Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences

David Herman, ed. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2003.363 pp. $80.00 cloth; $27.50 paper. The word narrative is rooted in the Latin gnarus, "knowing. " Narrating means "making [something] known," perhaps as much to the narrator as to any audience. To suggest that cognition is like or comparable to narrative is thusetymologically but also, I would contend, phenomenologically-to toy with tautology. Yet acknowledging this equation is not an end but a beginning to the problem of defining narrative. In his introduction to a dozen essays that broach topics as diverse as the therapeutic elements of narrative, the uses of mapping fictional spaces, and problems that readers of fiction may encounter with pronouns, David Herman lays down the logic of the collective enterprise: "cognitive narratologists assume that greater familiarity with techniques for analyzing naturally occurring narrative discourse-whether spoken or written, quotidian or literary-can benefit scholars working within the disciplines traditionally grouped among the cognitive sciences" (20). This claim is not as clear as it might be, and it is that bizarre phrase "naturally occurring" that strikes the first troubling note in the book. Herman is either positing that narrative discourse is by definition naturally occurring, like yogurt, stalactites, and hurricanes, or suggesting that there exists a genus of narrative that is "unnatural" (and rather difficult to imagine). Neither proposition is edifying, but together they point to two considerable challenges faced by interdisciplinary cognitive narratologists in general and the essayists in this volume in particular. Despite the astonishing number of books and articles with the words "consciousness" and "cognition" in their titles published within the last decade, there remains a significant and disappointing disconnection between the "scientific" fields of cognitive research and literary criticism and theory. Were he alive today, Roman Jakobson (mentioned only once in the volume under review, in passing, as an adjective: "Jakobsonian" [279]) would likely be dumbfounded at the lack of exchange between linguists and poets. Russian Formalism was inseparable from the avant-garde machinations of Futurism; since the Chomskyan revolution, linguists have seldom taken any notice of experimental poetics, preferring to concentrate on the ins and outs of elementary sentence constructions. (Poetic though the formulation "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is, study of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" or certain surrealist writings reveals that syntax had long since been recognized to be no guarantee of logic.) And burgeoning though cognitive narratology may be at present-and welcome and exciting as its prospects are-there is still a lot of lost ground to recover before richer soil can be explored. One immediate concern cognitive narratology raises is the fallacy of constructing a normative model of cognition, somewhat in the same way the "reader response" branch of literary criticism sometimes hovers near prescriptive accounts of reading. The x-factor of subjectivity, which Uri Margolin wisely observes in his contribution to this book prevents anyone's cognitive processes from being "directly accessed by any cognitive scientist" (287), likewise warns against determinism. Narrative depends upon distinction and detail, as anyone who has told a child a bedtime story quickly learns: characters need names, physical characteristics, and favorite desserts, or at least there had better be convincing reasons why they don't have them. When, in their essay "Cognitive Psychological Foundations of Narrative Experiences" Richard J. Gerrig and Giovanna Egidi express unsubstantiated doubt about readers' abilities to recall "the lovely details" that do not have any immediately discernible connection to "the main causal chain" of a story (44), they suppose that 1. …