Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [40]
Consider in this context the poststructuralist concept of the "Death of the Author," first advanced by Roland Barthes in 1968, elaborated by Michel Foucault in 1969, and assuming since then a prominent place in literary theory. The concept refers not to the actual demise of the writer (who could be dead or alive at the time of discussion—it does not matter) but to the rejection of the traditional view of the author as the main agency and the "ultimate 'explanation' of a work."2 As Barthes puts it, "[T]he birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author,"3 meaning that the reader, at liberty to choose whatever interpretation (or interpretations) of the text strikes him or her as most compelling, assumes the position of authority formerly reserved for the writer.
As a literary-theoretical credo (versus, that is, an obituary notice), "the Author is dead" strikes a cultural nerve, and for a good reason. It seems to
5: "Fiction" and "History"
demand a conceptual readjustment peculiarly challenging for our metarepresenting mind: the erasure of the figure of the author calls for some kind of suspension—or deferral—of the process of source-monitoring. It is possible, then, that as a conceptual experiment, "the Author is dead" is exciting because it allows us to consider various implications of such a suspension of source-monitoring even if on some levels this suspension remains unattainable.
For, ingenuous as the concept of the "Death of the Author" appears to be, note its essential cognitive conservatism. The source behind the fictional text is not really eliminated—it is merely substituted by another source. It is the reader who now emerges as an author or one of many authors of the narrative—a game of substitutes testifying to, among other things, the tenaciousness with which we cling to the idea that there must be some source (e.g., an author, a reader, multiple authors, multiple readers) behind a narrative that bears distinct marks of fiction.
Of course the idea that fictional narratives are always stored in a metarepresentational format is useful only as long as it is carefully qualified. Cosmides and Tooby begin such a qualification by pointing out that "the falsity of a fictional world does not extend to all of the elements in it, and useful elements (e.g., Odysseus's exploits suggest that one can prevail against a stronger opponent by cultivating false beliefs) should be identified and routed to various adaptations and knowledge systems." They further assert that the "fact that fiction can move people means that it can serve as input to whatever systems generate human emotions and motivation,"4 which is to say that at least on some level those systems "don't care" if the whole emotionally moving bundle of representations is stored with a source tag identifying it as an "invention" of somebody known as Jane Austen. (I will return to this issue of "not caring" later in my discussion of detective novels.)
But even if on some level we are ready to weep and laugh at a story that we know to be somebody's willful invention, on a different level we can be very sensitive to any attempt on the part of the writer to pass his or her fantasy as a "true" and not a "meta" representation. As Cosmides and Tooby observe, even though "'false' accounts may add to one's store of knowledge about possible social strategies, physical actions, and types of people,