Strange Concepts and the Stories they Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative (review)

In Strange Concepts and The Stories they Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative, Lisa Zunshine widens her scope from an erstwhile singular focus on Theory of Mind (inferring interior states from exterior expression and gesture) in fiction, turning her sights toward a branch of psychology aimed at the study of the early cognitive development of humans. Here she explores our distinctive mental capacity to ascribe a function to objects (a chair is to sit, etc.) and an essence to living creatures (the posited unchanging, ungraspable spirit or soul, for example). Zunshine’s aim: to throw light on how authors and artists confer strange configurations upon such concepts as function and essence in their making of novels, films, television shows, and art.

Zunshine builds her theoretical edifice largely on the research findings of Paul Bloom and Susan A. Gelman concerning the cognitive development of infants and children, specifically how they process objects (with a function) differently from living entities (with an essence). Accordingly, while object-use determines its nature--and so the object can shift in its identity (chair can become table or ladder, for instance)--living entities (plant, animal, human, say) are immutable. As Zunshine sums up: “a tiger without legs is still a tiger, not a new species of animal” (8). Zunshine makes much of this insight, asking why it is certain humans make and engage with cultural phenomena that confuse these otherwise mentally distinct and fixed categories of function and essence. She explores how a variety of authors and artists mix and blend these categories to create strange products that engage their readers and audiences. Here she chooses to focus on fictions by Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, J.K. Rowling, and Anton Chekov, on films like I Robot, and on the surrealist art of Salvador Dalí and Man Ray. All the cultural artifacts she examines deliberately create zones of “cognitive uncertainty and possibility” (54). They happily blur our core function and essence categories but while doing so they also create cognitive confusion and frustration.

There is an implicit continuum of domain violation and strange-making in Zunshine’s analyses. At one end of the spectrum, for instance, there’s J.K. Rowling’s infusion of an essence (personhood, say) into the objects (doors, for instance) at Hogwarts. They only open if asked politely. Only a “few essentialism-enabled assumptions about human beings [. . .] rub off on the flattered doors, but only a few and even those under some duress” (18), Zunshine comments. Novels such as Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus play more intensely with the “quirks of our cognitive architecture” (55). That Dickens’s Estella is an object “made” (130) by Miss Havisham turns upside down our sense of her as a sentient, human being with complex interior states of mind. Frustrating our impulse to read her as a person, we discover her to be a carefully constructed artifact programmed, as it were, for revenge. The net effect: “we are intuitively jolted when these two domains are momentarily brought together and a human being is characterized as ‘made’ in the fashion of an artifact” (130). Zunshine considers how Shelley’s Frankenstein reverses this expectation. In her novel, Shelley asks her readers to engage with a man-made object (the monster) as a person. Frankenstein’s creature thus functions as a character “whose ontology seems to pull us in two different directions—an artifact with a definite function and a living being, essentialized, multifunctional, and largely unpredictable” (86). At the other end of this (implied) continuum of “strange” cultural artifacts lie Man Ray’s ironically titled painting The Gift (it depicts a clothes iron with spikes sticking out of its base), Salvador Dali’s surrealist art, and Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades. These objects pretzel-twist our cognitive predisposition to “parse the world in terms of artifacts and living beings” (155). In the here-and-now of our viewing experience, these “cognitively inassimilable...