IGEL 2004 Debate: Sternberg

Narrative Universals, Cognitivist Story Analysis, and Interdisciplinary Pursuit of Knowledge: An Omnibus Rejoinder

Meir Sternberg
Tel-Aviv University
Introduction | Gerald Cupchik | Andrew Elfenbein | Art Graesser | Uri Margolin | Alan Richardson | |

The following article brings together my oral rejoinders to the participants in the debate on my "Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes" (Poetics Today 2003:297-395, 517-638), held during the IGEL conference at Edmonton in August 2004. A memorable event, for me at least. My warm thanks to the organizers, especially Els Andringa, David Miall, and Willie van Peer, who doubled as brilliant chairman. I also wish to thank the audience for their encouragement and sharp questions alike. Not least, I'm grateful to my fellow debaters for their stimulating multivoice contribution, whether approving or challenging or both: a contribution to the field, in my opinion, as well as to the overview debated and to the occasion. The frankness of the ensuing commentary is a measure of how seriously I take their responses and the need to get straight the issues they raise. Let me proceed in a descending order of generality.
On the highest methodological level, there resurges the question that I have shown to determine much of the cognitivist performance on record and, for better or worse, future developments. What is the respondent's conception of the interdiscipline - past, present, or prospective, actual or ideal - and what relation does it bear to those I have diagnosed or to the one I have advocated throughout? (For the gist of the latter, see the epigraph picked by Els Andringa in the Introduction.) As so often elsewhere, it turns out that the answers given or implied are far from uniform, even from self-consistent, at times.
On the face of it, all the respondents are for bridge-building and most of them deplore its absence, infrequency or inadequacy in the study of narrative and other domains. Further, I believe that they do mean it in principle, which is no small thing at this juncture. When it comes to the interdiscipline's operational realities, however, the emerging pictures diverge along various lines, from substance to emphasis to coherence.
Gerald Cupchik enthusiastically practices, rather than theorizes, the interdisciplinary give and take. In effect, he illustrates it in relating or translating his favorite kind of psychology to my mentalist narratology. If anything, he welcomes me as an ally arrived from another land to reinforce his own in-fighting against the limitations of "mainstream cognitive theory," such as the very umbrella of "mental representation." (Compare Jerome Bruner's invoking literature and literary study in his disenchantment with that mainstream's anti-humanism.) Having identified a common target of attack, across the disciplinary lines, Cupchik turns from negative to positive and gets down to the business of doing business together.
From the opposite direction, though hardly to the opposite effect, Uri Margolin devotes to this crux parts C-D of his response. The view expressed there is essentially similar to my argument for a two-way traffic between cognitivists and (literary) narratologists. In principle, again, the necessity for this interdisciplinary exchange stretches beyond narrativity, or narrative proper, to less heavily researched genres or issues that are, or may become, of mutual concern.
He thus ends by instancing the benefit derivable by literary study from the import of "cognitive models and theories" regarding character: its construction and its interior functioning, specifically. But here, as elsewhere, the beneficial effect would also go the other way, of course, and Margolin, I think, will agree. Character itself might then be delivered from the flattening and freezing to which I've shown it often subjected in cognitivist modelings of the agent along, or in line, with the action. In my overview, variants of this reductive approach to character(ization) abound, cross, join liabilities. They include the Proppian heritage of action-centeredness shared with Structuralism, whereby characters reduce to their agency; the cognition/emotion imbalance, to the loss of psychological realism and dynamics; the disregard for the infinitely variable images of humanity open to discourse and culture, not to speak of fictional art and literature; the obliviousness to the eventful processuality that governs character construction - like everything else in temporal experience - with anything from gapping to closure, from development to disclosure, from straight progression to complication to reversal, on the way. All these basic weaknesses manifest themselves to this day - even among overzealous literary cognitivists, who should know better than to adopt cognitivist and/or Structuralist reductionism - and all would find their repair within a proper interdisciplinarity. (Recall likewise my glances at inference theory, figurative language, verbal as well as world-bound ambiguity, for example, or Elfenbein's passing reference to dialogue and expository prose.)
Unlike Cupchik, however, Margolin never takes the bridge for granted, regarding either side. In his systematic manner, he examines afresh some of the forces behind cognitivism's isolationism - whether plain ignorance or divergence in goal and method - and finds them all wanting. One might add that such lines of division run not only between but also within the fields: as when computer experts interested in story-generating or -understanding programs attack Chomskyan formalism or the "methods police" of cognitive psychology. This bears, in turn, on an important question that Margolin raises. What is preferable: a rich but formally loose theory, or the reverse? Whichever you prefer, you can still adapt the work done by your opposite numbers on the other side (no less than by opponents on your own) to build up your kind of theory. A fortiori, when the other side numbers like-minded theorists. Therefore, even if a choice between richness and rigor enforces itself - as Margolin believes - preference will yet by no means disable interdisciplinary contacts, translations, partnerships.
The three other affirmations of interdisciplinarity are hardly as univocal and straightforward, often puzzlingly so, each in its different way. Elfenbein's stance, never quite articulated, will best emerge from the analysis of his dealings with closure below, which obliquely militate against the interactive common denominator of the models at issue, in favor of extreme readerly subjectivity. Meanwhile, note his strange opening referral of my overview of the interdiscipline to "a well-established subgenre in literary criticism, the attack on theory for ironing out the perceived richness and density of literature."
An association couldn't go more wrong. In the argument, I have dissociated myself from various literary critical trends, a fortiori those that exhibit or prescribe their own disciplinary isolationism. Nor would I dream of attacking theory as such, if only because it is my own line of business. As to the attack on cognitivist theorizing of narrative, it certainly foregrounds offenses against "richness and density" or "complexity," and here Elfenbein's informed summary has much to recommend it. However, my argument hardly stops there - regarding either targets or grounds, counterparts elsewhere or levels of generality. He himself mentions in passing the exposure of "the arbitrariness and inaccuracy of the rules about narrative" widely assumed by "cognitive scientists." The list of omissions would take too long to repair. But they range from demonstrations of inconsistency between cognitivist premises and practice, to comparisons with how key-questions of mutual interest have fared in a like-minded narratology, to scenarios and proposals of interdisciplinary endeavor on the respective fronts. Here we come back to Elfenbein's drive against the shared interactive model, but the details can wait a little.
For another reason altogether, those concerning Arthur Graesser must wait. I looked forward to his response, and not only because a programmatic statement of his (as well as some related articles) has been cited in my overview to typify the problematics of the field, what he calls "discourse psychology." Both as a researcher on a remarkably wide front and as editor of Discourse Processes, he has done more than most to promote the cognitivist approach, always centered in narrative. To my disappointment, though, Graesser's response proves all too telegraphic, all too automatic, and equivocal at that. An impossible contradiction runs through it. High praise for my scholarship apart, he begins by dismissing me as "mighty green behind the ears when it comes to understanding the goals and practice of science"; yet he ends with a tribute to "the mighty, challenging sword of Sternberg. I can't wait to see where the debate and aftermath will evolve." How can one possibly be mighty both ways?
Nor does Graesser's brief middle supply an answer to the puzzle or, for that matter, any evidence of genuine rethinking, let alone concession. He just reaffirms his commitment to the interdiscipline, while dismissing outright the strictures made upon the cognitivist practice of it and gesturing toward achievements: all reminiscent of his short way with critics as exposed in my overview. It would be tedious to repeat myself in turn, point by closely argued point, or even to refer you to the appropriate chapters and verses in my original account. The truth is, I suspect, that Graesser needs time to resolve his manifest ambivalence, to consider the questions in a fresh light, and we'd better wait for him to make up his mind.
Not much easier to understand is Alan Richardson's idea of the common pursuit. He has in recent years practiced and promoted a line of interdisciplinary bridging, one notably represented in a special issue on "Literature and the Cognitive Revolution" that he coedited and then defended in the questioning sequel to it, on "The Cognitive Turn?" (Poetics Today 23:1, 24:2). For all his disclaimers about his expertise in narrative theory, literary or cognitivist, I find his response encouraging. Not only has he, on rereading, come to see the critical aspect of my argument as a "service to cognitive literary studies"; he also endorses various particular caveats and suggestions developed there, methodological, theoretical, operational, even historical. All the more welcome, this, because it newly confirms and urges the extension of the argument for a professional interdiscipline beyond the narrative genre.
In regard to the workings of interdisciplinarity, however, Richardson - like Graesser from the opposite side - shuttles between extremes of his own. On the one hand, he begins by singling out for approval, among the "leading terms" of my critique, the "charges of isolationism … and amnesia" directed against cognitivism. Among the losses that result, he in turn singles out the throwback to "neoclassicism informing much of the work" examined, which "might well become a watchword." On the other hand, once Richardson proceeds to quarrel with the term "cognitivist" for its alleged implications of unity, he at least condones isolationism and amnesia in arguing (if not pressing) for disunity - and not only within cognitivism itself but also between the disciplines in question. Condones, because everything now falls under a reality principle, as it were: such is human nature and academic life with it.
While briefly assenting to "the intellectual and moral imperatives" of the common pursuit of knowledge, therefore, Richardson would have us believe that they, hence it, must remain utopian. In effect, he iterates my findings about isolationism, but with an all too understanding twist in explaining them, which often verges on de facto endorsement of isolationist practice. For him, scholarly groups know and care little about one another: literary, even literary-cognitivist researchers about cognitive psychologists, and vice versa, or the diverse cognitivist subgroups about their immediate neighbors. Indeed - he goes further - why should they? "There are no pressing professional reasons for me to read widely in discourse analysis, any more than for a cognitive psychologist to read widely in Jane Austen criticism," whatever its bearings on "representations of the mind." Suddenly gone are the very "professional reasons" to do otherwise, the "intellectual and moral imperatives" upheld earlier in principle. Nor can this laissez-fair attitude end here. It would stretch from the specific and divisive Austen example conveniently picked to larger interests shared by the respective disciplines: in problems of narrative theory, say. Apropos the literary cognitivists in his own line, what professional reasons would they have for studying theories of evolution or the modular mind as they scrupulously do, if entitled to improvise their own with impunity? And this self-contradiction might be further pressed, ad hominem, given Richardson's impeccable scholarship.
The practice is in fact better and harder than the appeal to life's pragmatic constraints. When invoking them, however, Richardson would more or less happily settle for the next worst thing to mutual isolationism. His is then the softest possible interdisciplinarity, characterized for the most part by negatives: loose, formless, undefined, undemanding, unobligatory, and, where practiced, unidirectional. Oddly for a self-declared "cognitive literary student," he regards the qualifications, methods, performances, results of every outside cognitivism (and every extracognitivist literary approach?) as its own business: no judgment, no guidance, no offer of exchange between them, not even where literary material is concerned or a literary tool-kit importable or actually misapplied or reinvented long behind time (after neoclassicism, say). In return, he would expect the same indifferent permissiveness from the other side, with the same recognition of his autonomous professionalism amid encroachment.
As such, then, cognitivist literary practitioners would freely borrow a model here, an idea there, now a term, now a topic, without submitting to the cognitivist originators' judgment of its fidelity, extractability, relevance, up-to-dateness or application in transfer. And vice versa. I called it the tourist approach to the interdiscipline, with which Richardson's metaphor of Rick's Café accords, against his own striving for a twofold expert anchorage. Among advocates of traffic across the lines, indeed, few voice this noninterference doctrine - a near relation to the extreme that has generated and would perpetuate the unhappy state of affairs uncovered by my analysis.
Hence also Richardson's otherwise inexplicable quarrel with my use of "cognitivist," as if it were not descriptive of the field, like "cognitive," but "a loaded and potentially misleading term of invective." Still odder is where he finds all these bad things: in the term's supposed implication of the discipline's "unity of aim and approach … shared worldview or ideology," even "common essence." Odder, because on his own premise, the ascription of unity would be ipso facto pejorative; and, if so, moreover, his own titular reference to "The Cognitive Revolution," with definite article, would only aggravate the load and the misleadingness and the invective.
Oddest of all, the inverse also holds. Richardson forgets what he himself started by approving: that my argument has progressively laid bare an underlying network of commonalities that unifies the decades and the subdisciplines in question. We thus uncovered a widely (if often unwittingly) common approach to each and every key issue examined: the definition of story, the conceptual vis-à-vis the emotional, the problematics of closure, interest value (point, tellability), complete with their interrelations. Deeper down still, the likeness has in turn proved to run across these key issues. There, it shows, for example, in the communication model professed (or assumed) but silently undermined, or just ignored, in practice. It also shows in the recurrent fixture on the narrated action at the expense of the narrative discourse; in the multifold fragmentation of the narrative object of study; in the impoverished idea of "understanding"; in the bearing of the names of "knowledge" and of "processing" in vain; as well as in the very self-isolation of the different subfields from both their immediate predecessors or mates and from narrative theory. A unity of premises and priorities and performances, if you will, as distinct from a concerted effort, unhappily. Even so, whether one affirms or denies or qualifies the field's unity, what has it to do with the choice between "cognitive" and "cognitivist"?
The truth is much simpler. In describing a field we need a term for the subject matter and another for the metalanguage, on pain of confusing the reference. Thus pragmatic/pragmaticist or Slavic/Slavicist. Like with "cognitive" (states, drives, phenomena) as against "cognitivist" (approaches, performances, balance sheets). Of course, you might object, as I have always done, to the word's overconceptual bearing, with the narrow practice it encourages and reflects, to the detriment of the affective, say; but such objection would apply to either cognate. Richardson's, therefore, is an idiosyncratic projection, born of a concern that no other respondent would appear to share.

Next comes the middle range of narrative and discourse theory proper, chiefly occupied by one respondent. Gerald Cupchik locates a "framework for dialogue" at the heart of the matter. Precisely where I have long stood opposed to the line of Structuralist narratology, he finds not only support against his Representationalist opponents in "mainstream cognitive psychology" but also a ground for positive interchange and advance. This lies in my "orientation to narrative effect and dynamics and processing," complete with their threefold set of generic universals, with the narrative/narrativity distinction, with the notion of play, and with the "holistic … theory building" at large. To extend the ground for dialogue yet further, there is the similarity in the more general idea of discourse. Unlike Elfenbein, Cupchik subscribes to the (or a) communication model, whereby these narrative processes would assume a symmetry between "creator and recipient."
All very gratifying and promising, not least the confirmation of the need for gearing narrative theory to mental realities as produced and experienced in time, between times. Ultimately, I believe, this "orientation" can indeed advance Cupchik's special, as well as shared or intersecting, concerns. Meanwhile, however, it turns out again that both the lack and the illusive semblance of a common language thwart (or, hopefully, impede) the wanted dialogue even on such a high common ground.
Thus, commonality of terms is mistakable for that of concepts. Take the very three universals of "narrative effect and dynamics and processing": all triggered by gaps, but one attached to prospection, another to retrospection, a third to recognition. As shorthands for them, my "suspense, curiosity, and surprise" multiply diverge in reference and workings from any namesakes inherited from Dan Berlyne. The divergence indeed shows at the points of contact emphasized here by his follower. The trio's linkage to "epistemic behavior" or "the cognitivist effort after meaning" (going as far back as Berlyne's own teacher, Bartlett) ostensibly reveals a thought/feeling hierarchy, even disjuncture, that is poles apart from my "holistic … theory building," while akin to the mainstream. (To either mainstream, in fact, the literary critical today or the cognitivist.) Not a word on our emotive responses and the interworking of mental domains, which give narrative such unrivaled power. Likewise with the privileging of "semantic information" or "symbolic richness" in what follows, except that the latter is now abruptly alleged to arouse "feelings" somehow. That Cupchik knows better than to divide our indivisible experience of narrative still leaves the key concepts mismatched.
Inversely, Cupchik reads into my narrativity-defining "play of suspense …" an overemphasis on "the relative presence of uncertainty" and favors, instead, "the complementary interplay between certainty and the emergence of coherence, between suspense and resolution." Another misunderstanding, now of agreement as disagreement. This "complementary" relation is definitionally built into my dynamics of suspense, as of curiosity and surprise, hence of narrativity, since all arise from discontinuities between the telling and the told orders: from chrono-logical incoherence, in short.
Once opened, therefore, these gaps[1] produce the uncertainty of (e.g.) suspense while pressing for a closure that will resolve it, if only by way of alternative hypotheses about the narrated future at issue. The question "What will happen, next or at the end?" always receives from us processors an answer of sorts, however forked, and a measure of coherence to suit: even the ordered ambiguity of rival scenarios - unlike formless indeterminacy - establishes a pattern that makes sense of plot. And the forward-looking ambiguity may itself turn univocal along the reading sequence, as theorized in my distinction of permanent vs. temporary gaps. May, it is worth iterating, not must or should. From beginning to end, the "emergence of coherence" needn't at all involve the firm "resolution" demanded on the neoclassical model to which cognitivism has regressed. Witness the changes rung on the suspenseful tale in both art and life.
The same holds for the past-directed curiosity and surprise universals, with their dynamics of retrospection and recognition. Across all differences among the trio, the "complementary interplay" between gapping and gap-filling persists in narrative to the last. Here Cupchik forces an open door, then, but to the effect of reinforcing (not, as with the initial silence on emotion, weakening) the common ground for dialogue.
Indeed, the advance toward substantive dialogue at once follows. "How can we speak of suspense or surprise that resolves into coherence in such a way as to incorporate the narrative/narrativity distinction?" An excellent question, especially with the above provisos kept in mind. I have of course developed an answer to it throughout my work - one tested afresh in this overview, against cognitivist echoes and reductions - yet an equivalent from a psychology equally opposed to the mainstream would doubtless be welcome.
However, once Cupchik proceeds to offer his own answer, trouble breaks out on the opposite word/thing front. Misunderstandings about common or sharable terminology now give place to mistranslations from one metalanguage to another. As a result, possibly attractive departures and crosslinkages suffer, along with mutual intelligibility.
"Sternberg's account of narrative can be redefined in terms of the interplay between subject matter and form, the latter being the way that the represented actions are presented to the world." In redefinition, the hard-won exactness of "represented and communicative time" is lost, and with it the uniqueness of narrative in its narrativity, as the genre that alone operates between these times: between the dynamics of the action and of its transmission/reception, between the process lived through by the characters in the happening and that experienced by us along the given sequence. Whatever they mean, on the other hand, "subject matter and form" - themselves interchanged at will with "vehicle" and "style" or "semantic and syntactive information" - apply to discourse in general.
The consequences of such translation, easily imagined, are too many to detail here. But let me glance at some shifts between the generic and the general that aggravate the problem beyond vagueness, mixture or opacity, toward substantive loss. There, Cupchik also brings in theoretical claims and premises that are alien, even opposed to mine - or to his own before - and often as regressive as the substitute terminology.
Having switched the key terms, for example, he goes on to claim: "The more that form, or style of presentation, departs from a logical or serial structure of time, the more difficult it is to understand in everyday terms what is happening. The deformation stimulates an experience of uncertainty…" Never mind the oddity of attributing to "style" generally a time logic or series, or of equating "form" with "deformation," per se. As regards narrative itself, this equation would exclude from our "experience of uncertainty" none other than suspense, the equator's very exemplar thus far. Alone among the three generic universals, suspense can dispense with a deformed time-line, because the uncertainty about what will happen arises regardless of the order in which the action unfolds. A universal excluded on this formalistic ground produces a boomerang effect, as well as an untenable split within narrativity. The more so because suspense, a fortiori when undeformed, would accordingly (and, again, counterfactually) lose in turn the entire "meaning or purpose underlying the deformation," such as the power to "transform the banality of everyday life into symbolic richness, initiating feelings and prompting the reader to adopt an appropriate perspective."
Inversely with the attempt to generalize the rule of deformation "beyond the temporal ordering of events to include all manner of stylistic transformation," not least the space art of painting. If so extended wholesale beyond narrative temporality, one wonders, how come that the rule later appears to depend on it, after all? "It is in the complementary integration of what Sternberg calls 'represented and communicative time' that aesthetic experience arises." But even discounting this inconsistency, the extension to nonnarrative elements and arts remains problematic, at best underdeveloped. For they offer no real analogue to narrative deformation, least of all when collocated under the umbrella of "subject matter vs. form or style." Themselves undefined, this pair of terms no more enable the theorizing of any unity in variety than of any variety in unity among the supposedly all-inclusive family.
Why no real analogue to narrative? First of all, because narrative "deformation" works against the only form available to humans that has an ordinal logic of arrangement built into it, namely: the march of events from earlier to later, as they do along reality's own time-line. Not for nothing did the Renaissance already call this ordering "natural" -- vis-à-vis, say, the "artificial" jump in medias res -- and it enjoys cognitive priority to match. Witness the repeated experimental demonstration of a truth known to every reader: that in the narrative process we rearrange all events back into their chrono-logical order, or else fail to understand what happened even on the simplest level. In life, survival itself hangs in the balance. And in narrative, "deforming" that order is going against the line of most resistance, with appropriate salience and effects in our progressive re-forming of the narrated action according to event time.
By contrast, all forms of arrangement outside the world's time are artificial, culture-made, especially regarding their linear coherence. Think of rhyme, metrical scheme, clause structure, descriptive set-up, character parallels, variations on a theme, thesis-antithesis-synthesis movement, pictorial color composition or space-equivalencies. Throughout, no logic or mechanism built into the components themselves enforces their sequential ordering (at times, not even any other patterning) into the respective formations. Unlike events, they hang together, and certainly unfold, by cultural convention. And as with the forms, so with their deformation. Indeed, how can you tell which is the form, which the deformation, equally given to conventionalizing? If you can tell them apart, this would no longer depend on anything intrinsic, like their observance or breach of orderly story time, but on their contingent, relative emergence in (discoursive, literary, art) history. Here the deformation just presupposes the form, thus identifying the two as such, yet only pro tem: the deformation will itself sooner or later get deformed, possibly back into the original form, now grown the less conventional and the more eligible for art.
So, the very possibility of understanding in or in sharp opposition to "everyday terms," the sense of departure from a "logic," the "experience of uncertainty" twinned with a quest for "coherence," the "code … shared by creator and recipient": all these, as much else, vary radically between narrated and other "subject matter," between narrative sequencing and other "elements of style."
Further, the principled generic difference underlines the analytic implications. Narrative's interplay of represented and communicative time - including "form" vs. "deformation" - is traceable and describable and explicable with remarkable precision. But what would be the analogue in the extranarrative "elements of style"? Where is the principle of interplay that will establish the variety in unity among themselves as well? To these questions, Cupchik offers no clue, and his terminology no access, but rather a fresh sense of their importance and elusiveness. For the purpose, he might turn to the outline I have drawn (apropos the cognition/emotion nexus, significantly) of the family likeness between suspense, curiosity, and surprise as generic universals of narrative and as universals of all discourse processed in time, space art included. For a start, this would provide a high common denominator along with a sharp cutting edge, both inseparable from our mental workings and experience in response to the turns of (narrative) communication. This would also appear to promise the kind of dialogic interchange envisioned by Cupchik himself.
The more so because, historically, his focal interest in how aesthetic experience "transforms the banality of everyday life" is reminiscent of the Russian Formalists' key tenet of "making strange" via the perceptible deformation of the familiar. Even his attempt to extrapolate from narrative to aesthetics at large parallels the relation between two of Viktor Shklovsky's famous works on the subject: the manifesto "Art as Device" (1916) and the novel-specific analysis of Tristram Shandy in The Theory of Prose (1925). Shklovsky never systematized the points of contact, but then, poetics has since forged better tools for the discriminate generalization wanted, such as my respective universals of processing. I therefore hope that Cupchik will pursue this line, among others, in developing a twofold, psycho-artistic theory of estrangement.

Andrew Elfenbein nimbly moves between the particular and the general, in the spirit of my argument. Of all the responses, his is the most focused, commenting on Section IV's analysis of closure vs. open-endedness in the narrative process. A key issue in itself, it cannot yet be isolated from the rest or from the underlying premises and rationales that govern (or distinguish) the approach to them all. Accordingly, Elfenbein also relates the specific questions involved to my two laws of discourse, which apply here as elsewhere. One is the Proteus Principle, generalizing a many-to-many correspondence between form and function. If the matches between them are in principle infinite and sense-making dependent on how we match them in context, then discourse is by nature dynamic and ambiguous: its Protean interplay lends itself to resolution (stabilizing, gap-filling, closure, however relative) only via our progressive inference of what looks like the best fit. Wider still, the Law of Reciprocity generalizes that whatever is expressed (or expressible) is explicable - counter to the dogma of "unacceptability" or "unreadability" (e.g., ruling out whatever resists "proper" closure) that has bedeviled so many disciplines.
Elfenbein would appear to accept both master rules, with their implications for a versatile theory of narrative closure, and, inversely, against cognitivist biases, or throwbacks, on this front. Specifically, he justifies my detailed argument against cognitivism's regress to the neoclassical model of closed, well-made plot and determinate signification in general: as if storytelling "entails, if not manifest resolution, then resolvability … on pain of ill-formedness and/or ill-understanding." In truth, Proteus and Reciprocity join forces to make the entire spectrum of the unresolvable (anti-closure included) equally given to integration along some line, for some purpose. In the critical part of his response, though, Elfenbein misapplies those general principles (inter alia) from a viewpoint on discourse that is alien to either of the approaches concerned. His is a radical variant of what I call the interpretive model - extreme even among its literary reader-response or poststructuralist mates - and so polarizes with the two-sidedness of communication, in apparent disregard for the polarity.
My overview has frequently stressed and explained the dominance of the communication model in, or behind, cognitivist theories of story, even when otherwise at odds. "The field's definitional concern with 'information processing' is misleading, in that the term may well suggest to the outsider a paradigmatic focus on the receiving end: on a one-sided activity, an understanding or interpretation of the text liberated (poststructuralist style) from the authorial transmitter's meaning, design, control. Actually, the disciplinary paradigm is bifocal, interactive or communicative rather than freely interpretive" (2003:307-8). Graesser and his associates figure among the abundant references there. Some of them even borrow from literary study the concept of implicit authorship to establish the transmitter as the reader's' guide cum partner. Nor does the field vary in this rudiment from other disciplines concerned with discourse: think of the centrality of "intention" to pragmatics. The trouble rather lies in the inconsistencies between the field's communicative program and its daily practice, analytic, experiemental, or computational.
Surprisingly, Elfenbein never recognizes this cognitivist model of discourse: let alone attacks its premises or practices, and least of all examines its relation to mine as fellow undesirables, in a "pox upon both your houses" style. Instead, he proceeds as if all dealings with "reader/reading" were necessarily interpretive (i.e., one-sided) and I have just failed to internalize fully what ensues from such a mentalist program, cognitivism's or my own. Hence the need for correctives from within, as it were, by appeal to a like-minded, single-minded reference point. The obliquity of the attack is in inverse proportion to the radicalness of the agenda it would substitute.
In the interests of this radical agenda, he begins with an attempt to qualify my following statement:

Neither action logic nor the will to understanding nor mental grammar or schema or script, nor any of their composites, will by itself enforce resolution on … a given text … as distinct from helping to make it desirable and to predict it … and to integrate its occurrence or to underscore its breach after the event. (2003:567)

Elfenbein agrees, but would except "the will to understanding" as "the odd man out" on the list of measures unable to impose resolution by themselves. Not a modest proposal - as it may appear to some - far less reasonable. This putative exception would rather quietly open the door to a contrary agenda and betrays oddity after oddity, in being singled out as failsafe terminator. An odd man out indeed, with a vengeance:
(1) Having just endorsed my exposure of cognitivism's neoclassical dogma, Elfenbein now himself equates (will to) understanding with (will to) closure, not with (will to) making sense of whatever ending we encounter or, subjectively, desire or imagine.
(2) He confuses tools and tendencies with their operations, what we readers bring to the discourse with what we perform on it throughout. By this category mistake, the "odd man out" forms not "a static set of expectations," like the rest, but an actual generator of meaning. In reason, however, just as action logic or mental schema are evidently prefabricated structures of knowledge, so is the will to understanding a predisposition: a lust for semantic gestalt. Again, pre-existent as such, they all come into play in our encounter with the text. At either level, nothing excepts the Elfenbein favorite.
(3) Even if mistakenly associated with an actual reading performance, the quoted statement anticipates Elfenbein's objection and counterstatement, so that he should applaud it rather than inventing a quarrel. Consider how we read in sequence. Our "will to understanding" indeed can never "by itself enforce resolution" - least of all ahead of the end, which may turn out closure-defying at that - any more than can our other mental equipment and predisposition at work. Like them, such will has only the power to make this firm arrest "desirable" before the event, and then "to interpret its occurrence" in retrospect "or to underscore its breach" on our way to an alternative, instable terminal formation. All by the "dynamic process of creating meaning" wanted by Elfenbein: the very phrase sounds familiar.
(4) Even so, the process demands more and less than sheer will: isolating (and at that privileging) the "odd man out" again fails both ways. "What other than the 'will to understanding' could 'enforce resolution' on a given text?" Instead of taking Elfenbein's question as rhetorical, one may well ask in turn how far such will can lead the understander without a repertoire of internalized patterns and skills whereby to actualize it, as well as without the numberless bottom-up operations performed all along the sequence. Conversely, the appropriate repertoire enables closure without any particular will to understanding, as when the lazy mind registers the "and they lived happily ever after" formula.
(5) Why, then, would Elfenbein favorably except this drive from the rest of my list, against all the indications to the contrary? Because it looks like the most subjective of the lot, and so most serviceable for his lopsided "interpretive" model. While "action logic … mental grammar or schema or script" are widely shared by authors and readers - hence a basis for communication between them - "the will to understanding" may appear twice removed from such community: not only located in the reader alone but also variable from one reader to another.
As Elfenbein's commentary unfolds, this push toward the interpretive extreme increasingly reveals itself as the deepest ground for his objections, quibbles, misunderstandings, selective recall. Even here, though, we already find it playing havoc with the very groundwork of opposing views (on top of the incongruities just laid bare). Apropos the will to understanding, for example, the name of "cognitivist criticism" gets borne in vain when invoked to discriminate against mental schemata, and then against communicative partnership itself. In subjectivizing that will, the universalist claims of Gestalt psychology also suffer reversal. Likewise with the attempt to turn my own universals of discourse integration against me. In failing to distinguish the will to understanding among measures for closure, he suggests, I have forgotten the Proteus Principle. Thereby, allegedly, "readers assume a given narrative formation exists for a reason, that it has 'some function'," here closural; and "gaps are gaps only if they 'count as gaps' to the individual reader, so that the 'will to understanding' is to be enlisted to close them."
Both arguments for "enforced resolution," however, are plain non sequiturs, even within the subjective twist wished on my theory. The "function" assigned to "a given narrative formation" (by "the individual reader," if you will) may equally be anti-closural, just as the gap can be left ambiguously or multiply resolved (permanent). This should now go without saying, were it not for the oddity of the familiar cognitivist neoclassicism yoked together by violence with an alien decoupling and de-objectivizing of the understander. More obviously incongruous is the "consequent" amendment allegedly needed in the Law of Reciprocity: from the "problematic … expression" that gets explained thereby to one that "the reader perceives" as such. The amendment clashes with the Law's very name and spirit ("what is expressible is explainable"), because the Reciprocity generalized by it operates between expressor and explainer, author and audience in communicative interaction, vis-à-vis the problematic, say.
Under the guise of amendment, then, Elfenbein twists the Law to suit his own bias for subjectivity unbalanced and unlimited. He refuses to acknowledge that anything can be problematic, or integrated, outside some particular reading. It's all or nothing: were he to admit so much as limit cases, and with them the principle of communicativeness, further retreats must follow. (The threatened pressure for retreat will materialize before long, once he affirms "standards of coherence.") Now, my theory accommodates even this extremism - often explicitly, apropos closure itself, or tellability - though Elfenbein disregards such allowances, not least in citing them. But the extremism nevertheless remains demonstrably untenable on multiple grounds, inconsistency among them, as well as opposed to the models of discourse processing at issue, cognitivism's or my own.
For example, the Law of Reciprocity subjected to subjectivizing amendment is quoted from a juncture where "the problematic expression" may run to logical contradiction. "He fell and he didn't fall," or "She knew that I had gone, but I hadn't." The given language makes nonsense by the discord among its components, which are unmappable together onto any possible world. Here, then, to deny the intrinsic problematicness of the logically absurd discourse (hence the expressor's forcing it on all comers to make sense of) is to reduce oneself to absurdity; while acknowledging it would invite the follow-up questions, Where to draw the line of community? How else do we understand each other if not by appeal to a shared code, albeit inferred or imagined? A hopeless predicament for the reader-as-solipsist extreme.
Further hopeless maneuvers run through the sequel, only crowned with a new sweeping false charge: another bid for subverting the communication model from within, as it were, under the guise of amendments required for consistency and the like. In oblivion of my own mentalist program and key concepts - so Elfenbein now repeatedly objects - I am liable to slide into "personifications of narrative, a rhetorical trope that often depends on an implied reader" and/or author.
When it comes to oblivion, he would do better to guard against his own acts of amnesia, instead. In regard to the transmitting end, Elfenbein thus conveniently forgets that the alleged, ominous-sounding "personification" is nothing but a long-established metonymy, whereby "narrative" stands for the narrator or author, the transmission for its transmitter(s). And the example he cites of "personified" authorship betrays worse than the ado made about nothing. It also gives away a misunderstanding of the genre's basic mechanisms, confusions of inevitable effect with the degree of its experiencing, points of agreement adduced as counterargument, and the rage for subjectivity that underlies them all. Briefly, the example is my thesis that "a suspense problem-line enjoys more options of closure than given to a curiosity-driven equivalent." The difference hinges on the logic of action closely analyzed there: specifically, the way our knowledge about the narrated event-line (here, the quest for a solution) interacts with its temporality vis-à-vis ours as humans caught between past and future, and so opens various possibilities of authorial emplotment. You may of course disagree with the analysis, or with the branching conclusion above. But how in the world can you do so on the ground that it unduly personifies the tale -universalizes the author's choice - because "no problem-line guarantees that suspense or curiosity will indeed arise," given the variations among readers? By definition, "a suspense problem-line" is one that centers in a gap about the future (How will the quest end?); "a curiosity-driven" problem-line, about the past (What really happened?). At this strategic level, every author can indeed take either of the leading narrative effects, and their difference, as read. A reader who never wonders whether Odysseus will overcome the Suitors or who killed Roger Ackroyd - if any such has ever existed - would be too mindless to count among readers. The logic of action thus reduces the objector to the same absurdity as the illogic of contradictory language.
Apropos the receiving end itself, in turn, Elfenbein forgets again that my theory covers on principle the interpreter-oriented line, however out of touch with any transmitting frame. That is exactly why my universals of narrative are universal, humanly inescapable by anyone reading (or telling) between the generic times to whatever effect. Or recall the principle that one interpreter's gap may be another's blank - depending on their mental state, equipment, activities - and the question for communicators is how to determine which is which. But then, even his quotes from my argument ironically testify to this accommodation of subjective response. Look at the following quoted definition of a "temporary gap," alleged by him to depend on an implied reader. "The narrative opens a discontinuity for a time - perceptibly for curiosity and suspense, quietly for surprise - yet fills in it, or invites the reader to do so with equal certitude, a a later point" (2003:521). What with "narrative" as metonymy out of the way, where and how would this statement exclude non-implied readers, actual, untrained, partisan, arbitrary? It allows for their making (picking, inventing, wishing on the narrative) their own temporary gaps, within the definitional limits of the terms: curiosity/suspense, surprise, or indeed temporariness, which perforce entails closure sometime. They may also (mis)read anything as firm closure, but evidently not vice versa. Nonresponse to overt authorized gap-filling (e.g., Trollope's about his heroine's future, Fielding's about Tom Jones's past, or Sherlock Holmes solving the mystery) would fall below the threshold of readership, just like comparable rock-bottom incompetences: blindness to glaring logical impossibility, unequality to problem rationale, or deafness to vocal gapping (e.g., in question form).
The same holds for permanent gaps. However and wherever opened by whoever, they by definition "outlast the narrative encounter to leave the product itself gapped" (2003:522): another self-defeating quote. And similarly with "the forks that sooner or later turn out imaginary … yet nevertheless energize and shape the overall experiential process" (ibid.:544). Who hasn't grappled with incertitudes that resolved themselves in narrated time, hasn't envisaged futures left unrealized, hasn't smarted from the belated discovery of one's mistaken images or judgments, and hasn't experienced the sense, even the lessons, of trial-and-error? The commonality again persists across the widest differences in reading, as in narrative, performance.
Yet Elfenbein finishes by trying to have it both ways. "Standards of coherence," he asserts, would offer an alternative to the implied reader, namely, "the degree of comprehension that a reader attempts to attain during the reading of the text." But those fancied "standards" are not only ill-defined and unoperational - beyond standardizing - too obviously so to require the detailing of their inadequacies to this purpose or any other. Viability apart, they beg all the questions projected onto my argument and countered in my rebuttal. E.g., if standards of coherence and comprehension exist, then why not (generic) universals? Does any standard tolerate blindness to flagrant incoherences? What is it that the comprehender comprehends, and how divorceable from communication, especially given that the lowest standard must form a basic common ground and threshold? If so, where to draw the line of commonality? Wouldn't the highest standard entail an implied reader? Inversely, wouldn't every standard incur "personification"? And so forth. Let me just invite you to detect the holes and self-contradictions packed into one sentence: "Naive readers who take Finnegan's Wake [sic] to the beach hoping for a fluffy afternoon's read … may find that their standards of coherence are completely inadequate to Joyce's text and their mental representation will not bring about the desired result." The substitute concept falls between the stools.
Throughout, in brief, the hidden drive surfaces on scrutiny: not content with the room left by my theory for variations in the reading subject and the reading itself, Elfenbein would negate a priori all communicative intersubjectivity. This without declaring the extreme model, from premises upward, opposing it to mine and to the cognitivist rule, or thinking it through. A more productive approach would be to highlight the crux at issue, articulate the alternatives, and weigh (if necessary, qualify or even cross) them in the light of the relevant data, tests, standards. The inquiry would then open with the question behind the polarity at silent strife here. In the plainest terms, is discourse-making the business of the solipsistic mind or the interaction of one mind with another on some joint (con)textual ground?

1. Nothing to do with Wolfgang Iser's heterogeneous namesakes: yet another terminological coincidence, which I repeatedly sorted out in the overview under discussion and earlier works. [back]

Document created January 26th 2004