The Secret Life of Stories

by Bérubé, Michael;

  Why do we need this newfangled concept of mind-reading, or ToM, to explain what appears so obvious? Our ability to interpret the behavior of people in terms of their underlying states of mind seems to be such an integral part of what we are as human beings that we could be understandably reluctant to dignify it with fancy terms and elevate it into a separate object of study. One reason that ToM has received the sustained attention of cognitive psychologists over the last twenty years is that they have come across people whose ability to “see bodies as animated by minds” is drastically impaired—people with autism. By studying autism and a related constellation of cognitive deficits (such as Asperger syndrome), cognitive scientists began to appreciate our mind-reading ability as a special cognitive endowment, structuring our everyday communication and cultural representations. (7)

  Moments like these, I told my students, are why deconstruction was invented. The argument here (I will focus first on its form rather than its content) is that we know we have Theory of Mind because some people don’t. In other words, the existence of X is predicated on the not-X; the exceptional condition becomes the condition for the not-exceptional. Deconstruction was particularly keen at finding and overturning these figure/ground relationships, and was properly suspicious of binary arrangements that involved one privileged term and one abjected term. So, I argued, Zunshine is adducing autism here only to cast it aside and get to the important stuff, namely, the way novels provide workouts for our brains, with only a drive-by pair of paragraphs on Curious Incident that (a) mention Christopher’s distaste for “proper novels” but do not stop to ask what novel Christopher is citing as “proper” or why that might be important, and (b) conclude by saying, “Still, as a novel authored by a child with a compromised Theory of Mind (even if this child is himself a fictional character), Curious Incident is a much-needed reminder about the complexity of the issues involved in the relationship between autism and storytelling” (12). I do not think myself in danger of overstating anything when I say that this is a serious underreading of Curious Incident.

  At this point, however, one of my students looked up from the seminar table in bewilderment. “I don’t have any of this,” she said, clearly lost in the depths of some horrible graduate-student nightmare in which one’s text turns to gubbish before one’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry?” I replied, equally bewildered. The other eleven students all had print copies of Zunshine’s book, and were following along without any problem. This student was reading a Kindle version of the book—in which there were no references to autism. Zunshine had stripped out all the passages mentioning autism, and had added an explanatory footnote in their place: “The original edition of this book contained a discussion of the implications for research on autism and Theory of Mind for the study of literature. I have eliminated this discussion from the present edition because given what I am learning about autism, I am now reluctant to make any generalizations about autism and fiction.”

  Zunshine’s theory of Theory of Mind is still deeply problematic, for reasons I will elaborate, but in disability studies as in life, I think we should take our victories where we find them. Just a few months before my seminar discussion, at the 2013 convention of the Modern Language Association, Zunshine had given a bracingly self-critical paper titled “Real Mindblindness, or, I Was Wrong.” (I believe it may have been the first paper in the history of the MLA since 1884 to bear that subtitle.) Her argument was precisely the one I wish Vermeule had made in her discussion of “situational” mindblindness—namely, that the attribution of mindblindness to people with autism is itself an example of misreading minds, an instance of neurotypical mindblindness: “It is the neurotypical observer who is ‘mindblind’ (i.e., incapable of reading the other person’s mind) yet the label of mindblindness or ‘impaired’ theory of mind is firmly attached to the individual exhibiting the unconventional behavior.” Zunshine’s change of mind was induced partly by autistic writers such as Tito Mukhopadhyay, Donna Williams, and Dawn Prince, and partly by researchers such as Douglas Biklen (Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone) and Ralph Savarese (Reasonable People), whose adopted son DJ is nonverbal yet capable of writing astonishing work that shatters stereotypes about people with autism. In a passage cited by Zunshine, DJ Savarese offers advice to people who might have trouble interpreting his intentions:

  First, ignore my involuntary gestures, including my signs for “done” and “break.” They fearfully hear years of negative fear and try to keep me locked into a cycle of autonomic impulses. Remember these gestures are not voluntary. They are just my body’s way of responding to stimuli. If you respond to them as meaningful, they fearfully rev my heart more, but if you wait patiently and wordlessly, you free me to finally respond voluntarily. Once I’ve freed my body to respond, I can skip over the autonomic responses and give faster motor replies as the conversation continues.

  Zunshine’s paper concludes that “my argument was not affected in the least” by the excision of the discussion of autism in Why We Read Fiction. “At this point,” Zunshine insists, “references to autism in cognitive literary criticism are gratuitous. We lose nothing by leaving them behind.”

  The good news is that chapter 3 of Zunshine’s book, “Theory of Mind, Autism, and Fiction: Three Caveats,” no longer exists in the Kindle version (I think it should be marked by a blank chapter or a black page, à la Tristram Shandy). The bad news is that Zunshine continues to rely heavily on Theory of Mind, and in her follow-up book, Getting Inside Your Head, she expands her argument to cover all of human culture, from novels to films and plays and musicals and paintings and reality shows. All the world’s a Theory of Mind stage, except that the world we have created includes millions of actual stages, where actors embody the principle that all the world’s a (self-reflexive) stage. Our culture, Zunshine writes, is “a culture of greedy mind readers” (11) that relentlessly invents scenes of “embodied transparency” (23) in which characters are briefly readable to each other and/or to us. In such scenes, we become able—or we are led to think we are able—to translate body language into a statement of intent: “That body, by virtue of being the object of our theory of mind’s obsessive attention, is a tremendously valuable and, as such, potentially misleading source of information about the person’s mental state” (14–15). It is potentially misleading, that is, because we can always feign a look, a posture, an expression, or a gesture: “We end up performing our bodies . . . to shape other people’s perceptions of our mental states” (15). Scenes of embodied transparency, then, delight us because they fulfill the brain’s need to decode social signals:

  Instances of embodied transparency offer us something that we hold at a premium in our everyday life and never get much of: the experience of perfect access to other people’s minds in complex social situations. As such, they must be immensely flattering to our theory-of-mind adaptations, which evolved to read minds through bodies but have to constantly contend with the possibility of misreading and resulting social failure. (23)

  As in Why We Read Fiction, Zunshine’s work does highlight some interesting features of narrative—brief moments when characters are rendered legible at moments of contemplation, anger, or high drama. The moments must be brief, Zunshine argues, because only social sadists try to render people legible for long periods, usually by means of torture or emotional cruelty.

  And why do we need to experience such fleeting scenes in fictional representational forms? Zunshine offers a couple of possibilities: “Does consuming embodied transparency on the page, onstage, and on screen sharpen our appetite for it in our everyday life? Do we start perceiving people around us as more transparent than they are? Or do we get addicted to shows and stories that offer us a steady supply of readable bodies?” (28). Zunshine’s money is (mostly) on the last of these, because that’s where her theory of Theory of Mind pays the highest dividends: “It’s only when we start thinking of mind reading as our most crucial and constant preoccupation (though not consc
iously so) as a social species that we can say that we like watching displays of emotion because they promise access to people’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions, and we evolved to value such access tremendously” (120–21).

  The problem is that when all you have is a Theory of Mind hammer, everything starts to look like a Theory of Mind nail. In Why We Read Fiction, the novel has its “currently familiar shape” because we are creatures with Theory of Mind; in Getting Inside Your Head, pretty much everything has its currently familiar shape for the same reason. “Movies, of course,” Zunshine writes, “are theory-of-mind writ large” (79)—apparently without exception. And one genre is Theory of Mind writ larger: “Because mock documentaries represent only a small segment of television programming, I feel justified in saying that they literally exist to cultivate moments of embodied transparency” (117). (I confess I do not understand the “because” here: if we value such moments so highly, wouldn’t mock documentaries represent a large segment of television programming?) Art criticism turns out also to be all about Theory of Mind: “This is what art criticism does—it introduces more mental states into our perception of an artwork” (154). Even abstract, nonrepresentational art turns out to be all about Theory of Mind: “It is as if we approach each painting ready and eager to attribute states of mind, and if something prevents us from attributing them to the subjects of the painting, we turn with the same eagerness to the artist and start thinking about her mind, and if we can’t do that, we begin to attribute mental states to ourselves” (150). So much for the possibility that in gazing at a painting, one might be looking at line, form, color, or texture. But the claim that I might be attributing mental states to myself in my contemplation of some monumental black painting by Richard Serra seems to be a last-ditch attempt to salvage a Theory of Mind reading of abstract art at the cost of understanding abstraction—and understanding art.

  Eve Sedgwick, in a fascinating essay contrasting Theory of Mind with Silvan Tomkins’s “affect theory” (which she was instrumental in bringing to bear on literary and cultural studies), suggests that the problems with Theory of Mind, as a theory, go still deeper than this.1 It is not merely that its overapplication, as in Getting Inside Your Head, can be brutally reductive; it is also that the theory itself is something like an on/off switch. Sedgwick notes, rightly, that in Why We Read Fiction, Zunshine concentrates largely on unreliable narrators and on cognitively complex scenes in the work of Virginia Woolf or Henry James in which readers are required, if they are to navigate the text successfully, to determine what character A thinks about character B’s worry that character C is insufficiently aware that character D has a very low opinion of character E. “Even though I take Zunshine’s point that a workout with five or six layers of narrative irony can be an exhilarating thing,” Sedgwick writes,

  I’m dismayed by how much the bulk of her readings have to depend on that rackety warhorse of high-school English classes, the Unreliable Narrator. She suggests that by mastering Theory of Mind, with the attendant disciplines of neurobiology and human evolution, we can learn to ponder mysteries such as “How do we know Henry James’s governess isn’t a delusional head case?” and “What if that erudite Professor Kinbote is just an evil queen?” . . . [T]he problem is that her readings really do have to cleave to the most reductive version of the Unreliable Narrator problematic. The constraint lies in Theory of Mind itself. (150)

  This is something of a disappointment for Sedgwick, who, by her own account, turned to Theory of Mind because it seemed to offer a way into the problem sketched out in Axiom 1 of Epistemology of the Closet, namely, “people are different from each other” (22). In acknowledging that other people have other minds, the theory of Theory of Mind would seem to enable the kind of radical individuation I have pursued in this study. But it turns out quite otherwise, not only for our understanding of other minds but also for the application of that understanding to the reading of literature:

  After all, the reason one’s heart sinks when students reach for the Unreliable Narrator is that that heuristic persists in addressing even the most complex narrative with a single, all too flattening, yes-or-no question: reliable or not reliable? As though a narrator or character who’s not certifiable, vicious, or systematically mendacious is thereby reliable. But then as though “reliable” itself is a single thing to be, a single kind of normative transparency or relationality. But if that is assumed, it would essentially undo the space for individual difference that’s supposed to be secured by achieving Theory of Mind in the first place. (150)

  Sedgwick then proceeds to show, by way of a reading of Proust, that “Theory of Mind is in no degree a purely cognitive issue” (154), and then, by way of an engagement with autistic writers who reject the attribution of mindblindness to them, to offer six suggestions for reconceptualizing theories of mind, the first two of which run as follows:

  1. Don’t work toward, or depend on the model of, development of a single, normative outcome—with differences from that outcome analyzed in terms of deficiency or at best detour.

  2. Instead, find ways of discerning and describing a variety of outcomes, qualitatively and phenomenologically distinct; not understood in terms of a preimagined evolutionary teleology, but instead in terms of a diversity of potentials. Only the latter mode can be relevant to a range of possible futures and to the rules of contingency and plurality that remain at the center of evolutionary process. (159–60)

  I focus on these two programmatic conclusions not only because I have attempted to follow them here, but because they point to something more pernicious lurking in the world of literary Darwinism—its attempt to reinstall universal, species-wide, radically transhistorical human norms. With a vengeance.

  Zunshine is by no means the worst offender in this respect. On the contrary, I believe there is an important difference between cognitive literary studies (in Zunshine’s work) and evocriticism/literary Darwinism (in the work of Joseph Carroll, Brian Boyd, and the late Denis Dutton), and that Zunshine’s use of Theory of Mind is relatively benign. Though it is badly overextended in Getting Inside Your Head, in Why We Read Fiction it serves as an analogue to Wolfgang Iser’s theory of reader response—an implied reader with Theory of Mind, if you will, for Zunshine’s arguments are all about how literary texts make specific cognitive demands on the figure once known in reader-response narratology as the “implied reader” (Iser) or the “narratee” (Gerald Prince). In the work of the evocritics/literary Darwinists, by contrast, we find an antipathy to individuation that is matched only by an antipathy to textual interpretation—not a promising combination for a fledgling school of literary criticism. But despite her significant differences from evocritics, Zunshine’s treatment of Steven Pinker, at the close of the first section of We Why Read Fiction, is far too kind—and this excess of kindness has serious implications not only for how one reads modernist and experimental narratives but also for the kind of “interdisciplinarity” imagined by advocates of cognitive and evolutionary literary studies.

  Zunshine’s chapter is titled “Woolf, Pinker, and the Project of Interdisciplinarity,” so the stakes are quite clear. I will cite the opening of the chapter at some length:

  Challenging 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.” 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 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. (404, 409–10)