Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [1]
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