Plotting Memory. What Are We Made to Remember When We Read Narrative Texts?
Authors: Mühlbacher Manuel 
Published: September 2022

While the general link between storytelling and remembering has often been underlined with regard to such topics as traumatic experience or the construction of identity, there are hardly any studies that analyse the mnestic performance that underpins the reading of narrative plots in literary texts. In order for a story to create meaning, the reader has to remember earlier events, thus becoming able to understand how conflicts arise and are resolved. If this fact seems much too obvious to require any questioning, the process of plot-related remembering takes on considerable complexity when it comes to long novelistic texts. In these cases, reading amounts to an exercise in remembering and writing becomes a way of addressing and guiding the reader’s memory. This article proposes a theory of emplotted memory, i. e. of how narrative texts create a sequence of events in the memory of the reader. It argues, furthermore, that emplotted remembering is a dimension of implied readership and that it can be analysed on a textual level.

Gathering elements and cues for such a theory, the first section of the article begins with an examination of the rule laid down in Aristotle’sPoeticsthat themythosof tragedy has to be easily rememberable (eumnēmoneuton). As the famous analogy of the animal body suggests, both the limited extension and the holistic structure of the ideal tragic plot prevent the audience from forgetting how events tie in with each other. The very intelligibility and the cathartic effect of tragedy hence depend on a mnestic activity. But whereas tragedy has to become rememberable by means of the plot’s inner structure and limited size alone, epic can use narrative techniques such as flashbacks and summaries in order to comprehend a much longer time span. In his theory of narrative desire, Peter Brooks builds on these insights and conceives plot as a dynamic process of anticipation and retrospection that heavily involves the reader’s memory. For Brooks, emplotted remembering amounts to a passionate quest for meaning: Narrative tension implies that a psychic need prevents the reader from forgetting as long as the end of the plot has not been reached. The more coherent the narrative structure of the text, the more intense the activity of emplotted remembering will be. The theoretical section of the article concludes with a review of some studies from the field of empirical psychology that have addressed the recall of stories. It turns out that the basic assumptions derived from Aristotle and Brooks – such as the importance of remembering for the comprehension of narrative, the correlation between structural coherence and memorability or the strife for meaning – are in tune with empirical findings. The goal of the article, however, is not to develop a theory that is able to predict the mnestic processes triggered by a given text. On the contrary, it uses theory as a heuristic tool that is meant to be transformed by each reading.

Whereas the first section constructs a heuristic model of plot-related remembering, the second aims to account for its particularity in different texts and contexts. Its purpose is to flesh out the theory of emplotted remembering by examining the interaction of plot and memory in three romances and novels. Narrative texts give rise to various processes of remembering and forgetting that depend on plot structure, narrative technique and cultural factors. The first case study is dedicated toYvain ou le chevalier au lionby Chrétien de Troyes. This 12th-century romance not only tells a story of forgetting and remembering – Yvain fails to respect a deadline set by his wife Laudine and then strives to redeem himself – but also addresses the problematics of memory on a narrative level. While the protagonist begins by forgetting his engagements to Laudine, the reader’s perspective is always firmly located on the side of remembering. This effect, which is achieved by diverging measures between discourse and story time as well as by mirroring relationships between the part and the whole, testifies to the great axiological and ethical prestige of remembering in Chrétien’s text. Rodríguez de Montalvo’s lengthy romanceAmadís de Gaulais at the centre of the second case study. It can be shown that theAmadísinvolves two kinds of emplotted memory and two corresponding sets of narrative strategies. The episodic elements of the romance invite the reader to remember minor incidents over hundreds of pages, but they are accompanied by almost no mnemotechnic hints because the intelligibility of the plot is guaranteed – even in the case of actual forgetting – by the permanent recurrence of the same schematic pattern. However, in the case of narrative strands that build up a coherent chain of causation, remembering is not an option but an absolute necessity. This is the reason why the narrator then gives extensive mnemotechnic comments in order to help the reader to tie the corresponding events together. The last case study focuses on Goethe’sWilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. The hero’s development is contingent on the fact that he vividly remembers certain incidents from his childhood and makes new experiences in the light of his infantile impressions. While the reader is made to remember alongside Wilhelm on the level of psychological causation, Goethe’s novel also creates a network of symbolic relationships between the characters that is fully accessible to the reader alone. This network involves a sense of simultaneity and complements the linear order of the plot with a synchronic memorial dimension.

The conclusion of the article suggests perspectives for further inquiry and argues that emplotted remembering is likely to respond to cultural discourses on memory. Narrative texts encourage certain practices of remembering and forgetting and can thus be understood as interventions in cultural and political debates.