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By Root 596 0

then cast aside by the elitist modernists. Dr. Johnson's confident (and so far wrong) observation that "nothing odd will do long," just like "Tristram Shandy did not last" should give pause to any attempt to designate some complex features of the literary narrative as broadly pleasing and thus likely to endure through millennia and other features as odd, elitist, and, thus, most likely, transient.6 A text can be perceived by some readers as unusual and difficult (and indeed it can be genuinely difficult, given, for example, its intensified demands on ourToM adaptations). However, that difficulty may actually heighten its appeal for other readers and—given a conjunction of particular historical circumstances and particular means of textual reproduction—eventually contribute to its lasting popularity.

Moreover, to draw on the respective arguments of Alan Palmer and Monika Fludernik, narratives that challenge their readers' ToM by their unusual and difficult representations of fictional consciousness may offer valuable insights into the workings of our consciousness which is anything but predictable, orderly, and simple. As Palmer puts it,

[fictional texts are] complex in their portrayal of the fictional mind acting in the context of other minds because fictional thought and real thought are like that. Fictional life and real life are like that. Most of our lives are not spent in thoughtful self-communings. Narrators know this, [even if we may not] have yet developed a vocabulary for studying the relationships between fictional minds and the social situations within which they function.7

And furthermore, as Fludernik reminds us, modernists saw themselves not as denying human nature and assaulting the human palate but, on the contrary, as getting closer to capturing the complexity of the real:

[If] the consciousness novel is being discussed here in its relation to novelistic realism, and surprisingly so for some readers I should think it reflects the very rhetoric of Modernist fiction, which claimed to be truer to life than the realist and naturalist novel could ever hope to be: truer, that is, to the very experientiality of peoples subjective involvement with their environment. .. . I propose to treat the consciousness novel as the culmination point in the development of narrative realism rather than its first regrettable lapse into idiosyncratic preoccupations with the nontypical and no-longer-verisimilar of human subjectivity.8

9: Woolf, Pinker, and the Project of Interdisciplinary

Ostensibly experimental texts, such as Mrs. Dalloway and Tristram Shandy, are thus a boon for an interdisciplinary analysis drawing on cognitive science and literary studies (I say ostensibly because my later chapters will expand significantly our concept of literary experimentation.) The moment cognitive scientists succeed in isolating yet another plausible cognitive regularity (e.g., as Dunbar and his colleagues have done), we can start looking for the ways in which fictional narratives (e.g., Mrs. Dalloway) have been burrowing into and working around that regularity, testing and reconfiguring its limits.

By thus paying attention to the elite, to the exceptional, to the cognitively challenging, such as Woolf's play with the levels of intentional embedment, we can develop, for instance, a more sophisticated perspective on the workings of our Theory of Mind.9 And, as Phelan observes, would not Pinker himself and "those in his audience who view modernist literature as he does be more likely to be persuaded to change their dismissive view of it, if literary critics show that [Woolf's] representations of consciousness, though initially challenging to a reader, are highly intelligible because they capture in their own ways insights that Pinker and other cognitive scientists have been offering (and popularizing)?"10

But if it makes sense to use as a starting point the cognitive psychologists' insight into certain regularities of our information processing and apply it to the literary narrative, then the opposite conceptual move can be equally