Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (review)

Any attempt to create an “interdiscipline” of scientific and literary (or other humanistic) study is a risky business, because such a project has to satisfy readers who will have different, if not antagonistic, scholarly commitments. From the scientific side, there is always the risk that a literary scholar is using scientific method and/or concepts purely (though perhaps unintentionally) for show—or worse, using them in ways that are entirely untrue to their epistemological nature. In effect, the “science” does not really play any substantial part in the claims that are put forth. The scientific reader (should there be one) will likely scoff at what he or she must see as, at best, a feeble attempt at interdisciplinarity and as work that can only appeal to other literary scholars. From the literary side, there is the converse risk that a scientific scholar will leave the very literariness of the object of study entirely out of the discussion; it can easily appear that literary examples are being reduced to the unambiguous regularity of data. A literary reader will likely view this as untrue to the epistemological nature of literature and the argument as appealing, at best, only to other scientists. Further, those on the humanities side are often just wary in general that if scientific claims about literariness are accepted at all, then the already-established kinds of literary study will look like only so much subjective, relativistic fog, soon to be burned away entirely by the objective, scientific sun.

In order to avoid these (and other) risks, a bona fide interdisciplinary study takes an especially smart and careful implementation of the different kinds of investigation. The successful writer of such a study must be adequately educated in at least three areas: the nature of scientific and of literary study as general kinds of methods; the specific scientific discipline and the specific literary interpretive tradition involved in a specific project; and the kinds of automatic risks that interdisciplinarity of this kind always entails. Lisa Zunshine is admirably educated in all three areas, and her Why We Read Fiction is an admirably smart and careful work of interdisciplinarity.

Zunshine, a literary scholar, has taken it upon herself to study in some depth two closely-related concepts in recent cognitive evolutionary psychology. The first is “theory of mind,” a term “used by cognitive psychologists . . . to describe our ability to explain people’s behavior in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires” (p. 6). Of all the fascinating work done in cognitive psychology now, theory of mind has perhaps the clearest and most direct appeal to literary scholars. Surely one of the most fascinating experiences of reading fiction is the sense of encountering, or “reading,” other minds. Theory of mind attempts to explain how we read other minds in real life, and therefore it ought to offer some insight into the related experience in fiction. Zunshine’s book makes the claim that fiction in general operates as a kind of experiment with our mind-reading ability, and that some fictions tend to push that ability to its limits. Conversely said, theory of mind as part of our cognitive machinery makes fiction possible and enjoyable, even when the fiction tests that machinery’s functionality.

As evidence of this, Zunshine reads in detail the “multiply embedded minds” of a scene from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Later, she will read in similar detail passages from other literary works. This matters because, from the literary-scholar’s perspective, a project that wants to be interdisciplinary must include solid examples of the bread-and-butter activity of literary scholars: close reading. Otherwise, the work will not likely come across as interdisciplinary. After unpacking the demands that the passage makes on our attention, she concludes that Woolf’s writing is difficult because it “tends to push the boundaries of our mind-reading ability to its furthest limits” (p. 34). So in Zunshine’s hands...