Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [88]
Sayers has thus anticipated the detective novels of the 1980s and 1990s, in which the question of how much "room" there is in a detective story for "love and romance" was compellingly rearticulated with the introduction of the female private investigator. Though perceived by some of her chauvinist male colleagues as an "alien monster" rather than a "real girl" (Paretsky, Burn Marks, 339), such a heroine is routinely depicted as negotiating romantic relationship, as is Kat Colorado (Karen Kijewski, Alley Kat Blues), V. I. Warshawski (Paretsky, Bitter Medicine), Kinsey Mill-hone (Sue Grafton, "P" is for Peril), Stoner McTavish (Sarah Dreher, Stoner McTavish; Something Shady), and Thursday Next (Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair). Some critics have hailed such plot developments as a sign that the detective novel has indeed escaped the "very tight little box" confining its predecessors. Ian Ousby suggests that the female investigator's "personal involvement" with lovers, friends, and family members "is not just a convenience to get the story going but a signal that its theme will be the detective's own self-discovery and self-definition." A private eye is "not just there to solve a mystery but to learn about herself by understanding women from her family past better, or to see herself more clearly by comparing her life with the fate of women friends,"12 an observation that seems to be borne out by the material of, say, Paretsky's Total Recall.
My response to such claims is cautiously optimistic. When researching this topic, I have read more detective novels than I have ever thought possible, and I came to believe that on some important level the kind of mind-reading expected from the reader of the detective novel is indeed not particularly compatible with the kind of mind-reading expected from the reader of the story focusing on a romantic relationship.13 At the same time, it seems that benefiting from the years of experimentation and failure, detective writers have certainly learned how to hierarchize various elements of the two kinds of mind-reading and thus how to successfully incorporate some romantic themes into their murder mysteries.
Contemporary cognitive research offers a fascinating (if, at this point, unavoidably rudimentary and tentative) way of modeling some of those
FIGURE 3. Book cover of MANEATER by Gigi Levangie Grazer reproduced with the permission of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group. Book cover, Copyright © 2003 by Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. Michael Mahovlich / Masterfile (image code 700075736).
failures and successes. First of all, we have to remember that our Theory of Mind is not an adaptation that enables us to apply a single universal set of inferences to any situation that calls for attributing desires, thoughts, and intentions to another living creature. Rather, it could be thought of as a "cluster" of multiple adaptations, many of them functionally geared toward specific social contexts. For example, the kind of mind-reading
3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story
that we use in the process of selecting and courting a mate is on some important level quite different from the mind-reading we deploy when we try to escape a predator. Trying to guess what that cute person at the adjacent table is thinking every time she provocatively glances up at you from her plate must recruit cognitive adaptations for mind-reading somewhat different from those recruited when you are trying to guess what that tiger is thinking as she leisurely approaches you in the street after having escaped her cage in the zoo. Specifically, the same question aimed at figuring the other's state of mind, for example, "I wonder if she is still hungry?" automatically activates a very different suite of inferences depending on whether it is applied to a potential mate or to a wild animal. (Of course, in certain situations, the two