Forces and Spaces – Maupassant, Borges, Hemingway: Toward a Semio-Cognitive Narratology

Abstract

The aim of a cognitive narratology, as I see it, is to develop the literary and generally semiotic study of narratives through cognitive modeling, and to develop cognitive studies of mind and meaning by integrating insights from literary scholarship. In this article, I first examine the concept of narrative discourse (versus descriptive and argumentative discourse); second, I discuss the principles for distinguishing narrative subgenres (realistic, fantastic, marvelous, grotesque, absurd stories); and third, I propose a model of the constitutive architecture of narrative meaning as manifested by ‘good stories’, stories that make sense by conveying a view of the human condition.In order to develop and test the model, I analyze a selection of acknowledged literary masterpieces: three short stories by Guy de Maupassant (Deux amis, La ficelle, La parure), two by Jorge Luis Borges (Emma Zunz, La otra muerte), one by Ernest Hemingway (A very short story). Through these analyses, including succinct literary interpretations of the texts, a new view of narrative dynamics is outlined. Agents operate in spaces that have specific dynamic properties, in that they display characteristic forces determining acts and events. There is, I postulate, a canonical set of narrative spaces, each encompassing and contributing a significant part of the meaning of a story. The model distinguishes four such spaces, which are typically also staged as distinct locations; an initial conditioning space, a catastrophic space, a consequence space, and a conclusion space. Forces are described as causal or intentional. The causal forces are either trivial (habitual, regular, default, whether physical or social) or ‘fatal’ (special, contingent, singular). The intentional forces are agentive (volitive and located in agents) or magical (supernatural and non-agentive but still volitive). The scenario-framing, dynamically invested spaces are linked in a default diegetic order allowing forces to fire forwards and backwards, which explains how stories progress and end, and in particular, eventually, how they can mean what we report them to mean. Interpretation and interpretability depend on the dynamic ‘logic’ of this spatial diegesis, more than on reader identifications in a story, or on ideologies ascribed to the narrator.