Storyminds and Readingminds: Cognitive Plots in David Small’s Stitches and Virginia Woolf ’s “In the Orchard”

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Beginning with Virginia Woolf ’s question, when writing a novel, “Who thinks it?,” this article proposes that behind every storyworld is a storymind whose action constitutes a cognitive plot. Redeploying Gérard Genette’s “narrativization by focalization,” I argue that description is always focalized, focalizing is an act of perception, and unfolding perceptions inscribe narrative paths. Urging increased attention to percepts, my approach supplements James Phelan’s communicative-oriented model of Author-Resources-Audience with a process-oriented model of storymind-reading-mind-reader’s mind. In this model, readingminds vary along a sliding scale between what I term allodeictic (storymind-oriented) and egodeictic (reader-oriented) poles. In David Small’s graphic memoir Stitches, allodeictic location leads readingminds to experience a cognitive plot of therapeutic self-healing enacted in the drawings themselves. In Virginia Woolf ’s “In the Orchard,” three conflicting allodeictic perceptions of a single scene challenge the coherent logic of egodeictic critical frames, until we grasp the storymind’s kaleidoscopic effects. Visualization, I posit, tells stories through embodied cognition, a supposition supported by neural linkages between imagined and actual body experiences. My conclusion summarizes the new dimensions that the construct of storyminds add to rhetorical theory in the areas of plot, readerly participation, narrativity, and ethics.