Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [13]
Did it matter to me back then that the states of mind that I tried on with such enthusiasm ranged from those of a young Jewish immigrant (Evergreen) to an articulate pedophile (Lolita) and from a fascist pedagogue (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) to a sex-obsessed New York lawyer (Portnoy's Complaini)\ Apparently not. I might have identified with some characters more than others (though even that was a tricky business, for I think I identified more with Humbert Humbert than Anna Friedman), but the awareness of the personal identification must have been somehow less important than the awareness of my mind-reading wellbeing. The latter was crucial for me, the way I was and the way I thought of myself, particularly at a time when I could not express myself, much less discuss complex states of mind, in coherent English. I remember conducting elaborate conversations about those states of mind—in what I thought was English—but only in my head. I was later surprised to learn that I was not alone in this experience. Several immigrants who came to the United States in their late fifties and sixties told me tha*- did this too, a habit appearing more poignant in their case because, being of a retirement age, few of them had a real chance to break through the social barrier created by the language barrier.
Many of them read a lot of fiction at that time and still do.
6
THE NOVEL AS A COGNITIVE EXPERIMENT
How much prompting do we need to begin to attribute a mind of her
own to a fictional character? Very little, it seems, since any indication that we are dealing with an entity capable of self-initiated action (e.g., "Peter Walsh has come back") leads us to assume that this entity possesses thoughts, feelings, and desires, at least some of which we could intuit, interpret, and, frequently, misinterpret.1
Writers can exploit our constant readiness to posit a mind whenever we observe behavior as they experiment with the amount and kind of interpretation of the characters' mental states that they themselves supply and that they expect us to supply. When Woolf shows Clarissa observing Peter's body language (Clarissa notices that he is "positively trembling"), she has an option of providing us with a representation of either Clarissa's mind that would make sense of Peter's physical action (something to the effect of: "how excited must he be to see her again!") or of Peter's own mind (as in: "so excited was he to see his Clarissa again!"). Instead she tells us, first, that Peter is thinking that Clarissa has "grown older" and, second, that Clarissa is thinking that Peter looks "exactly the same; . . . the same queer look; the same check suit" (40). Peter's "trembling" still feels like an integral part of this scene, but make no mistake: we, the readers, are called on to supply the missing bit of information (such as "he must be excited to see her again") which makes the narrative emotionally cohesive.
Ernest Hemingway, famously, made it his trademark to underrepresent his protagonists' feelings by forcing the majority of his characters' physical
6: The Novel as a Cognitive Experiment
actions to stand in for mental states (as, for example, in the ending of A Farewell to Arms: "After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain" [314]). Hemingway could afford such a deliberate, and highly elaborate, in its own way, undertelling for the same reason that Woolf could afford to let Peter's trembling "speak for itself": our evolved cognitive tendency to assume