reading, mostly literary scholars and psychologists, observe that we get “lost” in (Nell 1988) or “seduced” (Chambers 1984) or “transported” (Gerrig 1993) by narratives. Reading can put us into a sort of “trance,” hence the “witchery” of stories (Gottschall 2012; Nell 1988). When we are absorbed in this way, we notice fewer inaccuracies in the story, and we evaluate protagonists more positively (Green and Brock 2000). Green, Garst, and Brock (2004) propose that narrative operates “as a cue to a reader to engage in a less-critical, more immersive form of mental engagement” (p. 165). The experience of “immersion in narratives brings about partial isolation from the facts of the real world” (Gerrig 1993, p. 16). Beyond ideational impacts, those who research narrative impacts emphasize emotional arousal (Harold 2005; Hogan 2003; A. M. Jacobs 2015; Nabi and Green 2015; Oatley 2002; Polichak and Gerrig 2002; Tan 1996). Indeed, narrative’s emotional influence may be preeminent, as Green and Brock (2002) state: “Individuals are swept away by a story, and thus come to believe in ideas suggested by the narrative” (p. 325). A good story gets us feeling excited, anxious, disgusted, saddened, or satisfied. We identify and empathize with fictional characters: we come to feel what they feel (J. Cohen 2001; cf. Keen 2007). Absorbed in fiction, we become active participants in the storied events (Iser 1972, 1978; Polichak and Gerrig 2002).
Scholarly investigation of narrative impacts deals mainly with the verbal arts, or literature. It concerns fictional stories recounted by others almost exclusively. But comparable impacts are evident whether the story is fiction or nonfiction (Green, Garst, and Brock 2004; Strange and Leung 1999) and whether the story is received or told. Hence Torossian’s (1937) assertion: “The difference . . . between aesthetic and practical emotional experience is not very great. The same psychological factors of memory and association, as well as those already discussed, are involved in both; except that in a practical experience the feelings aroused are identified with the individual having the experience, whereas in an aesthetic experience the feelings aroused are identified with the contemplated object” (p. 25). A storied reality takes hold of us at all times. And we regularly tell stories about ourselves, in the form of statements we make self-consciously and the internal and “virtually uninterrupted monologue” of which we are barely conscious (Brooks 1984, p. 3). Psychologist Victor Nell (1988) notes that “a narrative continues to exercise its fascination if teller and audience are condensed into one person and the act of telling is reduced to silence” (p. 61).
It is in fact likely that we are even more susceptible to the impact of self-stories (or we-stories) than we are to other people’s stories. Engagement in the latter requires, at a minimum, an interest in whoever the story is about and what they are going through (Schank and Berman 2002). Yet, we are predictably interested in ourselves and in the real-world narratives in which we cast ourselves. We care about the outcomes of such narratives, and we identify with the protagonist as a matter of course.
CAPTIVATING THE SELF
For some, the idea that we could captivate ourselves might seem bizarre. Not so for the medical researchers whose randomized trials bear out the effectiveness of self-hypnosis on pain and health-related attitudes, among other things. We very effectively cast spells on ourselves by ourselves with no one else to distract us. As for stories, neuroscientists observe that most of the same regions of the brain and mental processes are involved when we construct and when we absorb narratives (see, e.g., Mar 2004; Silbert et al. 2014). Both processes demand the ability to order propositions to construct meaning, and both rely on the ability to divine other people’s (characters’) mental states—that is, to conjure theory of mind.
In addition, both in telling and in processing stories we rely on shared prototypes (Hogan 2003), which brings us to another basis for susceptibility to our own stories. “Our” stories are never completely our own. They draw on “recognizable plots, character types, conventional tropes, genre-specific cues that build suspense” (Frank 2010a, p. 119). Thus, when we inspire ourselves, the ultimate source of the inspiration is collective. The cultural resources we use for telling stories are the same ones we use for understanding stories. Imagine, for example, my story of a recent breakup along lines of failing to see clearly how frayed the bonds I shared with my partner truly were the whole time we were together. The unseeing protagonist is a conventional character in our culture, the unwelcome revelation a conventional plotline. This story is no less compelling to me and to others for its conventionality.
If notions of trance and witchery seem foreign to criminology, consider our homegrown theories of the morally bankrupt crowd, the drift into juvenile delinquency, and the spectacle of crime. Gustav Le Bon (1903) observed that individuals relinquish thinking to the crowd; the individual “is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will” (p. 24), hence “the hypnotizing effect of general beliefs” (p. 141). The crowd is unreasonable; it buys into “the most improbable legends and stories” (p. 32). In David Matza’s (1964) theory of drift, the young person gets carried away and into offending. Drift is “a gradual process of movement, unperceived by the actor” (p. 29), an “episodic release from moral constraint” (p. 69). Today’s cultural criminologists account for punishment, crime, and other transgressions in terms of energy and verve, underwritten by shared semiotics. For example, Mike Presdee (2000) took note of trances achieved by youth in club culture, who through music and drugs make “pleasure the site of meaning” (p. 122). These scholars and others (e.g., Gadd and Jefferson 2007; McLaughlin 2014) grapple with the suspension of human reasoning in the context of transgression and violence.
Under the spell of narrative one’s reasoning is not so much suspended as it is altered. Narrative itself is said to be a way of reasoning—temporally, causally, and meaningfully (Bruner 1986). Research from experimental psychology shows that we are active thinkers even when—or as—we are absorbed in narrative (see Gerrig 1993; Nell 1988). Furthermore, we get absorbed within certain social settings and times and phases of life, and not others. A theory based on narrative can expound the nature of getting swept away and into doing harm while not abandoning the idea that individuals are agents living in social contexts who make choices. To properly build such a theory we need, in addition to an account of narrative, an account of emotion. Martha Nussbaum (2001) and Paul Colm Hogan (2003) offer especially useful theories for present purposes.
Nussbaum (2001) identifies emotions as appraisals that “ascribe to things and persons outside the person’s own control great importance for that person’s own flourishing” (p. 4). Feelings reflect an interpretation of events and circumstances that highlights issues of control and well-being. Even as Nussbaum traces emotional experience to “propositional content” concerning a particular present experience and especially a loss or a triumph, she notes that such experience “involves a storm of memories and concrete perceptions that swarm around that content, but add more than is present in it” (p. 65). Raw material for the felt experience of our appraisals is past experience rendered imaginatively. Hogan (2003) takes the view that our most basic concepts of emotion are rooted in universal stories that relay both eliciting conditions and the effects of feeling some feeling. Thus are narrative and emotion “almost inseparable phenomena” (p. 264). Enriched by insights from cognitive science and Sanskrit literary theory, Hogan argues that stories’ suggestive shading of meaning activates traces of memories and thereupon the emotions associated with these. Both scholars tie feeling to signification through the lens of the past. Hogan furthermore conceptualizes shared narratives as engines of signification and credits narrative ambiguity with provocation. Nussbaum is more attentive to the beguiling theme of control over well-being.
What remains necessary for theorizing mass arousal is some sociology of cognition, for as Hagan and Rymond-Richmond (2009) remind us, “a collective explanation is needed for collective violence” (p. 136). Stories act upon multitudes. The cognitive and emotional impacts I am concerned with are communal ones. The work of Eviatar Zerubavel (1997) fills in here, highlighting the enculturation of major processes of cognition, including classification and memory. Of particular relevance to collective narratives: Zerubavel demonstrates that our memories are as likely to be located in impersonal sites as they are in embodied, personal
