Abstract
James V. Wertsch coined the concept of schematic narrative template in his Voices of Collective Remembering, which has become a classic work in memory studies. The central argument of this article is that the analytical power of the concept of schematic narrative template can be increased, and its methodological implications clarified, by making a distinction between plot structures, narrative schemata, and the practices of narrative production, dissemination, and consumption. The article demonstrates that these entities and their associated mechanisms and processes are different in kind and should therefore be studied by using different types of methods. Furthermore, the article elaborates on the cognitive aspects of Wertsch’s notion of schematic narrative template by distinguishing between the pattern completion and pattern matching functions of narrative schemata as well as between the cognitive processes of assimilation and accommodation of narrative schemata.
Keywords
The concept of schematic narrative template refers to storylines of the national past, which are shared by many specific narratives, and are significant for the national identity of a community (Wertsch, 2002, 2021). This concept is part of James V. Wertsch’s interdisciplinary framework for understanding the nature and processes of national remembering, developed in close connection with empirical analysis. In his account of national remembering, Wertsch emphasizes the role of modern states in the production of official narratives about the past, aiming to ensure the loyalty of their citizens and provide them with national identities. Although Wertsch focuses on national memory, it is an open question whether comparable schematic narrative templates can be found from subnational or transnational levels as well (see Philpott, 2014). This article nevertheless concentrates on national remembering.
The importance of schematic narrative templates has been widely recognized in studies on collective and national remembering. For example, Brescó de Luna and Van Alphen (2022a) write that ‘[t]he concept of schematic narrative templates is much needed today, especially considering the rise of nationalism and extreme-right populism, political movements that tend to tap into national narratives naturalized and accepted by large swathes of society’ (p. xiv). Yamashiro (2022) in turn suggests that ‘Wertsch’s synthesis of symbolic mediation, schematic narratives, and the cognitive unconscious represents a new point of leverage whereby collective memory researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds can find points of common reference and collaboration’ (p. 3). Accordingly, the concept schematic narrative is timely and useful for interdisciplinary memory studies.
The study of schematic narrative templates can be understood as an ongoing research programme that supports explanatory studies of collective and national remembering and, at least potentially, increases the unity of interdisciplinary memory studies. I will argue that these aims can be better achieved by distinguishing between plot structures, narrative schemata, and the practices of narrative production, dissemination, and consumption. The proposed distinction aligns with Wertsch’s (1998, 2002, 2021) mediated action approach to national memory, aiming to bring different disciplinary perspectives together to enhance our understanding of national remembering. The main difference from Wertsch’s work is that his concept of schematic narrative template tends to conflate the plot structures of narrative texts and the schematic processing of individual members of mnemonic communities. In my view, these are different kinds of entities that should be studied by using different methods. Therefore, I argue that explicitly making this distinction allows theorizing interlocking mechanisms and processes underlying national remembering and clarifying certain methodological issues within this interdisciplinary research programme.
But why do we need interdisciplinary studies on national remembering instead of many disciplinary-based perspectives? If our goal is to explain phenomena that relate to national remembering, then there are at least two reasons why interdisciplinary studies that aim to bring the social and the cognitive sciences closer together are important (for an account of more detailed arguments for cognitive social sciences, see Kaidesoja et al., 2019). First, social scientific explanations of memory phenomena often involve background assumptions about human cognition – specifically, the capacities, processes, and mechanisms of information processing – whether or not these assumptions are explicitly stated. Clarifying these assumptions about human cognition in a way that is compatible with the generally accepted findings of cognitive scientific or psychological studies on human memory would deepen these social explanations. Second, well-established social scientific theories of social or collective memory phenomena can be employed to critique cognitive scientific assumptions about memory-related cognition that often abstract from social and cultural contexts. This involves showing how social and cultural processes shape memory processes of individuals situated in specific social and cultural contexts. The rationale underlying these methodological procedures is that our explanatory understanding of different aspects of individual and collective memory would advance more rapidly if cognitive scientific and social scientific explanations of overlapping memory phenomena mutually constrain each other (for a parallel argument, see Hirst and Manier, 2008).
This article will begin with a brief overview and contextualization of Wertsch’s conceptual distinction between specific narratives and schematic narrative templates. I will illustrate the latter concept by describing Wertsch’s (2021) account of the ‘Expulsion of Alien Enemies’ narrative template that plays an important role in Russian national memory. Following this, I will consider the notion of schematic narrative template in detail from a semiotic, cognitive and community perspectives and propose a distinction between plot structures, narrative schemata, and the practices of narrative production, dissemination, and consumption. The final section will recapitulate the basic argument and identifies some new research areas.
Wertsch’s distinction between specific narratives and schematic narrative templates
According to Wertsch (2002: 58–59, 2021: Chapter 4), narratives organize our understanding of the past through emplotment and selectivity. Emplotment of historical narratives can be understood as a process through which selected (and sometimes invented) settings, characters, actions and events in the past are tied together into a meaningful whole with a beginning, middle and end. Emplotment requires selectivity, given that ongoing historical processes do not unfold in bounded event sequences with clear beginnings and endings. This does not imply that different narratives about the same historical episode cannot be evaluated in the light of empirical evidence, but it does imply that their epistemic evaluation is more complicated matter than the epistemic evaluation of isolated propositions about past events (e.g. Wertsch, 2021: 66–72).
Building on Bakhtin’s work, Wertsch (2002) emphasizes the dialogic function of narratives which ‘concerns the relationship one narrative may have to another’ (p. 57). The key idea here is that national narratives are explicitly or implicitly constructed by relying on, or responding to, earlier historical narratives that other people have told. Hence, historical narratives ‘are co-authored by the narrative tools provided by the community’ (Wertsch, 2021: 198) and may include more than one ‘voice’ in Bakhtin’s terminology.
The distinction between specific narratives and schematic narrative templates was first introduced in Wertsch’s (2002) book, Voices of Collective Remembering, which focuses on narratives about the national past in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia. His more recent book, How Nations Remember: A Narrative Approach, published in 2021, further develops the notion of schematic narrative template by drawing on recent developments in the cognitive sciences, such as dual-process models of cognition.
Specific narratives, according to Wertsch (2021), are stories about past events ‘that include concrete information about the particular times, places and actors involved in an event’ (p. 77). They exist ‘in directly observable surface texts’ (Wertsch, 2021: 78) and play ‘a role in the formation of narrative habits for members of a national community’ (p. 134). In addition, they provide scholars who study national memory ‘empirical evidence about [schematic] narrative templates’ (Wertsch, 2021: 134) that characterize mnemonic communities. Specific narratives then are what members of mnemonic communities read from history textbooks and tell other people about the national past.
Schematic narrative templates (hereafter, narrative templates), by contrast, are abstract and deeper narrative forms that underlie many specific narratives. They are ‘largely devoid of concrete detail about the time and place of events and about most actors’ (Wertsch, 2021: 78) since they ‘focus on the generalized “functions” that characterize a broad range of [specific] narratives’ (Wertsch, 2002: 60). These generalized functions include abstract roles like ‘enemy’, ‘villain’ or ‘hero’ and generic actions like ‘attack’, ‘defeat’ or ‘triumph’ that the narrative template ties together into a temporally organized and meaningful whole. However, according to Wertsch (2008b), ‘schematic narrative templates are not some sort of universal archetypes’ (p. 124) since they ‘belong to particular narrative traditions that can be expected to differ from one cultural setting to another’ (p. 124). In his view, schematic narrative templates can also be understood as ‘posited underlying codes to be unearthed through the analytical efforts of researchers’ (Wertsch, 2021: 78) who study many specific narratives about the national past circulating in a mnemonic community.
In addition to these semiotic characterizations, Wertsch also uses psychological terms to describe schematic narrative templates. He associates narrative templates to ‘schematic forms that members of national communities extract out of countless narratives they encounter from early childhood on’ (Wertsch, 2021: 76) and contends that narrative templates are ‘not readily available to consciousness’ (Wertsch, 2008b: 124). From this viewpoint, the key question is ‘how schemata, especially those built around narratives, play a central role in leading members of a national community to end up with similar accounts of the past’ (Wertsch, 2021: 52). Narrative templates also have ‘deeply held emotional resonance and are a fundamental part of the identity claims of a group’ (Wertsch, 2008a: 151). These points imply that narrative templates are often highly resistant to change even in cases where specific narratives about past events change in a national community (see, for example, Wertsch, 2002). 1
The most important example that Wertsch (2021; see also Wertsch, 2002, 2008a, 2008b) uses to illustrate these ideas is the ‘Expulsion of Alien Enemies’ 2 narrative template that he has constructed based on high school history textbooks used in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, as well as of supplementary interviews and surveys. The ‘Expulsion of Alien Enemies’ template consists of the four temporal stages:
An ‘initial situation’ in which Russia is peaceful and not interfering with others
‘Trouble’, in which a foreign enemy viciously attacks Russia without provocation
Russia comes under existential threat and nearly loses everything as the enemy attempts to destroy it as a civilization
Trough heroism and exceptionalism, against all odds, and acting alone, Russia triumphs and succeeds in expelling the foreign enemy (Wertsch, 2021: 100).
The main characters in this narrative template are ‘Russia’ and ‘foreign enemy’ which are both abstractly described actors or functional roles, forming ‘slots’ that can be filled in by many concrete actors in specific narratives. The same point applies to settings, events and actions that are described in the template. Although highly abstract, the template is not devoid of content, as it incorporates an idea that Russian history consists of endless struggle between peaceful and good Russia (‘us’) and hostile and evil foreign enemies (‘them’). It also portrays Russia as a victim of unprovoked aggression by foreign enemies. This makes it an efficient tool for political mobilization that Russian leaders or political parties use in their attempts to mobilize Russian people against suitably selected new ‘foreign enemies’, which may include ‘alien agents’ operating within Russian borders.
Russian history textbooks, in turn, include many specific narratives about different historical events that instantiate the aforementioned narrative template. These specific narratives fill its slots with more concrete descriptions of settings, characters, actions and events located in historical time and more specific geographical settings. For example, let us briefly focus on the main lines of Wertsch’s (2002: 105–110) analysis of the Soviet era high school textbooks about the so called ‘Great Patriotic War’, a term commonly used in Russia to refer to the Soviet Union’s involvement in World War II between 1941 and 1945. Wertsch’s analysis shows that the specific narratives about ‘the Great Patriotic War’ in history textbooks are typically framed in terms of Marxist-Leninist theory, emphasizing German imperialism and class-struggle. These specific narratives, found from history textbooks, typically begin by describing how Hitler’s Germany attacks the Soviet Union without provocation in 1941 and proceed by showing how its vicious invasion put Soviet Russia under existential threat as Nazis attempted to destroy Russian civilization. The textbook narratives continue by depicting how the Red Army fought against Nazis heroically and largely without the help of others, and after heavy losses in the Battles of Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk, achieved a triumph over Hitler’s Germany in 1945. In addition, the textbook narratives typically emphasize either the leadership of the Communist Party or Stalin, often described as a crucial factor that allowed Russians to defeat Nazi Germany almost without help of others. The selectivity of these narratives is evident in their systematic downplaying of the role of other allied countries in fighting against Nazi Germany and the omission of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed in 1939. Wertsch (2021: 130–133) suggests that these events were excluded from textbook narratives because they did not align to the ‘Expulsion of Alien Enemies’ narrative template or the interests of Soviet leaders at the time.
In his recent contribution, Wertsch (2021) discusses narrative templates by relying on the dual-process framework of cognition. He describes the influence of narrative templates to cognitive processing underlying national remembering by suggesting that
[r]ather than deliberately and consciously selecting an item from a stock of stories to make sense of an event, the influence of narrative templates is so automatic and powerful that they almost seem to take a lead and encourage members of a group to act in similar ways with overconfidence in how they size up events in predictable manner. (Wertsch, 2021: 108)
This type of fast and automatic processing is prone to produce at least two types of biases concerning our thinking of the national past. The first can be called transparency bias (although Wertsch does not use this term). It refers to the illusion of having a direct access to those sequences of past events that one only has textually mediated information (Wertsch, 2021: 12–14, 158–159). The second is confirmation bias that refers to the tendency to seek and favour information that supports the community members’ existing narrative templates concerning the national past (Wertsch, 2021: 106–108).
Furthermore, Wertsch (2021) slightly complicates the distinction between specific narratives and schematic narrative templates by introducing the concept of a ‘privileged event narrative’ (PEN). This notion refers to a ‘formidable combination of a particular specific narrative and a narrative template’ (Wertsch, 2021: 134–135) that is an especially powerful tool for shaping national memory due to its emotional appeal among the members of a national community. For example, the narrative of ‘the Great Patriotic War’ in the Russian national community in this century is, according to Wertsch (2021), ‘an obvious PEN’ (p. 135), because it is ‘simultaneously a specific narrative about a concrete event and an instantiation of the Expulsion of Alien Enemies narrative template’ (p. 135). Thereby, it constitutes ‘a preferred lens through which other events can and should be viewed and hence for making rhetorical appeals to mnemonic community’ (Wertsch, 2021: 135). The last point does not apply only to past events, but also to present and future events, as exemplified in Vladimir Putin’s repeated rhetorical appeals to the narrative of ‘the Great Patriotic War’ in recent decades to legitimate his foreign policy decisions, including the imperialistic and illegal invasions of Georgia and Ukraine (Wertsch, 2021: 135–136).
Plot structures, narrative schemata and the practices of narrative production, dissemination and consumption
After having considered the distinction between specific narratives and schematic narrative temples, I will move on to explore the latter concept by making a distinction between semiotic, cognitive and community perspectives. I suggest that differentiation between these three complementary perspectives allows us to distinguish between plot structures, narrative schemata and the practices of narrative production, dissemination and consumption. I also argue that this latter distinction allows us to theorize mechanisms and processes through which schematic narrative templates function in national remembering and enables us to specify the methods that are instrumental in studying them.
Semiotic perspective: the plot structures of narrative texts
The semiotic perspective concerns the cultural tools that function as meaningful signs for their users. In the case of national remembering, the most important cultural tools used as meaningful signs are narrative texts. In addition to written content, these may include pictures and, in the case of digital texts, video clips or animations. However, here my focus is on written texts understood as signs since Wertsch’s account of national remembering is centred on them.
Strictly speaking, material texts include only potential meanings for their readers who have cognitive capacities to read them and understand their contents. The meanings embedded in a text are potential rather than actual because they require readers to make them (or, rather, some of them) actual by reading the text. Hence, I agree with Strauss and Quinn (1997) who contend that ‘meanings can only be evoked in a person’ (p. 20). This claim is nevertheless compatible with the view that the potential meanings of material texts can be understood as affordances and constrains for meaning making, which, in turn, implies that the material properties of texts influence the meanings that their readers can extract from them. The affordances and constraints of material texts influence rather than determine the readers’ interpretations because different readers with different cognitive skills and schemata are typically able to access only to a subset of the texts’ affordances and, for this and other more contextual reasons, may interpret the same text in different ways (cf. Wertsch, 1998: 29, 38–42; 2021: 25–29).
Building on the previous ideas, I suggest that the distinction between plot structures and narrative schemata could be useful for studying national remembering. By plot structure, I refer to the pattern of affordances 3 and constraints for meaning making embedded in a material text, allowing it to be understood as a narrative, or a specific type of narrative (e.g. a national narrative) by readers with sufficient cognitive capacities. The text may share this specific pattern with other narrative texts. The plot structure therefore consists of the relations between narrative elements in a text by virtue of which it functions as a representation of a sequence of events that instantiates a specific storyline. The plot structures of historical narratives can be identified and described at different levels of abstraction. From the viewpoint of national remembering, it is interesting to search for general plot structures that are shared by many different types of narrative texts concerning the national past of a specific national community. These plot structures may then be contrasted with those found from other national communities.
Given this distinction, I suggest that the above description of the ‘Expulsion of Alien Enemies’ narrative template can be understood as a hypothetical account of a plot structure that is instantiated in many official narrative texts about the past produced in Russia. This description resulted from Wertsch’s comparative analysis of many specific narratives that explicitly or implicitly relied on the coding of their narrative elements. By contrast, from the viewpoint of the authors of official narrative texts, plot structures can be understood as textual means for emplotting a specific narrative that they may use (more or less) deliberatively to address a specific audience, such as students of a certain age. Emplotment thus typically includes uses of external structures (i.e. other narrative texts) to construct a new external structure (i.e. a narrative text written by the author). From the viewpoint of their readers, the plot structures embedded in narrative texts enable and constrain (but do not determine) how they can plausibly interpret and use them, while the readers’ interpretations are also influenced by their narrative schemata that I will discuss soon. Hence, the methods of narrative texts analysis commonly used in memory studies can be fruitfully employed in studies on contrastive plot structures embedded in narrative texts found from history textbooks and other official historical texts about national pasts that circulate in different mnemonic communities.
Cognitive perspective: the narrative schemata of individuals
The cognitive perspective focuses on information processing of individual members within mnemonic communities. Although debates exist about the proper definition of cognition within the cognitive sciences, it is not necessary to take a stand in those debates here. Instead, I will discuss some specific concepts and models from the cognitive sciences that could enhance our understanding of the mental processes related to national remembering.
According to Wertsch (2021), the key issue in understanding national remembering is the question of ‘how schemata, especially those built around narratives, play a central role in leading members of a national community to end up with similar accounts of the past’ (p. 52). This emphasis explains his choice of the term ‘schematic narrative template’ as his central analytic concept. However, although it has opened new avenues of research for memory studies, this concept tends to conflate the plot structures of narrative texts with the narrative schemata of individual members of national communities which, I think, should be kept analytically distinct. My suggestion therefore is that, to increase the analytical power of Wertsch’s theoretical framework, we should explicitly distinguish between plot structures (understood as patterns of affordances and constraints embedded in narrative texts) and narrative schemata (understood as dynamical cognitive structures of individuals). This distinction allows us to tease apart the semiotic mechanisms through which the authors of narrative texts emplot them and through which analysts of narrative texts reconstruct their plot structures by comparing many different texts from the cognitive mechanisms through which individual members of mnemonic communities acquire, use and transform their narrative schemata when they recurrently read and process many narrative texts. Before discussing the notion of narrative schema in detail, I provide a brief characterization of cognitive schemata since the former can be understood as subspecies of the latter.
Cognitive schemata can be understood as experientially acquired and modified representational structures in our minds that abstract from details and through which we process and remember domain-specific information.
4
As Strauss and Quinn (1997) explain,
Schemas sometimes reconstruct our memories of past events, [. . .] determine the meanings we impart to ongoing experience, and give us expectations for the future. Schemas also fill in missing or ambiguous information: just think of everything that can be left unsaid in any conversation because speakers assume their interlocutors share their schemas. Without these learned expectations regarding the way things usually go, it would be impossible to get anything done, plan for the future, or even interpret what is happening; and without schemas that were at least partly shared, social interaction would be impossible as well. (p. 49)
Furthermore, according to D’Andrade (1995), ‘[t]here are as many kinds of schemas as there are kinds of things; there are event schemas, orientational schemas, narrative schemas, propositional schemas, metaphoric schemas, image schemas etc’ (p. 132). These views may not be entirely unproblematic as there has been a tendency to overextend the meaning of the concept of cognitive schema, which has decreased its analytical power. Nevertheless, there is plenty of evidence that our thinking utilizes schemata in different domains (for a review, see Ghosh and Gilboa, 2014). The models of specific types of cognitive schemata are also more constrained than general theories of schemata. Here I will only focus on one subspecies of schemata that I will call narrative schemata.
By narrative schemata, I refer to specific type of cognitive schemata that organize our information about sequences of events and guide the selection of information that we remember and forget about past events or episodes. 5 Just like all cognitive schemata, narrative schemata can be described as forming interrelated ‘slots’ that are filled in by contextual details when the schemata are activated (D’Andrade, 1995: 132–133). These slots can also be understood as variables that can take different values and, in cases where contextual information is incomplete or ambiguous, a narrative schema of a person tends to automatically fill in the missing slots by the default values of variables. For example, a politician may use only a part of a historical narrative that embeds the plot structure of an official national narrative in order to activate the congruent narrative schema in people who listen to her speech since their activated narrative schemata fill in the missing pieces of the incomplete narrative by making use of the default values (e.g. representations of the characters and event types typically included in official national narratives). In this way, narrative schemata function as pattern completion devises that are not entirely under the person’s conscious control. In addition to this function, Boutyline and Soter (2021: 734) note that schemata may also function as pattern matching devices. In the case of narrative schemata, this may happen in situations where a person relies on a narrative schema when she reads a complete historical narrative with a plot structure that is congruent with her narrative schema that, thereby, guides her interpretation of the text. Although narrative schemata usually operate in the background in our cognitive processes, this does not imply that we cannot become partially conscious of the contents of our narrative schemata in any circumstances (for an interesting discussion on this issue, see Boutyline and Soter, 2021: 750–752).
With this understanding of narrative schemata, we can now briefly address the relation between narrative schemata and narrative texts. Although a person acquires narrative schemata by generalizing them from her experiences, it is reasonable to assume that these experiences include both sequences of events that a person herself has experienced and sequences of events that are described in historical narratives that she has heard or read. To the extent that members of a national community share the same official narrative texts about the national past (e.g. history textbooks), it can be expected that their narrative schemata take the form of cultural schemata that unite the members of a national community and differentiate them from the members of other national communities (cf. Wertsch, 2002, 2021). Having said this, it is also important to emphasize that, from the viewpoint of current cognitive sciences, narrative schemata do not exist in the form of ‘internalized’ linguistic structures, although their contents are influenced and may be partially redescribed using language (cf. Boutyline and Soter, 2021: 751; Lizardo, 2021). Instead, narrative schemata and their dynamics may be more adequately represented by using connectionist models that resemble networks of interconnected neurons in our brains (Rumelhart et al., 1986; Rumelhart and Ortony, 1977; Strauss and Quinn, 1997: Chapter 3; see also Boutyline and Soter, 2021). I will not delve into details of this approach here; my point is only to indicate that there are alternatives to linguistic or symbolic models of narrative schemata that are more plausible from the viewpoint of extant cognitive sciences. This is where my views probably differ mostly from those of Wertsch (2021) as he tends to follow Vygotsky, Luria and Bakhtin who all ‘viewed language as having a defining role in social and mental life’ (p. 52). My worry here is that these (over-?) emphases on language may lead problematic inferences concerning the cognitive processes of individuals insofar as these inferences are based on the analysis of narrative texts that individuals read and write. As I will suggest below, the methods of narrative texts analysis should be complemented with other methods tailored for analysing narrative schemata.
Once a person has acquired a narrative schema, it may undergo at least two types of changes that, following Piaget (1952), can be termed as assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation refers to ‘incorporating environmental elements into a schema without challenging the existing relationships within the schema’ (Ghosh and Gilboa, 2014: 108), while accommodation refers to ‘modifying a schema under pressures by new environmental elements’ (Ghosh and Gilboa, 2014: 108). For example, when a person reads a new historical narrative whose plot structure fits the structure of her activated narrative schema, this schema gets consolidated and/or adapted as the person assimilates new information into it. By contrast, when a person reads a historical narrative whose plot structure does not fit the structure of her activated narrative schema, she may either resist this new information by ignoring or misinterpreting it while retaining the narrative schema, or she may accommodate this new information to the narrative schema by changing its structure.
Assuming the previous distinction, one may ask in which conditions can we expect accommodation of a narrative schema about the national past to occur. My tentative answer is that this may happen in the following two types of conditions: (1) When the whole cultural environment of a person, including the surrounding narrative texts about the national past, changes such that she cannot use her narrative schema to make sense of it anymore, or (2) when a person mitigates the effects of her narrative schema about national history through slow and deliberate thinking. This kind of deliberate thinking may be triggered, for example, when one engages in open discussions with the members of other mnemonic communities with contrastive narrative schemata or reads such academic historical research that provides alternative historical narratives challenging the official historical narratives. It seems to me that the case of the transformation of narrative schemata among many West Germans after World War II exemplifies both processes since the whole cultural environment in West Germany profoundly changed after Nazi Germany’s defeat, and many West Germans had to confront new public information about the Holocaust that did not fit their existing narrative schemata about German history nor their conception of themselves as moral persons.
Moreover, I suggest that the specific role of privileged event narratives (or PENs) in national remembering can be cognitively accounted for in terms of prototypes understood as highly typical instantiations of narrative schemata and other types of cultural tools. As D’Andrade (1995) explains, ‘a prototype is not the same as a schema: a schema is an organized framework of objects and relations which has yet to be filled with concrete detail, while a prototype consists of specific set of expectations’ (p. 124). In this respect, PENs resemble prototypes insofar as they are constituted of specific set of memories about a sequence of events in the national past. This accounts for their capacity to invoke strong emotional responses when activated and generate specific set of expectations concerning current events through analogical reasoning. The notions of narrative schemata and prototype also allow us to reframe Wertsch’s (2021: 102–108) discussion of cognitive biases involved in the uses of narrative templates. Cognitive processing that is based on a narrative schema and accompanying prototypes can be assumed to provide us with vibrant imagery of past events, which may give rise to transparency bias. Schematic processing may also be one of the cognitive mechanisms that explains confirmation biases in this context since, as I suggested above, it is easier to assimilate new information that fits an existing narrative schema and forget discrepant information than to revise its structure as a response to contradictory information.
These points imply the necessity of employing methods beyond narrative text analysis for studying the narrative schemata of individual members within mnemonic communities. This is because the narrative analysis of texts and their plot structures does not warrant inferences about their readers narrative schemata, although it may give rise to hypotheses concerning the latter. In particular, I suggest that, in addition to the methods of text analysis, interviewing and productive methods (e.g. instructed writing of narrative texts) used by Wertsch (2002), also experimental methods and computational modelling could prove useful in gaining new insights of the cognitive mechanisms underlying schematic processing of narrative texts about national history. For example, experimental methods have already been used for studying how narrative schemata (or story schemas) affect readers’ comprehension and recalling of written folk tales in the context of cognitive psychology (e.g. Mandler and Johnson, 1977) and literacy studies (e.g. Rand, 1984). This line of experimental research may be extended, for example, to studies on the history students’ narrative schemata concerning the history textbooks used in history teaching, focusing on the questions of how the history textbooks with different types of plot structures influence students’ acquisition of narrative schemata about national history and how their available narrative schemata affect their comprehension and recalling of written narrative texts about national history used in history teaching in different contexts. Experimental studies of this kind would aim to isolate the common cognitive mechanisms of schematic processing through which individuals process different types of national narratives in different contexts.
Community perspective: the practices of narrative production, dissemination and consumption
The community perspective addresses practices through which official historical narratives are produced, disseminated, and consumed in different national and multi-national communities. 6 Accounts of these practices aim to explain the population-level patterns of distribution of plot structures and narrative schemata with specific contents in different national communities and how schematic processing occurs in specific contexts. However, these accounts do not directly answer the questions concerning the semiotic mechanisms that underlie emplotment of narrative texts about national past or the cognitive mechanisms concerning the acquisition and transformation of narrative schemata of individuals that are common to the mediated actions of individuals in different national communities. In addition to individuals and their cultural tools, institutions and meso-level organizations are key elements of the practices of narrative production, dissemination and consumption.
Next, I will briefly identify research questions concerning each of these practices that will fall into different disciplines and their intersections. The practices of narrative production and consumption are already discussed in Wertsch’s (2002) extensive analysis of how the Soviet state ‘sought to control both the textual resources involved in remembering and the particular uses of them’ (p. 67), although he does not analyse the practices of narrative dissemination separately. In what follows, I will utilize Wertsch’s insightful work and the previous distinction between plot structures and narrative schemata to formulate research questions that could advance empirical research on national remembering. I will also briefly summarize Wertsch’s (2002) answers to some of these questions concerning the Soviet case. As emphasized by Wertsch (2002, 2021), the issue of state control is crucial for understanding how the practices of narrative production and consumption contribute to the construction of (more or less) unified national communities, and the most important institution trough which modern states aim to exert control over national remembering is history education.
The practices of narrative production concern the processes through which official narrative texts about the national past are written in a mnemonic community. The crucial questions related to these processes include the following: Who produces official historical narratives, such as history textbooks used in schools? To what extend do producers utilize similar plot structures in their emplotment of different official historical texts? Do they employ or respond to other narratives when producing official narratives? To what extent how and for what purposes do the state control the production and contents of official historical narratives? To what extent and how does the state regulate university-based historical research and the production of historical counternarratives? Under what conditions are the plot structures of official historical narratives prone to remain stable or undergo change?
The practices of narrative dissemination concern the processes through which official narrative texts are distributed among their audiences or consumers. The crucial questions related to these processes include the following: How are official narrative texts distributed to consumers? What kind patterns of distribution do the distribution processes generate? To what extent and how does the state control distribution processes? To what extent and how does the state prevent distribution of historical narrative texts that include counternarratives? To what extent and how does the state control or prevent distribution of historical narratives produced in other mnemonic communities?
The practices of narrative consumption concern the processes in which official narrative texts are used by their audiences or consumers. The crucial questions related to these processes include the following: Under what conditions, how and for what purposes do consumers use official historical narrative texts? How does the state control the uses of official narrative texts in different contexts? To what extend and how does the state control doubt regarding official historical narratives? To what extend and how does the state control the uses of historical counternarratives? Under what conditions and to what extend is the state control successful? How consumer’s antecedent narrative schemata about history influence their uses of official narrative texts? How do different contextual conditions influence the activation of their narrative schemata? How are their narrative schemata transformed with repeated exposures to official national narratives in different contexts? What stances towards official historical narrative texts are typical among their consumers?
My central point here is that these questions cannot be answered by using the methods of narrative text analysis or experimental methods alone. Instead, answering them requires the uses of social scientific methods. For example, the methods of institutional analysis, document analysis, and interviews could be instrumental in studying the practices of narrative production, while process tracing, network analysis and surveys provide methods for analysing the practices of narrative dissemination and their outcomes. The practices of narrative consumption are, in turn, best analysed be means of interviewing, productive methods, surveys, ethnographic methods and perhaps, in some cases, experimental methods. However, I suggest that background knowledge concerning plot structures, narrative schemata and their interplay could prove useful in designing empirical research concerning these practices. The results of these studies may, in turn, suggest ways of enriching the schema theory by means of incorporating social and cultural factors into it (cf. McVee et al., 2005). Although I have used the term ‘state’ as if it was a unitary actor, it is obvious that the state acts through its representatives and functionaries, who may be individuals or organizations.
Wertsch (2002) provides nuanced and empirically grounded answers to many of these questions concerning the cases of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, the former providing an extreme case of state-controlled production, dissemination and consumption of official historical narrative texts. In the case of Soviet Russia, the production of official historical narratives, especially history textbooks, was a centrally planned and heavily state-controlled effort, influenced ideologically by ‘Soviet Marxist claims about the inevitable march of progress toward the shining heights of communism’ (Wertsch, 2002: 73). History textbooks were centrally distributed throughout the country by the USSR Ministry of Education and other state authorities that functioned under the control of the Communist Party, ensuring that the same books were used everywhere simultaneously during the school year. The consumption of history textbooks in schools was also centrally planned and controlled by detailed guidelines that teachers were supposed to follow in their lessons. However, Wertsch’s (2002) analysis of the consumption of official narrative texts interestingly shows that the state control over the Soviet citizen’s private thinking was not absolute. Many Soviet citizens privately doubted about official historical narratives. Nevertheless, expressing these doubts in public was dangerous, as state authorities, with the assistance of party-loyal and coerced citizens, formed a massive system of surveillance that monitored and recorded citizens’ communication and reported dissenters to party officials and state police, who did not hesitate arrest dissenters and sentence them to prison or execution.
In this context, Wertsch (2002: 119–123; see also Wertsch, 1998: 81–108) makes an interesting distinction between mastery and appropriation of narrative texts: Mastery refers to an individual’s skills for using a narrative text for various purposes, while the appropriation pertains to the extent of which she believes in the contents of a narrative text and uses it as a resource in building her identity. Wertsch suggests that a person can have a high degree of mastery over a narrative text while resisting its contents, and vice versa. It seems to me that the notion of mastery can be associated with the concept of narrative schemata such that it can hypothesized that a high degree of mastery over a narrative text presupposes that an individual has formed a rich narrative schema that is congruent with the plot structure of the text. The notion of appropriation, by contrast, seem to relate to the availability of alternative narrative schemata that an individual may utilize in processing the contents of a narrative text, such as one congruent with historical counter narratives that embed the plot structure of Russia’s aggressive imperialism, which was (and is) common outside Russia. These alternative narrative schemata provide a reason to doubt the contents of the official narrative text, even if the individual has mastery over it. However, Wertsch’s (2002: Chapters 6–7) detailed analysis of the Soviet case shows that it is difficult to measure the extent of which official narrative texts were appropriated by the Soviet citizens. He also argues that the degree of appropriation relates to the (lack) stability of official historical narratives over time and differences between contexts where narrative texts were consumed, in addition to the mere availability of counternarratives. Hence, specifying the conditions in which historical narrative texts are appropriated forms an interesting, albeit challenging, question to empirical research on narrative consumption.
Conclusion
I have argued that the distinction between plot structures, narrative schemata and the practices of narrative production, dissemination and consumption allows us to advance the Wertshian research programme on national remembering. This distinction was premised upon the separation between semiotic, cognitive and community perspectives to identify the key mechanisms and processes underlying the aforementioned phenomena, as well as suitable methods for studying them. My views are different from Wertsch’s account of schematic narrative templates in that I more explicitly distinguish between the plot structures of narrative texts and the narrative schemata of individual members of mnemonic communities. I suggested that plot structures can be characterized as the patterns of affordances and constraints for meaning making that are embedded in narrative texts and that narrative schemata can be understood as cognitive mechanisms through which individual members of mnemonic communities process information about sequences of past events. The primary benefit of this distinction is that it allowed me to provide more nuanced account of the cognitive aspects of narrative templates, as exemplified in the above distinctions between pattern completion and matching functions of narrative schemata and between assimilation and accommodation of narrative schemata. The distinction also clarifies that the methods for studying plot structures and narrative schemata are different. However, the term ‘schematic narrative template’ may still serve as an umbrella term that unifies these multilevel and complex but interlocking phenomena that are studied in different but overlapping memory disciplines using different types of research methods. While I have already formulated a number of research questions for advancing the Wertschian research programme, I will end this article by identifying new research areas that could be fruitfully incorporated into this programme.
A topic for further research would be to detail the social mechanisms that drive commemorative ceremonies (e.g. Connerton, 1989) and the formation of memory activist movements (e.g. Gutman and Wüstenberg, 2022) since it can be expected that they both play a significant role in national remembering in many contexts. Wertsch (2002) has mostly focused on state-controlled production of history textbooks and their consumption at schools, which are especially important practices for understanding the high degree of ‘the univocality’ of national memory in the Soviet Russia. While these are significant practices also in many other cases of national memory, the Wertschian research programme may be extended by analysing the role of commemorative ceremonies in embodied consolidation of existing narrative schemata and the role of memory activist movements in producing new national counternarratives that require accommodation of the existing narrative schemata of the members of national communities. The latter dynamics seems important in less authoritarian contexts than the Soviet Russia and the current Russia.
Finally, as Wertsch (2021) acknowledges, narrative texts are not the only cultural tools that are important for national remembering. In addition to full-blown narrative texts, also social media messages, pictures, movies, buildings, national monuments, national museums, and national holidays are commonly used for the purposes of dissemination and sustaining the official national history. Although a growing number of studies have already pursued this end, more research is needed to analyse the affordances and constraints of these different types of media for meaning making and the ways in which the members of mnemonic communities use them in national remembering in different contexts to produce, disseminate and consume national narratives.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Matti Sarkia as well as the anonymous reviewers of Memory Studies for their valuable comments and suggestions.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received funding from the Kone Foundation for writing this article.
