Toward a cognitive theory of literary character: the dynamics of mental-model construction

Style, Winter, 2001 by Ralf Schneider

Miss Bronte was struck by the force or peculiarity of the character of some one she knew; she studied it, and analyzed it with subtle power; and having traced it to its germ, she took that germ as the nucleus of an imaginary character, and worked outwards;--thus reversing the process of analyzation, and unconsciously reproducing the same external development.

Elizabeth Gaskell on Bronte's Shirley in The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857)

1. A Cognitive Perspective on Literary Character

Mrs. Gaskell's statement about Charlotte Bronte's method of creating characters hints at the double nature of literary characters: on the one hand, they are based on real-life experiences with living persons; on the other, they are the result of processes of literary construction. (1) Whereas Gaskell looks to the author's contribution to construction, my aim is to look at literary character from the point of view of readers and to elucidate what effects this doubleness has on their experience of encountering characters in fiction. (2) It may be a truism to say that the reading of literary texts is a process in which textual information interacts with the reader's knowledge structures and cognitive procedures. (3) But in literary text-analysis the constraints on literary understanding that arise from the interactive nature of the reading process are rarely acknowledged. Whereas a number of theorists from Iser through to Perry and Phelan have paid attention to the dynamic aspects of narrative, such attention is by no means the rule, and categories for text analysis still tend to highlight the nondynamic, structural side. For the analysis of literary character, there exist some categories that at least show an awareness of the dynamics of reception. In a famous distinction between flat and round characters, implying such awareness, E. M. Forster defines flat characters as those who "are easily recognized," whereas round characters are "capable of surprising" (Aspects of the Novel 74, 81); for the experience of recognition and surprise, the reader must previously have established mental representations and expectations. Other categories, such as the well-known differentiation between static and dynamic characters, fail to account for these dynamics: to decide whether a character is static or dynamic, the reader would have to wait until he or she has read the whole book, since changes in the character's traits may occur late in the story. Of course, readers start forming impressions of characters from the very beginni ng of the reading process on, and from a reader-oriented point of view, the question is not whether a character is static or dynamic, but, rather, when and under which conditions he or she appears static or dynamic to the reader.

Even the categories aware of the temporal dimension of understanding seldom offer any detailed description of how the dynamic processing strategies of the reader interact with the successive presentation of information in the text. Drawing on results from cognitive psychology and cognitive social psychology, as well as from research in discourse processing, I attempt to capture the quality of this interaction more precisely than the more text-oriented, structuralist approaches have been able to do. My theory-building is similar to that of Richard Gerrig in his Experiencing Narrative Worlds (1993), in that my method attempts to align psychological models of the workings of cognition and emotion in text understanding with the description of textual properties. (4) In such an alignment, the interaction between reader and text appears, above all, as a dynamic process, for the framework of cognitive psychology affords a view not only on such general constraints on information processing and text-understanding as l imitations on working memory, but also on the interaction of bottom-up and top-down processing in using inference and forming hypotheses, activating schemas, and constructing categories. (5) More specifically, in my model, understanding literary characters requires our forming some kind of mental representation of them, attributing dispositions and motivations to them, understanding and explaining their actions, forming expectations about what they will do next and why, and, of course, reacting emotionally to them. All this happens through a complex interaction of what the text says about the characters and of what the reader knows about the world in general, specifically about people and, yet more specifically, about "people" in literature.

In contending that dynamic reading effects of character-reception can be explained more adequately if we describe literary characters from the reader's point of view and with the terminology of cognitive psychology, I follow a proposal made by Richard Gerrig and David Allbritton in an article published in Style in 1990. Their brief discussion of the general cognitive constraints of character-reception, however, requires considerable modification and elaboration if we want to arrive at a more detailed understanding of character-reception and at more adequate categories for the analysis of characters in novels, In a first step, I will therefore explicate my proposal to conceive of literary character as a mental model that the reader construes in the reading process through a combination of information from textual and mental sources. In this process of character construction, mechanisms of social cognition also play a crucial role, even though special conditions prevail due to the various textual sources of inf ormation on characters. In a second step, I will survey results from the study of discourse processing and social cognition, including emotional response, and will use them to describe the parameters of character-reception. In a third step, I will focus on the process rather than the structure of mental-model construction to examine dynamic reading effects. I will propose a flow-chart that tries to capture the most important dynamic stages of character-reception, and I will provide a set of categories for reader-oriented character analysis. While in my outline of a theory I will obviously need to make a number of simplifications, I intend neither to diminish the fullness of nor to restrict the range of experiences involved in understanding characters in narrative worlds. Instead, my theoretical model assumes that for a more refined theory of literary character as well as for empirical testing of such a theory we need first to formulate a heuristic framework that integrates results from empirical research--alb eit tentative--with narratological text analysis. Such a framework ought to be compatible with other observations, made in literary theory and empirical psychology, on the cognitive reality of narrative. My attempts to reformulate categories for character analysis in a way that is more sensitive to the mechanisms, dynamics and constraints of information processing in reading can therefore be understood to contribute to the development of a general "cognitive narratology." (6)