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When the protagonist of the poem, the great Geat hero, Beowulf, first arrives to Heorot to save it from the terrible monster Grendel, he is taunted by one of the local men, Unferth, who (we infer, using our ToM) must be jealous of the attention and respect heaped on the newcomer. Later, however, after Beowulf has defeated Grendel and starts preparing for the fight with that monster's vengeance-breathing mother, Unferth lends him a powerful weapon, "a rare and ancient sword named Hrunting" (64).

Because the anonymous author takes particular care to inform us that it was Unferth and not some nameless drunkard in the crowd who ridiculed Beowulf about his presumed past misadventures, the present act of sword-giving can be read as a sign of a grudging change of heart in the character who initially envied the Geat hero and distrusted him.

Here is why I see this as an example of the text's experimentation with our metarepresentational ability. On the one hand, the poem clearly relies on our tendency to monitor sources of representations (e.g., "It was Unferth who initially said that Beowulf was a loser"). Similarly, the general thrust of our interpretations of Unferth's change of heart is guided by the text's emphasizing some social nuances more than others (e.g., "It looks like Unferth is somebody whose opinion will not necessarily carry the day, but it won't be completely ignored, either"). On the other hand, within these constraints, the exact effect that each particular instance of source-monitoring may have on the reader's understanding of the text remains unpredictable.

For instance, there is no certainty that when, utilizing my ToM and my metarepresentational ability and gauging Unferth's relative social importance, I register his new attitude, my reaction to his behavior will be the same as yours, or even the same as my own after five minutes of thinking further about the poem.1 I can say that Unferth is a good guy who has been led astray by drink and then came to his senses; OR, that he is a calculating fellow who can see in which direction the wind is blowing after Beowulf's first victory, and wants to be in the good graces of the winning warrior; OR, that he is one of the rare characters in the poem who actually intuits Beowulf's vanity but is powerless to do anything about this intuition, for Beowulf is destined to live out the flaws of his character, now gloriously, now tragically.

In other words, our interpretation of Unferth's and Beowulf's behavior and personality will certainly be structured by our metarepresentational ability: for the poem calculatedly feeds this ability by implying, first, that there is an important difference between the states of Unferth's mind then and now and, second, that Unferth's opinion matters to a certain degree within the social world of the poem. Still, the exact effect of this exploitation of the particular cognitive capacity remains dependent on the state of mind of the specific reader in the specific moment.

Thus any fictional gestalt (or, were I to broaden this discussion, I would say any utterance2) that deploys our Theory of Mind and/or our metarepresentational capacity experiments with these cognitive adaptations insofar as the effect of such a deployment on the reader is never fully

7: Don Quixote and His Progeny

determined: it differs from one mind to another and from one mind now and five minutes, five hours, or five years from now. Any fictional text is profoundly experimental because the brain that interacts with this text is a dynamic system. (Hence, perhaps, the pleasures of rereading: no two close encounters with the same fictional text are ever truly the same, for the brain that responds to the text changes ever so slightly with every thought and impression passing through it.)

7

DON QUIXOTE AND HIS PROGENY

lthough all fictional texts rely on and thus experiment with their

readers' ability to keep track of who thought, wanted, and felt what and under what circumstances, some authors clearly invest more of