Naming and Believing: Practices of the Proper Name in Narrative Fiction

Abstract

1.1 The power of discourse to construct realities is widely asserted in contemporary literary theory. But what exactly is this power? Surely it is only the divine word which can call into existence a mind-independent, external reality which we can all experience in our common life world! The constructive power of discourse in purely human circumstances is much more modest, and could be characterized as the ability to give rise to mental (cognitive) representations, discourse domains, or belief worlds in the minds of individuals, or to belief worlds shared by members of a group. Such discourse domains may be construed as worlds of the mind, which may or may not correspond to any external, intersubjective reality. Semiotic means of some kind (sounds, letters, words, phrases, sketches, etc.) serve in all such cases as both initiators and underpinnings of the resultant mental representation. One particular kind of mental representation or discourse domain consists of spatio-temporal frameworks containing both individual entities with their properties and relations and dynamic situations, that is, changing configurations of the relations between these entities. Such dynamic frameworks are the cognitive correlate of the narrative discourse type, be it factual or fictional. For it is not the semiotic or cognitive dimension as such that distinguishes the factual from the fictional, but rather the correspondence, or lack thereof, between a mental representation and an external situation. The power of discourse to give rise to a cognitive domain is most evident when we have access to the mental operations through which this domain gets established and subsequently modified, and when these operations occur in a well-defined and well-circumscribed [End Page 107] setting. This power is enhanced if the given discourse is the only currently available source of information for the corresponding cognitive domain construction, and it is maximal when the discourse is the only possible source of information about a given domain—namely, when we are dealing with a pure verbal invention, with a world whose very (mental) existence depends crucially and exclusively on a specific semiotic object (discourse, picture, film, etc.). This dependency is of the same nature whether the pragmatic status of the discourse is that of a lie or of a creative artistic invention. The difference between the two will manifest itself rather in the different behavioral disposition the cognitive frame evokes in the individual in whose mind it exists, once she has assigned, at least pro tempore, a pragmatic status to the corresponding discourse.