Cognitive cartographies in Liviu Rebreanu’s “Forest of the Hanged”

Abstract

ALINA BAKOCognitive cartographies in Liviu Rebreanu's "Forest of the Hanged"The present study sets out to analyze the relationship between two concepts -literature and knowledge -advancing a "Romanian model" in keeping with Ernst von Glasersfeld's remark that "[t]here can be no final answers in this area but only models that, for the time being, satisfy our demands" (1996,(279)(280)(281)(282)(283)(284)(285)(286). The theoretical backbone of our essay is made up of two levels: the first one will be employed in order to prove that the Romanian novel features "cognitive cartographies", using Roger M. Down and David Stea's definition of the phenomenon they refer to as "a process composed of a series of psychological transformations by which an individual acquires, stores, recalls, and decodes information about the relative locations and attributes of the phenomena in his everyday spatial environment" (2017, 12). Liviu Rebreanu's novel Pădurea Spânzuraților (1922; Forest of the Hanged, 1930) is centered on a protagonist who perceives external space by means of subjective states of mind, drawing a map out of the cognitive processes recorded in the narration, as part of a psychological analysis. 1 The complexity of such a mapping process is evident from the stages generating the overall image: the accumulation of narrative information, by means of the initial scene, the stocking up of experiences that define the Transylvania region as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the decoding of cognitive processes by clarifying the act of belonging to a space.Another direction outlined in our study is to prove that "literature is a type of knowledge rather than simply a collection of cultural artifacts" (Bjornson 1981, 59). Therefore, mental activities generate both literary works and their interpretations in the form of maps represented individually by each reader. The second hypothesis is taken from von Glasersfeld, for whom "the role of knowledge is not to reflect an objective reality but to empower us to act effectively in the world of our experience, which is to say, to act so that we achieve a goal we have chosen" (1996, 238). The power conferred by literature by means of the experience it narrates is the main element by means of which we can update the practical aspect of the literary imaginary, but also the updating and integration of fiction into the global circuit of knowl-