On a slightly less exalted level, there is "The One Where Everybody Finds Out" episode from the fifth season of Friends, in which Phoebe finds out that Monica and Chandler are "doing it" and decides to play a practical joke on them. Phoebe, who is not in the least attracted to Chandler, begins to act as if she were, knowing that because Chandler does not know that she knows that he is going out with Monica, he will think that Phoebe is actually interested in him and will be both confused and flattered, to the secret delight of everybody who is in on the joke. However, when Monica finds out that Phoebe has made a pass at Chandler (whom, she knows, Phoebe does not find attractive), she realizes that Phoebe is trying to make fun of him and talks Chandler into welcoming Phoebe's advances, so that Phoebe, not knowing that Chandler knows that she knows, will back down at a crucial moment and thus make a fool of herself. However, when Chandler acts according to this plan and responds enthusiastically to
7: Cognitive Science and Mis. Dalloway
Phoebe's flirting, Phoebe realizes that Chandler must know now that she knows that he knows . .. (and here I begin to lose it, so let us move quickly to the end of this sentence), and so decides that she will never back down first. As Phoebe puts it ever so eloquently, addressing her co-conspirator Rachel and their friend Joey, who has been witnessing Phoebe and Rachel's plotting from the beginning: "They thought they could mess with us! They're trying to mess with us? They don't know that we know they know we know! And Joey, you can't say anything!" To this Joey replies, rather reasonably, "I couldn't if I wanted to."
I am afraid that neither could I. Watching this episode, many of us start feeling like Joey, who is generally portrayed as being a bit on the slow side. The situation is really not that complicated, and having live actors play it out helps to render it more comprehensible. Still, at some point, the agglomeration of multiply embedded minds proves too much of a cognitive load, and we begin to think of Phoebe's plotting in segments. We are keeping track, that is, of the two or three most immediate mind-readings (as in "now X doesn't known that Y knows what X does") and not of the whole series (as in "X doesn't know that Y knows that X knows that Y knows that X knows that Y knows what X does").
We certainly laugh as we watch Phoebe, Rachel, Monica, and Chandler navigate enthusiastically those mental labyrinths, but our laughter may have a complex emotional undertow. For we have been cognitively overpowered, finding ourselves lagging behind in this social game, with Joey bringing up the rear. On the other hand, our social ineptitude (or, as I prefer to see it, our appealing personal predilection for straight dealing) has been revealed in the safe setting of watching a television sitcom, so perhaps it is amusing after all. In fact, as I speculate in Parts II and III, when cultural representations push our mind-reading adaptations to what feels like their limits (within particular historical milieus, that is5), we might find ourselves in rather emotionally suggestive moods. Depending on the context and the genre of the representation (e.g., a cartoon in The New Yorker, an eighteenth-century psychological novel, a twentieth-century detective novel), a momentary cognitive vertigo induced by the multiple mind-embedment may render us increasingly ready either to laugh or to quake with apprehension.
Let us now turn to a novelistic representation of multiply embedded minds and consider a randomly selected6 passage from Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Roughly halfway into the story, the husband of the title protagonist, Richard Dalloway, gets together with his old acquaintance Hugh Whitbread, and they come over to the house of one Lady Bruton, a woman keenly interested in politics. Milicent Bruton needs Richard's and Hugh's assistance to write a letter to the editor of the Times which would presumably influence the future of Great Britain. Here is how Woolf describes the process of composing the letter:
And Miss Brush [Lady Bruton's secretary] went out, came back; laid papers or. die table; and Hugh produced his fountain pen; his silver fountain pen, which had done twenty years' service, he said, unscrewing the cap. It was s rill in perfect order; he had shown it to the makers; there was no reason, rhev said, why it should ever wear out; which was somehow to Hugh's credit, and to the credit of the sentiments which his pen expressed (so Richard Dalloway felt) as Hugh began carefully writing capital letters with ::ngs round them in the margin, and thus marvelously reduced Lady Bruton's tangles to sense, to grammar such as the editor of the Times, Lady Bruton felt, watching the marvelous transformation, must respect. (110)
r.at is going on in this passage? We are seemingly invited to deduce the excellence of Millicent Bruton's civic ideas—put on paper by Hugh—first from the resilience of the pen that he uses, and then from the beauty of his
:ir:tal letters with rings around them on the margins." Of course, this reduction of lofty sentiments and superior analytic skills to mere artifacts, : uch as writing utensils and calligraphy, achieves just the opposite effect. By the end of the paragraph, we are ready to accept Richard Dalloway's
iew of the resulting epistle as "all stuffing and bunkum," but a harmless b unkum at that, its inoffensiveness and futility underscored by the : r.gue-in-cheek, phallic description of the silver pen that had done cv enty years in Hugh's service but is still "in perfect order"—or so Hugh thinks—once he's done "unscrewing the cap."
There are several ways to map this passage out in terms of the nested levels of intentionality. I will start by listing the smallest irreducible units : embedded intentionality and gradually move up to those that capture is much of the whole narrative gestalt of the described scene as possible:
The makers of the pen think that it will never wear out (1st level).
Hugh says that the makers of the pen think it will never wear out (2nd level).
Lady Bruton wants the editor of the Times to respect and publish her ideas (2nd level).
Hugh wants Lady Bruton and Richard to believe that because
7: Cognitive Science and Mrs. Dalloway
the makers of the pen think that it will never wear out, the
editor of the Times will respect and publish the ideas recorded
by this pen (4th level).
Richard is aware that Hugh wants Lady Bruton and Richard Dalloway to believe that because the makers of the pen think that it will never wear out, the editor of the Times will respect and publish the ideas recorded by this pen (5th level).
Richard suspects that Lady Bruton indeed believes that because, as Hugh says, the makers of the pen think that it will never wear out, the editor of the Times will respect and publish the ideas recorded by this pen (5th level).
Woolf intends us to recognize [by inserting a parenthetical observation, "so Richard Dalloway felt"] that Richard is aware that Hugh wants Lady Bruton and Richard to think that because the makers of the pen believe that it will never wear out, the editor of the Times will respect and publish the ideas recorded by this pen (6th level).
It could be argued, of course, that in the process of reading, we automatically cut through Woolf's stylistic pyrotechniques to come up with a series of more comprehensible, first-, second-, and third-level attributions of states of mind, such as, "Richard does not particularly like Hugh"; "Lady Bruton thinks that Hugh is writing a marvelous letter"; "Richard feels that Lady Bruton thinks that Hugh is writing a marvelous letter, but he is skeptical about the whole enterprise"; etc. Such abbreviated attributions may seem destructive since the effect that they have on Woolf's prose is equivalent to the effect of paraphrasing on poetry, but they do, in fact, convey some general sense of what is going on in the paragraph. The main problem with them, however, is that to arrive at such simplified descriptions of Richard's and Lady Bruton's states of mind, we have to grasp the full meaning of this passage, and to do that, we first have to process several sequences that embed at least five levels of intentionality. Moreover, we have to do it on the spot, unaided by pen and paper and not forewarned that the number of levels of intentionality that we are about to encounter is considered by cognitive scientists to create "a very significant load on most people's cognitive a
bilities."7
Note that in this particular passage, Woolf not only "demands" that we process a string of fifth- and sixth-level intentionalities; she also introduces such embedded intentionalities through descriptions of body language that in some ways approach those of Hemingway in their emotional blandness. No more telling "trembling," as in the earlier scene featuring Peter and Clarissa. Instead, we get Richard watching Lady Bruton watching Hugh producing his pen, unscrewing the cap, and beginning to write. True, Woolf offers us two emotionally colored words, carefully and marvelously, but what they signal is that Hugh cares a great deal about his writing and that Lady Bruton admires the letter that he produces—two snapshots of the states of mind that only skim the surface of the complex affective undertow of this episode.
Because Woolf has depicted physical actions relatively lacking in immediate emotional content, here, in striking contrast to the scene in Clarissa's drawing room, she hastens to provide an authoritative interpretation of each character's mental state. We are told what Lady Bruton feels as she watches Hugh (she feels that the editor of the Times will respect a letter written so beautifully); we are told what Hugh thinks as he unscrews the cap (he thinks that the pen will never wear out and that its longevity contributes to the worth of the sentiments it produces); and we are told what Richard feels as he watches Hugh, his capital letters, and Lady Bruton (he is amused both by Hugh's exalted view of himself and by Lady Bruton's readiness to take Hugh's self-importance at face value). The apparently unswerving, linear hierarchy of the scene—Richard can represent the minds of both Hugh and Lady Bruton, but Hugh and Lady Bruton cannot represent Richard's representations of their minds—seems to enforce the impression that each mind is represented fully and correctly.
Of course, Woolf is able to imply that her representations of Hugh's, Lady Bruton's, and Richard's minds are exhaustive and correct because, creatures with a Theory of Mind that we are, we just know that there must be mental states behind the emotionally opaque body language of the protagonists. The relative paucity of textual cues that could allow us to imagine those mental states ourselves leaves us no choice but to accept the representations provided by the author. We have to work hard for them, of course, for sifting through all those levels of embedded intentionality tends to push the boundaries of our mind-reading ability to its furthest limits.
When we try to articulate our perception of the cognitive challenge induced by this task of processing fifth- and sixth-level intentionality, we may say that Woolf's writing is difficult or even refuse to continue reading her novels. The personal aesthetics of individual readers thus could be at least in part grounded in the nuances of their individual mind-reading capacities. By saying this I do not mean to imply that if somebody "loves" or "hates" Woolf, it should tell us something about that person's general
7: Cognitive Science and Mrs. Dalloway
mind-reading "sophistication"—a cognitive literary analysis does not support such misguided value judgments. The nuances of each person's mind-reading profile are unique to that person, just as, for example, we all have the capacity for developing memories (unless that capacity has been clinically impaired), but each individual's actual memories are unique. My combination of memories serves me, and it would be meaningless to claim that it somehow serves me "better" than my friend's combination of memories serves her. (At the same time, I see no particular value in celebrating the person's dislike of Woolf as the manifestation of his or her individual cognitive makeup. My teaching experience has shown that if we alert our students to the fact that Woolf tends to play this particular kind of cognitive "mind game" with her readers, it significantly eases their anxiety about "not getting" her prose and actually helps them to start enjoying her style.8)
This point is worth dwelling on because, while writing this book and giving talks on ToM and fiction, I have become aware of the appeal of pop-hypotheses about the relationship between certain types of behavior (including reading preferences) and mind-reading "superiority." I have already mentioned the question that I was asked once about the "slightly autistic" adolescents who choose watching TV over reading novels. In the same vein, it was suggested to me that if somebody prefers Woolf to Grisham; or Grisham to TV; or novels to computer games; or long conversations about one's feelings to discussions of basketball games, it may testify to that person's mind-reading "excellence." I find such speculations misguided no matter how I look at them. Whereas common sense suggests that the mind-reading profile of a person who prefers Woolf to Grisham must indeed be somewhat different from that of a person who prefers Grisham to Woolf, I fail to see what practical conclusions about the per-son's overall mind-reading "fitness" can be made from the assumption of this commonsensical difference. Given how intensely contextual each act of mind-reading is, I would not be able to predict how a "typical" avid reader of Woolf would conduct herself in a complex social situation as opposed, say, to a "typical" avid reader of TV Guide. I had a friend once who delighted in discussing emotions and multiply embedded mental stances and who was, on the whole, what we call a "sensitive" man. Yet he could not stand reading fiction and generally was not fond of any reading because of a certain visual impairment that made it difficult for him to focus his eyes on the page. What gives? Theory of Mind makes reading fiction possible, but reading fiction does not make us into better mind-readers, at least not in the way that I can theorize confidently at this early stage of our knowledge about cognitive information processing. (I shall return to this point again in Part III, Section 2, entitled "Why Is Reading a Detective Story a Lot like Lifting Weights at the Gym?")
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A "COGNITIVE"
ANALYSIS OF MRS. DALLOWAY
AND THE LARGER FIELD OF LITERARY STUDIES
(T t is now time to return to the imaginary conversation that opened this
JL book. Some versions of that exchange did take place at several scholarly forums, where I have presented my research on ToM and literature. Once, for instance, after I had described the immediate pedagogical payoffs of counting, in one of my undergraduate seminars, the levels of intentionality in Mrs. Dalloway, I was asked if I could foresee the time when such a cognitive reading would supersede and render redundant the majority of other, more traditional approaches to Woolf.1 My immediate answer was no, but since then, I have had the opportunity to consider several implications of that question important for those of us wishing cognitive approaches to literature to thrive.
First of all, counting the levels of intentionality in Mrs. Dalloway does not constitute the cognitive approach to Woolf. It merely begins to explore one particular way—among numerous others—in which Woolf builds on and experiments with our ToM, and—to cast the net more broadly—in which fiction builds on and experiments with our other cognitive propensities.2 Many of these propensities, I feel safe in saying, still remain unknown to us despite remarkable advances in the cognitive sciences during the last two decades.
However, the current state of the field of cognitive approaches to literature already testifies to the spectacular diversity of venues offered by the parent fields of cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive evolutionary anthropology. Literary scholars have begun to investigate the ways in which recent research in these areas opens new avenues in gender studies (F. Elizabeth Hart); feminism (Elizabeth Grosz); cultural historicism (Mary Thomas Crane, Alan Richardson, Blakey Vermeule); narrative theory
8: The Larger Field of Literary Studies
(Alan Palmer, David Herman, Uri Margolin, Monika Fludernik, Porter Abbott); ecocriticism (Nancy Easterlin); literary aesthetics (Elaine Scarry, Gabrielle Starr); deconstruction (Ellen Spolsky); and postcolonial studies (Patrick Colm Hogan, Frederick Luis Aldama).3 What their publications show is that far from displacing or rendering the traditional approaches redundant, a cognitive approach can build on, strengthen, and develop their insights.
Second, the ongoing dialogu
e with, for instance, cultural historicism or feminism is not simply a matter of choice for scholars of literature interested in cognitive approaches. There is no such thing as a cognitive ability, such as ToM, free-floating "out there" in isolation from its human embodiment and historically and culturally concrete expression. Evolved cognitive predispositions, to borrow Patrick Colm Hogan's characterization of literary universals, "are instantiated variously, particularized in specific circumstances."4 Everything that we learn about Woolf's life and about the literary, cultural, and sociohistorical contexts of Mrs. Dalloway is thus potentially crucial for understanding why this particular woman, at this particular historical juncture, seeing herself as working both within and against a particular set of literary traditions, began to push beyond the boundaries of her readers' cognitive "zone of comfort" (that is, beyond the fourth level of intentionality).
At the same time, to paraphrase David Herman, the particular combination of these personal, literary, and historical contexts, in all their untold complexity, is a "necessary though not a sufficient condition"5 for understanding why Woolf wrote the way she did. No matter how much we learn about the writer herself and her multiple environments, and no matter how much we find out about the cognitive endowments of our species that, "particularized in specific circumstances," make fictional narratives possible, we can go only so far in our cause-and-effect analysis. As George Butte puts it, "[Ajccounts of material circumstances can describe changes in gender systems and economic privileges, but they cannot explain why this bankrupt merchant wrote Moll Flanders, or why this genteelly-impoverished clergyman's daughter wrote Jane Eyre,"6 There will always remain a gap between our ever-increasing store of knowledge and the phenomenon of Woolf's prose—or, for that matter, Defoe's, Austen's, Bronte's, and Hemingway's prose.7
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