Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [3]
The third part, "Concealing Minds," continues to explore the exaggerated literary engagement with our source-monitoring capacity by focusing on the detective novel. Following the history of the detective narrative over one hundred and fifty years, I show that the recurrent features of this genre, including its attention to material clues, its credo of "suspecting everybody," and its vexed relationship with the romantic plot, are grounded in its commitment to "working out" in a particularly focused way our ToM and metarepresentational ability. I conclude by arguing that the kind of cognitive analysis of the detective novel advocated by my study (and, indeed, the analysis of any novel with respect to its engagement of our Theory of Mind) requires close attention to specific historical circumstances attending the development of the genre.2
This emphasis on historicizing is in keeping with my broader view on the relationship between the "cognitive" and other, currently more familiar, approaches to literature. I do not share the feelings (be they hopes or fears3) of those literary critics who believe that cognitive approaches necessarily invalidate insights of more traditional schools of thought.41 think that it is a sign of strength in a cognitive approach when it turns out to be highly compatible with well-thought-through literary criticism, and I eagerly seize on the instances of such compatibility.5 Given that the human mind in its numerous complex environments has been the object of study of literary critics for longer than it has been the object of study of cognitive scientists, I would, in fact, be suspicious of any cognitive reading so truly "original" that it can find no support in any of the existing literary critical paradigms.6
But, compatible with existing paradigms or not, any literary study that grounds itself in a discipline as new and dynamic as cognitive science is today takes serious chances. In the words of cognitive evolutionary anthropologist Dan Sperber, "[O]ur understanding of cognitive architecture is [still] way too poor, and the best we can do is try and speculate intelligently (which is great fun anyhow)."7 I proceed, then, both sobered by Sperber's warning and inspired by his parenthetical remark. Every single one of my speculations resulting from applying research in cognitive psychology to our appetite for fiction could be wrong, but the questions that prompted those speculations are emphatically worth asking.
WHAT IS MIND-READING
(ALSO KNOWN AS THEORY OF MIND)?
In spite of the way it sounds, mind-reading has nothing to do with plain old telepathy. Instead, it is a term used by cognitive psychologists, interchangeably with "Theory of Mind," to describe our ability to
explain people's behavior in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires.1 Thus we engage in mind-readin
heart skips a beat when a certain person enters the room and we realize
that we might have been attracted to him or her all along); when we intuit a complex state of mind based on a limited verba
that we know what she means); when we compose an essay, a lecture, a movie, a song, a novel, or an instruction for an
in front of his boss that he would love to work on the new project, but we
have our own reasons to believe that he is lying and hence try to turn the
conversation so that the boss, who, we think, may suspect that he is lying,
would not make him work on that project and yet would not think that
he didn't really want to); Attributing states of mind is the default way by which we construct and navigate our social environment, incorrect though our attributions frequently are. (For example, the person
6
2: What Is Mind-Reading?
who reached for the