Marvellous Cognition: Why Fictional Worlds Are Incoherent (And Why It’s Good)

It is well-established in cognitive narratology that all fictional worlds are necessarily incomplete and are only modelled in more detail by the story consumer’s mental operations. In addition, I argue that the mental models prompted by narratives are typically incoherent, too. Interestingly, neither poses a serious problem for cognition or appreciation of narratives, but contrary to popular belief, this does not happen due to conventional suspension of disbelief. Since our cognitive capacities for creating representations and drawing inferences involve the same processes for cognizing fiction and for mapping the real world, appealing to conventions is a hasty answer underneath which are hidden certain facts about human cognition: that in both cases the constructs tend to be similarly illusory and incoherent and that cognition itself tends to be messy and limited to the most important tasks at hand, guided by a narrowly understood practicality. I argue that in the end, we do not really have to imagine the fictional fantastic in detail, because the fantastic (or the marvellous) enters all cognition.