Arkady Martine: The Mysterious Discipline of Narratologists: Why We Need Stories to Make Sense | Tor.com: "Cognitive narratology.... All of those little functional devices—how do they get processed? How do different humans react differently to them? Why did medieval Byzantine historians put obviously fake trope events—like emperors riding bravely into battles they weren’t even present for—into histories the writers swore were true and reported fact? How come readers say they feel ‘cheated’ when an author doesn’t write the ending they expected? Why, for that matter, is it so hard for human beings right now in 2019 to recognize and understand information that contradicts a narrative they believe in very strongly? In short, I started thinking about why we want stories to make sense. At the heart of cognitive narratology—really, at the heart of the whole mysterious discipline of narratologists—is a concept called the ‘storyworld’. It was named by the cognitive narratologist David Herman, and it is both intuitively simple and has deep consequences for thinking about how people engage with narratives...
...A ‘storyworld’ can be defined as a possible world constructed by, not only the narrative on the page, but the cognitive results of the process of comprehending the story, cued by the author and experienced and completed by the reader. It is bigger than any one narrative. It is a sort of “mental model” of a universe, containing all of the events, persons, places, and interactions that make up the narrative, plus all of the possible events, persons, places, and interactions which might exist in a world where the narrative-as-perceived also exists. A storyworld is thus a co-created world between author and audience, bound by mutually held-in-common rules of causality and verisimilitude—an assembly of referents that tell us what kind of stories are true and what sequences of events are believable, given the evidence of the world presented in the narrative.... Storyworlds are..., not confined to genres that we traditionally consider ‘fiction’. A storyworld can also be ideological: “stories construed as strategies for building mental models of the world” applies just as well to conceptions of ‘how a state functions’ as it does to ‘what is a plausible event in a novel’.... If no readers blink when your handwavium whisks your protagonist away through a wormhole into a distant part of the galaxy, you’ve built the storyworld of your narrative convincingly enough that wormholes are a true and plausible thing. If you can convince Great-Uncle Malcolm that climate change is real, even though it is snowing outside, by asking him if it snowed more often when he was a child, then you’ve fit your information into his narrative of how the universe works: into the storyworld that governs his everyday interpretations. And that is the power of the mysterious discipline of narratologists: it tells us why stories make sense, and why we want them to so very desperately...
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