WhyWeReadFiction

by Theory of Mind

  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 here includes such factors as the life histories of individual authors).

  Ellen Spolsky captures this important reversal of the traditional understanding of the relationship between the "cultural" and the "cognitive" when she suggests that the "theoretically infinite number of creative possibilities will in practice always be channeled and restricted by the cultural surround [even if] those restrictions are themselves often negotiable."3 Thus in spite of our evolved cognitive ability to attribute states of mind to ourselves and other people and to store information metarepresentationally, there is no predicting what cultural forms, literary or otherwise, these cognitive abilities can take. To quote Spolsky again, attention "to the complexity of the interrelationships among cognitive and cultural phenomena and the sheer number of possible local variations of these phenomena suggest why a commitment to the existence of evolved (innate or emergent) cognitive structures could never be a commitment to either philosophical or behavioral determinism—quite the opposite."4 In other words, by introducing cognitive evolutionary psychology into our study of the genre, we do not, as a matter of fact, give in to the "psychological" determinism of the kind Cawelti justly feared, but rather we develop a conceptual framework that truly commits us to historicizing our data.

  It is tempting to seize on Cawelti's opening proviso about the "present state of our knowledge" and suggest that because back in the 1970s, when he was writing his Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, literary critics indeed did not have at their disposal conceptual tools made possible by the recent advances in cognitive evolutionary science, he was only too right to be chary about the tendency to reduce "literary expression" to "psychological factors." Although nothing would date my own work more effectively than claiming that we have noiv attained the state of scientific sophistication unavailable to the benighted literary critics of the previous decades, at least a very mild version of this claim has to be ventured forth because even in its rudimentary state, cognitive evolutionary psychology does offer us a principally new way of approaching fictional narratives. By seeing such narratives as endlessly experimenting with rather than automatically executing given psychological tendencies, this approach opens new venues for literary historians wishing to integrate their knowledge of specific cultural circumstances implicated in the production of literary texts with important new insights into the workings of our brain/mind.

  CONCLUSION

  WHY DO WE READ (AND WRITE) FICTION?

  1

  AUTHORS MEET THEIR READERS

  fT have argued throughout this book that certain fictional texts, such as

  X eighteenth-century epistolary novels (e.g., Clarissa), early nineteenth-century comedies of manners (e.g., Emma), detective novels, stream-ofconsciousness novels (e.g., Mrs. Dalloway), and novels featuring unreliable narrators (e.g., Lolita) all engage clusters of cognitive adaptations associated with our ToM and metarepresentational ability in a particularly focused way. This is not to say that other novels do not (for a characteristically excellent discussion of this issue, see Palmer's Fictional Minds) or that all of the above novels do it in the same way. Clearly, the novels of Woolf and Chandler affect readers very differently and may indeed appeal to very distinct audiences. Still, most of these narratives seem to demand outright that we process complexly embedded intentionalities of their characters, configuring their minds as represented by other minds, whose representations we may or may not trust.

  I have also suggested that at certain junctures of human history (e.g., with the advent of print culture and growing literacy), a combination of new technological developments and socioeconomic conditions may make the cultural transmission of such "ToM-intense" fictional narratives possible. Such texts can then find their readers, that is, the people who like their ToM teased in this particular manner and who, once having gotten a taste of such a cognitive workout, want and can afford more and more of it.

  Moreover, when we think of this cultural-historical process of "matching" texts with their readers, perhaps it makes more sense to speak not just in terms of the text that serendipitously finds its audience but also in terms of the writer who finds hers. For it seems to me that working on a story that engages the reader's Theory of Mind in a particularly focused way must hit the author's own mind-reading spot as few other activities do. The process of writing can be excruciatingly difficult and is sometimes described in terms reminiscent of torture, but for a mind constituted the way the writer's mind is constituted, that process must represent something of a cognitive necessity. I am not saying that people who write fiction do it purely to stimulate or express their own peculiarly developed mind-reading ability. I do suspect, however, that other conscious and semiconscious incentives for writing, such as making a living, impressing potential mates, and advancing pet ideological agendas, would hardly suffice to make one offer up so much of her life to constructing elaborate mental worlds of people who never existed.

  P. G. Wodehouse insisted that authors conjure up fictional worlds precisely for that kick of creating, controlling, and inhabiting other people's states of mind. He called it "liking to write," but the example that he used to illustrate that elusive "liking" shows that he thought that "what urges a writer to write" is the pleasurable opportunity for a particularly focused mind-reading:

  I should imagine that even the man who compiles a railroad timetable is thinking much more of what fun it all is than of the check he is going to get when he turns in the completed script. Watch his eyes sparkle as he puts a very small (a) against the line

  4:51 arr. 6:22 knowing that the reader will not notice it and turn to the bottom of the page, where it says

  (a) On Saturdays only but will dash off with his suitcase and golf clubs all merry and bright, arriving in good time at the station on the afternoon of Friday. Money is the last thing such a writer has in mind. (110-11)

  In response to Dr. Johnson's categorical "nobody but a blockhead ever wrote except for money," Wodehouse would say that when the author has "written something, he wants to get as much for it as he can, but that is a very different thing from writing for money" (110). What drives the creative process is our
hankering for mind-making and mind-reading. Some of us work it by compiling railroad timetables, others by writing scholarly books, still others by sailing the empyrean with the likes of Galahad Treepwood, Jeeves, and Ukridge.

  Note how this view of writing fiction complicates an influential postulate of reader-response theory that "a text can only come to life when it

  1: Authors Meet Their Readers

  is read, and if it is to be examined, it must therefore be studied through the eyes of the reader."1 By now we are accustomed to thinking of a fictional narrative in terms of what it does to us (e.g., Booth is convinced that "it is good for [him] to be required to go through" The Wings of the Dove1) and what we do to it (e.g., we bring it to life; we "participate in the production of [its] meaning"3). Deeply congenial as these two views are to the perspective espoused by this study, we need to add the third component to them: the mind-reading mind of the writer. To poach on Booth's formulation, "[I]t is good" for the author to engage in the cognitive workout of constructing fictional minds. To poach on Iser's, a text "comes to life" in the mind of the author just as richly as—if not more richly than, in some aspects—it does in the mind of her readers because it engages her ToM in a unique and pleasurable (if at times torturous) manner.

  The novel, then, is truly a meeting of the minds—of the particularly • inclined minds in a particular historical moment that has made the encounter serendipitously possible. Samuel Richardson could indulge 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 would sound (in case she happens to like Henry James) something like this:

  There is more to my reading of fiction than simply having my ToM tickled! The argument of your book does not even begin to explain what I feel when I learn that the dearest wish of incurably ill Ralph Touchett of James's The Portrait of a Lady has always been to die at the same time with his father, and that Ralph is "steeped in melancholy" (84) when he realizes that this wish will not be granted, and, ill as he is, he will still outlive his father. As James puts it, "The father and the son had been close companions, and the idea of being left alone with the remnants of a tasteless life on his hands was not gratifying to the young man, who had always and tacitly counted upon his elder's help in making the best of a poor business" (85). Why I relate to this sentiment so strongly is my own business, but isn't it obvious that your book's theorizing on ToM and fiction does not capture or explain the instant recognition and heartache that is such an important part of my interaction with the novel? (A hypothetical reader, who insists, quite rightly, on the complexity and unpredictability of her feelings)

  I expect that by now you have also thought of episodes like this and concluded that there must be more to our response to our favorite fictional stories than just having our ToM stimulated by them. Except that if you have, you are mistaken, and your mistake stems from our use of that little word "just." It is fair to say that my book has dealt with just a few aspects of the relationship between our ToM and fiction—with a tiny subset of that relationship, in fact. It does not make sense, however, to say that our interaction with fiction entails much more than just having our ToM stimulated. When it comes to our everyday social functioning (which includes making sense of the social world of the novel), ToM is always much more than whatever cluster of cognitive adaptations we have isolated to make the discussion of it manageable.

  For instance, in practical terms, how do you separate our ToM and emotions? If, using my source-monitoring ability, I remember that it was my enemy who wanted my boss to promote me into a certain department, my emotions concerning that impending promotion might be quite different from what they were had I known that he hated the idea of my transfer. I might feel anxiety and anger instead of happy anticipation, and I might imagine unknown dangers and difficulties lurking behind my new appointment. ToM gives meaning to our emotions and is in turn given meaning by them. As Palmer observes, "[T]he interconnections between cognition and emotion .. . are difficult if not impossible to disentangle. Cognitions tend to have a strong emotional element and vice versa. They also relate closely in causal terms: a character's anger might be caused by a cognition of some sort that in turn results in further emotions and then other cognitions."1

  By the same token, my ima
gined reader's argument about The Portrait of a Lady is a complex amalgamation of dynamically interacting emotions and cognitions. Her personal feelings about some elder relative that she herself feels very close to are made more poignant, first, because she is able to attribute a particular sentiment to a literary character; second, because she can keep track of the complex source of the sentiment, seeing it issuing from James via "Ralph" and not from herself; and third, because she is titillated by the similarity between something that she has quietly felt for a long time and something that a highly sympathetic personage, such as Ralph, is experiencing. She realizes that she is not alone in the wish that she used to consider odd, and her new awareness of this fragile but comforting community is not reducible to the sum of cognitions and emotions that went into it.

  In other words, we do read novels because they engage our ToM, but we are at present a long way off from grasping fully the levels of complexity that this engagement entails. Fiction helps us to pattern in newly nuanced ways our emotions and perceptions;2 it bestows "new knowledge or increased understanding" and gives "the chance for a sharpened ethical sense";3 and it creates new forms of meaning for our everyday existence. All of this exploratory work is inextricably bound up with ToM, and the overall effect of it on the reader is not reducible to the sum of this narrative's engagements with our various cognitive adaptations. Some day we may have a conceptual framework that will allow us to speak about this overall effect—that "emergent meaning"4 of the literary narrative. In preparation for that sophisticated future, here is a very specific, modest, take-home claim from my book. I can say that I personally read fiction because it offers a pleasurable and intensive workout for my Theory of Mind. And, if you have indeed read this study of mine from cover to cover and followed attentively its arguments about Clarissa, Lolita, Arsene Lupin, and Mrs. Dalloway, I suspect that this is why you read fiction, too.