Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [2]
I then would ask you why is it that had Walsh's trembling been caused by an illness, Woolf would have had to explicitly tell us so, but as it is not, she simply takes for granted that we will interpret it as having been caused by his emotions. In other words, what allows Woolf to assume that we will automatically read a character's body language as indicative of his thoughts and feelings?
She assumes this because of our collective past history as readers, you perhaps would say. Writers have been using descriptions of their characters' behaviors to inform us about their feelings since time immemorial, and we expect them to do so when we open the book. We all learn, whether consciously or not, that the default interpretation of behavior reflects a character's state of mind, and every fictional story that we read reinforces our tendency to make that kind of interpretation first.1
Had this imaginary conversation about the automatic assumptions made by readers taken place twenty years ago, it would have ended here. Or it never would have happened—not even in this hypothetical form— because the answers to my naive questions would have seemed so obvious. Today, however, this conversation has to continue on because recent research in cognitive psychology and anthropology has shown that not every reader can learn that the default meaning of a character's behavior lies with the character's mental state. To understand what enables most of us to constrain the range of possible interpretations, we may have to go beyond the explanation that evokes our personal reading histories and admit some evidence from our evolutionary history.
This is what my book does. It makes a case for admitting the recent findings of cognitive psychologists into literary studies by showing how their research into the ability to explain behavior in terms of the underlying states of mind—or mind-reading ability—can furnish us with a series of surprising insights into our interaction with literary texts. Using as my case studies novels ranging from Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway to Dashiel Hammett's Maltese Falcon, I advance and explore a series of hypotheses about cognitive cravings that are satisfied—and created!—when we read fiction.
I divide my argument into three parts. The present part, "Attributing Minds," introduces the first key theoretical concept of this book: mind-reading, also known as Theory of Mind. Drawing on the work of Simon Baron-Cohen (Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind), I suggest that fiction engages, teases, and pushes to its tentative limits our mind-reading capacity. Building on the recent research of Robin Dunbar and his colleagues, I then consider one particular aspect of Woolf's prose as an example of spectacular literary experimentation with our Theory of Mind (hence, ToM). Finally, I turn to Steven Pinker's controversial analysis of Woolf in The Blank Slate to discuss the possibilities of a more profitable dialogue between cognitive science and literary studies.
The second part, "Tracking Minds," introduces my second theoretical mainstay: metarepresentationality. I base it on Leda Cosmides and John Tooby's exploration of our evolved cognitive ability to keep track of sources
1: Why Did Peter Walsh Tremble?
of our representations (i.e., to metarepresent them). I begin by returning to the point made in the first part—which is that our ToM makes literature as we know it possible—to argue that the attribution of mental states to literary characters is crucially mediated by the workings of our metarepresentational ability. Fictional narratives, from Beowulf to Pride and Prejudice, rely on, manipulate, and titillate our tendency to keep track of who thought, wanted, and felt what and when. I further suggest that research on metarepresentationality sheds light on readers' enduring preoccupation with the thorny