The Word Game (Week 14)

Theory seems to function only as well as it can be employed to perceive something anew about our realities. What happens to theory that seems too awkward or cumbersome to use? Does it fall to the wayside? It seems so. Note: this post is meant to reflect consideration of material new to my thinking. And this post represents a novice musing only.

Specifically, I wonder about what I am calling the word game in narrative theory. This is the seemingly continuous cycle of narrative theorists re-examining the same pieces to the puzzle and re-naming. “It’s not quite like this, so I am going to plant my flag over here and not there. Here, I say ole boy. Here.” (Yes, my ole boy narrative theorist is now Foghorn Leghorn. Talk about embodiment and masterplots.)

I understand some things about the politics of theoretical work. I have a novice’s understanding of the politics of publishing in academia. And I can even take into consideration the need to diversify meanings, especially with a concept as complex as the stories of humanity. Yes, as we do theory work and as we perceive with new eyes, meaning shifts, understandings become clearer and sometimes they do become murkier.

But, how many divergent definitions should one theoretical discourse have for plot? Not the suzjet, but the discourse. The story? No the plot. Forster’s definition of the plot or Genette’s? Is it time or events? Cumbersome.

Although to be fair, Heidegger didn’t found the idea of Dasein and that too has been argued to death by philosophers. Well, maybe not to death. We haven’t solved the puzzle of beingness yet.

What do you think your favorite author's personal theory of narrative is? (Week 15)

I don't really think I could tie down one theory of narrative for an author. I believe to do so would be to commit the fallacy. But, after thinking about your question, I have been thinking about all of the short stories I have read whose events I don't necessarily know to be constituent or supplementary events while reading, but then as I end the story, the events fall into place. These are the stories that catch. These are the stories that I end with “Aha. I see what you did there.”  

Patricia Highsmith is one of these writers. When reading a story like “The Terrapin,” part of the magic of the experience is the simultaneous reading and figuring. Where is his father? Is that important? How old is Victor? Oh, he’s 11. Is that important? She tossed the turtle into boiling water. How fast? Oh. nevermind.

Deciphering which are constituent events and which are supplementary events is part of the puzzling of the reading itself. Is that a feature of gothic stories? I experience the same while reading a Flannery O’ Connor story. Or an Edgar Allan Poe story. I have more thinking to do on this front. And that seems to be the fun of narrative theory.

Bodies in Narrative and Ethics of Feminist Narratology. Not far enough, yet.

A classmate and I were having a discussion about what we felt were the least useful theories we have read/learned/discussed this semester.  We both feel strongly that the feminist slant on narrative has not gone far enough. I am certain she will write her own opinion and it will, undoubtedly, look different than mine. We are both feminists, but have very different considerations therein, because, shocker, feminists don't all look at story through the same lens. That’s the wonder, for me, of feminist theories. Very often the theorizing is messy as hell. One must be able to hold ambiguity in their very hand in order to consider the theories and the academic and activist arguments therein. That is a hallmark of much feminist theory, for me. And it is wondrous.

But those doing feminist work through narrative theory OR, and I don't know which they consider themselves doing, those trying to bend narrative theory with a feminist perspective have so far seemed to remain in the safe and often less vulnerable waters of primarily white feminist theory. That’s a tragedy. There is so much more. And it is wondrous. And, my point in this post is to strongly urge that the more is absolutely important. Important absolutely.

In defining a corporeal narratology, Daniel Punday writes of some of the misguided thinking about bodies in narrative. For example he points to what should be an outdated consideration of narrative and reading, the concept that “Not only do we escape from the body while reading, but the experience of that escape, the suspension of corporeality, is part of what makes reading pleasurable” (V11). Do we really leave our bodies behind? Can we ever really leave our bodies behind? Especially considering that our identities are so closely connected to our embodiment. Punday suggests, “narrative, then first and foremost depends upon a corporeal hermeneutics – a theory of how the text can be meaningfully articulated through the body” (15). Punday also notes that much feminist narratology work so far is guilty of essentializing. Essentializing, as many feminist/womanist theorists have proven, is dangerous and re-inscribes marginalization.

I wonder aloud . . . How do we move away from such an essentializing way of looking to bodies and identities as presented in narratives without looking deeper into the feminist theories, like womanist theory, that speaks to embodiment? Important absolutely.

Revisiting E.M. Forster's Story and Plot

Compared to other ways to categorize narrative, Forster's division of Story and Plot seemed to me the least useful.  It did not distinguish between different narrative levels like the other division we examined.  Instead, it seemed rather pretentiously self serving, implying that some read for the Story, while others, more sophisticated, read for the Plot.  But as we have examined the ways in which the audience is an active participant in the creation of narrative worlds, and especially as we have moved into the realm of cognitive narrative theories, I have come to reconsider Forster's division.

Before going further, I should probably restate Forster's definitions.  Story is the sequence of events, the "what happens?"  Plot is the causal relationship between those events, the "why?"  Right away, I think I was turned off by the lack of intuitiveness in this division.  Prior to this course and really thinking about these sorts of things, I considered Plot to be the sequence of events, while Story was those events and their causal relationships.  Then we added Discourse and Fabulas and other clearly not English words, and, well, that simple view went flying out the window.

Now, though, I think more about my and other audience members' own roles in building narrative worlds, and I don't find Forster's division so damn snooty (though I still would like to reverse his word choice).  Stories exist as sequences of events, dormant on the page or disc or whatever medium.  The events are ordered with regard to an external logic, the choices of their author or the accidents of history.  Luke Skywalker's face gets all messed up because Mark Hamill got into a nasty car accident.  But when an audience member engages with the Story, it becomes a Plot, for the audience member seeks to discover or impose an internal logic for the ordering of events.  Luke Skywalker's face gets all messed up because the wampa slapped the Force out of him.

Seen this way, plot is the product of our tendency to over-read, which is essential to our making sense of narratives.

Or maybe it's just that I'm more pretentious now.

Revisiting Cognitive Theory

     When I first saw that we would be applying cognitive theory to narrative studies, I was thrilled. As a Psychology minor in undergrad, cognitive theory fascinated me. However, I was disappointed to see the application of it in our readings. Although Herman, Sternberg, Martinez, Gerrig, and Sunshine introduced very interesting concepts, it almost appeared as if they were all posing the exact same theory, only arguing over the reasons for this theory. They couldn’t seem to agree whether readers identify with narratives because they rely on preconstructed schema, they fit it into their personal constructions of possible selves, or they apply their inherent abilities to read people through actions and visual cues. As interesting as it was, I had trouble wrapping my head around one question: why does it matter?

     I had always adhered to the idea that cognitive studies were not just about how the mind works, but about what that means. For instance, when looking at how narrative is applied to psychological treatment and therapy, we see psychologists applying narrative theory with a constructive purpose. I thus expected to see narrative theorists apply psychology in the same manner. I was, however, disappointed. As fascinating as it was, why did it matter? If we do as Herman suggests and remove the author, the implied author, and the cultural context from the narrative, then why study it? Why does it matter without all of these things?

     In looking back over these texts, I found a ray of hope in the words of Sunshine (literally). She said something that gave me hope for merging cognitive theory with my desire for meaning: “Cognitive literary analysis thus continues beyond the line drawn by cognitive scientists—with the reintroduction of something else, a “noise,” if you will, that is usually carefully controlled for and excised, whenever possible, from laboratory settings” (“Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness” 284-5).

     Although cognitive theory does primarily attempt to isolate its study to “how” the mind works, Sunshine suggests here that it is not complete until it applies outside factors, or “noise” that furthers the analysis in an attempt to answer the question: Why does it matter? Thus, I suddenly began to see how cognitive theory is applied in multiple contexts, blending cultural, structural, and rhetorical theories with it, and creating analyses that use cognitive theory as a basis. In my own paper, for instance, I’ll be applying Kartunnen and Culler’s rhetorical theories of causality and naturalization, which are both concepts based on cognitive theory. I see now that it is only in knowing how the mind works that the idea of narrative as rhetoric is even plausible, or the application of narrative to cultural theory is possible. Cognitive theory by itself may have confused me, but it clearly supplies the basis for many other narrative theories, and is thus very productive for application.

But why?

In an effort to revisit cognitive theory, I skimmed David Herman’s chapters in Narrative Theory again. First, I tried for a better understanding of why this particular model seems least useful. I am not entirely sure that Herman proves the significance, or the ‘so what?’ of his theory. What is the point of cutting out the implied author and/or reader? Re-reading the cognitive theory sections left me feeling like a toddler. All I kept thinking is ‘but why?!’.

Yeah, yeah, I get that he thinks the whole concept of implied authors and readers is a kind of scholarly hedging. However, I still do not understand what that leaves me with to analyze. He claims that he provides “an approach that openly acknowledges the need to ascribe intentions to narrating agents [that makes] authors or story creators centrally important, while the category of ‘narrator’ will be more or less salient depending on the profile of a given narrational act” (46). But how can you assign intention to a narrating agent that places importance on an author without making up an implied author? And why is this approach sooooo much better, especially since I am never given a model or proof to follow?

Herman’s theory is difficult for me to take another shot at because I am definitely not sure how he does it. Unlike the first two sections in this book, Herman does not actually give me a model of how to apply his theory that I find useful. He gives tons of support for why he thinks his theory is the best, which is all well and good, but I cannot find that out for myself because, along with (or maybe because of) not totally believing it is the best, I have very little idea about how to try it out for myself.

However, I did try. I attempted to apply the cognitive approach to a short story, “Hugo” by Karen Maner, from the anthology The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014. Maner is totally unknown to me, which I thought would make it easier to ignore my instinct toward the implied author. Just looking at the “narrating agent” of the short story left me with very little analysis, some weirdly worded sentences that attached agency to the inanimate text, and a headache. I still don’t like the cognitive approach. Mostly because I still don’t see wwwwwhhhhhyyyy?

Cognitive Theory

When we first started this class, my knowledge of narrative was very limited. In fact, I was one of those individuals who assumed that narrative and story meant the same thing. Of course now, fifteen weeks later, I know better. Out of the many theories we covered this semester, I found most to be useful. Many of them changed my perspectives on fictional narratives. In fact, I would not say that I encountered a theory that was least useful to me. I would, however, like to say that I want to learn more about the cognitive theory of narratology.

Herman was the first one to introduce us to such a theory, and now that it's the end of the semester and I know what I know about narrative theory as a field, I must say his contribution is very important, even though much of his scholarship is difficult to understand at first. In the future, I would most certainly like to look further into his cognitive theory approach because so much of understanding and evaluating a narrative deals with the relationship between the physical author, the text, and the reader herself. 

On cognitive theory, Herman attempts to understand the reader and what she is bringing to the text. The reader, after all, has power in determining the implied author, and she is also responsible with understanding and evaluating the narrator as reliable or unreliable. As much scholarship in narratology thus far has revealed, a physical author wrote the text in a certain way, and because of this, she has control of the reader. However, what the reader understands of the text is largely up to her. Herman writes, "engaging with stories entails mapping discourse cues onto WHEN, WHERE, WHO, HOW, and WHY dimensions of mentally figured worlds; the interplay among these dimensions accounts for the structure as well as the representation functions and overall impact of the worlds in question" (17). Some of these will be obvious because of the plot as some of us may underread, but for those of us who tend to overread a fictional narrative, then these simple questions are addressed on a much deeper level. Herman continues, "narrative world making entails at least two different types of inferences: those bearing on what sort of world is being evoked by the act of telling, and those bearing on why (and with what consequences) the act is being performed at all" (17). The narrator tells a story, but the reader's attachment to that story becomes a very crucial part of the relationship between the physical author, the text, and the reader. The author has control over his text and the narrator, but the author does not have control over what the narrative comes to mean to the reader. 

Time and time again, the scholars of narrative theory find themselves in a circular discussion of all things narrative, and although their points are all valid, creating concepts that applied to all literature across the board becomes very hard. This is the confusing yet intriguing part of narrative. If as Abbott claims narratives reflect the real world, then the story and dialogue are and must be two very different emerging concepts. Cognitive theory is at the root of this, but again, like anything else in narrative theory, the one flaw cognitive theory has it's the inability to introduce a general concept that applies to fictional narratives across the board.