Yet to consider just one example of how crucial our "other" knowledges are for our cognitive inquiry into Mrs. Dalloway, let us situate Woolf's experimentation with multiple levels of intentionality within the history of the evolution of the means of textual reproduction. It appears that a written culture is, on the whole, more able than is an oral culture to support the elaborately nested intentionality simply because a paragraph with eight levels of intentional embedment does not yield itself easily to memorization and subsequent oral transmission. It is thus highly unlikely that we would find many (or any) passages that require us to go beyond the fourth level of intentionality in oral epics, such as Gilgamesh or The Iliad. "Walter Benjamin captured the broad point of this difference when he observed that the "listener's naive relationship to the storyteller is controlled by his interest in retaining what he is told. The cardinal point for the unaffected listener is to assure himself of the possibility of reproducing the story."8 The availability of the means of written transmission, such as print, enables the writer "to carry the incommensurable to extremes in representations of human life"9 and, by so doing, explore (or shall we actually say "develop," thus drawing upon Paul Hernadi's recent argument about the evolutionary origins of literature?10) the hitherto-quiescent cognitive spaces.
Of course, for a variety of aesthetic, personal, and financial reasons, not every author writing under the conditions of print will venture into such cognitive unknown. Even a cursory look through the best-selling mainstream fiction, from Belva Plain to Danielle Steel, confirms the continuous broad popular appeal of narratives sticking to the fourth level of intentional embedment. It is, then, the personal histories of individuals (here, individual writers and their audiences) that ensure that, as Alan Richardson and Francis Steen have observed, the history of cognitive structures "is neither identical to nor separate from the culture they make possible."11
In the case of Woolf, scholars agree that severing ties with the Duckworth—the press that had brought forth her first two novels and was geared toward an audience that was "Victorian, conventional, anti-experimentation" (Diary 1, 261)—"liberated [her] experimentalism."12 Having her own publishing house, the Hogarth Press, meant that she was "able to do what" she "like[d]—no editors, or publishers, and only people to read who more or less like that sort of thing" (Letters, 167). Another factor possibly informing the cognitive extremes of Mrs. Dalloway was Woolf's acute awareness of the passing of time: "my theory is that at 40 one either increases the pace or slows down" (Diary 2, 259). Woolf wanted to increase the pace of her explorations, to be able to "embody, at last" as she would write several years later, "the exact shapes my brain holds" [Diary 4, 53). Having struggled in her previous novels with the narrator "chocked with observations" (Jacob's Room, 67), she has discovered in the process of working on Mrs. Dalloway how to "dig out beautiful caves
8: The Larger Field of Literary Studies
behind [her] characters; . . . The idea is that the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment" (Diary 2, 263). Embodying the "exact shapes" of Woolf s brain thus meant, among other things, shifting "the focus from the mind of the narrator to the minds of the characters" and "from the external world to the minds of the characters perceiving it,"13 a technique that would eventually prompt Auerbach to inquire in exasperation, "Who is speaking in this paragraph?"14
Woolf's meditations on her writing remind us of yet another reason that simply counting levels of intentionality in Mrs. Dalloway will never supersede other forms of critical inquiry into the novel. When Woolf explains that she wants to construct a "present moment" as a delicate "connection" among the "caves" dug behind each character, the emerging image overlaps suggestively with Dennett's image of the infinitely recursive levels of intentionality. ("Aha," concludes the delighted cognitive literary critic, "Woolf had some sort of proto-theory of recursive mind-reading!") But with her vivid description of the catacomb-like subjectivity of the shared present moment,15 Woolf also manages to do something else—and that "something else" proceeds to quietly burrow into our (and her) cognitive theorizing.
This brings us to a seemingly counterintuitive but important point underlying cognitive literary analysis. Even as I map the passage featuring Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread at Lady Bruton's as a linear series of embedded intentionalities, I expect that something else present in that passage will complicate that linearity and re-pose Auerbach's question, albeit with a difference: Will it be the phallic overtones of the description of Hughs pen? Or the intrusion of rhetoric of economic exchange— "credit," "makers," "produce," "capital," "margin"? Or the vexed gender contexts of the "ventriloquism"16 implied by the image of Millicent Bruton spouting political platitudes in Hugh's voice? Or the equally vexed social class contexts of the "seating arrangements" that hierarchize the mind-reading that goes on in the passage? (After all, Woolf must have "seated" Lady Bruton's secretary, Miss Brush, too far from the desk to be able to see the shape of Hugh's letters so as not to add yet another level of mental embedment by having Miss Brush watch Richard watching Lady Bruton watching Hugh.)
Cognitive literary analysis thus continues beyond the line drawn by cognitive scientists—with the reintroduction of something else, a "noise," if you will, that is usually carefully controlled for and excised, whenever possible, from the laboratory settings. The exciting noisy scene—with all its overlapping and competing discourses of class and gender—is the rightful province of a literary critic. Still, as Phelan points out, the study "of the embedded intentionalities has implications for every one of [these discourses] if only because it provides a clearer ground from which to proceed."17
9
WOOLF, PINKER, AND THE PROJECT OF
INTERDISCIPLINARY Y
hallenging as it may be, Woolf's prose is so fundamentally rooted in
our cognitive capacities that I am compelled to qualify an argument advanced recently by Steven Pinker in his remarkable and provocative Blank Slate. Pinker sees Woolf as having inaugurated an aesthetic movement whose "philosophy did not acknowledge the ways in which it was appealing to human pleasure."1 Although he admits that "modernism comprises many styles and artists, . . . not [all of which] rejected beauty and other human sensibilities" and that modernist "fiction and poetry offered invigorating intellectual workouts," here is what he has to say about modernism as a whole and Woolf in particular:
The giveaway [explanation for the current crisis in the arts and humanities] may be found in a famous statement from Virginia Woolf: " [On] or about December 1910, human [character] changed." She was referring to the new philosophy of modernism that would dominate the elite arts and criticism for much of the twentieth century, and whose denial of human nature was carried over with a vengeance to postmodernism, which seized control in its later decades. . . . Modernism certainly proceeded as if human nature had changed. All the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate were cast aside. .. . In literature, omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability were replaced by a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed narration, and difficult prose.2
As literary critics, we have several ways of responding to Pinker's claims about Woolf. We can hope, together with a representative of The
9: Woolf, Pinker, and the Project of Interdisciplinarity
Publications of the Modern Language Association, that not "many students, teachers, theorists, and critics of literature will take [him] seriously as an authority on literature or the aesthetics more generally, especially since he misrepresents both Woolf and modernism."3 At first sight, this is a comfortable stance. It assumes a certain cultural detachment of literary studies and implies that cognitive scientists should just leave literature alone, acknowledging it as an exclusive playing field for properly trained professionals—us. The problem with this view is that it disregards two facts: first,
that more people read Pinker (who "misrepresents" Woolf) rather than, say, PMLA (which could set the matter straight); and, second, that as a very special, richly concentrated cognitive artifact, literature already is fair game for scientists, including Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Paul Harris, Robin Dunbar, and others, and it will become even more so as the cognitive inquiry spreads further across cultural domains.4
Thus, instead of simply ignoring Pinker's assertion that modernist writers have, by and large, cast aside "the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate," we should engage his argument, incorporating both insights from our own field and those offered by cognitive scientists. For me, the idea that our cognitive evolutionary heritage structures the ways in which we make sense of fictional narrative is profoundly appealing precisely because it begins to explain why the impulse to cast aside the tried-and-true "tricks" of representation is not at all limited to modernists. Writers, after all, have always experimented with the palates of their readers. Press a literary critic for an example of a novel featuring "stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed narration," and it is possible that she will come up not with one of the early-twentiethcentury novels but with an eighteenth-century one, such as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67), or a nineteenth-century one, such as
E. T. A. Hoffman's Kater Murr (1820-22). Press me for such an example, and I will say Heliodorus's An Ethiopian Romance, a novel written sometime between A.D. 250 and 380. Profoundly experimental in its handling of causal sequences and stories embedded within other stories, An Ethiopian Romance can be quite baffling to its readers; my students regularly find it so in spite of its accessible language (they read it in a contemporary translation) and its largely conventional set of adventures. Yet Romance has survived for seventeen centuries and has been enormously influential in the European literary tradition.5
In fact, the history of such books' reception contains a warning for both a cognitive scientist and a literary critic who are compiling a list of "tricks" that had been reliably delighting readers "for millennia" and were then cast aside by the elitist modernists. Dr. Johnson's confident (and so far wrong) observation that "nothing odd will do long," just like "Tristram Shandy did not last" should give pause to any attempt to designate some complex features of the literary narrative as broadly pleasing and thus likely to endure through millennia and other features as odd, elitist, and, thus, most likely, transient.6 A text can be perceived by some readers as unusual and difficult (and indeed it can be genuinely difficult, given, for example, its intensified demands on ourToM adaptations). However, that difficulty may actually heighten its appeal for other readers and—given a conjunction of particular historical circumstances and particular means of textual reproduction—eventually contribute to its lasting popularity.
Moreover, to draw on the respective arguments of Alan Palmer and Monika Fludernik, narratives that challenge their readers' ToM by their unusual and difficult representations of fictional consciousness may offer valuable insights into the workings of our consciousness which is anything but predictable, orderly, and simple. As Palmer puts it,
[fictional texts are] complex in their portrayal of the fictional mind acting in the context of other minds because fictional thought and real thought are like that. Fictional life and real life are like that. Most of our lives are not spent in thoughtful self-communings. Narrators know this, [even if we may not] have yet developed a vocabulary for studying the relationships between fictional minds and the social situations within which they function.7
And furthermore, as Fludernik reminds us, modernists saw themselves not as denying human nature and assaulting the human palate but, on the contrary, as getting closer to capturing the complexity of the real:
[If] the consciousness novel is being discussed here in its relation to novelistic realism, and surprisingly so for some readers I should think it reflects the very rhetoric of Modernist fiction, which claimed to be truer to life than the realist and naturalist novel could ever hope to be: truer, that is, to the very experientiality of peoples subjective involvement with their environment. .. . I propose to treat the consciousness novel as the culmination point in the development of narrative realism rather than its first regrettable lapse into idiosyncratic preoccupations with the nontypical and no-longer-verisimilar of human subjectivity.8
9: Woolf, Pinker, and the Project of Interdisciplinary
Ostensibly experimental texts, such as Mrs. Dalloway and Tristram Shandy, are thus a boon for an interdisciplinary analysis drawing on cognitive science and literary studies (I say ostensibly because my later chapters will expand significantly our concept of literary experimentation.) The moment cognitive scientists succeed in isolating yet another plausible cognitive regularity (e.g., as Dunbar and his colleagues have done), we can start looking for the ways in which fictional narratives (e.g., Mrs. Dalloway) have been burrowing into and working around that regularity, testing and reconfiguring its limits.
By thus paying attention to the elite, to the exceptional, to the cognitively challenging, such as Woolf's play with the levels of intentional embedment, we can develop, for instance, a more sophisticated perspective on the workings of our Theory of Mind.9 And, as Phelan observes, would not Pinker himself and "those in his audience who view modernist literature as he does be more likely to be persuaded to change their dismissive view of it, if literary critics show that [Woolf's] representations of consciousness, though initially challenging to a reader, are highly intelligible because they capture in their own ways insights that Pinker and other cognitive scientists have been offering (and popularizing)?"10
But if it makes sense to use as a starting point the cognitive psychologists' insight into certain regularities of our information processing and apply it to the literary narrative, then the opposite conceptual move can be equally productive. Our intuitive impression (bolstered by Dr. John-son's pronouncement) that Sterne was indeed doing something odd in his Tristram Shandy can prompt both cognitive scientists and literary scholars to inquire into other, not yet formulated, cognitive regularities underlying our interaction with fictional narrative. If Sterne was going against some cognitive grain, we need to understand that grain in terms incommensurably more specific than the ones evoking "structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability."
I have returned again to the quote from The Blank Slate not to criticize Pinker's endeavor to view literary history from a cognitive perspective but rather to stress our own relative interdisciplinary timidity. Responding to the revolutionary advances made in the last two decades in cognitive psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and the philosophy of mind, Pinker and his colleagues in cognitive sciences grapple with difficult questions about literary narrative that we should be grappling with to a much larger extent than we currently do. Pinker may or may not be immediately aware of Tristram Shandy or Kater Murr when he positions far-reaching experimentation with established forms as a literary development unique to the twentieth century, but his awareness of them is almost beside the point. What is important is that he is venturing into the murky interdisciplinary waters and engaging a larger audience with important questions about literature and cognition, whereas we, though beginning to address such questions among ourselves, are hardly reaching out to readers outside of literature departments.
I wonder, then, what exactly are the epistemological and ethical grounds on which we stand when we mock Pinker's claim to being an "authority on literature" if we have not yet made any good-faith effort to meet Pinker halfway and offer our literary-historical expertise to develop a more sophisticated and yet accessible cognitive perspective on modernist representations of fictional consciousness? Paradoxically, it is only while we refuse to "take seriously" the research of cognitive scientists who dare to pronounce "on literature or . .. aesthetics more generally" that we could be made to feel that our contribution to this in
terdisciplinary exchange would represent little or nothing of value. Once we enter the conversation and engage with respect the arguments of Dunbar, Pinker, Dennett, and others, we realize that because of their ever-increasing—and well-warranted—interest in how the human mind processes literary narratives, our expertise could make a crucial difference for the future shape of the ever-expanding field of cognitive science.
TART 11
TRACKING MINDS 1
WHOSE THOUGHT IS IT, ANYWAY?
ntation."1 Introduced in cognitive science in the 1980s, it has since gained wide currency among theory-of-mind psychologists and philosophers of mind and has recently become a subject of a wide-ranging collection of essays, Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, edited by Dan Sperber. Sometimes described as "a representation of a representation," a metarepresentation consists of two parts. The first part specifies a source of representation, for example, "I thought . . . ," or "Our teacher informed us. ... " The second part provides the content of representation, for example, ". . . that it was going to rain," or ". . . that plants photosynthesize.
Or, to come back to our Mrs. Dalloway passage, the sentence describing Hugh's pen—"It was still in perfect order; he had shown it to the makers; there was no reason, they 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 rings round them in the margin . . ."—is a metarepresentation with a specific source. That little tag, "so Richard Dalloway felt," alerts us to that source, that is, the mind behind the sentiment. Knowing whose sentiment it is constitutes a crucial aspect of our understanding of the psychological dynamics of this particular scene and of the novel as a whole. Moreover, as I will demonstrate shortly, our tendency to keep track of sources of our representations—to metarepresent them—is a particular cognitive endowment closely related to our mind-reading ability.
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