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  WHY WE READ FICTION

  THEORY OF MIND AND THE NOVEL

  Lisa Zunshine

  THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS

  Copyright © 2006 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Zunshine, Lisa. Why we read fiction : theory of mind and the novel / Lisa Zunshine.

  p. cm.—(Theory and interpretation of narrative series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8142-1028-7 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8142-5151-X (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Fiction. 2. Fiction—Psychological aspects. 3. Books and reading. 4. Cognitive science.

  I. Title. II. Series. PN3331.Z86 2006 809.3—dc22

  2005028358

  Cover design by Laurence Nozik. Text design and typesetting by Jennifer Forsythe. Type set in Adobe Garamond. Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc.

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992.

  98765432 1

  Contents

  List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix

  PART I: ATTRIBUTING MINDS

  1. Why Did Peter Walsh Tremble? 3

  2. What Is Mind-Reading (Also Known as Theory of Mind)? 6

  3. Theory of Mind, Autism, and Fiction: Four Caveats 10

  4. "Effortless" Mind-Reading 13

  5. Why Do We Read Fiction? 16

  6. The Novel as a Cognitive Experiment 22

  7. Can Cognitive Science Tell Us Why We Are Afraid of Mrs. Dalloway ? 27

  8. The Relationship between a "Cognitive" Analysis of Mrs. Dalloway and the Larger Field of Literary Studies 36

  9. Woolf, Pinker, and the Project of Interdisciplinarity 40

  PART II: TRACKING MINDS

  1. Whose Thought Is It, Anyway? 47

  2. Metarepresentational Ability and Schizophrenia 54

  3. Everyday Failures of Source-Monitoring 58

  4. Monitoring Fictional States of Mind 60

  5. "Fiction" and "History" 65

  6. Tracking Minds in Beowulf 73

  7. Don Quixote and His Progeny 75

  8. Source-Monitoring, ToM, and the Figure of the Unreliable Narrator 77

  9. Source-Monitoring and the Implied Author 79

  10. Richardson's Clarissa: The Progress of the Elated Bridegroom 82

  (a) Mind-Games in Clarissa 83

  (b) Enter the Reader 91

  11. Nabokov's Lolita: The Deadly Demon Meets and Destroys the Tenderhearted Boy 100

  (a) " Distributed" Mind-Reading I: A "comic, clumsy, wavering Prince Charming" 103

  (b) " Distributed" Mind-Reading II: An "immortal daemon disguised as a female child" 109

  (c) How Do We Know When Humbert Is Reliable? 112

  PART III: CONCEALING MINDS

  1. ToM and the Detective Novel: What Does It Take to Suspect Everybody? 121

  2. Why Is Reading a Detective Story a Lot like Lifting Weights at the Gym? 123

  3. Metarepresentationality and Some Recurrent Patterns of the Detective Story 128

  (a) One Liar Is Expensive, Several Liars Are Insupportable 130

  (b) There Are No Material Clues Independent from Mind-Reading 133

  (c) Mind-Reading Is an Equal Opportunity Endeavor 138

  (d) "Alone Again, Naturally" 141

  4. A Cognitive Evolutionary Perspective: Always Historicize! 153

  CONCLUSION: WHY DO WE READ (AND WRITE) FICTION?

  1. Authors Meet Their Readers 159

  2. Is This Why We Read Fiction? Surely, There Is More to It! 162

  Notes 165 Bibliography 181 Index 193

  Illustrations

  Figure 1 "Of course I care about how you imagined I thought you perceived I wanted you to feel." © The New Yorker Collection 1998 Bruce Eric Kaplan from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved. 30

  Figure 2 Clarissa dying. Reproduced courtesy of McMaster University Library. 83

  Figure 3 Book cover of MANEATER by Gigi Levangie Grazer reproduced with the permission of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group. Book cover, Copyright © 2003 by Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. Michael Mahovlich / Masterfile (image code 700-075736). 144

  Figure 4 "What else is there that I can buy you with?" Sam Spade and Brigid O'Shaughnessy before Sam finds out that she killed Archer. 151

  Figure 5 "When one in your organization gets killed, it is a bad business to let the killer get away with it—bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere." Sam and Brigid after he realizes that she killed Archer. 151

  Acknowledgments

  I had a great time working on this book because of the people whom I

  have met in the process. First, in the late 1990s, I had the privilege to sit in for several semesters on the graduate seminars taught by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby at the University of California, Santa Barbara, an experience that I immediately recognized back then and continue to consider now a once-in-a-lifetime learning opportunity. Second, over the last seven years, I have been fortunate to get to know a distinguished cohort of scholars working with cognitive approaches to literature. I am simply listing them here in alphabetical order to resist the temptation to fill pages with the expression of my admiration for their work and my gratitude for their friendship: Porter Abbott, Frederick Louis Aldama, Mary Crane, Nancy Easterlin, Elizabeth Hart, David Herman, Patrick Colm Hogan, Alan Palmer, Alan Richardson, Ellen Spolsky, and Blakey Vermeule. I could similarly talk forever about James Phelan—who has been encouraging my work since the time of publication, in his journal Narrative, of my essay on Theory of Mind and Mrs. Dallow ay—but let me just say that one could not wish for a better editor or mentor. Peter Rabinowitz, Phelan's co-editor of The Ohio State University Press's book series "Theory and Interpretation of Narrative," and Uri Margolin, a reader for the series, offered the most thorough and thoughtful responses to my manuscript. If the final product does not live up to their excellent suggestions, the fault is all mine. The Ohio State University Press continues to impress me as an exemplary press, a privilege for any scholar to publish with: I am grateful to Laurie Avery, Sandy Crooms, Maggie Diehl, Malcolm Litchfield, and Heather Lee Miller for their hard work and support. The participants of the Lexington IdeaFestival (2004); of the annual meeting of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (2003, 2004, 2005); and of the "Cognitive Theory and the Arts" seminar at the Humanities Center at Harvard University (2004) asked great questions and made excellent suggestions. Jason E. Flahardy and Christian Trombetta from the Special Collections and Archives at the University of Kentucky's King Library have been most helpful with illustrations, and so has been the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky, which once more came through in the most timely and generous manner to pay for the reproduction of these illustrations. Last but not least, I am indebted to Chris Hair and Anna Laura Bennett, who were invaluable for editing various drafts of my manuscript; to my students at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, whose smart and creative responses to Clarissa and Lolita have made teaching those challenging novels a pleasure; and to Etel Sverdlov, who reads and jokes with the best.

  PART 1

  ATTRIBUTING MINDS

  1

  WHY DID PETER WALSH TREMBLE?

  Let me begin with a seemingly nonsensical question. When Peter

  Walsh, a protagonist of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, unexpectedly visits Clarissa Dalloway "at eleven o'clock on the morning of the day she [is] giving a party," and, "positively trembling" and "kissing both her hands" (40), asks her how she is, how do we know that his "trembling" is to be accounted for
by his excitement at seeing his old love again after all these years and not, for instance, by his progressing Parkinson's disease?

  Assuming that you are a particularly good-natured reader of Mrs. Dalloway, you could patiently explain to me that had Walsh's trembling been occasioned by an illness, Woolf would have told us so. She wouldn't have left us long under the impression that Walsh's body language betrays his agitation, his joy, and his embarrassment and that the meeting has instantaneously and miraculously brought back the old days when Clarissa and Peter had "this queer power of communicating without words" because, reflecting Walsh's own "trembling," Clarissa herself is "so surprised, .. . so glad, so shy, so utterly taken aback to have [him] come to her unexpectedly in the morning!" (40). Too much, you would point out, hinges on our getting the emotional undertones of the scene right for Woolf to withhold from us a crucial piece of information about Walsh's health.

  I then would ask you why is it that had Walsh's trembling been caused by an illness, Woolf would have had to explicitly tell us so, but as it is not, she simply takes for granted that we will interpret it as having been caused by his emotions. In other words, what allows Woolf to assume that we will automatically read a character's body language as indicative of his thoughts and feelings?

  She assumes this because of our collective past history as readers, you perhaps would say. Writers have been using descriptions of their characters' behaviors to inform us about their feelings since time immemorial, and we expect them to do so when we open the book. We all learn, whether consciously or not, that the default interpretation of behavior reflects a character's state of mind, and every fictional story that we read reinforces our tendency to make that kind of interpretation first.1

  Had this imaginary conversation about the automatic assumptions made by readers taken place twenty years ago, it would have ended here. Or it never would have happened—not even in this hypothetical form— because the answers to my naive questions would have seemed so obvious. Today, however, this conversation has to continue on because recent research in cognitive psychology and anthropology has shown that not every reader can learn that the default meaning of a character's behavior lies with the character's mental state. To understand what enables most of us to constrain the range of possible interpretations, we may have to go beyond the explanation that evokes our personal reading histories and admit some evidence from our evolutionary history.

  This is what my book does. It makes a case for admitting the recent findings of cognitive psychologists into literary studies by showing how their research into the ability to explain behavior in terms of the underlying states of mind—or mind-reading ability—can furnish us with a series of surprising insights into our interaction with literary texts. Using as my case studies novels ranging from Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway to Dashiel Hammett's Maltese Falcon, I advance and explore a series of hypotheses about cognitive cravings that are satisfied—and created!—when we read fiction.

  I divide my argument into three parts. The present part, "Attributing Minds," introduces the first key theoretical concept of this book: mind-reading, also known as Theory of Mind. Drawing on the work of Simon Baron-Cohen (Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind), I suggest that fiction engages, teases, and pushes to its tentative limits our mind-reading capacity. Building on the recent research of Robin Dunbar and his colleagues, I then consider one particular aspect of Woolf's prose as an example of spectacular literary experimentation with our Theory of Mind (hence, ToM). Finally, I turn to Steven Pinker's controversial analysis of Woolf in The Blank Slate to discuss the possibilities of a more profitable dialogue between cognitive science and literary studies.

  The second part, "Tracking Minds," introduces my second theoretical mainstay: metarepresentationality. I base it on Leda Cosmides and John Tooby's exploration of our evolved cognitive ability to keep track of sources

  1: Why Did Peter Walsh Tremble?

  of our representations (i.e., to metarepresent them). I begin by returning to the point made in the first part—which is that our ToM makes literature as we know it possible—to argue that the attribution of mental states to literary characters is crucially mediated by the workings of our metarepresentational ability. Fictional narratives, from Beowulf to Pride and Prejudice, rely on, manipulate, and titillate our tendency to keep track of who thought, wanted, and felt what and when. I further suggest that research on metarepresentationality sheds light on readers' enduring preoccupation with the thorny issue of the "truth" of literary narrative and the distinction between "history" and "fiction." I conclude with the case studies of two novels (Richardson's Clarissa and Nabokov's Lolita), showing how several overlapping and yet distinct literary traditions are built around the narratives' exaggerated engagement of our metarepresentational capacity.

  The third part, "Concealing Minds," continues to explore the exaggerated literary engagement with our source-monitoring capacity by focusing on the detective novel. Following the history of the detective narrative over one hundred and fifty years, I show that the recurrent features of this genre, including its attention to material clues, its credo of "suspecting everybody," and its vexed relationship with the romantic plot, are grounded in its commitment to "working out" in a particularly focused way our ToM and metarepresentational ability. I conclude by arguing that the kind of cognitive analysis of the detective novel advocated by my study (and, indeed, the analysis of any novel with respect to its engagement of our Theory of Mind) requires close attention to specific historical circumstances attending the development of the genre.2

  This emphasis on historicizing is in keeping with my broader view on the relationship between the "cognitive" and other, currently more familiar, approaches to literature. I do not share the feelings (be they hopes or fears3) of those literary critics who believe that cognitive approaches necessarily invalidate insights of more traditional schools of thought.41 think that it is a sign of strength in a cognitive approach when it turns out to be highly compatible with well-thought-through literary criticism, and I eagerly seize on the instances of such compatibility.5 Given that the human mind in its numerous complex environments has been the object of study of literary critics for longer than it has been the object of study of cognitive scientists, I would, in fact, be suspicious of any cognitive reading so truly "original" that it can find no support in any of the existing literary critical paradigms.6

  But, compatible with existing paradigms or not, any literary study that grounds itself in a discipline as new and dynamic as cognitive science is today takes serious chances. In the words of cognitive evolutionary anthropologist Dan Sperber, "[O]ur understanding of cognitive architecture is [still] way too poor, and the best we can do is try and speculate intelligently (which is great fun anyhow)."7 I proceed, then, both sobered by Sperber's warning and inspired by his parenthetical remark. Every single one of my speculations resulting from applying research in cognitive psychology to our appetite for fiction could be wrong, but the questions that prompted those speculations are emphatically worth asking.

  WHAT IS MIND-READING

  (ALSO KNOWN AS THEORY OF MIND)?

  In spite of the way it sounds, mind-reading has nothing to do with plain old telepathy. Instead, it is a term used by cognitive psychologists, interchangeably with "Theory of Mind," to describe our ability to

  explain people's behavior in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires.1 Thus we engage in mind-readin

  heart skips a beat when a certain person enters the room and we realize

  that we might have been attracted to him or her all along); when we intuit a complex state of mind based on a limited verba

  that we know what she means); when we compose an essay, a lecture, a movie, a song, a novel, or an instruction for an

  in front of his boss that he would love to work on the new project, but we

  have our own reasons to believe that he is lying and hence try to turn the

  conversation so that the bos
s, who, we think, may suspect that he is lying,

  would not make him work on that project and yet would not think that

  he didn't really want to); Attributing states of mind is the default way by which we construct and navigate our social environment, incorrect though our attributions frequently are. (For example, the person

  6

  2: What Is Mind-Reading?

  who reached for the glass of water might not have been thirsty at all but rather might have wanted us to think that she was thirsty, so that she could later excuse herself and go out of the room, presumably to get more water, but really to make the phone call that she didn't want us to know of.)

  But why do we need this newfangled concept of mind-reading, or ToM, to explain what appears so obvious? Our ability to interpret the behavior of people in terms of their underlying states of mind seems to be such an integral part of what we are as human beings that we could be

  understandably reluctant to dignify it with fancy terms and elevate it into a separate object of study. One reason that ToM has received the sustained attention of cognitive psychologists over the last twenty years is that they have come across people whose ability to "see bodies as animated by minds"2 is drastically impaired—people with autism. By studying autism and a related constellation of cognitive deficits (such as Asperger syndrome), cognitive scientists began to appreciate our mind-reading ability as a special cognitive endowment, structuring our everyday communication and cultural representations.

  Cognitive evoluionar this adaptation must have developed during the "massive neurocognitive evolution" which took place during the Pleistocene (1.8 million to 10,000 years ago). The emergence of a Theory of Mind "module" was evolution's answer to the staggeringly complex challenge faced by our ancestores, who needed to make sense of the behavior of othe

  In his influential 1995 study, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and a Theory of Mind, Simon Baron-Cohen points out that "attributing mental states to a complex system (such as a human being) is by far the easiest way of understanding it," that is, of "coming up with an explanation of the complex system's behavior and predicting what it will do next."4 Thus our tendency to interpret observed behavior in terms of underlying mental states (e.g., "Peter Walsh was trembling because he was excited to see Clarissa again") seems to be so effortless and automatic (in a sense that w engaging in any particular act of "interpretation"5) because our evolved cognitive architecture "prods" us toward learnin