Jahn, Manfred. 2000.

"Stanley Fish and the Constructivist Basis of Postclassical Narratology".

Reitz, Bernhard; Rieuwerts, Sigrid, eds. Anglistentag 1999 Mainz:
Proceedings. 375-387.
Contents
1. Ambiguity and context
2. Additional evidence on processing effects
3. The locus of context
4. Recontextualisation and the "shaping-eye" hypothesis
5. Conclusion: the constructivist model
Notes
List of Works Cited
Stanley Fish is on record for holding that literary theory in general and narratology in
particular are "impossible" projects. Narratologists usually reciprocate by marking
him down as counterproductive or by pointedly ignoring what he is saying. The
present essay, however, argues that narratologists can learn much from Fish's notion
of a "literature in the reader." It begins by reviewing the phenomenon of ambiguity, a
topic that has attracted a certain amount of renewed attention in recent readingoriented approaches, and by reorienting and supplementing Fish's examples with the
test cases cited in cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, and artificial intelligence. Fish's
process-oriented analysis of ambiguity is seen as paving the way toward a cognitive
model of context on the one hand and to an account of "recontextualisation" heuristics
on the other. Building on Fish's recontextualisation experiments, the essay makes an
attempt to identify the axioms that characterise the new narratological projects.

1. Ambiguity and context

One of the most serious flaws of classical narratology was that it allowed itself to be
trapped in an atomistic-holistic doublebind. Seeing a story as a finished product,
classical narratology crafted the tools, first, to take it to pieces, and then, to
reassemble the pieces to explain the final state. Working both bottom-down from the
finished product as well as bottom-up from seemingly independent small units
(themselves deduced from the final product), classical narratologists not only accepted
the paradoxical rationale of the hermeneutic circle but at the same time turned a blind
eye to the dynamics of the text-reader interface that creates stories, plots, characters,
and narrative situations in the first place.
The distinction between "text-as-product" and "discourse-as-process" (Brown and
Yule 24), which highlights the aporias of the classical approach, is typically
demonstrated by referring to the cognitive heuristics of disambiguation.
Unfortunately, many of the strikingly contrarious positions on ambiguity tend to get
sidetracked by a centripetal question -- the question whether "true" ambiguity exists at
all. Consider the following selection of fairly recent views.
(1)

In real life -- that is, among real language users -- there is no such thing as ambiguity.
(Mey, Pragmatics 7)
(2)
Narrowly defined, almost every utterance is ambiguous. In fact, almost every
utterance is multiply ambiguous, with possible semantic interactions among its
individual ambiguous constructions. [. . .] it is thus quite typical for an utterance to
have dozens, or [End of p. 375] even hundreds, of possible propositional
interpretations. However, speaker and hearer are normally able to select a single one
of these interpretations without even realizing that they have made a choice. It is
generally agreed that this choice is a function of the context; but to define the
function, as opposed to claiming that it exists, is no easy task. (Sperber and Wilson,
"Irony" 298)
(3)
[A] reader-oriented analysis of a text [. . .] can take the name "formalism" -- or "new
formalism," if you like -- as a positive label. Its rhetorical purpose, then, is to call
attention to the relative but crucial place of "good reading" [. . .] in the sense that,
whatever its ambiguities, the word "cat" is a noun and not a verb, and refers to an
animal, not an inanimate object, a mammal, not a fish, a singular not a plural, and the
like; it is the opposite of obviously bad reading. [my] essays [. . .] try to formulate a
framework for interpretations of narratives which bridges the gap between the text in
its structured complexity and its effect upon its readers. (Bal, Story -Telling 11)
Presupposing a pragmatically rich environment of face-to-face communication, Jacob
Mey considers ambiguity a distractive subject not meriting closer investigation.
Against this, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson stress (i) the pervasiveness of
ambiguity in natural language, (ii) the cognitive relevance of ambiguity, particularly
the computational effort involved in the resolution of ambiguity, (iii) the role of
context as a disambiguating factor, and (iv) the extent of our ignorance in these
matters. Lastly, quote (3) presents a view from a narratological perspective,
tentatively suggesting a compromise position. Assuming that there are "good
readings" that are free of, or uncontaminated by, ambiguity, Mieke Bal proposes to
rescue the narratological project on the methodological basis of "formalism."
Formalism, as illustrated in Bal's example of the word cat, can be put to work on both
the nonambiguous (positive) meanings of the word as well as on its complement (i.e.,
non-cat) meanings. Hence formalism affords a decision procedure for distinguishing
good from bad readings. Let us focus on good readings, Bal suggests, and narratology
is in business, again.
Generally speaking, most modern narratologists will be happy with Bal's aims as
expressed in (3). Like Bal, narratologists today believe in the teachability of
narratology and the heuristic usefulness of models. Like Bal, they want to view texts
in their "structured complexity," moving from a "reader-oriented analysis" to a
systematic appreciation of "effects." Unlike Bal, however, many narratologists will be
reluctant to use the term "formalism" for this kind of undertaking. They are also likely
to question whether it is a good idea (i) to divide a text into ambiguous and
unambiguous regions, and (ii) to let analysis focus on those parts that are

unambiguous. In fact, Bal's notion of a safe area of non-ambiguity flies in the face of
a widespread consensus that ambiguity is a central aspect of literary texts, possibly
even a necessary condition. Moreover, the point so forcefully made by Sperber and
Wilson in (2) is a point about natural language in general. Indeed, under scrutiny,
Bal's seemingly commonsensical assumptions on the unambiguous aspects of the
word cat are the most vulnerable part of her argument. Presumably, the ambiguity
which Bal admits is that cat can refer to various types of felines (say, domestic and
wild cats). However, on the evidence of dictionaries like the OED or Webster's Third,
one finds that cat is exactly "multiply" ambiguous in Sperber and Wilson's sense, and
that means ambiguous to the order not [End of p. 376] of merely two, but of fifteen to
twenty meanings. On that basis, practically all of Bal's assertions about what a cat is
not turn out to be simply wrong. Contrary to what Bal believes is obvious, the larger
dictionaries advise us that cat can be used as a verb, can refer to a kind of fish (a
catfish), can refer to a number of objects or persons, and (at least arguably) can be a
plural as well as a singular.1 Even though it may seem unfair to challenge Bal's
example by holding it against two encyclopaedic sources, one cannot, to save Bal's
argument, exclude all specialist words, all trade names (cat: a caterpillar tractor), all
nicknames ("the cat has done it again -- won in three straight sets"), all shortened
forms (catfish; cat o' nine tails), all metonymic and metaphoric terms (a person
resembling a cat), all politically incorrect and misogynist terms (to go catting -- to
search for a sexual mate; cat -- a malicious woman). Paradoxically, then, Bal's
decidedly bad reading of cat demonstrates better than any other argument that the
realm of good readings is a horribly confined space and that the notion of restricted
ambiguity (or, conversely, of partial univocity) is a dead end. Hence, the
pervasiveness of ambiguity is best accepted without any qualification whatsoever.
Rather than Mey's claim of the non-relevance of ambiguity or Bal's notion of a safe
area of good readings the order of the day is Meir Sternberg's wholly uncompromising
"Proteus Principle" -- "the many-to-many correspondences between linguistic form
and representational function" (Sternberg, "Proteus" 112; see also Jahn, "Frames"
450).
Unfortunately, the Proteus Principle is an "anti-foundationalist" axiom, blocking the
road rather than opening a door or levelling the ground. Whoever wants to rebuild
narratology on such a negative foundation must accept ambiguity both as a stumbling
block (something to be got rid of) and something whose processual dynamics and
aesthetic significance is in urgent need of explanation. As it happens, this is where
Stanley Fish enters the picture.
Oddly enough, the key "ambiguity" is missing from the indexes of Is There a Text in
This Class and Doing What Comes Naturally, the two collections of essays that this
paper will mainly refer to. Yet the essays contained in these two volumes are full of
references to ambiguity, and an indexer could profitably arrange them under
subdescriptors such as "in literature," "in natural language," "in puns," "local,"
"global," "illocutionary," etc. In fact, it is mainly the type of "temporary" or
"resolvable" ambiguity that helps Fish argue his case for a "literature in the reader" (Is
There ch. 1). One of the examples adduced by Fish is the following passage from a
seventeenth-century sermon by Lancelot Andrewes.
(4)

He is found of them that seeke Him

not
but
of them that seeke Him [End of p. 377]
never
but found (qtd Is There 184)
Andrewes's text is clearly so difficult or -- in modern terms -- so uncooperative that an
impatient reader may easily give up. Yet, as Fish shows, the passage can be construed
in such a manner as to communicate a consistent and meaningful statement. The trick
is to realize that the first two lines, taken jointly, formulate a first proposition which is
then supplemented by a second proposition. To the first proposition He (God) is found
by those who do not seek him, the rest of the passage adds the corollary and by those
who do seek him he is always ("never but") found. Globally, then, the passage asserts
that God is found by everybody, whether they seek him or not. As messages go, this is
slightly anticlimactic, in fact it is as anticlimactic as a finished puzzle -- but here
Fish's point is precisely that the passage is valuable not for its ultimate message but
for the mental exercise that it affords as one labours over it. Recognition of this fact,
Fish says, slips through the net of all product-oriented formalist approaches because
"the only making of sense in a formalist reading is the last one." Fish, in contrast,
holds that "everything a reader does, even if he later undoes it, is part of the 'meaning
experience' and should not be discarded" (Is There 3-4).

2. Additional evidence on processing effects

The rift between product and process-oriented approaches is even stronger in
disciplines like linguistics and artificial intelligence (AI). Consider standard examples
such as the following:
(5)
Flying planes can be dangerous. (Chomsky 21)
(6)
Time flies like an arrow. (Brainerd 211)
In Chomskyan generative grammar, sentences like (5) are usually cited as evidence
that an adequate competence grammar must be able to account for all of its virtual
structural interpretations (whether an actual hearer in a specific situation is aware of
them or not). Structurally ambiguous sentences are also the AI researchers' favourite
examples for testing computational language-processing algorithms. To their delight,
AI programmers quickly discovered the heuristics that enabled them to produce great
numbers of virtual structural descriptions. As a matter of fact, their computers soon

outperformed ordinary humans in deriving all possible parses of items like (6) (which
actually admits of three readings). Then, to their dismay, the AI people found that
what was needed for practical applications was not a host of virtual parses, but the
human parser's "tunnel vision" (now considered a positive term) of seeing only
whichever "most likely" parse was demanded by the pressure of the context. And
oddly enough, even "zero" contexts apparently led to "most likely" parses. What was
happening here was little accessible to rational explanation, let alone computational
imitation. So intractable was the link between dismabiguation and context that many
AI researchers and many formal linguists decided to shelf the project of a "theory of
situations." Some AI theorists persevered, however, and in the mid-seventies, two
basic but workable AI models of context became known as "frame" and "script"
theories. Despite their [End of p. 378] obvious restrictions and shortcomings, the
concepts postulated in these theories were quickly taken up in the cognitive and social
sciences as well as in the humanities.2
One prominent linguist in the sixties took great pleasure in arguing against the grain
of his interpretive community's product orientation. Like Fish, Charles F. Hockett was
an inveterate inventor of intriguing test cases. (9), below, is one of them:
(7)
A man eating fish ...
... on Friday is not necessarily a Catholic.
... called the piranha is found in the tropical waters of Brazil.
... has an unbalanced diet. (Hockett, "Grammar" 226)
Hockett's test case is clearly only mildly ambiguous if enunciated carefully or spelled
more helpfully, if listened to attentively or read in maximally conscious awareness. (It
is questionable, however, whether such "ideal" scenarios ever come up in real life, or
whether cognitive processing ever depends on them.) At any rate, what Hockett wants
to focus on in (7) is the disambiguating function of subsequent context. As a sentenceinitial fragment, a man eating fish is locally ambiguous because it may (be understood
to) refer to a man who likes to eat fish or to some kind of predatory fish. If the
sentence continues on Friday is not necessarily a Catholic then a man eating fish
refers to a piscivorous man; if the sentence continues called the piranha is found in
the tropical waters of Brazil the phrase is understood as referring to a hominivorous
fish; and if it continues has an unbalanced diet then neither reading is suggested or
confirmed and further disambiguating evidence is needed. The question raised by
Hockett is this: when we hear a man eating fish, do we suspend processing of the text
until some disambiguating clue comes up as further context rolls by; or do we settle
for one of the readings immediately, making a stab at it and accepting the ill chance of
going wrong, accepting also the possible necessity of having to backtrack and to
revise?
Hockett's answer to this was that readings are always construed as early and quickly
as possible, and this hypothesis is strikingly confirmed on the evidence of the socalled garden-path effect. The prototypical garden-path sentence is (8), an item

invented by Thomas G. Bever; item (9) shows Hockett's awareness of the

phenomenon, even though he does not identify it by the garden path term.
(8)
The horse raced past the barn fell. (Bever 316; Marcus ch. 9)
(9)
After John had started the car pulled up to the curb. (Hockett, "Where the Tongue
Slips" 238)
As one can see, both (8) and (9) begin as seemingly ordinary sentences and then cause
a sudden processing difficulty requiring backtracking and revision. Bever's example is
[End of p. 379] rather a debilitating garden path -- one has (to be told) to re-interpret
the initial segment as "the horse that was raced past the barn" to see that (8) is, after
all, a perfectly grammatical sentence. Hockett's own example, (9), presents a rather
milder garden path, easily "cured," in its written incarnation, by the insertion of a
comma. (Note, however, that the common impulse to emend [8] to read ... past the
barn and fell would have to count as a misreading.) As has been recognised since, the
garden-path effect is quite a general phenomenon that can also occur in jokes, riddles,
and other narrative genres, including fiction. To point up the narratological relevance
of literary garden paths, consider the following passages from Ambrose Bierce's "An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," the story of a man who is about to be hanged.
(10)
As Peyton Farquhar fell straight downward through the bridge he lost consciousness
and was as one already dead. [. . .] Then all at once, with terrible suddenness the light
about him shot upward with the noise of a loud splash; a frightful roaring was in his
ears, and all was cold and dark. The power of thought was restored: he knew that the
rope had broken and he had fallen into the stream. [. . .]
[Five pages of text follow, depicting Farquhar's successful escape and his arrival at
home, where he is greeted by his wife.]
Ah, how beautiful she is! He springs forward with extended arms. As he is about to
clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light
blazes all about him with the sound like the shock of a cannon -- then all is darkness
and silence!
Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to
side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek Bridge. (13, 18)
This closing passage is the story's surprise ending, and it produces the precise
phenomenological shock that attends other garden-path constructions. Instructively,
the point at which the reader is led astray can be pinpointed exactly -- it is the diegetic
statement that Peyton Farquhar "knew that the rope had broken and he had fallen into

the stream." For an authorial narrator to assert that Farquhar knew that p means to
assert that p is factually true in the world of this fiction (this follows from the logic of
so-called factive expressions such as know). Naturally, a reader prefers to believe that
an authorial narrator would not assert what s/he knows to be false. It is only in
retrospect that one can activate a fall-back frame of interpretation, recuperating good
sense by assuming that the narrator picks this particular point in the story to delegate
focalization to the focalizer, relinquishing his or her mimetic authority in the process.3

3. The locus of context

Targeting formalism at large, Fish derides all discovery procedures that are "incapable
of finding value in temporal phenomena" (Is There 155). Narratology, in Fish's view,
is a system of "formidable apparatuses" (Doing 567n2) in which the "practitioner [. . .]
gives himself over to the theoretical machine, surrenders his judgement to it, in order
to reach conclusions that in no way depend on his education, or point of view, or [End
of p. 380] cultural situation" (Doing 319). This is all the more remarkable, Fish
argues, when it can be easily shown that even meaning and truth are often (perhaps
always) dependent on situational factors.
(11)
In the penultimate chapter of How To Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin presents a
sentence and asks us to consider it. The sentence is "France is hexagonal," and the
question he puts to it is a very familiar one in analytical philosophy: Is it true or false?
The answer is not so familiar. It depends, says Austin: "I can see what you mean by
saying that it is true for certain intents and purposes. It is good enough for a topranking general, perhaps, but not for a geographer" (p. 142). I[n] other words, the
truth or falsehood of a sentence is a function of the circumstances within which it is
uttered, and since it is always uttered within some set of circumstances or others, it is
not in and of itself either true or false, accurate or inaccurate, precise or imprecise. (Is
There 197)
Going one step further than Austin, Fish subsequently claims that it is not even the
situation per se that is relevant, but the construction of the situation in the mind of the
person hearing or articulating the true-or-false judgement. Context, Fish concludes, is
in the mind. It is a position that seems to be gaining ground: as Sperber and Wilson
argue at length more recently, context is never objectively given but always actively
chosen (Relevance ch. 3.3).

4. Recontextualisation and the "shaping-eye" hypothesis

The crucial strategic move in Fish's (and Austin's) explication of France is hexagonal
is to "reconceive" the utterance in different situations. Recontextualisation is a
"constructivist" procedure whose surprise potential is in many ways reminiscent of
that of garden paths.4 In the realm of literary interpretation, the most radical example
is Fish's famous Buffalo experiment, reported in "How To Recognize a Poem When
You See One" (Is There ch. 14). In this experiment, Fish presented a list of names to a

class of poetry students asking them to interpret it as a religious poem. Supposing that
Fish's account is to be trusted (see Scholes for a critical comment) Fish's students
acquitted themselves surprisingly well:
(12)
As soon as my students were aware that it was poetry they were seeing, they began to
look with poetry-seeing eyes, that is, with eyes that saw everything in relation to the
properties they knew poems to possess. [. . .] Skilled reading is usually thought to be a
matter of discerning what is there, but if the example of my students can be
generalized, it is a matter of how to produce what can thereafter be said to be there.
Interpretation is not [End of p. 381] the art of construing but the art of constructing.
Interpreters do not decode poems: they make them. (Is There 326-27)
It is at this point, precisely, that Fish executes a markedly constructivist turn.
Unfortunately, he neither proceeds to embrace constructivism as a discipline nor does
he enter into a dialogue with "radical" constructivists such as Heinz von Foerster, Paul
Watzlawick, Humberto Maturana, or Siegfried J. Schmidt. Yet, to novices, his account
is both more plausible and didactically useful than anything offered by the dyed-inthe-flesh constructivists themselves. Constructivists have an unfortunate habit of
beginning their exposition by stating that the human mind is an "autopoietic system"
-- a jargon that, in a classroom, comes across as nothing but the usual bit of
intimidation. Fish's essay, in contrast, works well for students, arguing the case for
constructivism in both entertaining and enlightening fashion.
Even though in his subsequent work Fish turns to what he considers anti-theories,
embracing models like anti-foundationalism and deconstructivism, the questions
raised by his account continue to be relevant to literary theory in general, and
narratology in particular. Evidently, from Bal's formalist notion of "good readings" we
must progress to Fish's notion of situated readings, readings that "produce what can
[. . .] be said to be there" (Is There 327). To illustrate the impact of situatedness on a
specifically narratological scenario, let us briefly conduct a recontextualisation
experiment on a visual narrative. Consider the World War I propaganda poster shown
in (13).
(13)

Daddy, what did you do in the great war? (Hillier 234).

A picture says more than a thousand words, and the spectator's gaze may variously
focus on detail such as the pattern on the curtains, the characters' garments, the Alicelike appearance of the little girl, and so on. Apart from such descriptive detail, the
narrative action that one constructs is that of a boy playing with a set of tin soldiers, a
girl leafing through an illustrated journal, and a male adult (clearly, Daddy) sitting
bemusedly in his chair. Proxemic relations (the characters' use of space) further
suggest that it is the girl who asks the question quoted in the caption -- "Daddy, what
did YOU do in the Great War?" Expecting Daddy's conversational turn, the viewer
notes his troubled face, and the character's mind becomes as good as transparent:
Nothing, Daddy thinks, I did nothing to help the war effort; how can I live with this
shame (or something very much like it). The propaganda message to the public clearly
is, do not become somebody like Daddy.[End of p. 382]
Recontextualising the picture is easy. To begin with, let the story-NOW be not postWorld War I, but post-World War II; second, let the setting be not somewhere in the
United Kingdom, but somewhere in Germany. Now the girl's question acquires a
different slant, and Daddy may well think, Wish I had not done what I did! What
suggests itself here, then, is a reading whose "cognitive payoff" (Jahn, "Speak" 177)
easily supresses nonconfirmatory "facts" such as (i) that the original artist could not
possibly have intended such a reading, or (ii) that the expression "Great War" more or

less unambiguously refers to World War I. Clearly, the recontextualised reading is not
a good reading in Bal's sense; however, the question at this point is not whether one
[End of p. 383] reading is good, one bad; or one superior, and one inferior; or one
correct, one incorrect -- rather, what is relevant is that, given the beliefs and memories
of a culturally situated interpretive community, the second reading will come naturally
and inescapably. Essentially, the first and "intended" interpretation of the picture is
based on the same cognitive principles that produce other (but not necessarily "bad")
readings in a different contexts.

5. Conclusion: the constructivist model

Like all approaches, constructivism must define its conception of three basic
concepts: expressions, mental models, and reality. While many semiotic-triangle type
models make an attempt to establish a firm link between expression and reality (either
by positing a signifier/signified relation or an expression/referent relation),5 the
constructivist view denies the existence of "objective" correlatives or referents, and
prefers to consider reality as a mere pattern of stimulations, "a succession of noises or
marks," as Fish puts it (Doing 295). Secondly, the relationship between expressions
and mental models is taken to be governed by the Proteus Principle. Thirdly, the
relationship between reality and mental models is one of "seeing X (reality) as Y." Y,
in this formula, is a Peircean "interpretant" (Morris 2-3; Peirce 2.228), a product of
mental operations, interpretive strategies, and preference rule systems (Jackendoff,
Semantics ch. 8). It is these operations and strategies that are the prime explicanda in a
constructivist analysis.6
A constructivist conception of the expression/mental-models/reality triad informs
most branches of what has come to be known as "postclassical narratologies"
(Herman, "Narratologies"), especially the subdisciplines of historiographic
narratology, postmodernist narratology, feminist narratology, possible-worlds
narratology, constructivist narratology, and natural narratology. These postclassical
approaches have all acquired a better awareness of the processual character of texts,
they pursue more or less pronounced cognitive orientations, and they make a
dedicated attempt to situate narrative in the cultural and historical contexts of
interpretive communities. Five positions, in particular, stand out as postclassical
narratological beliefs.
1. Proteus rules OK. Postclassical narratology prefers the Proteus Principle over the
principle of univocity. Despite the fact that the Proteus Principle presents a negative
and complicating condition, it enables the critic to recognise that texts materialise in a
process of reversible decisions, and that text and world can only be interpreted in the
frames and scripts of culturally inherited mental contexts.[End of p. 384]
2. Narratives are both products and processes. Classical narratological models arrive
at their categories of events and existents by considering the text as a finished product
and judging all textual detail from a global and retrospective view. Process-oriented
analyses, in contrast, focus on the stepwise integration and combination of textual
information, paying due attention to backtracking and revision. Both Sternberg
(Expositional Modes) and Perry draw attention to literary uses of cognitive "primacy"
and "recency" effects in story construction and characterisation; Perry, in particular,

presents an account that establishes "a place for rejected meanings" (355). Ultimately,
the main goal of the cognitive approach must be to develop a combined process-andproduct model, one that builds complex conceptual structures by cumulatively
integrating local interpretive decisions, including wrong turns (for an example, see the
model proposed in van Dijk and Kintsch).
3. Narratives are interpretively situated. Rather than pursue the project of drawing up
a timeless inventory of abstract laws and categories, postclassical narratology
reconsiders and redefines its units in the shaping contexts of historical, cultural, and
pragmatic parameters. One of the liberating consequences of situatedness is that texts
and genres are no longer definable by sets of inherent qualities. It is a commonplace
today that something can be read "either as literature or as history" or that "the same
sentence can have different meanings in poetry and prose" (Culler, Structuralist 123).
4. Story is an interpretant; mimesis is an effect. While classical narratology strictly
distinguishes between discourse as narrative's signifier and story as narrative's
signified, the assumption that action is something that exists "prior to" and
"independently of narrative presentation" is strongly challenged by Jonathan Culler,
who identifies story "not as the reality reported by the discourse but as its product"
("Fabula" 28-9). Culler's position is clearly related to Fish's argument that readers
"make" texts and that signifiers have no objective correlates in a world of signifieds or
referents. Postclassical narratology today generally acknowledges that story, causality,
and chronology are readerly constructs. Similarly, mimesis is no longer assumed to
present an imitative picture of the world; indeed, mimesis does not even work for the
narrative of verbal events because fictional speech, as Fludernik has shown, is an
evocation of speech rather than an imitation or a reproduction (Fictions ch. 8).
5. Last but not least, cognitively oriented narratologies are likely to heed Wallace
Chafe's advice that "the study of narratives can help us understand the workings of the
mind" (96). According to Fish, an interpretive community supplies its members with
the "standard stories" that situate "contextless" sentences and fill zero contexts with
default settings. Using a variety of metaphors, theorists from various disciplines have
suggested that a person's life plans are scripted on fairy-tales (Berne), that "everyone
is a novelist" structuring his or her own life story (Dennett), that everyone has a
"narrative identity" (Ricoeur), and that memory is a database of stories retrievable by
a procedure called "reminding" (Schank). A number of mental narrativising devices
were in fact already noted by Cohn in her analysis of "memory monologues" (ch. 6),
and Mark Turner has recently demonstrated that "most of our experience, our
knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories" (i). Evidently, "mental narrative"
[End of p. 385] is not just a subject in search of interdisciplinary treatment but also a
challenge for a constructivist narratology that adapts and modifies itself as it grows.

Notes
1. Neither of the larger dictionaries explicitly lists a plural meaning of cat. I am
assuming, however, that a fisherman talking to another fishermen would be more
likely to say "Plenty of cat [=catfish] around" than "Plenty of cats around."

2. See Minsky ("Framework") and Schank and Abelson (Scripts) for the founding
proposals of frame and script theory. For a narratological exploitation of these
concepts, see Perry ("Literary Dynamics"), Fludernik's The Languages of Fictions and
Towards a "Natural" Narratology, as well as the essays by Jahn listed in the
references.
3. For further discussions of garden-path stories, see Perry ("Literary"), Mey
("Pragmatic"), and Jahn ("Speak").
4. As has been noted elsewhere, recontextualisation may serve both analytic and
creative purposes. One of the most striking instances of the latter is William Carlos
Williams's famous "plums poem" -- see Jonathan Culler (Structuralist 175) for a
specific and Franz Stanzel for a more general account of what is now generally
termed "found poetry." Recontextualisation also underlies many intertextual
phenomena, especially the relationship between a text and its pretext(s).
5. See Whiteside for a useful survey of triangular semiotic models.
6. On a more general level, it is also legitimate to inquire into the "ecological
viability" of interpretive strategies, including those that may lead to misinterpretations
(Jackendoff, "Problem" 161). One recent view (actively pursued by AI researchers) is
that our ability to perceive, think and speak the way we do is directly related to our
being misled in certain circumstances (ambiguities, optical illusions, garden paths,
and so on).

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