IF YOU ARE BROWSING this paragraph in a bookstore, glance at the people around you. They are thinking, searching, planning, deciding, watching the clock, walking to the register, buying books, talking to friends, and wondering why you are looking at them. None of this seems literary.
But to do these things, they (and you) are using principles of mind we mistakenly classify as “literary”—story, projection, and parable. We notice these principles so rarely in operation, when a literary style puts them on display, that we think of them as special and separate from everyday life. On the contrary, they make everyday life possible. The literary mind is not a separate kind of mind. It is our mind. The literary mind is the fundamental mind. Although cognitive science is associated with mechanical technologies like robots and computer instruments that seem unliterary, the central issues for cognitive science are in fact the issues of the literary mind.
Story is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories. The mental scope of story is magnified by projection—one story helps us make sense of another. The projection of one story onto another is parable, a basic cognitive principle that shows up everywhere, from simple actions like telling time to complex literary creations like Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.
We interpret every level of our experience by means of parable. In this book, I investigate the mechanisms of parable. I explore technical details of the brain sciences and the mind sciences that cast light on our use of parable as we think, invent, plan, decide, reason, imagine, and persuade. I analyze the activity of parable, inquire into its origin, speculate about its biological and developmental bases, and demonstrate its range. In the final chapter, I explore the possibility that language is not the source of parable but instead its complex product.
Parable is the root of the human mind—of thinking, knowing, acting, creating, and plausibly even of speaking. But the common view, firmly in place for two and a half millennia, sees the everyday mind as unliterary and the literary mind as optional. This book is an attempt to show how wrong the common view is and to replace it with a view of the mind that is more scientific, more accurate, more inclusive, and more interesting, a view that no longer misrepresents everyday thought and action as divorced from the literary mind.
College Park, Md. M.T.
November 1995