Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [25]
The giveaway [explanation for the current crisis in the arts and humanities] may be found in a famous statement from Virginia Woolf: " [On] or about December 1910, human [character] changed." She was referring to the new philosophy of modernism that would dominate the elite arts and criticism for much of the twentieth century, and whose denial of human nature was carried over with a vengeance to postmodernism, which seized control in its later decades. . . . Modernism certainly proceeded as if human nature had changed. All the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate were cast aside. .. . In literature, omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability were replaced by a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed narration, and difficult prose.2
As literary critics, we have several ways of responding to Pinker's claims about Woolf. We can hope, together with a representative of The
9: Woolf, Pinker, and the Project of Interdisciplinarity
Publications of the Modern Language Association, that not "many students, teachers, theorists, and critics of literature will take [him] seriously as an authority on literature or the aesthetics more generally, especially since he misrepresents both Woolf and modernism."3 At first sight, this is a comfortable stance. It assumes a certain cultural detachment of literary studies and implies that cognitive scientists should just leave literature alone, acknowledging it as an exclusive playing field for properly trained professionals—us. The problem with this view is that it disregards two facts: first, that more people read Pinker (who "misrepresents" Woolf) rather than, say, PMLA (which could set the matter straight); and, second, that as a very special, richly concentrated cognitive artifact, literature already is fair game for scientists, including Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Paul Harris, Robin Dunbar, and others, and it will become even more so as the cognitive inquiry spreads further across cultural domains.4
Thus, instead of simply ignoring Pinker's assertion that modernist writers have, by and large, cast aside "the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate," we should engage his argument, incorporating both insights from our own field and those offered by cognitive scientists. For me, the idea that our cognitive evolutionary heritage structures the ways in which we make sense of fictional narrative is profoundly appealing precisely because it begins to explain why the impulse to cast aside the tried-and-true "tricks" of representation is not at all limited to modernists. Writers, after all, have always experimented with the palates of their readers. Press a literary critic for an example of a novel featuring "stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed narration," and it is possible that she will come up not with one of the early-twentiethcentury novels but with an eighteenth-century one, such as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67), or a nineteenth-century one, such as
E. T. A. Hoffman's Kater Murr (1820-22). Press me for such an example, and I will say Heliodorus's An Ethiopian Romance, a novel written sometime between A.D. 250 and 380. Profoundly experimental in its handling of causal sequences and stories embedded within other stories, An Ethiopian Romance can be quite baffling to its readers; my students regularly find it so in spite of its accessible language (they read it in a contemporary translation) and its largely conventional set of adventures. Yet Romance has survived for seventeen centuries and has been enormously influential in the European literary tradition.5
In fact, the history of such books' reception contains a warning for both a cognitive scientist and a literary critic who are compiling a list of "tricks" that had been reliably delighting readers "for millennia" and were