• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 547 0

we are told what Hugh thinks as he unscrews the cap (he thinks that the pen will never wear out and that its longevity contributes to the worth of the sentiments it produces); and we are told what Richard feels as he watches Hugh, his capital letters, and Lady Bruton (he is amused both by Hugh's exalted view of himself and by Lady Bruton's readiness to take Hugh's self-importance at face value). The apparently unswerving, linear hierarchy of the scene—Richard can represent the minds of both Hugh and Lady Bruton, but Hugh and Lady Bruton cannot represent Richard's representations of their minds—seems to enforce the impression that each mind is represented fully and correctly.

Of course, Woolf is able to imply that her representations of Hugh's, Lady Bruton's, and Richard's minds are exhaustive and correct because, creatures with a Theory of Mind that we are, we just know that there must be mental states behind the emotionally opaque body language of the protagonists. The relative paucity of textual cues that could allow us to imagine those mental states ourselves leaves us no choice but to accept the representations provided by the author. We have to work hard for them, of course, for sifting through all those levels of embedded intentionality tends to push the boundaries of our mind-reading ability to its furthest limits.

When we try to articulate our perception of the cognitive challenge induced by this task of processing fifth- and sixth-level intentionality, we may say that Woolf's writing is difficult or even refuse to continue reading her novels. The personal aesthetics of individual readers thus could be at least in part grounded in the nuances of their individual mind-reading capacities. By saying this I do not mean to imply that if somebody "loves" or "hates" Woolf, it should tell us something about that person's general

7: Cognitive Science and Mrs. Dalloway

mind-reading "sophistication"—a cognitive literary analysis does not support such misguided value judgments. The nuances of each person's mind-reading profile are unique to that person, just as, for example, we all have the capacity for developing memories (unless that capacity has been clinically impaired), but each individual's actual memories are unique. My combination of memories serves me, and it would be meaningless to claim that it somehow serves me "better" than my friend's combination of memories serves her. (At the same time, I see no particular value in celebrating the person's dislike of Woolf as the manifestation of his or her individual cognitive makeup. My teaching experience has shown that if we alert our students to the fact that Woolf tends to play this particular kind of cognitive "mind game" with her readers, it significantly eases their anxiety about "not getting" her prose and actually helps them to start enjoying her style.8)

This point is worth dwelling on because, while writing this book and giving talks on ToM and fiction, I have become aware of the appeal of pop-hypotheses about the relationship between certain types of behavior (including reading preferences) and mind-reading "superiority." I have already mentioned the question that I was asked once about the "slightly autistic" adolescents who choose watching TV over reading novels. In the same vein, it was suggested to me that if somebody prefers Woolf to Grisham; or Grisham to TV; or novels to computer games; or long conversations about one's feelings to discussions of basketball games, it may testify to that person's mind-reading "excellence." I find such speculations misguided no matter how I look at them. Whereas common sense suggests that the mind-reading profile of a person who prefers Woolf to Grisham must indeed be somewhat different from that of a person who prefers Grisham to Woolf, I fail to see what practical conclusions about the per-son's overall mind-reading "fitness" can be made from the assumption of this commonsensical difference. Given how intensely contextual each act of mind-reading is, I would not be able to predict how a "typical" avid reader of Woolf