Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [37]
A different example from the same novel: Austen's famous opening sentence, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in a want of a wife," derives at least some of its ironic punch from the play between its status both as representation and as metarepresentation. This sentence activates in its readers two rather different information-processing strategies, for it is framed simultaneously as an "architecturally true" statement and a statement to be processed under advisement. On the one hand, the tag phrase, "It is a truth universally acknowledged," literally pressures us to let the idea that "a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in a want of a wife" circulate completely freely among our other knowledge stores, thus influencing our future behaviors in a broad variety of ways (and, we assume, influencing with equal intensity the behavior of the novel's characters). On the other hand, phrases such as, "It is a truth universally acknowledged," or "as everybody says," or "as everybody knows," are generally a peculiar lot, for they also tend to alert us to the possible metarepresentational nature of the information that they introduce. Somewhat paradoxically, they can be easily interpreted as implying an interested source of representation even as they deny that there is one. They seem to hint that somebody wants to manipulate us into doing something that would benefit him or her by having us take a certain precept as a "universal" truth. What if you are a single man in possession of a good fortune, and yet you have no desire for marrying whatsoever? Who is it that wants to coax you into believing that you certainly are "in want of a wife"?
Austen's very next sentence provides an answer to this question, presenting a community of people for whom the idea that a well-off man needs a wife is not a metarepresentation but incontrovertible Truth (a semantic memory, if you will): "However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters" (1; emphasis added).2 The immediately following exchange between Mrs. Bennet and her husband narrows down our suspicions even further: it is the mothers of genteel but poor girls who will benefit if the rich young men of their acquaintance share their own absolute conviction on the subject. Some of the ensuing comedy of the novel is foreshadowed by this outlined-in-the-first-sentence clash between the sensibility that has selfservingly assimilated the idea that a rich man needs a wife desperately and immediately (for many of Mrs. Bennet's antics do result from apparently believing it unconditionally!) and the sensibility that holds this idea as a
4: Monitoring Fictional States of Mind
metarepresentation: under advisement and taking into consideration specific circumstances under which it was brought forth.3
My third example comes from Austen's Persuasion. I take as my starting point an observation of the literary critic Ellen R. Belton, who notes that when the novel's protagonist, Captain Wentworth, thinks that he is emphatically not interested in his former fiancee, Anne Elliot, he is, in fact, deceiving both himself and the reader. Belton argues that although it takes some effort for us to see through Wentworth's self-deception, once we do see through it, our attention shifts toward the ultimate source of that incorrect representation, the author herself:
Why, we immediately ask ourselves, does Captain Wentworth