Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness

Let me begin with a seemingly nonsensical question. When Peter Walsh unexpectedly comes to see Clarissa Dalloway "at eleven o'clock on the morning of the day she [is] giving a party," and, "positively trembling," asks her how she is, "taking both her hands; kissing both her hands," thinking that "she's grown older," and deciding that he "shan't tell her anything about it . . . for she's grown older" (40), how do we know that his "trembling" is to be accounted for by his excitement at seeing his Clarissa again after all these years, and not, for instance, by his progressing Parkinson's disease?

Assuming that you are a particularly good-natured reader of Mrs. Dalloway, you could patiently explain to me that if Walsh's trembling were occasioned by an illness, Woolf would tell us so. She wouldn't leave us long under the impression that Walsh's body language betrays his agitation, his joy, and his embarrassment, and that the meeting has instantaneously and miraculously brought back the old days when Clarissa and Peter had "this queer power of communicating without words" because, reflecting Walsh's "trembling," Clarissa herself is "so surprised, . . . so glad, so shy, so utterly taken aback to have [him] come to her unexpectedly in the morning!" (40). Too much, you would point out, hinges on our getting the emotional undertones of the scene right for Woolf to withhold from us a crucial piece of information about Walsh's health.

I then would ask you why it is that were Walsh's trembling caused by an illness, Woolf would have to explicitly tell us so, but as it is not, she can simply take for granted that we will interpret it as being caused by his emotions. In other words, what allows Woolf to assume that we will automatically read a character's body language as indicative of his thoughts and feelings?

She assumes this because of our collective past history as readers, you perhaps would say. Writers have been using descriptions of their characters' behaviors to inform us about their feelings since time immemorial, and we expect authors to do so when we open the book. We all learn, whether consciously or not, that the default interpretation of behavior reflects the character's state of mind, and every fictional story that we read reinforces our tendency to make that kind of interpretation first. ¹

Had this imaginary conversation about readers' automatic assumptions taken place twenty years ago, it would have ended here. Or it would have never happened—not even in this hypothetical form—because the answers to my naïve questions would have seemed so obvious. Today, however, this conversation has to go on because recent research in cognitive psychology and anthropology has shown that not every reader can learn that the default meaning of a character's behavior lies with the character's mental state. To understand what enables most of us to constrain the range of possible interpretations, we may have to go beyond the explanation that evokes our personal reading histories and admit some evidence from our evolutionary history.

In what follows, then, I attempt to make a broader case for introducing the recent findings of cognitive scientists into literary studies by showing how their research into our ability to explain behavior in terms of the underlying states of mind—or our mind-reading ability—can furnish us with a series of surprising insights into our interaction with literary texts. I begin by discussing the research on autism that alerted cognitive psychologists to the existence of the cognitive capacity that enables us to narrow the range of interpretations of people's behavior down to their mental states, and that makes literature, as we know it, possible. I then consider the potentially controversial issue of the "effortlessness" with which we thus read other people's—including literary characters'—minds. To explore one specific aspect of the role played by such mind-reading...