HOW STORIES MAKE US SMARTER

Narrative theory and cognitive semiotics

David Herman1

1. Introduction

In everyday life people incorporate stories into a wide range of

activities. Stories enable humans to carry out spontaneous
conversations, make sense of news reports in a variety of media,
produce and interpret literary texts, create and assess medical case
histories, and provide testimony in court. In the present essay, I build
on the interdisciplinary research tradition that has grown up around
the study of cognitive artifacts2 that is, material as well as mental

1 English Department, North Carolina State University.

2 D. HERMAN, Framed narratives and distributed cognition (under review) ;
D. HERMAN, Stories as a tool for thinking, in D. HERMAN (ed.), Narrative Theory
and the Cognitive Sciences (under review) ; D. HERMAN and B. C HILDS, Narrative
and Cognition in Beowulf Style (forthcoming) ; E. H UTCHINS, Cognition in the
Wild, Cambridge, Ma, MIT Press, 1995 ; E. HUTCHINS, How a cockpit remembers
its speeds, Cognitive Science, n 19, 1995, pp. 265-288 ; E. HUTCHINS, Cognitive

Recherches en communication, n 19 (2003).

 DAVID HERMAN

objects that enable or enhance cognition in an effort to account for

the pervasiveness of stories as a resource for problem solving. The
program for inquiry outlined here, with its dual focus on narrative
viewed as a semiotic system and on the cognitive representations and
processes supported by that system, also works to situate narrative
theory within the broader enterprise of cognitive semiotics.
The basis for my approach can be traced back to Lev Vygotskys
concept of psychological tools3. For Vygotsky, such tools include,
among other semiotic systems, language, various systems for
counting ; mnemonic techniques ; algebraic symbol systems ; works
of art ; writing ; schemes, diagrams, maps, and mechanical drawings ;
all sorts of conventional signs ; and so on4. Later researchers in
fields ranging from developmental psychology5 to cognitive
anthropology (e.g., Hutchinsand Shores work) have built on
Vygotskys ideas, which stress the social mediation of thought. From
a Vygotskyean perspective, individual mental functioning is a form of
activity continuous with and premised upon social activity, because
the psychological tools needed for thought grow out of social
institutions and also out of interactions with others. My argument is
that narrative, too, can be characterized as a (socially embedded)
psychological tool or cognitive artifact.
Blending insights from several areas of inquiry, including
narratology, discourse analysis, phenomenology, and artificial
intelligence, I use as case studies two literary texts that afford
narratives of transformation : Apuleiuss The Golden Ass (2nd century
CE)6 and Franz Kafkas The Metamorphosis (1915)7. Both of these

artifacts, in R.A. WILSON and F.C. KEIL (eds.), The MIT Encyclopedia of the
Cognitive Sciences, Cambridge, Ma, MIT Press, 1999, pp. 126-128 ;
D.A. NORMAN, Things That Make Us Smart, Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley,
1993 ; B. SHORE, Culture in Mind : Cognition, Culture and the Problem of
Meaning, New York, Oxford University Press, 1996.
3 L.S. VYGOTSKY, Mind in Society : The Development of Higher Psychological
Process, M. COLE, V. JOHN-STEINER, S. S CRIBNER and E. SOUBERMAN (eds.),
Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1978.
4 Quoted in J. WERTSCH, Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind, Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press, 1985, p. 79.
5 B. ROGOFF, Apprenticeship in Thinking : Cognitive Development in Social Context,
New York, Oxford University Press, 1990
6 APULEIUS, The Golden Ass, trans. Jack Lindsay, Bloomington, Indiana University
 HOW STORIES MAKE US SMARTER

narratives explore the problem of identity over time, and thus how to
reconcile constancy and change, stability and flux. Along the way,
Apuleiuss and Kafkas texts suggest how stories provide important
representational tools for humans tools that facilitate a number of
problem-solving activities. Moreover, despite their surface similarity,
these two stories of transformation reveal considerable variability in
the way narrative can be exploited as a tool for thinking, suggesting
that its prevalence as a means for cognition stems from its essential
flexibility, its adaptability vis--vis the most diverse objects,
situations, and events. By comparing and contrasting how Apuleiuss
and Kafkas texts bear on five core problem-solving abilities, I hope
to provide a blueprint for further research on stories as a resource for
cognition. Although the present paper draws on literary data to make
its case, my aim is to sketch out a theoretical model that will be
applicable to the full range of narrative subtypes, including stories
told during face-to-face interaction8, films, computer-mediated
narratives, nonliterary narratives in print, and so on.

2. Five problem-solving activities supported

by narrative
In this section I detail the five (overlapping) problem-solving
activities for which, arguably, the representational tools bound up
with narrative furnish crucial support. The problem-solving activities
at issue include chunking experience into workable segments,
imputing causal relations between events, managing problems with
the typification of phenomena, sequencing behaviors, and
distributing intelligence across groups. One of my working
assumptions is that theorists can gain insight into narrative as process
by studying instituted narrative products, in the same way that
linguists arrive at hypotheses concerning the human language faculty

Press, 1962.
7 F. KAFKA, Die Verwandlung, in Gesammelte Schriften, Bd I, Erzhlungen und
kleine Prosa, 2d ed., M. BROD (ed.), New York, Schocken Books, 1946, pp. 69-
130 ; F. KAFKA, The Metamorphosis, trans. S. Corngold, New York, Bantam
Books, 1986.
8 Cf. D. HERMAN, Framed narratives and distributed cognition, op. cit.
 DAVID HERMAN

by studying attested linguistic behavior. Thus my overall aim is to

characterize Apuleiuss and Kafkas accounts of transformation as
tools for problem solving in their own right, but also to characterize
the more general representational processes that subtend and make
possible all such narrative accountings.

2.1. Chunking experience into workable segments

From early on, the notion of chunking i.e., the process by

which the stream of experience is segmented into units that are
bounded, classifiable, and thus more readily recognized and
remembered has played an important role in cognitive-scientific
research. For instance, what Marvin Minsky9 called frames, or
structures for representing and remembering stereotypical situations
(e.g., being in a classroom or an art gallery), constitute a means of
organizing knowledge of the world into discrete, manageable chunks.
It is easier to organize knowledge and behavior if the vast realms of
experience are subdivided ; indeed, the world would quickly become
unmanageable if I had to sort through every possible concept and
potential course of action at every given moment. Minskys idea of
frames was designed to explain how knowing what one typically does
when in a classroom can be separated from knowing what one
typically does in an art gallery. That way, one can avoid staring at a
school desk as if it were a sculpture by Archipenko and, inversely,
refrain from using a piece of chalk to annotate a Renaissance painting
in a museum.
Likewise, narrative affords representational tools for addressing
the problem of how to chunk the ongoing stream of experience into
bounded, cognizable, and thus usable structures. Stories organize
experience by enabling people to select from among the total set of
sequentially and concurrently available inputs ; preprocess those
inputs into internally differentiated chunks with (as Aristotle10 put it)

9 M. MINSKY, A framework for representing knowledge, in P. WINSTON (ed.), The

Psychology of Computer Vision, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1975, pp. 211-277.
10 H. ADAMS (ed.), A RISTOTLE, Poetics. Critical Theory Since Platon, San Diego,
 HOW STORIES MAKE US SMARTER

a beginning, middle, and end ; and then use those temporally

structured segments as a basis for further cognitive operations on new
experiential inputs. Indeed, by marking off a point on the temporal
continuum and assigning it the role of origin or beginning, decisions
about where to begin a story not only constrain the design and
interpretation of the narrative itself, but also index competing ways of
understanding the world i.e., alternative strategies for tracing current
states of affairs back to a point of origin. By the same token, narrative
is a resource for closure. Any particular telling of a narrative has to
end, even if the narrative being told is presented as unfinished or
unfinishable.

2.2. Imputing causal relations between events

As I discuss in subsequent sections of this essay, both Apuleiuss

and Kafkas narratives focus on the problem of how something can be
identified as the same entity despite changes over time. To establish
identity over time, producers and interpreters of narrative must use a
cause-and-effect algorithm to map storyworld occurrences onto more
or less radical changes in the nature, appearance, or behavior of
participants in the situations and events being recounted. Indeed,
given that narrative prototypically roots itself in causal-chronological
relationsin sequences of happenings in which earlier happenings are
at least causally necessary for, though not fully determinative of, later
ones11 the problem of identity over time would seem to be one for
which stories are ideally suited. Narrative can be construed as both
reflecting and supporting a cognitive predisposition to find causal
links between entities, states, and events in a sequentially presented
array.

2.3. Managing problems with the typification of

phenomena

Under this heading, I include ways in which stories provide tools

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, pp. 48-66.

11 N. CARROLL, On the narrative connexion, in W. VAN PEER and S. CHATMAN,
New Perspectives on Narrating Perspective, Albany, SUNY Press, 2001, pp. 21-41.
 DAVID HERMAN

for solving the problem of how to balance expectations against

outcomes, general patterns against particular instancesin short, the
typical against the actual. Bruner discusses related issues under the
rubric of canonicity and breach, noting that to be worth telling, a
tale must be about how an implicit canonical script has been breached,
violated, or deviated from in a manner to do violence to the
legitimacy of the canonical script12. In this connection, Alfred
Schutzs concept of typificationhis notion that [a]ll our knowledge
of the world, in common-sense as well as in scientific thinking,
involves constructs, i.e., a set of abstractions, generalizations,
formalizations, idealizations specific to the respective level of thought
organization13 can be brought productively into play.
For Schutz, human beings

have preselected and preinterpreted this world by a series of

common-sense constructs of the reality of daily life, and it is
these thought objects which determine their behavior, define
the goal of their action, the means available for attaining them
in brief, which help them find their bearings within their
natural and socio-cultural environment and to come to terms
with it14.

From this perspective, typification facilitates a broad variety of

cognitive tasksfrom the organization of objects into classes and
members-of-classes, to the learning of the lexical and syntactic
patterns of a language, to the ascription of motives to others during
social interaction15. If assimilated to pre-existent types, any
encountered object, situation, or event can be placed within a horizon
of familiarity and pre-acquaintanceship which is, as such, just taken
for granted until further notice as the unquestioned, though at any

12 J. B RUNER, The narrative construction of reality, Critical Inquiry, n 18, 1991,

p. 11.
13 A. SCHUTZ, Common-sense and the scientific interpretation of human action, in
M. NATANSON (ed.), Collected Papers, vol. 1, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1962,
p. 5.
14 Ibid., p. 6 ; L. LANDGREBE (ed.), E. HUSSERL, Experience and Judgement, trans.
J.S. Churchill and K. Ameriks, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973,
pp. 321-338.
15 A. SCHUTZ, op. cit., pp. 7-23.
 HOW STORIES MAKE US SMARTER

time questionable stock of knowledge at hand. The unquestioned pre-

experiences areat hand as typical, that is, as carrying open horizons
of anticipated similar experiences16.
Crucially, stories fill the breach when typification fails; in line
with Bruners17 remarks about transgressions of canonicity, narrative
is a means of redressing problems that arise when anticipated similar
experiences do not materialize. More than this, however, stories can
be told prior to or in the absence of any real failure of expectation, in
order to question the explanatory limits of expectation-inducing and
sustaining typifications. Indeed, when juxtaposed with Bruners ideas,
Schutzs account suggests that the concept of typification actually
encompasses two, rather different processing strategies supported by
narrative. On the one hand, stories can be used to engage in problem-
raising, i.e., to throw into relief ways in which situations and events
depart from the typical or the expected. On the other hand, received
stories about the world provide a context of typicality in terms of
which unexpected occurrences can be interpreted, enabling various
modes of problem-solving. Section 5 below explores ways in which
Kafkas and Apuleiuss texts at once detach themselves from and
anchor themselves in dominant typification practices thereby
facilitating both problem-raising and problem-solving but do so in
distinct ways thanks to their very different contexts of production,
generic profiles, and thematic foci.

2.4. Sequencing behaviors

What exactly should one do, where, when, and in what order ?
As intractable as it sometimes seems, this too is a problem for whose
solution narrative provides important tools. When it comes to stories,
the problem manifests itself at two different levels : at the level of
narrative communication, and also at the level of the storyworlds18
that get constructed and reconstructed during narrative
communication.

16 Ibid., p. 7.
17 J. B RUNER, op. cit.
18 D. HERMAN, Story Logic : Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, Lincoln,
University of Nebraska Press, 2002, pp. 9-17.
 DAVID HERMAN

2.4.1. Narrative and communicative behavior

On the one hand, stories help organize the turn-taking behavior

of the parties engaged in narrative communication whether in the
context of face-to-face interaction or that of reading a literary
narrative. As Mary Louise Pratt noted, in both natural and literary
narrative the role structure of participants in the speech situation
remains similarly marked vis--vis the unmarked situation among
peers, in which all participants have [in principle] equal access to the
floor19. Apuleiuss and Kafkas readers, like a storytellers
interlocutor(s), assume the role of an audience ceding its floor rights
to discourse producers who must as a result live up to increased
expectations of delight20. In both settings, in other words, there is an
overall preference for a current speakers turn at talk to continue, and
a dispreference for potential next speakers to truncate that turn by
self-selecting. In the case of literary narratives, requests for such
extended turns can be accomplished by a variety of textual as well as
paratextual cues, e.g., the startling first sentence of Kafkas narrative
or the publication of a story in a volume containing other texts by the
author or by other fiction writers. In this sense, producers and
interpreters of literary narrative are caught up in a sociointeractional
nexus that remains anchored at essential points to the communicative
dynamics of face-to-face storytelling21.

2.4.2. Narrative representations of behavior

On the other hand, narratives also support the sequencing of

behaviors by modeling, in the storyworlds they encode, what, how,
where, and when a particular course of action can or should be
pursued. This representational function can accrue to storyworlds no

19 M.L. PRATT, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, Bloomington,

Indiana University Press, 1977, p. 113.
20 Ibid., p. 116.
21 D. HERMAN, Story logic in conversational and literary narratives, Narrative,
n 9-2, 2001, pp. 130-137 ; IDEM, Toward a transmedial naratology, in M.-
L. RYAN (ed.), Narrative across Media : The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln,
University of Nebraska Press (forthcoming).
 HOW STORIES MAKE US SMARTER

matter what their modality status, whether fictional, actual, or

indeterminate. Hence commentators as diverse as Horace, Samuel
Johnson, and Tipper Gore have assumed the power of fictional worlds
to impinge on provide models for actual human conduct.
But this aspect of stories viewed as a tool for thinking can be
studied more microanalytically, suggesting ways narrative provides
templates for behavior in physical as well as moral-cultural worlds.
For example, stories typically feature a protagonist orienting herself in
space as well as time. In this respect, narratives of all sorts can
function to support human navigational abilities, representing how
agents might pursue a particular trajectory through a complex,
dynamically emergent spatial environment. Putting the same point
another way, narrative supports cognitive mapping22, i.e., the
process by which things and events are mentally modeled as being
located somewhere in the world.

2.5. Distributing intelligence across groups

Narrative at once reflects and reinforces the supra-individual

nature of intelligencei.e., the inextricable interconnection between
trying to make sense of and being within an environment that extends
beyond the self23. Grasping this self-environment nexus means
thinking against the grain of explanatory schemes that posit a central,
controlling intelligence that stands out like a foreground against a
backgrounded context for mental and other forms of activity. What is
required instead is some concept of agents-within-an-environment a
molar notion greater than the sum of its molecular components
to explain how individual as well as collective cognitive processes are

22 R.M. DOWNS and D. STEA, Maps in Minds : Reflections on Cognitive Mapping,

New York, Harper and Row, 1977 ; P. GOULD and R. WHITE, Mental Maps, 2nd
ed., Boston, Allen and Uwin, 1986 ; D. HERMAN, Spatial reference in narrative
domains, TEXT, n 21-4, 2002, pp. 515-541 ; S. OSTROFF, Maps on my past : Race,
space, and place in the life stories of Washington D.C. area teenagers, Oral
History Review, n 22, 1995, pp. 33-53.
23 J. GIBSON, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston, Houghton-
Mifflin, 1979 ; E. ROSCH, If you depict a bird, give it space to fly : Eastern
psychologies, the arts, and self-knowledge, SubStance, n 94/95, pp. 236-253.
 DAVID HERMAN

organized 24. Narrative, arguably, is at once a vehicle for and target of

such distributed cognition, which is enabled by the shared
construction and revision of stories, but which also eventuates in the
fashioning and refashioning of accounts of how the world is, might
be, or should be. By the same token, the methods and stakes of
narrative theory change when the object of analysis is neither tellers,
nor tales, nor interpreters of tales, but rather the combined product of
all of these factors bearing on stories viewed as a resource for
collaborative problem-solving.

3. Stories as a source of structure : transformation

and chunking in Apuleius and Kafka

I turn now from my general account of the five problem domains

to a comparison and contrast of how Apuleiuss and Kafkas texts
bear on each domain. The present section explores how stories can be
viewed a source of structure in humans (shared) attempts to make
sense of experience. More specifically, it examines how stories of
transformation afford a means of chunking experience into (more or
less) bounded, cognizable segments in both Apuleius and Kafka.

3.1. The functions of (reversible) metamorphoses in

Apuleius

Lucius, the narrator of The Golden Ass, undergoes a

transformation from human to animal, before being re-transformed
from ass to human thanks to the intervention of the goddess Isis. In
addition, this Milesian tale contains multiple embedded narratives
involving a variety of literal as well as figurative metamorphoses
including shapeshifts from human to animal, and from mortal to god.
The theme of transformation thus provides the glue connecting the
various anecdotes and tales to the frame provided by Luciuss
odyssey.

24 J. WERTSCH, Mind as Action, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 20-
21 ; cf. L. VYGOTSKY, Mind in Society : The Developement of Higher
Psychological Processes, op. cit.
 HOW STORIES MAKE US SMARTER

More than this, the one-way and two-way metamorphoses in

Apuleiuss text furnish a way of segmenting the stream of events into
bounded structures each with an inception and a terminus, or rather a
source state and a target state which are, respectively, the initiation
and the end-point of the transformative process. In other words, tales
of transformations extract from times flow a definite span of events,
providing a source of structure for understanding other, analogous
event-spans. Relevant in this context is Mark Turners25 notion of
parabolic projection, whereby a familiar source story is projected
onto happenings in the world in order to make sense of those
happenings. Specifically, in Apuleius, transformation is the template
used for assigning change-of-state predicates to participants in the
narrated worldfor tracking identities-in-flux26. Even the most
radical changes of state (from human to ass, from the hairs of goats to
dancing wineskins animated by magic) can be made sense of in terms
of metamorphosis. Experience can be chunked into spans of time
during which Entity X acquires, displays, and then loses predicates,
instead of being encountered as an undifferentiated stream without
beginning, middle, or end. The difference is that between a world in
which a finite number of entities undergo changes emergent in time
and an innumerable set of successively presented entities, between
which no real conceptual links can be established.

3.2. Gregors cataclysmic and irreversible transformation

In Kafka, the tale of Gregor Samsas transformation from

travelling salesman to dung beetle structures and delimits the stream
of experience in a different way. Readers are privy only to the end-
point of the metamorphic process. Further, there is no suggestion in
the story that a two-way transformation from human to insect and
from insect back to human is within the sphere of possibility.
Whereas Apuleius represents metamorphosis as a durative process,

25 M. TURNER, The Literary Mind, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996.

26 G. BROWN, Speakers, Listeners ans Communication : Explorations in Discourse
Analysis, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995 ; G. B ROWN and G. YULE,
Discourse Analysis, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983 ; C. EMMOTT ,
Narrative Comprehension : A Discourse Perspective, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 1997.
 DAVID HERMAN

capable of being reversed, Kafka represents Gregors transformation

as instantaneous, cataclysmic, and final.
Unlike Luciuss, Gregors is a post-Freudian world in which
difficult-to-interpret legacies of past trauma live on in the present and
jeopardize the future. Transformations of the self can be traced back
to these traumatic hinge points, but there can be no moving back
beyond the intervening mediations of time, language, and experience
to arrive at an original trauma that must instead be hypothesized as
given. Rather than trafficking in transformative processes with a
beginning, middle, and end, with the end-point sometimes coinciding
with a reverse metamorphosis back to the pre-transformed self,
experience is structured into a before that is radically distinct from
and inaccessible to the after-time of the present. (Hence, Gregor loses
consciousness when, in a version of the primal scene, his mother
embraces his father in complete union with him and pleads for her
sons life27). This tale of transformation still constitutes a source of
structure ; but in a manner paralleling the use of the concept of half-
lives by Kafkas compatriot and successor, Milan Kundera, Gregors
existence is segmented into that of an earlier self that, for the self of
the present, figures as only a fading memory 28.
For both Apuleius and Kafka, then, tales of metamorphosis
afford a means of chunking the stream of experience into pre- and
post-transformation segments or phases. However, the two narratives
ascribe different modes and degrees of interconnectedness between
the source and target phases that are the input and output of the
transformative process, respectively. Apuleiuss and Kafkas texts
thus recruit from a common stock of representational resources a
stock grounded in narrative viewed as a cognitive style as well as a
discourse genre but they draw on those resources in distinctive ways
and with distinctive results.

4. Narrative, transformation, and causality

This section further explores how narratives of transformation

27 F. KAFKA, op. cit., p. 39.

28 See P. STEINER, Ironies of history : The Joke of Milan Kundera, C.-
A. MIHAILESCU and W. HARMANEH (eds), Fiction Updated : Theories of
Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1996.
 HOW STORIES MAKE US SMARTER

support humans efforts to structure and comprehend their experience.

Specifically, it characterizes transformation and causality as
interlinked notions, but suggests that different kinds of metamorphic
narratives cue interpreters to impute different sorts of causal relations
between events. Conversely, different species of causality are the
hallmark of different genres within the same historical epoch, as well
as indexing changes in narrative technique across historical periods.

4.1. Metamorphoses as effects of actions in Apuleius

Apuleius tales of transformation represent those metamorphoses

as more or less durative processes triggered by attitudes and actions of
characters. In other words, the narratives of transformation situate the
characters in causal networks, whereby cause-and-effect relationships
can be established between actions and occurrences that might
otherwise figure as localized or isolated incidents. Lucius is
transformed into an ass because of his overweening curiosity about
magic, and a re-transformation becomes possible only when that
inquisitiveness gives way to faith in Isis, who then appears to Lucius
in a vision and tells him how to become human again. The goat-hairs
taken by Fotis are transformed into dancing wineskins through the
magical practices of her employer, Pamphile ; and the debacle that
results for Lucius is in turn the effect of Fotiss attempt to deceive
Pamphile, who wanted to turn human hairs into lovers for herself.
Through Cupids intervention with Jupiter, Psyche is transformed into
a deity after she, like Lucius, learns the hard way about the dangers
of unbridled curiosity. Hence, in Apuleius, story-enabled
representations of metamorphosis are not only a way of carving
structure out of the stream of experience, but also a way of operating
on that structure to create coherent episodes, in which states, events,
and actions are bound together causally to create unified wholes.

4.2. The difficulty of discerning a cause for Gregors change

Meanwhile, by segmenting Gregors existence into a span of

years leading up to his metamorphosis and a span of months
following it, Kafkas tale of transformation enables different sorts of
causal linkage. In effect, interpretation of Kafkas text prompts the
 DAVID HERMAN

search for two independent cause-and-effect algorithms, ranging over

different elements of the narrative. One algorithm is of the same sort
used to interpret The Golden Ass as a series of (interconnected)
episodes. In the early pages of the story, readers construe the
backpedaling of the office manager into the vestibule as an effect of
his horror at Gregors new appearance and of his eagerness to escape
the apartment. Later, when Gregor clings to the picture on the wall of
his room and glares defiantly at his sister and mother, attributing to
Gregor the motive of hanging on to his human past allows this action
to be integrated into the larger attempted-furniture-removal episode in
which it occurs.
But the narrative also cues the search for a different species of
causal linkageone that would connect Gregors current condition
and activities to the situations and events that preceded his insectoid
change. Whereas the causal links between Gregors and his family
members local actions are readily discovered, Kafka frustrates the
search for more global cause-and-effect relations between Gregors
past and present. Is Gregors current mode of existence a literalization
of the life he led more figuratively before, as mere vermin for his
family particularly for his father ? Did the treatment he received
from his family cause his change, in this sense ? Or did
superfamilial forces contribute to his metamorphosis as well for
example, the constant distrust of his supervisors at work, or Gregors
decline from the proud demeanor he wore as a member of the
military, to the civilian obscurity of his later years, when his free time
is spent framing pictures cut out of magazines ? Or do these and other
factors jointly conspire to effectuate Gregors change ? The exact
causal mechanism is, of course, left underspecified.

5. Transformation and typification

Both of the texts under study suggest how narrative is not only a
resource drawn upon when the limits of more or less dominant
typifications are exposed, but also a strategy for building new and
different typifications, with stories then serving a re-typifying or
rather meta-typifying function. In particular, both The Golden Ass and
 HOW STORIES MAKE US SMARTER

The Metamorphosis question the coherence of standard membership

criteria for the classes human and animal. But they do so in
different ways and, arguably, with different consequences.

5.1. Transformation and typification in Apuleius

Building on the precedents set by ancient Greek myth and by

Ovid, Apuleiuss Milesian tale begins from the premise that the
boundary between the human and animal worlds is porous rather than
impermeable. Not only does Pamphile use her magical arts to occupy
the form of an owl, and Fotis misuse magic to bring about Luciuss
metamorphosis into an ass. More than this, the possibility of such
shapeshifts figures as a generalized condition of existence. In the
embedded narrative by Aristomenes that occurs early in the text,
Aristomenes friend Socrates stresses the supernatural powers of
Meroe, the tavernkeeper with whom he has consorted. She changed
one lover into a beaver, a rival tavern owner into a croaking frog, and
a lawyer into a horned ram, butting and rebutting in a different way
than previously. Later on, in telling the story of his night-watch over a
corpse, Telephron recounts the deceptive practices of Thessalian
wise-women. Telephron is warned by the man who hires him : these
abandoned slidder-skins can change themselves into any beast and
creep up so secretly as to cheat the eyes of the Sun and of Justice as
soon as to look at you. They disguise themselves as birds, and
sometimes as dogs or mice or even true it is as flies29. Given that
humans can either voluntarily or willy-nilly assume the form of
beavers, birds, frogs, and flies, the distinction between human and
animal must be retypified as gradient and fuzzy rather than binary and
clear-cut.
It is hard to determine which of these two ways of typifying the
human-animal relation was actually more robust during the culture
and period in which the pagan Apuleius wrote. Greek and Roman
mythology relied crucially, of course, on all sorts of metamorphoses,
and in the century before Apuleius, Ovid had used shapeshifts to
question and repudiate an Augustan emphasis on order to dissolve
the fixed hierarchies of Virgils Rome-centered epic, for example,
into a mosaic of transformations, a blending of kinds and categories.

29 APULEIUS, op. cit., pp. 63-64.

 DAVID HERMAN

But in Apuleiuss case, debatably, human-animal blends are yoked to

a different overall purpose. True, Luciuss asss-eye perspective
enables him to witness firsthand the deplorable conditions in which
slaves were kept, thereby exposing the dark underbelly of the Roman
Empire. Insofar as the trajectory of the narrative leads towards
Luciuss conversion to the priesthood of Isis and then Osiris,
however, the tales human-animal interchanges can be viewed as an
instrument for questioning the relation between the spiritual and
material realms. Reminding humans of their proximity to and even
interchangeability with animals, the text suggests the need for
reorganizing human behavior around new typifications typifications
that would enable humans to detach themselves more effectively from
the material world to which they remain all too bound. In that way,
they, like Lucius, might more successfully aspire to the immaterial
world of the gods.

5.2. Transformation and typification in Kafka

Kafkas text also involves a blending of types or kinds, such that

the categories human and insect must likewise be viewed as
located on a continuum rather than separated by an absolute divide.
However, Kafkas 1915 narrative was written in the wake of Freuds
theories about the consciousness-disrupting Id as the repository of
humans archaic heritage. The story also came in the midst of the
global conflict of WWI, when modern technological advancements
were put in service of combatants irrational in their disregard for
human life and their refusal to learn from history. Thus, although
Kafkas text parallels Apuleius in forcing a retypfication of
experience a rethinking of the division of human and animal into
natural kinds The Metamorphosis prompts interpreters to move in
the opposite direction along the human-animal continuum.
In other words, The Metamorphosis suggests the need to
reorganize human behavior around the recognition that human beings
are irreducibly embedded in concrete, material circumstancesthat
humans share with animals and insects not only the same overarching
environment but also the same sorts of drives, anxieties, and aims.
The story reveals the need for a retypification of experience such that
people see themselves as more, not less, firmly anchored in the
material reality of their bodies, their physical environments, their
 HOW STORIES MAKE US SMARTER

material constraints. From the very inception of Kafkas story, Gregor

is bound to learn the new constraints imposed by his dung-beetles
body what portion of his carapace is most vulnerable, what to make
of his itchy white spots, how best to use his thin, multiple legs, which
disposition of objects in space makes him feel the most at ease.
Whereas Lucius is a human temporarily condemned to an asss form,
Gregor is a dung-beetle with an ever dimmer memory of the
experience of being human. Lucius craves the same old foods and
imposes his old moral standards on others ; Gregor finds himself
repulsed by what he used to like to eat and at times has to struggle to
remember the exact familial connection between himself and his
mother and sister. The Golden Ass takes both Lucius and the reader on
a journey toward purification and de-materialization ; The
Metamorphosis leads toward the putrefaction and then dessication of
Gregors wasted body. Indeed, the familys growing neglect of their
son and brother stems in part from their failure to retypify the human-
animal nexus in the way that Kafkas protagonist and readers are
forced to do as the story proceeds.

6. Sequencing behaviors : communicative

and representational protocols

6.1. Communicative protocols in Apuleius and Kafka

In its form as well as it themes, The Golden Ass bears the

stigmata of spoken narrative of the classical worlds equivalent of
folk tales. Although Apuleiuss Milesian tale contains multiple
embedded narratives, whose intradiegetic narrators sometimes tell
stories about characters who in turn tell stories, thus evoking hypo-
hypodiegetic narratives, shifts between all these diegetic levels are
clearly and explicitly marked. Thus, Aristomenes prefaces his story
about Socrates and Meroe with the comment that Ill be pleased to
begin my story all over again for you [Lucius]30, and Lucius cues the
reader to pop this embedded narrative off the stack of diegetic
levels by remarking [h]ere ended the tale of Aristomenes31. The

30 Ibid., p. 34
31 Ibid., p. 44.
 DAVID HERMAN

inclusion of these level-indicating devices is a reflex of the texts

origins in oral traditions, where storytellers are under an imperative to
mark shifts between levels, participants, and time-frames with as little
ambiguity as possible, so that recipients can construct on-the-fly
interpretations of what is being communicated by narrators. Without
benefit of a written text, interlocutors rely on such cues to coordinate
their interpretive activities, i.e., to fashion the appropriate mental
models for situations and events recounted in particular stretches of
the narrative.
Kafkas tale, though perhaps farther removed from folk-tale
traditions, likewise differs from the communicative imperatives of
conversational storytelling in degree rather than kind. The storys first
sentence functions much like what William Labov 32 described as the
abstracts used in conversational narratives, pre-announcing the
subject of the tale and signalling the need for an extended turn at
talk to convey what happened : When Gregor Samsa woke up one
morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed
into a monstrous vermin33. Yet this textual cue triggers a mode of
communicative behavior that is not tantamount to activity on the part
of the teller and passivity on the part of an interlocutor (or group of
interlocutors). Instead, literary texts like Kafkas require a dovetailing
of sequencing strategies by interpreters as well as producers of
narrative. All parties must actively enable the production of the
narrative via an intercalated sequence of behaviors performed and
behaviors withheld.

6.2. Representational protocols in Apuleius and Kafka

What is more, The Golden Ass and The Metamorphosis furnish

representational protocols for the sequencing of behaviors. For
example, both Lucius and Gregor Samsa are represented as following
paths of motion through a range of spatial environments. Lucius
begins his journey travelling toward Thessaly, then navigates the city
of Hypata to find his hosts house as well as the house of a famous

32 W. LABOV, The transformation of experience in narrative syntax, in Language

in the Inner City, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972, pp. 354-
396.
33 F. KAFKA, op. cit., p. 3.
 HOW STORIES MAKE US SMARTER

magician, then follows the paths prescribed for him by his various
owners when Lucius becomes an ass. For its part, Kafkas tale
furnishes highly microanalytic representations of Gregors
movements to and fro through the Samsas apartment for example,
Gregors initial struggle to identify and follow a path from his bed
through his bedroom door into the living room, or his circuitous,
multi-legged flight from the revenge-minded father. More generally,
an important difference between types of story artifacts is the relative
degree of detail attaching to their representations of characters
manners and paths of motion as they unfold in time and space34.
Perhaps because Gregors sphere of movement is more narrowly
circumscribed than Luciuss, his manner of motion receives more
meticulous attention in Kafka, whereas Apuleius, recounting an epic
journey of sorts, charts a richer variety of paths of motion.

7. Distributing intelligence : from monads

to societies

Marvin Minsky35 describes the workings of intelligence in terms

of a society of mind. Intelligence, in other words, is socially
distributed, such that a group or team of experts is smarter than any
one individual could ever be. More than this, though, intelligence is
distributed not just socially, but also between humans and non-
humansi.e., between people and artifacts. Another way of putting
this would be to say that intelligence must be characterized in terms of
functional gestalts in which intelligence is distributed between two or
more agents (whether human, computational, or other) making a
coordinated effort to come to grips with a problem in their
environment via a complex interweaving of individual and shared
representations36. As both Apuleiuss and Kafkas texts suggest,

34 L. TALMY, Lexicalization patterns : Semantic structure in lexical forms, in

T. SHOPEN (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description, vol. 3, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 57-149 ; D. HERMAN, Toward a
transmedial narratology, op. cit.
35 M. MINSKY, The Society of Mind, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1986.
36 In the same vein, Hutchins (E. HUTCHINS, Cognition in the Wild, op. cit.) defines
cognition as computation taken in a broad sense such that the idea of
 DAVID HERMAN

narrative provides an optimal environment in which to synthesize and

propagate multiple representational states ; stories thus afford a
cognitive and communicative context supporting the shift from
monads to societies as the essence of intelligence.
Narrative helps distribute intelligence by facilitating more or less
sustained and far-reaching blends between the individual and his or
her environment. Described by Erving Goffman 37 as a fundamental
resource for laminating experience that is, a tool for embedding
imagined or noncurrent scenarios within a current context of talk
stories also afford a basis for various forms of imaginative projection,
including those required for empathetic identification with others. It is
not just that, by narrating the experiences of fictional characters,
writers like Apuleius and Kafka can extend the focus of concern to
places, times, events, and participants beyond those that lie within
their own or their interpreters personal acquaintance. Further,
building on their understanding of the social mind in action38, i.e.,
drawing on the same sociocognitive processes of attribution they use
to make inferences about their cohorts unstated feelings, motives,
and dispositions, readers of literary narrative have no trouble
accepting the fiction writers premise that other minds can be dipped
into, reported on, even quoted verbatim39 whether by a
homodiegetic or first-person narrator vastly different from his earlier
self, or by a heterodiegetic or third-person narrator capable of probing
the fears and aspirations of a dung-beetle.
In characterizing stories as an instrument for distributing
intelligence, one thereby shifts from the individual mind to the
narrative situation as the primary unit of analysis. If thinking can be
characterized in terms of a functional gestalt in which tools, tasks, and

computation is as applicable to events that involve the interaction of humans

with artifacts and with other humans as it is to events that are entirely internal to
individual persons For our purposes, computation will be taken to refer to
the propagation of representational state[s] across representational media (p. 118).
37 E. G OFFMAN, Frame Analysis : An Essay on the Organization of Experience, New
York, Harper and Row, 1974 ; IDEM, Forms of Talk, Philadelphia, University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1981.
38 A. PALMER, The construction of fictional minds, Narrative, n 10, 2002, pp. 28-
46.
39 Cf. D. COHN, Transparent Minds : Narrative Modes for Presenting
Consciousness, Princeton, Princeton Universty Press, 1978.
 HOW STORIES MAKE US SMARTER

users are less basic than the larger whole in which they jointly
participate, in the case of stories, too, tellers, tales, and interpreters of
tellings are less basic than the transpersonal narrative situation which
they collectively constitute. Apuleius represents the telling and
interpreting of stories as the mechanism by which knowledge of the
past as well as the present is transmitted. Kafka uses figural
narration40 to blur the boundary between the narrators telling and
Gregors experiencing of the metamorphosis. In this way, the form of
the tale enables the propagation of representational states across a
society of minds and furthermore suggests the inextricable link
between narration and knowledge. Thus, whether consciously or not,
both authors root their texts in the etymological heritage of the very
term narrative, which derives from a Sanskrit root meaning to
know.

8. Conclusion
The approach outlined here provides a framework for studying
how stories enhance core problem-solving abilities in a variety of
communicative contexts, nonliterary as well as literary. While
sketching basic and general principles by virtue of which narrative
supports human understanding, my approach also suggests that those
principles are implemented differently in different kinds of story
artifacts, and even within stories ostensibly falling under the same
descriptive category (e.g. narratives of transformation). Future
research, drawing on the work of theorists in a number of fields, needs
to continue this investigation, exploring how various kinds of
narrative practice vehiculate intelligence in various ways.
At stake are differences in how specific instantiations of the
semiotic system of narrative support cognitive representations and
processes. Ethnographic, sociolinguistic, and communication-
theoretic research may suggest how those differences can be
correlated with the variable functions of stories across distinct
cultural, subcultural, and situational settings. Relevant, too, is work in

40 F.K. STANZEL, Theory of Narrative, trans. Ch. Goedsche, Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 1984.
 DAVID HERMAN

developmental psychology and applied linguistics41 ; this research

bears on age-graded differences in how stories are used by children
more or less fully apprenticed in their cultures, subcultures, and
familys narrative practices. Comparative media studies, meanwhile,
may reveal medium-specific constraints and enablements when it
comes to the cognition-boosting power of stories. In turn, this
necessarily interdisciplinary program for research a program for
studying how stories are woven into the very fabric of intelligent
behavior constitutes an important subdomain of cognitive semiotics.

41 Cf. E. OCHS and L. CAPPS, Living Narrative : Creating Lives in Everyday

Storytelling, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2001.