Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [36]
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MONITORING FICTIONAL STATES OF MIND
owever little we may know at this point about our metarepresenta
tional ability, applying what we do know (or at least hypothesize strongly) to analysis of fiction results in the same embarrassment of riches as does the application of the Theory-of-Mind research. We start realizing that our capacity for storing representations under various degrees of advisement profoundly structures our interaction with literary texts, although, just as with the Theory of Mind, specific historical and cultural circumstances shape the specific forms that such interaction takes. Broadly speaking, whereas our Theory of Mind makes it possible for us to invest literary characters with a potential for a broad array of thoughts, desires, intentions, and feelings and then to look for textual cues that allow us to figure out their states of mind and thus predict their behavior, our metarepresentational ability allows us to discriminate among the streams of information coming at us via all this mind-reading. It allows us to assign differently weighed truth-values to representations originating from different sources (that is, characters, including the narrator) under specific circumstances. The ability to keep track of who thought, wanted, and felt what, and when they thought it, is crucial considering that the majority of our fictional narratives, from Homer's The Iliad, Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, and St. Augustine's Confessions, to Tolstoy's War and Peace and
4: Monitoring Fictional States of Mind
Achebe's Things Fall Apart, center on the characters' reweighing the truth-value of various cultural and personal beliefs.
Consider Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennet (and, through her, the reader) can get over her prejudice toward Mr. Darcy because one of the important representations on which she has based her deep dislike of him—Mr. Wickham's account of how Mr. Darcy had mistreated him in the past—is stored in her (and our) mind as a metarepresentation. The agent-specifying source tag, "Mr. Wickham says that. ..," ensures that the information about Mr. Darcy's cruelty and superciliousness is partially restricted from becoming such an integral part of Elizabeth's worldview that no information to the contrary would be able to make any dent in it.
Similarly, Mr. Darcy is able to reconsider his views of himself, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth's sister's feelings toward his friend Mr. Bingley only because he can see these views as metarepresentations: emanating from himself, at a certain time, and for certain reasons (unlike, say, Dostoyevski's delusional Katerina Ivanovna, who is not aware of herself as the source of some of her representations). For example, Darcy used to believe that Elizabeth's sister, Jane, did not love Mr. Bingley and wanted to marry him only for his money and that, furthermore, in marrying any of the Bennet sisters, a man of his own or Mr. Bingley's position would lower himself in the world. These were the sentiments that informed the letter that he sent to Elizabeth shortly after his unsuccessful marriage proposal to her. Later, however, Mr. Darcy is able to assure Elizabeth that the letter was written "in a dreadful bitterness of spirit" that he does not feel anymore; or, to adapt Elizabeth's own apt description of the situation, "the feelings of the person who wrote [that unpleasant] letter .. . are now . . . widely different from what they were then" (248).1 In other words, Darcy has revised his previous views because they have been "stored" in his mind with an agent-specifying source tag, such as, "It was me who felt it," and a time tag, such as, "several months ago, when I was angry at Elizabeth Bennet and mistaken in my earlier representations of Jane Bennet's feelings."
(Our inquiry into the workings of our metarepresentational capacity may also shed a new light on the unpleasant and yet undisputable power