Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [44]
The phenomenology of source-monitoring may sound complicated and look complicated, but don't let that fool you: it really is complicated. The scope of issues raised by introducing the concept of metarepresentationality, as defined by cognitive psychologists, into literary and historical studies can be truly staggering. Our evolved cognitive ability to store representations under advisement; to reweigh their architectural "truth"; and to refocus our attention on a source of a given representation in proportion to our intuitive perception of that representation's relative truth-value, structures an untold variety of cultural practices.
Of course, we are still quite a way off from figuring out what is actually going on in our brains/minds when we discriminate among the levels of truth-value associated with a given representation, such as Pride a?id Prejudice; Zuozhuan; or, for that matter, a toothpaste commercial—that is, when we somehow decide on the relative truth-value of the representation as a whole and on the relative truth-value of its components. For the purpose of the present discussion, however, we can agree on the following pragmatic observation. Our cognitive makeup allows us to store a given representation with a very strong, perhaps permanent, source tag (e.g., Beowulf will always remain a story "feign'd" by somebody, and so will Pride and Prejudice). Once we are decided on the overall metarepresentational framing of the given story (a decision mediated by a variety of cultural institutions), we can process its constituents as so many architectural truths, including the truths about emotions experienced by its characters and our own feelings in response to their emotions. The next section will thus take for granted the larger metarepresentational status of the given
6: Tracking Minds in Beowulf
literary text and focus on the interplay of metarepresentations and variously weighted architectural truths within its fictional world.
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TRACKING MINDS IN BEOWULF
ecause this book will eventually focus on several particular instances
of the novelists' experimentation with our metarepresentational ability, here is an important point worth repeating and worth clarifying. Throughout my argument, I frequently say that this or that fictional text experiments in a certain way with our Theory of Mind and/or our metarepresentational ability. What I do not want you to infer based on such statements is that I believe that some texts do tiot experiment with these cognitive predispositions. They all do insofar as every single act of writing and reading fiction deploys our ToM, and the overall cognitive outcome of such deployment is never fully predictable. Thus when I refer to Woolf's or Richardson's or P. D. James's experimentation with their readers' ToM and/or metarepresentational ability, what I really claim is that they push to their limits certain aspects of the general, constant, ongoing experimentation with the human mind that constitutes the process of reading and writing fiction.
To illustrate my point about this constant experimentation, let us turn to the text that I used in Part I as an example of a work of fiction that does not (and perhaps could not, due to material realities of its time's textual reproduction) play with multiply embedded levels of intentionality the way Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway does—an Old English epic Beowidf. Beowulf may never be able to embed more than three levels of intentionality, but it still engages our Theory of Mind in ways that vary—within certain parameters—from one