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  • Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel
  • Robert Chibka (bio)
Lisa Zunshine. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. x+200pp. US$22.95 (pb); US$59.95 (hb). ISBN 978-0-8142-5151-5 (pb); 978-0-8142-1028-4 (hb).

Brains are big this decade, in literary studies as elsewhere. Among interdisciplinary waves fashioning our shifting shores, "cognitive literary criticism" is altering littoral zones significantly, depositing, as critical waves do, not a dune of truth or falsehood, but berms of newly imaginable interrogatives likely to have lasting effects on what critics look for (hence tend to see) when they read, write, and teach.

This volume from Lisa Zunshine (Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England [2005]; co-editor, Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Samuel Richardson [2006]), while not eighteenth-century-focused, will interest many students of the early novel. It appeals to theories of human cognitive evolution to "explain the pleasure that we derive from being intensely aware that we are being lied to" (118), treating canonical texts from Clarissa to Lolita and a bagful of whodunits. Zunshine moves easily between esoteric and popular, cheerfully reading an episode of Friends beside a scene from Mrs. Dalloway. To probe brains' narrative investments, she adopts two concepts from evolutionary psychologists and philosophers of mind (the speculative end of the cognitive-studies spectrum): Theory of Mind (ToM) and metarepresentation.

Zunshine calls Theory of Mind—an inclination to attribute mentality to others—"our key cognitive endowment as a social species" (8). Fiction exploits "evolved cognitive architecture [that] 'prods' us toward learning and practicing mind-reading" (7). "As a sustained representation of numerous interacting minds, the novel feeds [this] powerful, representation-hungry complex of cognitive adaptations" (10). To suggest how this framework finds parallel layers of mental work for critics, readers, narrators, and characters, I quote from a section of the book that will most interest readers of Eighteenth-Century Fiction : Zunshine sees Clarissa as "a story of two brilliant young people ... fatally misreading each other's minds" (83), but "the truly amazing and sustained feat of mind-reading takes place ... [when readers] attribute ... thoughts and desires to each fictional character, however tenuously delineated, and then proceed to interpret his or her behavior in terms of his or her underlying mental world, supplying a myriad of absent links, assumptions, and tacit explanations that allow us to see the story as a rich and emotionally coherent whole" (84–85). Zunshine probes texts that brilliantly enact, thematize, and elicit mind-reading, surmising that they exaggeratedly typify our investment in other fictions: artists like Richardson and Woolf "push to their limits certain aspects of the general , constant , ongoing experimentation with the human mind that constitutes the process of reading and writing fiction" (73). [End Page 475]

Metarepresentation—our ability "to keep track of sources of our representations" (47) and "store information under advisement" (127), with source tags indicating likely reliability—configures contingencies of trust and doubt that motivate both plots and readers' judgments. I risk overrepresenting the book's focus on Clarissa (about 20 uninterrupted pages) by exemplifying this argument's tenor through Richardson again. Neatly establishing how mental inferences spin and snowball, Zunshine notes that by taxing our ability to monitor sources (that is, track nested trust-or-doubt tags), Richardson makes us invest in Lovelace, who seemingly performs such feats effortlessly. But a compulsive mind-reader (exaggeratedly mirroring our behaviour) "can easily lose track of himself as the source of his representations of the other person's mental world" (89). Lovelace, who "is not, after all, telepathic" (90), behaves as if he were. Zunshine reads both him and Nabokov's Humbert—whose "attempts to 'outsource' his flattering representations of himself" (108) by "quick, casual, ... groundless attributions of mental states to strangers" (111) she splendidly analyses—as delusional; she shows both characters established as more reliable sources before undermining themselves, so readers experience a "mental vertigo" not unlike Clarissa's (93). Her analysis, however, makes Lovelace the novel's centre, de-emphasizing Clarissa's counterpointed version of mind-writing, which tends to distrust her representations perhaps as much as...

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