Abstract
In Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media, David Ciccoricco continues the quiet daring of the University of Nebraska Press’ interdisciplinary Frontiers of Narrative series. Written mostly by narratologists engaged with the disciplines most literary scholars are content to merely cop from, edited collections in the series such as The Emergence of Mind and Stories and Minds as well as Karin Kukkonen’s monograph Contemporary Comics Storytelling have functioned as models for emerging literary research at the intersection of cognitive science, phenomenology, and narrative theory.
Ciccoricco pushes this model even further in his own monograph by presenting a delicately organized group of case studies that strongly suggest the need for experimental psychologists and literary critics to open up dialogue once again. For, when considering the specific affordances of differing narrative media, the methods of visual perception–based literary criticism cannot be relied upon alone. Even when it seems to branch out, the troubling existence of continual unexamined references to Freud in mainline literary criticism and pedagogy betray that even the basic assumptions about the mental lives of characters in texts are decades out of date. For Ciccoricco, this is not just a problem to be solved by a new wave of interdisciplinary theorists or increased study of a “transmedial” narratology, it is a matter of seeing the road between psychology and literature as open and two-way: “Contextualizing cognitive-oriented approaches to literary studies in this manner, perhaps ironically, may point more urgently to the matter of being current rather than cutting-edge” (p. 16). His book is an excellent example of the fruitfulness of such an exchange.
The way he structures these points works as an argument in itself: attention and perception are paired in Part 1, and memory and emotion are paired in Part 2. Each part progresses through parallel chapters of increasingly “new” media through close analysis of two novels, two digital texts, and two video games. It is immediately apparent that the method this suggests is that to separate texts by medium, cognitive activity into categories, is mostly heuristic; in the grain of lived experience of felt meaning, either in daily life or through aesthetic engagement, literary and psychological terminology break down. To reconcile this, Ciccoricco identifies two key cognitive distinctions that seem essential to any textured experience of narrative: action/evaluation and representation/simulation.
The strongest chapters of Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media are the two that expand these distinctions in the context of attention and memory in video games. This is developed with the background of a conventional line of literary history that follows through purportedly revolutionary figuration of mind by writers such as Virginia Woolf and Henry James—who use free-flowing thoughts and complex layers of perspective shifts to better represent cognition—to later experiments that now have reached their zenith in refigured simulation of mind in interactive and immersive narrative media. But Ciccoricco warns that even if it is tempting to draw parallels with the form and affordances of contemporary digital media as advancing the realistic representation of mind, this implicit realism should be curbed. What is clearer and certainly more valid is how new media disrupts and forms new patterns of reception for readers and players, not necessarily “better” formal representation of mind and consciousness.
Thus, he turns his focus to the surprisingly reflective God of War, David Jaffe’s 2005 action-adventure hack and slash for the PlayStation 2. This chapter, “Playing with Memory,” is a productive and unique close analysis of both this best-selling video game—which superficially affords nothing but sensual engagement with its legalcontroversy-causing gore and sexuality—and the cognitive roots of the video game tropes it utilizes. Despite the proliferation of theory on games that focus on the dynamics of their interactivity as simulation, Ciccoricco highlights that this ignores the narrative and especially memory-based function of the conventional adventure game’s puzzle-fight-cutscene structure. After completing complex action-forward boss scenarios in God of War, what follows are increasingly reflective cutscenes of the protagonist’s history. The exchange between identification with the character through simultaneous action and response in the fast-paced gameplay and the engagement with backstory that structures the character’s motivation synthesizes into a “sharable narrative memory” of the player-character. In many video games of this kind, the high narrativity of the medium is largely fueled by “this process of constructing a sharable memory [that] at the same time serves as a reward system that feeds the player’s sense of achievement” (p. 196). This opens up a way of talking about video games as enactive narratives: they offer a procedural experience of memory through the unique interplay of action and reflection seated on the uncertain boundary between player and character. Unlike print or digital fiction, “players carry away with them an embodied memory of their enaction along with any interpretive evaluation of the represented storyworld” (p. 206). Both the direct excitement of gameplay and the intrigue left in the indeterminacies of a character’s backstory and this shared memory afford the player a rewarding narrative experience beyond any static model of the representation or simulation of cognition.
When Ciccoricco makes a claim such as this about the “machinations of memory,” he does so in good faith and with a well-utilized group of references that will be useful for both the cognitive scientist and the literary critic. For example, in the other chapter on video games, “Gameworlds and Sharing Attention,” he utilizes an intriguing mix of social cognition research and studies of figure-ground gestalts and applies them to the scale of myth and parable. While much of the experimental research on video games focuses on high-action games (like God of War), in order to test his hypothesis on perception and attention, Ciccoricco challenges this bias through the 2012 independent game Journey, an “interactive parable” (p. 95). Like all the narratives studied in Refiguring Minds, Journey privileges “the experiential quality over a hermeneutic one” (p. 120). This is in part a justification for the focus on the cognitive activity rather than the meaning of the parable or the use of mythic elements in the game’s story, but it is also a useful way to frame a phenomenologically rooted and therefore experimentally valid set of conclusions. In addition, it emphasizes the need for further experimental studies on the entire encounter with narrative experience in video games, akin to Richard Gerrig’s pioneering 1993 work on literary narrative, Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading, now a staple reference in cognitive-oriented literary studies.
The other four chapters are less engaging than these two on video games but are nonetheless valuable. Two focus on a direct intervention with the psychoanalytic bias in literary studies (through Freud, Jung) and will be mostly useful to—although they will likely not reach the ears of—those they rebut. The strongest analyses of print and digital media are those sections which veer away from traditional close reading of these texts (of which there are plenty) and use the methods and enactive focus developed in the two aforementioned chapters on video games. A good example of this is Ciccoricco’s willingness to shy away from currently popular focus on formal experimentation and antinarrative in The Mezzanine, a 1988 postmodern novel that has been receiving increased attention in the past several years. Instead, he begins to show how his model of enactive narrative can also apply to “fixed” representations of minds in novels (versus the interactive simulations or enactions of mind in video games). Such a mundane scenario as that of the novel’s primary storytime—the minute of traveling up an escalator makes up the “now” of the narrative telling—becomes the stage for memory and emotion to feed back into each other in their manifestation in the protagonist’s constant, meandering nostalgic flashbacks. He argues that the continual reflexive commentary in the novel on how or why the protagonist started reflecting on something as microscopic as the topography of a vinyl record is something more malleable than the postmodern propensity toward the nonlinear because “the novel can be said to incorporate antinarrative or counternarrative elements in order to underscore the other, nonnarrative ways that everyday minds operate” (p. 142). Ciccoricco powers this interesting reversal into an argument on how a focus on minds in texts can reveal to us something about the blind spots of postmodern criticism itself and its focus on irony at the expense of nostalgia and memory.
While Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media may be a bit too extended in its examples and length to do the focused work necessary to equip new interdisciplinary scholars to take the next step, it is encouraging to see an analysis of this kind take on theorization of narrative in a wide and inclusive range of literary and popular forms. As the feelers of literary theorists naturally extend to all types of texts, it becomes more and more apparent that this openness must extend across disciplinary boundaries in addition to medial boundaries. The specificity of different narrative media demands an open exchange with certain perceptual, emotional, and mnemonic universals being developed by cognitive science. If a dialogue is to occur about the cultural significance of these works, as well as the identification of novel experimental forms, readers and players alike must be met by both cognitive scientists and literary critics.