Expansion and Densification of Fictional Spaces. Transtextual Characters in Arthurian Romances and Grimmelshausen

For a narratology informed by cognitive sciences, narrative worlds can be understood as mental models of readers based on textual structures and inferences. Taking this as a starting point, this article aims to show how characters change not only their own profiles when they become transtextual, but also the shape of a storyworld they enter. The theoretical premises can be related to Wolf Schmid’s narratological model, which distinguishes between the story told in a narrative text and the deducible happenings underlying the selection of the story. In this sense, characters transport a past with them when entering a new world; through the inferential formations of the readers, the space-time structure of this world, of which the characters have now become a part, is also altered. I examine this hypothesis in two groups of pre-modern texts, namely Middle High German Arthurian poetry and Grimmelshausen’s picaresque novels. In a typological approach, I trace two forms of space-time relations that can be associated with transtextual characters. First, I analyse the typical way in which characters from Arthurian romances reappear or are invoked in other texts. In doing so, their deeds are remembered without being given a precise position in the past. Secondly, I discuss a case in which an Arthurian event, potentially already known to the audience, is taken up and placed as a background plot alongside the main plot of a new romance. The space-time coordination of the two plots does not require much narrative effort. This is due to the specific space-time structure of the Arthurian worlds, as I will show in a third step by contrasting some of Grimmelshausen’s texts. While the storyworlds of the Arthurian romances provide a framework that remains so general that it can include any number of other spaces, the world of Grimmelshausen’s novels is not expanded, but successively filled in with new details and thus condensed.