Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (I)

Now this poor fellow, continued Dr. Slop,
pointing to the corporal, has had the
misfortune to have heard some superficial
empiric discourse upon this nice point.

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

1. Isolation with or against Interdisciplinarity?
Narrative as Paradigm Case

—And pray who was Tickletoby's mare?—'tis just as
discreditable and unscholarlike a question, Sir, as to have
asked what year (ab. urb. con.) the second Punic war
broke out.—Who was Tickletoby's mare?—Read, read,
read, read, my unlearned reader!

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

In a cross-disciplinary review of narrative theory, "Telling in Time," I diagnosed isolationism as a cardinal evil:

Unhappily, the narrative field is parcelled up among several disciplines, which tend to work in casual or even studied disregard for one another's very subject matter as well as methods and findings. Thus the inquiries into so-called artistic/literary, historical, and everyday narrative all too often go each its own institutional way: a division of labor with little interdisciplinary feedback and synthesis. (Sternberg 1990b: 991 and passim)

In this regard, only with the substantive implications foregrounded, the present argument complements that "Telling in Time" series. Here, as there, vested group interests come second to my interest in narrative at large. Of the groups involved to date, I will show, the cognitivist latecomer has most flagrantly and self-defeatingly reversed this hierarchy, especially in its contact, or lack thereof, with the poetic tradition. It exhibits too much self-sealing, too little achievement by common standards, and less impact on the mainstream treated, or most often ignored, as outgroup. The self-styled Cognitive Revolution has therefore failed either to rival or to reorient the practice of narratology—let alone interests other than theoretical—not even at a time when the major Structuralist paradigm eventually began to crumble there. As before, the reorientations discernible there since, in and against the mentalist line, not excepting the occasional tie-up with cognitivism proper, have mainly issued from lights and changes and pressures, alternatives and shifts of balance, within the established discipline.

Moreover, though the group's apartness widely typifies its approach to text at large, these minuses vis-á-vis narrative and narratology have a special claim to attention. Nowhere else has the renovated mind science invested so heavily since the 1970s, in a discourse kind so central and congenial as well as so researched within the humanities. Next to it by such criteria, the work done on figurative language under the new banner, since Ortony (1979) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980), has relatively more to show, and more will to show it, with a fairer chance of being heard without—in special issues of Poetics Today (13:4, 14:1, 20:3), for example. Accordingly, perhaps, its amnesia and separatism have also drawn more fire.¹

As a longtime student of how narrative is constructed in the mind, I for one find the poor start made by a kindred area of study anything but exhilarating. That the so-called cognitive turn has on the whole turned out such a disappointment regarding the genre most attractive to it and most amenable to comparative assessment, however, yet leaves the future open. The unhealthy balance sheet to date only brings home the general lesson of isolationism and argues for a sea change in this particular new arrival, from self-conception downward, without either belittling the spirit of its enterprise or overidealizing the established poetic tradition with which it might, and still may, form an interdiscipline other and better, if not larger or greater, than the sum of its parts. Other certainly, like any whole; also better, if only owing, and proportionally, to the forgeable composite equipment; though not larger or perforce greater, in that it would be focused on the mind/narrative junction, hence bent on selectively interrelating, not swallowing and supplanting wholesale, the disciplines that encompass the respective parts.²

In effect, such...