Neuro-Narratology

1. The neurocognitive grammar of narration

A series of joint phenomena led first to the decline, then to the vigorous rebirth of a second-generation narratology, capable from the outset of overcoming the dichotomy between structure and story, text and context, permanence and variability. It is worth recalling the success of a study on narrativity observed from the point of view of the individual endosphere, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986), in which the American psychologist Jerome Bruner formulated a distinction between paradigmatic thinking (characteristic of the scientific sphere, hinged on the definition of abstract concepts) and sequential narrative thinking, in which the logical-temporal correlations between different elements allow us to photograph reality: according to Bruner, narratives only rely on the second cognitive mode, just as the ability to give an account of oneself with life stories would be based on four types of coherence – temporal, biographical, causal (the only one capable of explaining the difference between continuity and change), and thematic (where organised nuclei of arguments attract each other) – which are acquired only in adolescence.

This binary arrangement of thought according to a semantic or sequential structuring – which among other things has the drawback of increasing the distance between humanities and scientific disciplines – would soon be disproved, but Bruner has the undoubted merit of favouring a repositioning of narratology. Moreover, the shift in contextualist focus generated by the decline of structuralism led scholars to take an interest in everything that had remained outside the scientific community prior to the 1990s. At a time when the thresholds of literary narratives were becoming permeable to the context, favouring a free circulation of the contents of those texts, what regained vigour was thematology or Toposforschung, which had initially limited its interest to the identification of minimal textual units (known as themes or motifs), to the naming of themes (étiquetage), to the distinction between recurring elements (isotopies) and variable components (semantemes) in the certainty that an integrated semantics of literature could be achieved. Once that hope had collapsed, thematology turns its interest more to indexing the guiding ideas and logical-semantic nuclei formed in the longues durées, but less on the model indicated by Curtius (for the German Romanist, the topos was an indefinable cliché, which could contain micro-narratives, allocutive formulae, figurative relics of the past) and more on the model of Warburg’s Pathosformeln, linguistic representations of codified social practices and permanent traces of states of mind revealed by intensified mimicry, in the awareness that literary texts favour the sedimentation of human perceptive models.

Indeed, it was precisely on this terrain that narratology would soon afterwards encounter cognitivism and neuroscience (Bamberg, 2007). When we began to think of “themes” as processes of thematisation, structured and dynamic units of content capable of exerting a structuring action on the spatio-temporal dimensions and grammar of man’s communicative actions, the mind became the leading protagonist and ultimate guarantor of narrativity. The beginning of this new trend can be traced back to the publication of David Herman’s volume Story Logic (2002), in which for the first time neurocognitive sciences encountered problems and aspects that until then had been the domain of literary scholars and linguists. Herman marked an epistemological turning point in narratology by replacing Bruner’s erroneous dichotomy between scientific and narrative thinking with a unified vision of the cognitive processes underlying each story, and this thanks to the use of the concepts of schema and script.