On Comic Mental Imagery in Literature The Case of

Authors: Jeroen Vandaele

Publish Date: 2015/04/03

Volume: 99, Issue: 3, Pages: 351-370

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Abstract

This essay deals with comic mental imagery in literature that is the aesthetic experience of reading a literary text and then suddenly finding yourself laughing at an image produced by your mind’s eye This common experience largely neglected by literary analysts vividly illustrates what cognitive science calls “the embodied mind” the human mind that turns symbols such as literary texts into “quasiperceptual” mental imagery and responds emotionally to these quasi percepts My essay investigates the imagery or quasi percepts I found myself laughing at while reading Elvira Lindo’s Manolito Gafotas—an enormous source of “verbally visual” humor The analysis agrees with Wolfgang Iser that the readerly mind produces the images but that the text frames them on its own emotive terms the comedic text functionalizes the imagery and the imagery materializes and elaborates the emotion Furthermore the essay tentatively describes certain types of comic imagery and it signals that imagined faces of characters play an important role in comic mental imagery—as is the case in plainly perceptual audiovisual or theatrical comedy More generally the essay constitutes a readerresponse exercise that intends to awaken literary scholars to the topic of comic mental imagery in literature It suggests that classical literary phenomenology eg Iser’s readerresponse approach may inspire not only the more recent cognitive approaches to literature but also those recent strands of embodied cognitive science that accept phenomenological analysis methodical introspection as an important component of knowledge construction about the human mindI am grateful to Jessica Milner Davis Gregory M Pell and Cecilia Alvstad for stimulating comments on an earlier version of this paper I would also like to thank Pilar Orero’s team at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona for a smallscale readerresponse experiment related to this investigation This research received funding from the project “Voices of Translation” the Research Council of Norway and the University of Oslo project 213246

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