THE NARRATIVE AS A BASIC MODALITY OF COGNITION

NARRATOLOGICAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Abstract

In this paper we have proposed to discuss and analyze the proposal of the philosopher Walter Burkert in light of the considerations made by different narratologists regarding the role of the narrative as a cognitive ability. For Burkert, the emergence and survival of certain cultural artifacts such as myths and traditional stories can be explained by the effectiveness and efficiency they express as tools to store and transmit information relevant to the species. Among the virtues and potentialities that have stories and simple stories we can note that they are easy to remember.
In the last decades authors of different specialties have pointed out that narrative could be a basic modality of our cognition. Throughout history, learning to tell stories, create fables and convey morals, could be a key skill for those who wanted to define and condition the social practices of a community. Following these guidelines, Burkert affirms that traditional stories and myths would come to fulfill the function of transmitting, in a synthetic and pregnant way, vital information for individual and group survival. But in addition, it affirms that certain structural constants exist that determine the way in which we organize the plot of any history.
Burkert will base his proposal on the studies made by the folklorist Vladimir Propp on the traditional Russian stories. After a rigorous and systematic analysis of a variety of traditional stories from his country, Propp found that certain patterns of structural organization were repeated in all of them. According to Burkert, these patterns would be extendable to almost any narrative production. What he will try to show is that in all of them there is an architecture that is more or less similar to the one described by Propp. The organizing principle of the story, he will say later, the soul of the argument, seems to operate, in a more or less universal way. This pattern seems to express for Burkert a basic modality of cognitive organization.