Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books: The Making of a Storyworld ...

“readerly”⁵ projection takes place, Zuckerman’s name gives him away as a Jew. Furthermore, he keeps being Zuckerman. This rather obvious fact, that is, his onomastic sameness throughout his entire narrative, triggers a spontaneous attribution of consistency. It is the cornerstone around which readers begin to exercise “the human urge to create significance” (Fludernik, Natural 457) and presume and postulate that they are dealing with the same character, given the same name, whom they have already met. In so doing, readers try to process information as productively as possible following a basic cognitive process: “they try to obtain from each new item of information as great a contextual effect as possible for as small as possible a processing effort” (Sperber and Wilson 142). The smallest processing effort entails choosing, without thinking, the default option and applying what one might call, adapting Palmer’s terminology,⁶ “a continuing character frame.” A frame is a cognitive model, that is to say, a structured and fixed framework or repertoire one selects to apply to a new situation on the basis of one’s previous knowledge and experience.⁷

The default assumption—that behind the name Nathan Zuckerman lies a character whose thoughts, actions, beliefs, and behavior are recognizably continuous—will be maintained in the absence of any countering textual evidence. I call it a default assumption because it represents a preference rule, or, to use Marie-Laure Ryan’s terms, a “principle of minimal departure”—readers postulate the minimal departure from the state of affairs in the actual world where an individual with a given name is expected to be the same each time we meet him or her.⁸

As storyworlds are inherently (Doleel would say ontologically) incomplete,⁹ gap filling is one of the main activities readers engage in while reading. “The reader has to interpret all the available evidence, not just that which is made available by direct access” (Palmer, Fictional 41). What is not textually given, in other words, the (numerous) missing pieces of Nathan Zuckerman’s biography, will be provided by readers according to the initial frame they have chosen to apply to this character. As Sperber and Wilson made clear, “people do not come to the processing of new information with a ‘blank mind’ ” (138), they use cognitive frames