IMAGINATION VS. IMAGERY

Another issue that concerns the understanding of “world-theories” and such metaphoric expressions as “transportation” and “immersion” is that they could be taken to explain a semantic process, psychological reactions, or both. Theoreticians who advocate a putative “epistemic” approach would thus claim that these theories both clarify how readers make sense of “To Kill a Child” and why the story affects them.

A major objective of those studying narrative comprehension is to understand the nature of reading. In literary studies, the mental pro-cesses involved in converting texts into rich and complex cognitive representations are often taken for granted. However, from a linguis-tic and psychological point of view, there is a significant amount still to be learned about the way in which readers move from perceiving mere strings of words on the pages of books to the sensation of being so immersed in different worlds that they feel as if they are witness-ing events and experiencwitness-ing the emotions of characters […]. These worlds have been called “narrative worlds,” “texts worlds,” and “sto-ryworlds” by different researchers.

(Emmott 2005, 351)

Ryan explains (see her chapter in this volume) the psychological process as a game of pretense:

If one applies this conception of possible worlds to narrative fiction, fictional worlds will be created by the mind of authors for the ben-efit of audiences. Readers, spectators or players relocate themselves in imagination into these worlds, pretending that they are actual. In the best cases, this game of pretense results in an experience of immersion in the fictional world.

(Ryan 1991) Theoreticians who describe the reading of fiction in terms of world-making, as Emmott and Ryan do in the passages quoted, could be taken to suggest either that the construction of a mental model and experiences of “pres-ence” are two sides of the same coin or that the construction of a world is a necessary prerequisite for feelings of presence. Anežka Kuzmičová, who claims in her doctoral dissertation that it is a misunderstanding of the theory of immersion to assume that theoreticians imply that readers are “following the narrated events from ‘within’ the storyworld, exclusively and consis-tently, throughout the entire text” (Kuzmičová 2013, 70), could perhaps be taken to assume the latter option.

Kuzmičová suggests that we should distinguish between “imagery” and

“imagination.” She studies “imagery” from the perspective of what is called second generation cognitive studies, and focuses on “embodied cognition.”

Assuming that there is a connection between the unconscious neurologi-cal or muscular reactions (simulations) that occur when we come across phenomena in the real world and what we experience when reading fiction, she uses “imagery” to denote “simulations” that reach our consciousness so that we can reflect about them. Yet, “imagery” is also, as some kind of spontaneous near-sensory phenomena, separated from voluntary evoked

“imaginations.”

Kuzmičová distinguishes between two domains of imagery, each compris-ing two variants. The domain “referential imagery” consists of “enactment imagery” and “description imagery,” “verbal imagery” of “speech-imagery”

and “rehearsal-imagery” (2013, 29ff.).

“Enactment imagery” is described as short sensations of vicarious experi-ence. A prerequisite for this kind of imagery is that there is an experiencer in the narrative. Kuzmičová refers to the study of mirror neurons and sug-gests that “enactment imagery” occurs when characters are said to have sensorimotor experiences, preferably in direct interaction with their physi-cal environment (2013, 31). “Description-imagery” is a “semi-autonomous experience” that is mediated via a verbal filter. The imager’s embodied mind is in this case “situated outside the storyworld” (2013, 32).

Kuzmičová challenges the common notion that description causes expe-riences of presence. She asserts instead, as we have noted, that readers have

certain sensorimotor simulations when characters interact with objects in their environment. Descriptions, on the other hand, do not correspond to any kind of perceptual experience in the real world, and they are thus not perceptually mimetic. Yet, this kind of mimesis can occur if there is an experiencer in the fiction through whom readers’ may, as it were, perceive.

Kuzmičová claims that this suggestion is confirmed by the fact that readers tend to skip long descriptions or read them fast and forget them. If, after all, we “see something” it can be described as voluntary imagination, as for example when we try to imagine a particular car model (2013, 90).

However, not even this is common in reading, since many descriptions in fiction are too complicated and long-winded. The second domain, “ver-bal imagery” comprises, as we have seen, “speech-imagery” and “rehearsal imagery.” In the former variant we have the sensation of hearing a voice that is not our own but the voice of a character, while the latter variant resembles inner speech since we hear our own voice reading the words of the text. It is, Kuzmičová asserts, possible that these simulations occur constantly but that they only impinge on our consciousness and become imagery occasionally.

Studies such as Kuzmičová’s could be taken to explain what metaphors like transportation, relocation, and immersion refer to. Yet, I am not sure that Kuzmičová and “world-theoreticians” or scholars like Bortolussi and Dixon are talking about the same thing. This relates to the ambiguity, which I have already referred to, of the theories of “world-making” and metaphor-ical terms such as transportation, for instance. They could, firstly, indicate that readers construct mental models and that they relocate to these models in their minds. This is a semantic suggestion. It does not necessarily mean that readers who construct storyworlds or draw inferences “feel as if they are witnessing events and experiencing the emotions of characters” (Emmott 2005, 351). The terms could secondly refer to “imagery” in the sense of sensations of presence. This distinction is important, because a “separatist”

could argue that one does not need to accept the semantic theory to be able to explain readers’ experiences of presence.

Kuzmičová’s psychological suggestions are thus not incompatible with an approach that holds that readers are affected by the aesthetic impact of a literary work of art. Adherents of such an approach can very well find it rea-sonable to suggest that readers experience “presence” when reading “To Kill a Child” although so much is unspecified—and remains unspecified—since readers do not need to construct a voluntary imagination of the child, the car, etc., because characters (experiencers) constantly interact with items in their environment. They open car doors, feel the sun in their eyes, shave, set the breakfast table, open gates, hold pieces of sugar in their hands, imagine what it will be like to row a small boat in the river or swim in the sea, etc.

Yet, they would probably point out that the mimetic effect that Aristotle refers to is not created by these effects but by the genre and the conveyed notion that life is “constructed in a merciless fashion.”

It could even be argued that Kuzmičová’s study—I am not sure she would agree about this—can be taken to challenge the “epistemic” approach, since the “imagery” to which she refers appears to be occasional sensations rather than effects based on readers’ transportation to mental models of a world.

Moreover, the sensations she describes imply that readers appreciate literary fiction with a peculiar and specific attention. They thus tend to see or hear things when these sensations are cued either by mirror effects or by seman-tic effects like when the voice as it were of the narrator or of a character really becomes (or functions as) a “voice,” that is a voice that holds a certain perspective.