Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [11]
There is a rub, though. Sometimes I get so engrossed by my "test" that I lose sight, at least to some degree, of the fact that neither do I have the lawyer uncle who lives in Cheapside nor am I in love with Mr. Darcy. Or, in a related cognitive slippage, I begin to feel that there is much more to Elizabeth Bennet than meets my eye on the page. Whereas I can shake off
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5: Why Do We Read Fiction .P
the former illusion pretty quickly (unless, that is, I am Don Quixote, but that is the subject of the second part of this book), the latter is much more enduring.
Hence what James Phelan sees as the striking "power of the interpretive habit to preserve the mimetic."8 And hence, perhaps, our ambivalence toward that habit. For even though, as critics and teachers of literature, we do base both scholarly interpretations and classroom discussions on our "interest in the characters as possible people and in the narrative world as like our own,"9 we remain wary about our own and our students' tendency to treat fictional personages as real people. We consider this tendency "a sentimental misunderstanding of the nature of literature."10 We complain, as a colleague of mine did recently, that we "work so hard on illuminating the elaborately wrought artifice of the fictional world, and then [our students] get carried away by debating if Elizabeth Bennet slept with Mr. Darcy before marriage. She didn't because she never existed!"11 It seems to me that our unease on this occasion stems from our intuitive realization that on some level our evolved cognitive architecture indeed does not fully distinguish between real and fictional people.12 Faced with Elizabeth Ben-net and Mr. Darcy, our Theory of Mind jumps at the opportunity (so to speak) to speculate about their past, present, and future states of mind, even as we realize that these "airy forms [and] phantoms of imagination"13 do not deserve such treatment. The pleasure of being "tested" by a fictional text—the pleasure of being aware, that is, that we are actively engaging our apparently well-functioning Theory of Mind—is thus never completely free from the danger of allowing the "phantoms of imagination" too strong a foothold in our view of our social world.
Note, too, how this complicates a closely connected and very attractive hypothesis advanced by several cognitive literary critics, including Palmer, who argue that one "of the pleasures of reading novels is the enjoyment of being told what a variety of fictional people are thinking. . . . This is a relief from the business of real life, much of which requires the ability to decode accurately the behavior of others."14 Whereas on the whole I subscribe to this view myself (and will build on it shortly), here is a nuance to consider. On the one hand, we indeed "have frequent direct access to fictional minds"15 (e.g., we know that Mr. Darcy gets over his prejudice and learns to like and respect Elizabeth's uncle for who he is as a person). On the other hand, we tend to compromise our pleasure of "direct access" by believing, like Erich Auerbach, that "the people whose story the author is telling experience much more than [the author] can ever hope to tell."16 Without pressing this point too strongly, I still want us to see in it some
Part I: Attributing Minds
thing of a cognitive catch-22 situation. Our Theory of Mind allows us to