The narrative construction of reality - Narrative Intelligence - page 48

of constructing a narrative, moreover, is considerably more than “selecting”
events either from real life, from memory, or from fantasy and then placing
them in an appropriate order. The events themselves need to be constituted in
the light of the overall narrative - in Propp's terms, to be made “functions” of
the story. This is a matter to which we will return later.
Now let me return to “hermeneutic composability.” The telling of a story
and its comprehension as a story depend upon the human capacity to process
knowledge in this interpretive way. It is a way of processing that has, in the
main, been grossly neglected by students of mind raised either in the rational-
ist or in the empiricist traditions. The former have been concerned with mind
as an instrument of right reasoning, with the means we employ for establish-
ing the necessary truth inherent in a set of connected propositions. Piaget was
a striking example of this rational tradition. Empiricists, for their part, rested
their claims upon a mind capable of verifying the constituent “atomic propo-
sitions” that comprised a text. But neither of these procedures, right reason or
verification, suffice for explicating how a narrative is either put together by a
speaker or interpreted by a hearer. This is the more surprising since there is
compelling evidence to indicate that narrative comprehension is among the
earliest powers of mind to appear in the young child and among the most
widely used forms of organizing human experience (see, for example, Nelson
(1989) and Bruner (1990)).
Many literary theorists and philosophers of mind have argued that the act
of interpreting in this way is forced upon us only when a text of the world
to which it presumes to refer is in some way “confused, incomplete, cloudy...”
(Taylor 1985: 15). Doubtless we are more aware of our interpretive efforts when
faced with textual or referential ambiguities. But I would take strong exception
to the general claim that interpretation is forced upon us only by a surfeit of
ambiguity. The illusion created by skilful narrative that this is not the case, that
a story “is as it is” and needs no interpretation, is produced by two quite differ-
ent processes. The first should probably be called “narrative seduction.” Great
story tellers have the artifices of narrative reality construction so well mastered
that their telling preempts momentarily the possibility of any but a single in-
terpretation - however bizarre it may be. The famous episode of a Martian in-
vasion in the broadcast of Orson Welles's War of the Wor l ds provides a striking
example (Cantril 1940). Its brilliant exploitation of the devices of text, context,
and mis en scene predisposed its hearers to one and only one interpretation,
however bizarre it seemed to them in retrospect. It created “narrative neces-
sity,” a matter we understand much less well than its logical counterpart, logical
necessity. The other route to making a story seem self-evident and not in need