter. — 2009d. “Storied Minds: Narrative Scaffolding for Folk Psychology.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 16 (6 – 8): 40 – 68. — 2011a. Herman, David, ed. The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. — 2011b. Introduction. In The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, ed. David Herman, 1 – 40. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. — 2011c. Re-minding Modernism. In The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, ed. David Herman, 243 – 272. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. — 2012. Exploring the Nexus of Narrative and Mind. In David Herman, James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol, Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates, 14 – 19. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Herman, Luc, and Bart Vervaeck. 2004. Focalization between Classical and Postclassical Narratology. In The Dynamics of Narrative Form: Studies in Anglo-American Narratology, ed. John Pier, 115 – 138. Berlin: de Gruyter. Van Heusden, Barend. 2009. “Semiotic Cognition and the Logic of Culture.” Pragmatics and Cognition 17 (3): 611 – 627. Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2003. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holland, Norman N. 1975. 5 Readers Reading. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Horsdal, Marianne. 2012. Telling Lives: Exploring Dimensions of Narratives. London and New York: Routledge. Hoy, David Couzens. 1999. Critical Resistance: Foucault and Bourdieu. In Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, ed. Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber, 3 – 21. New York and London: Routledge. Hurlburt, Russell T. 2011. Investigating Pristine Inner Experience: Moments of Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hurlburt, Russell T., and Sarah A. Akhter. 2006. “The Descriptive Experience Sampling Method.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 5: 271 – 301. Hutto, Daniel D. 2000. Beyond Physicalism. Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

216

Works Cited

— 2005. “Knowing What? Radical Versus Conservative Enactivism.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4: 389 – 405. — 2006a. Against Passive Intellectualism: Reply to Crane. In Radical Enactivism: Focus on the Philosophy of Daniel D. Hutto, ed. Richard Menary, 121 – 149. Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins. — 2006b. Impossible Problems and Careful Expositions: Reply to Myin and De Nul. In Radical Enactivism: Focus on the Philosophy of Daniel D. Hutto, ed. Richard Menary, 45 – 64. Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins. — 2007. The Narrative Practice Hypothesis: Origins and Applications of Folk Psychology. In Narrative and Understanding Persons, ed. Daniel D. Hutto, 43 – 68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — 2008. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. — 2010. Enactivism: Why Be Radical? In Sehen und Handeln, ed. Horst Bredekamp and John Michael Krois, 21 – 44. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. — 2011a. “Understanding Fictional Minds without Theory of Mind!” Style 45 (2): 276 – 282. — 2011b. “Elementary Mind Minding, Enactivist-Style.” In Joint Attention: New Developments in Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, and Social Neuroscience, ed. Alex Seemann, 307 – 341. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. — 2012. Exposing the Background: Deep and Local. In Knowing without Thinking: Mind, Action, Cognition, and the Phenomenon of the Background, ed. Zdravko Radman, 37 – 56. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Hutto, Daniel D., and Erik Myin. 2012. Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Iser, Wolfgang. 1978. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. — 2000. The Range of Interpretation. New York: Columbia University Press. Iser, Wolfgang, Norman N. Holland, and Wayne C. Booth. 1980. “Interview: Wolfgang Iser.” Diacritics 10 (2): 57 – 74. Jackendoff, Ray. 1987. Consciousness and the Computational Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jackson, Frank. 1982. “Epiphenomenal Qualia.” Philosophical Quarterly 32: 127 – 136. Jackson, Tony E. 2003. “‘Literary Interpretation’ and Cognitive Literary Studies.” Poetics Today 24 (2): 191 – 205. De Jaegher, Hanne, and Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. 2007. “Participatory Sense-Making: An Enactive Approach to Social Cognition.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (4): 485 – 507. Jahn, Manfred. 1996. “Windows of Focalization: Deconstructing and Reconstructing a Narratological Concept.” Style 30 (2): 241 – 267. — 1997. “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third Person Narratives.” Poetics Today 18 (4): 441 – 468. — 1999a. “More Aspects of Focalization: Refinements and Applications.” GRAAT (21): 85 – 110. — 1999b. “Speak, Friend, and Enter”: Garden Paths, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Narratology. In Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman, 167 – 194. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Works Cited

217

Jesch, Tatiana, and Malte Stein. 2009. Perspectivization and Focalization: Two Concepts— One Meaning? An Attempt at Conceptual Differentiation. In Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization. Modeling Mediation in Narrative, ed. Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, 59 – 77. Berlin: de Gruyter. John, Eileen. 2005. Art and Knowledge. In The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic Lopes, 417 – 430. Abingdon: Routledge. Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. — 2007. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. — 2008. “What Makes a Body?” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 22 (3): 159 – 168. — 2010. Metaphor and Cognitive Science. In Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed. Shaun Gallagher and Daniel Schmicking, 401 – 414. Dordrecht: Springer. Joyce, James. 2000. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin. Kanizsa, Gaetano. 1955. “Margini quasi-percettivi in campi con stimolazione omogenea.” Rivista di Psicologia 49 (1): 7 – 30. Kaschak, Michael P., and Arthur M. Glenberg. 2000. “Constructing Meaning: The Role of Affordances and Grammatical Constructions in Sentence Comprehension.” Journal of Memory and Language 43: 508 – 529. Kaschak, Michael P., John L. Jones, Jacqueline M. Coyle, and Andrea Sell. 2009. Language and Body. In Beyond Decoding: The Behavioral and Biological Foundations of Reading Comprehension, ed. Richard K. Wagner, Christopher Schatschneider, and Caroline Phythian-Sence, 3 – 26. New York: Guilford Press. Keen, Suzanne. 2007. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Klein, Julie Thompson. 2010. “A Taxonomy of Interdisciplinarity.” In The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, ed. Robert Frodeman, 15 – 30. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kosslyn, Stephen M., Giorgio Ganis, and William L. Thompson. 2001. “Neural Foundations of Imagery.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2 (9): 635 – 642. Kosslyn, Stephen M., William L. Thompson, and Giorgio Ganis. 2006. The Case for Mental Imagery. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Kuzmičová, Anežka. 2012. “Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative: A Case for Motor Enactment.” Semiotica 189 (1/4): 23 – 48. Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Our Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Lamarque, Peter. 2008. The Philosophy of Literature. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Larsen, Steen, and János László. 1990. “Cultural-Historical Knowledge and Personal Experience in Appreciation of Literature.” European Journal of Social Psychology 20 (5): 425 – 440. Lennon, Kathleen. 2010. Feminist Perspectives on the Body. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/feminist-body (19 March 2014). Levinson, Stephen C. 2003. Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

218

Works Cited

Lévy, Pierre. 1998. Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age. Trans. Robert Bononno. New York and London: Plenum Trade. Lewis, David. 1999. What Experience Teaches. In Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, 262 – 289. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Locatelli, Carla. 1990. Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works after the Nobel Prize. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lockwood, Michael. 1993. “Dennett’s Mind.” Inquiry 36: 59 – 72. Lodge, David. 2002. Consciousness and the Novel. In Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays, 1 – 91. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lopes, Dominic. 2003. Out of Sight, Out of Mind. In Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. Matthew Kieran and Dominic Lopes, 208 – 224. London: Routledge. Malina, Debra. 2002. Breaking the Frame: Metalepsis and the Construction of the Subject. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Mar, Raymond A., and Keith Oatley. 2008. “The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3 (3): 173 – 192. Margolin, Uri. 2003. Cognitive Science, the Thinking Mind, and Literary Narrative. In Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. David Herman, 271 – 294. Stanford: CSLI Publications. — 2009. Focalization: Where Do We Go from Here? In Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization. Modeling Mediation in Narrative, ed. Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, 48 – 58. Berlin: de Gruyter. Marr, David. 1982. Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. New York: Freeman. Maturana, Humberto, and Francisco J. Varela. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Reidel: Boston. Maude, Ulrika. 2009. Beckett, Technology and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCarthy, Cormac. 2006. The Road. New York: Knopf. McEwan, Ian. 2007. On Chesil Beach. London: Vintage. McGinn, Colin. 2004. Mindsight. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mellmann, Katja. 2010. Objects of “Empathy”: Characters (and Other Such Things) as Psycho-Poetic Effects. In Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media, ed. Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider, 416 – 441. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Melville, Herman. 1994. Moby Dick. London: Penguin. Menary, Richard. 2008. “Embodied Narratives.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (6): 63 – 84. — 2010. The Extended Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Menary, Richard, ed. 2006. Radical Enactivism: Focus on the Philosophy of Daniel D. Hutto. Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge. Miall, David S. 1989. “Beyond the Schema Given: Affective Comprehension of Literary Narratives.” Cognition and Emotion 3 (1): 55 – 78. — 2006. Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies. New York: Peter Lang. Miall, David S., and Don Kuiken. 1994. “Foregrounding, Defamiliarization, and Affect: Response to Literary Stories.” Poetics 22 (5): 389 – 407.

Works Cited

219

Millikan, Ruth Garrett. 2004. Varieties of Meaning: The 2002 Jean Nicod Lectures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Moi, Toril. 1999. What Is a Woman? And Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Musil, Robert. 1995. The Man Without Qualities. Trans. Sophie Wilkins. New York: Knopf. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1979. Zashchita Luzhina. Ann Arbor: Ardis. — 1990. Strong Opinions. New York: Vintage. — 2000a. The Luzhin Defense. Trans. Michael Scammell and Vladimir Nabokov. London: Penguin. — 2000b. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. London: Penguin. — 2010. Bend Sinister. London: Penguin. Naiman, Eric. 1998. “Litland: The Allegorical Poetics of The Defense.” Nabokov Studies 5: 1 – 46. Neill, Alex. 1996. Empathy and (Film) Fiction. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 175 – 194. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Nisbett, Richard E., and Timothy DeCamp Wilson. 1977. “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes.” Psychological Review 84 (3): 231 – 259. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nolan, Cristopher. 2000. Memento. Summit Entertainment. O’Neill, Patrick. 1992. “Points of Origin: On Focalization in Narrative.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 19 (3): 331 – 350. O’Regan, J. Kevin, and Alva Noë. 2001. “A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (5): 939 – 1031. O’Regan, J. Kevin, Erik Myin, and Alva Noë. 2005. “Sensory Consciousness Explained (Better) in Terms of ‘Corporality’ and ‘Alerting Capacity’.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4: 369 – 387. Oatley, Keith. 1999. “Why Fiction May Be Twice as True as Fact: Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Simulation.” Review of General Psychology 3 (2): 101 – 107. — 2011. Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Malden, MA: Wiley. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. 2001. Living Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Olsen, Stein Haugom. 1987. The End of Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Osborn, Jody, and Stuart W.G. Derbyshire. 2010. “Pain Sensation Evoked by Observing Injury in Others.” PAIN 148 (2): 268 – 274. Palmer, Alan. 2004. Fictional Minds. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. — 2010. Social Minds in the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Di Paolo, Ezequiel A., Marieke Rohde, and Hanne De Jaegher. 2010. Horizons for the Enactive Mind: Values, Social Interaction, and Play. In Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science, ed. John Stewart, Olivier Gapenne, and Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, 33 – 87. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pavel, Thomas. 1986. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pecher, Diane, and Rolf A. Zwaan. 2005. Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Peer, Willie, Jèmeljan Hakemulder, and Sonia Zyngier. 2007. Muses and Measures: Empirical Research Methods for the Humanities. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars. Peirce, Charles S. 1998. The Essential Peirce, Volume 2: Selected Philosophical Writings, 1893 – 1913. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

220

Works Cited

Phelan, James. 1989. Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. — 2007. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Pitt, David. 2008. Mental Representation. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/mental-representation/ (19 March 2014). Poe, Edgar Allan. 1982. The Complete Tales and Poems. London: Penguin. Polanyi, Livia. 1989. Telling the American Story. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pouillon, Jean. 1946. Temps et roman. Paris: Gallimard. Poulet, Georges. 1969. “Phenomenology of Reading.” New Literary History 1 (1): 53 – 68. Pred, Ralph. 2005. Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Prince, Gerald. 1988. “The Disnarrated.” Style 22 (1): 1 – 8. — 2001. A Point of View on Point of View or Refocusing Focalization. In New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective, ed. Willie Van Peer and Seymour Chatman, 43 – 50. Albany: State University of New York Press. Prinz, Jesse J. 2004. Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Rabinowitz, Peter J. 1977. “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences.” Critical Inquiry 4 (1): 121 – 141. Ramsey, William M. 2007. Representation Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richardson, Brian. 2005. Anti-Narrative. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 24 – 25. London and New York: Routledge. — 2006. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Richardson, Daniel C., Michael J. Spivey, Lawrence W. Barsalou, and Ken McRae. 2003. “Spatial Representations Activated During Real-Time Comprehension of Verbs.” Cognitive Science 27 (5): 767 – 780. Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative: Volume 1. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. — 1985. Time and Narrative: Volume 2. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. — 1988. Time and Narrative: Volume 3. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 1996. A Glance Beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation, Subjectivity. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Rohrer, Tim. 2005. Image Schemata in the Brain. In From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics, ed. Beate Hampe and Joseph E. Grady, 165 – 196. Berlin: de Gruyter. Ronen, Ruth. 1986. “Space in Fiction.” Poetics Today 7 (3): 421 – 438. — 1994. Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russell, James A. 1991. “Culture and the Categorization of Emotion.” Psychological Bulletin 100: 426 – 450.

Works Cited

221

Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. — 2001. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. — 2003. Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Narrative Space. In Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. David Herman, 214 – 242. Stanford: CSLI Publications. — 2005. On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology. In Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, ed. Jan Christoph Meister, Tom Kindt, and Wilhelm Schernus, 1 – 24. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. — 2006. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. — 2010. “Narratology and Cognitive Science: A Problematic Relation.” Style 44 (4): 469 – 495. Saramago, José. 1999. Blindness. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. Orlando: Harcourt. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1966. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Riedlinger. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill. Scalise Sugiyama, Michelle. 2001. “Food, Foragers, and Folklore: The Role of Narrative in Human Subsistence.” Evolution and Human Behavior 22: 221 – 240. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. — 2001. Dreaming by the Book. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schank, Roger C., and Robert P. Abelson. 1977. Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Schechtman, Marya. 1996. The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. — 2007. Stories, Lives, and Basic Survival: A Refinement and Defense of the Narrative View. In Narrative and Understanding Persons, ed. Daniel D. Hutto, 155 – 178. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scherer, Klaus R., Angela Schorr, and Tom Johnstone, eds. 2001. Appraisal Processes in Emotion: Theory, Methods, Research. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Schneider, Ralf. 2001. “Towards a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The Dynamics of Mental-Model Construction.” Style 35 (4): 607 – 640. Schulte, Joachim. 1993. Experience and Expression: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2007. “Do You Have Constant Tactile Experience of Your Feet in Your Shoes? Or Is Consciousness Limited to What’s in Attention?” Journal of Consciousness Studies 14 (3): 5 – 35. Searle, John. 1983. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — 1992. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. — 1997. The Mystery of Consciousness. London: Granta. Seemann, Alex, ed. 2011. Joint Attention: New Developments in Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, and Social Neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Seilman, Uffe, and Steen Larsen. 1989. “Personal Resonance to Literature: A Study of Remindings while Reading.” Poetics 18: 165 – 177. Semino, Elena, and Kate Swindlehurst. 1996. “Metaphor and Mind Style in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Style 30 (1): 143 – 166. Sharkey, Joseph E. 2001. “Rayuela’s Confused Hermeneutics.” Hispanic Review 69 (4): 423 – 442.

222

Works Cited

Shaw, Christopher A., and Jill C. McEachern, eds. 2001. Toward a Theory of Neuroplasticity. Philadelphia: Psychology Press. Shen, Dan. 2002. “Defense and Challenge: Reflections on the Relation between Story and Discourse.” Narrative 10 (3): 222 – 243. Shklovsky, Viktor. 1973. On the Connection Between Devices of Syuzhet Construction and General Stylistic Devices. In Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation, ed. Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt, trans. Jane Knox, 48 – 72. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. — 1991. Art as Device. In Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher, 1 – 14. Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press. Siewert, Charles. 2008. Consciousness and Intentionality. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/consciousness-intentionality (19 March 2014). Simons, Daniel, and Christopher Chabris. 1999. “Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events.” Perception 28 (9): 1059 – 1074. Slingerland, Edward. 2008. What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Standish, Peter. 2001. Understanding Julio Cortázar. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Stanzel, Franz Karl. 1984. A Theory of Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sterelny, Kim. 1999. Language of Thought. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, ed. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sternberg, Meir. 1982. “Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and Forms of Reported Discourse.” Poetics Today 3 (2): 107 – 156. — 1992. “Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity.” Poetics Today 13 (3): 463 – 541. — 1993. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. — 2001. “How Narrativity Makes a Difference.” Narrative 9 (2): 115 – 122. — 2003. “Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (I).” Poetics Today 24 (2): 297 – 395. Stewart, John. 2010. Foundational Issues in Enaction as a Paradigm for Cognitive Science: From the Origin of Life to Consciousness and Writing. In Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science, ed. John Stewart, Olivier Gapenne, and Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, 1 – 31. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stitch, Stephen, and Shaun Nichols. 1997. “Cognitive Penetrability, Rationality, and Restricted Simulation.” Mind and Language 12. Strawson, Galen. 2004. “Against Narrativity.” Ratio XVII (4): 428 – 452. Stueber, Karsten R. 2006. Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Svevo, Italo. 2003. Zeno’s Conscience: A Novel. Trans. William Weaver. London: Vintage. Tammi, Pekka. 1985. Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics: A Narratological Analysis. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. Tan, Ed S. 1996. Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Works Cited

223

Thibault, Paul J. 1997. Re-reading Saussure: The Dynamics of Signs in Social Life. London: Routledge. Thomas, Nigel J. T. 1999. “Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination? An Active Perception Approach to Conscious Mental Content.” Cognitive Science 23 (2): 207 – 245. — 2010. The Multidimensional Spectrum of Imagination: Images, Dreams, Hallucinations, and Active, Imaginative Perception. http://www.imagery-imagination.com/spectrum.htm (19 March 2014). Thompson, Evan. 2007a. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. — 2007b. “Look Again: Phenomenology and Mental Imagery.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6: 137 – 170. Toker, Leona. 1989. Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Tomasello, Michael. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Torrance, Steve. 2005. “In Search of the Enactive.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4: 357 – 368. Trevarthen, Colwyn. 1979. Communication and Cooperation in Early Infancy: A Description of Primary Intersubjectivity. In Before Speech: The Beginning of Interpersonal Communication, ed. Margaret Bullowa, 321 – 348. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Mark. 1996. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tversky, Barbara. 1996. Spatial Perspectives in Descriptions. In Language and Space, ed. Paul Bloom, Mary A. Peterson, Lynn Nadel, and Merrill F. Garrett, 462 – 491. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. — 2009. Spatial Cognition: Embodied and Situated. In The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, ed. Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede, 201 – 216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tye, Michael. 1997. A Representational Theory of Pains and Their Phenomenal Nature. In The Nature of Consciousness, ed. Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere, 329 – 340. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. — 2009. Qualia. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/qualia/ (19 March 2014). Varela, Francisco J. 1979. Principles of Biological Autonomy. New York: Elsevier North Holland. — 1996. “Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3 (4): 330 – 349. — 1997. “Patterns of Life: Intertwining Identity and Cognition.” Brain and Cognition 34: 72 – 87. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Walsh, Richard. 2007. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. — 2011. “The Common Basis of Narrative and Music: Somatic, Social, and Affective Foundations.” Storyworlds 3: 50 – 71. Walton, Kendall. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

224

Works Cited

— 1997. “Slime, Simulation, and Spelunking: On Being Moved by Fiction.” In Emotion and the Arts, ed. Mette Hjort and Sue Laver, 37 – 49. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Watson, John B. 1913. “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.” Psychological Review 20: 158 – 177. Werth, Paul. 1999. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman. White, Hayden. 2005. Emplotment. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie–Laure Ryan. London and New York: Routledge. Wilcocks, Robert. 1994. Maelzel’s Chess Player: Sigmund Freud and the Rhetoric of Deceit. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Winawer, Jonathan, Nathan Witthoft, Michael C. Frank, Lisa Wu, Alex R. Wade, and Lera Boroditsky. 2007. “Russian Blues Reveal Effects of Language on Color Discrimination.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104 (19): 7780 – 7785. Winnicott, Donald W. 1982. Playing and Reality. New York: Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1992. Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. Oxford: Blackwell. Woelert, Peter. 2011. “Human Cognition, Space, and the Sedimentation of Meaning.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10 (1): 113 – 137. Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle, and Vittorio Gallese. 2011. “How Stories Make Us Feel: Toward an Embodied Narratology.” California Italian Studies 2 (11). Wolf, Werner. 2003. “Narrative and Narrativity: A Narratological Reconceptualization and its Applicability to the Visual Arts.” Word & Image 19 (3): 180 – 197. Woolf, Virginia. 2000. The Waves. London: Penguin. Young, Iris Marion. 2005. Lived Body vs. Gender: Reflections on Social Structure and Subjectivity. In On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays, 12 – 26. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Zahavi, Dan. 2007a. Self and Other: The Limits of Narrative Understanding. In Narrative and Understanding Persons, ed. Daniel D. Hutto, 179 – 201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — 2007b. Expression and Empathy. In Folk Psychology Reassessed, ed. Daniel D. Hutto and Matthew Ratcliffe, 25 – 40. Dordrecht: Springer. Zola, Émile. 2004. Germinal. Trans. Roger Pearson. London: Penguin. Zunshine, Lisa. 2006. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Zunshine, Lisa, ed. 2010. Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Zwaan, Rolf A. 2004. The Immersed Experiencer: Towards an Embodied Theory of Language Comprehension. In The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, ed. Brian H. Ross, 44:35 – 63. San Diego and London: Elsevier Academic Press. — 2008. Experiential Traces and Mental Simulations in Language Comprehension. In Symbols and Embodiment: Debates on Meaning and Cognition, ed. Manuel De Vega, Arthur M. Glenberg, and Arthur C. Graesser, 165 – 180. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Zwaan, Rolf A., and Carol J. Madden. 2005. Embodied Sentence Comprehension. In Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and

Works Cited

225

Thinking, ed. Rolf A. Zwaan and Diane Pecher, 224 – 245. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zwaan, Rolf A., and Gabriel A. Radvansky. 1998. “Situation Models in Language Comprehension and Memory.” Psychological Bulletin 123 (2): 162 – 185. Zwaan, Rolf A., and Lawrence J. Taylor. 2006. “Seeing, Acting, Understanding: Motor Resonance in Language Comprehension.” Journal of Experimental Psychology 135 (1): 1 – 11. Zwaan, Rolf A., Carol J. Madden, Richard H. Yaxley, and Mark E. Aveyard. 2004. “Moving Words: Dynamic Representations in Language Comprehension.” Cognitive Science 28 (4): 611 – 619.

Index Abbott, Porter 9, 43 – 44, 200 affordance 20, 76, 160 Alber, Jan 5, 48 Alexandrov, Vladimir 182 – 183, 194 artistic creativity 74 – 75, 78 – 79, 85 – 89, 109 automata, robots, zombies 1 – 2, 18, 112, 115, 117 Bamberg, Michael 63, 138 Banfield, Ann 168 Barsalou, Lawrence 20, 156 Beckett, Samuel 7, 58, 174 – 180 bodily feelings 57, 104, 106 – 107, 177, 186 – 187 Booth, Wayne C. 10, 13 Bortolussi, Marisa 11, 122, 127 Boyd, Brian 67, 182 – 184, 189, 192, 194, 196 – 197 Brooks, Peter 171 Brooks, Rodney A. 19, 156 Bruner, Jerome 21 – 22, 133, 138 Caillois, Roger 78, 83 Capps, Lisa 54 Caracciolo, Marco 42, 68, 81, 102, 105, 113, 118, 126, 130, 141, 150, 159 Chalmers, David 4, 14 – 15, 111 – 112, 136 character 1 – 3, 38 – 41, 49, 103 – 105, 110 – 114 Clark, Andy 156 cognition, see also mind, second-generation cognitive science – as handling of abstract representations 16 – as meaning-generation 18 – 19 – computational account 4, 16, 29, 35, 45 – 46 cognitive approaches to narrative and literature 8 – 9, 11, 13, 206 – 208 cognitive science 3, 8 – distinction between first- and second-generation cognitive science 16, see also second-generation cognitive science

Cohn, Dorrit 9, 107, 113, 126 – 130, 146 Colombetti, Giovanna 55 computational account of cognition, see cognition conceptual knowledge and thinking 19 – 21, 36, 58 – 59, 63 – 64, 99, 157 – 158, 177 – concrete versus abstract concepts 20 Connolly, Julian W. 183 – 184, 186, 192, 196, 199 Conrad, Joseph 140 consciousness 57, 102, 115, 181 – 182 – definition of ~ 1, 3 – in Nabokov’s The Defense 183 – 187 – the “hard problem” of ~ 14 consciousness attribution 41, 115 – 117, 141, 143 – 144 consciousness enactment 41, 47, 49, 122 – 132, 141, 143 – 144, 158 – 159 – and altered perception 185, 197 – 198 consciousness representation in narrative 9, 38 – 41, 103 – 105, 110 – 112, see also mind style consciousness-focused narration 7, 122, 129, 133, 139 – 140, 182, 202 conversational storytelling 32, 43, 51 – 54, 63, 138, 203 Coplan, Amy 49, 66, 104, 130 – 131 Cortázar, Julio 7, 22, 73 – 90 Crane, Tim 4, 35, 104, 106, 118 Csordas, Thomas 155 – 156, 158 Currie, Gregory 32, 42 – 43, 94, 99, 124, 130 – 131, 141 Damasio, Antonio 57, 67, 137, 178 De Jaegher, Hanne 4, 8, 62 – 63, 79 defamiliarization 108, 147, 150 Dennett, Daniel C. 4, 14, 78, 105 – 106, 115, 135 – 136, 142, 181, 193 Dewey, John 22 – 23, 49, 51, 72 – 73, 75 – 79, 82, 89 – 90, 109, 141 Di Paolo, Ezequiel A. 4, 8, 62 – 63, 79 Dixon, Peter 11, 122, 127

228

Index

e-approach to cognition 6, 15, see also second-generation cognitive science Eco, Umberto 45, 64, 125 Eder, Jens 31, 123, 141 Ekman, Paul 42, 59 embodied simulation 6, 20, 102 – 103, 105, 131 – 132, 160 – 161, see also mental simulation embodiment 8, 13, 19 – 22, 58 – 60, 102, 132, 155 – 158 – and intersubjectivity 142 – and perception 47 – and the self 137, 178 – in Beckett’s Company 174 – 175 – in Fludernik’s treatment of experientiality 48 emotions 44, 55, 59, 61, 65 empathetic perspective-taking 41, 113, 128 – 131, 140, 143 – versus sympathy 65 – 66, see also mental simulation, embodied simulation empirical approaches to literature 11 – 13 enactivism 4, 8, 16, 18 – 19, 22, 29 – and emotion 55 – and the interactive structure of experience 72 – enactivist account of perception 97 – 100 – versus simulation theory 131 – 132 Esrock, Ellen J. 159 evaluation, see values and evaluation evolution and evolved predispositions 38, 42, 52, 60 – 63 experience 1, 3 – 4, 14 – 15, 30, 34, 36 – 38, 51, 55, 98 – 99, 200 – 201, see also story-driven experience experiential background 4 – 5, 35 – 37, 55 – 71, 124, 158, 168, 206 – its role in determining readers’ responses 42 experiential traces 5, 46 – 47, 65, 95, 102, 108, 141, 160 – 161, 168 experientiality 3, 7, 11, 41, 117 – and narrative’s feedback effect on the experiential background 64 – 65 – and Winnicott’s potential space 74 – differences between my approach and Fludernik’s 47 – 48

– network model of ~ 49 – 54 expression 31, 36 – 38, 114 – 115, 117, 142 – 143, 202 – 204, see also expressive devices expressive devices 31, 41 – 44, 104, 109, 125 – 127, 201 Faulkner, William 7, 114 – 116, 125, 202 fictionalization of the reader’s body 132, 159 – 162, 173 – 174, 176 first-generation cognitive science, see cognition Flanagan, Owen 2 – 3, 5, 63 Flaubert, Gustave 7, 170 – 173 Fludernik, Monika 3, 9, 32, 47 – 48, 51, 54, 93, 106, 110, 128, 159, 168 – 169, 207 focalization 104 – 105, 118 – 119, 122, 127, 162 – 164, 166, 170 Fodor, Jerry 16, 29, 35, 40 folk psychology 21 – 22, 94, 113, 131 – 132, 134, 139, 143 foregrounding 43 – 44 Fowler, Roger 44, 126 frames, scripts, and schemata 45 – 46, 171 – 172 – Palmer’s “continuing-consciousness frame” 111, 198 functions of narrative, see narrative Gadamer, Hans-Georg 28 Gallagher, Shaun 13 – 14, 21 – 22, 57, 75, 94, 104, 111, 118, 131, 139, 142, 156, 182, 188 Gallese, Vittorio 21, 94, 132, 159, 178 games, see play and games Gaut, Berys 121, 123 Gendler, Tamar Szabó 124 Genette, Gérard 127, 190 Gerrig, Richard 15, 45 – 46, 160 Gibbs, Raymond W. 19, 21, 58, 157 Gibson, James J. 76 Gibson, John 68 Goldie, Peter 61, 118, 121 Goldman, Alvin I. 21, 65, 94 – 95, 99 Goodman, Nelson 39, 63 Grice, Paul 203

Index

Hakemulder, Jèmeljan 142, 147 Hamburger, Käte 113 Hamlet (play) and Hamlet (character) 2 – 3, 5, 161 Heidegger, Martin 22, 56, 157 Herman, David 3, 7 – 8, 31 – 32, 42, 48, 52, 54, 94, 102, 105 – 106, 110, 112 – 114, 116, 119 – 120, 124, 129, 134, 138, 143 – 144, 149, 160, 162 – 164, 175, 200 – 201 Herman, Luc 127 Hogan, Patrick Colm 61 Holland, Norman 12 – 14 Hoy, David Couzens 156 – 157 Hurlburt, Russell T. 15 Hutto, Daniel D. 4, 6, 9, 11, 22, 30, 34 – 36, 39 – 40, 57, 72, 75, 98 – 100, 106, 113, 115 – 118, 131, 136, 138 – 139, 142 – 143, 178, 201 image schemata 20, 58 imagination, see also mental imagery – distinction between sensory and propositional imagination 6 – enactment imagination 94 – 95 immersion – in fictional worlds 160 – 161 – in reality 75 intentionality 35, 56, 93, see also mental representation interaction 8, 16, 49, 158 – across levels of the experiential background 70 – 71 – and the structure of experience 72 – 73 – between organism and environment 75 – 78, 82 – in intersubjectivity 138 – 139 interdisciplinarity 8 – 9, 206 – 207 interpretation 5, 11 – 12, 18, 68 – 69, 165, 198 – 199 intersubjectivity 11, 21 – 22, 129, 138 – 139 – and consciousness enactment 142 – 144 – and engaging with characters 113, 133 – in Cortázar’s Hopscotch 89 – in McEwan’s On Chesil Beach 145 – 151 introspection 13 – 15, 21, 206 Iser, Wolfgang 12 – 13, 36, 64, 68, 77, 93, 97

229

Jackson, Frank 106 – 107 Jackson, Tony E. 10 – 11, 69 Jahn, Manfred 45, 54, 104, 119, 121 – 122, 127, 162, 166, 170, 198 Johnson, Mark 16, 20 – 23, 58, 75, 83, 86 – 87, 90, 141, 156 – 158 joint attention 42 – 43 Joyce, James 7, 45 – 47, 99, 136 Kanizsa, Gaetano 169 – 170, 173 Kaschak, Michael P. 20, 103 Keen, Suzanne 128, 130 Kosslyn, Stephen M. 17, 99, 160 Kuiken, Don 43 Kuzmičová, Anežka 103, 159 Labov, William 43, 53 Lakoff, John 16, 20 – 21, 58, 156 Lamarque, Peter 68, 73, 85 Lévy, Pierre 161 literature 6 – 7, 68, 73, 85 Locatelli, Carla 176 – 178 Lodge, David 106, 129 Lopes, Dominic 6, 93 Malina, Debra 176 – 179 Mar, Raymond A. 201 Margolin, Uri 127, 134 Maude, Ulrika 179 McEwan, Ian 7, 135, 140, 144 – 151 McGinn, Colin 6 Menary, Richard 11, 21 – 22, 25, 134, 136 – 138 mental imagery 16, 65, 93, 99 – 100, 160 – 161, 169 – 171, 175 – 176, 178, see also imagination mental representation 16 – 17, 29 – 31, 34 – 35, 40 mental simulation 5, 21, 32, 94 – 95, 129 – 132, see also embodied simulation Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 22, 62, 98, 120, 136, 155 – 157, 161, 178 – 179 metafiction 74, 80, 86 – in McEwan’s On Chesil Beach 151 – in Nabokov’s The Defense 183 – 184, 194 – 196

230

Index

metaphorical language 20 – 21, 34, 58 – 59, 105 – 109, 118, 120, 125 – 126, 155 – 157, 185, 187 methodological issues 8 – 15, 121 – 122, 205 – 207 Miall, David S. 11, 43, 46 mimesis 39, 47 – 49, 116, 208 mind style 44, 126, 147, see also consciousness representation mind, see also cognition, second-generation cognitive science – computational account 16 – versus consciousness 111 – 112 Musil, Robert 52 Myin, Erik 4, 9 – 10, 19, 22, 35, 47, 97 – 98

– and the imagination 95 – enactivist account of ~ 4, 19, 97 – 98, 172 Phelan, James 67, 116 phenomenology 7, 9, 13 – 15, 21 – 22, 57, 68, 77, 98, 105, 118, 126, 136 – 138, 142, 156 – 158, 174, 179, 186 – 187 play and games 1, 74, 78 – 79, 83 – 84, 181 – 182, 184, 187 Prince, Gerald 127, 151 Prinz, Jesse J. 59 problem of other minds, see folk psychology

Nabokov, Vladimir 7, 126, 181 – 200, 204 – 205 Naiman, Eric 183, 187, 194, 196, 198 narrative 3 – 4, 200 – 205 – and the implication of values 53 – 54 – and the organization of experience 52 – 53 – and the self 21 – 22 – definition of ~ 31 – 32 – functions of ~ (expressive, abstractive, evaluative) 200 – 205 – narrativity versus experientiality 48 narrative space 100 – 103, 155, 162 narrative theory 3, 10, 12, 206 – 207 Neill, Alex 122, 130 Noë, Alva 4, 19, 47, 60, 97, 102, 156, 161, 172

Rabinowitz, Peter J. 146 Ramsey, William 29 – 30 Ravenscroft, Ian 32, 94, 130 reader-response theory 12 – 13, 64 representation 9 – 10, 16 – 17, 29 – 44, 201, 205, see also mental representation – and Fludernik’s treatment of experientiality 48 – 49 Richardson, Brian 175 Ricoeur, Paul 48, 201 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 175 – 176, 179 robots, see automata, robots, zombies Rohde, Marieke 4, 8, 62 – 63, 79 Ronen, Ruth 119, 171 Rosch, Eleanor 4, 16 – 19, 22, 29, 76 – 77, 97, 102 Ryan, Marie-Laure 8, 12 – 14, 31, 48, 160 – 161, 164, 183

O’Regan, Kevin J. 4, 19, 47, 97 – 98 Oatley, Keith 32, 67, 201 object-based schema 30, 34 – 36, 39, 98, 104, 118, 160, see also consciousness, experience Ochs, Elinor 54 Palmer, Alan 3, 9, 110 – 111, 117, 128, 133 – 135, 137 – 138, 146, 198 Peirce, Charles S. 36 perception 17, 46 – 47 – and embodiment 59 – and evaluation 56

qualia, qualitative properties of experience 2, 4, 7, 15, 33, 36, 46, 101, 105 – 109, 111, 198 – 200

Saramago, José 7, 96, 99 – 105, 107 – 109 Scarry, Elaine 65, 107, 169 Schechtman, Marya 139 schemata, see frames, scripts, and schemata Schneider, Ralf 68, 112, 123 scripts, see frames, scripts, and schemata Searle, John 1, 4, 51, 56 – 57, 112 second-generation cognitive science 16 – 17, 19, 21 – 22, 75, 155, 157, 206, see also cognitive science self 11, 21 – 22, 57 – 58, 135 – 139 – in Beckett’s Company 174 – 180

Index

self-narrative 129, 139 – 142 – in McEwan’s On Chesil Beach 149 – 151 – in Nabokov’s The Defense 187 – 193 Shklovsky, Viktor 1, 108, 192 socio-cultural practices – and embodiment 155 – 158, 168 – and experience 58 – 63 – and narrative 67 – 69 Stanzel, Franz Karl 49, 93, 97, 102 – 103, 170 Sternberg, Meir 44, 48, 66, 101, 168, 202 – 203 story-driven experience 5, 10, 13 – 14, 30 – 31, 36, 46, see also experience – and the network of experientiality 50, 69 – 70 – structural resemblance with everyday experience 72, 75 – 79, 90, 95 – 96, 101 – 102, 172 storyworld 29, 32, 48, see also narrative space Strawson, Galen 135 – 138 Stueber, Karsten R. 130 subject-object divide 18 – 19, 74 – 75, 120 Svevo, Italo 7, 33 – 35, 40 – 41 Tammi, Pekka 183 – 184, 192 – 195 temporality of the reading process 128 – 129, 140 – 141, 207 thematic reading 7 – 8, 80, 177, 181 Thompson, Evan 4, 16 – 19, 22, 29, 55, 76 – 77, 95, 97, 100, 102 Toker, Leona 183 – 184, 200 Torrance, Steve 19 Trevarthen, Colwyn 142

231

Turner, Mark 6, 20, 108 Tversky, Barbara 104, 162, 167 – 168, 171 Tye, Michael 4, 105, 107 values and evaluation 34, 43, 52 – 56, 62 – 63, 76 – 77, 79, 112, 124, 203 – 205 – and interpretation 69 Varela, Francisco J. 4, 14, 16 – 19, 22, 29, 62, 76 – 77, 97, 102, 141 Vervaeck, Bart 127 virtuality 52, 159, 161 – 162, 169 – 170, 174 – virtual movements in perception 98, 100, 103, 172 Walsh, Richard 52 – 54, 67, 200 Walton, Kendall 37, 39, 172 Werth, Paul 202 White, Hayden 201 Winnicott, Donald W. 72 – 75, 78 – 80, 82, 85 – 88, 90, 109 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 36 – 37, 68, 115 Woelert, Peter 158 Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle 159 Wolf, Werner 31, 48 Woolf, Virginia 7, 150, 159, 168 – 169, 173, 202 Zahavi, Dan 13 – 14, 21 – 22, 25, 57, 94, 104, 111, 118, 131, 134, 136 – 138, 142, 174, 182, 188 Zola, Émile 65, 159, 166 – 168, 173 – 174 zombies, see automata, robots, zombies Zunshine, Lisa 3, 110 – 111, 156 Zwaan, Rolf A. 20, 24, 46, 99 – 100, 103, 105, 131, 156, 162, 171