Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [42]
A cognitive perspective on "fiction" and "history" allows us to qualify the argument sometimes made by my colleagues in literary studies that the notion of "truth" is a relatively recent Western invention and that other epochs and cultural settings do not share our preoccupation with that elusive entity. To support this argument, they typically point out that other peoples' notions of "history" and "fiction" are very different from ours; for example, something that we certainly classify today as a myth could be considered, say, 2,000 years ago, a historical truth about the origins of a nation. What my examples from eighteenth-century England, fourth-century B.C. China, and sixth-century B.C. Greece demonstrate is that although on some level, some of our cognitive systems do not distinguish between actual situations and deliberate fictions—for example, the tears that we shed while reading a touching novel are real enough—on another level, people have always cared deeply about the difference between "true" and "feign'd" stories and were even willing to die for their right to call the myth a myth.
On the other hand, my colleagues are right in their skepticism about some universal notion of "history" and "fiction," because on the practical level there is really very little universality to our enduring quest for truth. The criteria and definitions of truth shift on every imaginable level, cultural, contextual, and personal—they have to shift, in fact, if we consider this process from the perspective outlined by Cosmides and Tooby. If our metarepresenting mind is constantly busy "monitoring and re-establishing the boundaries within which each representation remains useful," then our universal "quest for truth" is really a universal quest for temporary, local, intensely contextual truths that are reliable only within "the envelope of conditions to which [they are] applicable."11 This is to say that the constantly changing boundaries and definitions of truth are not the casualty of the social-historical change but rather the key condition of the functioning of the human brain. By adjusting and redefining what constitutes the "truth" at every new social, cultural, and personal junction, we exploit, build on, develop, fine-tune, struggle with, tease, and train a broad variety of cognitive mechanisms underlying our evolved metarepresentational capacity.12
This constant hunt for truths supposes a constant delicate interplay between energy costs and benefits. Our brain is a very "expensive" device: compared with muscle tissue, it consumes sixteen times as much energy per unit weight. Monitoring and reestablishing the boundaries for truths is crucial for our existence, and yet, in some specific situations, doing it again and again on the same material could become too costly.
For example, it may be that once readers have decided on the relative truth-value of a complex cultural artifact, such as Robinson Crusoe, or, to put it differently, once they have integrated it with a relatively weak metarepresentational tagging (as a "true story"), they may experience a broad gamut of negative emotions, ranging from disappointment to anger, when they realize some time later that they have to expend more cognitive energy on drastically reassessing their initial valuation and on reintegrating Robinson Crusoe with a very strong metarepresentational tagging (as a "feignd" story) instead. Some readers may be more amenable to this kind of reassessment, which involves revising numerous knowledge databases affected by the initial processing of the story, whereas others may find this call for the extra expenditure of mental energy irksome.
Of course I am speculating here, but the question that I am grappling with is a serious cognitive issue that has