The questions narrative
raises seem to pervade all areas of enquiry. Psychologists ask us if narrative
replicates patterns of consciousness; linguists ask us whether or not narrative
precedes all other types of discourse; even anthropologists ask us if narrative
acts as the initial embodiment of our conceptions of time-and-space. Because
the capacity for narrative virtually knows no bounds–it is constrained by
neither the historical period nor the geographic location, neither the
chronological age nor the chosen medium of its telling–perhaps narrative
usually invites only the most cursory investigations into its nature, and, with
some fortunate exceptions, still remains quaintly transparent to many.

This neglect is all the
more curious given the resurgence of the study of narrative for the past
generation and a half which was initially spearheaded by literary and cultural
theorists eager to apply–or, more recently, to overturn–structuralist
analyses derived from the Geneva and Prague, Copenhagen and Paris waves of what
is collectively known as the structuralist movement.. The movement aimed at
disclosing not what a particular narrative might mean, but how its underlying
code shaped the manner in which narrative in general was systemically
organized. Almost immediately by the late ‘sixties, those rejecting the claim
that particular narratives should be construed as manifestations of an
underlying code began to look upon the manifestations themselves as the result
of interaction amongst the participants in any act of narration within its
specific context or definable situation. By so doing, this second phase of
analysis placed greater emphasis upon the linguistic and organizational
patterns of actual narrative encounters in which participation persists if both
the plot and the evaluative strains of the story have recognizable significance
or point. Within another decade, others, re-assessing the structuralist
conception of code, saw in it a socio-cognitive attribute of the members of any
given (speech) community.

David Herman’s rich
anthology in many respects announces the arrival of the inter-disciplinary
field of cognitive narratology. To that extent, it may well become (along with
his magnum opus a year earlier, Story Logic) as seminal a text as many
readers of psycho-analytical persuasion have found the 1994 anthology, Psychoanalysis
and Development: Representations and Narratives, edited a decade earlier by
Massimo Ammaniti and Daniel Stern. Here, there is much to be had for those of
us intrigued by narrative, be it spoken or written, spontaneous or planned,
solitary or communal, secular or sacred, factual or fictional. Within the limits
of this review, we shall sample some of the more suggestive lines of enquiry,
though not necessarily in the order presented, before turning our attention to
at least three factors largely ignored by Herman’s far-reaching anthology.

Beneath their riveting
use of a short story by Eudora Welty, Richard Gerrig and Giovanna Egidi argue
that cognitive investigations of narrative are primarily concerned with the
mental processes by which readers construct the world of the narrative and with
the representations cueing or enabling such processes. It is this dual focus
that, from at least the ‘seventies, has been exemplified in the appeal to
schemata, the means by which experience can be resolved into expectations of,
say, faces and places by writers and readers alike in the inferential
transactions both deploy in their respective acts of crafting and comprehending
a story no matter how minimally detailed. How the intricacies of causally
tracking connections of both the explicitly and the implicitly embedded kind within
narratives work, and that "relevant theories have no way of
conceptualizing," lead Gerrig and Egidi to conclude that there is a need
"for perpetually broadening the research agenda" (52).

The same expansive mood
finds expression in the contribution by Uric Margolin who reminds readers of
the methodological need in cognitive enquiries

to concentrate initially
on one major component in isolation for the closer study of its specifics, as
long as we bear in mind that the only natural unit is indeed the social mind in
action (272).

The "semi-intuitive
theories" of generations past, we are assured, can now be replaced by
"all four levels or circuits of narrative communication" (274 &
273). The four, in largely structuralist terms, involve actual writers and readers,
implied writers and readers, textually inscribed narrators and addressees, and,
finally, participants in the world of the story itself, all of whom can
"engage in any conceivable cognitive activity" (273). Margolin then
proceeds to survey typical ways in which an analysis of these four levels yield
their "mechanisms and modes of generation" by applications of the
"very modern cognitive framework" (293).

The expansiveness of
cognitive narratology peaks by the time we encounter claims of the type made by
Mark Turner:

Running two stories
mentally, when we should be absorbed by only one, and blending them when they
should be kept apart, is at the root of what makes us human (120).

This contention is
followed by the partial concession that, even if conceptual blending is shared
at least rudimentarily with other species in which memories become either
backgrounded or foregrounded in our experience and understanding of present or
emerging events, then

the advanced ability to
blend incompatible conceptual arrays is a basic part of what makes us
cognitively modern (121).

Immediately thereafter,
Turner assigns blending as "fundamental" to our counterfactual
thinking, our apprehension of personal identity, our comprehension of
causality, the nature of language and more specifically grammar, the extension
and transformation of categories of thought be they artistic or scientific,
before highlighting "double-scope" stories identifiable as
"cognitively modern" and exemplified by the avowal scene in Act Two,
Scene Five of Jean Racine’s 1677 play, Phèdre (121ff.). Leaving aside
the matter of when cognitive modernity may be said to have begun, the
difficulty some readers may of course have with Turner’s blanket approach is
that there is little said about what actually discriminates, say, narratives in
the artistic realm from those in the scientific domain, let alone art and
ritual from science and mathematics.

Turning from the
expansionary zeal found in some of the thirteen papers of this anthology, let
us also focus upon the degree to which the very tools of analysis of narrative
are consistently foregrounded by paper after paper. Kitty Klein, when pursuing
how narrating trauma becomes part of the process of healing it, examines how
psychologists aim at adapting their operational definitions of patients’
reports of internal states and perceptions to the largely measurable,
observable, consistent descriptions of behavior. Consequently, competing
analyses of what constitute significant variables in narrative emphasize such
features as structure, cohesion, and density of expression. Not unlike
readability scores, much energy has been given to counting lexical and
sentential items as well as to lexical frequencies and cohesive connections.
Whether such forms of measurement, though easily tabulated, provide sufficient
evidence from which to make inferences about the patterns of interpretation
employed by the teller seems highly questionable. Other analyses of narrative
stress modes of evaluation or judgment by listeners, at times identifying
utterances or propositions by which the content is developed, be it in terms of
negative or positive feelings, coherent or fragmented thoughts, internalized or
externalized perceptions, and the like. Yet here, too, such psycho-linguistic attributes
need not be mutually exclusive nor confined to one utterance or proposition at
a time. Not unsurprisingly, therefore, more holistic measures have been sought
in appraisals of integrative or differentiated patterns of perspectives on the
one hand or in judgments of descriptive or interpretive treatment of
recollections on the other. Klein as a result finds that operational
definitions of narrative have "proven difficult" and to that extent
continue to make ways of disclosing the relationship between narrative, causal
coherence, and healing "a pressing task" (62).

By contrast, William
Frawley and colleagues plot another path by construing therapeutic discourse in
performative terms. Unlike consultations between doctor and patient,
"therapeutic knowledge is constituted by insight in the moment of
speaking, rather than uncovered in factual discovery" (86). To that
extent, contend Frawley, Murray and Smith, the "world" in therapeutic
narrative "function[s] less as referential descriptions than semantic constructions
that determine referential domains" (86). That said, they begin to chart
the complexities of therapeutic narrative in terms of co-construction of voice,
the goal of plausibility, and the reflexivity and self-organization of
re-narrativization itself. Much of this is open to various forms of analysis
which trace lexical networks and semantic fields by which a narrative unfolds,
metaphorical means by which emotions are articulated and worldviews perceived,
and, finally, the introduction of semantic scales by which patients can be
asked to grade their perceptions at, say, moments of narrative impasse. In
other words, unlike Klein who pursues narrative within a therapeutic context,
Frawley and colleagues would focus future efforts upon therapeutic strategies
in the context of narrative.

Perhaps we should
conclude our necessarily limited sample from the anthology with Monika
Fludernik’s defense of her highly influential model of "natural
narratology," her 1996 text by that name arguably being the pivotal work
of the current generation. At the core of her thesis lies the claim that
"the cognitive framework" for naturally occurring narratives
"can be applied to all narrative" albeit that significant
transformations accompany fictional developments associated with its literary
forms (244). Moreover, our reading processes constitute narrativity which is
not so much "a quality adhering to a text, but rather an attribute imposed
on the text by the reader who interprets the text as narrative" (242). In
other words, the reader first of all brings to the text his or her basic
schemata of, say, actions and events, intentions and goals, schemata which, in
turn, define a text from the fivefold perspective of action, telling,
experiencing, viewing, and reflecting frames. Thereafter, readers collectively
accumulate sets of generic, historically contingent schemata of narratives such
as the romantic and the satiric, the didactic and the tragic. The
above-mentioned constitutive act of narrativity is one which effectively draws
upon all three facets enumerated here in mediated acts of narrativizing
experience or consciousness. Fludernik, therefore, does not construe narrative
as story or plot, but ”as a process that captures the narrator’s past
experience" (245)–be it personal or vicarious or
testamentary–reproducing, evaluating, and resolving it in terms both of a
protagonist’s responses and of a narrator’s coupling of its "emotional and
evaluative significance" (249) and the present context. That the implications
of conflating schemata and frames or of appealing to the competence of readers
remain two crucial conceptions yet to be resolved by Fludernik indicates the
need for the debate to continue over the nature of the cognitive and the
pragmatic paradigms that she anchors linguistically.

The highly synthesized
and programmatic contributions by the editor himself (1-30 & 163-192)
contain a wealth of lines of enquiries to engage a host of professionals and
researchers in cognitive narratology and its cognate disciplines. Yet, for all
that, there appear to be at least three kinds of questions that the anthology
ignores. For example, what role does imagination and pretence play in the
formation and reception of narrative? Indeed, is there not a need to account
for the distinctions initiated by such recent thinkers as a Gregory Currie or a
Kendall Walton (the first of whom is particularly attuned to developments in
the cognitive sciences)? The question here is not one about invading the
territory of neighboring disciplines so much as one about insisting upon
perspicacity in one’s key concepts and assumptions.

Next, can discussions of
"What is narrative?" be so easily deflected or dismissed in pursuit
of "How are acts of narrative to be explicated?"? Can contributors,
in Herman’s own words, simply "seek less to specify necessary and
sufficient conditions for story than to explore the semiotic, cognitive, and
sociointeractional environments in which narrative acquires salience and to
which stories in turn lend structure" (3)? The concern here is not that
socio-psychological and -linguistic investigations lack legitimacy. Rather, it
is whether or not they can gain purchase without questioning their basic
assumption of whether narrative is susceptible to such definitions or whether,
by contrast, it ought to be construed in less "essentialist" ways as
critics of Fludernik note (258, n. 10).

Thirdly, has the developmental dimension of
cognitive narratology been ignored to the point where narrative is uncritically
regarded as a primary mode of discourse "in some sense more fundamental
than descriptive, instructive, expository, or argumentative types" (171)?
Is the Tuija Virtanen hypothesis–that its primacy, if not its universality,
lies in the fact that narrative types of text can be manifested in every other
kind of discourse–one that accords with the emergence of spoken language?
Notwithstanding Herman’s many references to the cognitive revolution associated
with Lev Vygotsky, no attention is given to his observations about the joint emergence
of two basic functions of an infant’s speech. Children do not only use language
to recount past experience, they also use it to hypothesize about future
conditions. What we are wont to call the beginnings of narrative speech is
accompanied by the beginnings of argumentative speech.