Cognitive poetics of deixis in J. Cortazar’s “La isla al mediodia”

This paper aims to describe how the textual category of deixis functions in a short story “La isla al mediodia” [The Island at Noon] written by the prominent Argentine writer of the 20th century Julio Cortazar. Cortazar is famous for his short stories many of which have an open-ended structure, a combination of realistic and fantastic elements, and other experimental features providing readers with multiple possibilities for interpretation. The current research is done within the framework of cognitive poetics, which is a relatively new area at the intersection of cognitive linguistics, text linguistics and literary studies. Cognitive poetics applies principles of cognitive science to the interpretation of literary texts. This paper is concerned with the linguistic means expressing deixis and their cognitive role in the formation of reader’s interpretation. Deixis is reference by means of linguistic expressions that require certain context to be understood, and it plays an important role in texts of all types as it helps to maintain their cohesion. However, deixis can play an even more important role in literary texts, where writers manipulate it for various artistic effects that the authors of the paper aim to explore in the current study. The examination of deixis in the short story “La isla al mediodia” is based on the works on poetics by Russian (E.V. Paducheva, B.A. Uspenskiy) and foreign linguists (P. Stockwell). To provide the cognitive representation of deixis the authors apply the theory of mental spaces and the theory of conceptual integration proposed by J. Fauconnier and M. Turner. These theories allow presenting the conceptual process of meaning formation in the form of models whose architecture includes mental spaces representing temporary conceptual domains constructed during discourse, space builders, various elements with different properties within mental spaces and relations between these spaces. According to the theory of conceptual integration, several mental spaces can integrate their structures and form one blended space, or blend. We use blends to provide a cognitive modeling of a reader’s attempt to integrate ambiguous mental spaces. This ambiguousness of Cortazar’s texts is caused primarily by his “deictic plays”. The authors find mental spaces and blends to be a good instrument for representation and explanation of possible ways in which readers perceive and interpret such complex and ambiguous texts as Cortazar’s “La isla al mediodia”. The authors conclude that J. Cortazar creates the possibility of multiple interpretations in his short story by modifying different types of deixis. During the reading process, mental spaces change their content and status, sometimes dramatically, confusing readers and making them reinterpret the whole story. The deliberate “deception” of readers that Cortazar applies is a part of his play with the language of the text and, as a consequence, with readers’ cognition.

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