Narratology and Psychology: Holding on to One's Perspective

Willie van Peer and Seymour Benjamin Chatman, eds., New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. xiii + 398 pp.

If only because they are very often interested in interpretations that turn detailed formal aspects into meaning, theorists of literary narrative have always considered their object of investigation in terms of its effect on an ideal reader. Even reception aesthetics, as practiced by Wolfgang Iser (1974, 1978), boiled down to a hermeneutics in which this ideal audience took the form of a readerly role determined by the text. Despite early studies into the cognitive dynamics of the reading process by Meir Sternberg (1978) and Menakhem Perry (1979), the role of the real reader did not become central to narratology until its constructivist phase, which started about a decade ago. There is, however, a serious problem with this approach. Although constructivist narratologists, such as Ansgar Nünning, investigate "the cognitive activity through which observers create subjective models of the world they regard as actual" (209), they mostly refrain from empirical testing, perhaps because they simply have not been trained for this kind of research. As a consequence, the empirical study of narrative processing has largely been left to social psychologists, whose interest in the specific workings of literary narrative has been very limited. Representative contributions to the field, such as by Gordon H. Bower and Daniel G. Morrow (1990) and Richard Gerrig (1993), indicate that studies of narrative in social psychology are mainly concerned with relatively short and "simple narratives" (Bower and Morrow 1990: 44), which are quite often made up for the purpose. Social psychologists first and foremost want controllable testing conditions in order to isolate an issue relevant to any narrative, and their work seems to imply that (substantial) literary narratives most often constitute too complex a phenomenon for the restrictive kind of questions they envisage.

For this new collection of essays on the thorny issue of perspective, Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman have brought together scholars from both sides of the scientific divide. The result of this interesting collocation indicates that it will take much more time before "psychonarratology," as Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi (275–87) propose to call their empirically tested brand of narrative theory, starts to appeal to literary scholars across the board. The new discipline's continued reliance on relatively brief and simple texts deflates the challenge of understanding the complex forms of textuality that have almost always provided the breeding grounds for encompassing theories of narrative—witness the importance of Proust for Genette 1980 [1972], and the substantial role played by interior monologue in Stanzel 1984 [1979]. More often than not, the interpretation of these complex forms was enriched in turn because of the narratological angle. Literary scholars may therefore tend to shrug off psychonarratology, and yet some of the articles in this collection show that these academics too can derive extra information from the empirical approach, or—seen from a less-biased angle—that it would perhaps be wise to mount interdisciplinary projects.

Thus, Uri Margolin's essay on literary narratives in the first-person plural demonstrates that texts such as these can seriously complicate the identification of referentiality by the reader. Margolin, though, stops short of an investigation of the cognitive resources readers have at their disposal for this task. Without providing a definitive answer to this specific question, Arthur Graesser and his colleagues from the psychology department at the University of Memphis confirm a relatively developed capacity on the part of the reader to identify and analyze the components of narrative perspective. In an equally useful chapter, Dixon and Bortolussi submit that readers model their image of the narrator on that of a partner in everyday conversation, which goes a long way toward corroborating the set of axes relating to the narrator proposed by Susan Lanser (1981). While these combinations of the two approaches may not break any new ground, they do show...