Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [23]
At the same time, to paraphrase David Herman, the particular combination of these personal, literary, and historical contexts, in all their untold complexity, is a "necessary though not a sufficient condition"5 for understanding why Woolf wrote the way she did. No matter how much we learn about the writer herself and her multiple environments, and no matter how much we find out about the cognitive endowments of our species that, "particularized in specific circumstances," make fictional narratives possible, we can go only so far in our cause-and-effect analysis. As George Butte puts it, "[Ajccounts of material circumstances can describe changes in gender systems and economic privileges, but they cannot explain why this bankrupt merchant wrote Moll Flanders, or why this genteelly-impoverished clergyman's daughter wrote Jane Eyre,"6 There will always remain a gap between our ever-increasing store of knowledge and the phenomenon of Woolf's prose—or, for that matter, Defoe's, Austen's, Bronte's, and Hemingway's prose.7
Yet to consider just one example of how crucial our "other" knowledges are for our cognitive inquiry into Mrs. Dalloway, let us situate Woolf's experimentation with multiple levels of intentionality within the history of the evolution of the means of textual reproduction. It appears that a written culture is, on the whole, more able than is an oral culture to support the elaborately nested intentionality simply because a paragraph with eight levels of intentional embedment does not yield itself easily to memorization and subsequent oral transmission. It is thus highly unlikely that we would find many (or any) passages that require us to go beyond the fourth level of intentionality in oral epics, such as Gilgamesh or The Iliad. "Walter Benjamin captured the broad point of this difference when he observed that the "listener's naive relationship to the storyteller is controlled by his interest in retaining what he is told. The cardinal point for the unaffected listener is to assure himself of the possibility of reproducing the story."8 The availability of the means of written transmission, such as print, enables the writer "to carry the incommensurable to extremes in representations of human life"9 and, by so doing, explore (or shall we actually say "develop," thus drawing upon Paul Hernadi's recent argument about the evolutionary origins of literature?10) the hitherto-quiescent cognitive spaces.
Of course, for a variety of aesthetic, personal, and financial reasons, not every author writing under the conditions of print will venture into such cognitive unknown. Even a cursory look through the best-selling mainstream fiction, from Belva Plain to Danielle Steel, confirms the continuous broad popular appeal of narratives sticking to the fourth level of intentional embedment. It is, then, the personal histories of individuals (here, individual writers and their audiences) that ensure that, as Alan Richardson and Francis Steen have observed, the history of cognitive structures "is neither identical to nor separate from the culture they make possible."11
In the case of Woolf, scholars agree that severing ties with the Duckworth—the press that had brought forth her first two novels and was geared toward an audience that was "Victorian, conventional, anti-experimentation" (Diary 1, 261)—"liberated [her] experimentalism."12 Having her own publishing house, the Hogarth Press, meant that she was "able to do what" she "like[d]—no editors, or publishers, and only people to read who more or less like that sort of thing" (Letters, 167). Another factor possibly informing the cognitive extremes of Mrs. Dalloway was Woolf's acute awareness of the passing of time: "my theory is that at 40 one either increases the pace or slows down" (Diary 2, 259). Woolf wanted to increase the pace of her explorations, to