jarmila.mildorf@upb.

de
Jarmila MILDORF
Universität
WORTH PURSUING? THE LIMITS OF Paderborn,
COGNITIVE NARRATOLOGY Deutschland

Keywords: Cognitive narratology, empirical approaches to cognition and

literature, literary interpretation, cognitive-functional linguistics, deixis, dialogue,
spatiotemporal parameters
Abstract: Cognitive narratology remains a disparate field but has recently gained
renewed interest in the wake of academic endeavours to launch transdisciplinary
research projects across the humanities/sciences divide. This paper presents a critical
view of cognitive narratology, questioning especially its explanatory power when
it comes to interpreting literary texts. While it is legitimate to ask about readers’
perceptions when reading fictional texts, empirical studies rarely offer illuminating
insights as regards the aesthetic design and meaning-making of texts. Likewise, the
theoretical models offered by cognitive narratology are often too crude to capture
the sometimes complex playfulness of literary texts, and they are mired in abstract
metaphorical discourses that are hardly helpful. In discussing one exemplary text
passage from May Sinclair’s modernist novel Mary Olivier (1919), I draw on cognitive
concepts such as “enaction” and cognitive-functional approaches to deixis to then
point out some of the shortcomings of these cognitive approaches to date. Ultimately,
this paper advocates questions more pertinent to literary analysis and the return to
text-based interpretation.

In 2010, Monika Fludernik cautioned against an over-optimistic view

of the future of cognitive approaches because of their “lack of a unitary
cognitive framework for the analysis of literary texts”:
The field at the moment resembles a group of construction sites, as
some scholars concentrate on metaphor and blending theory (e.g., Gavins
and Steen), others on cognitive reflexivity (Zunshine), still others on deixis
(Stockwell) or space perception (Tsur). The different cognitive approaches
show no sign of coalescing. (Fludernik 2010: 927)
This lack of a “sign of coalescing” could in the early days very well
be seen in the diversity of approaches and contributions, for example, in
Herman (2003). Five years down the line the field looks even more dis-
parate than it has ever done before: while the cognitive approaches listed
by Fludernik and represented in Herman’s and others’ various collections
continue to co-exist without much visible cross-fertilization, there is also
a greater push towards ‘scientificity’ as regards the exploration of the
narrative-mind nexus. Herman (2013), for example, demonstrates close
leanings towards research undertaken in artificial intelligence and the
neurosciences, and universities and research councils these days lavishly
fund co-operations between neuroscientists, IT researchers and scholars
working in the arts and humanities. However, the three key questions
Библид 0350-6428. - God. 47, br. 156 (2015), str. 33-48. / оригиналан научни рад
УДК 82.0; 801.73
that Herman (2014) poses at the end of his survey article on cognitive
narratology in the Handbook of Narratology largely remain unanswered:
1. “ how best to foster genuine dialogue or interaction between scholarship
on narrative and the sciences of mind”;

2. “ how to take into account the relationship between theory and

corpus—that is, the way one’s understanding of the mind-narrative
nexus will be shaped by the kinds of narrative practices one considers”;

3. “ how a focus on the mind-narrative nexus might illuminate the structure

and functions of situated storytelling acts” (Herman 2014: 58–59)
In this paper I will address some of the problems I perceive in cogni-
tive narratology as it is practised today. In a second step, I will discuss
a short chapter from May Sinclair’s novel Mary Olivier (1919) to show to
what extent current cognitive approaches are still galaxies away from
dealing adequately with complex literary structures. Finally, I will raise
more fundamental questions concerning the role of cognitive approaches
for literary and cultural studies.

1. Taking Issue with Cognitive Narratology

The first question Herman asks (see above) is not trivial given that
a lot of money is being invested in joint projects across the humanities-
sciences divide. Can one seriously expect valid, reliable and generalizable
results when, say, literary or cultural studies scholars barely know any-
thing about computational algorithms, statistical methods, eye-tracking
procedures or brain scan tests but are still expected to feed relevant data
and theoretical input into such scientific endeavours? Conversely, will
computer scientists, neurobiologists, clinical psychologists, etc. be able
to design their empirical tests in such a way that they generate answers
relevant to literary and cultural studies scholars if the initial questions
asked by those scholars may sound outlandish to them? Furthermore, the
study of the neurological processing of literary texts may turn out not to be
so easy after all. Burke (2015) points out that, while the neuro-aesthetics
of music and of painting have become well-established fields in the brain
sciences, there have been considerably fewer studies on the processing of
prose fiction and other literary texts. This is hardly surprising given the
fact that there is no one-to-one relationship between fictional texts and
human sense perceptions as there is when listening to music (audioception)
or when looking at a picture (ophthalmoception). Even if it were possible
one day to figure out which areas of the brain are activated precisely in
which way during the process of reading, one would still not know how
exactly readers arrive at making sense of what they read. Burke talks
about “the challenge that reading literary fiction poses when it comes
to how meaning gets coded in the cortex” (Burke 2015: 7). Perhaps such
tricky notions like ‘meaning’ and ‘interpretation’ are simply not meant to
be decoded by quantitative-scientific means.

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The second question concerning theory and corpus may also imme-
diately tie in with more practical questions surrounding methodologies:
thus, if psychological tests, for example, rely on comparatively simple texts
that are easy to manipulate for certain variables, how can their results
be extrapolated and applied to, say, complex and lengthy fictional texts
without a danger of loss or reductionism? And what notion of ‘narrative’
do we want to use as a baseline to select texts? As any introduction to
narratology quickly reveals, there is no absolute consensus even among
narratologists as to what ‘narrativity’ entails. Moreover, how can one
operationalize complex narrative elements? And how can one make sure
that tests are not simply testing for more general cognitive operations
than those that are specifically relevant for the processing of prose fiction
(i.e., they might be equally relevant for other areas of mental functioning)?
As I will demonstrate in my chosen textual example, the playfulness of
literary texts poses a real challenge in this regard.
And finally, as regards the third question, it is noteworthy that Her-
man phrases this carefully by referring to “storytelling acts” rather than to
‘storytelling artefacts.’ I would like to ask the same question more provoca-
tively by rephrasing it to fit the context of literary narrative: ‘How might a
focus on the mind-narrative nexus illuminate the structure and functions
of novels, short stories, epics and the like?’ In other words, can cognitive
narratology contribute in any significant way to our understanding of nar-
rative texts as texts by focusing on how we ‘understand narrative texts’?
This reminds me of a question one of my linguistic colleagues once put to
me: has there ever been an approach to literature that was not cognitive
in the sense that it did not also consider readers’ mental and emotional
engagement with, or reactions to, literary narratives? This, to me, seems
a valid question to ask because even literary theories that did away with
the author never really got rid of ‘the reader,’ whoever he or she may be.
By contrast, ‘getting rid of the text’ seems to me something that cognitive
narratology has accomplished, whether deliberately or unselfconsciously
(see a similar critique of other literary theoretical positions in Tepe 2007).
For example, when Palmer (2004) claims that readers engage with the
minds of fictional characters much in the same way as they do with real
people’s minds, or when Zunshine (2006) traces the pleasure readers take
from applying ‘Theory of Mind’ to the motivations and mental processes
of fictional characters, they both posit the importance of textual cues in
the novels they investigate but effectually ignore the fact/fiction distinc-
tion. One could counter here that fictional characters—no matter how
‘realistically’ they are portrayed—are still textual constructs and as such
are subject to a narrative text’s overall artistic design. Elsewhere I have
already argued that I consider it a fallacy to conceive of our understanding
of fictional characters and their interactions as analogous to the ways in
which we understand other people in real life (Mildorf 2014). Or at least
the analogy can only go so far. After all, is it not plausible to assume that
our awareness of the fact that we read fiction will cause our brains to filter
information differently? For example, I may physically experience sensa-
tions similar to real emotions of fear or even panic when reading about
a murderer chasing a victim in a thriller but this will not make me jump
up and run for my life. In other words, the pragmatic consequences of my
perceptions are very different in reading, and does it not make sense to
assume that this already changes my perceptions in the first place? Formal
semanticists try to grapple with the problem of seemingly non-referential
reference in fictional texts by positing an intermediate operator, “fiction
assert” (Niefer and Ottschofski 2014), thus acknowledging the fact that
there is an ontological difference between real and fictional worlds and
between the respective discourses describing them.
One of the most recent concepts in cognitive science that has been
embraced by literary scholars is “enaction.” Originally derived from a
biologically informed cognitive science perspective, the term captures the
idea that the mind is “embedded in embodied action and the multiplicity
of interpenetrating relationships between the organism and its environ-
ment” (Malkemus 2012: 202). It seems to me a good example of yet another
mind-boggling exercise in which scholars use a concept that is meant to
apply universally to all living organisms including micro-organisms such
as cells and apply it to how we read fiction. In this particular application,
‘enaction’ seems to refer to readers’ vicarious experience of characters’
lives (Kuzmičová 2013 and forthcoming), i.e., readers emulate characters’
sensations and embodied perceptions of the worlds they move around in.
To my mind, what is most troubling in this latest literary appropriation of
a cognitive concept is once again its turning away from the significance
of (artistic) language. Thus, Popova (2015: 8) writes:
I reject the claim that narrativity exists exclusively in language. Narrative,
grounded as it is, by my definition, in perception and cognition, cannot be
studied as a mere linguistic artifact. Its linguistic manifestation becomes
relevant only when it is linguistically enunciated, as is the case with most
verbally expressed literary narratives, and, crucially, depends on how the
mediation is realized.
Leaving aside the somewhat circular argument that language is ir-
relevant unless it is relevant, the focus on readers’ ‘embodied’ experience
of storyworlds (in Popova’s book the focus is on readers’ experience of
the narrator as a communicative partner) once again undercuts the ques-
tion of how precisely the fictional text as text can allegedly create such
an experience. Just like other cognitive science concepts that are widely
popular in literary cognitive approaches—think of ‘conceptual blending’ or
‘conceptual metaphors’— ‘enaction’, too, seems to be mired in metaphori-
cal parlance. More importantly, one can question its explanatory power as
regards textual narrative design. Surely, if I watch a soccer match on TV
and all of a sudden jump up from my sofa and break into cheers because
my team has scored a goal I also ‘enact’ the behaviour of fans right there
in the stadium. And yet, is this narrative? In other words: cognitive ap-
proaches to literary narratives are often too crude because they focus on
aspects of cognition that are not at all specific to literature. In that sense,
they do not really add anything to textual exegesis that ‘structuralist’ ap-
proaches have not already accomplished. It is telling that Popova explicitly

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refers to Genette (1980) and Stanzel (1984) when listing spatiotemporal

and personal/vicarious viewpoints, as well as “narrative situation” as
important “signals to control how some information is to be enacted”
(Popova 2014: 11).
As this recent example shows, tenets in cognitive narratology are not
really innovative except in their appropriation of ‘scientific’ vocabulary to
describe what largely remains a set of assumptions based on speculation
and introspection. Strip Theory of Mind off Zunshine’s (2006) book and
her approach comes to resemble procedures traditionally employed in
hermeneutics (for a recent proposal to return to hermeneutic principles
in narrative analysis, see Brockmeier and Meretoja 2014 and also—with a
stronger emphasis on text-based interpretative procedures—Tepe 2007).
In fact, literary studies’ turn towards cognition long after text-centred
approaches had already been firmly established (albeit with excursions
into reception and reader response theories in the 1960s and 70s) can
generally be said to parallel similar developments in other disciplines
such as linguistics, where Chomsky introduced his innateness hypothesis
and a conception of language as deeply anchored in people’s minds as a
counter-reaction to behaviourism’s externalist view. Interestingly, however,
linguistics saw a significant shift away from the Chomskyan paradigm with
its focus on mental representations of grammatical relations to language
in interaction in the 1960s: sociolinguistics considered language use in
social contexts; discourse and conversation-analytic approaches looked
more closely at situated verbal interaction (see also the outline in Flud-
ernik 2010). Chomskyan linguistics simply did not have suitable answers
for some questions posed in linguistics: why work with models that may
or may not represent whatever grammatical rules are ingrained in one’s
brain? If language is regarded as action and only becomes relevant in its
usage, why not study this usage in interaction and look at what language
does rather than what it is? A similar turning away from purely cognitive
parameters took place in psychology when sub-disciplines such as dis-
cursive or narrative psychology with their orientation towards discourse
and conversation began to stress (and have done so time and again) that
one cannot directly observe mental processes, one can do so only by way
of digression by observing how speakers make sense of their mental and
emotional states in and through their verbal negotiations (Potter 2006).
Even though this is admittedly not the mainstream in psychology today
and even though there is also a lot to criticize in such ‘non-mentalistic’
approaches (Sanders 2005) it is quite striking that literary studies, and
especially narratology, have somewhat belatedly also come to embrace
‘cognition’ as a new, quasi-scientific paradigm. Saying that, there has been
a parallel movement towards ‘cognitive linguistics,’ which also draws on,
among other things, conceptual metaphors and conceptual blending (e.g.,
Dancygier 2012; Polzenhagen 2007), thus potentially displaying similar
problems as literary cognitive approaches (except for the fact that in lin-
guistics the focus clearly is on linguistic structures). The question arises
how fruitful these approaches promise to be in the future. I will now use
an excerpt from May Sinclair’s novel Mary Olivier (1919) as a test case to
illustrate some narrative-theoretical issues that cognitive approaches have
hitherto not been good at grappling with. My analytical method draws on
linguistic concepts because I firmly believe that it is only on the grounds of
the linguistic manifestations of a text that we can say something sensible
about it, also with regard to how the text cues readers towards certain
interpretations (see also Sanford and Emmott 2012)

2. Challenges to the Cognitivist Paradigm:

May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier
The novel tells the life story of the eponymous heroine, Mary, who
struggles to find happiness amidst a constrained family situation, which
curtails her imaginative powers and intellect. While the novel is somewhat
slow in propelling the plot it is very rich in symbolic imagery and psycho-
logical depth, and its narrative situation innovatively oscillates between
third-person narrative and snippets of you-narration, with both types be-
ing focalized through the main protagonist. The following excerpt (Book
Five, Chapter XXIX, section IV; reprinted in its entirety here) describes
a moment in the protagonist’s life in her middle age when she starts to
think about a possible career as a poet:

Last year the drawer in the writing-table was full.

This year it had overflowed into the top left-hand
drawer of the dressing-table. She had to turn out all
the handkerchiefs and stockings.
Her mother met her as she was carrying them to the
wardrobe in the spare room. You could see she felt that
there was something here that must be enquired into.
“I should have thought,” she said, “that writing-table
drawer was enough.”
“It isn’t.”
“Tt-t—” Mamma nodded her head in a sor t of
exasperated resignation.
“Do you mean to say you’re going to keep all that?”
“All that? You should see what I’ve burnt.”
“I should like to know what you’re going to do with it!”
“So should I. That’s just it—I don’t know.”
That night the monstrous thought came to her in
bed: Supposing I published those poems—I always
meant to do it some day. Why haven’t I? Because I
don’t care? Or because I care too much? Because I’m
afraid? Afraid that if somebody reads them the illusion
they’ve created would be gone?

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How do I know my writing isn’t like my playing?

This is different. There’s nothing else. If it’s taken
from me I shan’t want to go on living.
You didn’t want to go on living when Mark died. Yet
you went on. As if Mark had never died. . . . And if
Mamma died you’d go on—in your illusion.
If it is an illusion I’d rather know it.
How can I know? There isn’t anybody here who can
tell me. Nobody you could believe if they told you—
I can believe myself. I’ve burnt everything I’ve written
that was bad.
You believe yourself to-day. You believed yesterday.
How do you know you’ll believe to-morrow?
To-morrow— (Sinclair 1980: 312–313)

2.1. Space and Viewpoint

The excerpt begins with spatiotemporal contrasts which are emphasized
through the corresponding noun phrases’ placement in similar syntactic
positions: the fronted temporal adverbial “last year” (line 1) is contrasted
with the equally fronted “this year” (lines 1-2) of the subsequent sentence.
The subject of the first sentence (“the drawer in the writing-table”) is ana-
phorically referred to and substituted for by the third-person pronoun ‘it’
in the second sentence. “It” thus constitutes known information (theme)
in the second sentence, which is then in turn contrasted with the “drawer
of the dressing-table” that forms part of the second sentence’s new infor-
mation (rheme). The change-of-state verb “overflow” in combination with
the preposition “into” (line 2), which signals movement from one spatial
position to the inside of another (enclosed) spatial position, connects the
two types of drawers logically by suggesting that the content of the former
moved into the latter. I say ‘suggesting’ because this inference is not spelt
out for the reader. It is only by reading the first sentence’s verb phrase,
which contains the predicative adjective “full”, and by drawing on our world
knowledge (schemata) about writing-tables (that they contain written
documents or papers) that we can infer what kind of content must have
moved from this kind of drawer to the other: some writing. Furthermore,
since we have just read in the preceding section that the protagonist, Mary,
filled her dull days by making “rhymes” (Sinclair 1980: 311) it is safe to
assume that the pieces of writing are in fact Mary’s poetry and that the
writing-table is hers (rather than her mother’s, for example). We infer the
same possessive relationship regarding the “drawer of the dressing-table”
(line 3) even though this relationship is not linguistically signalled either,
for example through possessive pronouns. The only thing that is signalled
is the two pieces of furniture’s specificity, which is indicated by the definite
article “the”—i.e., the mentioned drawers are specific ones, not just any
drawers one could find in the house. As with the feminine third-person
pronoun “she” (line 3), which we take as referring to Mary, we also have
no difficulty inferring which drawers are actually meant here. Despite
linguistic underspecificity we seem to derive sufficient contextualization
cues from our (inferred) knowledge of the presented storyworld to be able
to make those possessive and referential attributions correctly. What is
striking, however, is the fact that specificity is linguistically marked for
a piece of detail that, at first glance, seems to be entirely irrelevant or
trivial: we learn that Mary’s poetry moved to the “top left-hand drawer
of the dressing-table” (lines 2–3). Why should the exact position of this
drawer be important?
The ‘over-determinacy’ of the presented object as expressed in the
two prepositions “top” and “left-hand” is all the more striking if we have
a closer look at the spatial setting more generally. Mary carries the origi-
nal contents of her dressing-table drawer “to the wardrobe in the spare
room” (lines 5–6). Where is this spare room: across the corridor, beside
Mary’s own room, on another floor level? Does Mary walk a short distance
or round the corner or up or down a flight of stairs? The text offers very
little information on the actual spatial layout of the house and of the rooms
therein. And this is what narrative texts do all the time: they leave gaps for
readers to fill. If they tried to provide every single detail, they would soon
bore readers to death. From a cognitive perspective, a paramount question
to ask is how readers fill such gaps. In fact, scholars such as Ryan (2003)
conducted experiments with students where they had to draw maps of
spaces presented in selected stories. Leaving aside the problems involved
in linking mental representations of fictional spaces to schematic draw-
ings—where other factors such as skilfulness in drawing will influence
the ‘accuracy’ of the resulting pictures, if one can ever determine such
a thing—this kind of exercise has very little consequence for the actual
interpretation of the literary text except for highlighting the information
that is given in contrast to that which is not given. The more interesting
question to ask from a literary-analytical perspective is why, in our ex-
ample, we have indeterminacy as regards the general layout of the house
while there is the above-mentioned over-specificity regarding the drawers.
My answer would be that, in foregrounding these trivia, the text creates
a sense of irony, especially if we also consider the items that are moved
from the drawer to the wardrobe: “handkerchiefs and stockings” (line 4).
Drawing on our cultural-historical knowledge about the significance of
these items as markers of a woman’s housekeeping qualities and decency
in Victorian times, we begin to have a sense of how outrageous it is that
Mary replaces those items with her poetry.
While I as a reader am amused about the symbolic implication of Mary’s
act her mother observes these goings-on with suspicion: “You could see
she felt that there was something here that must be enquired into” (lines
6–7). This sentence is extremely interesting from a cognitive-functional
linguistic perspective. First of all, we are now required to decode the pro-
noun “she” as a reference to Mary’s mother and no longer to Mary. While
this shift in referent poses no problem the referent of the second-person
pronoun “you” is a lot less easy to determine. It could be substituted for by

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‘one’, in which case we would interpret it as generic or generalized ‘you’.

It could also refer to Mary as it does later in this section and repeatedly
throughout the novel. Depending on which of these two options we posit
we arrive at very different perspectival frameworks and, more impor-
tantly, at different positions readers might assume. The generic reading
of ‘you’ in combination with the verb of perception “see” suggests inde-
terminacy and distance (‘anyone could see what Mary’s mother felt’) and
thus potentially includes the reader in this vantage point (see discussion
of generalized ‘you’ in Hyman 2004). The second possibility narrows down
the perspectival scope to Mary’s position (‘only she could see what her
mother felt’). Alternatively, one can posit a merging of both references, as
some scholars working on you-narration have done (e.g., Herman 1994). If
cognitive narratology were one day able to figure out how exactly readers
decode such instances of the second-person pronoun that would be a great
feat. At present, very little is said about ‘you’ in cognitive models such as
Dancygier’s (2012) narrative space model, for example, or fictional minds
theory (Palmer 2004), enaction theory (Popova 2015) or what have you.
The sentence presently under discussion offers more cognitive conun-
drums. Thus, in the reported thought clause “that there was something
here that must be enquired into” (lines 6–7), the simple past verb “was”
indicates a retrospective viewpoint from a current storytelling position. By
contrast, the proximal spatial deictic “here” as well as the modal auxiliary
“must”, which expresses self-obligation rather than obligation imposed
from the outside (Leech 2004: 78), anchor the perspective with Mary’s
mother. Similar viewpoint phenomena such as the past + now construction
have been discussed in terms of the conceptual blending of two mental
spaces, where past and present parameters are compressed into one (see,
e.g., Nikiforidou 2012). Whether such a ‘metaphorical’ description is really
helpful in clarifying what might be going on in readers’ minds remains
debatable. More importantly, it says little about the potential aesthetic
effects of such blending operations. Vandelanotte (2009: 116) contends
for such phenomena:
Such devices as now or here cotemporal or cospatial with the represented
speaker’s t 0or location […] can all be exploited to invest the reported clause
with ‘directly’ represented speaker related meaning, combining with the
overall current speaker construal obtained in IST [indirect speech and
thought].
Put differently, they create ‘directness’ or immediacy or, as literary
scholars would say, we experience a closeness with the character whose
feelings (thoughts, etc.) are captured through indirect thought presentation.
At the same time, such ‘mixed’ constructions also make us discern (expe-
rience?) a distinction between a character’s deictic centre and a current
speaker’s deictic centre. Usually this ‘current speaker’ is conceptualized
as the narrator. My argument would be that, rather than trying to under-
stand readers’ perception of some ‘narrator’ figure by means of abstract
theoretical notions such as “enaction” (e.g., Popova 2015: 175–176), it is
more helpful to look at how micro-level linguistic constructions like the
one discussed above contribute to readers’ ‘mental representations’ of a
storytelling situation even in novels where the narrator remains covert,
as is the case in Mary Olivier. Admittedly, readers’ minds may stray from
the text and wander in all kinds of experiential directions when reading
a novel, but those dynamics, I would argue, are no longer relevant for the
literary interpretation of the text.

2.2. Dialogue and Self-Address

Let me now turn to another narrative element that cognitive ap-
proaches to my mind are not doing well with: dialogue. In Dancygier’s
(2012) narrative space model, direct speech or dialogue is captured as
“discourse spaces”, which differ from their surrounding narrative spaces
through shifts in indexicals. However, Dancygier does not further elaborate
on how such discourse spaces could be broken down into smaller units
and whether these units would be purely thematic (what the participants
talk about) or whether one would try and capture the verbal qualities of
the interaction (speech patterns, turn-taking mechanisms, interactional
markers, style and register, etc.). Elsewhere I have discussed the useful-
ness but also the limitations of pragmatic approaches (including socio-
cognitive ones) for the analysis of fictional dialogue and for understand-
ing the mechanisms at work in the comprehension of fictional dialogue
(Mildorf 2013; 2014). I do not want to repeat these points here. Instead,
I will focus on another aspect often neglected in the analysis of fictional
dialogue, namely its implied voice qualities and prosodic features. The
‘enactionist framework’ naturally must place a premium on these issues
as the underlying assumption is that reading is an embodied experience.
Indeed, neuropsychological experiments have shown that reading direct
speech in a text activates voice-sensitive areas in the brain differently
from when one reads indirect speech (Yao, Belin and Scheepers 2011).
The implication is that we simulate voices in our mind when reading, for
example, fictional dialogue. Yao, Belin and Scheepers explain this by linking
the experience of fictional voices to our experience of how people imitate
other people’s voices in conversational storytelling:
Comprehension of direct speech is, therefore, more likely to be grounded
in the perceptual experience of a vocal demonstration or dramatization of
a reported speakerʼs utterance. This would explain why silent reading of
direct speech is more likely to engender mental simulations of voice than
silent reading of indirect speech. (Yao, Belin and Scheepers 2011: 3151)
I am not sure whether in our day and age of “secondary orality” (Ong
1982) one can just as easily draw a causal connection between real-life
orality and literary orality. Is it not equally plausible that we imagine voices
in analogy to characters we have seen and heard on television or in film?
And what about the narrator’s voice that Popova (2015) assumes to be part
of readers’ enaction of literary communication? Alexander and Nygaard
(2008) found that readers seem to emulate the voice of authors they know,
including their speaking speed. So, if both narrators’ and characters’ voices

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in a text activate voice-sensitive areas in the brain what is the difference

between the two? How can this difference be measured? Furthermore,
things are of course a lot more complicated. Perrone-Bertolotti et al.
(2014: 228) point out that attention is also a decisive modulator in the
activation of voice-sensitive areas during reading, suggesting that inner
voice experience is not an automatic response to written words. Moreover,
there seems to be a temporal lag between the activation of auditory and
visual areas during attentive reading (Perrone-Bertolotti et al. 2014: 228).
Since the visual experience could potentially relate to both an ‘inner-eye’
imaging of the storyworld but also to the visual processing of letters and
words on a book page, what do these results actually tell us about the
reading experience? And the ultimate question for literary scholars is:
even if I measure heightened speech activation in the brain during silent
reading of fictional dialogue what does that tell me (if anything) about
what kinds of meaning readers ascribe to what characters say, how they
assess the symbolic interaction among characters, how they evaluate a
dialogic exchange against the background of larger plot structures? In
other words, where are the text and the meanings it creates?
Coming back to the text excerpt (and I think it is no coincidence that
my little excursion into neuropsychological and cognitive science ques-
tions has deterred me from attending to the text), we can see a rather short
verbal exchange between Mary and her mother, who is obviously taken
aback by Mary’s actions. The placement of the inquit formula “she said”
in the middle, rather than at the beginning or at the end of the mother’s
initial comment (lines 8–9) creates an effect akin to a pause in speech,
which in turn lends the mother’s comment more ‘weight’. This effect is
also due to the fact that the content of what the mother “thought” (line
8) is suspended for a split second and thus creates a brief moment of sus-
pense. Mary’s response to her mother’s critical remark is very short and
blunt. Rather than being apologetic or defensive, Mary simply states that
the space in her drawer no longer suffices. This response and presumably
also the manner in which it was offered create in the mother “a sort of
exasperated resignation” (lines 11–12). The narratorial comment here is
interesting because it gives us indirect instructions as to how to imagine
the mother’s reproachful tone of voice when she utters “Tt-t—” (line 11).
In the mother’s preceding comment, our perception of the severity of her
critical stance would also very much depend on how exactly we imagine
(hear?) the intonation contour and stress pattern in her remark. In her
next question we are given a typographical cue: the verb “keep” (line 13)
is printed in italics, thus signalling to the reader that it must receive added
stress. Likewise, the exclamation mark in line 15 indicates more forceful,
perhaps louder articulation. Apart from these sparse indicators, readers
are left to their own devices as regards the way they figure out the tone
and mood of this short conversation. What is important, however, is that
there is a more universal pattern to this dialogue when compared to other
dialogues between Mary and her mother throughout the novel. In most
cases, the mother criticizes something or other in Mary, e.g., the kinds of
books she reads, the philosophical questions she asks, her refusal to ob-
serve religious rituals, etc. Invariably, the mother’s (imagined) tone of voice
expresses her disappointment, anger or despair concerning her daughter.
What gradually emerges from the novel, then, is not merely individual
instances of conflict situations but a recurring pattern of ‘problem talk’
that points to more deep-seated issues in this mother-daughter relation-
ship. In other words, no matter how much cognitive narratologists urge us
to see the similarities between making sense of fictional characters (and
their dialogues) and understanding real-life people we are well advised
to pay heed to the artistic design behind those characters and behind the
ways in which they talk.
In the final part of this section, we see Mary at night in bed reflecting
on what she should do with her poetry. This part is almost exclusively
presented as direct thought with its linguistic markers of first-person pro-
noun, present tense verbs, comparatively simple sentence structures that
resemble the style of spoken rather than written language and numerous
short questions, which point to Mary’s qualms about her poetic activities.
The noun phrase “the monstrous thought” (line 17) in the introductory
clause to the stretch of direct thought is again ambiguous because it is
certainly an evaluation that could be attributed to Mary. At the same time,
if we attributed this expression to the narrator that would be another in-
stance of covert irony: the narrator in a way pokes fun at Mary for having
those qualms. The stretch of direct thought presentation is almost like an
interior monologue, except that it shifts into something like a dialogical
mode in lines 26–28, 31 and 34–35. The most interesting feature in this
context is the use of ‘you’. Above, I discussed some of the problems involved
in identifying the referent of ‘you’ in certain examples. Here, the referent
seems to be clear because the information accompanying the ‘you’ is so
specific that it can only refer to Mary. What is less clear is whether the
‘you’ also has an address function, and if it does, who is the speaker? In this
particular example, because the ‘you’ is embedded in a stretch of direct
speech there is a strong suggestion that Mary in fact addresses herself.
Monologic interiority thus shifts to dialogic interiority. However, this is
not the regular pattern throughout the novel. Most of the time the shift is
between ‘she’ and ‘you’, which could point to a mere playful exchange not
unlike Margolin’s (1984) and Herman’s (1994) “deictic transfer”, where
distinct pronouns come to refer to the same character. The question is
whether cognitive narratology is able to resolve such ambiguity.
Approaches that draw on mental spaces and conceptual blending
seem to be too crudely cut to make finer distinctions. Thus, for example,
Dancygier posits the supremacy of viewpoint over how this viewpoint is
actually conveyed:
When a narrative space is marked with a viewpoint of a character, all
the structure of the space is accessed that way, regardless of the linguistic
realization of that space (whether it is structured more like speech, like
thought, or like narration). (Dancygier 2012: 172)
In other words, as long as we recognize a certain viewpoint in a narra-
tive space our reading of this entire space will be based on that recognition.

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 Читање традиције 45

Applied to our excerpt this means that we read the text as expressing Mary’s
viewpoint. However, I already indicated that there are moments in the nar-
ration where certain linguistic markers render viewpoint and discourse
attribution more ambiguous and difficult. Even on a more global level, i.e., in
the narrative space that is the entire novel, to posit that Mary is the anchor
for the story’s viewpoint would undoubtedly explain innumerable instances
of direct and indirect thought presentation as in the example above, as well
as the frequent use of free indirect thought presentation; but it would not
explain the strange shifts between first, second and third person pronouns,
nor instances of irony. From a literary-analytical vantage point it is precisely
these breaks and seeming inconsistencies that require attention.
I do not have a neat answer to the question what precisely the pro-
noun shifts and their attendant shifts in other indexicals might mean.
Perhaps they help support the conceptualisation of the protagonist as an
‘odd’ person, as someone who, for most of the novel, does not seem to be
‘at one with herself’. Perhaps the ‘you’—if indeed it marks a form of self-
address—offers the protagonist the possibility to distance herself from
her ‘self’ and to take stock of her life from an ‘externalized’ vantage point.
The ensuing self-communion could also be a reflection of Mary’s deep-
seated loneliness in a world where she does not really feel understood.
I admit that all of these possibilities are interpretative speculations of
sorts. However, they are no more speculative than what cognitive nar-
ratologists claim about readers’ mental processing of narrative texts. In
contrast to those claims, the reflections presented here are more congenial
to interpreting texts as texts rather than as stimuli for complex cognitive
processes. Of course all literary texts are that, too, and in that sense cog-
nitive approaches are legitimate. The question is how deeply cognitivists
will be able to penetrate the secrets of reading fiction without becoming
more and more entangled in the above-mentioned metaphorical mire and
in overly abstract theoretical concepts and models.

3. Conclusion
I began this article with an admittedly harsh critique of cognitive
narratology and other cognitive approaches to the study of literary texts
as they are practised at universities worldwide. I do not want to end on
just such a critical note. What I tried to foreground in my discussion is
some of the limits inherent in cognitive approaches when it comes to
dealing with literary texts as artistic artefacts. I realize that cognitive
approaches partially arose as a countermovement to precisely the kind of
text-centred approach I propagate here. Such an approach was regarded
as too narrow: it did not take real readers into consideration. Well, tak-
ing stock of cognitive approaches to date one can observe that they have
also failed to reinstitute the reader. Or at least readers remain theoreti-
cal constructions in theoretical models of mental processes that may or
may not reflect the true functioning of our brains. One sensible way out
of this is to conduct more empirical research. However, as I indicated in
my discussion, neuropsychological research also has its limitations. Even
if empirical studies eventually turned out to be the way forward one
would still have to ask whether literary and cultural studies scholars are
really well placed to venture into this terrain while lacking the expertise
to engage in genuine dialogue with scientists and engineers. Yet, if this
feat were to be accomplished, how great would this be for cognitive stud-
ies—but how about literary studies? How about literature? Too many ifs,
too many open questions…

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Јармила Милдорф

Вреди ли бавити се тиме? Ограничења когнитивне наратологије

Резиме
Когнитивна наратологија и даље је диспаратно поље, али однедавно
изнова привлачи заинтересоване, услед академских покушаја да се покрену
трансдисциплинарни истраживачки пројекти који би премостили јаз
између хуманистичких и природних наука. Овај текст представља критички
поглед на когнитивну наратологију и нарочито доводи у питање њену
способност објашњавања кад је у питању интерпретација књижевних
текстова. Мада је легитимно постављати питања о читалачкој перцепцији
за време читања приповедних текстова, емпиријска проучавања ретко
нуде просветљујуће увиде у естетско осмишљавање текстова и њихову
производњу значења. Исто тако, теоријски модели које нуди когнитивна
наратологија често су превише примитивни да би ухватили разиграност
књижевних текстова, повремено сложену, а заглибљени су у апстрактним
метафоричким дискурсима који тешко да су од помоћи. Анализирајући
као пример пасаж из модернистичког романа Меј Синклер, Мери Оливије
[Mary Olivier, (1919)], посежем за когнитивним концептима попут „enaction”
и когнитивно-функционалним приступима деикси, како бих истакла неке
од досадашњих недостатака тих когнитивних приступа. У закључку, овај
текст залаже се за питања релевантнија за књижевну анализу и за повратак
интерпретацији заснованој на тексту.
Кључне речи: когнитивна наратологија, емпиријски приступ когницији
и књижевности, интерпретација књижевног дела, когнитивно-функционална
лингвистика, деикса, дијалог, просторно-временски параметри

Примљено: 11. 10. 2015.

Прихваћено за објављивање: 18. 1. 2016.

48 Jarmila MILDORF