In and Out: The Dynamics of Imagination in the Engagement with Narratives

Despite the attention the topic has received in recent years, there is still little agreement on how best to characterize what is at the core of engaging with narratives, irrespective of the medium— whether novels, films, plays, and so forth. Here, I look at a portion of contemporary philosophical debate, specifically, at Noël Carroll’s and Matthew Kieran’s criticisms of what we can call for convenience the “participant view” of narrative engagement.1 Such a view comprises those accounts that, albeit in rather different ways, explain narrative engagement in terms of a narrative perceiver’s self -oriented responses, that is, of responses involving some sort of imaginative projection onto the narrated events or some sort of imaginative sharing in the mental states of the characters.2 The spectrum of notions invoked by such theories goes from identification to empathy, with the latter sometimes explained as mental simulation, to that form of imagination that Richard Wollheim dubbed “central imagining.”3 By contrast, the approach defended by Carroll and Kieran, hereafter called the “onlooker view,” conceives of narrative engagement in terms of other-oriented responses, those typical of sympathy.4 It privileges Wollheim’s “acentral imagining” and deems a perceiver’s understanding of a fictional situation from without, so to speak, as usually sufficient to explain one’s engagement with a narrative.5 I argue for a partial redirection of this debate, both by pointing to what I consider the correct and most fruitful methodology in this area and by making the case for a pluralistic approach, one that acknowledges the existence of several mechanisms of engagement with narratives. I start by discussing the battery of objections raised by Carroll and Kieran against the participant view, for that will provide an excellent opportunity to correct the methodological mistakes that vitiate, I will claim, this debate, and to introduce my pluralistic approach (Section I). Then, I correct a rather prevalent misconstruction of Wollheim’s notion of central imagining (Section II). Hence, I propose my own emendations to Wollheim’s views on the modes of imagination, which will provide me with the conceptual structure needed further to indicate a novel direction for the investigation of narrative engagement (Section III). My positive proposal is then strengthened and clarified by applying it to passages from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (Section IV).