On Comic Mental Imagery in Literature: The Case of Manolito Gafotas

Abstract

This essay deals with comic mental imagery in literature, that is, the aesthetic experience of reading a literary text and then suddenly finding yourself laughing at an image produced by your mind’s eye. This common experience, largely neglected by literary analysts, vividly illustrates what cognitive science calls “the embodied mind,” the human mind that turns symbols such as literary texts into “quasi-perceptual” mental imagery and responds emotionally to these quasi percepts. My essay investigates the imagery (or quasi percepts) I found myself laughing at while reading Elvira Lindo’s Manolito Gafotas—an enormous source of “verbally visual” humor. The analysis agrees with Wolfgang Iser that the readerly mind produces the images but that the text frames them on its own emotive terms: the comedic text functionalizes the imagery, and the imagery materializes and elaborates the emotion. Furthermore, the essay tentatively describes certain types of comic imagery, and it signals that imagined faces of characters play an important role in comic mental imagery—as is the case in plainly perceptual (audiovisual or theatrical) comedy. More generally, the essay constitutes a reader-response exercise that intends to awaken literary scholars to the topic of comic mental imagery in literature. It suggests that classical literary phenomenology (e.g., Iser’s reader-response approach) may inspire not only the more recent cognitive approaches to literature, but also those recent strands of embodied cognitive science that accept phenomenological analysis (methodical introspection) as an important component of knowledge construction about the human mind.