Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [14]
For a different—and differently striking—example of undertelling the characters' mental states, consider Henry James's The Awkward Age. Written in the aftermath of James's disappointing venture into playwriting, The Awkward Age experiments with fusing the theatrical and the novelistic modes of mind-reading. Theatrical performance, after all, engages our Theory of Mind in ways markedly different from those practiced by the novel, for it offers no "going behind," in James's parlance, that is, no voiceover explaining the protagonists' states of mind (though in some plays the function of such a voiceover is assumed, to a limited degree, by a Chorus or a narrator figure). Instead, we have to construct those mental states from the observable actions and from what the protagonists choose to report to us (e.g., "Irina: I don't know why I feel so lighthearted today"3; "Nina: I am happy!"4; "Treplev: I wish you knew how miserable I am!"5). Moreover, in the case of the live performance—as opposed, that is, to simply reading the text of the play—this exercise of our mind-reading capacity is crucially mediated by the physical presence of actors and thus the wealth of embodied information (or misinformation) about their characters' hidden thoughts and feelings.
The Awkward Age strives to approximate this theatrical "absence of. . . 'going behind'" the protagonists' physical exteriors, as it refuses to "compass explanations and amplifications" of Nanda's, Aggie's, Mitchy's, Van's, Mrs. Brook's, and Mr. Longdon's mental states—refuses "to drag out odds and ends from the 'mere' story-teller's great property-shop of aids to illusion" (12). What we get instead is the account of the characters' feelings as hesitantly implied by a third-person narrator—an arrangement that forces us to reconstruct those feelings by negotiating between the narrator's report (riddled with "it seemed's" and "as if's") and our own observations of the characters' physical actions. For example, when Van and Mitchy talk about the possibility of Mitchy's marrying Aggie (mainly to please Nanda, who loves Van, but not Miteny, even though Mitchy loves her and is considered by her mother to be a highly eligible suitor), the readers receive a detailed description of the two men's body language along with tentative guesses about what might be going on behind their restless starts, turns, and rises:
Mitchy had stood a moment longer, almost as if to see the possibility [of
Vans eventually marrying Nanda if Mitchy first marries Aggie] develop
before his eyes, and had even started at the next sound of his friend's
voice. What Vanderbank in fact brought out, however, only made him
turn his back. "Do you like so very much the little Aggie?"
"Well," said Mitchy, "Nanda does. And I like Nanda."
"You are too amazing," Vanderbank mused. His musing had presently
the effect of making him rise .. . (218)
Looking back at his experience of writing a novel "as if. . . constructing a play" (14), James found it both "perplexing and delightful" (12). It was certainly a challenge to write a 300-page story in the vein of the above-quoted "passage . . . between Vanderbank and Mitchy, where the conduct of so much fine meaning" has to be effected "through the labyrinth of mere immediate appearances" (16). Still, the challenge was met and the conduct of "so much fine meaning" was "successfully and safely effected" (16)—a success, let me stress again at the risk of repeating myself, owing both to James's brilliance and to the workings of our mind-reading capacity.
For it is because we engage in our own constant construction of the possible states of mind of the people we encounter—negotiating among their own reports of how they feel, others' guesses of what they might feel, and our intuitions of what a smile, a turn, a pause, a rise may mean