James Erin - The storyworld accord : econarratology and postcolonial narratives

Thursday Next has lost herself in a good book, literally. The heroine of Jasper Ffordes 2001 novel The Eyre Affair, Next has an odd experience at the Charlotte Bront Museum when she is a young girl. As she listens to a fellow museum visitor read from the original manuscript of Jane Eyre, she finds herself transported to Janes world:

I closed my eyes and a thin chill suddenly filled the air around me. The tourists voice was clear now, as though speaking in the open air, and when I opened my eyes, the museum had gone. In its place was a country lane of another place entirely. It was a fine winters evening and the sun was just dipping below the horizon. The air was perfectly still, the color washed from the scene. Apart from a few birds that stirred occasionally in the hedge, no movement punctuated the starkly beautiful landscape. I shivered as I saw my own breath in the crisp air, zipped up my jacket and regretted that I had left my hat and mittens on the peg downstairs. As I looked about I could see that I was not alone. Barely ten feet away a young woman, dressed in a cloak and bonnet, was sitting on a stile watching the moon that had just risen behind us. (66)

Interpreting the words of Bronts narrative as she hears them, Next finds herself inhabiting Jane and Rochesters world. She marvels at Janes stoic posture and plain yet beautiful face before spotting Rochesters dog, Pilot, and witnessing the future lovers first meeting near the country lane stile. As she hears a distant voice calling her name, the sky darkens, the air warms, the lane evaporates, and Next finds herself back in the museum. She dutifully abides by her aunt Pollys warning to keep up with the museum tour and laments the end of the books magic.

The world of Ffordes novel clearly is fantastic. Surrounded by domesticated dodo birds and time travelers, Next inhabits an alternative 1985 Britain in which the Crimean War has lasted for over a century and Wales is an independent socialist republic. Next is also a fantastic character. She is a detective who specializes in crimes related to literaturethe most serious of crimes committed in Ffordes book-loving alternative worldand at the climax of the novel transports herself into Bronts text for a second time to capture archvillain Acheron Hades, who himself enters Bronts text to kidnap Jane Eyre and hold her ransom. She does this with the aid of a Prose Portal, a machine that permits readers to leap into the worlds of the texts they read.

Yet as fantastic as they are, Thursday Nexts experiences in Jane Eyre feel somewhat familiar. Viewing reading as a type of escapism is a common-sense ideaimmersing yourself in a story is part of the enjoyment of reading, after all. But recent studies in cognitive science and narrative theory suggest that Nexts ability to inhabit the fictional world that contains Thornfield Hall is not magical at all, but necessary to the process of reading that every interpreter of a narrative must undergo to achieve narrative comprehension. We all, it seems, lose ourselves in books when we read. And we do not require a Prose Portal to do so.

In The Storyworld Accord I am interested in mapping and understanding the very process Next describes when she feels the air cool and sees the sun dip below the horizon. I take my central premise from the work of cognitive narrative theorists, who see reading as a process of immersion or transportation. Such scholars define a storyworld as a mental model of context and environment within which a narratives characters function. Like the similar terms story and fabula, storyworld is a term narrative theorists use to discuss what happens in a narrative. But more so than other terms, the storyworld highlights the world-making power of narrative texts. Storyworld scholars argue that narrative comprehension relies upon readers interpreting textual cues to make mental models of a texts world and inhabiting those models emotionally. To understand a narrative, such scholars suggest, we must lose ourselves in the same environment and experiences as a narratives characters.

As David Herman explains, the storyworld captures the ecology of narrative interpretation in three key ways (Story Logic 1314).in a narrative but also the environment embedding the characters that inhabit a texts world. In this way, it offers a corrective to narratological readings that have tended to pay greater attention to time or sequence than space. Second, the storyworld points to the idea that comprehending a narrative is an inherently comparative process, in which readers reconstruct sequences of events, states, and actions by considering and integrating both the world that is in the narrative and the world that is not. This process involves determining how the actions and events depicted in a narrative relate to other possible past events, alternative presents, or potential happenings in the future, and is often aided by familiar representations, particularly those involving stereotypical sequences of actions and events. Such a comparison thus calls on readers to directly engage the defamiliarizing aspects of a text as they compose and inhabit their mental models of that texts world. Third, the storyworld points to the immersive quality of narratives, in which readers shift from the here and now of their actual world to the vantage point a text cues them to inhabit. The concept of the storyworld, in other words, highlights the world-creating power of narratives that catalyzes an imaginative relocation of readers to a new, often unfamiliar world and experience.