6
The Nexus of Narrative and Mind
(iv) What it’s like. Narrative representations convey the experience of living through storyworlds-in-flux, highlighting the pressure of events on real or imagined consciousnesses affected by the occurrences at issue. Thus – with one important proviso – it can be argued that narrative is centrally concerned with qualia , a term used by philosophers of mind to refer to the sense of “what it is like” for someone or something to have a particular experience. The proviso is that recent research on narrative bears importantly on debates concerning the nature of consciousness itself.
This chapter draws on ideas from the philosophy of mind, among other areas within the umbrella discipline of cognitive science, to flesh out the notion of an experiencing consciousness. The chapter thus seeks to explain why I characterize the representation of what it’s like to experience disruptive events in a storyworld as one of the basic elements of narrative.
In this chapter, I explore a fourth basic element of narrative – another critical property of the representational practices that are more or less amenable to being understood in narrative terms, depending on their structure and the contexts in which they unfold. At issue is the way stories highlight the impact of events on the mind or minds experiencing those events within a storyworld. Narrative, I argue, is a mode of representation tailor-made for gauging the felt quality of lived experiences. Accordingly, the less a given representation registers the pressure of an experienced world on one or more human or human-like consciousnesses, the less central or prototypical an instance of the category “narrative” that representation will be – all other things being equal.1 To put the same point another way, to the extent that a representation embodies the elements of situatedness, event sequencing, and worldmaking/world disruption but backgrounds or suppresses what it’s like, that representation will be pushed closer to the edge than the center of the category space of “narrative,” where forms such as “chronicle” or “report” verge on the fuzzy border separating narratives from descriptions, as discussed in chapters 1 and 4.
That said, like the other basic elements of narrative discussed in this book, what it’s like should be viewed not as a failsafe guarantee of the presence of narrative, but rather as a marker of texts that circulate in communicative contexts in the manner that is characteristic of – or prototypical for – narratives. Also, like the factors of particularity and disruptiveness, what might be called the consciousness factor operates in a gradient or more-or-less manner, resulting in more or less prototypical instances of the category narrative – with the caveat that judgments about what counts as prototypical are themselves subject to change across different contexts (see chapter 4). Furthermore, the very notions of mind and consciousness demand closer scrutiny in this connection. Indeed, as I go on to discuss below, recent scholarship on narrative not only stands to benefit from but also itself bears importantly on conceptions of mind developed in the fields included within the umbrella discipline of cognitive science, including philosophy, psychology, and linguistics (cf. Herman 2007b).
Before I move on to a more detailed discussion of the nexus of narrative and mind in the remainder of this chapter, I address in my next section an important preliminary question: namely, whether my emphasis on consciousness as a key factor of narrativity is perhaps a byproduct of my focus on a particular class (or corpus) of narratives that I am using, tacitly, as a yardstick for my analysis of stories in general.
Consciousness across Narrative Genres
For Fludernik (1996, 2003), it is not plot but experientiality – that is, the evocation of an experiencing human or human-like consciousness on which narrated situations and events are represented as impinging – that constitutes narrativity, or what makes narrative narrative. Yet if one admits degrees of narrativity, then other factors besides consciousness must be invoked to account for the extent to which a given story will be construed as being prototypically narrative. My previous chapters have sought to characterize the other features at issue, suggesting that capturing what it’s like to experience storyworld events constitutes a critical property of but not a sufficient condition for narrative. But by the same token, the consciousness factor can be argued to be criterial for narrative in general rather than for particular kinds of narratives (e.g., psychological novels).
A key difference between narrative genres is the extent to which they foreground the factor of consciousness – highlight the impact of events on an experiencing mind – in the storyworlds that they evoke. In psychological fiction like the novels of the later Henry James, for example, the filtering consciousness of the experiencing protagonist takes center stage, to the point where the term “novel of consciousness” has been applied to texts such as The Ambassadors and Wings of the Dove (cf. Jahn 2007). By contrast, in some action-adventure films, for instance, or in some of the more radical experiments of Robbe-Grillet ([1957, 1959] 1965) and other practitioners of the nouveau roman, the consciousness factor can be assigned a more subordinate position within the overall structure of a representation that nonetheless remains recognizably narrative in nature. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the nouveau roman is the way it tests the very limits of narrativity, exploring the threshold past which events cease to be narratable, precisely by suppressing or at least occluding the consciousness factor in its representation of unfolding situations and events (Richardson 2006: 7–8; cf. Warhol 2005: 222–3).
However, in alluding to Henry James’s well-documented use of a center of consciousness, “reflector,” or filtering perceptual agent in his later novels (cf. Teahan 1995), I have broached what F. K. Stanzel ([1979] 1984) characterized as a distinctively modernist narrative technique – namely, figural narration. Figural narration, which as Stanzel noted began to appear in high concentrations only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in texts by writers such as Henry James, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, contrasts with the two other “narrative situations” identified by Stanzel: namely, first-person narration and distanced third-person or “authorial” narration. In figural narration, there is in effect a blending of first-person and third-person narration: a third-person or heterodiegetic narrator recounts events filtered through the perspective or focalizing perceptions of a reflector figure, that is, a particularized center of consciousness. Stanzel’s approach raises a broader question: is it the case that in emphasizing the consciousness factor in narrative (in general) my account is skewed toward written, literary narratives published only during the past hundred years or so? More specifically, is the explicit concern with consciousness a historically contingent byproduct of the rise of psychological fiction, such that in interpreting it as a core factor or feature of narrativity I am conflating one type of narrative with narrative tout court, illicitly extrapolating from one kind of literary fiction until its generic profile becomes identified as the signature of narrative itself? To address these issues, I propose to revisit some of the ideas of Monika Fludernik, whose work I have drawn from in making the claim that the impact of narrated situations and events on an experiencing consciousness constitutes a core property of narrative (see Fludernik 1996: 12–13, 28–30, 49–50; Fludernik 2003).
In Fludernik’s account, the factor chiefly responsible for making narratives interpretable as narratives is human experientiality, or “the evocation of consciousness [in terms of] cognitive schema of embodiedness that relate to human existence and human concerns” (Fludernik 1996: 168).2 In fuller terms:
[The model presented in Fludernik (1996)] constitutes narrativity not – as is traditionally the case – in reference to plot or story, but in reference to what I have called experientiality. This term... describes the typical quality of natural narratives in which surprising events impinge on the protagonist (usually coterminous with the narrator) and are resolved by his (or her) reaction(s) – a sequence that provides an illustrative “point” to the story and links the telling to its immediate discourse context.... By introducing the concept of experientiality, I was concerned to characterize the purpose and function of the storytelling as a process that captures the narrator’s past experience, reproduces it in a vivid manner,and then evaluates and resolves it in terms of the protagonist’s reactions and of the narrator’s often explicit linking of the meaning of this experience with the current discourse context. (Fludernik 2003: 245)
However, as Alber notes, Fludernik’s account of experientiality as constitutive of stories raises the question of how to distinguish between narrative and lyric (Alber 2002: 68–9), or for that matter why “inarticulate screams of horror” should not count as narratives. Alber also points out that for Fludernik the boundary between narrative and lyric is permeable, implying that degrees of narrativity can be assigned to representations that share with lyric poems the core feature of experientiality but that exhibit other features more prototypically associated with narrative. In other words, if one posits experientiality as constitutive of narrative but also admits degrees of narrativity, then other factors besides consciousness must be invoked to account for the relative ease or difficulty of processing a given text or representation as narrative in nature. In the present study, I have tried to characterize the other features at issue, suggesting that capturing what it’s like to experience storyworld events constitutes a critical property of but not a sufficient condition for narrative. But just how critical to narrative – that is, to narrative in general rather than to particular kinds of narratives – is the consciousness factor anyway?
Partly as an attempt to answer this question, I outlined in a previous study (Herman 2002a) an account of narrative genres as “preference-rule systems,” or systems that involve graded judgments about what is more or less typical (or “preferred”) for a given situation or case. My approach builds on Frawley’s definition of a preference rule as “a statement in probabilistic form of the relative strength of two or more items for interpretation relative to some property or properties” (1992: 57). For example, with respect to the property of “punctuality,” the linguistic items sip, drink, and chug can be arranged along a scale (sip > drink > chug) to indicate which of these verbs would be preferred when it comes to coding a process as punctual versus durative or ongoing. Likewise, and in accordance with Halliday’s (1994) functional account of grammar as an instrument for construing the world in terms of types of processes, genres can be defined as sets of preference rules bearing on how processes unfolding in the storyworld should be coded or represented (e.g., as mental, behavioral, verbal, or other). Such preference-rule systems in turn create default assumptions about the roles that protagonists will play within storyworlds (e.g., experiencer, behaver, sayer, etc.) (cf. Herman 2002a: 140–69). In the genre of psychological fiction, for instance, the preference is to code processes in the storyworld as mental ones, thereby selecting “experiencer” as the default role-assignment for protagonists in this kind of narrative. By contrast, in the tip-of-the-iceberg mode of narration used in Hemingway’s “Hills,” explicit characterization of mental processes is backgrounded in favor of accounts of behavioral and verbal processes, such that Jig and the male character are coded predominantly as behavers and sayers. From this perspective, Hemingway’s text could be interpreted as a form of narrative worldmaking sometimes termed behaviorist narration (Prince [1987] 2003) – though as I discuss later on in this chapter “Hills” does in fact prompt interpreters to frame inferences about the nature and quality of the characters’ conscious experiences. Indeed, a strictly behaviorist narrative would arguably be a contradiction in terms (cf. Herman forthcoming a; Palmer 2003); for if a representation completely eliminated or occluded the consciousness factor it would fall outside the (elastic) text-type category of “narrative.”
The foregoing remarks suggest that the factor of consciousness will be more or less accentuated depending on the narrative genre in question; it is not the case that, for every narrative genre, the default role-assignment for the protagonist will be that of “experiencer.” But here the reciprocal relation between contexts and prototypes, discussed in chapter 4, becomes salient once again. Genres can described as contexts that define the degree to which the consciousness factor must be foregrounded for a story to count as a prototypical instance (or “standard case”) of that narrative kind. What it’s like, in other words, is likely to be coded in a more explicit way in a Henry James novel, or for that matter in a tale of the supernatural like Monica’s, than in a narrative that, like Hemingway’s, seeks to innovate upon the literary system precisely by omitting or suppressing narratorial reports of characters’ attitudes, dispositions, and emotional states. But different degrees of explicitness or detail in the representation of consciousness should not be confused with the option either to evoke what it is like for human or human-like agents to undergo experiences in storyworlds or else to factor out that dimension altogether. Rather, my argument is that the absence of the element of what it’s like from a text or a representation is tantamount to zero-degree narrativity – even if one or more of the elements of situatedness, event sequencing, and worldmaking/world disruption is in play. For example, the more the element of what it’s like is factored out to produce a skeletal albeit chronologically ordered list of the events associated with a political coup, the greater the distance between that representation and exemplars of narrative – and the closer the representation will come to exemplars of description. Conversely, the presence of what it’s like coupled with a complete absence of event sequencing (as in Alber’s example of inarticulate screams of horror) likewise results in the expulsion of a text or representation beyond the frontiers of narrative.
But how might the consciousness factor itself be further specified – in a manner that, rather than privileging how the element of what it’s like tends to function in a particular narrative genre, instead gets at the fundamental imbrication of mind and story, the nexus of narrative and mind thanks to which a given text or discourse can be interpreted as narratively organized in the first place? My next section draws on ideas from the cognitive sciences, which encompass fields ranging from psychology and linguistics to Artificial Intelligence and the philosophy of mind, to explore this issue. I also return to my main case studies, among other illustrative instances, to examine some particular manifestations of mind in narrative contexts.3
Experiencing Minds: What It’s Like, Qualia, Raw Feels
It is productive to recontextualize Fludernik’s conception of experientiality by drawing on Nagel’s (1974) account of consciousness as a sense of “what it is like” to be someone or something. Philosophers of mind have developed the notion of “qualia” to discuss this what-it’s-like dimension of consciousness; qualia are felt, subjective properties of mental states, such as those I experience when I see the white color of my cat’s fur, or feel the bite of cold air on my face when I step outside on a winter evening. With this section revisiting my main case studies and exploring how qualia form a basis or rather condition for narrative, in my next section I test out the merits of the converse approach, considering whether narrative might be viewed as a basis or condition for conscious experience itself.
Ways of characterizing what it’s like
As already suggested in my previous section, Fludernik seeks to develop an approach to the problem of narrativity, or what constitutes narrative, that moves away from the older, Aristotelian emphasis on plot and instead accentuates experientiality, which she describes as “the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life’ experience” (1996: 12). Having characterized experientiality as the key condition for narrativity, Fludernik goes on to write that in the constitution of experientiality, “[t]he most crucial factor is that of the protagonist’s emotional and physical reaction to [events as they impinge on her situations and activities] . . . since humans are conscious thinking beings, (narrative) experientiality always implies – and sometimes emphatically foregrounds – the protagonist’s consciousness” (1996: 30). In this subsection, though I do not treat the element of what it’s like as more fundamental to narrative than the other basic elements discussed in previous chapters, I suggest how it can be productive to explore this fourth basic element by drawing on recent research on the nature of consciousness – and by integrating that research with previous work in narrative theory that likewise takes consciousness into account. The research at issue suggests not only that that narrative is centrally concerned with qualia, a term used by philosophers of mind to refer to the sense of what it’s like for someone or something to have a particular experience, but also that narrative bears importantly on debates concerning the nature of consciousness itself.
As Davies (1999) points out, conscious mental states, including sensations (the feel of the fur on my cat, Tinker), perceptions (the whiteness of Tinker’s fur, or the sound of her complaining meows when she is hungry), and “occurrent thoughts” (thoughts about how I’ll soon need to purchase more cat food for Tinker, and where I’ll need to go to get it) are a pervasive yet puzzling aspect of our mental lives. The puzzling part of consciousness is how – and why – such awareness could be the product of the physical processes, the firing of neurons and other electrochemical activities, that take place in the human brain. What surfaces here is the so-called “explanatory gap” in cognitive science (Levine 1983), already mentioned in chapter 4. At issue is the gap between what we know about physical brain states and the condition of conscious awareness, the phenomenology of our mental lives, that may or may not be supervenient on those states. To put the same point another way, there is a gap between current understandings of the complex forms of neuronal activity in the brain and what Nagel (1974) has influentially characterized as the what-it’s-like dimension of conscious experience – the dimension whereby there is something that it is like be a certain creature or system, whether a bat, a human, or (potentially) an intelligent machine or robot. To restrict myself to the human case, how could the structure of the brain, so far as neuroscience understands it, give rise to the sensation I have when I pet Tinker, or perceive her white fur, or hear her hungry meow? And why should I have such sensations? In other words, in what way am I advantaged (say, from the standpoint of evolution) by my having consciousness?
To be sure, an extensive literature has grown up around this problem, or cluster of problems, in the philosophy of mind; it is beyond the scope of the present study to review the complete history of the debate or the full range of positions adopted by participants in the ongoing discussion.4 Instead, my treatment here will focus specifically on the what-it’s-like dimension of consciousness and on how accounts of that dimension are pertinent for my own argument that the consciousness factor can be characterized as a basic element of narrative. I begin with an overview of research on a key concept developed by philosophers of mind and others to capture this what-it’s-like dimension, namely, the idea of qualia or states of felt, subjective (or first-person) awareness attendant upon consciousness. I then move to a discussion of the concept’s relevance for an analysis of the main case studies I have been focusing on in this book. In this part of my analysis, I explore the representation of qualia in narrative contexts, which I argue to be recognizable as such partly because of how stories orient themselves around the what-it’s-like properties of experiencing consciousnesses in storyworlds. Then, in my final section, I explore grounds for making the converse claim, which is a more radical, controversial, and speculative one: namely, that we cannot even have a notion of the felt quality of experience without narrative.
Qualifying qualia
As Levin notes, in the philosophy of mind “[t]he terms quale and qualia (pl.) are most commonly used to characterize the qualitative, experiential, or felt properties of mental states” (1999: 688). Or, as Dennett puts it, “ ‘[q]ualia’ is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us” (1997: 619). At issue, as Dennett writes, is the “particular, personal, subjective... quality” of one’s conscious experiences at a given moment (1997: 619) – in Nagel’s (1974) terms, the sense or feeling of what it is like to be someone or something having a given experience. Talk about qualia, then, stems from the intuition that conscious experiences have inelimin-ably subjective properties, a distinctive sense or feeling of what it is like for someone or something to experience them.
To spell out the notion of qualia, Searle (1997) offers the following account of the sensation of pain; he contextualizes his account by relating qualia both to the notion of the intrinsically first-person nature of conscious awareness (see my next section) and to the idea of the explanatory gap, that is, the problem of moving from the neuroscience of brain structures and processes to the what-it’s-like dimension of consciousness:
My pain has a certain qualitative feel and is accessible to me in a way that is not accessible to you. Now how could these private, subjective, qualitative phenomena be caused by ordinary physical processes such as electrochemical neuron firings at the synapses of neurons? There is a special qualitative feel to each type of conscious state, and we are not in agreement about how to fit these subjective feelings into our overall view of the world as consisting of objective reality. Such states and events are sometimes called “qualia,” and the problem of accounting for them within our overall worldview is called the problem of qualia.... all conscious phenomena are qualitative, subjective experiences, and hence are qualia. There are not two types of phenomena, consciousness and qualia. There is just consciousness, which is a series of qualitative states. (1997: 8–9)
However, Searle’s is just one take on the problem of qualia, and the idea continues to be debated among scholars who have adopted a range of positions on their status. Physicalists such as Dennett (1991, 1997) argue for the possibility of reducing qualia to brain states. From this perspective, conscious experience only seems to have an irreducibly subjective or first-person character, and is in fact susceptible to description and explanation in the “third-person” terms afforded by scientific discourse (cf. Blackmore 2005; Hutto 2000: 100–3).5 By contrast, anti-reductionists such as Jackson (1982) and Levine (1983) emphasize what they see as an unbridgeable (explanatory) gap between accounts of brain physiology and the phenomenology of conscious experience. Proponents of this view follow Nagel (1974) in underscoring the irreducibly subjective or first-person nature of consciousness. Meanwhile, functionalists argue that qualia are “multiply physically realizable,” such that they could in principle be emulated on a computer system, for example, and are therefore not specific to an individual brain (see Tye 2003: section 4).
For his part, Lodge (2002) has pursued yet another way – a way that has special relevance for the present chapter. For Lodge, “literature is a record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive we have” (2002: 10). In particular, Lodge suggests that narrative fiction, and more specifically the use of free indirect discourse/thought, makes it possible to combine “the realism of assessment that belongs to third-person narration with the realism of presentation that comes from first-person narration” (2002: 45). From this perspective, narrative fiction provides a sort of dialectical synthesis of the third-person orientation of scientific discourse, including discourse on the nature of mind, and the first-person orientation of consciousness itself. As I discuss in my next subsection, however, qualia figure importantly not just in narrative fiction, let alone the subset of fictional texts where free indirect discourse is used, but more generally in storytelling practices whenever and wherever they occur. Indeed, my argument is that such practices constitute a coherent class of representational (or worldmaking) procedures precisely because of their shared concern with the impact of situations and events on the minds experiencing them. Cutting across differences of narrative genre, communicative context, and storytelling media is a common focus on the what-it’s-like dimension of experiencing minds, insofar as they are affected by what is going on in the narrated world.
What it’s like in the case studies
To pick back up with an issue broached above, although Hemingway’s fiction in general and “Hills Like White Elephants” in particular might be thought of as a “behaviorist” mode of narration, presenting only overt, surface behaviors of the characters and omitting narratorial commentary on more or less fugitive internal states (dispositions, thoughts, attitudes, memories, etc.), as the characters’ conversation unfolds in the story a rich context of felt experience emerges.6 Here one might reiterate Hemingway’s statement concerning his own tip-of-the-iceberg method of composition: “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg....There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows” (quoted in Johnston 1987: 31). This statement suggests that Hemingway’s chosen strategy is to prompt readers to draw inferences about what it’s like for the characters to experience events unfolding in the storyworld, rather than providing direct characterizations of the qualia or, as they are also called, the “raw feels” (van Gulick 2004: section 2.2) of these fictional minds. But consider the following passage from the story:
The girl looked across at the hills.
“They’re lovely hills,” she said. “They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees.”
“Should we have another drink?”
“All right.”
The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.
“The beer’s nice and cool,” the man said.
“It’s lovely,” the girl said. (Hemingway [1927] 1987: 212)
How the hills appear to Jig, the warmth of the wind, the sight (and presumably sound) of the bead curtain’s being blown against the table by the breeze, and the taste of the cool beer: all of these qualia or raw feels are encoded in the text and situated in the dynamic unfolding of the characters’ experiences, in a manner that helps distinguish Hemingway’s narrative worldmaking from other strategies for world-construction (lists, syllogistic arguments, statistical analyses, etc.), which do not place a premium on representing what it’s like to live through the events in the world being evoked, as discussed in my previous chapter. Grounding the representation of the characters’ interchange in what it’s like for them to experience this scene of talk (Herman 2006b), passages such as the one just excerpted cue readers to adopt a particular interpretive stance toward the text as a whole. Specifically, readers are prompted to project from the explicit information given about the characters’ words and actions a dense constellation of raw feels, whether they are explicitly mentioned or merely implied. What emerges is a pattern of felt, conscious experience by virtue of which narrative modes of representation can be recognized as such.
Likewise, qualia figure importantly in Monica’s story, where the older narrating-I uses prosodic resources of spoken discourse to underscore the impact of events on her younger, experiencing self during the encounter with the big, glowing orange ball – thereby indexing her own narrative orientation toward the unfolding interaction and cuing her interlocutors to maintain the same orientation toward her ongoing worldmaking efforts. Thus, in line 17 the slowed-down, emphatic pronunciation of the verb phrase risen up, together with the two-second pause separating this phrase from Monica’s next utterance, suggests a re-enactment in the present of her past experience of witnessing the apparition and of registering the extent to which it defied her expectations about how the world works.
(15) And I’m still walkin you know*
(16) Then I look back over my side again,
(17) and it has ºrisen up*º ... {2.0}
(18) And I’m like “
SHI::T.” ... {.5} you know.
Here Monica’s use of the present-tense form of the perfective construction – has risen up – reinforces this re-enactment in the present of the qualia of an earlier time-frame.
The semantic content of these lines dovetails with their prosodic profile, emphasizing the intensity of Monica’s experience of the ball’s frighteningly anomalous movements, which she relives performatively in the here and now. Similarly, in lines 38 and 39, Monica again uses prosodic resources to highlight the impact on her earlier self of the ball’s expectation-violating manner of progress through space:
(37) It’s just a-bouncin behind /us/
(38) it’s no:t.. > touchin the ground, <
(39) it’s bouncin in the air. ... {.5}
The elongated pronunciation of not, the rushed-through production of touchin the ground, and the use of heightened volume and pitch for not, ground, and air all reinforce the contrast between the expected and the actual mode of movement; even the rapid rate of delivery in line 38 serves this purpose, helping to accentuate the semantic content of the subsequent line. The sound properties of spoken discourse therefore constitute a key resource for representing what it’s like, allowing first-person narrators like Monica to reconstitute the qualia defining the felt, subjective character of the storyworlds that they seek to evoke in the here and now of communicative interaction. More than this, prosody allows storytellers in face-to-face interaction to establish a performative link between different phases of the self whose coherence and continuity derive in part from this ongoing process of re-performance – a process that more traumatic experiences, by splitting off the past from the present, can disrupt.
In Ghost World, Clowes exploits word–image combinations to evoke qualia in his own storytelling medium. Thus, in the second panel in sequence A, the utterance attributed to Rebecca in the speech balloon, together with her facial expression and hand-to-her-mouth posture of surprise, suggests what it’s like for Rebecca to experience the shock of first seeing Enid’s new hairstyle (the subsequent narration reveals that she has dyed it green, though that color is not part of the three-tone color scheme [blue, white, and black] of the text as whole and so is not displayed anywhere in Clowes’s panels). In the doubly embedded narrative presented in sequences C and D, Clowes uses Rebecca for similar purposes. Thus, in the first panel of sequence D, in the hypohypodiegetic narrative here underway (Enid is telling to Rebecca during a late-night phone conversation the story of how she told her own loss-of-virginity story to Naomi, their common acquaintance), what it’s like for these characters emerges from Rebecca’s posture and engrossed demeanor together with Enid’s re-narration of her own reaction to the letter she receives from her first sexual partner (“I couldn’t believe it!”). As with Monica’s narrative, Enid’s re-enactment of how these events impinged on her and Rebecca’s earlier, experiencing selves links together the different phases of these selves – selves whose continuity over time derives in part from just this (ongoing) process of re-performance. Meanwhile, to revisit from a different perspective an aspect of Ghost World discussed in chapter 3 in connection with the idea of positioning, in sequence B, readers are likely to use the design of the first two panels as a basis for assessing the status of the image represented in the third panel. Specifically, they are likely to infer that this image of the former bass player is part of what it’s like for Rebecca to experience this locus within the unfolding storyworld – given her physical position and the orientation of her torso and gaze in the preceding panel. More precisely, this image evokes the quale corresponding to how the bass player appears to Rebecca at this moment in the history of the emerging storyworld.
However, it is not just that the example narratives ground themselves in raw feels, that is, evoke what it was like to live through a storyworldin-flux. What is more, my case studies suggest that narrative allows for more or less direct, explicit reflection on – for critical and reflexive engagement with – competing accounts of the world-as-experienced. Arguably, narrative is unique in this respect: stories, and stories alone, afford an environment in which versions of what it was like to experience situations and events can be juxtaposed, comparatively evaluated, and then factored into further accounts of the world (or a world). Along the same lines, in Hemingway’s text the question of qualia enters directly into the plot: the conflict at the heart of the story concerns what an experience (more specifically, the experience of having an abortion) will or would be like for the person who undergoes that procedure. In other words, “Hills” portrays an interaction in which one of the participants seeks to manage and minimize the felt experience of events from his interlocutor’s vantage-point. To draw again on the terms of positioning theory discussed in chapter 3, in the storyline that the male character seeks to project, the subjectively experienced character of storyworld events – the qualia associated with them – is at odds with what Jig herself senses they are or will be like. Jig, being of another mind, therefore rejects the male character’s other-positioning strategies. Similarly, at the very end of the story, the male character tries to emplot their current interaction as one in which Jig, after going through a brief period of feeling “unwell,” recovers her equilibrium. Jig rejects this storyline, which is based on an attempt to position her in terms of the polarity feeling worse/feeling better; but she does not necessarily project a storyline of her own vis-à-vis their recent interaction:
“Do you feel better?” he asked.
“I feel fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.”
(Hemingway [1927] 1987: 214)
Jig thus rejects the presupposition of the male character’s question, but does not engage in a self-positioning act that might lend a sense of closure to their recent dispute – or to the narrative itself.
Similarly, UFO or the Devil does not just register the impact of events on experiencing minds but moreover uses narrative to stage a dispute between competing accounts of the world-as-experienced. Two moments of conflict constitute kernel events of the story: (1) Monica and Renee’s tense encounter with the glowing orange ball, and (2) Monica’s dispute with Renee’s grandmother concerning what was at stake in that encounter. These kernel events, furthermore, are tightly interlinked. By constructing herself as an accountably frightened experiencer in her narrative about event (1), Monica provides crucial context for the interpretation of event (2). In essence, the second event is a dispute in which one of the participants again seeks to gain narrative control over the felt experience of the first event from her interlocutor’s vantage-point. In other words, in the storyline proposed by Renee’s grandmother, the first event lacks the experiential profile that Monica herself imputes to that kernel event, in part by configuring it as an event in the present story. And once more, as my phrasing here indicates, the positioning logic discussed in chapter 3 directly intersects with these characters’ felt experience of events – the qualia that define what it is like for them to have or undergo experiences from a particular vantage-point on the storyworld. Rejecting the grandmother’s other-positioning strategies, Monica refuses to become the self she would have to be – to experience the mode of felt, subjective awareness she would have to experience – were she to take up the position entailed by the grandmother’s storyline.
Resituating raw feels
In the foregoing paragraphs I have suggested that qualia, raw feels, or the what-it’s-like dimension of conscious awareness play a crucial role in – indeed, help define the scope and nature of – storytelling practices across media and genres. Furthermore, I have argued that, more than just representing qualia, narrative as a mode of representation uniquely allows for the comparison of versions of what it was like to experience particular situations and events. This last line of argument, which is based in part on previous studies exploring the nexus of narrative and mind (Herman 2007b; see also Herman forthcoming a), and which suggests that narrative not only reflects but helps shape the sense of what it is like to live through worlds-in-flux, provides a convenient transition to the final section of this chapter.
As noted in chapter 3, a discursive approach to narrative and mind can be contrasted with a cognitivist approach. In the cognitivist approach, discourse (print texts, conversational interaction, graphic novels, films, etc.) can be viewed as a window onto underlying mental processes that form a kind of bedrock layer for psychological inquiry. By contrast, the discursive approach studies how the mind is oriented to and accounted for – that is, constructed – in systematic, norm-governed ways by participants in these and other modes of discourse production, e.g., through processes of positioning. A key question in this context is whether the notion of qualia or raw feels can be reconciled with a dis-cursive conception of mind – an understanding of mind as not just revealed but also constituted via the collaborative processes by which discourse is produced and interpreted.
Thus, in one of the earlier studies just mentioned (Herman forthcoming a), I argue that in the case of “Hills Like White Elephants” there are grounds for replacing Hemingway’s own surface-and-depth metaphor of the iceberg with a more “lateralized” or distributed model, in which memories, emotions, and qualia – in short, the mind – are spread out as a distributional flow in what the characters do and say (as well as what they do not do and do not say), in the material environment that constitutes part of their interaction, in the method of narration used to present their verbal and nonverbal activities, and in readers’ own engagement with all of these representational structures. From this perspective, rather than being lodged in a “privileged and insulated inner arena” that is separated off from the body and the world – to quote Clark’s (1998: 508) characterization of the focal object of early work in cognitive science – the experiential profile of events emerges from the participants’ use of verbal as well as nonverbal acts, in a richly material setting, to engage in the discursive construction of mind. My final section traces out some of the implications of this discursive approach for research on the link between storytelling and qualia, narrative and what it’s like. More specifically, I move from exploring the issue with which I’ve been concerned up to now – how, by evoking what it’s like for one or more minds to experience events, a text or discourse meets a threshold condition for narrativity – to examining a second issue, which is in a sense the converse of the first. The second issue is whether narrative affords a basis or context for the having of (an) experience in the first place.
Storied Minds: Narrative Foundations of Consciousness?
Contributing to debates within the philosophy of mind about the status of qualia or raw feels, Searle (1992), in contrast with eliminativist physicalists such as Dennett (1991, 1997), suggests that raw feels are real but irreducibly subjective. Insofar as qualia thus have a “first-person ontology,” we cannot inspect them in the way we can inspect objects in the world. In this final section, I discuss how narrative’s essential concern with experiencing consciousnesses might bear on these issues. More generally, underscoring an emphasis of this book as a whole, I stress how coming to terms with the basic elements of narrative will require a synthesis of ideas and methods from multiple disciplines – not just the philosophy of mind, but psychology, linguistics, ethnography, and other fields across the arts and sciences.
Significantly, many of the arguments about qualia in the philosophy of mind are couched in the form of stories or story-like thought experiments. Thus Jackson’s (1982) “knowledge argument” centers around Mary, the neuroscientist, who encounters a qualitative difference between what she knows through her study of the physiology of brains experiencing color, on the one hand, and, on the other, the subjective, phenomenological knowledge of color that she herself acquires when she is finally let out of her windowless, colorless laboratory. Meanwhile, Chalmers (1996) uses an imagined race of zombies (humanoid beings exactly like us except that they have no conscious experiences) to argue against both strict physicalist and functionalist critiques of the concept of qualia (cf. Kirk 2003). Zombies hard-wired just like us but lacking raw feels, neuroscientists without a life beyond the lab: in these contexts, storytelling constitutes not just a repository of qualia, but furthermore a resource for exploring their nature and functions. The broader issue is whether, not just in the domain of philosophical argumentation but also in people’s everyday engagement with the world, narrative affords scaffolding for consciousness itself. In other words, what are the grounds for making the strong claim that narrative not only represents what it is like for experiencing minds to live through events in story-worlds, but furthermore constitutes a basis for having – for knowing – a mind at all, whether it is one’s own or another’s?
Relevant here is Searle’s emphasis on what he terms the first-person ontology of conscious mental states: “[c]onscious mental states and processes have a special feature not processed by other natural phenomena, namely, subjectivity....in consequence of its subjectivity, [an experienced] pain is not equally accessible to any observer. Its existence, we might say, is a first-person existence” (1992: 94) In other words, “the ontology of the mental is an irreducibly first-person ontology,” and “the real world... contains an ineliminably subjective element” (1992: 95). Searle goes on to write:
If I try to observe the consciousness of another, what I observe is not his subjectivity but simply his conscious behavior, his structure, and the causal relations between structure and behavior.... the standard model of observation simply doesn’t work for conscious subjectivity. It doesn’t work for other people’s consciousness, and it doesn’t work for one’s own. For that reason, the idea that there might be a special method of investigating consciousness, namely “introspection,” which is supposed to be a kind of inner observation, was doomed to failure from the start, and it is not surprising that introspective psychology proved bankrupt. (1992: 97)
The problem here, as Searle notes, is that there is “no way for us to picture subjectivity as part of our world view because, so to speak, the subjectivity in question is the picturing” (1992: 98). What these formulations suggest is that there is no way to step outside consciousness and observe it as it really is, since consciousness simply is the (act or process of) observing, i.e., the qualia associated with observing or experiencing the world from a particular, irreducibly subjective or first-person vantage-point. Two further implications follow from these claims. First, I cannot observe the raw feels bound up with my own observational acts; strictly speaking, therefore, (my) consciousness cannot be represented but only experienced. Conscious states are not inner, mental objects that I can inspect in the same way I inspect other kinds of objects like stones, adjustable wrenches, or contact lenses; instead, they are structures of experience, or rather ways of experiencing.7 Second, not only is my relation to my own consciousness necessarily mediated because of its subjective profile, but, further, I would seem to be cut off – absolutely, ontologically – from the consciousness of another. I can experience, though not observe or inspect, only my own raw feels; by contrast, I have no access to the qualia (uniquely) associated with a different first-person vantage-point, another mind.
How does narrative connect up with this constellation of issues – with the first-person ontology of consciousness, and its bearing on questions about knowing or accessing one’s own or others’ minds? For his part, Strawson (2004) criticizes what he sees as an overextension of narrative as a paradigm for inquiry (or explanatory scheme) by theorists such as Bruner (1987, 1990), MacIntyre (1984), Ricoeur (1990), Schechtman (1997), and Taylor (1989). Strawson critiques both what he characterizes as the psychological narrativity thesis, which holds that the self is narratively structured, and what he terms the ethical narrativity thesis, which states “that experiencing or conceiving one’s life as a narrative is a good thing; a richly Narrative outlook is essential to a well-lived life” (2004: 428). Strawson draws a distinction between types of people he calls Diachronics and Episodics, and argues that the tendency to narrativize one’s experiences displayed by some Diachronics is just that – a tendency that must be situated within a range of non-pathological human tendencies only some of which involve chaining together experiences into a time-line that stretches back into the past and extends forward into the future. Aligning himself squarely with the Episodics, Strawson notes his own lack of concern with temporally remote events:
it’s clear to me that events in my remoter past didn’t happen to me* [where the asterisk denotes “that which I now experience myself to be when I’m apprehending myself specifically as an inner mental presence or self” (p. 433)]. But what does this amount to? It certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t have any autobiographical memories of these past experiences. I do. Nor does it mean that my autobiographical memories don’t have what philosophers call a “from-the-inside” character. Some of them do. And they are certainly the experiences of the human being that I am. It does not, however, follow from this that I experience them as having happened to me*, or indeed that they did happen to me*. They certainly do not present as things that happened to me*, and I think I’m strictly, literally correct in thinking that they did not happen to me*. . . . the from-the-inside character of a memory can detach completely from any sense that one is the subject of the remembered experience. (Strawson 2004: 433–4)
In this account, however, Strawson’s chief concern is with (models of) the constitution of the self over time. It is a different question whether, at any given stage in the history of the self’s engagement with the world, narrative affords a basis for the conscious experiences that the self (the I* in Strawson’s terms) takes itself to be having. Likewise, to what extent do human beings rely on narrative to make sense of the ongoing experiences, the conscious mental states, of others – such that those experiences can be factored into their own understanding of the way the world is and how they should orient themselves to it?
Here it is worth emphasizing the similarity of structure or isomorphism between the temporally and perspectivally situated nature of raw feels, on the one hand, and narrative as a resource for worldmaking, on the other hand. Stories, thanks to the way they are anchored in a particular vantage-point on the storyworlds that they evoke, and thanks to their essentially durative or temporally extended profile, do not merely convey semantic content but furthermore encode in their very structure a way of experiencing events. To put the same point in other terms, narrative, unlike other modes of representation such as deductive arguments, stress equations, or the periodic table of the elements, is uniquely suited to capturing what the world is like from the situated perspective of an experiencing mind. In turn, the isomorphism between the structure of narrative and the structure of consciousness may suggest a way beyond the paradox identified by Searle. Narrative, as an extensive and longstanding body of narratological research suggests, does concern itself with representing the consciousness of characters (see, among others, Cohn 1978; Fludernik 1993; Herman 2007c; Leech and Short [1981] 2007: 150–67, 255–81; Palmer 2004; Toolan [1988] 2001: 119–42; Zunshine 2006). But more than just representing minds, stories emulate through their temporal and perspectival configuration the what-it’s-like dimension of conscious awareness itself. As Searle notes, consciousness cannot be pictured but is rather the process of picturing itself. But to this claim we can add another: narrative affords a discourse environment optimally suited for the world-picturing process, since that environment shares crucial elements of structure with raw feels. Hence stories point beyond what might be called the closure of consciousness, that is, the impossibility of inspecting the very mechanisms by which inspection, as such, is made possible. Enacting and not just representing ways of experiencing – the what-it’s-like dimension of an encounter with a supernatural being, a difficult transition from adolescence to adulthood, or a painful conversational exchange that points up the willful obtuseness of a selfish and manipulative romantic partner – stories capture and sustain our interest because of how their structure maps on to the mind’s own engagement with the world.
The foregoing remarks suggest that, given the first-person ontology of conscious mental states, narrative bears crucially on one’s relation with one’s own as well as others’ minds. For one thing, the having of raw feels unfolds as a world-picturing process with which stories are isomorphic. The link between how narratives are structured and the phenomenology of conscious awareness points to an indissoluble nexus between narrative and mind – irrespective of whether the constitution of the self over time entails a process of narrativization, whereby temporally remote experiences can be connected together to form a story-line stretching between me* (in Strawson’s sense) and all that has affected me in the past or will affect me in the future. Furthermore, this same link between storytelling and consciousness goes to the heart of the problem of other minds. Thus, building on and refining Bruner’s (1990) ideas, Hutto (2006a, 2007, 2008; cf. Gallagher 2006) has proposed what he terms the “Narrative Practice Hypothesis,” according to which interpreting and producing narratives is the means by which humans “become skilled at the practice of predicting, explaining and explicating actions by appeal to reasons of the sort that minimally have belief/desire pairings at their core” (2007: 44). Accordingly, whenever a person’s actions call for an explanation, it takes a “folk psychological narrative” to construct an account based on that person’s belief-set, contextual circumstances, and assumed desires given his or her beliefs and the circumstances in question (2007: 45; cf. Herman 2003a).
Further, Hutto hypothesizes that it is through childhood engagement with narratives built around such belief-desire schemata that humans learn the forms and norms of folk psychology, or people’s everyday understanding of how thinking works, the rough-and-ready heuristics to which they resort in thinking about thinking itself. We use these heuristics to impute intentions and plans to others, to evaluate the bases of our own conduct, to make predictions about future reactions to events, and to draw correlations between situations and occurrences and the raw feels associated with them. Developmentally, Hutto suggests, children acquire the ability to use such heuristics
by engaging in story-telling practices, with the support of others [e.g., parents, older siblings, etc.]. The stories about those who act for reasons – i.e., folk psychological narratives – are the foci of this practice. . . . By participating in this kind of narrative practice children become familiar with the way the core propositional attitudes, minimally belief and desire, behave with respect to each other and their familiar partners: emotions, perceptions, etc. (Hutto 2007: 53; cf. Hutto 2008)
To extrapolate from Hutto’s account, which focuses specifically on how folk-psychological narratives allow beliefs (what does X believe?) and desires (what does X want?) to be paired together in ways that account for people’s actions: narrative can be viewed as the fundamental resource used to construct explanations of others’ behavior in terms of assumptions or hypotheses about their minds.8
Such explanations take the form of provisional, tentative ascriptions to others of motivations, beliefs, goals, and other mental states, including the what-it’s-like dimension of experiencing the taste of a freshly sliced tomato, the sight of a dramatic sunset, or the pain of a twisted ankle. And in parallel with ideas discussed in my previous subsection, narrative allows for critical and reflexive engagement with competing accounts based on different strategies for ascription. Just as stories, and stories alone, afford an environment in which versions of what it was like to experience situations and events can be comparatively evaluated, likewise narrative provides a discourse context in which different accounts of someone’s mind can be proposed, tested against other versions, and modified or abandoned as necessary – based on the goodness-of-fit between the ascribed mental states and the whole pattern of the person’s experiences, conduct, and demeanor. Monica, for example, embeds Renee’s grandmother’s folk-psychological narrative within her own narration, thereby stigmatizing it as one that misconstrues her and Renee’s minds. Likewise, in sequence B from Ghost World, Clowes uses the resources of multimodal narration to juxtapose Rebecca’s and Enid’s accounts of the mental states and dispositions that explain Enid’s conduct and demeanor toward men – with Rebecca ascribing to Enid a generalized contempt for men based on excessively high standards, and Enid responding by mentioning a counterexample and then angrily ascribing to Rebecca a counter-model of her (Rebecca’s) mind as too accepting, insufficiently discerning when it comes to potential romantic partners.
Which come first: the experiences-in-worlds that give rise to stories or the storytelling processes by which worlds are made? The present subsection is designed to provoke further discussion about rather than settle once and for all such deep questions concerning the nexus of narrative and mind. At the very least, my hope is that my remarks here – like this book as a whole – will convince readers of the need to engage further with these and other questions that are crucially important for narrative inquiry. In addition, through the interdisciplinary approach outlined in this and my other chapters, I hope to have demonstrated that no one area of study can come to terms with the multidimensional complexity of stories and storytelling. In developing my account of basic elements of narrative, one of my overarching aims has thus been to foster more dialogue about stories among people who, from all academic fields and indeed all walks of life, create, engage with, and analyze narrative in its many guises, from everyday storytelling in face-to-face interaction, to oral history and autobiography, to films, graphic novels, and narratives associated with digital environments, to the multitude of stories found in the world’s narrative literature. Further dialogue of this kind is a prerequisite for taking the measure of stories not just as a means of artistic expression or a resource for communication but also a fundamental human endowment.