搬运丨叙事学家的神秘学科：为什么我们需要故事才能有意义 Arkady Martine

　我曾经生活在世界屋脊上，试图理解为什么有些故事会被保存几千年而其他故事会消失。我在那里度过了三年。我不是一个人：我的同事和我，都在苦苦思索关于叙述，讲故事和如何谈的方式让人们用讲故事，在过去的其他国家，当什么真和逼真和良好的讲故事的可能与我们现在对他们的意义完全不同。
　　
　　不，我没有加入一个致力于文化批评崇拜的修道院，位于遥远的北方。诺言。
　　
　　我是一名历史学家，我曾在乌普萨拉大学（Uppsala University）从事拜占庭（Byzantium）的文字与叙事（Text and Narrative）研究项目。这是我学习叙事学的地方。在某种程度上，我自己也成了一名叙事学家。
　　
　　从广义上讲，叙事学是对叙事结构的研究，以及人类感知，创造和受其影响的方式。它是一种文学理论，与大多数文学理论一样，它充满了明显和刻意模糊的术语。（为什么，例如，我们需要术语聚焦时，我们已经得到的非常好的，公平可解释性概念的观点？有一些原因，但大部分我发现时间的角度来看的作品刚很好，尤其是当我作为一名从业者 - 作家 - 而不是文学分析家或评论家 - 说话时。但是，叙事学所做的 - 尤其是其新形式，如“认知叙事学” - 给我们的工具不仅要考虑该模式在一个叙事中，叙述如何成为人类如何理解和解释他们日常生活中发生的事件的一部分。
　　
　　法国术语叙事学是由保加利亚 - 法国历史学家，哲学家和文学评论家Tzvetan Todorov在其1969年出版的“ GrammaireduDécaméron”一书中创造的。在那本书中，托多罗夫鼓励文学评论家将他们的注意力转移到叙事的最一般的结构属性，这些属性无论你看什么样的叙事都适用：事件的排序，人物，叙述者，观众，观点。托多罗夫呼吁一种新的叙事思维方式成为叙事学的学科。但他当然不是第一个试图在故事叙述中识别系统和模式的人。
　　
　　古希腊哲学家非常关注这一点，例如，因为他们担心类型：这是什么样的故事，我们怎么能说出来？（它是真实的类型还是虚构的类型或介于两者之间的东西？）在共和国，柏拉图说基本上有两种不同的讲故事：一种叫做模仿，是一种“模仿” - 讲话或思想或行动由谁是字符由内部的故事。另一种类型，即死亡，用于属于作者的言论，思想或行动。这种分裂在解释故事时对我们来说仍然是至关重要的 - 当我们思考叙述者时，我们会考虑这个问题，观点，并显示与告诉。柏拉图并不是唯一关心叙事区别的希腊人：亚里士多德在诗学中，区分了叙事世界中可能发生的事件的总体情况和叙述的实际情节，这只是一个子集这些事件，由作者根据审美理由选择和安排。
　　
　　叙事学的学科也采取了大量从被称为俄国形式主义文学批评的一所学校，这是在20年初流行日在沙俄世纪。早期的俄罗斯形式主义者之一被称为OPOJAZ，或诗歌语言研究学会，由一个名叫Viktor Shlovsky的人领导。Shlovsky在他1916年的着作“Iskússtvakakriyóm”（Art As Device）中写道叙事是艺术家操纵他的作品的文学和艺术设备的总和。形式主义者有兴趣打破这些“装置”，并试图看看他们在叙述中有什么功能。但他们也高度投入，没有刻意去关注叙事的历史或文化背景。他们只关心的功能，什么设备做了，不为什么它在那里。
　　
　　当我成为一名叙事学家时，我意识到形式主义者是非常错误的。叙事设备的功能完全取决于观众的历史和文化背景......以及作者的观点。叙事学的一个更现代的分支，称为认知叙事学，侧重于叙事的人类智力和情感处理，帮助我作为历史学家和作家提出这些问题。所有这些小功能设备 - 如何处理？不同的人对他们的反应有何不同？为什么中世纪的拜占庭历史学家明显假冒伪造的比喻事件 - 就像皇帝勇敢地参加他们甚至不存在的战斗 - 作家发誓的历史是真实的和报道的事实？当作者没有写出他们期望的结局时，读者怎么会说他们感到“被骗”？就此而言，为什么现在人类在2019年难以识别和理解与他们非常强烈相信的叙述相矛盾的信息？
　　
　　简而言之，我开始思考为什么我们希望故事有意义。
　　
　　认知叙事学的核心 - 真正地，是叙事学家整个神秘学科的核心 - 是一个被称为“故事世界”的概念。它由认知叙事学家大卫·赫尔曼（David Herman）命名，它既简单直观又对思考人们如何与叙事有关而产生深刻的影响。“故事世界”可以被定义为一个可能的世界，不仅是由页面上的叙述构成的，而且是由作者提出并且由读者体验和完成的理解故事的过程的认知结果。它比任何一个叙事都要大。它是宇宙的一种“心理模型”，包含构成叙事的所有事件，人物，地点和互动，以及所有可能发生的事件，人物，地点和互动，这些事件，人物，场所和互动可能存在于一个既存在叙事也存在的世界中。因此，一个故事世界是作者和观众之间共同创造的世界，受到相互关联的因果关系和逼真规则的约束 - 一种指示对象的集合，告诉我们什么样的故事是真实的，什么样的事件序列是可信的，给定叙述中提出了世界的证据。
　　
　　访问故事世界是在叙述的观众心中进行的。（毫无疑问，'故事世界'是由认知叙事学家发明的一个术语 - 因为他们要求我们将阅读/感知/解释叙事的行为视为在思想中发生的事情。）我们可以想到这个访问过程故事世界有三个要素，理论家艾伦帕尔默定义为“源域” - 读者所处的世界，叙述者正在处理读者的思想 - “目标领域” - 故事世界 - 和该“的文字特征系统触发各种读者持有真实世界的知识投射读者从源域到目标域”。这就是故事世界概念的深层后果开始出现的地方：故事世界思维将叙事视为一个过程，它将读者的思想从他们所生活的世界，以其可感知的规则，转移到具有不同可感知规则的故事世界。
　　
　　在认知上，观众有一套共享的社区知识 - 我们可以将其称为百科全书，就像法国理论家多尔泽尔所做的那样 - 他们用它来理解文本。这部百科全书，多列热说，“与文化，社会团体各不相同，[和]历史时期” 10的-the共享公共知识个 -century拜占庭知识显然是不一样的，一个21 日 -century Byzantinist试图理解2015年瑞典的叙事，更不用说美国某地的少年阅读她的第一部图画小说。我们可以想象读者/感知者关于故事世界的知识，通过他们自己的宇宙知识过滤，作为他们虚构的百科全书。为了“重建和解释”叙事，读者/感知者必须“重新定位他的认知立场以与[故事]世界的百科全书一致”。（那是赫尔曼，解释故事世界是如何进行认知过程的。）
　　
　　因此，故事世界并不局限于我们传统上认为是“小说”的类型。一个故事世界也可以是意识形态的：“故事被解释为构建世界心理模型的策略”同样适用于“国家如何运作”的概念，以及“小说中什么是合理的事件”。一个人可以重新调整他们的认知立场，以匹配对历史事件的意识形态叙事解释，同时他们可以这样做来解释小说或电视节目的叙述。
　　
　　事实上，我们可以把整个社会想象成一个故事世界。但是我的故事世界 - 我对世界应该如何表现的规则- 与我的邻居不同，他的经历与我不同。当我想到它们时，对我的邻居有意义的故事可能是不可理解的，反之亦然。这就是狂热主义的发生：人们如何相信不真实的事情，即使他们被提供了相反的证据。它与叙述不符。它不符合故事。这个证据对世界没有意义，所以证据必定是错误的。
　　
　　这也是理解如何说服某人的关键- 无论你是作家，政治家，科学家，还是只是想与邻居相处得更好。你能否将你所呈现的新信息融入观众的故事世界中，以便他们不会无法拒绝它？如果没有读者眨眼，当你的手淫通过一个虫洞进入银河系的一个遥远的地方时，你已经建立了你的叙事的故事世界令人信服地充足了虫洞是真实可信的事情。如果你能说服马尔科姆大叔认为气候变化是真实的，即使外面正在下雪，通过询问他小时候是否经常下雪，那么你就可以将你的信息融入他关于宇宙运作方式的叙述中：进入管理他日常诠释的故事世界。
　　
　　这就是叙事学家神秘学科的力量：它告诉我们为什么故事有意义，以及我们为什么要如此非常绝望。
　　
　　尼泊尔，喜马拉雅山。Langtang国家公园图片? Sergey Pesterev / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
　　
　　阿尔卡季·马丁（Arkady Martine）在撰写拜占庭历史时没有写过投机小说。她过于喜欢边界，修辞和限制空间。她的小说A Memory Called Empire将于3月26日与Tor Books合作出版。在Twitter上找到她的@ArkadyMartine。
　　
　　脚注
　　
　　1：Palmer 2004,34。

　　The Mysterious Discipline of Narratologists: Why We Need Stories to Make Sense
　　
　　Arkady Martine
　　
　　I used to live on the roof of the world, trying to understand why some stories get preserved for millennia and other ones disappear. I spent three years there. I wasn’t alone: I had colleagues with me, all thinking very hard about narrative and storytelling and how to talk about the ways people used to tell stories, in the other country of the past, when what truth and verisimilitude and good storytelling might have meant very different things than what they mean to us now.
　　
　　No, I hadn’t joined a monastery devoted to a cult of literary criticism, located in the far north. Promise.
　　
　　I was a historian, and I worked at Uppsala University, on a research project called Text and Narrative in Byzantium. It’s where I learned about narratology. In a way, I became a narratologist myself.
　　
　　Narratology is, broadly, the study of narrative structures and the way in which humans perceive, create, and are influenced by them. It’s a type of literary theory, and like most literary theory, it is full of terms that can seem overtly and deliberately obscure. (Why, for example, do we need the term focalization when we’ve already got the perfectly good and fairly explicable concept of point of view? There are some reasons, but most of the time I’ve found that point of view works just fine, especially when I’m speaking as a practitioner—a writer—rather than a literary analyst or critic.) But what narratology does—especially in its newer forms, like ‘cognitive narratology’—is give us tools to think about not only the patterns in a narrative but how narratives are part of how human beings understand and interpret events which happen to them in their everyday lives.
　　
　　The French term narratologie was coined by Tzvetan Todorov, a Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher, and literary critic, in his 1969 book Grammaire du Décaméron. In that book, Todorov encouraged literary critics to shift their focus to the most general structural properties of a narrative, properties which would apply no matter what kind of narrative you looked at: things like sequencing of events, character, narrator, audience, perspective. Todorov’s call for a new way of thinking about narrative became the academic discipline of narratology. But he certainly wasn’t the first person to try to identify systems and patterns in storytelling.
　　
　　Ancient Greek philosophers were awfully concerned with this, for example, because they were worried about genre: what kind of story is this, and how can we tell? (Is it the true kind or the made-up kind or something in-between?) In The Republic, Plato said there were basically two different kinds of storytelling: one, called mimesis, was an ‘imitation’—speech or thought or action made by characters who were inside the story. The other kind, diegesis, was for speech or thought or action that belonged to the author. This division is still fundamentally important to us in interpreting stories—we think about it when we think about narrators, point of view, and showing vs. telling. Plato wasn’t the only Greek who cared about narrative distinctions, either: Aristotle, in the Poetics, distinguished between the totality of events which could take place inside the world of the narrative and the actual plot that was narrated, which is only a subset of those events, chosen and arranged by the author on aesthetic grounds.
　　
　　The discipline of narratology also took a great deal from a school of literary criticism called Russian Formalism, which was popular in the beginning of the 20th century in Tsarist Russia. One of the early groups of Russian Formalists was called OPOJAZ, or the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, and it was headed by a man named Viktor Shlovsky. Shlovsky wrote in his 1916 book, Iskússtvo kak priyóm (Art As Device) that a narrative is a sum of literary and artistic devices that the artist manipulates to craft his work. The Formalists were interested in breaking down each of these ‘devices’ and trying to see what functions they had in narratives. But they were also highly invested in not paying any attention—deliberately—to the historical or cultural context of a narrative. They only cared about functionality—about what a device did, not why it was there.
　　
　　When I became a narratologist, I realized that the Formalists were extremely wrong. The functionality of narrative devices is completely dependent on the audience’s historical and cultural context… and on the author’s. A much more modern branch of narratology, called cognitive narratology, which focuses on the human intellectual and emotional processing of narratives, helped me to ask these questions as a historian—and as a writer. 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.
　　
　　Access to the storyworld takes place in the mind of the audience of the narrative. (It is no surprise that ‘storyworld’ is a term invented by cognitive narratologists—since they ask us to think of the act of reading/perceiving/interpreting narrative as something which occurs within the mind.) We can think of this process of access to the storyworld as having three elements, which the theorist Alan Palmer has defined as “the source domain”—the world the reader lives in, where the narrative is being processed by the reader’s mind—“the target domain”—the storyworld—and the “system of textual features that triggers various kinds of reader-held real-world knowledge that projects the reader from the source domain to the target domain”. This is where the deep consequences of the storyworld concept begin to emerge: storyworld thinking treats narrative as a process which moves the mind of the reader from the world they live in, with its perceivable rules, to the storyworld, which has different perceivable rules.
　　
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　　Cognitively, the audience has a set of shared communal knowledge—we can call this an encyclopedia, like the French theorist Dole?el does—which they use to comprehend the text. This encyclopedia, says Dole?el, “varies with cultures, social groups, [and] historical epochs”—the shared communal knowledge of a 10th-century Byzantine intellectual is clearly not the same as that of a 21st-century Byzantinist trying to understand narratives in Sweden in 2015, let alone that of a teenager somewhere in America reading her first graphic novel. We can think of the reader/perceiver’s knowledge about the storyworld, filtered through their own knowledge about the universe, as their fictional encyclopedia. In order to “reconstruct and interpret” a narrative, the reader/perceiver must “reorient his cognitive stance to agree with the [story]world’s encyclopedia”. (That’s Herman again, explaining how storyworlds are cognitive processes.)
　　
　　Storyworlds are, therefore, 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’. A person can reorient their cognitive stance to match an ideological narrative interpretation of historical events just as well as they can do so to interpret the narrative of a novel or a television show.
　　
　　We can in fact imagine all of society as a storyworld. But my storyworld—my rules for how the world ought to behave—are different from my neighbor’s, who has had different experiences than me. The stories that make sense to my neighbor may be incomprehensible when I think about them, and vice versa. This is how fanaticism happens: how people believe things which are not true, even when they’re presented with evidence to the contrary. It doesn’t match the narrative. It doesn’t fit in the story. The world doesn’t make sense with this evidence, so the evidence must be wrong.
　　
　　It is also the key to understanding how to convince someone—whether you’re an author, a politician, a scientist, or just trying to get along better with your neighbor. Can you fit the new information you’re presenting into your audience’s storyworld so that they don’t reject it out of hand? 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.