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This chapter provides an introduction to narrative theory as a formal approach to the lives of the saints in the Scottish Legendary. Narratology as a key theoretical field, its main strands as well as its chances and challenges for the analysis of medieval narrative are discussed and problematised. The formal approach is placed within more general discussions of surface vs. symptomatic reading. Both a close and a deep reading are proposed as an expedient method to scrutinise the narrative art in the compilation. The chapter is rounded off with a section on the various ‘communicative’ instances that come into play when reading and interpreting the legends of the saints.

Unlike the physicist, the musicologist or the sociologist studying the intricacies of real-life sound, all of whom have a number of solid methodologies at their disposal, the literary scholar assessing a fictional soundscape is decidedly underequipped. Phrases like ‘point of view’ or ‘looking through a character’s eyes’ exemplify the ocularcentricity that has unfortunately tended to reduce a valuable narratological tool such as ‘focalization’ to a largely visual concept. In an attempt to revalue the other sensory modes, the auditory chief among them, several narratologists have recently come up with a number of new terms in order to differentiate between the different sensory experiences, thereby rethinking the concept of focalization. By cross-examining concepts such as ‘auricularisation’ (William Nelles and Sabine Schleckers, following film theorists François Jost and Michel Chion) and ‘auscultation’ (Melba Cuddy-Keane), and indicating how these differ from, yet intertwine with the visual aspects of narrative perspective scholars have hitherto tended to prioritize, this chapter aims to provide the first stepping stones towards a coherent theory for the study of sound in narrative. The writings of Virginia Woolf, in whose work sound more often than not fulfils a crucial function, will then serve to put the theory into practice.

Chapter 3 describes how impossible puzzle films create paradoxical, incongruent or impossible narrative experiences. To understand the nature of the confusion these films create, this chapter adopts Leon Festinger’s original theory on the psychological state of cognitive dissonance (1957) and argues that the perplexing effects of impossible puzzle films can be understood as cognitive dissonances. These films strategically evoke and maintain dissonant cognitions in their viewers through internal incongruities (contradictions in their narration) and projected impossibilities (narrative structures or elements that disrupt the elementary knowledge, logic and schemas that viewers use to make sense of both real life and fiction). Along with more recent insights from embodied-cognitive sciences and narratology, cognitive dissonance theory offers us a tool to explain the effects that impossible puzzle films have on viewers.

Chapter 2 focuses on a cognitive approach as a pertinent method to address complex narratives’ ‘difficult’ viewing experiences. As it argues, complexity does not only lie in a story’s formal composition itself, but is best understood in terms of how the narrative hinders viewers’ comprehension and meaning-making routines. Noticing that some films pose more conspicuous impediments to sense-making efforts than others, this chapter differentiates movies in regard to their relative complexity in cognitive terms – that is, their ability to cause various states of cognitive puzzlement and trigger diverse mental responses in their viewers. The cognitive approach will lead to reconsider the classificatory accuracy of existing concepts, such as the umbrella term of puzzle film. From there on, the chapter proposes more refined categories within the overarching division of narrative complexity, aiming to discern between different types of film that offer various degrees of complexity.

Chapter 4 addresses how effects of narrative cognitive dissonance incite in viewers an urge to make meaning, and therefore asks how viewers cope with dissonant experiences in narrative fiction. This chapter offers an overview of the different interpretive strategies and hermeneutic manoeuvres that viewers may utilise to ‘tame’ troubling or puzzling dissonances in narrative artworks. Regarding the reception and interpretation of highly complex stories, it aim to answer relevant questions such as ‘How do viewers usually make sense of or assign meaning to contradictory and impossible narrative elements?’, ‘What kinds of interpretive activity do these challenging films evoke in viewers?’ and ‘How do such interpretive activities shape our viewing experiences?’.

Chapter 5 discusses the formal make-up of impossible puzzle films, asking how they regulate viewer responses to their excessive complexities. This section addresses two specific questions: ‘How do impossible puzzle films cue certain sense-making and meaning-making operations over others?’ and ‘How do they keep viewers hooked on trying to solve their ultimately unsolvable puzzles?’. In line with these questions, part of the chapter is dedicated to a comparative perspective on the storytelling mode of impossible puzzle films and that of (modernist) art cinema. Art cinema, as a narrative mode, has used complex means similar to its contemporary counterpart, but, as the chapter demonstrates, has generally done so to different ends. The section argues that impossible puzzle films draw from both the tradition of (modernist) art-cinema and classical narration, but remain fundamentally rooted in the latter by carefully balancing their pervasive complexities with more classical elements of mainstream film storytelling.