Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media

Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds

Mari Hatavara, Matti Hyvärinen, Maria Mäkelä, Frans Mäyrä, Mari Hatavara, Matti Hyvärinen, Maria Mäkelä, Frans Mäyrä

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317524618
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Offering an interdisciplinary approach to narrative, this book investigates storyworlds and minds in narratives across media, from literature to digital games and reality TV, from online sadomasochism to oral history databases, and from horror to hallucinations. It addresses two core questions of contemporary narrative theory, inspired by recent cognitive-scientific developments: what kind of a construction is a storyworld, and what kind of mental functioning can be embedded in it? Minds and worlds become essential facets of making sense and interpreting narratives as the book asks how story-internal minds relate to the mind external to the storyworld, that is, the mind processing the story. With essays from social scientists, literary scholars, linguists, and scholars from interactive media studies answering these topical questions, the collection brings diverse disciplines into dialogue, providing new openings for genuinely transdisciplinary narrative theory. The wide-ranging selection of materials analyzed in the book promotes knowledge on the latest forms of cultural and social meaning-making through narrative, necessary for navigating the contemporary, mediatized cultural landscape. The combination of theoretical reflection and empirical analysis makes this book an invaluable resource for scholars and advanced students in fields including literary studies, social sciences, art, media, and communication.

1 Texts, Worlds, Stories Narrative Worlds as Cognitive and Ontological Concept

Marie-Laure Ryan

DOI: 10.4324/9781315722313-1

Every period in literary theory (or should I say in the humanities) has its favorite concepts. In the fifties and sixties, under the influence of Saussure’s linguistics, we witnessed a so-called “language turn” that inspired structuralism, semiotics, New Criticism, and deconstruction and placed the notion of text or textuality at the center of attention. With its emphasis on the signifier, at the expense of the signified, this movement regarded the literary text as the gate to a meaning that was absolutely unique to it; it assumed (more or less tacitly) that if you changed a single word, the entire meaning was changed. When the term world was used, the textualist school meant some kind of infinite sum of meanings that could not be paraphrased (a favourite battle cry of New Criticism was indeed: “The heresy of paraphrase”) ¹ . It follows from these positions that the text was the only mode of access to its world. Because textualism is reluctant to isolate a narrative level of meaning from the global textual world, it implicitly adhered to a strict formula: 1 text—1 world—1 story.

After the linguistic turn came the narrative turn of the eighties, and “narrative” or “story” became prominent. One of the effects of the narrative turn was a shift of focus from the signifier to the signified. While stories are transmitted by discourse, which means by text, they remain inscribed in our mind long after the signifiers have vanished from memory. This means that a story is a cognitive rather than a linguistic construct. The fact that stories can be summarized, adapted, and translated, and that they can be told by various media, emancipates them from language and makes them somewhat independent from the particular signs through which they are transmitted. The structuralist idea that Cinderella and a Chinese folk tale can be versions of the same story, which was heretic for textualism (Smith 1981), becomes very acceptable for a narratologist. Instead of 1 text, 1 world, 1 story, one could now have the possibility of many texts—1 world—1 story.

As narratology has expanded from literature to other disciplines and media, we have seen the emergence of yet another theoretical concept, the concept of “world.” In earlier days, “world” was a totality of meanings associated with authors or with genres. Critics would speak of “the world of Proust” or “the world of Kafka” or even “the world of epic poetry,” meaning by this a distinctive set of values, themes, or objects of thought. In its new narratological use, “world” is no longer the world of an author or of a genre, but rather the world of a story—literally a “storyworld.” It combines a spatial dimension, the setting, and a temporal dimension, the narrative events.

The new theoretical prominence of the concept of world further weakens the formula 1 text—1 world—1 story. Contemporary culture, whether popular or highbrow, practices an aesthetics of proliferation that implements the full range of possible relations among text, world, and story. This proliferation can take several forms. In this chapter, I will concentrate on the first two.

• Narrative proliferation: a world with many stories.
• Ontological proliferation: a story (or a text) with many worlds.
• Textual and medial proliferation: many different texts targeting the same world, especially texts of different media. This is the phenomenon currently known as transmedia storytelling (Jenkins 2006).

As the Czech narratologist Jirí Koten (2010) observes, the narratological concept of world can be traced back to two lines of ancestry. When we speak of storyworld the influence comes mainly from cognitive approaches to narrative (Herman 2009), while when we speak of fictional world the influence comes from schools and disciplines interested in the ontological status of imaginary entities: philosophy of language, formal semantics, and more particularly possible worlds theory (Pavel 1986; Doležel 1998; Ryan 1991). Yet the association between storyworld/cognitive approach and fictional world/ontological approach should not be taken in an exclusive sense, for storyworlds can raise ontological issues, and the recognition and evaluation of fictional worlds involve cognitive operations.

The concern of the cognitive perspective is self-evident: It asks how the mind constructs stories and their world(s), either as an encoding, productive activity or as a decoding, interpretive activity. While the first of these questions has received in the past a lot of speculative attention by authors and philosophers interested in the nature of creativity, especially under the influence of Romanticism and its cult of genius, our far more empirically minded period has overwhelmingly focused on the second, because it is much more amenable to experimentation, or at least to self-examination. Few critics are creators, but all of them can ask: What goes on in my mind when I read (watch, play with) a narrative text? In contrast to the cognitive perspective, which focuses, at least in principle, on operations that every interpreter performs, the ontological perspective asks theoretical questions that go far beyond the concerns of ordinary people. These questions concern the nature, or mode of existence, of creations of the imagination. We can read/watch/play stories, especially fictional ones, without asking ourselves about the ontological status of the characters (or objects) that occupy our thoughts or about the relations between their world and the world we live in; yet insofar as stories can contain many worlds, and worlds with various existential modalities (material, imagined, dreamed, feared, desired, anticipated, etc.), the recognition of these ontological differences and of the borders that separate them (borders occasionally transgressed) is an integral part of the cognitive processing of stories. Ontological questions, therefore, can dovetail with cognitive ones, and they are not necessarily abstruse metaphysical issues raised for the pure pleasure of theoretical debate.

Storyworlds

The concept of world is intuitively very accessible. The nine definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary reveal two dominant themes: world as a planet (preferably the planet Earth, but there are also extra-terrestrial worlds), and world as a totality of things, as “everything that exists.” In this second sense “world” becomes synonymous with “universe.” Of these two conceptions the second is more useful to narratology, since a theoretical concept of world should apply equally well to a narrative of space travel, such as Star Wars, and a narrative that focuses on a small area, such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857).

The totality conception of world is particularly useful in the case of storyworld. A storyworld is not just the spatial setting where a story takes place; it is a complex spatio-temporal totality that undergoes global changes. Put more simply, a storyworld is an imagined totality that evolves according to the events in the story. To follow a story means to simulate mentally the changes that take place in the storyworld, using the cues provided by the text. However, this rough definition leaves some questions unanswered. For instance: Does the concept of storyworld apply to all narratives or only to fictional ones? For nonfiction, could one simply say that the storyworld is the world of the text, this is to say, the real world? I believe that a distinction should be made between storyworld and reference world. A text of nonfiction describes the real world, but it may do so more or less accurately and always incompletely. Imagine that a text of nonfiction presents a distorted, false, or deliberately inaccurate version of reality—in other words, that it tells lies. In this case the audience may be capable of making a distinction between the world projected by the text—the storyworld—and the world that serves as referent. When a story is told as fiction, however, the storyworld cannot be distinguished from the reference world, since the story creates its own world. While in nonfiction the storyworld provides information that can be integrated into our representation of reality, at least if we believe it; in fiction, we construct the storyworld largely for its own sake.

Another problematic issue concerns what kind of information belongs to the storyworld and what kind does not. Extending Gérard Genette’s typology of narrators (1972, 256), we can distinguish two types of narrative elements: intradiegetic elements, which exist within the storyworld, and extradiegetic elements, which are not literally part of the storyworld but play a crucial role in its presentation. Storyworlds are larger than what is directly shown in the text, larger than the narrative “here” and “now.” Let’s take the example of drama. It frames a certain time span, and it shows events that take place in a specific location, the location that occupies the stage, but the storyworld also includes events that precede the beginning of the action, as well as events that do not take place on stage but are narrated by the characters. The same distinction can occur in novels, for instance in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925): The novel takes place over a single day, and its setting is London, but it references many events that precede that day and that take place elsewhere, for instance the traumatic World War I experience of Septimus Smith. In other words, storyworlds encompass not only the story per se, but also the backstory, and sometimes the afterstory (such as the later life of the protagonists, as represented in epilogues), and not only the scene of the story, but all the places that characters think or talk about. Storyworlds should therefore be divided into an inner circle occupied by the events that constitute the focus of the story and an outer circle that represents a larger spatial and temporal frame (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The scope of storyworlds.

Let’s now return to the difference between intradiegetic and extradiegetic elements. A good example of this difference is the sound track of movies. Film theorists have long been aware of the distinction between diegetic music—music that originates inside the storyworld and is perceived by the characters—and extradiegetic music, which controls the expectations and emotions of the spectator but does not exist within the storyworld. In drama, the objects on the stage are (normally) part of the storyworld, but the stage directions are not; they are rather instructions by the author on how to put together a storyworld. In literary narrative, the speech of characters is clearly part of the storyworld, but the status of the discourse of the narrator is more problematic. Here we can distinguish three possibilities.

First, there is what Genette calls intradiegetic narrators (1972, 256), such as Emma Dean in Wuthering Heights (1847). These narrators are individuated characters who tell about their own life or about events they have witnessed. Their discourse is not the main support of the narration; rather, it is quoted by the main narrator. Since their act of telling is witnessed by other characters and may influence future events, it is clearly part of the storyworld. The discourse of these intradiegetic narrators is just an extended case of character speech. Another type of narrator that can be assimilated to the case of the intradiegetic narrator is the letter writers in epistolary novels. Their act of narration is clearly an event within the storyworld, since their letters can be intercepted by other characters and influence future events.

Second, there is the case of regular first-person narrators—narrators who are individuated characters, who appear as characters in the story, and whose discourse is the main support of narration, such as Robinson Crusoe in the eponymous novel by Daniel Defoe. These narrators exist as individuals within the storyworld, but their discourse is not perceived by the other characters, and it has no effect on the evolution of the storyworld. This is why Genette (1972, 256) calls these narrators extradiegetic. Their act of narration is what makes it possible for the reader to imagine the storyworld, but it is not an event within the story, and most of the time it does not imitate a distinct nonfictional (“natural,” some narratologists would say) type of discourse, such as diary, testimony, or autobiography. Quite often in first-person narration we cannot tell if the narrator is speaking, writing, or just thinking. If it sounds paradoxical to regard standard first-person narrators as extradiegetic, compare their discourse with the camera in film. The camera in Saving Private Ryan (1998) is what makes it possible to see the landing on Omaha Beach, but we certainly do not imagine that there was a camera and a cameraman on the Omaha Beach of the storyworld. The paradox of a narrator who exists in the storyworld, while his discourse is not part of the story, can be resolved by the well-known narratological distinction between the experiencing I, the narrator as character, and the narrating I, the narrator as camera. Another way to handle this paradox is to regard the narrator’s discourse as ontologically part of the extended time frame, while the events represented by this discourse belong cognitively to the narrow time frame. The narrator, consequently, is situated at the outer edge of the outer circle.

The third case concerns impersonal third-person narrators, who often narrate from an omniscient perspective. These narrators clearly do not exist in the storyworld, since they are not individuated, and if they do not exist as individuals, neither does their discourse. My personal inclination ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction: Minds in Action, Interpretive Traditions in Interaction
• SECTION I
• 1 Texts, Worlds, Stories: Narrative Worlds as Cognitive and Ontological Concept
• 2 Storyworlds and Paradoxical Narration: Putting Classifications to a Transmedial Test
• 3 The Charge against Classical and Post-Classical Narratologies’ “Epistemic” Approach to Literary Fiction
• SECTION II
• 4 How You Emerge from This Game Is up to You: Agency, Positioning, and Narrativity in The Mass Effect Trilogy
• 5 Playing the Worlds of Prom Week
• 6 Scripting Beloved Discomfort: Narratives, Fantasies, and Authenticity in Online Sadomasochism
• 7 Storyworld in Text-Messages: Sequentiality and Spatialisation
• SECTION III
• 8 Defending the Private and the Unnarratable: Doomed Attempts to Read and Write Literary and Cinematic Minds in Marguerite Duras’s India Cycle
• 9 Of Minds and Monsters: The Eventfulness of Monstrosity and the Poetics of Immersion in Horror Literature
• 10 Narrative Conventions in Hallucinatory Narratives
• 11 Narrative and Minds in the Traditional Ballads of Early Country Music
• SECTION IV
• 12 Mind Reading, Mind Guessing, or Mental-State Attribution? The Puzzle of John Burnside’s A Summer of Drowning
• 13 Mind as World in the Reality Game Show Survivor
• 14 Performing Selves and Audience Design: Interview Narratives on the Internet
• 15 Documenting Everyday Life: Mind Representation in the Web Exhibition “A Finnish Winter Day”
• Afterword: A New Normal?
• List of Contributors
• Index