Response

Towards a natural narratology:

Frames and pedagogy
A reply to Nilli Diengott
Monika Fludernik

First of all, I would like to thank Nilli Diengott, whose work I admire, for having taken the trouble to articulate her unease about my model in the Journal of
Literary Semantics. Thirteen years after Towards a Natural Narratology appeared in hardcover (i.e. fifteen years after its writing, and just as the book finally becomes available in paperback), I am myself beginning to take a more
critical attitude towards the theory, though perhaps from a different perspective
than does Professor Diengott. Her article has helped me look at some aspects
of the model in a new light, and this is always a good thing and opens ones
eyes to new insights. As I explicitly said at the end of Towards a natural narratology, I was hoping for constructive criticism and expecting the book to
become obsolete after maybe some ten years or so, depending on further developments, particularly in the area of cognitive studies.
On the other hand, I was somewhat surprised to find myself faulted for
setting a bad example within the framework of cognitive narratology and
particularly for betraying the methodological stringency of classical nar
ratology. And this perhaps for two reasons. On the one hand, I thought that
Diengott and I were safely positioned on one side of a divide within narratology, i.e. in our common defence of universally applicable descriptive categories. In the famous debate between Nilli Diengott and Susan Lanser in the
1980s (Lanser 1986; Diengott 1988; Lanser 1988), I tended towards the Diengott position, rejecting many of Lansers arguments for the introduction of
gender into narratology. It may be the fact that, as a former fellow combatant
on the frontier against cultural invasions into virginal structuralist theory, I
am now causing excessive wrath at apparently having betrayed the good old
cause.
My second reason for being surprised at Diengotts objections links with her
synecdochical move to depict me as a key representative of cognitive studies
and to see my work as typical of current trends in (implicitly) rampant cultur
alism and cognitivism, all developments that Diengott deplores and castigates
for a lack of precision. This is surprising to me because I am myself critical of
the methodological diversity of cognitivism in literary studies (see Fludernik
JLS 39 (2010), 203211
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204 Monika Fludernik

2010), but also because I believe that my own work attempts to counter such
centrifugal tendencies.
Having said this, I do, however, wish to reassert that my work has from the
start focussed on an extension of classical narratology, though in the spirit of
preserving the basic objective of narratology to facilitate the analysis of narratives and to explain how narratology works within a narratological model
based on textual (traditionally linguistic) elements.
In Fictions of Language (1993) I pursued this aim by expanding my corpus
of texts, and I was thus able to document a wide range of uses of free indirect
discourse beyond the classical restriction to literary prose and beyond the restrictions imposed on free indirect discourse by the Banfieldian theory of unspeakable sentences. The material moreover helped me to develop some general thesis on the constructedness of speech and thought in all representations
including newspaper articles, and to set performative aspects of this textualization against the requirements of veracity and authentic reporting. (On the latter
point a lengthy exchange took place with Michael Short, whose insistence on
the prevalence of verbatim speech report was countered by my reference to the
exigencies of saliency and stylistic foregrounding in most media contexts.
Only at court and in, say, The Times do we expect verbatim reproduction, and
even there a lack of tape recorders may result in less than perfect recall.1)
In my 1994 work on second-person fiction I likewise resorted to new
material (1994b) in order to question the dyadic model of the narratological
category of person, though I then proposed a new dichotomy of homo-/
heterocommunicative narrative (1994a, 1994c).
In Towards a Natural Narratology, expanding the classical model took the
shape of extending the historical range of narratives, including pre-eighteenthcentury as well as postmodernist texts and moving oral storytelling into the
centre of the discipline. Basing myself on Kte Hamburger and Franz Karl
Stanzel, I emphasized the crucial role of consciousness in narrative, and elaborated on both critics insights by foregrounding consciousness both as the what
of narrative (this fed into the notion of experientiality) and as the medium of
processing narratives (the various cognitive frames of my model, which takes
us exactly to the main problem that Diengotts article raises).
Since Diengott complains that I am using the term frame in different senses,
let me just briefly note that this lexeme is in fact employed widely in both a
general everyday meaning and in a more specifically cognitive sense. As Diengott so brilliantly outlines, frame is used in the general meaning of framework or context (her points 3 and 5). All the other uses of the term are in fact
specifically cognitive and rely on a schema-theoretic analysis of narrative. My
fault, if there is one, consists in anticipating what will be elaborated later in the
chapter. First, it needs to be emphasized that the terms frame and schema are
used interchangeably in cognitive studies, though schema is the more basic

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A reply to Nilli Diengott 205

term and static frames are opposed to dynamic scripts (cf. Jahn 2005: 69). We
have a frame or schema in our minds for a house (i.e. an image that contains
windows, doors, a roof, etc.), whereas scripts like the restaurant script refer to
sequences that have been stored in memory. Since the terms schema theory and
frame theory are now synonymous, frame has become generalized in cognitive
studies. It also displays some overlap with the everyday use of the lexeme
frame in framework or frame of reference. A frame of reference is precisely
that context which we access in interpreting a text, e.g. an academic frame of
reference rather than an ecclesiastical or commercial one. A letter will be read
very differently if seen as a commercial transaction, a love letter or an example
of spiritual guidance. Moreover, as readers, we impose such frames since the
text more often than not does not contain explicit contextualizations.
The point about the cognitive approach lies precisely in this extension of
reference from a mental schema (which only empirical cognitive analysis may
hope to trace, if at all) to its results in our thinking and acting and speaking,
which show in choices, for instance choices in articles (saying the waiter if
the restaurant script is involved) or in relating a situation (whether real or in a
text) to a context that will determine its meaning(s). What is important in this
extended use of the term is the reliance on cultural knowledge that makes a
frame a useful lens through which to see the object of analysis. The problem,
as I see it, is an empirical one, namely how to prove that there are frames in the
mind; the existence of frame-like patterns of cognition in our thinking is, as I
believe, self-evident from our experience of introspection. Thus, where Diengott, as I read her argument, worries about the borderline between a notabene
cognitive frame and a metaphoric frame of reference, I am more inclined to
emphasize two levels of the use of frame: frame as a concept, and frame as a
conceptual tool in the process of thinking, speaking and interpreting. While the
frame of a house in the Schank and Abelson sense is a kind of visual diagram
into which one can or cannot fit certain items, and which one can superimpose
on another situation in order to determine similar relations between items, the
use of frame that I am more interested in relates to the process of cognition, to
the very possibility of there being cognition since our minds need to project
schemata on what we see and feel in order to produce orientation and sense, in
order to become able to react to, forestall, counter or reorient the impact of the
world around us.
In understanding life, and therefore in reading stories, we resort to complex
mental shapes that combine a number of elements and their relationships into
a prototype, i.e. a schema or frame. These frames are accessible because we
have encountered the same situation, object or complex numerous times before
and therefore recognize its shape and makeup. By reading a situation as involving such a frame we speed up our process of cognition and save energy for
those subjects or aspects of the situation which are new and unexpected. All I

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206 Monika Fludernik

am arguing in Towards a Natural Narratology is that these principles also
apply to storytelling and to the understanding of narrative. Following this assumption and inspired by Stanzels narrative theory, I then go on to suggest
possible frames that are accessed in the process of reading narrative.
Which takes me to my diagram (1996: 50) and to my model that Diengott
takes issue with, claiming that I am far from presenting a narratological
model, i.e. a coherent structure where the different levels are clearly distinguished from each other (2010: 99). Now it may be a point of debate what the
status of a model in narratology is, and I do not think that even if the theory
were inconsistent this would necessarily affect its status as theory; after all,
Genettes model of focalization is still a major reference point despite its inconsistencies, which Mieke Bal amended by her introduction of the focaliser/
focalised distinction.
But let me get to Diengotts main cause of frustration, the fact that the diagram on page 50 does not reflect the four levels discussed on pages 4346. The
truth is that I never meant to represent levels I to IV in that diagram. Following
my presentation of the four levels a reconception of Paul Ricoeurs three
levels of mimesis, remodelled with a view towards the process of narrative
production and reception, and in which the introduction of narrativization constituted the major new emphasis on page 47 I next turn to a consideration of
the link between the frames on level II and Stanzels narrative situations and
the teller vs. reflector dichotomy. In this argument I try to reflect my own thinking about narrativity and to elaborate on my insight that mediacy in Stanzel
occurs in two forms, and that what I am doing is to extend the modes of mediacy by two further modes. Ultimately, as I argue, all these modes can be seen
as consciousness-based, depending as they do on the consciousness of the protagonist, the teller, and a viewer or observer. (I come back to the issue of number and order in a minute.) In Chapter 5 of the book I also discuss cases in
which one can possibly align the reader with the observers position (Banfields empty centre, or what I call figuralization). It is on the basis of these
reflections about the status of consciousness in narrative that I come to the diagram on page 50. This diagram admittedly carries no subscript, and this may
have been the cause of Diengotts confusion. It is actually two diagrams; the
top part serves as an illustration of the role of consciousness in narrative globally: experientiality is mediated in the process of narrativization and results in
narrativity. The lower half of the diagram summarizes level II frames in their
relation to consciousness, illustrating that three human minds are involved
protagonist, teller and viewer.
It is of course no oversight that ACTING, the fifth schema of level II, is
missing here action parameters, as I explicitly state on page 44, really belong
to level I (as in Ricoeurs Mimesis I): Properly speaking, this fourth frame
really belongs with level I since it refers to the what and not to the how of nar-

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A reply to Nilli Diengott 207

rative experience (1996: 44). Put differently, the ACTION schema is not a
mediating schema it does not primarily serve to mediate the story world
through a humanoid consciousness. More crucially still, narratives based only
on the ACTION schema do not necessarily foreground consciousness-related
experientiality; they link with the zero degree of narrativity in report and
report-like narrative that I posit in Towards a Natural Narratology. Hence the
absence of ACTION (or ACTING) from the consciousness-related diagram on
page 50.
Which takes me to the different order of presentation on pages 4346 and
50. There is in fact no order to these frames why should there be? Since the
lower half of the diagram was not meant to delineate level II frames as such but
to sketch their base in consciousness, the order is from protagonist to teller and
viewer in the order of narrative saliency. On the other hand, when outlining the
different frames subsumed in level II in pages 4345, I started with the three
least controversial frames, the ones familiar from Stanzels and Genettes typologies: teller mode (TELLING)2; reflector mode (EXPERIENCING); neutral narrative, i.e. observer mode (VIEWING); and then went on to discuss
ACTING and REFLECTING. I also put TELLING and VIEWING before EXPERIENCING in order to move from the more natural to the less natural schemata. ACTING and REFLECTING (which, pace Diengott, I did mention on
page 44) are not included in the original triad that corresponds to classical narrative modes. ACTING in fact is a more basic schema and belongs on level I;
but since narrative report is also treated as zero degree narrative, one could
argue that such report is read by reference to the ACTION schema hence I
added it to the three others.
Finally, I tentatively introduced REFLECTING as a fifth and most controversial schema. I felt the necessity of adding this schema to account for postmodern narratives such as the dramatic monologue novels of Nicholson Baker
(e.g. U and I, 1991) that consist in a speaker meditating, arguing and speaking,
but often not telling a story or presenting a world separated from the act of narration. In such texts, the narrators act of speaking and thinking in itself constitutes the story world, the matter of the narrative. REFLECTING as a frame
may be controversial for two reasons. On the one hand, the term is not ideal
since it seems to link with Stanzels reflector figure, and therefore with the
EXPERIENCING frame. However, what I was trying to delineate, though imperfectly no doubt, was the self-reflexive mental activity of a narrator persona,
of the teller as thinker who turns protagonist. The category perhaps prefigures
what Nnning calls the mimesis of narration (2001).
Secondly, and this would be a legitimate point of criticism, what I do not
address is the relation between such a narrative based on the REFLECTING
frame and poetry or philosophical analysis. It is mostly by reading poetry
as depicting a situation in which the poet is an observer or experiencer, or as

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consisting in the poetic speakers reflections, that a cross-over from narrative
to poetry is effected, or narrativity extended to cover poetic texts. One can, of
course, argue that in a novel we are interested in the figure of the narrator as a
protagonist, whereas in a poem or philosophical tract the reflections of the
speaker/writer are interesting as such, with no regard to the question who it is
that voices them. The relationship of narrative and poetry is a very controversial one, and the jury is still out on this issue.3
I hope that my discussion has allayed some of the misunderstandings generated by the expectation to find a one-to-one correlation between pages 4346
and the diagram on page 50. I also hope to have explained the missing schema
of ACTING or ACTION on page 50 and the different order of presentation on
pages 4344 and 50. What Diengotts critique has clearly noted, however, is
the difficulty in placing the ACTION/ACTING schema. On the one hand, it is
part of the basic self-understanding of how the material world and humans
operate. Yet ACTION is in fact a hyponym of GOAL, INTENTION, etc.; an
action consists of these elements, and an understanding of them allows one to
observe somebody as acting with an objective, as having intentions, and so on.
Since introspection allows us to experience ourselves as acting, the relevant
frame also has a minimal experiential quality, and one could, therefore, perhaps split this frame into ACTION (clearly part of level I) and ACTING (to be
placed on level II as a second frame aligned with the protagonist). This would
be a suggestion that corrects the original proposal. In order to supply a visual
aid that might clarify things, I therefore create a new diagram here.

Figure 1. The four levels of cognitive narrative frames

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A reply to Nilli Diengott 209

Figure 2. The role of consciousness in narrative

Figure 3. Level II global frames of narrative mediacy

Figure 2 (the top part of the diagram on page 50, here reproduced for conveniences sake) does not repeat levels I to IV, but picks out the constitutive factor of consciousness in the constructivist production of narrativity through narrativization on the basis of experientiality. The frames that narrativization
resorts to are levels I to III, but on level IV the mere decision to read something
as a narrative can override the lack of material or appropriate story matter.
Thus, anything that is called a novel is immediately read as a narrative even
if it does not seem to have a proper protagonist, etc.
Finally, Figure 3 (the bottom part of the diagram on page 50) illustrates the
different types of consciousness that the mediating frames on level II are based
on. I have added ACTING to the diagram as suggested above in my reconsideration of the model.
My impression is that most readers actually understood that the diagram on
page 50 was not meant to reproduce levels I to IV in a one-to-one reflection;

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210 Monika Fludernik

certainly, the many reviewers of the book had no problem with it. One needs to
appreciate, though, that reviewers focussed on the whole study and not exclusively on the first chapter, so they were keen to go on to discuss the results
achieved by the cognitivist approach and the diachronic emphasis in the book,
a facet that Diengott incidentally seems to have no interest in.
Let me conclude by again thanking Nilli Diengott for making me go back to
my earlier work and rethinking its design and implications. No doubt, were I to
construct another model today, I would not only put in three separate diagrams
but possibly write an entirely different book that foregrounds different issues,
among them the narrativity of drama and poetry, or the problems of applying
my 1996 model to factual narrative. Cognitive studies, too, have developed
rapidly since the 1990s, and have become much more sophisticated. A book
composed today would have to reflect these trends and much else. As Heraclitus
said at the dawn of Western philosophy, you cant step into the same river
twice. Hence, every turn back to ones previous theoretical insights inevitably
generates new theorizing, reflecting ones concerns of the moment. There is no
use debating about the past, which is irretrievably past, just as there is no use
in crying over spilt milk neither can be preserved, but only swept up, reused
and eventually replaced by the present, or a new bottle of milk.
Albert Ludwigs University, Freiburg
This response was written during my stay at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS).
Notes
Correspondence address: monika.fludernik@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de
1. On this question see Short et al. 1999, 2002.
2. This frame has been nobilitated in Ansgar Nnnings secondary mimesis or Mimesis des
Erzhlens (Nnning 2001).
3. See Hhn (2004) and Mller-Zettelmann (under review).

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