Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [6]
feeling ticular, is implicated with our mind-reading ability to such a degree that I do not think myself in danger of overstating anything when I say that in its currently familiar shape it exists because we are creatures with ToM.23 As a sustained representation of numerous interacting minds, the novel feeds the powerful, representation-hungry comple
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THEORY OF MIND, AUTISM, AND FICTION: THREE CAVEATS
In theorizing the relationship between our evolved cognitive capacity for mind-reading and our interest in fictional narratives, one has to be
3: Theory of Mind, Autism, and Fiction
careful in spelling out the extent to which one builds on what is currently known about autism. Three issues are at stake here. First, though the studies of autism were crucial for initially alerting cognitive scientists to the possibility that we have an evolved cognitive adaptation for mind-reading, those studies do not define or delimit the rapidly expanding field of ToM research. For example, later in this section I discuss the work of cognitive evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, who deals with autism only tangentially and who grounds his study of cognitive regularities underlying our mind-reading processes in a different kind of compelling empirical evidence. Similarly, Alan Palmer's recent groundbreaking study of cognitive construction of fictional consciousness, Fictional Minds, mentions autism only briefly. I use research on autism merely to provide a vivid example of what it means not to be able to attribute minds (just as in Part III use research on schizophrenia to show what it means not to be able to keep track of the sources of one's representations); the bulk of my argument does not rely on it.
Which brings me to the closely related second point. Increasingly probing and sophisticated as research on autism is becoming, it still is— and will remain for the foreseen future—a research-in-progress. Given the broad range of autistic cases—indeed it is often said that no two autistic individuals are alike—it seems that the more cognitive scientists learn about the condition, the more complex it appears. Again, the complexity of the issues involved should be a warning to cultural critics casually pronouncing some texts, individuals, or groups somehow deficient in their mind-reading ability—an increasingly popular practice, as autism becomes what one researcher has called a "fashionable"1 cognitive impairment. I remember giving a talk once on ToM and fiction, after which one of my listeners suggested that adolescents today must all be "slightly autistic" because they are not interested in reading books anymore and want to watch television instead; as if—to point out just one of many problems with this suggestion—making sense of an episode of Friends or Saved by the Bell somehow did not require the full exercise of the viewer's Theory of Mind. Consequently, my present inquiry into Woolf's, Richardson's, James's, and Nabokov's experimentation with our mind-reading capacity should not be taken as a speculation about what so-called normal versus so-called borderline autistic readers can or cannot do.
My final point sounds a similar note of caution about applying our still-limited knowledge of autism to the literary-critical analysis of reading and writing practices. Although I used the now-iconic story of Temple Grandin to illustrate the challenge faced by autistic individuals in understanding fictional narratives, we have to remember that this challenge varies across the wide spectrum of autism cases. For example, if we include within that spectrum people with Asperger syndrome2—which is sometimes classified as high-functioning autism and sometimes viewed as a separate condition (i.e., a nonverbal learning disability3)—we can say that a