Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [90]
But, one could say, reading about the homicidal maniac is not the same as being actually stalked by him. By the same token, trying to guess together with Austen's Anne Eliot whether Captain Wentworth still loves her is not the same as actually going through such emotional upheavals yourself. It could be very difficult to do both at the same time in real life—to think, that is, of how to outsmart a rapidly approaching murderer while you are figuring out what your beloved really meant yesterday when he said that the weather was particularly friendly for outdoor rambles—but what prevents us from combining these two "activities" in our imagination? Why can't we control our emotions and manipulate
3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story
them into "multitasking" by reminding ourselves that we personally are not threatened by the murderer-at-large and we personally are not worried about Captain Wentworth's feelings?
This question dovetails a much larger issue: "how is it that we respond emotionally to literature at all?"16 For a detailed analysis of this issue, I refer the reader to Hogan's two most recent studies.17 For the purpose of the present argument, I want to focus on his observation that our emotional response to fiction is a "matter of trigger perception, concrete imagination, and emotional memory. The issue of fictionality just does not enter."18 Note, incidentally, how well this works with my earlier argument that once we have bracketed off the fictional story as a whole as a metarepresentation with a source tag pointing to its author, we proceed to consider its constituent parts as more or less architecturally true. "To know that something is fictional," Hogan continues, "is to make a judgment that it does not exist. But existence judgments are cortical. They have relatively little to do with our emotional responses to anything. The intensity of emotional response is affected by a number of variables . . . [which] include, for example, proximity and speed, vividness, expectedness and so on."'9
To illustrate Hogan's point about the variables affecting our emotional response to fiction, think of yourself reading the second to last chapter of a murder mystery. You know that a murderer, whose identity is still hidden, is getting closer and closer (the issue of proximity) to the protagonist you have come to associate with. You know how the protagonist feels sitting there trapped in her own creaky house (the issue of vividness) with no phone lines working, and the slightly intoxicated neighbor, who has accidentally wandered in earlier, as her only and clearly inadequate, protection. Then—boom!—the suddenly sobered-up neighbor turns out to be the murderer (the issue of expectedness), and there seems to be no escape for the heroine now.
And when it comes to all these emotion-triggering variables, we have to remember that after tens of thousands of years of collective cultural experience of storytelling, authors have at their disposal a bag of rather effective tricks aimed at emotionally hooking us on whatever mind-reading scenario they are activating. A compelling love story knows how to push your emotional buttons by making you guess and second-guess the characters' states of mind because it is built on the bones of millions of forgotten love stories that didn't. Detective narratives have not been around for so long, but still, given that fewer than one-half of one percent of such narratives published since the nineteenth century have survived in cultural memory,20 we may assume that authors have learned a thing or two about how to keep you on the edge of your seat with guesswork concerning the mental processes of their characters.
It could be, then, that the narrative that attempts to be simultaneously a high-intensity love story (i.e., a love story that keeps us working hard on figuring out the lovers' state of mind) and a high-intensity detective story (i.e., a story that keeps us working hard at figuring the suspected criminal's state of mind) proves "too much" for us, at least in the currently familiar