Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives: Towards a Cognitive Narratology

Abstract

The article presents a model-oriented approach to how third-person narratives are read. Building on Minsky's (1979 [1975]) theory of frames, Jackendoff's (1983; 1987) concept of preference rules, Perry's (1979) theory of literary dynamics, and Sternberg's (1982b) Proteus Principle, its main aim is to conceptualize third-person narrative situations (Stanzel 1984) in terms of cognitive models, and to explore the mechanics of top-down/bottom-up hermeneutic processes. Avoiding classical low-structuralist narratology with its normal case approach, the essay also proposes new ways of analyzing protean phenomena like description, free indirect discourse, and parenthetical discourse. It presents an integrative account of primacy/recency conflicts and sketches the possible direction of a genuinely readingoriented narratology. A Frame-Based Conceptualization of Third-Person Narrative Situations The termframe, either in its usual meaning of context, pattern or scheme, or in a variety of stipulative meanings is currently popular in a number of different disciplines-in literary theory alone, recent reference works list more than ten different uses.' In the present context, a will be The author wants to thank Helmut Bonheim, Monika Fludernik, Robert F. Kemp, Delphine Lettau, and Ansgar Niinning for commenting on various preliminary versions of this article. 1. See Prince 1987, Wales 1991, and Hawthorne 1992 under frame for a cumulative general survey. The possible impact of cognitive, empirical, and artificial intelligence issues on literary theory is also discussed in van Dijk and Kintsch 1983; Hrushovski 1982 and 1984; Poetics Today 18: 4 (Winter 1997). Copyright ? 1997 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.70 on Tue, 06 Sep 2016 05:10:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 442 Poetics Today 18:4 understood, as in Perry 1979, to denote the cognitive model that is selected and used (and sometimes discarded) in the process of reading a narrative text. According to Perry, a stores and structures the answers to questions like is happening? What is the state of affairs? What is the situation? Where is this happening? What are the motives? What is the purpose? What is the speaker's position? (Perry 1979: 43). But while in Perry the term remains largely an undefined primitive, a more explicit theory of frames has been available from artificial intelligence research since about 1975. The following introductory passage from Marvin Minsky's influential exposition presents a useful working definition: (1) Here is the essence of theory: When one encounters a new situation (or makes a substantial change in one's view of a problem), one selects from memory a structure called a frame. This is a remembered framework to be adapted to fit reality by changing details as necessary. We can think of a as a network of nodes and relations. The top of a are fixed, and represent things that are always true about the supposed situation. The lower levels have many terminals-slots that must be filled by specific instances or data. Each terminal can specify conditions its assignments must meet. (The assignments themselves are usually smaller sub-frames.) . . . Much of the phenomenological power of the theory hinges on the inclusion of expectations and other kinds of presumptions. A frame's terminals are normally already filled with default assignments. (1979 [1975]: 1-2) To illustrate the uses of theory as a general theory of cognition and knowledge, Minsky discusses cases of visual perception such as seeing a room, the semantic processing of ungrammatical sentences, and the understanding of stories and various social scenarios. Given the wide scope of theory, a conceptualization of Franz K. Stanzel's (1984) concept of narrative situations clearly falls within its range of possible applications. Although primarily conceived as tools of narratological taxonomy, the narrative situations emphasize pragmatic and cognitive detail. Part of their integrative power derives from Stanzel's decision to describe types, a notion that corresponds closely to the frame-theoretical defaults. Despite such promising points of contact, however, a frame-oriented conceptualization of narrative situations Halasz 1987; Harker 1989; Ibsch 1990; Ryan 1991; Weber 1992; Gerrig 1993; Andringa and Davis 1994; Cook 1994; Duchan et al. 1995; as well as in several articles in New Literary History 20:2 (1989) and Poetics 19:1 (1990). Readers may also want to refer to the forthcoming papers of the 1995 Utrecht conference, Narrative Perspective: Cognition and Emotion, edited by Will van Peer and Seymour Chatman. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.70 on Tue, 06 Sep 2016 05:10:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Jahn ? Toward a Cognitive Narratology 443 is not immediately obvious. Certainly, Stanzel's own design of a typological circle, despite achieving an impressive featural synthesis (Cohn 1981: 159), cannot satisfactorily represent the complex dependencies, intricate hierarchies, correlations, and restrictions pertaining to person, mediacy, perspective, and narrative mode that are usually apparent in any discursive account of the narrative situations. It would seem possible, however, to enlarge on Mieke Bal's (1981) proposal that the formula X relates that r sees that Z does constitutes a miniature general model of narrative situation. In Bal's formula, X is a narrator, Y a focalizer, and Z one or several actors. According to Bal, if the narrator is a focalizer and also one of the actors, the narrative situation corresponds to homodiegetic (first-person) fictional autobiography. But if the narrator does not take part in the action, the narrative situation is a heterodiegetic, realist (ibid.: 45) one, which is more or less the extent of Bal's utilization of the formula. In later elaborations of the various narrator-focalizer relations (Bal 1985: 120), she resorts to a different type of formalization that is less germane to my present purpose. Marrying Stanzel's narrative situations to Bal's formula requires some adjustments in the latter. First, I will extend the formula to include a receiver (R) to represent the narratee, that is, the narrator's fictional immediate addressee. Thus X tells R that sees that Z does conveniently installs the text-internal pragmatic dimension and provides a possible projection of text-external pragmatics. Second, Bal's focalizer will be understood to be a reflector in Stanzel's sense, in other words, a characterial center of (I will make no use here of external or narrator-focalizers). Third, two cases will be separated out, one without a reflector-X tells R that Z does-and one with a covert or withdrawn narrator(X tells R that) sees Z does. These two cases correspond to Stanzel's authorial and figural narrative situations, respectively. The structural trees shown below (representing the basic syntactic relations of the respective formulas) can now serve as intuitive visualizations of the three major third-person narrative situations.2 In (2), the rounded squares denote the extent of narratorial control, the ellipses or spotlights of consciousness (Stanzel 1984: 155) indicate reflectorial seeing, the clipboard icons represent sets of conditions, and the small black boxes under the clipboards represent the terminal slots that hold the various agents-narrators, narratees, reflectors, and actors. Despite the drastic simplifications, (2) enables one to visualize frames as hier2. Strictly speaking, only A and C correspond to Stanzel's two ideal third-person types; B is an intermediate or mixed type. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.70 on Tue, 06 Sep 2016 05:10:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 444 Poetics Today 18:4 (2) Third-person narrative situations as frames:

Cite this

Manfred Jahn (1997). Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives: Towards a Cognitive Narratology. Poetics Today. https://doi.org/10.2307/1773182

@article{manfred1997frames,
  title  = {Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives: Towards a Cognitive Narratology},
  author = {Jahn, Manfred},
  year   = {1997},
  journal = {Poetics Today},
  doi    = {10.2307/1773182}
}

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