The Temporal Plot of Understanding the Text

When readers reflect on their sense of a narrative text, they can usually distinguish a time, relative to other times, of when they learned of something happening or existing in the text world, from the time when that something is meant to have happened or existed in the text-world. Thus, reflection can intermittently encounter multiple dimensions of progressive temporality, including also the separate epistemic horizons of different characters. Using Bühler’s idea of origo, the chapter examines how the reader undergoes a ‘plot’ of cognition in learning about the text world during a first reading. Readers are capable of experiencing a ‘shock’ at understanding something ‘too late’ that happened in the text world, e.g., in Faulkner’s novels. This shows that passive synthesis does not insulate the temporality of the text from that the reader. It also clarifies some experiences of lyrical poetry. The concluding sections examine memorization, forgetting and a reader’s ‘systematic’ exploration of their motivating associations, e.g., for academic purposes.