Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [50]
Our source-monitoring adaptations are generally on the lookout for material to work on, ready to seize on any evidence that a given representation could be processed as a metarepresentation. Nothing is sacred, nothing is safe from being turned from "truth" to a representation accompanied by a source tag and thus processed under advisement ("Chocolate is good for you." "Says who?"), although different ideological climates may actively encourage some types of metarepresentational processing and discourage others. Combine this general cognitive tendency with the professional training of a literary critic, and it is not unlikely that this individual would be more attuned to the possibility of seeing not just one source behind Pride and Prejudice (i.e., Jane Austen) but a rich hierarchy of sources (i.e., the "real" Jane Austen, the "implied" Jane Austen, the "narrator" of Pride of Prejudice, and so forth). In other words, whereas our shared cognitive adaptation for source-monitoring makes it in principle possible both for me and for my first-year students to see those multiplying authors behind the text, it might be easier for me than for them (at least initially) to achieve such a split vision. I think of the relative ease with which it comes to me as my cognitive-professional hazard.
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RICHARDSON'S CLARISSA: THE PROGRESS OF THE
ELATED BRIDEGROOM
hen I think of fiction and cognition in literary-historical terms,
attempting to reconstruct, in particular, the development of the motif of the "Quixotic" imagination from Cervantes to Nabokov, I inevitably return to Samuel Richardson's novel Clarissa (1747-48). Clarissa has been deservedly admired by numerous literary critics, and it is currently going through a pedagogical renaissance, being increasingly taught, even in its forbidding 1,500-page entirety, in a variety of graduate and undergraduate college courses. With the advent of a "cognitive" approach to literature, however, it also ought to be acknowledged as a massive and unprecedented-in-Western-literary-history experimentation with the readers' Theory of Mind and metarepresentational ability, experimentation that certainly made possible the later-day mind-games played by Lolita and Pale Fire}
In this section I argue that in Clarissa, Richardson created a kind of protagonist that we today would call an unreliable narrator. I follow a series of episodes in the novel that increasingly force the reader to doubt the trustworthiness of at least one of its two narrators, and I discuss the cognitive effects of being confronted with a character who seems to believe his own lies. I suggest, in particular, that the presence of such a personage induces in us a state of metarepresentational uncertainty, thus providing a rich stimulation for our Theory of Mind.
10: Richardon's Clarissa
FIGURE 2. Clarissa dying. Reproduced courtesy of McMaster University Library.
(a) Mind-Games in Clarissa
Clarissa is a story of two brilliant young people, Clarissa Harlowe and Robert Lovelace, fatally misreading each other's minds in the course of their deeply troubled courtship. Lovelace, a paradigmatic eighteenth-century "rake," committed to seducing and subsequently abandoning incautious virgins, and Clarissa, a paragon of beauty, piety, and foresight, live out the eighteenth-century version of the "ultimate challenge": will Clarissa convert Lovelace to her exalted system of values and prove that "the reformed rake makes the best husband," or will Lovelace sweet-talk, cheat, and intimidate Clarissa into cohabitation without marriage, his "darling scheme" and his sign of "triumph" over the whole female sex and their pretensions to "virtue"?
Structured as a series of epistolary exchanges between Clarissa