Naming and Believing: Practices of the Proper Name in Narrative Fiction

Belief Worlds, Proper Names, and Name Usage

1.1 The power of discourse to construct realities is widely asserted in contemporary literary theory. But what exactly is this power? Surely it is only the divine word which can call into existence a mind-independent, external reality which we can all experience in our common life world! The constructive power of discourse in purely human circumstances is much more modest, and could be characterized as the ability to give rise to mental (cognitive) representations, discourse domains, or belief worlds in the minds of individuals, or to belief worlds shared by members of a group. Such discourse domains may be construed as worlds of the mind, which may or may not correspond to any external, intersubjective reality. Semiotic means of some kind (sounds, letters, words, phrases, sketches, etc.) serve in all such cases as both initiators and underpinnings of the resultant mental representation. One particular kind of mental representation or discourse domain consists of spatio-temporal frameworks containing both individual entities with their properties and relations and dynamic situations, that is, changing configurations of the relations between these entities. Such dynamic frameworks are the cognitive correlate of the narrative discourse type, be it factual or fictional. For it is not the semiotic or cognitive dimension as such that distinguishes the factual from the fictional, but rather the correspondence, or lack thereof, between a mental representation and an external situation. The power of discourse to give rise to a cognitive domain is most evident when we have access to the mental operations through which this domain gets established and subsequently modified, and when these operations occur in a well-defined and well-circumscribed setting. This power is enhanced if the given discourse is the only currently available source of information for the corresponding cognitive domain construction, and it is maximal when the discourse is the only possible source of information about a given domain—namely, when we are dealing with a pure verbal invention, with a world whose very (mental) existence depends crucially and exclusively on a specific semiotic object (discourse, picture, film, etc.). This dependency is of the same nature whether the pragmatic status of the discourse is that of a lie or of a creative artistic invention. The difference between the two will manifest itself rather in the different behavioral disposition the cognitive frame evokes in the individual in whose mind it exists, once she has assigned, at least pro tempore, a pragmatic status to the corresponding discourse.

In fictional narrative contexts, it is a basic assumption that the textual actual world or matrix world is established by the discourse of the narrator, and that many of the domains or worlds projected in the discourses, external or internal, of the characters constitute their individual mental representations of this matrix world, or their belief systems about it. This assumption, or basic convention of reading, is universally accepted when we are faced with impersonal narration in the third-person past tense, in which the narrating voice has unrestricted mental access to the minds of the characters, that is, the denizens of the matrix world. In this case, the narrating voice can present to us fully and reliably the information sources the characters possess and the processes whereby they form on the basis of this information any and all of their mental representations of the textual actual world. Unrestricted mental access also enables us to juxtapose and compare differing mental representations of the same matrix world in the minds of different characters. With the minds of the characters being an open book, we, the actual readers, are able to have full and reliable knowledge of how and why a character forms a given mental representation, of its specific nature, and of its subsequent impact on his or her thought, communication, and behavior. Finally, the truth-functional status of any individual cognitive representation with respect to the base or matrix world can be...