Image Schemas as Emotional Attractors inThe Crying of Lot 49: To Live Narratives is to Feel Narratives

Abstract

Now, thanks to the latest Neuroscience and Cognitive Linguistics studies (Lakoff 2014), we know that the most complex and the common day-today linguistic constructions share the same cognitive scaffolding. Something similar happens with emotions. Following the somatic markers hypothesis, emotional states are related to body and regulatory states structures even when they do not arise from the body but in its mental representations. Thus, the emotional mind cannot be separated from the cognitive mind for our thought processes are intrinsically bound to emotional processes. To understand the power of narratives is also to understand our ability as human beings to feel and experience what others are feeling and experiencing. Thus, to further understand the evolutive role of storytelling we should put narrative studies at the core of the New Humanities and Brain Studies (Zeki 2014). Here, we apply the cognitive linguistics model of Image Schemas (mental patterns of our bodily experience which provide structure to other experiences) to several examples from the novel The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon in order to describe the hypothesis that relational actions from image schemas and their inherently embodied and dynamic structures function as attractors profiling the chaotic but deterministic trajectory of the narrative. Thus, the changing configurations in space, conformed by image schemas, might correspond with the occurrence of changes in emotional states, exposing one of the invisible processes taking place in our narrative experience.