Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [24]
8: The Larger Field of Literary Studies
behind [her] characters; . . . The idea is that the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment" (Diary 2, 263). Embodying the "exact shapes" of Woolf s brain thus meant, among other things, shifting "the focus from the mind of the narrator to the minds of the characters" and "from the external world to the minds of the characters perceiving it,"13 a technique that would eventually prompt Auerbach to inquire in exasperation, "Who is speaking in this paragraph?"14
Woolf's meditations on her writing remind us of yet another reason that simply counting levels of intentionality in Mrs. Dalloway will never supersede other forms of critical inquiry into the novel. When Woolf explains that she wants to construct a "present moment" as a delicate "connection" among the "caves" dug behind each character, the emerging image overlaps suggestively with Dennett's image of the infinitely recursive levels of intentionality. ("Aha," concludes the delighted cognitive literary critic, "Woolf had some sort of proto-theory of recursive mind-reading!") But with her vivid description of the catacomb-like subjectivity of the shared present moment,15 Woolf also manages to do something else—and that "something else" proceeds to quietly burrow into our (and her) cognitive theorizing.
This brings us to a seemingly counterintuitive but important point underlying cognitive literary analysis. Even as I map the passage featuring Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread at Lady Bruton's as a linear series of embedded intentionalities, I expect that something else present in that passage will complicate that linearity and re-pose Auerbach's question, albeit with a difference: Will it be the phallic overtones of the description of Hughs pen? Or the intrusion of rhetoric of economic exchange— "credit," "makers," "produce," "capital," "margin"? Or the vexed gender contexts of the "ventriloquism"16 implied by the image of Millicent Bruton spouting political platitudes in Hugh's voice? Or the equally vexed social class contexts of the "seating arrangements" that hierarchize the mind-reading that goes on in the passage? (After all, Woolf must have "seated" Lady Bruton's secretary, Miss Brush, too far from the desk to be able to see the shape of Hugh's letters so as not to add yet another level of mental embedment by having Miss Brush watch Richard watching Lady Bruton watching Hugh.)
Cognitive literary analysis thus continues beyond the line drawn by cognitive scientists—with the reintroduction of something else, a "noise," if you will, that is usually carefully controlled for and excised, whenever possible, from the laboratory settings. The exciting noisy scene—with all its overlapping and competing discourses of class and gender—is the rightful province of a literary critic. Still, as Phelan points out, the study "of the embedded intentionalities has implications for every one of [these discourses] if only because it provides a clearer ground from which to proceed."17
9
WOOLF, PINKER, AND THE PROJECT OF
INTERDISCIPLINARY Y
hallenging as it may be, Woolf's prose is so fundamentally rooted in
our cognitive capacities that I am compelled to qualify an argument advanced recently by Steven Pinker in his remarkable and provocative Blank Slate. Pinker sees Woolf as having inaugurated an aesthetic movement whose "philosophy did not acknowledge the ways in which it was appealing to human pleasure."1 Although he admits that "modernism comprises many styles and artists, . . . not [all of which] rejected beauty and other human sensibilities" and that modernist "fiction and poetry offered invigorating intellectual workouts," here is what he has to say about modernism as a whole and Woolf