Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [39]
Furthermore, such an approach allows us to make certain predictions about the "chess game" that could take place between the reader and the writer. The author who gives his or her readers a good reason to doubt a
5: "Fiction" and "History"
representation considered hitherto true in the context of the narrative can reliably expect the reader to start scrutinizing the source of that representation. For example, once the readers of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire realize that Charles Kinbote's account of the country named "Zembla" contains serious contradictions and lapses, they have to begin wondering who Charles Kinbote really is and what about his life and past makes him tell such strange stories. Such a "guarantee" of what the reader will be thinking of and looking for offers the writer the possibility of calibrating, if he is so inclined, the kind and amount of information about the source of representation that the writer sees fit to provide. Nabokov responds to the carefully anticipated shift in the reader's attention by providing cues about Kinbote's real personality, and, although these cues remain maddeningly inconclusive, the author knows that the reader will return to them again and again as Kinbote's chronicles of Zembla become both further divorced from reality and peculiarly reconnected to it. Of course, all of this is done intuitively—neither readers nor writers think in terms of "information stored under advisement"—but the intuition does tend to follow a suggestive pattern. Some writers are particularly fond of choreographing this particular mental game, which may explain, at least in part, the not-altogether-unpleasant feeling that we sometimes get after reading their novels, which is that the writer had somehow anticipated and even planted some of our smart interpretive gambits.
5
FICTION" AND "HISTORY
ere are some questions that must have occurred to you while read
ing my discussion of source-monitoring and that I have actually elided as long as possible to keep my argument under some semblance of control: Aren't works of fiction themselves metarepresentations with source tags pointing to their authors? And, if they are, what allows us to consider any information contained in them, even the apparently incontrovertible, "Lydia ran away with Wickham," a "fact" or an "architectural truth"? Should not we try to envision a much more intricate system of degrees of metarepresentational framing that would allow for such nuances? Thinking through these questions inevitably means raising a series of far-reaching inquiries into the ways cognition structures and is in turn structured by culture. In the remaining sections of Part II, I map out a few parts of this forbidding territory and point briefly to some of its landmarks (a more detailed discussion deserves a separate book).
Commenting on the special metarepresentational status of fictional texts, Cosmides and Tooby observe that it is likely that stories explicitly labeled as fiction (e.g., Little Red Riding Hood) are never stored "without a source tag. The specificity of the source tag may be degraded, from (say) 'Mother told me [story X]' to 'Someone told me [story X],' . . . but . . . insofar as source tags are an important part of a self-monitoring system, one would expect them to be retained in some form as well."1 In other words, works of fiction, at least those clearly defined as such, seem to be metarepresentations par excellence, perennially stored with either variously implicit source tags, such as "folk" in the case of Little Red Riding Hood and as "Anglo-Saxon bard(s)" in the case of Beowulf, or explicit source tags, such as "Jane Austen" in the case of Pride and Prejudice.
We can speculate, then, that it