Cues to the Imagination in Memoir, Science, and Fiction

Abstract

To understand psychological functions of writing, in which words achieve a certain permanency, we discuss Petrarch's memoir of his ascent of Mont Ventoux, Galileo's scientific account of the laws governing falling bodies, and Cervantes's fictional account of Don Quixote's confrontation with windmills. In each case, written words function as cues, instructions to the reader, to construct scenes in the imagination. We analyze the writing of Jane Austen's (1813/1980) Pride and Prejudice and find three categories of cues: utterance, thought, and observation. These are essential to fiction, but a comparable range of cues occurs in other genres, which have different purposes and can draw on cues in different proportions. Fiction is, perhaps, distinctive in reaching imaginatively toward psychological laws.