Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [94]
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A COGNITIVE EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE:
ALWAYS HISTORICIZE!
P o what have I really been saying by insisting on grounding our enjoyed ment of detective stories in the workings of our metarepresentational ability and our Theory of Mind? A quarter-century ago, in his influential Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, John Cawelti cautioned literary critics about the dangers of assuming that the process of writing and reading fiction is "dependent, contingent, or a mere reflection of other more basic social and psychological processes."1 Have I recruited research from the currently fashionable field of cognitive science to smuggle in the same old fallacy of explaining away a complex cultural artifact as a mere reflection of a basic psychological process? Have I tumbled headlong into the pit that Cawelti warned us about?
If I have, my response is to dig myself further in. I shall start by quoting more of Cawelti's argument:
In the present state of our knowledge, it seems more reasonable to treat social and psychological factors not as single determinant causes of literary expression but as elements in a complex process that limits in various ways the complete autonomy of art. In making cultural interpretations of literary patterns, we should consider them not as simple reflections of social ideologies or psychological needs but as instances of a relatively autonomous mode of behavior that is involved in a complex dialectic with other aspects of human life.2
My main rejoinder to the quite irreproachable case made by Cawelti is that, although certainly focusing on "psychological factors," a cognitive-evolutionary approach to literature does not subscribe to the traditional notion of psychology that he may have had in mind in his influential study. First of all, as I have argued earlier with my "weightlifting" example, our cognitive predispositions do not enter the "cause-effect" relationship with complex cultural artifacts such as works of fiction. Our Theory of Mind and our metarepresentational ability render the detective stories cognitively possible, but they by no means make their emergence and popularity inevitable. Too many locally contingent historical factors influence the process of the establishment of the new genre for us to suggest otherwise. In fact, it is quite possible that many other genres, currently latent and perhaps never to be explicitly culturally articulated, would have engaged our ToM and metarepresentationality equally well or much better, but the myriad of historical contingencies "conspire" to keep them dormant.
Hence my qualification of the second point made by Cawelti. When he observes that "psychological factors" should be considered as "elements in a complex process that limits in various ways the complete autonomy of art," we recognize in his formulation the traditional view of our culture as "limited," via a complex mediation of multiple factors, by our biological (here, cognitive) endowment. Cognitive evolutionary perspective holds the promise of the productive reversal of this model. It seems that, if anything, it is the specific historical contingencies—or "culture"—that limit the concrete expressions of our cognitive endowment, for, as I have
4: Always Historicize !
pointed out above, nobody knows how many genre variations that could have worked out our ToM in a particularly felicitous way have never been realized because of a given confluence of historic circumstances (and my concept of historic