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Ane ž ka Kuzmi č ová Outer vs. Inner Reverberations: Verbal Auditory Imagery andMeaning-Making in Literary Narrative While phonological recoding may not be necessary for the comprehension of all print, visually processing printis regularly associated with auditory and articulatory activity in readers with hearing.(Sadoski/Paivio 2001, 123) Abstract: It is generally acknowledged that verbal auditory imagery, the reader ’ ssense of hearing the words on a page, matters in the silent reading of poetry.Verbal auditory imagery (VAI) in the silent reading of narrative prose, on the otherhand, is mostly neglected by literary and other theorists. This is a first attemptto provide a systematic theoretical account of the felt qualities and underlyingcognitive mechanics of VAI, based on convergent evidence from the experimentalcognitive sciences, psycholinguistic theory, and introspection. More generally, theaim is to isolate a new set of embodied experiences which, along with more widely researched phenomena such as sensorimotor enactment or emotion, contribute toour understanding of literary narrative. The central argument is that distinctionswithin the domain of embodied VAI also apply to higher-order meaning-making,i. e., that discrete types of VAI are associated with discrete tendencies in sponta-neous literary interpretation. Spontaneous literary interpretation stands for any process of meaning-making, however inarticulate, that reaches the reader ’ s con-sciousness in an uninterrupted course of reading. Although the necessity of phonological access for the silent processing of print is disputed, the experimental contexts in which VAI has proven to dependon lower-order embodied processes, and/or to have a pronounced effect on silentreading, are countless. But what is it like, in terms of embodiment, to consciously experience VAI? The basic felt quality of all VAI is that the linguistic medium of awritten narrative enters the reader ’ s awareness qua spoken discourse. Thisdescription of VAI, however apt, is not very elaborate. But as we begin to study narrative VAI experiences in greater detail, they soon fall into two distinct types,or more precisely, position themselves between two ends of a continuum. The twoends will be referred to as outer and inner reverberations. Outer reverberations put the reader in the position of a vicarious listener,feeding on activity in the mind ’ s ear only. Meanwhile, inner reverberations reach DOI 10.1515/jlt-2013-0005 JLT 2013; 7(1 – 2): 111 – 134 themind ’ s earviasubvocal rehearsal, i.e.,covertarticulatoryactivityinthereader ’ smouth and throat. While outer reverberations represent text as situated speech andmay accommodate perceptual detail of the imaginary voice, inner reverberationsrathertendtorepresenttextasrawlanguage,wheretheonlyauditoryqualitiestobeexplored are those of first-person (subvocal) speech production. Although outerreverberationscanfeaturesomekinestheticqualitiessuchasasenseofresonanceinthe reader ’ s torso, kinesthetic experience is much more pronounced in inner rever-berations, and felt motor activity in the articulatory apparatus is a distinctivetrait of inner reverberations alone. Outer reverberationsmay effectively beprompted bytextual cues suchasoralstyle, speaker familiarity, and situational embedding. By contrast, inner rever-berations may be more likely to occur with discourse particularly lacking in suchcues. However, the cuing process is subject to many variables pertaining to thetext, the individual reader, and the specific reading session. More generally, then,inner reverberations can be said to result from the language of an utteranceappearing markedly non-situated. As a consequence, inner reverberations entaila sense of medium opacity, while outer reverberations may rather be associatedwith a relative sense of medium transparency. On the level of higher-order meaning-making, outer and inner reverberationslink with the presence or absence of spontaneous interpretation, respectively. Thisis due to a trade-off between one ’ s degree of openness to interpretation on the onehand and one ’ s bodily appropriation of the discourse on the other. The more one isengaged in what X could mean, the less one can possibly be engaged in the sayingof X, and vice versa. In analogy to ordinary overt speech: When the voice is mine,the thought is mine as well. It is only when the voice is not mine that one is left towonder what the underlying thought and meaning is. Other speakers are alwaysambiguous to some extent, requiring some interpretation. Meanwhile, as the first-hand speaker, one is unambiguous to oneself. Although one may be surprised atthe specific course one ’ s speech has taken, one does not reflect, on equal termswith one ’ s interlocutors, on the many coexistent meanings of one ’ s utterance. Consequently, meaning may be experienced as more dynamic and less firmly tied to wording in outer compared to inner reverberations. The particular wordsexperienced in an outer reverberation are quicker in receding outside awareness,possibly due to the load of concurrent meaning-making. Because of the experien-tial intensity of such meaning-making relative to the baseline, »literal« meaning-making associated with inner reverberations, the words chosen may seem com-parably arbitrary. In inner reverberations, on the other hand, this impression of comparable arbitrarinessis lesslikely.Meaning is felttobeconstricted, asit were,to wording proper. 112 Ane ž ka Kuzmi č ová The observations made in this essay are consistent with empirical findings in various fields of psychological inquiry, ranging from reader response and memory studies to experiments investigating willed VAI. For instance, it has been reportedthatimaginedverbalstimuliaremore ambiguouswhentheimaginaryvoicebelongsto an extraneous speaker (in analogy to the proposed notion of outer reverberati-ons), compared to when imagined as voiced by oneself (in analogy to the proposednotion of inner reverberations). In other words, there is experimental evidencethat language heard in the mind ’ s ear can be more firmly or more loosely tied tomeaning, depending on the imaginer ’ s level of self-implication in its production. Ane ž ka Kuzmi č ová: Department of Literature and History of Ideas, Stockholm University,E-Mail:
[email protected] Introduction This is an attempt to account systematically for the phenomenon of voice inliterary narrative in other than metaphorical sense of the term. 1 It is generally acknowledged that verbal auditory imagery, the reader ’ s sense of hearing thewords on a page, matters in the silent reading of poetry (see e.g. Tsur 1992,1996). Verbal auditory imagery in the silent reading of narrative prose, on theother hand, is largely neglected by literary and other theorists. When it ismentioned at all, approaches seem to diverge widely. Some (e.g., Derrida 1974,27 – 73) come close to denying it altogether. Others (e.g., Miall 2006, 173 – 188)consider its workings only when particular sound patterns and expressions areto be proven special and significant from the viewpoint of global interpretation.One solitary critic (Stewart 1990) turns verbal auditory imagery into a full-blowninterpretive strategy, but fails to provide a systematic account of its spontane-ous occurrence, its felt qualities or underlying mechanics. Another one (Chap-man 1984) accounts for the ways in which verbal auditory and other soundexperiences can be encoded by writers in literary texts, but does not detail theireffects on readers ’ mental imagery. This essay aims to fill the gaps. Ultimately,the aim of this essay is to isolate a new set of embodied experiences which,along with previously researched phenomena such as the sensorimotor enact-ment of narrative events and situations (e.g., Caracciolo 2012; Kuzmi č ová 2012) 1 An established term in narratology, »voice« is commonly used as a metaphor for the reader ’ sconstrual of the ontological status of a narrative utterance (Is it Leopold Bloom speaking? Or is itan impersonal narrator?). (For a review, see e.g. Aczel 1998.) Outer vs. Inner Reverberations 113 or the emotional response to text (e.g., Miall 2011), contribute to our under-standing and (crucially) enjoyment of literary narrative. It should be noted from the outset that I do not believe the linguistic mediumto be continuously in the spotlight of the reader ’ s attention. Nor do I believe thatthis medium is attended to most of the time, which may be the case in poetry. Onthe contrary, I agree with phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, who asserts thatreaders rather tend to focus on whatever the linguistic medium serves to repre-sent, experiencing the »phonetic stratum« (Ingarden 1973, 12) of language »only peripherally« (ibid., 91). On the other hand, everybody has probably had thesubjective experience of hearing the narrative they silently read. I suggest thatthis experience, albeit comparably subtle and probably scarce in some readers,occurs now andthen with each andevery narrative we read. This is a view held by many others. For instance, one of the points of criticism traditionally raisedagainsttheaudiobookasmediumisits»denialofthereader ’ sinner voiceinvokedby the printed page« (Rubery 2011, 11). Similarly to the authors of these criticisms,I believe verbal auditory imagery to be vital to any experience of literary readingworth the name (see also Rosenblatt 1994, 26), although I will not make a casehere for that belief. Nonetheless, I do make a case for the idea that distinctionswithinthedomain ofverbalauditoryimageryalsoapplytohigher-ordermeaning-making, i.e., that discrete types of verbal auditory imagery may be associatedwith discrete tendencies in spontaneous literary interpretation.The essay is structured as follows: After a brief, selective review of psycho-logicalliteratureonverbalauditoryimagery(subsection1.1),IwillintroducewhatI take to be a key phenomenal distinction between the two types of embodiedexperience produced by such imagery. Representing two ends of one experientialcontinuum, these two types of verbal auditory imagery will be referred to as outerand inner reverberations. The basic distinction between outer and inner rever-berations will be defined as follows: In outer reverberations, verbal auditory imagery is experienced to srcinate outside the reader ’ s body. In inner rever-berations, verbal auditory imagery is experienced to srcinate inside it. Havingdescribed the basic corporeal qualities (subsection 1.2) of these experiences, I willextend the scope of my description so as to include their respective relationshipsto higher-order meaning-making, or interpretation broadly defined (section 2.). Iwill argue that outer reverberations agree with interpretation inasmuch as they put the reader in the position of a vicarious listener. Meanwhile, inner rever-berations may rather be incompatible with interpretation by virtue of slanting theembodied experience toward active speech production. Throughout the essay, I will support my argument with references to theexperimental cognitive sciences, but I will also introspect on my personal experi-ences of three rather diverse text samples. The hybrid methodology is due to the 114 Ane ž ka Kuzmi č ová deeply private, experiential nature of my subject matter. The haphazard choice of literary material is due to an attempt to reach back, amongst the reading experi-ences stored in memory, to what reading was like to me before the idea of thisessay was born. 1 Outer vs. Inner Reverberations: EmbodiedQualities 1.1 Terminology and Psycho(physio)logical Underpinnings First a few remarks regarding terminology. For lack of a better term, I will soon(subsection 1.2 and beyond) begin alternating the term verbal auditory imagery (from now on, VAI) with the notion of reverberation(s). 2 This is not a simple one-to-one trade of terms, long-for-short or scientific-for-aesthetic. Firstly, VAI in thisessay stands for the sort of mental auditory representations commonly investigatedin psychology and other cognitive sciences as a subpersonal cognitive mechanism,i.e., without specific claims being made on the matter of the subject ’ s conscious-ness (but with the unspoken assumption that VAI is largely non-conscious). Ratherthan referring to VAI in this somewhat abstract sense, my term reverberation isdesigned to capture the aggregate of conscious VAI experiences that can beaccessed directly, through introspection. 3 Secondly, reverberations are more thanjust VAI plus consciousness. Unlike VAI in the abstract sense, reverberations as Iunderstand them feature felt embodied qualities as well as felt conceptual quali-ties. Thatis tosay,there issomething it islike toexperience reverberations not only in terms of VAI (my quasi-auditory uptake of the strings of letters on a page), butalso in terms of what this particular kind of VAI suggests to me in my quest for 2 While »reverberation« more often tends to suggest iterative echoing rather than a single andshort-lived instance thereof, it will be used here (primarily) in the latter sense. However, this isnot to say that reverberations as described below cannot be experienced to recur in the furthercourse of reading. For similarly variable use of the verb »reverberate« in the context of readers ’ verbal auditory imagery, see Tsur 1996. 3 Although behavioral and neuroimaging evidence will be invoked throughout my descriptionsof reverberations, primacy will always be given to their qualities as first-person, experientialphenomena. Thus I will follow cognitive scientists Anthony I. Jack and Andreas Roepstorff, whoargue that, »(w)here experiential phenomena are concerned, it is objective measures that mustseek validation by establishing their correspondence with introspective measures, and not viceversa .« (Jack/Roepstorff 2003, xiii) Outer vs. Inner Reverberations 115
