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By Root 614 0

the quirks of his ToM (boy, was he one interesting London businessman!) and write the 1,500-page Clarissa focusing obsessively on mind-reading and misreading because he had first tried it first on a lesser scale in Pamela. He must have liked how it felt, and, moreover, he must have come to believe that his second novel would be able to reach a group of readers who love just this kind of cognitive stimulation. Or, to put it slightly differently, some of the people (by no means all) who read Pamela when it first came out discovered that they like this kind of story, wished for more, and could afford more (what with reasonable book prices and increasing leisure time for readers of a certain social standing), thus ensuring that what we call today a "psychological" or "sentimental" novel would survive and give birth to several related genres.

I speak of the "ensured" survival of the psychological novel guardedly. It did not have to happen like this. As I argued in Part III, there is nothing really ensured or determined about how genres arise, metamorphose into other genres, or die out, even if they do "get at" our ToM in a particularly felicitous way. For all that we know, there might have been a man or a woman in the eighteenth century who wrote an experimental novel that could have started a new literary tradition stimulating our ToM in a wonderfully unpredictable fashion. That novel did not find a publisher; or it was lost in the mail; or its author changed his/her mind and never revisited this particular style of writing in his/her subsequent publications. Literary history reflects only a tiny subset of realized cognitive possibilities constrained by the myriad of local contingencies, and those contingencies include personal inclinations and histories of individual writers and readers.

2

IS THIS WHY WE READ FICTION? SURELY, THERE IS MORE TO IT!

his emphasis on local contingencies carries over to another claim

that I think you think I have been making throughout this book (yes, that's the third level of embedment—we handle it easily). Theory of Mind is a cluster of cognitive adaptations that allows us to navigate our social world and also structures that world. Intensely social species that we are, we thus read fiction because it engages, in a variety of particularly focused ways, our Theory of Mind.

That's my general claim, and here are the promised qualifications. First of all, some texts experiment with our ToM more intensely than others, and some readers appreciate that experimentation more than others, or appreciate some forms of that experimentation more than others. (Again, neither preference is a meaningful indicator of the reader's emotional intelligence or any other personal characteristic. For example, people who love Woolf's prose at times apply to graduate programs in English, and that's as much as I can say about their overall personal profiles.)

Second, the reader's predilection for a certain form of novelistic experimentation with ToM does not mean that she is guaranteed to enjoy every well-written novel adhering to that form. For example, among the people who like the cognitive thrill offered by the figure of the unreliable narrator, somebody could be turned off by Lolita's theme of pedophilia. By the same token, an aficionado of a detective novel could find too depressing certain aspects of P. D. James's The Black Tower. Conversely, a person could find intolerable James's depiction of corruption in the house of assisted living but still be deeply touched by her portrayal of the novel's murdered protagonist, Father Baddeley. This is to say that factors other than the form of the novel's engagement with ToM enter into the assessment of our personal liking of the novel or our assessment of its relative aesthetic value.

Third—but here I ought to be interrupted by my long-suffering reader

2: Surely, There Is More to It!

who feels badly misrepresented by the argument of this book, in spite of all my qualifications. Let me play the role of that impatient reader myself and voice her main objection, which