Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [43]
Similarly, a cost-benefit analysis may enter into a discussion of the tenacity with which our bookstores cling to the separation between "fic
5: "Fiction" and "History
tion" and, say, "history," in their shelving practices. Can it be that imperfect as it is, this separation saves the customers a significant cognitive effort of "deciding" (subconsciously, of course), when they begin to read a book, how much of metarepresentational tagging each little element of the story will need? Once a book is placed on the "fiction" shelf, the decision about its overall truth-value has been made for us, so to speak.13 We have the cognitive luxury of knowing, as we pick up such a book, that the story it contains is, as a whole, a metarepresentation that needs to be stored with a permanent source tag pointing to the author. We can then enjoy it as such, processing some constituent parts of it with a much weaker or no metarepresentational framing at all (including the parts that conform to our general knowledge and the parts that have a real emotional effect on us and/or teach us important life lessons).
Compare the experience of picking up a book from a shelf labeled "history." We open such a book with a subconscious expectation that as a whole it could be assimilated with a much weaker metarepresentational tagging than a book from a "fiction" shelf. Of course we can change our mind in the process of reading and decide, for example, that the given treatise contains more propaganda than accurate historical information and thus store it with strong metarepresentational tagging. But again, the preliminary cognitive work has been done for us (or is claimed to have been done for us) by the publisher, who has provided enough external markings to alert us to the intended truth-value of the book, and by the bookstore's clerk, who has put it on the designated shelf.
Furthermore, once we begin to think of how cultures satisfy, reinforce, struggle with, and manipulate our cognitive predispositions, such as our constant monitoring of the boundaries of truth, we may realize, for example, that there is something deeply paradoxical in the position of historian both today and in the time of Thucydides. On the one hand, a historian strives to diminish the amount of metarepresentational framing that her readers would deploy in assimilating her book, which, taken to its logical extreme, means removing herself from readers' consciousness altogether. The ultimate goal of the historian is to have her readers store the information that she provides simply as "X," and not as "Thucydides says that 'X,'" or as "Linda Colley says that 'X.'" On the other hand, the historian's own personality (e.g., her academic degrees, her other books, the names of publishing houses that she associates with) becomes an important factor in persuading the reader that the information contained in her book has a high truth-value, that is, that it should be assimilated with a relatively weak source-tagging.
Thucydides thus had to puff himself up and put down his competitors as liars and myth-peddlers (all the while claiming that his work "is no mere piece produced for a competition"14) in order to disappear from his work, that is, to encourage his readers to perceive a historical account penned by Thucydides as simply "the" historical account or "the everyreasonable-person's" historical account. The martyrdom of the three Chinese historians bound them inextricably to Zuozhuan and as such contributed to making Zuozhuan an infinitely more