Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [12]
In other words, we may see the pleasure afforded by fictional narratives as grounded in our awareness of the successful testing of our mind-reading adaptations, in the respite that such a testing offers us from our everyday mind-reading uncertainties, or in some combination of the two. No matter which explanation or combination of explanations we lean toward, however, we have to remember that the joys of reading fictional minds are subject to some of the same instabilities that render our real-life mind-reading both exciting and exasperating.
If this is not complex enough, throw in some aesthetics. Some writers are willing to construct rather breathtaking tests of our mind-reading ability—provided we are willing to take those tests. (This "we," by the way, is a complex cultural compound, for it denotes a particularly historically situated reader with a particular individual taste.) After all, the story of Little Red Riding Hood tests our ToM quite well—with all the attributions of states of mind to the grandma, to the trusting little girl, and to the Big Bad Wolf that it requires from its readers/listeners. Still, as we grow older, we begin to hanker for different mind-reading fare. For literary critic Wayne Booth, for example, it has to be Henry James, and not just any James, but the one in his later period. Toward that James, Booth ends up feeling a profound "gratitude"—gratitude of a self-conscious reader of fiction at a certain point in his life toward an author who succeeded in making him try on a poignantly rich suit of mental states.17 As Booth puts it, in The Wings of the Dove:
James] has invited me to recreate under his tutelage a beautiful structure—not just any abstract structure but a structure of beautifully realized human creatures highlighted miraculously by the artist. He offers me the chances to pretend, for the duration of my reading, that I too live "up there" with him, able not only to appreciate what he has done but to do it myself. Nobody, including James himself8 has ever lived for long in
5: Why Do We Read Fiction .P
this empyrean. . . . How can I express my conviction that it is good for me to be required to go through all this, and to know that if I return with similar attentiveness to the other late novels [of James] I'll be invited to similar—but always fresh—recreations. I have no doubt about it myself—I who am so much inclined to preoccupations of far less defensible kinds."
If you happen to be a sneaky cognitive literary theorist, you are only too delighted to hear Booth wondering "how can [he] express [his] conviction that it is good for [him] to be required to go through all this." Why (so you pipe in happily), if a reader's mind-reading profile is constituted like Booth's, there is no doubt that it is "good" for him or her to be "tested" by The Wings of the Dove. At every step, the book is telling such a reader, as it were: "These immensely complex, multi-leveled, ethically ambiguous, class-conscious, mutually reflecting and mutually distorting states of mind you are capable of navigating. This is how good you are at this maddening and exhilarating social game. Did you know it? Now you know it!"
Something along these lines must be going on every time we read fictional stories that we enjoy, though the deeper personal meaning of each "conversation" between the story and the reader varies widely depending on the circumstances of the latter and her perception of those circumstances. For example, when I