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By Root 580 0

I was recently, rereading the novels of nineteenth-century Russian writer Ivan Turgenev and looking in vain for all those endless "nature" passages that bored me so desperately in my adolescence (I had finally learned to skip all of them). Turns out that those endless passages are brief, few and far between, and, more often than not, shot through with pathetic fallacy and personification.8 Moreover, when they do not explicitly ascribe human thoughts and feelings to natural events and objects, they are frequently focalized so as to provide an indirect insight into the feelings of the characters perceiving them. Thus Turgenev's On the Eve:

Passing the ponds, they all stopped to admire [the town] for the last time. The bright colors of the approaching evening blazed all around them; the sky glowed; stirred up by the rising breeze, the leaves glittered iridescently; the molten gold waters flowed in the distance; reddish turrets and gazebos, scattered here and there throughout the garden, stood out sharply against the dark greenery. (341; translation mine)

The passage does contain spots of pathetic fallacy: those stirred-up leaves, that glowing sky. On the whole, however, the glorious colors of Turgenev's early sunset derive their meaning from the social context of the scene, as they set off various emotional uplifts experienced by several characters. Still, seeing their states of mind as accentuated by those colors, skies, leaves, and waters may require a cognitive effort different from the effort involved in a more straightforward imagining of a state of mind behind a character's observable behavior.9 The reader wishing for a more immediate gratification of her mind-reading adaptations—a fast-food experience of reading fiction—may find the "glowing evening" interlude both superfluous and tedious, as I certainly did at age fourteen.10 Today, now that my taste has been thoroughly vitiated by such works as Wordsworth's Prelude (which makes one work hard for every pleasurable shot of mind-reading that it delivers to our insatiably social mind), I can take Turgenev's nature passages in stride and even enjoy them.

Thus, if we conceive of the fictional narrative as a cognitive artifact in

7: Cognitive Science and Mrs. Dalloway

progress—an ongoing thousands-year-long experimentation with our cognitive adaptations—we can say that this narrative constantly diversifies the ways in which it engages our Theory of Mind. Imagined landscapes, with their pathetic fallacies, personifications, and anthropomorphizing, and with their tacit illuminations of human minds perceiving those landscapes, prompt us to exercise our ToM in a way very different from the stories that contain no such landscapes. The relative popularity of such descriptions depends on the specific cultural circumstances in which they are produced and disseminated (a topic which I consider in detail in Part III) as well as on the tastes and life histories of individual readers.

7

CAN COGNITIVE SCIENCE TELL US WHY WE ARE

AFRAID OF MRS. DALLOWAY?

hen we start to inquire into how writers of fiction experiment with

our mind-reading ability, and perhaps push it to its furthest limits, the insights offered by cognitive scientists become particularly pertinent. Although their investigation of ToM is very much a project-inprogress, enough carefully documented research is already available to literary scholars to begin asking such questions as, Is it possible that literary narrative builds on our capacity for mind-reading but also tries its limits? How do different cultural-historical milieus encourage different literary explorations of this capacity? How do different genres? Speculative and tentative as the answers to these questions could only be at this point, they mark the possibility of a genuine interaction between cognitive psychology and literary studies, with both fields having much to offer to each other.

This section's tongue-in-cheek title refers to my attempt to apply a series of recent experiments conducted by cognitive psychologists studying ToM to Mrs. Dalloway.