Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [46]
From a cognitive psychological point of view, Cervantes's protagonist suffers from a selective failure of source-monitoring. He takes in representations that "normal" people store with a restrictive agent-specifying source tag such as "as told by the author of a romance" as lacking any such tag. He thus lets the information contained in romances circulate among his mental databases as architectural truth, corrupting his knowledge about the world that we assume has hitherto been relatively accurate. Among other literary characters belonging to this tradition are Arabella, the heroine of Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752),1 who takes the fantastic events described in French romances as the accurate representation of reality, as well as the already mentioned Katerina Ivanovna from Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment and Charles Kinbote from Nabokov's Pale Fire, both of whom wax delusional by failing to keep track of themselves as the sources of their fanciful representations about the world.
The category of such "Quixotic" protagonists can be further expanded if we consider characters whose source-monitoring is somewhat compromised, though not to the degree that renders them unquestionably mad, such as Richardson's Lovelace [Clarissa) and Nabokov's Humbert Humbert (Lolita).2 For a literary critic exploring fictional narrative's manipulation of our metarepresentational capacity, such characters as Lovelace and Humbert are particularly fascinating: not only do they conflate their visions of reality with the more "real" reality, but they also drag their readers along into that perceptual quagmire.
That's what such novels do then. If in Don Quixote and The Female Quixote, the failure to keep track of sources of certain types of representations was restricted to the title characters, making them the locus of madness, Clarissa and Lolita diffuse this fascinating failure among characters and readers, making us experience if not a bout of insanity then still an occasional feeling of mental vertigo. This feeling, captured in part by the literary-critical term unreliable narrator (more about this term later), is predicated upon our anxious (though not, of course, articulated in these terms) realization, as we read on, that we have been tricked by the narrative into losing track of sources of certain representations.
Consider Lolita and its first-person narrator, Humbert Humbert. We realize (so to speak) that going back and retroactively turning representations into metarepresentations by supplying source tags such as, "It was Humbert's idea that Lolita has been sexually interested in him, for in reality she has not," is a treacherous undertaking. What if she has been, a little bit? Whom can we trust now in figuring that out? Which source tags should we retain? Which discard? Which reweigh as to their relative truth-value? Having processed some representations as architectural truths within the world of the novel, are we now supposed to scrap the results of that processing? And if we do, where is the guarantee that our new assignment of truth-values will hold for the next fifty pages in this kind of story? Some writers never fully resolve the source-monitoring ambiguity cultivated by their narratives, leaving it to those readers who appreciate this kind of mental game to enjoy Lolita and Pale Fire; others may grudgingly settle on decidedly battered and compromised versions of the "real."
Of course a reader who hated Lolita yesterday because she felt that there is no stable ground in the story from which to judge the truth-value of any given episode (read: no reliable source of information;