Genette meets Vygotsky: narrative embedding and distributed intelligence

Abstract

Framed tales, or stories within stories, have garnered considerable attention from theorists of narrative in recent years. By and large, however, story analysts have not sought to account for why the practice of narrative embedding has persisted so long - or why it is so widespread - in the world’s folk traditions and written literatures. Using William Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage as its tutor-text, this article advances a broadly cognitive explanation for the pervasiveness and persistence of narrative embedding across so many different storytelling situations. My central claim is that, in conjunction with the cognitive activities of their interpreters, framed narratives such as The Ruined Cottage constitute intelligent systems - systems that both stage and facilitate the process of shared thinking about past events and about one’s own and other minds. Such systems propagate experiential frames - specifically, the experiences of character-narrators - across time and space. By contrast, in a story that does not involve narrative embedding, there will be a net decrease in the capacity of the system to communicate representations originating from sources potentially quite widely separated in space and time. Narrative embedding thus increases the distributional reach of a framed tale, enhancing the overall power of the knowledge-generating system to which it lends structure. Adapting Barbara Rogoff’s (1990) definition of intelligence as the socially supported ability to solve problems grounded in particular domains of activity, I explore how framed narratives can help distribute intelligence both synchronically (across regions of space and participants and material artifacts within those regions) and diachronically (across different temporal phases of a given spatial region).