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Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 24 Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature General Editors Winfried Fluck · Herbert Grabes Jürgen Schlaeger · Brook Thomas 24 The Literary Mind Edited by Jürgen Schlaeger and Gesa Stedman Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Notice to Contributors The editors invite submission of manuscripts appropriate to the topics of the forthcoming volumes of REAL. The 2009 volume, edited by Herbert Grabes and Ansgar Nünning, will be on “Metaphors Shaping Culture and Theory”. The 2010 volume, edited by Brook Thomas, will be on “Literary Journalism”. Each author will receive one copy of the yearbook and 15 offprints of the article. Articles submitted for consideration may be sent directly to one of the editors or via an advisor. They should reach one of the editors by October 1 of the year prior to publication, and should not exceed 15,000 words (including endnotes and references). To facilitate processing, they should be sent in duplicate and on disc or cd.; they must be typed in English, doublespaced, and should observe the conventions laid down in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, ed. Joseph Gibaldi & Walter S. Achtert (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003 sqq.). Editors Winfried Fluck, Freie Universität Berlin, John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Lansstrasse 5-9, D-14195 Berlin, Germany Herbert Grabes, Universität Giessen, Institut für Anglistik, Otto-Behaghel- Strasse 10, D-35394 Giessen, Germany Jürgen Schlaeger, Humboldt-Universität, Großbritannien-Zentrum, Mohrenstrasse 60 , D-10117 Berlin, Germany Brook Thomas, Department of English Literature, University of California, Irvine, CA 926697-2650, USA Advisory Board Jonathan Arac (Columbia University), Catherine Belsey (University of Wales), Avrom Fleishman (Johns Hopkins University), Ronald Shusterman (University of Bordeaux 3), Werner Sollors (Harvard University), Albert E. Stone (University of Iowa), Arne Zettersten (University of Copenhagen). Text-editing and final layout: Corinna Radke © 2008 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, D-72070 Tübingen All rights including the rights of publication, distribution and sales, as well as the right to translation, are reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, taping, or information and retrieval systems - without written permission of the publisher. http: / / www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de Printed in Germany ISBN 978-3-8233-4179-6 ISSN 0723-0338 Contents Contributors VII Editorial Note IX J ÜRGEN S CHLAEGER Preface 1 G ESA S TEDMAN Introduction: The Cognitive Sciences Meet Literature - And Vice Versa 7 M ARK T URNER The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex 13 P ATRICK C OLM H OGAN Before Stories: Anna Karenina and the Emotional Structure of Lived Time 45 A LEXANDER B ERGS When concepts clash ... 61 J ÜRGEN S CHLAEGER The Mimesis Myth 69 R ONALD S HUSTERMAN Æsthetics and the Literary Mind: Some Thoughts from a Thought Experiment 81 V ALENTINE C UNNINGHAM Figuring it Out 95 G ESA S TEDMAN Brain Plots - Neuroscience and the Contemporary Novel 113 H ERBERT G RABES Encountering People Through Literature 125 L ISA Z UNSHINE Why Jane Austen Was Different, And Why We May Need Cognitive Science To See It 141 C ONTENTS VI A LAN P ALMER Small Intermental Units in Little Dorrit 163 M ARCUS H ARTNER Narrative Theory Meets Blending: Multiperspectivity Reconsidered 181 R ENATE B ROSCH The Secret Self: Reading Minds in the Modernist Short Story: Virginia Woolf’s “The Lady in the Looking Glass” 195 A NNA T HIEMANN A ND A NNETTE K ERN -S TÄHLER Metaphor and (Dis)Embodiment: Inside the Autistic Mind 215 W OLFGANG H ALLET The Multimodality of Cultural Experience and Mental Model Constructions of Textual Worlds 233 Contributors B ERGS , A LEXANDER . Institut für Anglistik/ Amerikanistik, Universität Osnabrück, Neuer Graben 40, 49069 Osnabrück. E-mail: abergs@uniosnabrueck.de. B ROSCH , R ENATE . Institut für Literaturwissenschaft: Anglistik/ Amerikanistik, Universität Stuttgart, Heilbronner Straße 7, 70174 Stuttgart. E-mail: renate.brosch@ilw.uni-stuttgart.de. C UNNINGHAM , V ALENTINE . Corpus Christi College, University Oxford, Merton Street, Oxford, OX1 4JF. E-mail: valentine.cunningham@corpuschristi.oxford.ac.uk. G RABES , H ERBERT . Institut für Anglistik, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Otto-Behaghel-Straße 10 B, 35394 Gießen. E-mail: Herbert.Grabes@anglistik. uni-giessen.de. H ALLET , W OLFGANG . Geschäftsführender Direktor des Instituts für Anglistik, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Otto-Behaghel-Straße 10 B, 35394 Gießen. E-mail: Wolfgang.Hallet@anglistik.uni-giessen.de. H ARTNER , M ARCUS . Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft, British Literary and Cultural Studies, Universität Bielefeld, Postfach 10 01 31, 33501 Bielefeld. E-mail: marcus.hartner@uni-bielefeld.de. H OGAN , P ATRICK C OLM . English Department, University of Connecticut, 215 Glenbrook Road, Unit 4025, Storrs, CT 06269. E-mail: patrick.hogan@uconn. edu. K ERN -S TÄHLER , A NNETTE . Institut für Anglophone Studien, FB Geisteswissenschaften, Universität Duisburg-Essen, Universitätsstraße 12, 45141 Essen. Email: annette.kern-staehler@uni-due.de. P ALMER , A LAN . Independent scholar living in London. E-mail: a@palmer-lon. fsnet.co.uk. S CHLAEGER , J ÜRGEN . Professor for the Literature and Culture of Great Britain and Director of the Centre for British Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Mohrenstraße 60, 10117 Berlin. E-mail: juergen.schlaeger@staff.huberlin.de. C ONTRIBUTORS VIII S HUSTERMAN , R ONALD . AERES - Paris, Université Paul Valéry - Montpellier 3, Route de Mende, 34199 Montpellier Cedex 5. E-mail: RonaldShusterman@ tele2.fr. S TEDMAN , G ESA . Professor for the Literature and Culture of Great Britain, Centre for British Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Mohrenstraße 60, 10117 Berlin. E-mail: gesa.stedman@staff.hu-berlin.de. T HIEMANN , A NNA . Englisches Seminar, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Johannesstraße 12-20, 48143 Münster. E-mail: amthiemann@unimuenster.de. T URNER , M ARK . Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University. E-mail: mark.turner@case.edu. Z UNSHINE , L ISA . Bush-Holbrook Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, 1215 Patterson Office Tower, Lexington KY 40506. Visiting Scholar at Yale University 2007-2008. E-mail: lisa.zunshine@yale.edu. Editorial Note With two exceptions the conributions to this volume are revised versions of papers given at a conference on ‘The Literary Mind’ held in April this year at the Centre for British Studies, Humboldt-Universität Berlin. The exceptions are Renate Brosch’s paper “The Secret Self: Reading Minds in the Modernist Short Story: Virginia Woolf’s The Lady in the Looking Glass” and Lisa Zunshine’s paper “Why Jane Austen Was Different and Why We May Need Cognitive Science To See It”. Renate Brosch participated in the conference, but sent her contribution later. Lisa Zunshine presented a paper on “Theories of Mind and Fiction” which will be part of a book to be published shortly. She kindly offered an earlier article on “Why Jane Austen Was Different, And Why We May Need Cognitive Science to See It“ published in STYLE (2007): 275-299. We would like to thank her and the editor of Style Professor Knapp for the permission to reprint this article. The editors would also like to thank the editorial team of the Centre Georgia Christinidis, Sandra Müller and Corinna Radke for their painstaking and indefatigable work on the manuscripts. J ÜRGEN S CHLAEGER Preface The title of this volume takes us right away to Mark Turner’s seminal book The Literary Mind, which has opened up a new field of investigation for many literary scholars. It is, therefore, more than appropriate that we borrow the formula to move the debate forward. I will begin this introduction with a quotation from the 17th century, then move on to tell you how I became interested in cognition and the neurosciences as a new perspective for understanding literature, and finish off with a story about aliens who have great problems with music. On the way, I’ll raise a couple of general questions and points which had always been with us during the conference on which this volume is based. In 1643 Sir Thomas Browne famously reminded his readers that to explore and to know the internal worlds, the minds of human beings was more urgent and more important than to explore and know the external world. And he insisted on this preference although he was very much a child and part of an era, in which exploration, experiment, in short the advancement of a scientific view of nature and the human body as part of it made huge progress and caused tremendous excitement. Here is the quotation: I could never content my contemplation with those general pieces of wonders, the flux and reflux of the sea, the increase of Nile, the conversion of the Needle to the North, and have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of Nature, which without further travell I can doe in the Cosmography of my self; we carry with us the wonders, we seek without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of Nature, which he that studies wisely learnes in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume. (78) As I have shown elsewhere (Schlaeger), for a short period of time internal and external exploration were pursued side by side. Both activities, their various aspects, dangers and promises were documented by the same metaphorical domains. But the grand division of labour between the two cultures was already in the making and eventually each mind-set went its very different way of understanding the world. Progress in the knowledge of the inner self and the operations of the mind was mainly and often solely seen as moral progress and stayed as such firmly in the hands of theology and philosophy. The price to be paid for what Bacon had stated in his Advancement of Learning and his Novum Organon (122), i.e. that the Fall did not originate from man’s desire to know, that is to understand the world scientifically, but from his presumptuous wish to gain God- J ÜRGEN S CHLAEGER 2 like knowledge of good and evil, that price had to be paid by separating the two kinds of knowledge radically and it was not before the rise of psychology as a university discipline that there were some indications that things were changing. But it was going to be a long, drawn-out campaign. The fact that psychology for a long time has had and even today still has equally strong footholds in both camps, shows that the fundamental conflict is still with us. Freud tried to bridge the chasm by a curious mixture of scientific posturing and hermeneutics, but that we are still in the middle of an undecided struggle for precedence can be seen from the resistance of the humanities to claims by the sciences, and in particular by neurobiology and the neurosciences that everything that is considered the territory of the arts and the humanities will eventually be explained by scientific methods, i.e. as emanating from and in fact consisting of processes in the material world. The neurochemistry of love as an acceptable answer to an age-old problem in human life is still anathema for many academics who work in the humanities. But, on the other hand, advances in the neurosciences, in emotions theory and in understanding the complex connections between brain structures and some salient features of human cognition have made so much progress that they do not only constitute a serious challenge to, but also a huge opportunity for the humanities to understand the relationship between brain and mind, nature and culture better than ever before. This is why we organized a conference on “The Literary Mind” and why we publish the papers given. They show that there is no need for intellectualtual warfare. I hope we are not in a state of war. There is no battle to be decided once and for all. I rather think the papers show that we are - whatever our deepest convictions in this matter - in a win/ win situation, a scenario in which everybody can profit if only we keep our minds open enough to really listen to what the other side has to offer. I now come to the second part of my introductory remarks - to the story of how I came to be interested in the neurosciences and in cognition theory - not because I think everybody will be dying to know more about me, but because over decades of a professional life as a professor of English and Comparative Literature, the questions and problems for which I did not find satisfactory answers in my own discipline accumulated and in the end it felt as if the growing surplus and excess of such questions cried out for a paradigm shift, at least for radically new avenues of thought and theorizing. Although I did my fair share of close reading and new critical interpretations of texts in my early days as an Oxford undergraduate, I had the great opportunity to do my further qualifications as Wolfgang Iser’s research assistant i.e. in an intellectual environment in which interpretation was not seen as an established and successful practice but was cultivated as a theoretical problem. Yet even there and then it was obvious and taken for granted that the answers to these problems had to be found in theories of the mind such as phenomenology and aesthetics and not in the physics of the brain, in its Preface 3 architecture or the specific character of brain processes such as blending, compression etc. But, in spite of some disappointment with the long term productivity of such theorizing, the tendency to look at the theoretical side of all aspects of understanding literature remained with me when I turned to research about writing the self, i.e. diaries, memoirs and autobiographies from the late 16 th to the 20 th century. One of the most fascinating aspects of this research was to see how the act of writing changed the people who did the writing and how these changes registered in the language. Maybe they thought it would be easy to sit down and produce a record of the kind of person they believed they were or they would love to present for future generations, but whatever their intentions there is plenty of evidence that the act of turning inward by exploring the past and present self in writing led to a recreation of the self and of the language needed to grasp something so complex. (The rise of the novel, from this perspective cannot only be seen as an offshoot of autobiographical writing, but it also changed radically the parameters for writing the self). There is obviously something very exciting going on in a mind that tries to “represent” itself in the act of writing. So against this background Norman Doidge’s claim that “thought changes the physical make-up of the brain”, that there are direct and highly fluid relationships between what is at the centre of cultural activities and the physiological make-up of the human brain, is not only welcome support from the other side of the fence, but it also shows that one can learn a lot more from the speculations of neuroscientists and cognition theoreticians than from literary theory. I have also gained something very valuable from Alan Palmer’s and Lisa Zunshine’s work on the constitution of the self in fictional texts: i.e. that it is culture-specific and that it has biased any Theory of Mind in favour of books and reading them. A broader approach based on the neurosciences could put that in an enlightening historical perspective. At least there should be some caution with the claim that writing as the medium for self-constitution is a cultural universal. Later on I came to be interested in emotions and the different uses literature makes of them. It is obvious that literary studies did not have to offer much in this field beyond highly sophisticated interpretations of emotions. And this is a point one has to make here as well as in many other aspects of the problems and questions we are discussing: so far, the neuroscientific threat is no reason to give up completely the old ways and change sides, for one thing is even more obvious today than ever before: literature may tell us more about what goes on in the brain than the neurosciences can tell us what goes on in literature. In other words we can bring more evidence for the workings of the human mind into the laboratories than any of the breathtaking imaging machinery that are designed to explore the Africa within us. You remember I promised a little story about aliens and music as the third part of my introduction. Here it is: J ÜRGEN S CHLAEGER 4 The scanning devices of scientifically and technologically far advanced aliens pick up signals of a violin concert from earth during their journey through the universe and some of these signals strike them as showing highly unusual patterns. Since they have no arts and music in their civilization they are curious to know what the source of these somehow intriguing patterns is. So they send a robot to earth to find out. After some time the robot comes back and reports that the noise consists of complex wave patterns (which the aliens had already realised when they first measured them) and that these wave structures were produced by contraptions made of wood and metal and strings and valves and some unknown life-form mainly consisting of water. “Ah! ”, said the aliens “Is that all? ” and travelled on. Now, I don’t have to spell out the implications of this story at great length. One could simply dismiss it as a bad story based on bad science, but may be there are a couple of lessons to be drawn from it after all. If you leave culture out of the account you will end up with blind atoms doing something that has no meaning, only structure. If you investigate the physics of a cultural phenomenon you may get information about the how, but not about the what - let alone the pleasure it can bring. If we all agree that the brain would be nothing, probably would not have evolved at all the way it did, without culture, but also, and equally obvious, that there would be no culture without the potential that billions of nerve cells working in unison holds in store, then it is their cooperation which makes the music. The quarrel for precedence is, in view of that, futile. If the arts and the humanities help the brain to turn itself into mind, i.e. to use its potential in ever new ways, then activities like these have legitimacy in their own right. It is only when the humanities masquerade as science, that is speak with an authority underpinned by a truth claim that they are out of their own depth and run the risk of losing out on the sciences. And equally, it is only when the sciences masquerade as doing the work of culture better they will be out of their depth. Obviously science as we know it has in some sense been so successful because it decided to make the reckoning without the host: the humaneness of the human brain. Equally obvious, scientific thought is not the ultima ratio of brain work. The literary mind is the best evidence we have for that. Maybe we need another science to understand what is really going on, a science that recognises “fuzziness, excess, indeterminacy, compression and blending, plasticity and its most expert agents - the Artists” who, as Per Aage Brandt has it, “are cognitive researchers in the wild” as central to brain work (Brandt 183f). I at least expect, we need a much softer science before we can use it to make literary studies harder. And as long as this is not the case, literature will rightly remain a provocative sore in the soft underbelly of science, which, unfortunately most scientists think they don’t have. Preface 5 Listen to what Friedrich Cramer, director of the Max-Planck-Institute for experimental Medicine in Göttingen from 1962-1991, has to say about complex structures in living things: The complexity of living things marks the limit of what we can scientifically know: It is not that we cannot describe all the many details of nucleid acids or proteins. But their interaction in subsystems and higher forms of biological organisms confronts us with unpredictable network-systems for they show what I would like to call “fundamental complexity. Most scientists still believe that the only method to do science properly is to adopt the venerable Cartesian procedure: “If a problem is too big or too complex, then divide it into a set of sub problems which you can solve step by step. This approach is predicated on the assumption, that after having solved all the sub-problems you can put the solutions together like the pieces of a mosaic in order to solve the big, complex problem. In complex multi-parameter systems which operate with high density feedback processes such an assumption and its implicit promises are fundamentally flawed. Such systems are not reversible. I call such systems which are characterized by the fact that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, fundamentally complex systems. In such systems there is no reversibility. They cannot be understood by the laws of classical, reversible but only by non-reversible thermodynamics. It would, therefore, be simply intellectual sloppiness to assume that in biochemistry or neurophysiology the total picture of a living organism can be put together like a mosaic from bits and pieces.” (Cramer 223f.) Self-organization (auto-steering) is a characteristic of the system as a whole. In specific circumstances a system which shows a high degree of complexity organizes itself. (228; quotations my translations) So much for now. Let me return again at the end, before Gesa Stedman gets down to business in hand, to the 17 th century, in fact to a contemporary of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), Andrew Marvell (1621-1678): Meanwhile the Mind, from pleasures less, Withdraws into its happiness: The Mind, that Ocean where each kind Does streight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other Worlds, and other Seas; Annihilating all that’s made To a green Thought in a green Shade (“The Garden” ll 41-48, 49f.) Works Cited Bacon, Francis. A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Ed. Brian Viekers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. J ÜRGEN S CHLAEGER 6 Brandt, Per Aage. “Form and Meaning in Art.” The Artful Mind. Ed. Mark Turner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 171-188. Browne, Sir Thomas. The Major Works. Ed. C.A. Patrides. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984. Cramer, Friedrich. Chaos und Ordnung - Die komplexe Struktur des Lebendigen. Frankfurt a. M.: Insel Verlag, 1993. Doidge, Norman. The Brain that Changes Itself. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. Marvell, Andrew. The Complete Works. Ed. George deF. Lord. London: Everyman’s Library, 1984. Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Schlaeger, Jürgen. “Parallel Explorations.” Studies in Travel Writing 3 (1999): 27-46. Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006. G ESA S TEDMAN Introduction The Cognitive Sciences Meet Literature - and Vice Versa There are several different ways in which the cognitive sciences and the humanities in general, and literary studies in particular, can meet. Most of these possibilities were explored at the conference on ”The Literary Mind“ which took place at the Centre for British Studies, Humboldt Universität Berlin, in April 2008, on which this volume is based. Cognitive scientists can use literary texts as examples for their explanations of the human psyche. Conversely, literary scholars may want to work with the concepts developed by their colleagues from cognition studies in order to find new ways of interpreting textual phenomena. Since many scientists consciously or unconsciously work with stories and metaphors, this usage can be analysed and perhaps even criticised by literary scholars who focus on the manner in which literary texts in the widest sense make their appearance in scientific articles and books written by cognition specialists. A further point of convergence between literature and cognition or neuroscience is the representation of this academic endeavour in novels. Rather than representing differences in kind, these various meeting points between cognition studies and literature and/ or literary studies are points on a scale with the extreme ends being represented, respectively, by those wholly critical of cognition studies and those who wholeheartedly adopt cognitive concepts for their interpretations, whereas the rest of the contributions to this volume can be found veering either to one or the other end of the scale. Any convergence between two separate fields of study is not easy and the jury is still out on the question which type of convergence is the most helpful. That the whole endeavour is not only timely but also productive is borne out by the different contributions to this volume. Needless to say, Mark Turner but also Patrick Hogan are advocates and practitioners of cognition studies and their articles reflect this. Mark Turner clarifies the frequently misunderstood relationship between double-scope blending and mature narrative cognition. While there is evidence of rudimentary narrative cognition in other species, mature narrative cognition, which is characterised by conceptions of the self and others as interactive intentional agents over time, is exclusive to human beings and predicated on the uniquely human cognitive operation of double-scope blending. Albeit blending can also occur on other levels of the cognitive process, including in G ESA S TEDMAN 8 the blending of fully formed particular narratives, much blending takes place on an unconscious level and is fundamental to human thought processes. Patrick Hogan explains a critical moment from Leo Tolstoj’s Anna Karenina in terms of the interruption such critical moments produce for the emotional, temporal and spatial experience of those involved in the incident - in the context of the novel, the critical moment is of course one based on disturbed emotional attachments, in this case between two of the protagonists, Stiva and Dolly. As Hogan states: … our experiences of both space and time are encoded non-homogeneously. The principles by which objects and occurrences are selected, the principles by which they are segmented, and the principles by which they are structured, both internally and in embedded hierarchies, are crucially … emotional. Hogan then goes on to explain that a story can only occur when there is an episode or ”sequences of causally linked events that move from normalcy to temporary normalcy, and finally, stories that conclude the sequence of episodes with enduring normalcy.“ How speakers of a language and more particularly, how readers, make sense of what they hear or read when seemingly incompatible words are combined or the boundaries of genres are stretched to unexpected points, is the focus of Alexander Bergs’s contribution. He explains how the human mind adapts itself to apparently incongruous linguistic and generic circumstances: ”This creation of and search for meaning, and the use of mismatch and coercion are something deeply ingrained in our linguistic and literary mind.“ With varying degrees of intensity, the second point of convergence between cognition studies and literary analysis is represented by a number of contributors whose articles either try to expand the vocabulary currently available for the analysis of literary texts, or who argue that their readings of specific texts are only possible if cognitive approaches are adopted. First and foremost, Lisa Zunshine investigates literary representation of multi-layered and mutually-reflecting subjectivity from Jane Austen onwards in her article. Although she calls for a historical contextualisation of her findings, she argues that ”a cognitive approach encourages us to see fictional narratives as engaging our evolved cognitive adaptations: playing with these adaptations and pushing them beyond their zones of comfort.“ Working on examples taken from Jane Austen, Restoration comedy and contemporary TV sitcoms, Zunshine intends to show that fictional narratives endlessly experiment with rather than automatically execute our evolved cognitive adaptations. … The culturally enmeshed cognitive ‘limits’ thus present us with creative openings rather than with a promise of stagnation and endless replication of the established forms. This realization marks the possibility of a genuine interaction between cognitive psychology and literary studies … The Cognitive Sciences Meet Literature - and Vice Versa 9 Alan Palmer would certainly agree with the latter statement, since he, also, lets cognitive psychology and literary analysis interact. His contribution explains certain features of Charles Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit not based on the usual concept of individualised subjectivity, but on what he calls ”intermental units“, that is shared, social subjectivity. Palmer argues that one overlooks these intermental forms of subjectivity if one bases character-analysis only on concepts derived from high modernist literary representations of subjectivity. The shared forms in Little Dorrit point to the essentially public, social nature of what goes on in Dickens’s characters’ minds - and Palmer argues that these ”intermental units“ ”are the chief means by which the plot is advanced.“ Renate Brosch applies this concept to high modernist literature - she analyses Virginia Woolf’s story ”The Lady in the Looking Glass“. Although generally, short stories ”contain less intermental activity and social thought than novels“ and ”[i]ntersubjectivity poses a real problem for short stories“, she nevertheless focuses on Woolf’s complex story which is very short on events but all the richer for its multi-layered representations of subjectivity, which Brosch analyses with the help of the notion of intermental activity. She concludes that [b]y making the reader consciously participate in the intentionality of the narrative, Woolf offers a complex interaction between the desire for the intermental and its failure. It seems that in modernist narratives intermental processes are stalled or made increasingly difficult at the level of the fictional world, while such mental communication is improved and expanded at the level of interaction between fictional text and reader. Markus Hartner focuses on a specific aspect of (contemporary) literature, namely, the frequent use of multiple perspectives. In order to extend and improve the narratological tools available to analyse such narrative devices, Hartner links blending theory as developed by cognitive scientists with the investigation of multiple narrative perspectives in literary texts. He bases his discussion on the analysis of Tobias Smollett’s novel Roderick Random and of Penelope Lively’s novel Moon Tiger to show that ”[B]lending theory vividly demonstrates that meaning construction is a dynamic process involving multiple stages and mental spaces. … considering cross-space matches between perspectives can lead to stimulating revisions of critical readings.” Wolfgang Hallet works with mental model constructions to explain how readers imagine textual worlds and come to terms with the different kinds of cultural experience they encounter in literary texts. He intends to integrate into the analysis of literary texts the category of experientiality and how the reader’s knowledge and experience of his own world is used to understand and actively engage with the constructed worlds in literary texts. Anna Thiemann and Annette Kern-Stähler also work with literary texts in the widest sense, beginning their contribution on the role of metaphor and embodiment in autistic people and their texts with a quotation from Jorge Luis Borges. They then move on to explain the shortcomings of more traditional approaches to autism and specifically, to the representation of the au- G ESA S TEDMAN 10 tistic mind, ending with an explanation of the ”interrelation between embodiment, cognition, and language use“ in the autobiographical writings of Tito Mukhopadhyay whose examples they set against the ‘external’ view of what goes on in autistic minds, presented by autism specialists. Jürgen Schlaeger, although sympathetic towards cognitive approaches, adopts a slightly different perspective in his paper. He argues that a too-close reliance on historical and literary contextualisation in particular of older literary texts may obscure rather than illuminate what goes on below the surface of such texts and their ‘take’ on the activities of the human mind. He chooses as his example Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry and shows that ”a mind-centred perspective clearly allows us to see below the surface of the text a ‘Theory of Mind’ which privileges the realities of the mind over concepts that tie its workings too closely to outside reality or an idealisation based on it.” Exploring the potential of the mind’s workings as Sidney, according to Schlaeger, did, is and was more productive than ”efforts to make sense of the new with the help of older traditions.“ Decidedly critical stances are taken by Herbert Grabes, Valentine Cunningham, Ronald Shusterman, and Gesa Stedman. Herbert Grabes concentrates his discussion of the cognitive approach to literary characters first on a historical tour d’horizon of character analysis from the structuralist through the poststructuralist to the current cognitive phase and asks why very few critics show an interest in the question why in many readers’ minds literary characters take on a life of their own and are such powerful illusions that they alone are remembered. Grabes contrasts and combines those approaches to character analysis he finds most useful, namely Alan Palmer’s and Lisa Zunshine’s work, but criticises most cognitive models of character analysis for an important oversight: the absence of the bodies of fictional characters. He ends with a plea to continue encountering people through literature, so long as we don’t attempt to make them fit too neatly into a procrustean interpretational frame and instead follow the rule of close reading and try to infer by a bottom-up procedure the theories of mind the author has supplied them with, however difficult that may be. Valentine Cunningham concentrates on the inadvertent but also sometimes intentional and conscious use of figurative speech and stories by cognitive scientists. From the at times laughable metaphors of the mind as porridge, sponges, computers and robots to the use of stories containing colour-blind aliens and similar creatures, Cunningham takes his readers through a large number of recent scientists’ writings on the mind to end with the contention that these imagined minds and the stories in which these minds are said to function are not as interesting, not as imaginative, and not as rewarding as those fictional minds and the metaphors they are couched in which have for centuries been developed by literary writers. In my own paper, I look at the less-than-rewarding minds of a number of literary characters in contemporary American and British novels which all The Cognitive Sciences Meet Literature - and Vice Versa 11 deal explicitly with cognition, neuroscience, the mind, and its possible impairments, in particular in the context of 9/ 11 and 7/ 7. The novels all adopt elements from neuroscience and rework ever-recurrent plot lines without really being able to flesh them out. These ”brain plots“ as I call them are not only repetitive and lack interest in aesthetic terms, they also point to a fundamentally disturbing trend: namely, to represent social, cultural, or political tensions only on the level of individual illness or mental disturbance and thus forego any attempt to find more than individualised answers for these tensions. Ronald Shusterman is even more critical of the meeting between cognition studies and literature than Herbert Grabes and Valentine Cunningham. The contention that metaphor is part of everyday mental activity and that the realm of aesthetics cannot lay claim to a particularly poetic or otherwise separate language is rejected by Shusterman, who argues that equating literature and cognition is not particularly helpful and ”ends up in total selfdestruction.” The emphasis on the ordinariness of literature, claims Shusterman, trivialises literature as well as science. ”Linguists may be wise to underline the ubiquity of the ordinary metaphors by which we live, but in doing so they portray a mind that may be ‘literary’ in a sense of the term that has absolutely nothing to do with art.” He goes on to argue that the second contention - namely, that all minds are based on narrativity, and that therefore the literary mind has to be, too - is equally flawed since one can imagine works of art which are art in spite of the absence of any kind of narrative content or context for these works. Shusterman ends with a call ”for more investigation into certain special operations of the literary, plastic and musical mind.“ Although this tour through the present book seems to end on a critical note, it is clear from the above that most contributors to the volume find at least some inspiration in cognitive approaches and/ or in works of literature. The more creative they are in adopting these approaches for their own ends - be that literary analysis or cognition studies - the more interesting the results of this kind of overlap is. Although much remains to be done, this volume shows that interdisciplinary work requires an open mind, a willingness to interact and to converse, and to see the points of others, to whichever conclusion one then comes oneself. We hope that not only the participants of the conference and contributors of this volume but also the readers of this book will find evidence of such openness, interaction, and discussion in the individual contributions to an exciting field of research. M ARK T URNER The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex Blending Is Indispensable for Advanced Narrative Cognition In The Literary Mind, I argued that the modern mind derives from our remarkable capacity to deploy a cohort of basic mental operations—story, projection, blending, and parable. These operations are a pack, a troupe, a selffeeding cyclone, an autocatalytic vortex, a breeder reactor, a dynamic heterarchy—choose your metaphor: they labor together. Some of the evidence I presented in The Literary Mind can be misinterpreted, it seems, as suggesting that advanced narrative cognition comes first in the sequence, and that upon this rock the other operations build their conceptual church. My purpose here is to correct that misinterpretation. Mature narrative cognition does not exist without blending. Blending is not a second step. Story, Projection, and Parable Evolutionarily and developmentally, the mental cohort I call story, projection, blending, and parable precedes the human singularities we know as language, art, music, mathematical and scientific discovery, religion, advanced social cognition, refined tool use, advanced music and dance, fashions of dress, and sign systems. This mental cohort makes our higher-order human behaviors possible, evolutionarily and developmentally. Story is our ability to construe and imagine situations as complexes of events, objects, and actors engaged in interdependent activity. In scientific inquiry, story is often called “narrative,“ “narrative cognition,“ or “narrative imagining.“ It operates constantly in our thought. Its complex operation is almost entirely unconscious, although aspects of its operation can be dragged onto the stage of consciousness. For human beings, story is anything but a costly or special mental operation. It is fundamental to the modern mind. Projection is the operation of making various kinds of mental connections. Rudimentary forms of projection occur throughout mammalian and primate cognition. A particularly important system of projection, called blending or conceptual integration, is also available in rudimentary forms throughout mammalian and primate cognition, but human beings developed the most advanced form, double-scope blending. Indeed, the ability for double-scope blend- M ARK T URNER 14 ing seems to separate the cognitively modern human mind from its precursors. Parable is the use of double-scope blending on story. The use of double-scope blending on story creates blended narrative conceptual structures, of the sort that characterize human higher-order cognition, with its species-wide capacities for exceptional creativity and innovation. In sum, the mental cohort of story, projection, blending, and parable is constantly at work in human thought, mostly below the horizon of consciousness. It is not cognitively costly and is not special. Or rather, double-scope blending is indeed special—in the sense that it belongs to only our species; it seems to be ours alone. But it is not special within our species; it is not special to particular times, activities, or people. Doublescope blending is uniformly available and constantly deployed across our entire species, all the time, morning noon, and night. It is equally at work in the most impressive and in the least remarked aspects of human behavior and thought. The use of double-scope blending on story creates narrative conceptual products that are special to human beings. But the mental cohort of story, projection, blending, and parable belongs equally to all human beings, now and presumably for at least the last fifty thousand years. Advanced narrative cognition is not a precursor of this cohort. Rather, the cohort working together spirals up, and advanced narrative cognition is a product of their cooperation. The Blending of Mature Narratives The theory of blending, or conceptual integration, originated in joint work by Gilles Fauconnier and me in 1993 (for surveys, see Fauconnier & Turner The Way We Think; Turner ‘The Blending website’). The theory has advanced greatly in the intervening fifteen years, and many people have worked to extend blending theory in a transdisciplinary way. In early work, emphasis was often laid on the double-scope blending of stories to create a blended story. The Literary Mind, to take the most obvious example, begins with “The Tale of the Ox and the Donkey,“ from The Thousand and One Nights. I analyzed there at length the principles of blending as they operate in constructing the network of narrative structures involved in the tale of the ox and the donkey. That network includes a blended narrative with creative, innovative, emergent narrative structure of its own. Similarly, in “Double-Scope Stories“ (Turner, “Double-scope stories”), I analyzed conceptual integration networks that have as inputs to the blend separate and conflicting mature narrative structures. In analyses such as these (although not others), my procedure invited misinterpretation. Specifically, in those analyses, I presented at the outset different sophisticated narrative structures, which served as inputs to the blend, and I focused on how they are blended. The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex 15 Such a procedure was misleading, it seems, in a crucial way. From this procedure, it is easy to slide into the assumption that narrative comes first, and that blending works subsequently on achieved narratives. From this procedure, it is easy, it seems, to assume that mature narratives can arise in the mind to begin with absent the mental work of blending. On the contrary, although rudimentary narrative cognition appears to be available across mammalian and primate cognition, the powers that human beings have for advanced narrative cognition are a product of double-scope blending. • Higher-order narrative cognition is a product of double-scope blending. I will present here ways in which double-scope blending cultivates advanced narrative cognition. In the overall view I present, rudimentary story and double-scope blending interact. Blending goes to work on rudimentary story, to produce advanced story. Advanced story, and indeed particular advanced stories, are then available to lend their power back to blending. The result is a feedback loop—an autocatalytic vortex, a self-reinforcing cyclone of cognitive innovation. Conceptual Integration Networks Let us begin with a thumbnail sketch of conceptual integration, conceptual integration networks, and kinds of conceptual integration networks. Conceptual integration, also called “blending,“ is a basic mental operation that works on conceptual arrays to produce conceptual integration networks. Certain conceptual arrays provide inputs to the network. Selective projection from the input conceptual arrays and from the relations between them carries elements and relations to a blended conceptual array that often has emergent structure of its own. This blended conceptual array is often referred to as “the blend.“ The blend typically does not obliterate the inputs. It provides a human-scale, integrated scenario that serves as a conceptual anchor for the conceptual integration network it grounds. This thumbnail sketch omits many complexities: • Conceptual integration always has as its goal the creation of conceptual integration networks. • The original basis for the network’s creation can derive from any of the arrays that end up participating in the conceptual integration network. • Conceptual work can be done on any of the participant arrays at any time during the construction of the network. • There can be multiple inputs and successive and iterated blends. • There can be, and usually are, hyper-blends that have blends as inputs. • A conceptual array can be decompressed in interesting ways so as to create a network in which the original conceptual array ultimately counts as a blend. M ARK T URNER 16 • Emergent structure must be thought of as arising not only or even chiefly in the blend, but rather in the entire network • And so on. In The Way We Think, Fauconnier and I analyze the way in which conceptual integration can blend conceptual frames. When frames are blended, the operation is called double-scope conceptual integration and the resulting network is called a double-scope integration network. Double-scope integration is the most advanced form of conceptual integration. To give a more exact definition, double-scope integration is the blending of input frames into a blended frame whose organizing frame-level structure includes at least some organizing structure from each of the two input frames that is not shared by the other. Often but not always, the input frames to the double-scope integration network are incompatible. Double-scope integration networks are the most advanced form of conceptual integration network. There are others: Simplex networks. A simplex network is a conceptual integration network in which one input space has a familiar abstract frame (such as the kinship frame parent-ego) that is designed to embrace certain kinds of values, and the other input space is a relatively specific situation presenting just such values. For example, if we wish to say that two people—John and James—stand in a certain kin relation, we say something like “John is the father of James.“ The parent-ego frame of kin relation is in one input space; the other input space has John and James. In the blended space, John is the father of James, and there is a new role father of James. Mirror networks. In a mirror network, two input spaces share topology given by an organizing frame, and the blend inherits that organizing frame. A standard example of a mirror network is “Regatta.“ In “Regatta,“ a freightladen clipper ship, Northern Light, set the record for an ocean voyage from San Francisco to Boston in 1853 and a modern catamaran named Great American II is in the process of making that run in 1993. A sailing magazine named Latitude 38 reports, “As we went to press, Rich Wilson and Bill Biewenga [the crew of the catamaran] were barely maintaining a 4.5 day lead over the ghost of the clipper Northern Light.“ Here, the two inputs—we label them “1853“ and “1993“—have the organizing frame boat making an ocean voyage. The blend has an extension of that frame: two boats making ocean voyages and moreover racing as they make them. Single-scope networks. A conceptual integration network is single-scope if the inputs have different organizing frames and only one of those frames is projected to organize the blend. For example, a cartoon of presidential candidates having a shoot-out evokes a single-scope network. The frame gunslingers at a shoot-out is projected from one of the inputs to organize the blend. As long as the shoot-out frame is the only one used to organize the blend, then the network is single-scope. But if frame-level organizing structure from the other input is later on projected to the blend so as to play a role in the orga- The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex 17 nizing frame of the blend, the network ceases to be single-scope. With only the slightest conceptual work, single-scope networks slide instantly along the cline toward double-scope networks. Double-scope networks. A conceptual integration network is double-scope if different input frames are blended into a blended frame whose organizing frame-level structure includes at least some organizing structure from each of the two input frames that is not shared by the other. Again, single-scope networks sit atop a very slippery slope and slide easily into double-scope structure. The gradient between them is important to keep in mind. It is not clear that any actual ecologically valid conceptual integration network has been discovered that on thorough analysis turned out to be purely singlescope. Single-scope networks exist as in-principle reference points in the theory. Double-scope networks involve frame blending. An Example of a Double-Scope Blend of Stories An editorial cartoon titled “World Food Crisis” (Chappatte) appeared in The International Herald-Tribune on the morning of the day I gave the talk on which this chapter is based. I chose it for the talk as an example of the ubiquity of the double-scope blending of stories. The cartoon shows a bland, pudgy, middle-aged American pumping fuel—“Bio-ethanol”—from a green and tan gas pump into the tank of his green car. The car’s bumper sticker says, “Go Green.” The gas pump has a sign presenting an image of a half-shucked ear of ripe corn. This unappealing American is looking over his shoulder at two emaciated people, one vaguely Asian—with minimally Asian eyes, a stereotypical woven bamboo peasant farmer horn hat, and a shift—, the other wearing only low-hanging shorts, his body deformed by the stereotypical edema potbelly and thin hair of children suffering from protein-deficient diets. The vaguely Asian character is lifting a rice bowl with both hands in a classic gesture of supplication. The edemic character, lethargic, dangles his hands at his side and watches wideeyed. The American says, casually, one hand in his pocket, “Sorry, I'm busy saving the planet.“ What we call “expressions“—speech, signs, gestures, cartoons, visual representations—are not themselves conceptual integration networks. They are prompts, material artifacts, sometimes material anchors for cognition. Conceptual integration networks are not external material artifacts; they are mental arrays. Such mental arrays mean; the external expressions do not mean. Words, symbols, signs do not mean. They are prompts for us to construct meanings by working on knowledge we have with processes we already possess. In no sense is the meaning of any expression “contained” in the expression. It is the mental arrays that mean. The prompts are just prompts. The prompts say nothing themselves independent of the richly detailed knowledge and powerful cognitive processes we bring to bear. M ARK T URNER 18 Inevitably, since knowledge varies, different interpreters may activate somewhat different knowledge in constructing a meaning in response to the same given prompts. Since attention varies, different interpreters may construct different integration networks, depending on the qualities of their attention to the prompts. The overarching purpose in this chapter is not to provide any interpretations—the cartoon is just an example to make a point about mental operation. The ultimate goal is to explain the way we think, including the way we interpret. Such an explanation must include an explanation for why interpretation should vary in the ways it does across interpreters. That the theory of conceptual integration does not present an algorithmic mechanism, with a unique product from given inputs, is not a demerit of the theory but an indispensable strength. To ask cognitive science to propose models of mental operation that would produce a single interpretation, and in particular a single correct or approved interpretation, would be a confusion of the purpose of science. It would be like demanding that evolutionary biology produce a model of evolution that excludes any possibility of variation in the outputs, despite the fact that variation is exactly what we see in the biological evidence. The models of thought and action we offer, if they are not to be disconfirmed immediately, must accord with the kinds of variation and regularity we actually find in the ecologically valid data of human higher-order cognition. Interpretation varies, and our models must capture the precise nature of that variation. So let us take one interpretation of the cartoon and look at some of the processes needed to produce it. The cartoon is easily taken as suggesting two narratives. One of these narratives involves the typical behavior of Americans disregarding the needs of the world’s starving populations while assuaging their guilt, or, anyway, manufacturing an acceptable self-image by participating in activities that count popularly as helping the environment, even when those activities are in fact self-serving, useless, or deleterious. The other narrative involves the needs of impoverished and deprived people worldwide that go unheeded by the developed nations. I will not here discuss the all-important subject of compression in conceptual integration networks (see Turner “Compression and Representation”, “The Art of Compression”, “The Way We Imagine”, Fauconnier & Turner “Rethinking Metaphor”), but remark in passing on the considerable compression achieved in this conceptual integration network. On one side lie the vast range of individual American behaviors, the many different ways these behaviors affect the environment, the consequences of American government, the psychology of self-delusion, and the scientific and technical details of inventions such as ethanol and their actual effect on the environment. On the other side lie the foreign needy, deprived of not only food but also shelter, health care, education, and security. In projection through the conceptual integration network down into the blend, these ranges of diffuse structure The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex 19 are compressed to human scale: an exchange between one American filling his car with ethanol and two deprived foreigners requesting food. There are clear prompts in the cartoon for both the compression and the blending of two distinct narratives. The landscape over the shoulder of the American who is fueling his car is barren except for a line that looks like the horizon of the globe of the Earth. The feet of the foreigners lie below that horizon, but their bodies rise above it, as if they are standing on the other side of the globe but visible right here at the gas station. In the narrative of the world’s food crises, none of the destitute, emaciated, hungry foreigners can make a direct personal appeal to an unexpecting individual American at a gas station. In the narrative of the American consumers, none of them speaks directly to individual hungry foreigners, and the hungry foreigners prototypically do not understand English. The frame used for the cartoon is an extremely common, familiar, humanscale frame of request and denial between individual human beings who can see each other and communicate with each other directly through speech and gesture. This is a third narrative input to the blend. But the secondary detail populating the frame makes it completely fantastic: it is strictly impossible that an American in America fueling his car could see in his actual visual field (without distance technologies) two foreigners who are in fact not in America, who are continents away, who are appealing to him directly to provide them with food (many kinds of basic food around the world being compressed into rice, which alone, for example, would not solve the problem of protein deficiency). It is geographically impossible that two impoverished and hungry people who are on different continents can be standing next to each other. It is strictly impossible that the American could utter (without distance technologies) a spoken expression in English that would be heard by them on separate continents, neither of which is North America. The American moreover has no rice, certainly no cooked rice to put into the rice bowl. There are many other items in the cartoon that are at least implausible. Yet no one encountering this cartoon is looking for it to serve as a representation of a visible single scene on Earth. For example, the “Bio-Ethanol” pump carries the label, “Pure Corn.” The presentation of this phrase is an exploitation of an accident: corn can be thought of as a sustainable agriculture product, as opposed to petroleum resources, and corn happens to be used in the production of ethanol. And so the American, eager for any token of environmental sensitivity, can take the view that the fuel is somehow ecofriendly, despite the arguments that net consumption of petroleum is increased by the manufacture and use of ethanol instead of gasoline. The word “pure” can be taken as the kind of thing the willfully self-deluded American wannabe environmentalist likes to associate with his activities, the way American suburban adolescents who know nothing about combat wear military fatigues or martial arts paraphernalia as indications of their personal identity. But of course, the phrase “pure corn” in American English is used to M ARK T URNER 20 indicate “nonsense.” No vendor of a commercial product is going to label it in such a way as to indicate that the rationale of its provision is fraud, nonsense, pure corn (except ironically, for consumers who will pay for irony, and then the product is the irony itself). We recognize immediately that the use of “pure corn” involves a projection from a fourth narrative, the one in which an editorializing voice is communicating directly with us, the reader of the cartoon. The cartoonist is exploiting the accident of the existence of corn in one of the narratives to do some editorializing. The entire scene is, if taken as a representation of an actual event, crazy. But no one reacts to this cartoon as if it is surreal or mentally taxing, a jumble of impossible conflicts, because no one takes it as a representation of an actual event. Its impossibility is no impediment, and in many ways an asset, to its role in communicating truth about actual reality. The cartoon is embraced instantly and with no feeling of mental effort as a coherent snapshot, a vignette as recognizable as a lightning bolt, summing up the gist of the matter, connecting the newspaper reader, the American populace, the world’s needy, and the cartoonist’s opinion. I adduce this cartoon and this interpretation of the cartoon as an example of the blending of well-formed narratives, which are recognizably distinct but connected by elaborate domino-trains of causality, evaluation, and other conceptual relations. Those causal chains, across very many agents, are compressed so that in the small blended narrative, the causality is direct, between few agents, and the cartoonist’s implicit editorializing on that human-scale scene can be expanded to indicate his editorializing on the world food crisis. I could as well have made this point using not a cartoon but rather examples from the high end of the canon. For example, I could have presented Shakespeare sonnets 37, 52, 73, 94, 97, 106, picked out for each of them the multiple rich narratives they invite us to imagine, and then analyzed how the sonnets prompt us to blend those rich narratives to remarkable effect. These are the kinds of examples, and the kinds of analysis, that can lead to the mistaken view that, independent of blending, we can construct fullyformed advanced narratives, in fact several of them, and then, as an extra, optional step, bring in the turbocharged engine of blending to manufacture a blended story. My purpose here is to indicate that this is a false view of both blending and story. Blending is always at work, even in basic human cognition, and story as a human mental operation depends fundamentally upon blending, from the start, at level zero. In the rest of this study, I will analyze ways in which the human capacity for narrative cognition is itself a product of double-scope blending. This use of blending to construct elements for narrative cognition is crucial to the way we think but almost always goes unnoticed in consciousness. The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex 21 Advanced Narrative Cognition as a Product of the Evolution of Double-Scope Blending Previous work has explored the ways in which double-scope blending is indispensable for language, advanced representation, mathematical and scientific invention, social ontology of institutions such as distributed law and economic markets, and a range of other human singularities (see Fauconnier & Turner The Way We Think, “The Origin of Language”, “Rethinking Metaphor”, Turner Cognitive Dimensions). A fortiori, any narrative cognition whose content includes products of these operations—such as conversation, grammatical constructions with rich pragmatics such as “Sorry, I’m busy xing,” cars, stereotypical fashion carrying social significance such as socioeconomic status, rice bowls, money, credit cards, gas pumps, and so on— depends on double-scope blending. But as interesting and fundamental as that dependence undoubtedly is, I skip over it here as by now established. To bring into perspective the question of how double-scope blending advances narrative cognition, let us consider what might be the differences between story as a human cognitive operation and story as it is available to other species. To be sure, it is exceptionally difficult to read the mind of any animal, human or nonhuman. All cognitive scientific methods - linguistic analysis, measurement of task performance, controlled experiments, computer simulation and modeling, lesion studies, brain imaging - are indirect, requiring plausible inference whose warrant derives from rich theory. Our best methodological hope lies in using multiple methods to see whether their indications align in pointing to the same conclusion. But with nonhuman animals, we are deprived of many of our best methods. We cannot interview them, prompt for linguistic performance, analyze linguistic behavior they do not have, explain anything but rudimentary tasks to them—if, indeed, we can explain tasks to them at all—, observe their behavior in rich, ecologically valid scenarios of the sort for which they are adapted, and so on. Indeed, the difficulties of inquiring into the capacities of members of other species have led to strong efforts and some rapidly changing views over the last decade, as in the alert from Tomasello, Call, and Hare of a few years ago: “New data suggest that relatively drastic revisions are needed in our theoretical accounts of what other animal species understand about the psychological states of others” (153). Nonetheless, plainly, there is little evidence that members of other species enjoy various features of advanced narrative cognition of the sort deployed constantly and effortlessly by human beings. In some cases, there is compelling evidence that nonhuman animals certainly do not have these abilities. No nonhuman animal, for example, seems to understand beliefs held by others. It appears that there is a general mammalian line of parsing immediate perception into objects and events with the understanding of some of those objects as animate, and a general ape line of parsing immediate perception so M ARK T URNER 22 as to understand some of those animate others as having direction to a goal. But this does not mean that any of the members of other species has • a conception of oneself as possessed of a characteristic personal identity running through time; • conceptions of other agents as similarly possessed of characteristic personal identities running through time; • conceptions of other agents as possessed over time with the standard system of elements in folk psychology, that is, emotions, goals, and beliefs that drive actions and reactions; • a conception of oneself that includes relationships with the psychology of others, and, conversely, conceptions of those others as themselves possessed of conceptions of self that contain relationships with the psychology of oneself, that is, the self doing the original considering of those others; • a conception of oneself and one’s personal identity as richly inhabiting both the past and the future. In short, the kinds of narrative thinking available to nonhuman animals appear to be far below the rich higher-order capacities for narrative thinking common to human beings. In what follows, we will go through the role of double-scope blending in the achievement of these specific capacities of advanced narrative cognition. Self as Agent in Narrative Cognition As we analyzed in The Way We Think, the work of projection to connect conceptual arrays relies heavily on a set of Vital Relations. Two of these Vital Relations are Analogy and Disanalogy, which always work together. There is a very basic pattern of blending across such separate analogous arrays, which works to compresses them into a single blend. In the blend, there is a unique element that undergoes change. The relations of analogy across the separate mental inputs are projected and compressed to unique identity in the blend, and the associated disanalogous relations across the separate mental inputs are projected and compressed to change in the blend for that unique element. The result is a human-scale blend of change for a unique, abiding element. We discussed in The Way We Think the example, presented in Zoobooks, of the evolution of dinosaurs into birds. What is happening in this case is this: there are many different organisms (specific dinosaurs), with analogies and disanalogies connecting them. None of these organisms “turns into” another organism or “changes” into another organism or even “changes” its features in the direction of features possessed by later organisms. Rather, in conceptual integration networks, members of the species at a given time are compressed into stereotypes of the species at a given time, with stereotypical characteristics. These kinds of compressions are extremely common across conceptual structure. For example, if half of Ohio voters voted one way and The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex 23 the other half the other way, this vast number of voters can be compressed to just two voters who oppose each other in the blend and “stand for” the population of voters. One can imagine the political cartoon. In an alternative compression, if 60% of Pennsylvania voters voted one way and 40% the other way, they can be compressed to a single voter who has a 60% “probability” of voting one way and a 40% “probability” of voting the other way. The resulting stereotyped stages of the dinosaur in sequence across evolutionary time are then further compressed in the conceptual integration network into a single unique dinosaur in the blend. The Analogy vital relations across the inputs are compressed to Uniqueness in the blend and the Disanalogy vital relations are compressed to Change for that unique identity. So the “beginning” dinosaur undergoes “change” that “ends” in the bird. We analyzed many similar cases that are immediately intelligible even as they rely upon quite complex and nuanced conceptual integration networks involving compression of analogy and disanalogy to uniqueness and change. The North American Pronghorn, for example, is said to run so amazingly fast because it is running from the “ghosts of predators past.” That is, it is remembering. The analogies across the pronghorns in evolutionary time are compressed to identity for the species; the evolutionary outcome of great speed is compressed to an intentional processes in the blend, i.e. “learning”— a kind of change—by this species; and its current behavior, in fact the result of the differences produced by evolutionary mechanisms across generations, is compressed to another intentional process in the blend, i.e. “remembering.” Fauconnier analyzed cases like “The President changes every four years,” on the reading that there is a role, President, and that its value is different every four years. Sweetser surveys work on such change predicates for roles, as it relates to expressions such as “The cars get three feet bigger when you enter Pacific Heights,” “The fences get taller as you move westward across the United Statues,” and “The paint gets darker as you move down the wall.” Vera Tobin observes that it is common to refer to a literary work as a unique identity that undergoes change. She cites Hugh Kenner’s comment on the five-stanza version of Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry” as “the one scarred by all those revisions” (Tobin 171; Kenner 1432). In this conceptualization, the many variations published under the title “Poetry” are compressed (Fauconnier and Turner 2002) into a single, concrete entity that the poet has altered many times. This entity is also metaphorically characterized as a living body, and the alterations that remove material from that body as violent mutilations. In this way, even a new, intact printing of an earlier version can be “scarred” by the publication of shorter variations. (Tobin 171-172) There are many products of our double-scope blending capacity to create identity out of disparate scenarios connected by analogy and disanalogy. Roles, especially roles in frames constituting social ontology, are one of those conceptual products. While nonhuman animals appear to recognize differences across individuals that we might label with close evolutionary status M ARK T URNER 24 such as offspring, conspecific, sibling, mother, alpha male, or predator, they do not appear to conceive of conceptual entities such as The Supreme Court, Chief Justice of the United States, prophet, or priest. Such roles depend upon conceptual integration networks compressing across disparate elements. Nor should we assume, even in the case of close evolutionary roles such as mother or predator, that the animal conceives of the role mentally with any of the rich complexity extending over time that the human being perceives for the animals themselves, much less for the human beings. The rich human conception of the self also depends upon compressions. The baby born of the mother, the 18-month old learning language, the toddler, the lad in short pants, the adolescent, the young man, the worker, the husband, the father, and the old man inhabit quite different conceptual frames, with great disanalogies between them. But the analogical connections across them are also strong. These disparate scenes reside within conceptual integration networks that offer a unique self in the blend, a self that undergoes change. This is not to say that the concept of the self is an abstraction over whatever specific local events take place. On the contrary, the personal identity established in the blend can be exceptionally powerful, residing more generically as a stable character in the generic space above all the specific inputs, so much so that when the individual moves to a radically unfamiliar scene with entirely new conditions and agents, the compressed concept of personal identity can be causal for the specific events. This self is imbued, in virtue of the conceptual integration network, with stable but variable beliefs, goals, and personal dispositions. The result is a full agent. The mental existence of such a full agent derives from double-scope blending and greatly advances narrative cognition. Culture deploys the tools of advanced conceptual integration to support, maintain, and enforce a rich blended conception of an abiding self. A culture may invest a great deal of language—itself a product of double-scope blending—in providing proper names attached to the personal identity in the blend. The grammatical construct that is the proper name counts as a linguistic invariant—however pronounced, declined, or drawn—to indicate the culture’s insistence that there is a stable referent. This proper name attaches to a newborn, a parent, an agent of action and inaction, someone healthy and someone sick, someone speaking English and someone speaking Chinese, usually over scores of years. Strong rituals may be created to increase the analogical connections over time, such as birthdays, to aid the conceptual connection of this local moment, this particular cycle of time, to all the others lying before and after. The birthday celebration, for example, fits a frame— with friends, cake, presents—creating frame analogies all along the sequence, allowing only secondary details in the ritual to differ—one more candle on the cake, slightly different presents. The existence of the blend and its personal identity does not obliterate the rest of the network. On the contrary, the human-scale blend makes it possible for us to manage the diffuse array of conceptual structure in the rest of the The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex 25 network, which otherwise would lie beyond our cognitive powers to grasp, explore, and manipulate. The blend may contain a unified personal identity while two of the inputs contain quite different selves, even aggressively opposed selves, with a time relation of many years between them. All of these conceptual structures can be activated in a particular scene, as when someone, drawing on the blend, feels in one way a strong and continuous personal identity, and yet, looking in the mirror, is sensible of the quite different selves she has been, and what one of them might think of the other. When her face in the mirror resembles a picture of herself from years ago - perhaps because of a hat, flip of the hair, lighting, blouse, or smile - she may conceive the scene as one in which the self from years ago now addresses the self looking in the mirror. She may speak, and her voice may in the little story attach not to the body speaking but to the younger person, saying to the older person, “you’ve done all right.” Or the same voice, with a different inflection, may attach conceptually to the older person, saying, “I failed you, didn’t I? ” The woman in this moment is not deluded or insane. On the contrary, her ability to range conceptually over the integration network is a sign of her mature understanding, a sign of the human capacity for advanced narrative cognition. Remembrance of Things Past A human being in the local, present moment has, like any mammal, a brain in a certain state of activation, with integrated systems for affect, perception, inference, and construal. No scientist imagines that when a brain goes into a state of activation corresponding to what we would call “a memory” that the so-called “memory” comes with its own separate systems for affect, perception, and thought. On the contrary, for the memory to make sense to us, we must activate our present cognitive systems for it. Everything involved in memory is a matter of present brain activation, but at the level of content, understanding, and reaction, we are blending elements that we take as referring to the past with our present cognitive self and its abilities, including its abilities to take perspectives of various kinds, form judgments, experience reactions, make choices. We blend elements of our present self with elements taken as belonging to a former self so as to make a blend that contains a former self with full cognitive abilities, including emotions. If we ask a man whether he has ever been embarrassed, and he responds instantly, “yes,” on the principle that all human beings undergo embarrassment, and so syllogistically the answer must be “yes,” or says “yes” as a conditioned vocal response without inference, and in either case says “yes” without recalling a past scene of embarrassment, that is one kind of experience. But it is quite a different feeling to recall the past scene of embarrassment sufficiently to sense in the present the twinge of that embarrassment. M ARK T URNER 26 When we recall the scene, we are creating a former self in the blend by projecting capacities and elements of the present self into the blend. This projection of present self provides an intentional stance toward our former self. Metaphorically, it is cognitive time travel, putting elements and abilities of oneself into the past. Accordingly, any narrative cognition involving our former self as an agent, including any narrative cognition that produces a continuous narrative that reaches to the present, depends upon double-scope blending. No nonhuman animal appears to have any such advanced narrative cognition. It is an open problem in cognitive science why human beings should have a memory that operates as ours does. As Arthur Glenberg writes in “What Memory Is For,” To avoid hallucination, conceptualization would normally be driven by the environment, and patterns of action from memory would play a supporting, but automatic, role. (1) But as Glenberg astutely observes, for human beings, it is often the case that memory takes the upper hand in conceptualizing the narrative one is inhabiting: A significant human skill is learning to suppress the overriding contribution of the environment to conceptualization, thereby allowing memory to guide conceptualization. (1) There is flexibility in blending present self with past conditions suggested by memory, because selective projection in blending is flexible if constrained. Consider the following range of blends that involve blends of present self with former self: 1. One remembers a moment from the past. The memory includes the knowledge that the moment was recognized at the time as embarrassing. Projecting some of one’s present psychological abilities into the blend, one experiences in the present a twinge of the embarrassment taken as an analog of the original experience of the embarrassment. 2. One remembers a moment from the past. The memory includes the knowledge that the moment was recognized at the time as embarrassing. Projecting some of one’s present psychological abilities into the blend, one analyzes the embarrassment as merely fear of evaluation by peers, shame in their eyes, and not as essentially embarrassing at all. On the contrary, remembering the scene, one now feels pride rather than embarrassment even though one remembers that the moment was regarded at the time as embarrassing. 3. One remembers a moment from the past. The memory includes the knowledge that the moment was recognized at the time as embarrassing. But one does not feel on first pass embarrassed. The memory is then cultivated actively, bringing in more aspects of the past event, context, and personal situation, until the feeling of embarrassment becomes recognizable. The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex 27 4. One performs an action in the present that seems to have a certain significance, but then, a separate action from the past surfaces in memory, and there seems to be an analogy. The analogy results in a compression, bringing a new significance to the action in the present. All of these, and many more cases as well, are instances of projection of self from the present into a blend that receives input from the past, or rather, memory, for a double-scope blend of self that provides an agent for advanced narrative cognition. Fauconnier and I (The Way We Think) consider, for example, a case in which a man has troubles with his girlfriend, named “Angela.” He remembers how, when he was little, he was so intent upon hiding his treasures that he hid them too well and usually could not find them again. He remembers in particular the loss of his new penny when he was four, hidden so well he never found it again. And it seems to him that this is what he has done with his love for Angela. The projection of present self into the past makes the memory intelligible and sensible; the analogical connections across his many selves provide the basis of a pattern; the compression of those analogies into the blend provides a character not only for his present understanding of his relationship with Angela but also for the generic space that influences the entire network. Double-scope blendings of self provide agents for advanced narrative cognition. There is no evidence that they are available to members of other species. In The Time Machine, H. G. Wells presents time as a dimension one can move through. The Time Machine has a lever, which, if turned one way, carries the passenger at a speed proportional to the angle of the lever through sequential moments of time, ever farther back in time, and moved the other way, carries the passenger similarly through sequential moments ever farther into the future. The sign of the angle gives the direction in time and the absolute value of the angle gives the speed. I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs. Watchett came in and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came to-morrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. To-morrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. — H. G. Wells, The Time Machine. This seems familiar, given our folk conception of time, and is not so different from some scientific conceptions of time as a linearly ordered succession of events. Human memory is not constrained to move in the fashion of H. G. Wells’ Time Machine. Like the Tardis in Dr. Who, it can drop anywhere into the past, or, if one prefers the dual, any moment from the past can intrude via M ARK T URNER 28 memory into the present. Val Cunningham, in his contribution to this volume, quotes George Eliot on this aspect of memory: Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina. —George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871-2), chapter 20. Fauconnier and I (The Way We Think) observe that “from an objective viewpoint of time and space, the activities of human memory are bizarre. Why do our memories work in these strange ways? ” We hypothesize as follows: One possible answer to this puzzling question is that memory and conceptual integration evolved to support each other. To do advanced conceptual integration, we need the ability to integrate and compress over inputs that are often very different and highly separated in time and space. We cannot predict which inputs will turn out to be useful, but we do know that useful inputs from many sources need to be activated simultaneously and linked by vital relations. Human memory appears to be superb at giving simultaneous activation of quite different inputs, and at offering good provisional connections. Running apparently on autopilot, it often delivers up inputs and connections that have no apparent reason for being activated simultaneously or being connected at all, except that they lead us to quite useful blends. (317) There are many familiar phenomena that result from the blending of present self and memories of past self. Consider the case in which one recognizes a present scene as analogous to a past scene that ultimately carried a negative emotion. It is presumably useful not to have to work all decisions, evaluations, and reactions up from scratch in every scene of our experience. An item of memory seems to be able to evoke for the present self a reaction analogous to the original reaction. When the old self and the present self are blended, and the analogy compressed, the result is a direct indication to the present self of how to react. In this case, the blending of present self and past self provides wisdom, or at least quick disposition and choice, to the present self. The present self is a richer present self in narrative cognition for its blending with the past self. I note that the Mac operating system numbered 10.5 includes a backup utility called “Time Machine” that relies upon both our conception of time as a linear succession and our conception of memory as able to insert us into any point in that succession. When you “enter” the “Time Machine,” there is a vertical linear scale running up the right hand of the screen, with times and dates on the scale, higher being longer ago. The windows representing the previous states of the file structure are displayed in succession, stretching away from the viewer, back toward what seems to be the big bang at the dawn of time. You can select any spot in the history to drop into. I assume that, behind this amazing representation of a blend, the backup utility in fact The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex 29 works by making new copies on the external hard drive of only those items that have been changed since the last backup copy, but the blend does not include the projection of that structure: the indication is that each of those windows carries the full file structure as of the date and time with which it is labeled. It looks like this: Future Selves The mental construction of a future self is in one way unlike the mental construction of a past self: the future has not happened. It is inevitably the case that conceptual structure blended into the future self draws on past and present knowledge, as when we imagine ourselves next year sitting in the house that we own today and that we have inhabited for some years, but that future scene is not time-marked as lying in the past. Otherwise, the future self is like the past self, to the extent that no scientist presumes the imagined future self created when a brain goes into a state of activation corresponding to what we would call an imagined hypothetical future to come with its own separate systems for affect, perception, and thought. On the contrary, for the hypothetical future self to make sense to us, we must project onto it our present mental apparatus. If we ask a man whether he will invest in real estate next year, or go to Paris, or subscribe to a newspaper, and he responds instantly “yes,” on the principle that these are invariant, that is one kind of experience. But it is quite a different feeling to create a blend for the future into which he projects his present psychological dispositions and systems, so that, e.g., he now richly M ARK T URNER 30 imagines the local conditions of the investing, or traveling, or subscribing, and activates his inferencing and affect. Think of this as bringing the future into the present, making it present so that present systems can play a role. It can also be thought of as the mental equivalent of H. G. Wells’ time machine, now moving us into the future. The result of putting present and future together might be that his various abilities for judgment in local scenes can come into play and make a difference in his conceiving of the future, and so influence his present choices leading to that imagined future. In our environments of evolutionary adaptation, only that which is contained within our local scenes of time and space can affect us, and we can affect only that. Absent technologies that bring distant locations into range—such as telephones, intercontinental ballistic missiles, lieutenants garrisoned faraway to do our will—and technologies that bring distant times into range—such as writing and multiyear agricultural systems—, we are built to operate in the present, with what lies within the horizon of our spatial and temporal situation. To make good choices in the present about future situations, we may need to have access to the feeling that would be elicited by those situations, but we are not actually in them; they do not lie within the horizon in which we are built to operate. So how can we operate, how can we decide and choose? Double-scope blending makes it possible to bring the future into the present, or to project present embodied cognition of the sort we are built to run into the future, and so to think now with present feeling about the future, because the present feeling is projected into the blend that contains the future. Again, double-scope blending in this case provides functionality to narrative cognition that nonhuman animals do not seem to be able to achieve. This blending of present and future can also be used to manage the self in the present: blending our present embodied cognition with a future self in a preferred moment (winning the lottery) can activate feelings that we would like to have in the present situation but find difficult to achieve when immersed in the present. So we can daydream about the future, and consequently feel different in the present. Conversely, such advanced narrative cognition about a future scene can create in the actual present consequences we do not want. For example, blending our present embodied cognition with a future self in a situation that we fear might come to pass, such as the loss of a loved one, may be upsetting to us in the present. This can provide incentive to us to avoid the rich activation of that blend (unless, of course, as in acting, there is benefit in looking genuinely upset). Someone who routinely fails in a particular kind of present scene to do their duty or avoid temptation may, when not in that kind of present scene, try to avoid thinking about it richly, avoid the mental time travel, avoid the bringing of the imagined future into the actual present, in order not to be sapped in the present of the strength needed to take an action that they fear a future self in a different present will fail to take. People may cut up their The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex 31 credit cards now so they will not be able to use them later, at a future time when the present is different and the mental state of the chooser is also different. People may elect to have large monthly tax withholding as a kind of forced savings, not because they do not understand that this is not financially the best return they could get, but because their present embodied cognition can make the choice to save but they doubt that their future self would in certain conditions make the same choice. Nonhuman animals do not have these concerns: since they lack double-scope blending, they do not have credit cards, tax withholding, or lotteries to begin with. The Present is Part of Human-Scale Mammals are built to think, act, and feel in present embodied moments. The effect of evolutionary adaptive mechanisms is often to create systems built to work in present embodied cognition in ways that produce on average adaptive long-term consequences that the mammals do not need to recognize, contemplate, or understand in order for their present embodied cognition to work to long-term adaptive effect. Appetite, attraction, and disgust work in present embodied cognition without the mammals needing to contemplate or even conceive of physical energy, grandchildren, or infection. The human being is a mammal, and its systems are built to work in the present scene. As we explain in The Way We Think, there is one overarching principle of conceptual integration that drives all the others: • Achieve Human Scale Present, embodied cognition is an indispensable part of human-scale conception. Our present, embodied cognition is built to work within a human-scale limited scene of human-scale distances of space and time; limited arrays of other agents, objects, and events; a particular viewpoint, focus, and perspective and local ways of changing them; and the capacities for perception, attention, inference, and memory that we possess in the present scene. Human beings, through projection of self into the past or the future—that is, blending memory or imagination of distant times with present embodied cognition—are able to transform scenes that were not at human scale (because they were not in the present) into human-scale scenes in the blend. By double-scope blending, we have rich present embodied cognition in the blend to use in thinking about scenes that, as inputs to the blend, lacked present embodied cognition since we are not actually inhabiting them in the present. In the blend, our present embodied cognition is inhabiting scenes that we are not actually inhabiting in the present. This projection of the present self into the blend provides to advanced narrative cognition the capacity for rich, human-scale, personal agency in scenarios that are not present. Human individuals and cultures develop mechanisms for managing the consequences of this advanced narrative cognition. Interestingly, one of those M ARK T URNER 32 mechanisms is the use of language—another product of double-scope blending—to create spoken or written expressions—that is, particular stories— whose purpose is to prompt the audience to preferred narrative cognition. Blending the Present Self and the Future In The Way We Think Fauconnier and I analyze ways in which we can project present embodied human-scale cognition to create a future self in the blend. In the section titled “The Bypass,” we analyzed an advertisement with the caption “Joey, Katie, and Todd Will Be Performing Your Bypass.” The advertisement shows a patient lying on an operating table in a surgery room. Three surgeons, dressed in surgical gowns, are on the other side of the patient. The one in the middle, holding a scalpel, is about to cut. All three of them are looking out of the frame at the reader. In appearance and height, these surgeons look about 8 years old. They look like schoolchildren, and that is the point. The purpose of the ad is to induce the viewer to think not in the abstract about the consequences of failing to educate present-day schoolchildren, but to project the present self into a distant prospect, so as to weigh the consequences as if they were in one’s immediate field of interaction, to bring the future to immediate human scale. This kind of blending supplies narrative cognition with a way to assist present choices: we can construct narratives connecting our present to felt futures, indeed we can construct alternative narratives leading to different felt futures, and make our choice now on the basis of those outcomes, weighed not in the abstract but in a human-scale embodied present (in the blend) that happens to be taking place in the future. Toward the end of the film version of his slide-show presentation on global warming, Al Gore posts a picture of Earth, the pale blue dot photographed from 4 billion miles out in space. He explains, Everything that has ever happened in all of human history has happened on that dot. All the triumphs and tragedies, all the wars and all the famines, all the major advances. That is what is at stake—our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization. Concluding, Gore states, Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, “What were our parents thinking? Why didn’t they wake up when they had the chance? “ We have to hear that question from them now. In this example, for both space and time, we have diffuse conceptual arrays that are not at human scale: a distance of four billion miles, and all of human history plus the future. But, through double-scope blending, we can pack these arrays to human scale. The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex 33 First, let us take the spatial packing. We have a bodily notion of vision, at human scale, taken from our local visual experience, according to which, the farther we back up from an object, the smaller the angle it subtends in our field of vision. This is a human-scale conceptual input. We also have the input of the universe, with the Earth somewhere in it. The incompatibility of these conceptual arrays is evident. For starters, human beings cannot walk backward four billion miles from Earth to have a look. It could also be that vision from four billion miles does not work quite the way it does in your front yard. Imaginatively, it might have been that sight across the universe works differently at great distances. Many aspects of physical reality at great spans of distance and time do not fit human intuitions, and there are science fiction books in which it does work differently. But we can project our local visual intuitions to the packed blend, and in the blend, we can see the Earth from four billion miles the way we might see a bird in a tree. In the blend, Earth becomes one small, fragile thing. In the blend, everything human is contained in a dot that is hard to see. In the packed blend, we have an understandable scene in which the entire Earth subtends a small angle in the field of our vision. It is just a pale blue dot. In the packed blend, the conception of viewing the Earth from four billion miles has inherited the human scale of the input with the actual human being, who has human motion and human vision. There are further selective projections from the input space with the human being that can contribute to the human scale of the packed blend in which we are looking at a pale blue dot that is the Earth. In the natural scene of vision, without technological aids or representations, what is in our visual field is local. We have a local relationship to what we see and for the most part can act upon it. It can also act upon us. When we think of the vast Earth and all its human history and future, it is so far from human scale as to seem quite beyond us, insusceptible to our individual actions. But the packed blend has an Earth that is small and in our visual field and accordingly subject to our actions. This can stimulate a feeling of human-scale power, responsibility, and duty, which is exactly the rhetorical effect Gore is trying to achieve. The Earth over all of human history can seem much too complex and diffuse to comprehend. But in the blend, it is unitary and visually homogenous. To be sure, there is diversity on Earth, as Gore describes, but it is nonetheless unitary and comprehensible when considered as our home, and the home of our children. There is great diversity in a home, but a home is nonetheless a human-scale concept. And we are responsible for our home. The Earth can seem much too large and vast to be vulnerable to our actions. How could any one of us have any effect on Earth, as opposed to, say, our yard, or at most our street? But in the human-scale, packed blend, Earth is a very small thing, which we are powerful enough to affect; it is small, and vulnerable, in much the way our home is vulnerable. M ARK T URNER 34 One purpose of Gore's presentation is to lead us to perform a mental packing on space, so that we will carry around a new packed concept, of Earth. His hope is that we will carry that new packed concept with us from situation to situation, and unpack it to hook up to new situations, with the result that we will think and act differently in those situations. Our actions and decisions in this or that local spot, at the hardware store or the gas station, will be connected to this packed concept, making the local global and the global local. Gore's “pale blue dot“ also invites us to perform a temporal packing to human scale. There are the conventional (but no less marvelous) temporal packings that go with phrases like “history“ and “Everything that has ever happened.“ In just the same way in which the vast spatial expanse of Earth is packed into a pale blue dot contained in our field of vision the vast temporal expanse of human action is packed into one chunked unit. But the temporal packing that leaps out at us is the one in which unborn descendants are talking to us, and we hear them. The scene in which we are talking with people and they ask us questions is one we understand immediately. It is quintessentially at human scale. There are other conceptual inputs to this packed blend, but those are hypothetical, diffuse, stretching across generations of individuals. There are many reasons we cannot hear the people in those inputs. First, they do not exist. Second, there are far too many of them. Third, they are not in one human-scale auditory field, but rather distributed around the entire Earth. Fourth, they are not in a human-scale temporal interval but instead stretched across many generations, so their comment is longer even than our individual lives: if we listened to them all our lives, we would never hear everything they had to say on the subject, because the conversation goes on for generations. Fifth, they do not all speak in languages we understand. Sixth, they might not be speaking at all, but instead only writing, or even thinking. And so on. But that diffuse, complex, hypothetical, unknowable future, so very far from human scale, can be blended with the basic scene of human questioning. Now, in the packed blend, all the individuals of future generations are packed into the perspective of one human voice, the voice of our child. The emergent structure in the packed blend is amazing: now, in the blend, each of us can hear voices of our descendants, even if some of us, in reality, have no children at all. And we hear their question now. Our present embodied cognition, at human scale, is in this advanced narrative blend. Such an example of advanced narrative cognition, in which we have a human scale scene, involving ourselves and the children in an embodied blended present that has input from non-present times and scenes, is like the cartoon about the “world food crisis” with which we began. Now we see that the kinds of agents—self and others—and the kinds of scenes—temporal and spatial—and the kinds of thought and feeling in this narrative cognition are not available except via the advanced mental operation of double-scope blending. The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex 35 I could have made the same point by analyzing an example from the high canon, such as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 3: Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest Now is the time that face should form another; Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest, Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother. The blend of present, human-scale thought with alternative future conditions produces two narratives leading from two alternative choices in the present to two distant alternative future selves—one a father, one not. In the first future, there is a mother of the child, too. In the other, there is the same woman, but that woman does not hold the role of mother of the child, for there is no such child. This counterfactual relationship between the two alternative futures—fatherhood or not—and between the two alternative choices—procreation or not—creates emergent structure for the present, in the following way. At first, the present is just the present. But when the hypothetical scene of procreation is imagined, there comes with it a counterfactual relationship to the present. The present and the hypothetical are blended, and their counterfactual relationship is compressed into the blend, which gives a new conception of the present: now, in the present, there is a lack of procreation, an absence. In retrospect, it may seem as if the present always had that structure, but not so: there is always an infinity of objects and events that are not in our actual present, but that does not mean we actively conceive of our present as containing an infinity of such absences. It is only the activation of the possible space of procreation and the creation of the counterfactual relationship to the present that provides the basis for the compression that creates the absence in the blend. Next, the counterfactual relationship between the futures is compressed back into the present: where before, the present did not involve structure related to the woman, and there was no question of the young man’s treatment of her, now in the present blend there is an action of unblessing that woman. She counts as blessed up there in one future, and consequently blessed in the scene with the choice of procreation. Compressing the counterfactual relationship between the scene of procreation and the present produces a conception of the present that now has a woman in it and the action of unblessing by the man. Not only the existence of the action of unblessing but even the kind of action is a result of compressing to the present relations that hold between alternative scenes of future selves. Other Minds In The Literary Mind, I observed, as many others have over two and a half millennia, that we do not have access to the mental states of others, only to the mental states of ourselves. I remarked that since Aristotle, and now as analyzed in cognitive scientific research, it has been recognized that attribu- M ARK T URNER 36 tion of animacy and agency depend on perception of what we take to be selfmovement and reaction to sensory data. I analyzed the ways in which the recognition of other minds results from blending the appearances of others and their actions with our understanding of our own mental states correlated with such appearances and actions, so as to create in the blend the concept of other minds. Proposals that human beings have a “theory of mind” that allows them to recognize the mental states of others, to adopt an intentional stance toward them, to attribute to them a folk psychology of beliefs, goals, and desires, are a black box, a theoretical stipulation, a magic wand, unless we indicate where, in cognition, we find the source of such an understanding of mental states to begin with. The source of that understanding is our own experience and understanding of ourselves. A rich understanding of another mind is a double-scope blend in which one of the inputs is our own conception of mental self. I discussed the ways in which variable projection and emergent structure in the blend produces a concept of another mind that is much like ourselves, but not exactly like ourselves. Consider as an example Julius Caesar’s assessment in the eponymous Shakespeare play: Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o' nights: Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous. We see a similar conception of another mind when Othello watches Cassio in conversation with Iago. Cassio’s appearance drives Othello mad because he is construing from Cassio’s appearance the kind of knowledge Cassio could have that would result in that appearance. In fact, Othello’s construal is wrong. Iago knows Othello is wrong, because cunning Iago has worked to elicit action and appearance from Cassio that will provide just the right inputs to the integration network that will induce Othello to make just the right projections to the blend in Othello’s mind that will produce there another mind—Cassio’s—who has sexual knowledge of Othello’s wife, Desdemona. As Shakespeare observes, “To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit” (Sonnet 23). Alan Palmer, in this volume, reminds us that Oscar Wilde observed, astutely, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” Such judgment of others is part of advanced narrative cognition: double-scope blending provides such agents to story. When we see what we take to be another human being, all we have from them are perceptions, images, sounds. We form analogical connections between them and us, and, on the basis of those analogical connections, create double-scope blends containing other minds, with mental states largely projected from our understanding of our own mental states. Over time, we develop and learn more sophisticated double-scope integration networks, according to which the other minds in the blend differ in content and cast from our own minds. Of course, as has often been suggested, there may be evolu- The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex 37 tionary adaptation to dispose us to immediate projection of some very basic mental states such as happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust (Ekman; Damasio), but this is quite a limited set of recognitions, and even then the projection might be based on how we feel in the presence of certain appearances in a few basic mammalian scenes: e.g., we feel fear and vulnerability in the presence of an organism and so project a threatening state of mind to that organism. I also analyzed in The Literary Mind how this double-scope blending creates conceptions of other minds that are not limited to conspecifics. Via double-scope blending, we create minds for nonhuman animals, and indeed, for inanimate objects such as trains, balloons, flora, even cars, buildings, and nations. This kind of conception of other minds via double-scope blending has been analyzed in a range of studies (see e.g. Turner ‘The origin of selkies’). Note, for example, that even though I know that rattlesnakes are beneficial to human beings for the rodents they eat, and although I know of no philosopher, biologist, or cognitive scientist who maintains that a rattlesnake intends to be mean to you, proud of its dominance, and dismissive of your fear, yet my own memory is that, if you are inexperienced, it is impossible to avoid projecting such mental states to the Southern Pacific rattlesnake whom you just surprised in the dry and stony riverbed. In the instant, you want to blow your evil, bloody-minded, murderous enemy to smithereens. Later, with more experience and dispassion, you can moderate and perhaps overcome such projections, to produce a different blend from the same prompts. Such double-scope blending is not even limited to animals: the gloomy graveyard can seem malevolent, as if it desires to suck the life out of us. We take it for granted that robust other agents are directly available to narrative cognition. Instead, those robust other agents are a product of double-scope blending, a contribution to advanced narrative thinking. There is no evidence that nonhuman animals have these advanced capacities for narrative cognition. The range of projections possible in conceptual integration networks for creating conceptions of other minds is vast. We can project not only varieties of intentionality, but also viewpoint, perspective, focus, differential attention, joint attention. Fauconnier & Turner (The Way We Think) give a suggestive survey of different selective projections for a phrase such as “If I were you, I’d quit my job.” The agent in the blend can have your public identity and your job but my insight, or your great wealth but my public identity and job, or your inability to deal with someone like my tyrant boss, or . . . Fauconnier (Mappings in Thought and Language) surveys the variability of selective projection to a blended agent for Charles Fillmore’s example, “If I were your father, I’d spank you,” and other examples such as “If I were you, I’d hire me.” M ARK T URNER 38 Blending Self and Personal Consciousness Double-scope blending provides to advanced narrative cognition not only a sense of unique self as agent but also theories of the nature of the human self. Cognitive science has shown that human beings are mentally much more complicated and diffuse than our folk theories of mind suggest. For example, there is no controversy in vision science or language science that the mechanisms of vision and language are extraordinarily complex, quite unlike commonsense conceptions of how they work, and mostly invisible to human beings, who see and talk and offer folk theories such as “I just open my eyes and the scene comes in” or “Words have meanings so I say what I mean.” Great ranges of backstage cognition make vision and language happen. There is no scientific dispute over this matter, although the secondary and tertiary details make for enjoyable scientific controversies. The principal reason that human beings think that sight and language happen in fairly simple ways, with fairly simple principles, and with intelligible, human-scale frames, is that vision and language do produce some small, integrated, useful packages and deliver them into consciousness, and these little packages do seem to us to be fairly simple, with simple principles and with intelligible, human-scale frames. Although human beings are not built to grasp actual mental functioning scientifically, they are built to grasp these little humanscale packages of consciousness, and to blend the frame for the scientific question with the conscious experience, and so to produce, in the blend, human-scale folk theories of who we are and what we do. For example, for centuries, scientific notions of perception depended on the “Cartesian theater.” The Cartesian theater is the implicit idea that there is a little perceiver in the head, a kind of attentive homunculus, who pretty much watches a representation of what we are watching in the world, and who figures it out. In the simple human-scale frame that we can hold in consciousness of the Perceiving Self, each of us is an attentive self looking at the world and figuring it out. To answer the question, what is the mind doing? , we blend the simple, conscious frame of the Perceiving Self with our frame for the scientific question and so create a folk-theory of mind in which there is an attentive mental agent looking not at the world but at a mental representation of the world. In the double-scope blend, there is a watchful little perceiving guy looking at sensory representations of the world. This watchful little perceiving guy is the audience of the Cartesian theater. The notion of the watchful internal homunculus in his Cartesian theater had influential scientific standing for centuries. But it turns out that vision works nothing like that. Vision is far more complicated, there is no attentive homunculus in the mind, and there is no anatomical spot where sensory data are assembled into a unified representation of the sort we imagine, much less on a big screen with surround-sound and supplements for olfactory, gustatory, and tactile perception. Indeed, it is a deep scientific problem to explain how something like a coffee cup-with its hue, saturation, reflectance, shape, smell, The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex 39 handle for grasping, topology, temperature, and so on-can seem in consciousness like one unified object. In neuroscience, this problem is called “the binding problem” or “the integration problem.” We are built to think that the reason we can see a coffee cup as one unified object is simply that the coffee cup is one unified object whose inherent unity shoots straight through our senses onto the big screen in the conscious mind, where the unity is manifest, unmistakable, no problem. It is natural to hold such a belief, but the belief turns out just to be a folk theory, another case in which we blend the simple, conscious frame with the frame for the scientific question itself to produce a folk theory that we mistake for a scientific explanation. It does not seem to us in consciousness that we are doing any work at all when we parse the world into objects and events and attribute permanence to some of those objects, but explaining how we do this presents a major open scientific problem. In consciousness, typically, we frame experience as consisting of little stories: our basic story frame includes a perceiving self who is an agent interacting with the world and with other agents. Despite the detail in which we are embedded, and the manifest discontinuities in our lives, we manufacture small conscious narratives of ourselves as agents with stable personal identities, and these small narratives are at human scale and easily intelligible. In these narratives, we possess straightforward powers of decision, judgment, and choice. Consciousness is equipped for just such little stories of choice: we encounter two paths, or a few fruits, or a few people, and we evaluate, decide, choose. We act so as to move in the direction of one of the possibilities. We say, “I’ll have an espresso.” We are not set up to see the great range of invisible backstage cognition that subtends what we take to be evaluation, decision, and choice, any more than we are set up to see the work of vision or language. But we are set up to make a blend of (1) the humanscale conscious experience of a chooser choosing and (2) the scientific question of how the mind decides. The result is homo economicus - a folk theory of a rational actor in the head, with preferences, choices, and actions. Homo economicus is a homunculus much like the little mental guy in the Cartesian theater. The Cartesian homunculus looks at the screen and perceives; homo economicus looks at choices and chooses. In the homo economicus blend, each of us is a stable chooser with interests, living a narrative moment as an agent with a personal identity, encountering other such agents. This humanscale narrative blend of the self as a stable identity with preferences that drive choice toward outcomes is marvelously useful, instrumental in action, motivation, and persuasion. It is a worthy fiction that helps us grasp ranges of reality that are diffuse and complicated. Because of double-scope blending, human beings are able to invent technologies. For the most part, we are built to understand these personal technologies. Speech, for example, is a personal technology developed for communication. It is at human scale. It operates in the present, within congenial human dimensions, with pleasing proportions. We have a simple conceptual frame for speech in consciousness. In this frame of Speech, one person uses M ARK T URNER 40 speech to communicate with another person, and they take turns. When we ask ourselves how we really work and what we really are, it is easy for us to blend the scientific matter with the human-scale conscious experience of speech. The result is a conception of self as a Converser. This is a blend of self with communications technology. Once we have this blend, we can use it as an input for further blending. Thought can be conceived of as a colloquium, either informally, as in our notion of thought as an internal debate or internal conversation, or scientifically, as when we imagine that different aspects or even anatomical locations of the brain are “talking” to each other, “communicating.” So it turns out that one of our most basic conceptions of self derives from blending our concept of self with our most basic communications technology, speech. Writing systems are another communications technology, only several thousand years old, and not widespread until quite recently in our history. Many conceptions of self derive from blending our mental activity with writing systems. These conceptions range from the notion of the tabula rasa to Hamlet's promise to the ghost: Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there; And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmix'd with baser matter. (Act 1, Scene 5) The invention of each new communications technology has brought new opportunities for understanding the self by blending our vague, diffuse notions of self over time with our notion of self as a user of the technology. These technologies include semaphore signaling systems, sign language, telegraphy, personal letter writing, telephony, radio, television, e-mail, and chat rooms. We know our technologies better than we know ourselves. Our communication technologies are designed to operate at human scale and are therefore at the center of what we know best. Accordingly, we think of ourselves in terms of them, by blending our general concept of ourselves with our understanding of how the communications technology works. Perhaps the next big platform in telecommunications is the 3D web, as exemplified in massively multiple online synthetic worlds such as Second Life. Second Life presents many opportunities for blending self with telecommunications technology so as to produce folk theories of the self that can play a role in advanced narrative cognition. The Mind is an Autocatalytic Vortex 41 The Mind is a Pack, a Troupe, a Self-Organizing Cyclone, an Autocatalytic Vortex This chapter has argued that although it is easy to notice blending of fullyformed particular narratives, blending is not subsequent to advanced narrative cognition. Rather, advanced narrative notions of self and others stretching across time derive from double-scope blending in the first instance. It is common in psychology to portray the modern mind as a Swiss Army Knife, consisting of modular tools, each designed for separate task, not working together. It is also common for theorists to select one or another of these tools as having made the big difference in the evolution of human beings. Social cognition is often selected as the big blade in the knife. But human higherorder cognition is not a Swiss Army Knife of separate, modular, independently arisen tools. On the contrary, double-scope blending made this range of advanced tools possible—language, advanced social cognition, mathematical invention, scientific discovery, art, religion, music, advanced tool use and advanced technology, dance, fashions of dress, sign systems. Because I have focused here on how double-scope blending advances narrative cognition—which includes the self and others as interactive intentional agents over time—I should be careful to preclude the misinterpretation that I am proposing that social cognition provided the great leap forward. On the contrary, social cognition, indispensable to human beings as it undoubtedly is, manifests only one of a set of mental abilities and behaviors made possible by double-scope blending. These double-scope blending abilities are a coordinated pack: they share a derivation and they work together evolutionarily and developmentally. Social cognition is absolutely crucial, as a member of that pack, but it does not per se explain human abilities in the realms of music, mathematics, technology, and so on. Social cognition may provide a better ratchet to hold onto creative achievements, but theory of human evolution and developments requires an explanation of the great improvement in creative and innovative capacities in the first instance. Absent those abilities, the ratchet effect has little to hold onto. Around the globe, there are millions of Cub Scouts. They all repeat, in unison, at every meeting the “Law of the Pack,” whose opening is: • The Cub Scout follows Akela. • The Cub Scout helps the pack go. • The pack helps the Cub Scout grow. Think of Akela as double-scope blending. This Pack of higher-order human cognitive abilities follows double-scope blending; double-scope blending made the Pack possible. Each of our higher-order cognitive abilities is part of a Pack and contributes to the power and achievement of the Pack, and the Pack helps each of the abilities operate and develop. The problem with this blend—the Pack blend of human cognition—is that, misunderstood, it might look as if it is projecting into the blend the very higher-order human capacities that we want to explain, just as the Swiss M ARK T URNER 42 Army Knife blend does, because the Swiss Army Knife of course accomplishes nothing unless a human being is using it, and it has none of the understanding or cognition of a human being. All of the cognition and understanding reside with the whittler. Modern cognitive science is working toward new models that (1) do not presuppose the human higher-order cognitive abilities we want to explain, and (2) do not assert a black box or a magic wand supposed to provide the power of human cognition but whose actual processes in human scale embodied cognition are left unexplained. We seek models according to which higher-order human cognition can derive from processes that are not themselves at their level, models in which the mind is a self-organizing system, a self-feeding cyclone, an autocatalytic vortex. Works Cited Chappatte, Patrick.“World Food Crisis.” Cartoon. The International Herald Tribune 11 April 2008. Available at <http: / / public.globecartoon.com/ cgi-bin/ WebObjects/ globecartoon.woa/ wo/ 1.0.9.3.8.9.0.1.0.1.1.1.1.0.1.5>. Coulson, Seana. Semantic Leaps: Frame-shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999. Ekman, Paul. “Facial expressions of emotions: New findings, new questions.” Psychological Science 3 (1992): 34-38. Fauconnier, Gilles. Mappings in Thought and Language. 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Tomasello, Michael, Josep Call, and Brian Hare. “Chimpanzees understand psychological states - the question is which ones and to what extent.” Trends in Cognitive Science 7.4 (2003): 153-156. Turner, Mark. The Blending Website. 2008. <http: / / blending.stanford.edu>. —. “The Way We Imagine.” The Imaginative Mind. Ed. Ilona Roth. Proceedings of the British Academy 147. London: Oxford University Press and The British Academy, 2007. 213-236. —. “Compression and Representation.” Language and Literature 15.1 (2006): 17-27. —. “The Art of Compression.” The Artful Mind. Ed. Mark Turner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. See <http: / / theartfulmind.stanford.edu>. —. “The origin of selkies.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 11.5-6 (2004): 90-115. —. “Double-scope stories.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Stanford: CSLI, 2003. 117-142. —. Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The Way We Think About Politics, Economics, Law, and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. —. “Figure.” Figurative Language and Thought. Cristina Cacciari, Ray Gibbs, Jr., Albert Katz, and Mark Turner. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. P ATRICK C OLM H OGAN Before Stories: Anna Karenina and the Emotional Structure of Lived Time Anna Karenina begins with a rift in a family. Dolly Oblonsky has discovered that her husband has been having an affair. One morning, a few days after the initial quarrel, Stiva Oblonsky, the husband, wakes up alone in his study. For a moment, he does not remember the rift, or even his own precise location in the home. For a moment, he is content, tacitly imagining his ordinary life, his ordinary bed. But then he remembers. “All the details” come rushing back, but they are not uniform. He particularly recalls, “the first moment when, on coming back cheerful and satisfied” he “saw her . . . holding the unlucky note that had revealed everything” (2). He goes on to reflect on the entire “event,” feeling particular torment over the “silly smile” with which he greeted his wife’s reproaches and the way, seeing this, “Dolly shuddered as though in physical pain” (3). He begins to feel “despair,” unable to answer the question “What is there to do? ” In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger draws a valuable distinction between the uniform, objective time of clocks and the subjective temporality of human experience; this is parallel with a distinction between the objective space of maps and the subjective spatiality of human activity. The opening of Anna Karenina brings home this distinction sharply. Spatiality is perhaps the more obvious here. In themselves, rooms are simply organizations of space. Objectively, Stiva’s location is simply a matter of a physical body located at a particular point relative to other physical bodies. But the spatial experience of Stiva is quite different from this. Stiva understands his location by contrast with where he should be, where he would like to be, where he would be if everything were right. Jean-Paul Sartre refers to this experience as nothingness. Stiva’s location is not only a matter of where he is, but equally of where he is not. My first contention here is that spatiality, the “existential” experience of location, is fundamentally an emotional experience. As my characterization of Stiva’s place already suggests, nothingness—the judgment of where one is not, should be, should have been—is, first of all, a function of what one feels about locations. In this case, there are two aspects to the feeling. The first is not precisely emotion per se, but rather forms the baseline from which emotions arise. This is normalcy. More often than not, emotions are a response to changes in what is routine, habitual, expected. We anticipate normalcy unreflectively. When our anticipations are violated, attentional focus is triggered (see, for example, Frijda 272-73, 318, and 386 ) and a sort of pre-emotional P ATRICK C OLM H OGAN 46 arousal occurs, an arousal that often prepares for a particular emotion (see, for instance, Simpson 692). It is only when Stiva puts down his feet toward the expected slippers and reaches out toward the expected robe, the moment when he finds the nothingness where the slippers and the robe should be, that his attention is focused. In this case, the focus is recollective; it is a matter of memory—and that increased attention carries in its train the entire sequence of happenings that pushed this body from his wife’s bed to the couch in the study. This leads to the second aspect of feeling that bears on our experience of space. Our experience of the world is not uniform. It is focused on particular areas. The center toward which we tend, and against which we experience all other places, is home. I am not simply referring here to the building we call “home,” as when we “go home” at the end of the day. Rather, I am referring to the location that, paradigmatically, both is home (in the sense of the origin and end-point of journeys) and, so to speak, “feels like home.” Thus it is a point of cognitive orientation (“Where is the restaurant? ” “About a five minute drive from your home”) and a point of emotional ease and security. The idea is not merely phenomenological. There are neurobiological reasons for “place attachment,” as it is called. Indeed, the same subcortical structures appear to be involved in place attachment as in attachment to persons, leading the affective neuroscientist, Jaak Panksepp, to suggest that perhaps “the ancient mechanisms of place attachment provided a neural impetus for the emergence of social attachments” (407 n.93). Deviation from normalcy or removal from home may have different valences. But leaving home and normalcy is always a matter of risk— specifically, emotional risk. That is what attentional focus responds to—risk, both threats and opportunities. Because leaving home and normalcy involves risk, it involves emotion as well, at least potentially. Conversely, being at home and surrounded by what is routine involves the avoidance of risk. This too can give rise to emotion, if risk is expected. In short, the spatiality of human being-in-the-world (to use the Heideggerian idiom) is a sort of emotional geography that develops out of fundamental human propensities toward organizing the world along two fundamental axes: attachment and normalcy. Normalcy in turn guides anticipation, which itself affects attentional focus and pre-emotional arousal, producing a state of emotion readiness. Similar points may be made about the temporality of our being-in-theworld. It too is organized - or, more precisely, encoded - emotionally. Encoding is the process whereby we select, segment (or “chunk”), and give preliminary structure to our experience. There are many different ways in which we encode aspects of our experience. These depend on current interests, expectations, contextual relations (e.g., figure/ ground relations in perception), and so forth. Moreover, there are different levels of encoding. Most basically, there is the perceptual encoding that gives us our sensory experience of the world. This is a function of the sensitivity of sensory neurons (e.g., visual Before Stories: Anna Karenina and the Emotional Structure of Lived Time 47 neurons, with their sensitivities to colors or particular orientations of lines), processes such as lateral inhibition (in which neurons surrounding a highly activated neuron are inhibited; this results in, for instance, the sharpening of lines in vision), etc. There are also higher levels of selection, segementation, and structuration. Some of these are self-conscious. In those, self-conscious cases, we may refer to the processes as “construal” or, even more broadly, “interpretation.” Though only partially recognized by theorists of emotion, it seems that our emotional encoding of experience too occurs repeatedly and at different levels. For example, there is a very basic level of emotional encoding that is bound up with perceptual encoding. Joseph LeDoux has argued that there are two perceptual streams, one of which goes directly to subcortical emotion-systems, while the other goes to cortical areas. Thus a potentially threatening movement in our vicinity might activate a circuit connected to the amygdala, thus generating fear. At the same time, a more informationally rich encoding of that experience may be sent to cortical areas, which may then inhibit or enhance the amygdala response. Put differently, in the “low road” (as LeDoux calls it), particular sorts of motion and proximity (commonly in relation to expectation) are selected by our sensory systems and given a tentative structure in relation to fear. At this fundamental level, emotional encoding is directly part of perceptual encoding. As we have seen, one aspect of emotional encoding is the encoding of space for home versus not home and familiar versus unfamiliar or expected versus unexpected. While the last has a geographical or spatial aspect, it should already be clear that it has a temporal aspect as well. When the expectation is a matter of slippers and a robe being absent, then the expectation is more spatial. When it is a matter of some movement in the nearby bushes, then it is more obviously a matter of time. Indeed, it seems plausible to assume that the encoding of occurrences as expected or unexpected is the first element or component of emotional temporality. I say “first element or component” because unexpectedness only excites attentional focus and gives rise to a pre-emotional state of increased arousal. The development of emotional experiences themselves involves further encoding of experiences as well. Consider, again, Stiva’s conflict with Dolly. As Stiva recalls this highly emotional experience (or sequence of experiences), a few components stand out sharply. The first is the image of Dolly with the letter, “looking at him with an expression of horror, despair, and fury” (2). What is striking here is that this immediately divides the experience into an almost atemporal focus and a broader periphery. The focal moment is in some way the key experience. It is the point that defines the emotion, or that crystallizes it. There is, of course, a larger event here. Dolly presumably moves and speaks; so does Stiva. The occurrences that constitute the event involve change. But this key moment is compressed, almost frozen. There is at least one other compressed, emotionally crucial moment as well--Stiva’s “silly smile” (3). Here, too, there must have been many occurrences surrounding the smile. But Stiva seems almost fixated on this one act, which he P ATRICK C OLM H OGAN 48 deeply regrets. In short, the temporal landscape here is uneven, and the unevenness is emotional. Some of the occurrences that constitute this sequence—itself forming a sort of whole or episode--are highly salient and consequential; others are downplayed. It is worth considering just what gives these particular moments their importance or, more precisely, what leads to this particular encoding of this sequence. Here, then, is the episode as Stiva recalls it. Stiva is returning home from the theater. His mood is “cheerful” and he carries “a huge pear for his wife.” He looks for her, sees her “in the bedroom holding the unlucky note” (2). She asks him, “What is this? This? ” (3). He responds with his smile. Her reaction follows. It is difficult to say how long this sequence took. There is a “torrent” of words that may have lasted ten seconds or ten minutes. Either way, the entire matter is reduced to the key emotional moments isolated above. We may refer to these moments as “incidents.” Incidents, as I am using the term, are the focal points of emotional response, the minimal units of emotional temporality. Moreover, they seem to operate through something akin to lateral inhibition. Specifically, the isolation of an incident appears to reduce the saliency of surrounding occurrences. (I will use “occurrence” as a neutral term, indifferent as to duration, structure, etc.) In this way, incidents stand out more sharply from the sequence of occurrences than is warranted by the occurrences themselves. Finally, incidents serve as the nuclei of “events.” An “event,” as I am using the term, is the next level of temporal segmentation, encompassing a cause and response to an incident. Events themselves compose episodes. An “episode,” in this sense, is a series of events which begins and ends in temporary normalcy. Above the episode, we have stories. A story begins and ends in permanent normalcy. To understand the segmentation of incidents here, and particularly its emotional nature, it is helpful to establish the context for Stiva’s meeting with his wife. One important aspect of emotional response is that our experience of emotion does not operate on an absolute scale. It is in part a function of the gradient of change from one moment to the next. To some extent, this is a matter of our prior mood. But it also crucially involves our anticipations, including—perhaps most importantly--our tacit anticipations (see my “Sensomotorische Projektion, Kontinuitätsbrüche und Emotion” and “Sensorimotor Projection”). In keeping with this, Tolstoy informs us about Stiva’s positive mood. Moreover, he suggests that Stiva anticipated enhancing his cheerfulness by presenting the pear to his wife and receiving a warm response from her. The oral, sensual nature of this particular piece of fruit also suggests that he envisioned at least a playful physical response from her. (Contrast, say, the gift of a book or theater tickets or a new hat.) This is not to say that we should envision Stiva as self-consciously thinking out all this. Rather, insofar as we imagine Stiva as a full person, we must imagine him as having a series of implicit anticipations. In this case, some such anticipations would have contributed to his motivation in bringing the pear. Given all this, we may begin to understand the isolation of this particular incident. When Before Stories: Anna Karenina and the Emotional Structure of Lived Time 49 Stiva sees Dolly holding the incriminating letter, he sees a face filled with “horror, despair, and fury” (2). This hostility directed at Stiva provides perhaps the most striking contrast with his own mood and, more significantly, his tacit anticipation of Dolly’s response to the pear. But why does Stiva (or Tolstoy) isolate just these aspects of the scene— Dolly’s expression and the letter itself? There is reason to believe that certain features of the world and of our own bodily experience are encoded almost immediately as emotion triggers (see chapter seven of my Cognitive Science and citations). I have already mentioned the encoding of, say, unexpected movement in the nearby bushes (thus occluded motion) and the direct activation of the amygdala, thus fear. This is a specific case of a more general tendency. We are ready or prone to encode certain sorts of experience as emotion-relevant. We have particular sensitivity to certain features of experience. When we encounter certain conditions or occurrences (or, to a lesser degree, when we imagine them), that encoding is triggered and the relevant emotion system is activated. Some of these sensitivities are innate. In particular, a good case can be made for considering one large set of emotion sensitivities as innate, and as particularly important for our emotional development. These are sensitivities to the “expressive outcomes” of emotion. Before continuing with this, we need to clarify the components of emotion. The most basic elements of an emotional experience are the following. First, there are eliciting conditions. These are the situations, occurrences, properties to which we are sensitive in emotional encoding and that serve to activate emotion systems. Second, there are expressive outcomes. These are the manifestations of an emotion that mark the subject as experiencing an emotion. They range from vocalization to facial gestures to postural changes to perspiration. A third component of emotion is actional response or what one does in reaction to the situation. This action may be undertaken to maintain a desirable situation or to alter an aversive situation. For example, when faced with an angry stranger, I might look for an escape route and begin to run away. A fourth component is the phenomenological tone, or just what the emotion feels like. This is important in part because it motivates us to sustain or change the situation by making us experience it as desirable or aversive. (We might isolate other components as well. However, these will suffice for present purposes.) A remarkable fact about expressive outcomes, briefly noted above, is that they are also eliciting conditions for emotion. Depending upon the nature of the emotion and its orientation, an emotional expression may affect us in a parallel or a complementary way. If I am out on a dark night in the woods and my companion gasps in fear, I will feel fear—a parallel emotion triggered by my companion’s emotion expression. When I meet a stranger in a dark alley and he looks at me with anger, I am also likely to feel fear, but in this case the fear will be a complementary emotion triggered by the expression of anger. Again, our emotional response to emotional expressions appears to be largely innate. Indeed, it is arguable that we do not need to posit P ATRICK C OLM H OGAN 50 much else in the way of innate emotional triggers. Our emotional sensitivity to the emotional expressions of others serves to guide us in just what we should fear, what should make us happy, and so on. As Margaret Atwood put it, “what to feel was like what to wear, you watched the others and memorized it” (131). For example, for some time, it was thought that fear of snakes is innate in monkeys. In fact, it may be that it is not innate per se. Rather, the fear of snakes is in effect “acquired” by monkeys when, at a young age, they experience their mother’s fear of snakes (see Damasio 47). It may still be that there is an innate fear-related sensitivity to snakes making this fear particularly easy to acquire. But, whether or not it is sufficient, the experience of someone else’s fear expression seems to be necessary in this case. On the other hand, there is something of a problem here. Suppose I am a small child, just “acquiring” emotional sensitivities. I see three people in a given situation. One is angry; one is afraid; a third is neutral. What governs my emotional acquisition in this case? There are probably several factors. For example, we may be more sensitive to emotions than to neutrality and fear may be more contagious than anger. Moreover, orientation of the emotion (signaled by line of sight, posture, and other expressive factors) is obviously crucial; anger oriented toward me is something very different from anger oriented toward someone else. But there is another important factor as well, already suggested in the preceding account. As I mentioned, monkeys acquire fear of snakes from their mothers. This indicates that there is some isolation of particular individuals whom we trust—or, more precisely, individuals with whom we have formed a basic attachment relation. We acquire our emotional sensitivities disproportionately from these individuals—most often, our parents and, of these, most commonly our mothers. For example, in the preceding scenario (of the three people exhibiting different emotional expressions), I am more likely to feel what is relevant to my mother in this context—fear, if she is afraid of something in the environment; anger, if she is angry at something; amusement if she is laughing, and so on. Thus it is no accident that Stiva experiences a particular emotional spike in connection with the facial expression of his wife, an attachment figure (on spikes in an emotion experience, see Smith). Note that, in this case, the response is partially complementary and partially parallel. Stiva feels “despair” in parallel with her “despair” (2, 3). But he feels fear and shame in the face of her “fury” and “horror” (2). No less importantly, Stiva remarks on her posture and movement. These too are expressive. He had tacitly imagined her “bustling about” in the sort of motion that would fit with his own “cheerful” mood. He is faced, instead, with her “sitting motionless” (2), thus in an attitude in keeping with her despair—the one parallel emotion that he experiences (2, 3). (The description of Dolly as motionless suggests that, at this point, despair is her predominant emotion, with the fury rather subdued.) So, the first incident of this episode marks a moment of sharp emotional change, due to a sharp change in expectations, a change triggered by emotional expressions from an attachment figure. It is becoming clear why so Before Stories: Anna Karenina and the Emotional Structure of Lived Time 51 much else in the larger occurrence fades into obscurity. However, we are still left with one unexplained detail—why the letter? There are several reasons why the letter is important. I will address only one. When we experience an emotional spike, our cognitive response is partially automatic. Crucially, we shift our attentional focus. But just what do we shift our attentional focus to? It is relatively simple—causes, or possible causes. Almost immediately upon experiencing an emotion, we attribute a cause. More precisely, we narrow our attentional focus to candidate causes, attributing a cause very quickly. This is crucial because causal attribution is a necessary prerequisite for any actional outcome. Put very crudely, if I am afraid, I need to know what I am afraid of in order to run away in the right direction. It may seem that this is just obvious. We just know directly what causes our emotion. Indeed, it may seem that we would not even have the emotion if we were unable to attribute a cause. But, in fact, our causal attributions are highly fallible. Later in the novel, Tolstoy makes the point that “Sometimes [Anna] had no idea of what it was that she was afraid of and what she wanted. Whether she was afraid of what had happened, and wanted that, or of what was going to happen, and wanted that, or just what it was that she wanted, she had no idea” (345). Research suggests that Anna’s state is far less remarkable than it might seem. The condition is unusual only in the fact that Anna recognizes that she does not know the cause of her fear or of her desire. We never directly know these causes. We must always infer them. Most often, however, we do not realize that we have to do this. We think that we know. As Frijda explains, “One knows, generally, that one has an emotion; one does not always know why, and what exactly makes one have it; and if one does know, it is a construction, a hypothesis, like those one makes about the emotions of someone else” (464). Moreover, even when “correct,” our causal attributions are only partial. I may feel sad for many reasons. But I will be inclined to isolate only one or two—the most obvious or salient ones, but not necessarily the most significant ones (see Clore and Ortony 27, Zajonc 48, and Damasio 75). Of course, we usually do get our causal attributions roughly right. Moreover, in most cases, they are relatively simple. Indeed, they are bound up with normalcy. I am going along in the usual way, then receive a letter explaining that I made a mistake in my income tax return and, rather than receiving a $392 refund, I actually owe $4,723. Later in the day, I feel unhappy. I attribute it, not to the ordinary things that occur every day, but to the unusual and unexpected occurrence. One important, simplifying aspect of our automatic and immediate causal attribution is that we tend to stop with the most proximate cause. We may elaborate on the causal sequence subsequently and self-consciously. But we tend not to do this spontaneously. The one clear and consistent exception to this is the case of emotions that result from other people’s emotional expressions. We may refer to these as “expression-triggered emotions.” In those cases, it is crucial that we attribute a cause, not only to our emotions, but to the emotions of the other person as well. If my friend shouts in fear, it is his P ATRICK C OLM H OGAN 52 shout that causes my fear. But I do not want to run away from his shout or from him. Rather, I want to run away from, say, the bear he has spotted. Indeed, in the case of expression-triggered emotions, causal attribution may in some cases precede the full communication of the emotion, for that causal attribution is often critical to the determination of whether one’s emotional response is parallel or complementary. Here we may return to the letter. The letter figures importantly because it is the salient object for causal attribution. Its salience is enhanced by Stiva’s expectation of handing Dolly the pear, an expectation that would draw his attention to anything she is holding, and of course by her following question, with its demonstrative repetition (“What is this? This? ”), presumably accompanied by appropriate movement. Indeed, the question itself is included in Stiva’s recollection primarily because it converges with Stiva’s attentional focus on the letter as the cause of Dolly’s emotion. But, of course, this cause does not in itself give the crucial information about the direction of Dolly’s emotion. Thus we need to add a further sort of inference here. In expression-triggered emotions, we need to isolate the target of the other person’s feeling as well as the cause. The two are often the same, but they need not be. We commonly isolate the target of an emotion by isolating the target of a trajectory of motion, a look, a verbal address. In the case we have been considering, the emotional target is, of course, Stiva, for Dolly was “looking at him” with her “expression of horror, despair, and fury” (2). This target-isolation also makes Stiva salient for himself. Indeed, recognizing oneself as the target of someone else’s attention regularly makes one self-conscious, makes one aware of oneself as an object. This self-awareness may have different foci. For example, it may be a matter of physical beauty or status markers (as in dress), racial group or religious affiliation (if this is indicated by visible signs), or something else. For our purposes, it may most importantly be a matter of one’s own emotional expressions, particularly in a context where emotional expressions are already salient, as here. In keeping with this, the second incident in this episode is Stiva’s experience of his own facial gesture, his “silly smile” (3). Before going on to this, however, we need to return to the hierarchical organization of temporality. The treatment of causal attribution begins to move us from the incident (Dolly motionless in the chair with the expression of horror, despair and fury) to the encompassing event. As I briefly indicated above, the event includes the proximate cause and what we might call the “situational response,” the immediate actional outcome. Consider a paradigmatic scenario for fear. A predator appears unexpectedly within my field of vision. I feel fear—attributing this (accurately) to the presence of the predator. Since this is a highly aversive situation, my unreflective response is to try to alter it. Since it is fear in particular, my response is to try to run away. I look around for a path that will take me away from the predator. The situation for Stiva is similar, though more complex. It is highly aversive. Thus his spontaneous impulse is to change the situation or his relation to it. This gen- Before Stories: Anna Karenina and the Emotional Structure of Lived Time 53 eral response is particularized by the specific emotions involved—the shame, despair, and fear or anxiety. The difficulty for Stiva is that this combination of emotional responses does not point toward any clear actional outcome. Shame counsels concealment. Shame is bound up with our acute sense that we are the target of someone else’s aversion, particularly their disgust, physical or moral. Our immediate response to this is the wish to hide. Note that this sense of shame further enhances Stiva’s self-consciousness about himself as the target of Dolly’s attention. This self-consciousness is likely to make him intensely aware of his own emotional expressions. The salience of these expressions increases the likelihood that he will isolate them in causal attribution for any subsequent incidents in Dolly’s emotional response. Thus Dolly’s subsequent shudder, “torrent” of words, and exit might in principle have been provoked by any number of things. Stiva’s self-consciousness at this moment makes his own emotional expression—in this case, the facial gesture—highly salient for him, thus a likely object for causal attribution. It may then, in turn, become isolated as the focus of his own intense regret, thus becoming an incident in a separate emotional event. In any case, Stiva’s experience of shame points toward an actional outcome of hiding. However, it may also point to an actional outcome of appeasement or submission. Many emotions involve more than one possible actional outcome. Typically, they are hierarchized—in fear, first try flight, but, if that does not work, try to fight (or, in certain cases, freeze). More generally, actional outcomes are bound up with spontaneous, rapid, unselfconscious possibility assessments. An assessment that one option is not viable shifts one’s response down the hierarchy of actional alternatives. In some cases, that shift can be repeated until no options remain. Tolstoy is particularly sensitive to our sense of such complete impossibility. Thus, when Stiva first begins to recall his situation, he thinks of “his impossible position” (2). He experienced the first shift in the direction of such impossibility in relation to shame when he initially saw Dolly holding the letter, for he could not hide. This left an appeasement response as his only option. We will return to this below. Stiva finds himself in a similar position with regard to the fear or anxiety. He could, of course, flee the immediate situation. However, even in the short term, that would not prove much of a solution. Where would he go? He could not simply remove himself to another part of the house, since Dolly could follow. If he left the house, where would he spend the night? I do not believe that this is a matter of long-term calculations, as the preceding questions might suggest. The exclusion of flight as a possible response is much the same as would occur in cases of physical threat when all escape routes pose dangers (the predator could catch me if I go right, but there is a cliff to left). A subsequent response option is to fight. But that too is not possible here, in part because Dolly’s “fury” has not manifested itself in physical aggression. The only possible fight would be a verbal conflict over Stiva’s guilt— P ATRICK C OLM H OGAN 54 “making denials or excuses” (3), as Stiva puts it retrospectively. But Stiva is guilty; the letter proves it. More importantly, his own sense of shame inhibits his fight response along precisely this axis of dispute. In addition, the fight response relies on a feeling of anger being connected with the anxiety. However, Stiva’s sense of his own guilt inhibits this response. Stiva “couldn’t manage to put on the right expression . . . now that his guilt was exposed.” There are several possibilities for that “right expression.” One involves “acting offended” (3), thus a form of anger, but, again, that is emotionally excluded. Freezing too is an option within the hierarchy of fear outcomes. However, it is preferential only in cases where one is not already the target of gaze, motion, and/ or address from the threatening agent. None of this is the case for Stiva. On the other hand, freezing tends to occur when no other actional outcome is initiated and this partially happens with Stiva. Finally, there is the option of appeasement. This opposes both flight and aggressive motion and thus may partially converge with freezing. Still, as in the case of shame, it is not clear that this provides a solution. The despair felt by Stiva only compounds the problem. Despair leads to just the sort of motionlessness that Stiva sees in Dolly. It is bound up with Stiva’s possibility assessments—or, more properly, impossibility assessments: “What is there to do? He said to himself in despair, without finding an answer” (3). The despair inhibits concealment, flight, conflict—or even much in the way of appeasement. It is most obviously compatible with submission, but submission of a very minimal sort—submission that does not really go beyond the absence of a refusal to submit. What, then, does Stiva do? What is the actional outcome of his emotion, his response to this provoking incident, the outcome that results from the interaction of these emotion systems and situational constraints? It is his silly smile. It is a form of emotional expression that serves generally to indicate benevolence. It is a “goodhearted” smile (3). The evolutionary reflections of writers such as Panksepp suggest that the smile is not entirely submissive, but incorporates a response to threat as well. As Panksepp explains, “The smile . . . probably harks back to ancient mammalian threat displays.” In humans, the probable evolutionary adaptation behind the display [of teeth] is that the potentially tense situation will require no further action if one smiles. The human smile may have evolved . . . to communicate that one is basically friendly but quite capable of dealing with any difficulties that may arise (287). Though this fits Stiva’s situation, I am skeptical about this analysis. Izard and Ackerman seem to me more accurate in stating that “The smile has the capacity to operate as a universally recognizable signal of readiness for friendly interaction” (258). Brody and Hall note that smiling “is socially useful in that it puts others at ease” (346). It is difficult to reconcile this with the idea that smiling communicates threat. In keeping with Izard, Ackerman, Brody, and Before Stories: Anna Karenina and the Emotional Structure of Lived Time 55 Hall, then, it seems that we are most justified in taking Stiva’s smile as something like an appeasement response. Tolstoy later makes this use of smiling explicit. Seryozha is a poor student, yet he “always conquered” his tutor with a “gay and affectionate smile” (625). Indeed, Stiva himself later has an unpleasant exchange with Karenin about Anna. In response to Karenin’s anger, Stiva’s face assumes “an embarrassed smile” as he says, “forgive me then, forgive me if I’ve wounded you” (867). Stiva’s response to Dolly is an expressive and actional outcome of the same sort. (Of course, it is problematic as such, since being an unfaithful husband is more emotionally divisive than being a bad student.) At the same time, it is more than this. First, it is a sort of default facial expression for Stiva. It is his “usual” expression (3), by implication an expression that his face assumes when there is no strong emotional reason for it to assume any other expression—or when there are conflicting emotional pressures that are not easily resolved. Perhaps most importantly, the smile suggests Stiva’s own attitude toward himself. The target of Stiva’s smile is in part Dolly, suggesting his goodhearted friendliness. But it is in part himself. Again, at this point, he is highly self-consciousness. With regard to himself, this smile suggests his sense of his own ludicrousness. He feels the smile to be “silly” because he feels himself to be silly. It may, then, be consistent with a sense of shame. Later in the novel, Tolstoy reports something of just this sort. Specifically, Levin smiles in such a way as to express the feeling that he is at once ridiculous and blameworthy: “Levin smiled at his own thoughts and shook his head at them disapprovingly; a feeling something like remorse tormented him” (581). One obvious problem with this as an appeasement response, however, is that a smile is ambiguous (as the preceding comments already indicate). Beyond a desire for reconciliation or a sense of one’s own ludicrousness, it could suggest self-contentment, amusement, or mockery. Here we need to shift to Dolly’s perspective. She anticipates some strongly negative emotional response on Stiva’s part—perhaps remorse, perhaps anger, but certainly something clearly indicating that he finds the situation emotionally aversive. In the context of this expectation, any sign of a positive affect is, at best, disconcerting. In Dolly’s case, it pushes her complex emotions in the direction of fury (rather than horror or despair). This is compounded by the fact that his smile would tend to frustrate Dolly’s preferences as well. Specifically, her preference—based in part on attachment—would be that he is not guilty (in which case, he would respond with anger) or that, if guilty, he begs forgiveness. Apparent amusement frustrates both desires—and frustration is a primary trigger for anger. Before turning to Dolly’s response, however, we need to conclude something about the occurrences discussed thus far. We have just outlined an event. We have the emotion-provoking incident (Dolly, motionless, looking at Stiva with horror, despair, and fury), causal attribution (the letter), target isolation for the emotional expression, and the expressive and actional out- P ATRICK C OLM H OGAN 56 comes. Stiva experiences this as an event; Tolstoy depicts it as such, and we presumably experience it as such as well. This event is causally linked to a second event. In this case, Stiva’s expressive and actional outcome (the smile) serves as an emotion-provoking incident for Dolly. This makes Dolly angry, leading to the expressive outcome of a shudder, followed by the actional outcome of shouting and leaving the room. Dolly plays out a more ordinary sort of anger response here. She experiences something akin to “physical pain” (3) and responds with aggression—verbal rather than physical. When the aggression is complete, she leaves, flight following fight in a fairly predictable way. Thus we have a second event. I will not consider this in great detail. However, it should be clear that the incidents arise in much the same way here as in the first case and that the linked event forms by the same principles as well. For Dolly, Stiva’s facial expression is a highly emotionally provocative violation of expectation and, if construed as mockery or even amusement, a violation of attachment-based preference as well. The target isolation is obvious (we can assume Dolly takes him to be smiling at her). Finally, the actional and expressive outcomes are clear. It is not at all necessary that two people should experience the same occurrences as incidents or the same complexes of occurrences as events. Indeed, there will invariably be some differences. However, in this case, the incident for Stiva is the same as the incident for Dolly (at least as Stiva infers this as an emotional cause)—his silly smile. Both seem to view the subsequent shudder and departure as the expressive and actional outcomes of Dolly’s response to that incident. (Tolstoy, presumably reflecting Stiva’s understanding, reduces Dolly’s words to their expressive aspect, noting their violence and bitterness, but not their semantic content.) Dolly’s departure, the end of this second event, marks an interruption in the causal sequence, if only temporarily. That is why this sequence of two events constitutes an episode. For example, that is why it makes sense for Tolstoy to end the first chapter with Stiva, “in despair,” thinking “But what can I do? What is there to do? . . . without finding an answer” (3). Prior to the first incident, we have ordinary life, normalcy. After Dolly leaves, there is a sense in which that situation is restored. For example, Stiva is able to go to sleep and to wake up expecting to find his robe and slippers. He would not be able to do this if Dolly were in the room, questioning him about the letter or berating him. But, at the same time, it is clear that the emotions aroused by these incidents and their encompassing events will have further expressive and actional consequences. In other words, it is clear that further events will follow in the same emotional/ causal sequence. Indeed, the incident that provoked Stiva’s regret has not been developed into a full event. The possibility of any satisfactory actional outcome (such as a plea for forgiveness) has been lost by Dolly’s departure. The temporary return to normalcy marks this as a structural unit of emotional history. But it is not a story, because the enc- Before Stories: Anna Karenina and the Emotional Structure of Lived Time 57 hainment of emotional causes initiated by the opening incident—and sustained most forcefully by the final, unacted incident--will continue. I indicated above that a story structure occurs when we move from normalcy to emotion-provoking incidents embedded in events and developed in causally-linked episodes, all followed by a return to normalcy. The difference between an episode and a story is simply that the normalcy is enduring in a story. For example, in a romantic plot, the lovers are married and live happily ever after. In these cases, there is no longer any need for further actional outcomes. In comic stories, the chain leads to a non-aversive situation, a situation that is sustained by normalcy and that we emotionally wish to be sustained. Alternatively, it can turn out that there is an aversive situation, but one that it is genuinely impossible to alter. In other words, it may turn out that no actional outcome will ameliorate conditions. In this case, we have a return to normalcy also. The causal sequence ends because an unalterable outcome has occurred. This is, obviously, the tragic version of a story. In a romantic plot, we find it when, for example, one of the lovers dies. Novels often have one or more extensively elaborated stories that span much of the work as well as many briefer stories that are more localized. In the case of Anna Karenina, the two extended stories are both romantic—the story of Anna and Vronsky (which ends with Anna’s death, thus tragically) and the story of Levin and Kitty (which ends in the couple’s ordinary life together, thus in a non-aversive return to normalcy—though there are complications here due to the intertwining of this story with another narrative regarding Levin’s spiritual self-realization). The various stories that comprise a novel are often related to one another in treating similar relations and themes. The rift between Stiva and Dolly that opens the novel is an obvious case of this sort, paralleling, as it does, some aspects of the two main plot lines. More exactly, despite Stiva’s feeling, at the end of chapter one, that his situation is impossible, it is not really impossible. It is apparently impossible in the short term, but not in the long term. Again, it is clear that the incidents will continue to provoke emotions, actions, and further incidents. The issue is whether there is anything that will produce a “resolution,” either a comic, non-aversive situation which demands no further action, or a tragic situation that could never be altered. In principle, there are several possibilities here. Tolstoy offers one option in particular. Indeed, it is named by Stiva in the course of this episode, and eventually taken up by him—“asking forgiveness” (3). A recurring motif in the novel is that human emotional conflict requires continual forgiveness—the guilty parties seeking forgiveness, the offended parties granting it. We are oriented toward this from the epigraph to the novel, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (xv). Punishment should be in the hands of God alone. The tragedies of human life are often tragedies of emotion. In Tolstoy’s novel, forgiveness has the highest place among responses to emotion-inducing occurrences. Indeed, it is itself an emotional response, and one that is not unrelated to attachment—as we see when Dolly forgives Stiva later on, when Levin forgives Kitty for reject- P ATRICK C OLM H OGAN 58 ing his first proposal, and when Kitty forgives Levin for his pre-marital affairs. Forgiveness is what rounds out this particular episode, turns it into a story, brings the life of Stiva and Dolly back from this aberration and rift into normalcy. The normalcy is, of course, not untroubled. But that normalcy, and its troubles, are no longer part of this particular story. In sum, our experiences of both space and time are encoded nonhomogeneously. The principles by which objects and occurrences are selected, the principles by which they are segmented, and the principles by which they are structured, both internally and in embedded hierarchies, are crucially (though of course not exclusively) emotional. In relation to this, our sense of normalcy, our expectations, our experience of other people’s emotional expressions, our attachment relations with those people, and our tacit possibility assessments are of particular importance in our organization of emotional geography and, even more, emotional history. Finally, the hierarchy of that organization involves almost atemporal emotional causes or incidents, “thicker” structures of causal attribution and actional outcome (events), episodes or sequences of causally linked events that move from normalcy to temporary normalcy, and, finally, stories that conclude the sequence of episodes with enduring normalcy. Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1972. Brody, Leslie R., and Judith A. Hall. “Gender, Emotion, and Expression.” Handbook of Emotions. Ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones. 2nd ed. New York: Guilford Press, 2000. 338-49. Clore, Gerald L., and Andrew Ortony.“Cognition in Emotion: Always, Sometimes, or Never? ” Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion. Ed. Richard D. Land and Lynn Nadel, with Geoffrey L. Ahern, John J. B. Allen, Alfred W. Kaszniak, Steven Z. Rapcsak, and Gary E. Schwartz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 24-61. Damasio, Antonio. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003. Frijda, Nico H. The Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1986. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1927. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists. New York: Routledge, 2003. —.“Sensomotorische Projection, Kontinuitätsbrüche und Emotion im Filmerleben.” Trans. Jens Eder. Audiovisuelle Emotionen: Emotionsdarstellung und Emotionsvermittlung durch audiovisuelle Medienangebote. Ed. Anne Bartsch, Jens Eder and Kathrin Fahlenbrach. Köln, Germany: Herbert von Halem Verlag, 2007. 361-81. —.“Sensorimotor Projection, Violations of Continuity, and Emotion in the Experience of Film.” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 1.1 (2007): 41-55. Izard, Carroll E., and Brian P. Ackerman.“Motivational, Organizational, and Regulatory Functions of Discrete Emotions.” Handbook of Emotions. Ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones. 2nd ed. New York: Guilford Press, 2000. 253-64. Before Stories: Anna Karenina and the Emotional Structure of Lived Time 59 LeDoux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Touchstone, 1996. Panksepp, Jaak. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. 1943. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square, 1966. Simpson, Joseph R, Jr., Wayne C. Drevets, Abraham Z. Snyder, Debra A. Gusnard, and Marcus E. Raichle. “Emotion-Induced Changes in Human Medial Prefrontal Cortex: II. During Anticipatory Anxiety.” PNAS 98.2 (16 January 2001): 688-93. Smith, Greg M. “Local Emotions, Global Moods, and Film Structure.” Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion. Ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. 103-26. Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. 1877. Trans. Joel Carmichael. New York: Bantam, 2006. Zajonc, Robert B. “Feeling and Thinking: Closing the Debate Over the Independence of Affect.” Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition. Ed. Joseph P. Forgas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 31-58. A LEXANDER B ERGS When concepts clash ... 1 Coercion, in a nutshell, is what we can find when two linguistic elements which are actually incompatible are combined. This could either result in a completely unacceptable combination (*I the read a book), or the combination may somehow be acceptable and may make sense as in “I have had too much book today” or “I had three coffees this morning”. Much is a modifier for uncountables, book is countable, a combination of the two should not be OK. Still this sentence (I have had too much book today) can be parsed. And the same applies to three coffees. The numeral three suggests countability, coffee is an uncountable noun, and a combination of the two should not be acceptable. However, constructions like this are actually in use. Similar examples include sentences like: “You have apple on your shirt”. Apple is countable and should not be available here as a kind of substance, as in, for example, “you have gravy on your shirt”. And again, while the sentence as such should actually not be acceptable, occurrences like these are not uncommon. In fact, there are many more examples that would probably not be found in a standard grammar book and that would yet be perfectly acceptable in everyday spoken English. In many of these cases, speaker-hearers arrive at an interpretation of the utterance through coercion, i.e. through a reinterpretation that one of the items or the construction as such forces onto the other. Ziegeler (992) defines coercion simply as the resolution of mismatch. Note that coercion is actually invisible in the item itself and in the syntactic environment, i.e. it is rather unpredictable. Coercion usually takes place when specific items are used in certain specific linguistic and/ or extra-linguistic contexts. Three coffees is great, three teas is a little bit more awkward, but probably still OK, three waters is, arguably, very strange and not really acceptable. All three, coffee, tea, water are regular, liquid uncountables, and they are put into one and the same environment. I think it is quite clear that there is hardly any predictable grammatical factor here (and I leave it up to the reader to test other liquids, from beer through milk to tequila). The situation is even further complicated by the fact extralinguistic factors seem to influence the acceptability of potentially coercive combinations. While three coffees is fine in almost any social context today, three waters is only (or at least much more) acceptable in restaurant scenes or in scenes where water is regularly discussed or served. The point is that coercion in linguistics seems to be closely connected to both linguistic (co-textual) and non-linguistic (contex- 1 This paper is dedicated to my son Julius, who spent much of the time when it was written on my lap, and apparently provided excellent inspiration. A LEXANDER B ERGS 62 tual) factors. Only in certain environments and situations do hearers have the chance to see the interpretation intended by the speaker. So when these ‘awkward’ constructions are used they can trigger „the need to resolve semantic conflict in contexts which require particular reinterpretation mechanisms to be fully processed“ (Ziegeler 992). Many approaches to coercion distinguish between what has been called implicit and explicit type-shifting. Type-shifting here simply means that „a construction denotes a different kind of entity or event from the lexical expression with which it is combined“ (Michaelis 2004: 29). Explicit typeshifting occurs when a lexical item (or its projection) is shifted in its designation by the grammatical construction with which it is usually combined. One textbook example is the mismatch between uncountable mass nouns like bread and partitive expressions like a piece of, which essentially refer to countable portions. Obviously the two can be combined successfully into a piece of bread. This is what is called explicit type-shifting, since the shift is directly derivable from the combination of parts. It is predictable in some way. Things are very different when we have a countable noun such as sheet. This can also combine with a partitive construction, but here a new meaning is contextually forced into the lexical item: “give me a shred of sheet”. Here, sheet must be rather seen like an uncountable substance. This has been called implicit type-shifting, since it is neither predictable nor derivable once we know the parts that combine. And there is one more concept needed, the socalled override principle. The override principle basically says that the meaning of lexical items is adjusted to, or overridden by, the syntactic configurations in which they occur. In other words, syntactic patterns essentially determine meaning, not just single lexical items. It is worth pointing out here that coercion may sound weird and rare and awkward, but that many scholars see coercive phenomena even in everyday grammatical structures. There is nominal coercion as in “She had a beer”, where beer is made countable, aspectual coercion as in “I’m loving it! ”, where to love is made dynamic, complement coercion as in “linguistics bores me”, where linguistics is made animate, and quite a few more. So it seems indeed fair to say that coercion as such is part and parcel of everyday communication, that it is the rule rather than the exception. The question now is, however: what does that have to do with the literary mind? First of all there is good reason to believe that coercion and its basic mechanisms are not just some technical gimmick that linguists came up with to make the data fit their theories. Rather, it can be assumed that coercion, and the resolution of mismatch are very central, cognitively grounded and well-motivated mechanisms which are independent of language as such. This is reflected partly in the pragmatic slogan coined by the psychologist Bartlett in 1932: “effort after meaning” (20, 44). Apparently, human beings invest a remarkable amount of effort and energy to make sense of things they perceive, to find, or create meaning, even when the things they encounter super- When concepts clash ... 63 ficially are incompatible and do not “make sense”. So when we do encounter apparent nonsense we have an inbuilt drive (or need) to make sense of it, to find some meaning. In linguistic pragmatics, for example, we have the wellknown cooperative principle developed by Grice with its four maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relevance, and Manner. These maxims are the foundation of successful communication: speak as much as is required (quality), only say what you believe to be true (quality), be relevant (relevance), and be orderly and clear (manner). However, in our daily communication we do not always follow the maxims. In fact, we flout them quite often. The flouting of conversational maxims, however, does not lead to a breakdown in communication, but rather helps addressees to see that the speaker probably performed an indirect speech act which now needs to be recovered. Quite simply: when somebody in a faculty meeting exclaims, out of the blue, “It’s cold in here! ”, he or she certainly does not want to describe the room temperature. The utterance thus flouts the maxim of relevance. But this obvious violation leads the hearers to the suspicion (on the basis of ‘effort after meaning’) that something else must have been intended: “Close the window”, “Turn up the heating”. If all this is true, and coercion plus effort-after-meaning are more general, cognitive phenomena, it seems quite plausible to assume that they are also operational in other domains, and not just everyday language. Or if we want to phrase that as a question: does the literary mind also work with coercion? In the following, I will argue that it does indeed. It might even be argued that mismatch and coercion are an integral part of many literary works, and that they are relevant on a number of different levels. In the following, I will discuss several types of literary products and literary effects, starting with poetry and the lexicon-syntax interface. Quite a number of literary strategies, first and foremost in poetry, operate with what we would now have to call mismatch. Some examples: Death, be not proud, thou some have callèd thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; (Donne 1296) Quite obviously, this is a case of complement coercion: death can’t be proud, i.e. the semantics of the subject and its corresponding predicate are incongruent and should not go together as such. Similarly, E. E. Cummings provides us with excellent material: O sweet spontaneous earth how often have the doting fingers of prurient philosophers pinched and poked A LEXANDER B ERGS 64 thee , has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty . (e.e. cummings 272) Again, this is a case of complement (or maybe modifier) coercion: earth can’t be sweet or spontaneous, at least not in a straightforward way. Also, pinching and poking is not what philosophers’ (doting) fingers usually do and science does not have a thumb. In the first case, the modifying adjectives sweet and spontaneous are usually not available for the head noun earth. In the second case, subject and predicate are incongruent. In the third case, we find a possessive or partitive construction with elements that are incompatible: science is an abstract noun and therefore does not allow for concrete parts to be attached to it. Other literary genres also abound in coercive phenomena, even children’s books are full of semantico-grammatical mismatches. One example is “Wolves stopped being dribbly” (David Melling, The Kiss That Missed). The concept of dribbliness is usually not associated with wolves. So, in sum, it seems that coercion on this level, since it is so much based on daily language use, is also natural and wide-spread in literature. One might even take this one step further and argue that on this general level, coercion and mismatch are very helpful tools for speakers to express their inbuilt linguistic creativity. Keller, Haspelmath, Haiman, and many others have pointed out that speakers usually like to play around with their language, to be new, innovative, expressive with what they say. Speakers simply like to bend the rules of their language. On the level that has just been described this is not only quite easy but also a very effective and powerful expressive device in everyday language and also in literature. But mismatches in literature do not just occur on the simple semanticogrammatical level. Looking at the well-known poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth” by Wilfred Owen, there is another interesting mismatch to be found here: What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? - only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, - The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for them from sad shires. What candles may be held to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes When concepts clash ... 65 Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes. The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds. (Owen 540f.) Apart from the many mismatches on the level of semantics and grammar (e.g., “anger of the guns”), it is the form of the poem itself which is actually incongruent with its message, its content. The form, obviously, is that of a traditional Shakespearean sonnet, and thus usually associated with love, requited love, beauty, maybe even politics, mortality. Shakespearean sonnets usually do not describe war, the details of warfare and fighting scenes, or their consequences in such a brutal and open way as Owen’s poem. In contrast to many Shakespearean sonnets, it is somehow shockingly unambiguous in its message and function. What we see here might be regarded as an interesting clash of form and function on a higher level. Needless to say, this is not as common in everyday language. Although even here form and content sometimes clash. This can even be taken a little bit further. At least since Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, authors have played around with literary forms, have breached conventions, have stretched limits, have transgressed the boundaries of tradition. Some of the latest examples are Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Only Revolutions. Both these works which superficially may look like novels are nowhere near what Ian Watt, and with him Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding would probably have accepted as such. Similar phenomena in other genres, such as drama, have to be discussed in a separate paper. In sum, the diagnosis is fairly clear: there are numerous instances and cases of mismatches in literature. What remains to be done now is to show in how far these mismatches and their processing are similar to the mismatches and their resolution through coercion in linguistics. For the sake of clarity, let me repeat the main features of mismatches and coercion in linguistics. Explicit type-shifting happens when the combination of two elements predictably leads to new interpretations of one of the two. Implicit type-shifting is more or less unpredictable. The override principle essentially says that other things being equal, syntactic structures win out over lexical insertions, and so determine the meaning of a construction (e.g., bread looses its meaning when it is inserted into the partitive construction). There is reason to argue that metonymy, for example, as in “The ham sandwich wants to pay”, is usually a question of explicit type-shifting since metonymic processes are normally contiguous and, given enough cultural background, fairly easy to decode or predict. Their composition is, on the surface, incompatible, but their meaning is usually derivable from their parts plus contextual background. Note that the latter can be very important. Jackendoff (53) claims that “He poured three cements today“ is not possible, while Ziegeler (1002) points out that in certain context (e.g. on a specialized construction site) the utterance might not be so bad. Metaphor, on the other A LEXANDER B ERGS 66 hand, seems to be an example of implicit type-shifting, since metaphors are usually based on analogy (see Hopper and Traugott), but still unpredictable as such. These two facts already account for quite a few simple, basic mismatch resolutions in literature. It gets much more interesting when we turn to the larger structures. How do people resolve conflicts between form and function on the level of genre and the like? First, it needs to be pointed out of course that they need to perceive the mismatch as such. In contrast to linguistic structures, where explicit type-shifting (like metonymy) might be something much more intuitive, here we need active, intentional participation. Only somebody who is familiar with Shakespearean sonnets will be able to see the dissonance and mismatch in Owen’s poetry. Somebody who does not know what a Shakespearean sonnet is will simply miss this point. N.B., this is not to say that readers without this background cannot understand the work as such. It means quite simply that such readers will miss this particular point in their interpretation. Their reading, however, might highlight a number of other fascinating and equally interesting aspects. But even if you perceive the mismatch, the question certainly is: how do you resolve it? We might find some kind of override principle here, namely that external form (which we usually perceive first, before we look at content) usually determines our expectations and our interpretation. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake essentially count as novels and are treated as such. They have the shape, size, and prize of novels, are marketed as such and would be sold as novels. Hence the potential readers would approach these works as novels, i.e. as works of fiction, which essentially follow the rules that define this particular genre for us today. What about mismatches in content, then? What about the postmodern novel, such as Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Satanic Verses, or perhaps even Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity? Do readers discard them as nonsensical? Obviously they don’t. Do they create a new category for them? They don’t. Again, they count as novels with a narrative structure. And readers try to find or create meaning on that basis. When conventions are broken, people go out hunting for meaning. And this is also the main reason why we have mismatches and coercion in the first place. We are homines ludenses, and we like to play around with essentially everything we find, including language, linguistic products. Playing around with language, being witty and innovative provides us with evolutionary advantages, since it keeps us and others entertained (see Keller, Haspelmath), playing around with literary form, from the very basic level up to most complex questions of composition and genre helps authors to generate meaning. They can rely on the fact that, a cooperative principle of some sort and the effortafter-meaning-principle will prod to find meaning behind seemingly incongruous constructions. Readers can trust that authors actually tried to make sense somehow, that there is something to find or create. This creation of and search for meaning, and the use of mismatch and coercion are something deeply engrained in our linguistic and literary minds. When concepts clash ... 67 Works Cited Bartlett. Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932. Cummings, E.E. “O Sweet“. Englische und Amerikaniche Dichtung 4. Ed. Eva Hesse and Heinz Ickstadt. München: C.H. Beck, 2000. Donne, John. “Death be not proud”. 1633. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8th ed. New York; London: Norton, 2006. 1296. Haiman, John. Talk Is Cheap. Sarcasm, alienation, and the evolution of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Haspelmath, Martin. “Why is grammaticalization irreversible? “ Linguistics 37.6 (1999): 1043-1068. Hopper, Paul, and Elizabeth Traugott. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Jackendoff, Ray. The architecture of the language faculty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Keller, Rudi. Sprachwandel: Von der unsichtbaren Hand in der Sprache. Tübingen: Francke, 1990. Melling, David. The Kiss That Missed. London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2003. Michaelis, Laura. “Type Shifting in Construction Grammar: An Integrated Approach to Aspectual Coercion“. Cognitive Linguistics 15.1 (2004.): 1-67. Owen, Wilfred. “Anthem for a Doomed Youth”. 1917. The Norton Anthology of of Modern Poetry. 2nd ed. New York; London: Norton, 1988. 540f. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957. Ziegeler, Debra. “A word of caution on coercion“. Journal of Pragmatics 39.5 (2007): 990- 1028. J ÜRGEN S CHLAEGER The Mimesis Myth Let me begin with a few basic assumptions: Without brains there would be no culture and without culture there would be no minds. This seems to be an odd combination of a truism with a paradox, but I still hope, not only that this statement is not too wide off the mark but that the fundamental insight it wants to convey is something we all share whatever our own conclusions. Culture is thus conceived as an extension of and a playing field for brains. It is used by brains to turn themselves into minds. Thus its primary reality is the man-made world and the other brains in it, and not a physical material reality. To put my own convictions in this matter as radically and bluntly as I can: reality in the physical, experiential sense does not come in, at least not as a prime concern, when it comes to analysing and understanding the interplay between brains and culture. If human brains had never existed, there would have been no conceptualizations of reality as we know them, no reality in the sense that cultures have tried to configurate it. There would probably only have been mindless matter or, to put it more cautiously, matter with something other than humans in mind. Now, if we look at the many attempts in Western culture to define what literature, after all one of the most complex products of the human mind, is about and does, we find - at least until the eighteenth century and, I would claim, far into the twentieth century - the mimesis concept or ‘imitatio naturae‘ as a description of what art and literature do, taking pride of place. For Aristotle on whose doctrine of mimesis European thinking about art had been based for more than 2000 years, imitation in art is an anthropological universal, a rationalization of a naive response to art, a response which we can still observe in the satisfactions popularly expressed in representational accuracy, in catching a likeness in portraiture for example, or in the verisimilitude of a story or play. Obviously this is imitation in the sense of establishing a convincing illusion of what is represented ... , so Geoffrey Shepherd in his “Introduction” to Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (Shepherd 47). Aristotle argued that The creation of poetry generally is due to two causes, both rooted in human nature. The instinct for imitation is inherent in man from his earliest days; he differs from other animals in that he is the most imitative of creatures, and he learns his earliest lessons by imitation. Also inborn in all of us is the instinct to enjoy works of imitation. J ÜRGEN S CHLAEGER 70 The instinct for imitation, then, is natural to us, as is also a feeling for music and for rhythm - and metres are obviously detached sections of rhythms. Starting from these natural aptitudes, and by a series of for the most part gradual improvements on their first efforts, men eventually created poetry from their improvisations. (Dorsch 35) What Aristotle claims and Shepherd still seems to take for granted is that the relationship between the artistic representation and the object represented is naturally a relationship between the human mind and some physical reality or an idealization based on it; whereas it is, in reality, much closer to what Coleridge described as the relationship between the primary and the secondary imagination - i.e. a relationship that is intra-mental and not one between ‘in here’ and ‘out there‘. (Coleridge, I, 202) In short, my thesis here is that the concept of mimesis falls prey to an optical illusion, an epistemological fallacy, which has been at the bottom of much of the misconceptions about the origin and function of art and literature. Even Shepherd has to admit “that exactly what Aristotle meant by imitation still baffles his commentators.” (47f.) But I think the reason for this bafflement is not Aristotle’s obscurity or the intricacies of his Platonic epistemology but the fallacy I have been talking about. If Aristotle and his followers had used the concept of simulation or second degree conceptualization, instead, I would be much happier, but mimesis as a key concept was required by his Platonic constructions of reality so that he not only had to insist that poets should imitate ‘natura’ but that they should also do so, if they want to earn their proper place in the scheme of things. By adding ‘catharsis’ to the mimesis myth he bolstered his claims with a theory of effects which would link up the mimetic impulse to an internal emotional switchboard, i.e. a psychological theory designed to assure that imitation would be more than just a mechanical reduplication, would involve something extra that tied it to the needs of the human mind and human society. Horace added to Aristotle’s recipes a couple of even more problematic notions of what poetry should achieve. According to his famous Ars Poetica poetry should Aut prodesse volunt, aut delectare poetae, Aut simul et jucunda et idonea dicere vitale (lines 333 - 4) Aim at giving profit or delight, or at Combining the giving of pleasure with some useful precepts for life. (Dorsch 90) In using the persuasive skills of rhetorical or poetical strategies literature was supposed to represent ‘natura’ within the bounds of probability in a particularly effective way - and this included its idealized as well as its depraved state so that the recipients could learn from it how the human world should be or how to avoid what was bad or dangerous about it. It is easy to see that Christian culture had no problem picking up this moralizing epistemology and Renaissance thinkers adopted the Aristotelian and Horatian premises The Mimesis Myth 71 and injunctions and used the revived prestige of these ancient authorities to flourish their own intellectual acumen. But they also discovered that these premises did not sit well with their own ambitions and aspirations. If we ask, what was behind their notion of ‘natura’ it is obvious that they were still a long way away from a concept of nature in an empiricist or even Romantic sense. They stuck to a residual Platonism but “men who thought about the arts in the sixteenth century found it necessary to reforge the whole doctrine and give it a new edge.” (Shepherd 48) And this “new edge” lay in moving away from a Platonic ontology to an interest in mental processes: ... the new bias of humanist inquiry made the mind of man a much more important field of study than it had been before. There is more interest in the process of thinking, in mental analysis ... There is a prime emphasis in Renaissance thought on concept-making. ... The mind manufactures its own intellectual species ... (Shepherd 22f.) In short, in Humanism and the Renaissance we can observe a more or less obvious radical shift towards a ‘mentalization’ of reality concepts. This also had far-reaching consequences for the mimesis myth. Increasingly writers had a hunch that there was something basically wrong with the Platonic and Aristotelian imitation story because it had tied thinking about the role of art and literature to an intrinsically passive notion of their production. The growing confidence in the ability of man to shape and change his world adumbrated the moment when literature and art would be free from the constraints that traditional thinking had imposed upon them. The mirrorconcept of the human mind could then be replaced by a concept of its workings which recognised its primary role and fundamental creativity; poetry could become an important agent of world making. I will analyse an example for these processes in more detail in the second part of my paper. Yet in spite of these early signs for a paradigm shift in these matters mimesis enjoyed continued popularity because the concept seemed to be reinforced by intellectual movements running parallel to the processes of mentalization described above. The rise of modern sciences, of philosophical empiricism and the theological revaluation of everyday experience as the stage for the drama of election and salvation in Protestantism gave a new lifeline to the mimesis concept. Admittedly, what was imitated now came to mean something completely different, but the growing importance of a concept of nature as physical, empirical reality ultimately underscored the traditional configuration of a relationship between something in the mind and something outside it. ‘Natura’, whether physical or metaphysical, still was first and foremost ‘out there’ rather than ‘in here’ - and this structure remained firmly in place at least until the end of the nineteenth century. In sum, I think the combination of the prodesse aut delectare-formula with that other shibboleth of poetics ‘Mimesis’ or ‘Imitatio’ has been a serious impediment to progress in understanding what really happens in literature not to speak of our understanding of the working of the human mind which J ÜRGEN S CHLAEGER 72 it implies. The fixation on the mimesis-concept tied debates about the usefulness of literature to its role in helping to make sense of a perceptual world, to understand fate, to guide human behaviour, to instil rules and codes of conduct. It drove the discussions about the status and role of literature into the arms of religion, epistemology and ethics and in most cases into a mixture of them and their various territorial claims. And even in modernism when representation of reality as the guiding principle for artistic production was seriously challenged in theory and practice it remained a central concern ‘ex negativo’, so to speak. As long as this was the case, literature and its theory tended to hover uneasily between the different mind-sets of epistemology and ethics and was tied to the ‘ut pictura poesis’ notion, i.e. to a compartmentalized and perception-focused concept of how the human mind works. If we accept as a historical fact that human societies have survived and prospered irrespective of whether what they believed about reality was scientifically and empirically right or wrong, then their reality-concepts must have been working first and foremost as mental constructs rather than as approximations to a physical reality or to the natural laws governing them. The rationale of cultural mind-work is fundamentally different from the rationality promoted by the Enlightenment and by scientific thinking. From this point of view the development of cultures, literature and the arts can be seen as comparable to the laws, governing the development of the modern sciences and of technology. However, its agenda is not understanding and mastering the physical world but managing and optimizing the mind’s potentials and needs. The mind is, after all, not subject to the stringencies of natural laws but to the fractal patterns of cultural dynamics. What I have been trying so far is to innitiate a first step towards a longoverdue revision, which shifts the focus of the debate from world-making and managing to mind-making and mind-management, i.e. to a theory of mind in which reality concepts are primarily seen as cognitive strategies, as exercising, adapting and enlarging the mind’s capacity for information processing and concept building. The main focus of the argument thus moves to the internal dynamics and development of the human mind and no longer insists on its central role in the construction of a supposedly real world. Radically phrased, my approach involves a redirection of the focus of analysis from an interaction between ‘outside world’ and mind work to the dynamics of mind work, in short from epistemology to cognition. The point is to see what comes out of such a thought experiment when one takes the world and all it includes to be a function of the mind rather than the other way round. In playing with the world, the mind first and foremost is playing with itself. I think, there are very interesting implications in such an approach for an evolutionary theory of human culture, and the place of literature in it; but this is definitely beyond the scope of this paper. The Mimesis Myth 73 To give substance to such an argument clearly requires a new theory of mind, and although I think that cognition research holds a number of elements for such a theory already in store, I also think it would overburden the occasion as well as my own small expertise in these fields if I tried to sketch such a new theory in the space of a paper like this. I will, therefore, explore another avenue, stay within the confines of poetics and more generally aesthetics and use one particular historical example to show that in spite of the straightjacket of ‘prodesse aut delectare’ and ‘imitatio’ poets have, with growing urgency, tried to stake out a special claim for poetry or literature when they felt the pressures of cultural change and consequently the need for reinforcing and reshaping the unique contribution of the literatureand art-producing capacities of the mind in preparing it for the challenges of such change. If Mark Turner and others working in the various branches of cognitive research are right in their assumption that the way in which human minds process information, sort it, store it, retrieve it, visualize and conceptualize it, and combine it to produce new connections and constellations in order to weigh, to decide, to project, to calculate the consequences of a possible course of action - that this mind-way is much closer to what we find in literature and art than in the highly specialized forms of scientific and philosophical argument, then poetological discourses - even if they are paying more than lip-service to the mimesis creed and a didactic version of the ‘prodesse’- injunction - will always also show an insight, however tentative and indirect, into the capacity of literature to optimize the mind’s strategies for dealing with new challenges. Turner, for instance, argues: One transcendent story of the mind that has appeared many times in many avatars (myths, scientific or not) is ... that there are certain basic, sober and literal things the mind does; that imaginative and literary acts are parasitical, secondary, peripheral, exotic, or deviant; and that when neuroscience gets its act together, we will come to understand that the brain does things pretty much in the ways we have always expected. On this logic, since imaginative and literary acts are peripheral and exotic, they can safely be ignored, while, as serious scientists we investigate the basics. (Turner 113) But such a story, Turner continues, completely misses the point: For It is possible that this story is just wrong at its core. The brain does not seem to work at all in ways we expected it to, based on our notion of stable and unitary concepts. On the contrary, our notion of concepts as stable and unitary seems to be a false guide to neurobiology. Blending may seem exotic to us, but in fact it may have a fundamental neurobiological analogue. It should not be surprising if blending turns out to be basic, not exotic, in the everyday mind. Certainly there is considerable evidence that blending is a mainstay of early childhood thought. (113f.) And he clinches his argument by saying that, in general J ÜRGEN S CHLAEGER 74 ... the processes of the literary mind are usually considered to be different from and secondary to the processes of the everyday mind. On that assumption, the everyday mind - with its stable concepts and literal reasoning - provides the beginnings for the (optional) literary mind. On the contrary, processes which we have already considered to be literary, are at the foundation of the everyday mind. Literary processes like blending make the everyday mind possible. (115) If literary strategies of using language and concepts are a specific cultural practice to exploit everyday mind-work in a highly sophisticated and creative way then the mimesis myth can be finally laid to rest. My prime example for the historical exploration I have in mind will be Sidney’s Apology for Poetry or Defense of Poesie and its implicit Theory of Mind. What I hope to show is that on the surface Sidney seems to reinforce the traditional precepts of ‘prodesse aut delectare’ and of ‘imitatio’ as guiding principles for literature, but if you peel off the layer of traditional concepts one can clearly see that he also has to say a great deal about what literature does in and to the mind and that this is much more important and valuable than what the established authorities such as moral philosophy and historiography are able to do for it. In this way imitation is pushed aside and the needs of the mind take precedence. Through this strategy I also hope to sharpen our sense of the necessities behind the shifts and moves of poetics in particular cultural contexts, shifts which, I think, are not haphazard, due to chance constellations, exceptional personalities or a happy conjunction of outside influences, but the result of pressures within a given culturally shaped mental system to reorganize its strategies for conceptualization, its processing facilities in order to make them fitter for necessary adaptations to changes in their cultural environments. What I do not want to support is the idea of a cultural teleology or any kind of cultural determinism that produces such shifts and movements in accordance with some hidden but universal logic, but rather something that Norbert Elias once formulated in the introduction to his “Entwurf zu einer Theorie der Zivilisation”: In fact, nothing in history indicates that change is brought about “rationally”, through any purposive education of individual people or groups. Change happens by and large unplanned, but it does not happen without a specific type of order. (Elias 313, my translation) In summary, one could say that all literature and art aspire to a reconditioning and extension of the human mind. If one takes Turner’s point about blending to be a metaphorical approximation to what happens in the mind when it is not put in a rationalist straightjacket then we have some sort of idea of the immense flexibility, combinatorial power and plasticity of our minds using language, images, concepts and emotions as switchboards for connecting, sorting and experimenting with everything in their reach. The Mimesis Myth 75 But with it we also have a Theory of Mind in which Mind reasserts its primacy, particularly when there arises a historical situation in which it just would not do to rely on routinized processes of conceptualization. Such massive shifts occurred in classical antiquity in the lifetimes of Plato and Aristotle and during the Augustan reign in the Roman Empire; they again happened in Renaissance Europe, in Romanticism, in High Modernism and, maybe, again today. In all these shifts we find thinkers and poets reflecting upon the role of literature in the ways humans see and regulate their world. And in all these text we find hidden or explicitly a sense of urgency in their pleas to use what the literary mind has to offer in terms of conceptual and emotional creativity. As promised I will use the remainder of this paper to identify such pleas in a more detailed analysis of Sidney’s Apology. Sidney’s Apology was probably written between 1581 and 1583 and published posthumously in 1590. It is said to have been a direct response to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse which had satirically targeted “Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, and such like Caterpillars of the Commonwealth.” But since Gosson is not mentioned in the text and Sidney’s approach is much more serious and comprehensive, it is likely that he had a more fundamental agenda whatever his original impulse for writing it might have been. Geoffrey Shepherd conclusively sums up Sidney’s indebtedness to the poetological philosophical traditions in the following way: His understanding of the nature of poetry is Horatian in main character and derivation, but it is reinforced by a firmer if still mainly indirect knowledge of Aristotle than had been possessed by any earlier theoriser on poetry in England; it is enriched still further with high Platonic notions about ideal forms in art which still retain religious overtones; and it is supported throughout by the technical institutions and moral insistences from an unbroken line of rhetoricians stretching back through the humanists to Quintilian, Cicero, and Isocrates. This is the critical milieu we would expect of a man of Sidney’s intelligence and interests, placed in his chronological position. For us perhaps it appears an intricate inheritance, a complex of traditions which is almost as difficult to unravel as to see whole. (Shepherd 45) It is true, in the overall design of his argument as well as in many of its details Sidney never directly challenges the venerable precept that poetry (and he uses the term to include all types of literature) has to teach and to delight and that it does it mainly through ‘imitatio naturae’. But he is at great pains also to prove that to understand poetry as ephemeral, as merely a rhetorical embellishment of philosophical truth or of historical facts would be a gross misunderstanding of what it really does. And what he thinks it should really do is far from the representational claims and didacticisms of the traditions which he uses as his starting points. But this situation only becomes clear, if one avoids philologizing Sidney’s text. By writing him back into the intellectual traditions which he uses as a jumping board, one tends to miss what he is really trying to grasp. J ÜRGEN S CHLAEGER 76 Right from the beginning his implicit Theory of Mind assigns to literature a primary role. He does it by separating its achievements from any truth claims. The main line of his argument is an attempt to provide evidence for his conviction that literature is superior to moral philosophy and historiography, that is, if it comes to mind-power and not to giving a true picture of the factual world or to instilling moral ideals. Poetry ... has been the first light giver to ignorance, poets were rightly called fathers in all learning. With their charming sweetness they drew the wild untamed wits to an admiration of knowledge. (Shepherd 96) But Sidney’s argument is not that poetry has shown the way from ‘mythos’ to ‘logos’, has done its best in the early days of human development and has since been superseded by higher forms of knowledge such as philosophy and historiography, but that it has established itself as a medium with which the mind expresses and regulates itself in ways that are much more adequate if it comes to know the truth about human affairs and to find out what course of action to take. Because this is so, philosophers and historiographers, according to Sidney, have always been glad to borrow “both fashion and perchance weight of poets.” (97) What they did was “stealing from Poetry their passionate descriptions of passions.” (97) Again, our attention is directed to the internal world of the mind, to the cognitive and emotional strategies the mind holds in store and employs. Poetry provided “a great passport” (97) for everyone to tap the secret and profound sources of the mind. Poetry, one could say, was for Sidney not only a particularly efficient instrument to convey ‘natura’ and guide moral conduct, but it is first and foremost a strategy for enabling the mind to operate at maximum capacity. It optimizes the mind’s ability to look ahead, to experiment with ideas and images thus preparing it for new challenges. Poetry is, in Sidney’s eyes, the only discipline that “looks beyond the confines of nature and morality.” Allowing the poet to freely range “only within the zodiac of his own wit.” (100) Poets look at everything with “the eyes of the mind.” (99) It is true, he agrees that works of nature are a starting point for poets, but true poets also have the obligation to “making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew forms, such as never were in Nature” (100). “Nature’s world” - and that is the world which represents the endhorizon for philosophers and historiographers - “Nature’s world is brazen, the poets deliver a golden.” (100) A world, he adds, “which is not wholly imaginative, as we are want to say by them that would build castles in the air, but so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency, as Nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world, to make many Cyruses,” i.e. mental Cyruses that will The Mimesis Myth 77 provide blueprints for other minds and help them to build and fix concepts of greatness with a strong emotional input. (100) What Sidney is describing here, one would call today the mind’s capacity for emergence, for creating images, ideas, stories, worlds that unleash the tremendous generative power we have in our minds and that cannot be reduced to mere configurations of so-styled real experience or memories of a real world stored in the brain. In other words, poetry turns what is already in the mind into something that can become an inexhaustible source for further creativity, in fact into a creative matrix - and cultural history is, after all, an accumulation of such productive matrices. As I have said, Sidney plays to the gallery by frequently presenting his case for poetry by stressing its role in keeping human beings on the path of virtue or leading them back to it. But that this is not the only, perhaps not even the primary effect he has in mind, comes out clearly, when he attacks the moral philosophers and the historians for ignoring the true needs of the human mind. “Only the poet yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description.” (107) And the historian knows “better how the world goeth than how his own wit runneth.” (105) Sidney’s focus here is clearly on a mind doing something for the mind rather than something with, in and to an outside world. He also posits a “literary mind” beyond the specifics of genres and styles. “It is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet. But it is feigning notable images of virtues, vices or what else, with that delightful teaching, which is the right describing note to know a poet by.” (103) Teaching can be interpreted here not as the teaching of moral behaviour, but as training the brain muscle to operate at full capacity. The effect of poetry is, in terms of its beneficial impact on the operations of the human mind, of universal significance, for it offers: • a “purifying of wit”, • an “enriching of memory”, • an “enabling of judgement” and an “enlarging of conceit” (104) which, so Sidney, “we commonly call learning” and in helping us on “in the knowledge of a man’s self, in the ethic and politic consideration with the end of well doing and not of well knowing only ... to lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying of his own devine essence” (104). In this last point, I think, Sidney subtly uses the traditional Christian anthropology to get across a message that is quite un-theological: the message that in literature the mind is at home with itself - uninhibited by the violence and straight-jacketing of rational thinking, the thought-policing of theology and philosophy and the fact-grinding of historiography. The moral philosopher gives the precept, the historiographer the example, but both remain ineffective because what they say “lieth dark before the imaginative and judgeing power, ... However, “when illuminated or figured J ÜRGEN S CHLAEGER 78 forth by the speaking picture of poesie,” (107) they take hold of the inward light each mind hath in itself ...” (113) It helps “to feel the inward reason” for following a particular insight, whereas the philosopher setting down with thorny argument the bare rule, is so hard of utterance, and so misty to be conceived, that one that hath no other guide but him shall wade in him till he be old before he shall find sufficient cause to be honest. For his knowledge standeth so upon the abstract and general, that happy is that man who may understand him, and more happy that can apply what he doth understand. One the other side, the historian, wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be but to what is, to the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine. Now doth the peerless poet perform both: for whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it in some one by whom he presupposeth it was done; so as he coupleth the general notion with the particular example. A perfect picture I say, for he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description: which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other doth. (106f.) This is why “His imagining of matters be so fit for the imagination” that the poet “with his hand of delight doth draw the mind more effectually than any other art does, not to speak of philosophy or historiography.” (109) So, “Then is the conclusion manifest that ink and paper cannot be to a more profitable purpose employed than in writing poetry ...” (123) The final deathblow Sidney deals to the pretensions of the philosophers and historians to a privileged access to truth and Nature and, indeed, to the notion that some outside nature or reality, empirical or metaphysical, is the yardstick for what they have to imitate, comes with his assertion: “that the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.” (123) The poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writes. … In Poesy, looking for fiction, they shall use the narration but as an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention. (124) This profitable invention is profitable only, because it is an invention, not an abstracting representation of some truth or reality, but something the mind has made for itself to train and expand its own capacities for making optimal use of its own resources. Maybe this is what McNab once called Salman Rushdie’s “ethics of mutability and possibility” as the ultimate ethical agenda of literature (Hadfield et al. 8). Shepherd, the authoritative commentator and editor of Sidney’s Apology pinpoints “the difficulty we have in re-stating Sidney’s position” and hopes to reduce them with the help of “chronology”, that is to say by his accurate positioning within the ruling traditions: The Mimesis Myth 79 Sidney precedes Descartes (1596 - 1650) by little more than one generation. Sidney thinks as a literary man on the eve of Cartesianism. His is groping forwards to a position from which a man would be able to see all the interesting and important processes as taking place within the mind, where even dealings with external things must be with the mind, not the senses, where ultimately the only truly reliable ideas are those that are invented by the thinker himself. (60) “Sidney”, he concludes, “draws near to this position” but sadly, a traditional philological analysis of the sources and traditions which inspired Sidney and which he uses as points of reference, obscure rather than reveal what is really revolutionary in his approach. Sidney takes the first steps in moving aesthetics out of the stranglehold of epistemology and moral philosophy, a move that eighteenth century theories of the beautiful and the sublime picked up and which Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft brought to a philosophical conclusion. But only now, arts and literature as cultural practices for generating knowledge have completed the move from epistemology to cognition, a move that was only possible by discarding the mimesis myth. Of course, I have deliberately highlighted those arguments from Sidney’s Apology that support my claims. Sidney had to engage with the established traditions in order to make his points. He, therefore, couches much of what he has to say in the language and conceptual framework of his time. But a mind-centred perspective clearly allows us to see below the surface of the text a Theory of Mind which privileges the realities of the mind over concepts that tie its workings too closely to outside reality or an idealised version of it. Faced with a world that was so much in transition and was undermining most of the certainties of former ages in what was no more than a millisecond of evolutionary time, thinkers like Sidney had perhaps more than a hunch that exploring and exploiting the literariness of the mind might yield a richer harvest than all other efforts to make sense of the new with the help of older traditions. Works cited Coleridge, S.T.. Biographia Literaria. Ed. J. Shawcross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Dorsch, T.S. Ed. Classical Literary Criticism. London: Penguin Books, 1965. Elias, Norbert. „Entwurf zu einer Theorie der Zivilisation“ Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. 2 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976. Hadfield, Andrew; Rainsford, Dominic; Woods, Tim, eds. “Introduction.” The Ethics in Literature. London: Macmillan Press, 1999. 1-14. Sidney, Sir Philip. An Apology for Poetry. Ed. Geoffrey Shepherd. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973. Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. R ONALD S HUSTERMAN Æsthetics and the Literary Mind: Some Thoughts from a Thought Experiment 1. The “Linguisticality” of Understanding My goal here is relatively unambitious. I will not claim to explain consciousness, nor to solve, once and for all, the mind-body problem, nor even to gauge the usefulness of the concept of the “literary mind” for the future of cognitive linguistics. I will, however, be indirectly concerned with the place of this concept in epistemology, for I do have the impression that certain questions in the philosophy of mind will resist all attempts at “naturalization”. My intuition is that the neurosciences will never be able to replace philosophy by turning all of its problems into empirical questions about the brain. Ultimately, this means, perhaps, that the question of the literary mind needs to be analyzed in the context not merely of linguistics and neurology, but also in the context of these philosophical problems, that is, in the light of debates concerning materialism, functionalism, naturalism, dualism, and so on. I do not intend to pursue these debates here. Yet I do think that we need to be aware that many formulations of this concept of a “literary mind” invoke (explicitly or implicitly) what has been called the “linguisticality of understanding” - which is one rough translation of Gadamer’s term Sprachlichkeit. 1 In a sense, a similar position was formulated by Wittgenstein - by the “first” Wittgenstein, at least - with his famous slogan, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (5.6). And many other philosophers and essayists have, in one way or another, equated thought and language - all thought and language - in such an intimate way. For instance, this identity is the presupposition behind Orwell’s Newspeak (1984) as well as his essay on “Politics and the English Language”. Now it may turn out that we are wrong to equate thinking and language in this way. Perhaps we should seek a more pluralistic vision of thought that would lead not only to a literary mind but to a plastic mind as well, or to some combination of the two. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen, as Wittgenstein would have it, but perhaps there are things of which we cannot speak that we can manage to think about nonetheless. And this might mean that the notion of the literary mind is only part of the story. In other words, the question that needs to be 1 I take the term from David C. Hoy (Hoy 5-7 and passim). R ONALD S HUSTERMAN 82 asked is whether or not the narrative aspects of the mind are as fundamental and all-encompassing as certain philosophers seem to imply. Does the concept of the linguisticality of understanding exhaust the concept of the mental? Does it even exhaust the concept of understanding? Yet my main interest is æsthetics, and my primary goal in this paper will be to understand what the concept of a “literary mind” can contribute to some of the perennial questions of this field. Briefly put, does everything that has been said or could be said about “the literary mind” also amount to a definition of art in general? I take this search for some kind of a definition to be the central question in æsthetics, one that determines our answers to the other questions, such as the nature of interpretation or the relation of art to ethics. My project, then, is to measure the relevance to aesthetics of all that has been said about the literary mind, about the central role of metaphor and of cognitive mapping, about “blending”, “sorting” and so on. My suspicion - which I announce at the outset to ruin all the suspense of this paper - is that however convincing these concepts may be in their own fields, they remain largely irrelevant to both theoretical æsthetics and practical criticism. 2. The Investment in Metaphor I would like to start from John Searle's basic assumption “that the philosophy of language is a branch of the philosophy of mind” (Searle vii). This reasonable suggestion is something he can be seen to share with more radical linguists and philosophers such as George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner. 2 My own assumption will be that the philosophy of literature (or of art more generally) is also ultimately a branch of the philosophy of mind. In the case of literature, it seems clear that, because of its status as language, certain principles or concepts of the philosophy of language will automatically be relevant. And if the philosophy of language can indeed be seen as a special case of the philosophy of mind, then it will be difficult to deny that literature can be approached or understood from this perspective. I mention Lakoff, Johnson and Turner since they have conducted highly influential analyses of this very relation between literature and the mind. The theory of metaphor has been at the heart of recent efforts to redefine literary studies in terms of cognitive science. Metaphor does indeed seem likely to provide the basis of “literary cognition” sought for by many theorists; it has been central to many of the most prestigious works in literary theory - works on those "margins" between philosophy and criticism that have dominated poststructuralist thought. Indeed, poststructuralism has tended to blur or deny the 2 References to the works of Lakoff, Johnson and Turner will be included in the text with appropriate abbreviations when necessary. The volumes under consideration are Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things; Johnson, Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, Lakoff and Turner, More Than Cool Reason; Turner, The Literary Mind. See Works Cited. Æsthetics and the Literary Mind 83 distinctions between science and poetry; it has often argued that all thought is essentially metaphoric or implied that both science and poetry are founded on metaphor. Much of the impetus for the current re-evaluation of metaphor comes from the deconstructive turn in literary theory and the swing towards pragmatism in philosophy. This can be seen clearly in the work of Richard Rorty. One of Rorty's main points was that the dominant metaphor of the “mind's eye” was just an accident of history: “There was... no particular reason why this ocular metaphor seized the imagination of the founders of Western thought” (Rorty 38). Of course, if one could show that there is a reason for the prevalence of this metaphor - in other words, if one could justify it in some sense, then one would be well on the way towards refuting certain aspects of Rorty's pragmatism. Indeed, in the same passage, Rorty himself goes on to admit that the mind's eye metaphor was a “powerful” one (41) - though he never fully explains why some metaphors are “powerful” and others are not. In any case, both the centrality and the plasticity of metaphor have become standard elements in contemporary reappraisals of art. Lakoff makes metaphor essential to his entire project. In Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, he contrasts the traditional view of the mind with the new view that he is defending. For Lakoff, "reason has a bodily basis" and his new view takes "imaginative aspects of reason - metaphor, metonymy, and mental imagery - as central to reason, rather than as a peripheral and inconsequential adjunct to the literal" (xi). It is important to understand the goals of the argument: "If we understand reason as merely literal," writes Lakoff, "we will devalue art" (xvi). All of this shows quite explicitly how revising epistemology is seen as a means of justifying art. The same position is taken up in his collaborative work with Mark Turner: The Western tradition, which has excluded metaphor from the domain of reason, has thereby relegated poetry and art to the periphery of intellectual life - something to give a veneer of culture, but not something of central value in one's everyday endeavors. (214-215) In recent decades, those who feel the need to justify literature have generally sought to underline its cognitive content and/ or its moral efficiency. Like many others, Lakoff and Turner emphasize both; theirs is a dual-pronged approach which holds not only that metaphor has a cognitive dimension but that it will both reflect and influence everyday values. Lakoff, Turner and Mark Johnson exemplify in fact a typical strategy used by those who wish to valorise fiction and art on the basis of their cognitive status. The strategy involves the following steps: 1) Connect knowledge and truth to metaphor in some direct way. We have seen how Rorty makes this connection. Lakoff and Johnson make the same point in Metaphors We Live By when they argue that “truth is always relative to a conceptual system that is defined in large part by metaphor” (159). R ONALD S HUSTERMAN 84 2) Show that metaphor is untranslatable. The non-translatability or non-paraphrasability of metaphor is one of the standard points in almost all contemporary treatments of metaphor. It is essential as a means of denying any subservience of metaphor to literal meaning (which would imply a subservience of art to science). This leads to the next step: 3) Make metaphor a defining characteristic of art. Lakoff and Johnson argue, for instance, that metaphor "is one of our most important tools for trying to comprehend partially what cannot be comprehended totally: our feelings, aesthetic experiences, moral practices, and spiritual awareness" (193). This seems to define the aesthetic as that which is embodied in metaphor. If the first three points are granted, it is easy to impose the final step in the demonstration: 4) Conclude that art gives us some untranslatable truth, that art is thus knowledge. Indeed, if art is the realm of metaphor, and metaphor is the key to truth, how could art not be the key to fundamental understanding? Briefly put, if metaphor can be shown to be cognition, and if literature is the realm of true metaphor, then literature is cognition. I'm not saying, of course, that this is the explicit or conscious argument, but it does seem to be the motivation behind much that is written about metaphor. Why else have so many studies been devoted to this particular linguistic phenomenon? There are dozens of other stylistic devices that could be dealt with, but they aren't promising as justifications of art - Zeugmas We Live By hardly seems likely to do the trick. Martha Nussbaum, for example, insists, in Poetic Justice, on the value of metaphor in Hard Times: “the persistent exuberant metaphoricity of the language of Hard Times is no mere game, no stylistic diversion; it goes to the heart of the novel's moral theme. Even while the novel portrays the Gradgrind schoolroom, it cannot help comparing one thing to another, seeing one thing in another...” (43). It is clear that Dickens teaches us to value “fancy” and what Nussbaum calls the “metaphorical imagination” (36). “The novel calls on us to interpret metaphors,” concludes Nussbaum. “But we can now say more: the novel presents itself as a metaphor. See the world in this way, and not in that, it suggests” (43). All of this tends to reinforce the rough syllogism, presented above, connecting literature to cognition via metaphor. This mystique of metaphor is so prevalent that even more literal minded philosophers get caught up in the enthusiasm. Though he is eager to demystify metaphor in many ways, Donald Davidson begins “What Metaphors Mean” with the claim that metaphor is “the dreamwork of language” (200). I admit that this is a rather pretty formula - as is Nelson Goodman's image of metaphor as “moonlighting” (104). But it does contribute to the mystique, since "dreamwork" sounds promising and mysterious. The idea that dreams Æsthetics and the Literary Mind 85 reveal hidden truths and secrets is not something that Freud invented, and to see metaphor as dreamwork seems a way of granting it some mysterious explanatory power. The question is, do we want to define cognition in this way? Is the act of refining conceptual tools or descriptive resources an act of cognition? Do we want to say that cognition involves just adding to vocabulary? I can invent a word, trizz, for example, which designates all philosophers who prefer steak to spaghetti. I now have a “concept” that was not previously part of my vocabulary and thus am able to make comparisons that were not possible before this admittedly minor “paradigm shift.” Such categories can be invented ad infinitum. But do we want to identify cognition with the creation of potentially endless categories of classification? Back in the fifties, Max Black was already talking about metaphor in terms of isomorphism and mapping. His general concept of the mapping of different “models” from one domain to another seems close to Goodman's conception of metaphor as the transference of symbol schemata. The idea of "mapping" is of course essential to the theories of Lakoff, Johnson and Turner. When I call Roger a pig, I am mapping certain qualities of one animal onto those of another. All of this has grown quite familiar, and we can find it in all sorts of approaches or disciplines. Douglas Hofstadter is an example of someone who is not often quoted in these contexts and who was working out similar ideas at roughly the same time. Though he doesn't use the term metaphor, Hofstadter sees the same kind of process as essential to all thought: “I claim that it is such perceptions of isomorphism which create meanings in the minds of people” (50). This is very close to I.A. Richards's emphasis on all thought being metaphoric - as expressed in his famous claim (in The Philosophy of Rhetoric) that metaphor is “the omnipresent principle of language” (92). “There is nothing more basic than categorization to our thought, perception, action, and speech,” writes Lakoff. “Every time we see something as a kind of thing... we are categorizing” (5). Richards had already written, in 1936, that “all thought is sorting" (30). 3 Lakoff makes this into a general rule: “S EEING TYPICALLY INVOLVES CATEGORIZING .” (127). And this brings us back to the basic strategy I am trying to underline: if all thought is sorting, then metaphor is the key operation of the mind. And if literature is the realm of metaphor, then it is fundamental in establishing our relation to the world. 3. From Speculation to Bankruptcy Elsewhere I have spent much time discussing some of the fallacies of this cognitive theory of metaphor, but this will not be necessary here. 4 For in the realm of æsthetics, it turns out, quite simply, that there is no need to refute the cognitive theory of metaphor. As an æsthetic theory (at least), it ends up in 3 On Richards, see Shusterman 1988. 4 See for example my chapters in Lecercle and Shusterman 2002 as well as Shusterman 1991. On metaphor and ethics, see Shusterman 2003. R ONALD S HUSTERMAN 86 total self-destruction. I have been dealing with Lakoff and Turner, so perhaps it would be best to use them again to show how the theory self-destructs. The following quotation from More than Cool Reason can be taken as a manifesto of the new vision of metaphor: It is commonly thought that poetic language is beyond ordinary language that it is something essentially different, special, higher, with extraordinary tools and techniques like metaphor and metonymy, instruments beyond the reach of someone who just talks. But great poets, as master craftsmen, use basically the same tools we use; what makes them different is their talent for using these tools, and their skill in using them, which they acquire from sustained attention, study, and practice. Metaphor is a tool so ordinary that we use it unconsciously and automatically, with so little effort that we hardly notice it. It is omnipresent. (xi) The key element is the emphasis on the ordinariness of metaphor. I should like to argue that, however useful it may be elsewhere, the Lakoffian approach ends up trivialising both literature and science in this emphasis on the ordinary. Though they may be giving linguists and cognitivists essential tools of analysis, Lakoff and his colleagues are failing to grasp the specificity of art. For example, Lakoff and Turner examine five basic metaphors of death which are “used naturally, automatically, and largely unconsciously” in understanding a poem by Emily Dickinson (8). But that's just the point: these unconscious mechanisms are not where the real interest of poetry lies. If metaphor is the omnipresent principle of language, if the ordinary mind is always already a literary mind, then æsthetics is going to need a separate theory of metaphor that would distinguish these ordinary mappings from whatever else that is going on in the realm of art. Linguists may be wise to underline the ubiquity of the ordinary metaphors by which we live, but in doing so they portray a mind that may be “literary” in a sense of the term that has absolutely nothing to do with art. 4. When Art is Not I am, of course, being somewhat unfair to the cognitivists, since their explicit goal was never really the definition of art. Yet they do seem to be saying sometimes that metaphor is both a necessary and sufficient condition of art, so my argument is not entirely irrelevant. I am also being unfair insofar as the aforementioned definition of art has proved incredibly elusive, and the very idea of a substantive definition, a definition giving its essence, so to speak, is no longer fashionable. This is certainly the case for the various defenders of the “Institutional Theory of Art” (such as Danto, Dickie or Goodman) and I admit that I subscribe to such a view. If the theory of metaphor and the literary mind cannot help us, how are we to proceed? There might be other ways to stipulate a certain number of necessary conditions for the exis- Æsthetics and the Literary Mind 87 tence of art, and this might help us understand both certain things about the mind and certain things about the institution. I intend, therefore, to turn one of Goodman’s famous slogans upside down, asking not “When is art? ” but “When art is not? ”. Are there elements, practices, attitudes or contexts the absence of which would render art unconceivable? Could some radical change in our neurological status or the ontology of the world make it impossible for art to exist? To ask such questions is not to renew the attempt to give a substantive definition of “what art is” (the concrete question rejected by Danto and Goodman). By asking such questions, one is not seeking the essence of particular forms of art but rather certain pragmatic characteristics of the institution as a whole. In the double thought experiment that follows, I envision radical changes that would eliminate the possibility of art. Let us imagine beings who are conscious and intelligent, but totally free of all affectivity. They live in a society with a social structure based on pure rationality, since they have absolutely no emotions. Of course, they do have appetites and desires, since their bodies require food and sexual intercourse. Yet these are mere biological necessities that they carry out without the slightest passion. Would art exist in such a society? The official answer to this question, according to the National Broadcasting Company in 1966, was Yes, an answer that provoked some consternation for the young cosmologist and philosopher that I was at the time. My hero back then was Mr Spock - a native of the Planet Vulcan, and like all Vulcans, a being of pure logic, emotions having been eliminated in the distant past of his species. The early episodes made it clear that Spock could understand, intellectually, the existence of emotions; he could recognize, in his human friends, the signs of love or sadness, but he could not feel such things himself. He could neither laugh nor cry, and he constantly shocked Dr McCoy, his humanist foil in the series, by brutally applying the Utilitarian Calculus to all moral problems, for, as we might have expected, pure and heartless logic automatically leads to the ethics and politics of Utilitarianism. I was thus shocked and saddened as I watched Mr Spock, in a later episode, pick up his Vulcan Lyre and begin to sing. The fact that he was apparently deriving pleasure from the act made things even worse. How could this being of pure logic consider music to be anything else but a mere configuration of sounds, having perhaps certain mathematical and formal relations that one could study, having no doubt a cathartic role for those species burdened with emotions, but having no visible utility or rational goal? I could have understood a scene where Spock might investigate music or even test his own dexterity - but for him to enjoy a tune now and then seemed totally out of character. NBC had defined him as an emotionless creature, and much of the humour of the series came indeed from his inability to decipher figures of speech or the jokes of his colleagues. How could a being of pure logic be moved by art? R ONALD S HUSTERMAN 88 As an adolescent philosopher, I was thus postulating some necessary connection between affectivity and art. I should mention that the producers of Star Trek also went off course at warp speed when they disfigured Spock’s home planet with some horribly baroque architecture, where it seemed to me that Bauhaus would have been more convincing. But aside from these two examples of bad taste, most of the science fiction I have come across since has confirmed my intuition, giving us passionless robots and computers who can do no more than feign a comprehension of emotion or art. As sensory beings, the Vulcans might perform exercises to sharpen their perceptual abilities, but these operations would not be accompanied by the slightest affectivity. In their world, there should be no difference between a television test card and a Fra Angelico. At this level of generality, our theory of art is connected to basic facts of the human condition, facts involving ontology, physiology and consciousness. I would like to argue that the existence of art has something to do with our status as 1) individualized entities 2) living in a space-time continuum 3) without telepathic capacities. To see the impact of this, let us leave Mr Spock for a moment and visit a parallel universe inhabited by a unique being which I shall call The Infinite Sponge. This multi-cellular creature is not only infinite and eternal, it also happens to fill up its universe entirely and to be composed of cells in constant, instant and total telepathic contact with each other. They exist in a form of perfect harmony and symbiosis and share a single, undivided consciousness. Since I am a rather poor historian of philosophy, I am unable to say to what extent my Infinite Sponge was already dreamed up long ago by Leibniz or Spinoza, but I hope the reader will allow me to pursue my thought experiment nonetheless. Let us suppose, then, that unlike Spock, the Infinite Sponge could conceivably experience emotion - nothing in my thought experiment forbids it explicitly, at least. But there is one thing that has been eliminated from the picture: In the world of the Infinite Sponge, motion is impossible, for there is no such thing as distance. Here it would make no sense to speak of communication, exchange or interpretation, since a single infinite consciousness occupying the totality of space would not have to worry about hermeneutics. Interpretation, like movement, derives from the distance between individuated beings, and this separation cannot exist in the universe of the Infinite Sponge. The monad need not, and indeed cannot, express its being. It is, and that is all. Without the need or the possibility of affectivity, expression and interpretation, art could not exist. I would like therefore to use these two examples to suggest that motion and emotion, in the senses that I have implied, are in some way necessary - though not sufficient - conditions of art. I realize that I have only argued intuitively, but it does seem intuitively correct to assert that art would not exist for a being without emotion or for a being without spatial differentiation. For the being of pure logic, art would be superfluous; for the Infinite Sponge it would be totally inconceivable. Æsthetics and the Literary Mind 89 5. Narrativity, Visual Thinking, and Pure Plasticity I have so far suggested that the presence of metaphor cannot be taken to be a necessary or sufficient condition of art, and that the theory of the literary mind does little to advance æsthetics. One might object that, though I have shown these things not to be sufficient conditions, since they can be found elsewhere, I have not proved that they are not as necessary to the institution as the motion and emotion I have just examined. Could it not be claimed that some kind of narrativity is a necessary element in all art? Could it not be claimed, moreover, that the visual thinking that I mentioned at the outset as a possible complement to the literary mind, is itself steeped in narrativity? Behind the theory of the literary mind is the assumption that narrativity is ubiquitous. This implies, of course, that not only is all art necessarily narrative in some sense, but that all thought will be structured in this way. Mark Turner makes this relatively clear: ...principles of mind we mistakenly classify as ‘literary’- story, projection, and parable ... make everyday life possible. The literary mind is not a separate kind of mind. It is our mind. The literary mind is the fundamental mind. (i) This is from the preface to his work, but further down the page we encounter a slight modulation in his position: Story is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories. (i) The difference seems to be that, where the first statement appears to be making a more absolute claim, the second statement concedes that though this principle is “basic”, there may indeed be other forms of experience that are not organized in terms of narrative. But the general drift of the argument is indeed to suggest that everything, or almost everything, that goes on in the brain is based on the fundamental principle of narrativity. I doubt that we could accuse Wordsworth of plagiarizing Turner or Lakoff, but we can indeed find in his writing an analogous formulation of this omnipresence of narrativity. The poet endorses this principle of the inevitability of story in the middle of a curious poem called Simon Lee (1797): My gentle Reader, I perceive How patiently you've waited, And now I fear that you expect Some tale will be related. O Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you would find A tale in every thing. (302) I would like to argue that Wordsworth is right, that there is indeed “a tale in every thing”, and that this is true for a very simple reason: Any identifiable object, or any representation of such an object, is automatically situated in a R ONALD S HUSTERMAN 90 social or natural context that is essentially temporal and thus sequential. To recognize a thing is to recognize its place in this sequence, in this story. One might sum up this point with a slogan: No representation without narrativity! Any form of thought - including art - that is involved in representation will automatically possess the structures that Turner underlines in his work on the literary mind. But what about those forms of art that are not involved in representation? Could we not have a reverse slogan that would claim, No narrativity without representation? Though there may well be a tale in every thing, what if the work of art includes no recognizable object? If a work rejects representation, does it not thereby reject narrativity? To answer these questions, I’d like to take a very bad example. If I can show that even this bad example will resist being reduced into an illustration of the literary mind, I will have gone a long way towards showing the limits of the theory for æsthetics. My bad example is taken from photography, and it is bad precisely because photography has always been an art connected to the real and thus to narrative sequence. Moreover, it is an art where the process of production is itself a question of sequence and causality - so a picture seems to be the kind of Wordsworthian thing that will necessarily have a tale. Take, however, the following image whose copyright has been granted to me by a contemporary photographer: This work is characteristic of a school of macrophotography that de-realizes natural objects, that uses special techniques in order to turn a recognizable object of the natural world into an abstract pattern of shapes and colours. This is a bad example, since there is, in a sense, a “thing” that has been represented. It is the kind of work of art that pushes people towards a futile effort of identification. We all know the habitual reflex of the uninitiated when confronted with abstract art - the habit that I call the it-looks-like-a reflex. We should recall how the artists of Minimalism rejected all efforts of identification, or projection of meaning. Remember people such as Frank Stella claiming “What you see is what you see”. My example is bad because Æsthetics and the Literary Mind 91 there is indeed a thing that could be identified - but the whole purpose of the work is to make this identification impossible and irrelevant. Indeed, for many of these photographers, the distinction between photography and abstract painting is problematic, and in some cases it is impossible to know if one is looking at a painting or a photo, for the artists often mix the media in undiscernible ways. A second technique for injecting narrativity into this artwork would be to emphasize the genetic process behind the piece. The artist took out her camera, attached her macro lens, produced an image, developed it, cropped it or modified it in some way, and all of this, in a sense, is the tale of this object. The argument, however, doesn’t work, because as an artwork, this piece isn’t about its modes of production. There is of course a story behind it - but this story doesn’t enter into its appreciation. A third and slightly more legitimate way of injecting narrativity and sequence into the work has to do indeed with the appreciation involved. For the work will invariably produce a sequence of eye movements, and this, too, can be seen as a story. Unlike the genetic process, these eye movements are indeed part of appreciation, in a sense. But only in a sense - for, when asked what the work was about, we wouldn’t want to answer something like “Well, first your eye starts in the middle, and then it goes up to the top, and then you focus on the thin lines on the left side, and then you go down to the bottom.” This is the story of our reception, but we wouldn’t want to say that it is the essence of the work. Indeed, I don’t know how I would describe the “essence” of the work, and I’m not certain that I even need to try. The limits of my language are the limits - no, not of my world, but of my linguistic expression. That’s quite a nice tautology, but my goal is to point out that I can experience abstract art, I can even think about it, give it attention, sense the spatial relations, without necessarily needing, or being able, to translate this visual thinking into any preexistent vocabulary. I could, again, invent a vocabulary - some word or words to designate stringy whiteness coming out of a thick whiteness on a background of black configured in a certain way - indeed, I have just described, rather awkwardly, an aspect of my visual experience. But it is true that I had the visual experience before I assembled the vocabulary, and that my description doesn’t do justice to the experience itself. If it did, if the description were enough, then anyone who wrote “Lisa Gherardini and her enigmatic smile” on a sheet of paper would possess an authentic Leonardo. All of this is leading to a claim that the mind is also involved in plastic operations that cannot be reduced to the literary. I do not mean only that perception involves realms of sensation that have little to do with narrativity, but that thinking itself can take place in visual rather than verbal forms. This was a point made by Rudolf Arnheim, with his study of Visual Thinking published back in 1969, but we can also find similar positions in the work of Paul Valéry who wrote that “the graphic can grasp the continuous that language R ONALD S HUSTERMAN 92 cannot grasp; it surpasses language in power and precision.” 5 And before Valéry, Bergson as well had claimed that thought could take place both as image and as concept: We have but two means of expression, the concept and the image. It is by means of concepts that a system develops; it is via images that it intensifies, when the system is pushed back towards the intuition from which it descended… 6 The point is, therefore, that any theory of the mind should try to take into account these plastic considerations. And we’d also have to add that there must be a musical mind as well, with its own use of sequence that doesn’t quite amount to narrativity. When Keith Jarrett sits down at his piano to improvise, there is no story that he needs to tell, but we can indeed imagine that he is thinking “Well, first I’m going to this, and then I’m going to do that” - where this and that refer not to narrative content but rather to specific configurations of sounds. Clearly, thinking this and that amounts to thinking without being “story” or “parable” or anything else. But the conclusion will also be that if the mind, the fundamental mind, does indeed turn out to be musical, literary and plastic, then this fact will tell us nothing about the specific nature of art. “Everything is what it is and not another thing,” wrote Bishop Butler, and unless we decide that art is really just another ordinary thing, it will continue to deserve a specific effort towards theorization. The problem is, of course, that a definition of art that gets too specific will end up being easily refuted (as being no more than the product of a particular culture with an eye on a particular practice), and a definition that gives only the broadest outlines as to what has to be there - as exemplified by my thought experiment - will not satisfy those of us who are looking for a key. To say that art involves, necessarily, some dimension of affectivity that gets attached to the kind of movement involved in hermeneutic practice is not to say very much. But I’m afraid that the Institutional Theory can say no more - so I will leave you with my own hopelessly vague yet pragmatic definition of a work of art: Any object, event, performance (or combination of the above) destined for hermeneutic contemplation of some sort, with (in certain cases) attendant sensorial qualities and effects, yielding emotion, or pleasure, or intellectual interest, or some combination of the three, these aspects being in some way connected to the qualia or phenomenology of the contemplation itself. Such a definition does little to prescribe artistic practice. Nor will it, in itself, further interpretation. But I think it does eliminate Spock and the Infinite Sponge from the institution of art, and it leaves room for more investigation into certain special operations of the literary, plastic and musical mind. 5 My translation. Valéry quoted by Didi-Huberman: “Le graphique est capable du continu dont la parole est incapable; il l’emporte sur elle en évidence et en précision.” (278). 6 My translation. Bergson in Didi-Huberman: “Nous n’avons que deux moyens d’expression, le concept et l’image. C’est en concepts que le système se développe; c’est en image qu’il se resserre quand on le repousse vers l’intuition d’où il descend…” (276). Æsthetics and the Literary Mind 93 Works Cited Davidson, Donald. “What Metaphors Mean.” Critical Inquiry 5.1 (1978): 31-47. Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor. Ed. Mark Johnson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981. Didi-Huberman, Georges. “La Danse de toute chose.” Mouvements de l’air : Étienne- Jules Marey, photographe des fluides. Georges Didi-Huberman and Laurent Mannoni. Paris: Gallimard, 2004. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978. Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979; Vintage, 1989. Hoy, David. The Critical Circle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. —, and Mark Turner. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. —. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, and Ronald Shusterman. L’Emprise des signes. Paris, Seuil: 2002. Nussbaum, Martha. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Richards, I.A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York: Open University Press, 1936. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Searle, John. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Shusterman, Ronald. “Content, Qualia, and Event: Some Theories of the Moral Role of Metaphor” European Journal of English Studies 7.2 (2003): 215-227. —. Critique et poésie selon I.A. Richards: de la confiance positiviste au relativisme naissant. Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1988. —. “La métaphore et le problème du relativisme.” Théorie, Littérature, Enseignement 9 (1991). Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 1922. London: Routledge, 1981. Wordsworth, William. The Poems. Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. 302. V ALENTINE C UNNINGHAM Figuring it Out How does the mind work? What is consciousness? What is selfconsciousness? What is what we think of as self - as the conscious me? What is a person, conceived of as an individual conscious entity? How to think of mind, consciousness, me? How to talk of this? The so-called cognitive world - that convergence of artificial intelligence researchers, neuro-physiologists, philosophers of mind, psychologists, anthropologists - is extremely busy trying to figure it out. ‘Consciousness is all the rage just now’ said Jerry Fodor in 2007, and he was right (Fodor, “Headaches have Themselves” 10). The contemporary furor is to figure out consciousness in the base sense of finding out, of working it out. A figuring out which, strikingly to the literary-minded observer, has a way of also being a figuring out in the rhetorical sense - an investment in figure: in metaphor, in analogy and story. Which is a knowing, or professing to know, mind and consciousness, as if they were something else. And that is, of course, to do poetic work, the work of the story-teller, of the novelist. “We are all virtuoso novelists”, declared the loudest consciousness expert Daniel Dennett, notoriously, in his 1988 TLS piece, “Why Everyone is a Novelist” (1029: it was incorporated into the last section of his influential Consciousness Explained of 1991). He was referring to our allegedly universal practice of self-fashioning through telling stories about ourselves. This may or may not be true as a universal technique of self-knowing. The philosopher Galen Strawson has resisted that story-telling notion as simply nonsense, a “fallacy of our age” (Strawson, “A Fallacy of Our Age”). What, though, is pretty clear, is that attempting to describe consciousness (or mind, or self, or person: the equating and overlapping of terms for this item, this ‘thing’, is common) turns the generality of would-be describers (all of Jerry Fodor’s motley clutch of observers: “philosophers, psychologists, phenomenologists, brain scientists, MDs, the Dalai Lama … neurologists … priests, gurus and (always) people who used to do physics” (Fodor, “Headaches have Themselves” 10)) into fictionists - into story-tellers, novelists, or at least quasi-novelists. Thomas Nagel, in that most influential invitation to a thoughtexperiment, “What Is It Like to be a Bat? ”, talks of this practice of ‘explaining what is’ hard to explain or even incomprehensible, “in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different”, as a human weakness (Nagel; Heil 528). But it is rather, I would say, from the evidence, seemingly inevitable - especially when we are faced with what has come to labelled the Hard Problem, the problem of consciousness. Or when faced V ALENTINE C UNNINGHAM 96 with the Really Hard Problem (as Dennett has it: Sweet Dreams 162) of What Happens Next - the sequelae of the brain functions which have themselves become in such large numbers apparently easy to scan, and capture in action, and describe. What’s It Like? (‘w.i.l.? ’ in what seems to be the jargon), i.e. what is the nature of the case: the transition from brain to mind, from neural state to mental state, from spatial event in the brain to non-spatial event in the mind or consciousness (in the description of the philosopher Colin McGinn, The Mysterious Flame 115)? So far, at least, it has proved impossible to say, as such. This transition, or passage, remains a mystery indeed. It merely begs the question to point out, or point to, the neural, material, physical events in the brain, in an act of what Fodor dismisses as “bottom-up ontology” (Fodor, In Critical Condition 3) - or physicSalism in Galen Strawson’s neologism (e.g. Freeman 4). Neuro-psychologist-philosophers don’t get rid of the problem either by simply sneering at the problem’s describers - people like Colin McGinn - as feeble-minded New Mysterians (Dennett, Consciousness Explained 273). What we can say of consciousness (or mind or self) - what, it would appear, we can only say in place of saying what consciousness is actually like - is what it’s like, i.e. what it resembles, in analogical terms, in description by means of similes and metaphors. Not as is, but only as if. And that is what we do say - pouring metaphors over the otherwise unspeakable case. Which is a sure instance of what George Eliot, in that momentous moment in The Mill on the Floss (1860) called the (to be lamented) fact, “that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor - that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else” (Bk. II, Ch. 1). Which is, indeed, poets’, story-tellers’, novelists’ work. Arrestingly, as David Lodge’s essay “Consciousness and the Novel” (in his Consciousness and the Novel: Collected Essays), finds it easy to point out, the history of the novel is utterly cognate with the history of the modern discussion of consciousness. Consciousness has ever been the business of literature, but it became a main concern of the Novel. ‘The novel is arguably man’s most successful effort to describe the experience of individual human beings moving through space and time’ (Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel 10). Lodge is right. The Novel, as the West knows it, is resolute that its subject is knowing, or seeking to know, the mystery of persons. From the start in the hands of Daniel Defoe, the Novel is convinced of the existence of an I, a self, that is potentially knowable, possessable, ownable. It is ‘my self’ - as Robinson Crusoe has it - mine, my own; me, uniquely me, an individual private me; me on my own; me as my own property, properly me, my propri t , a complex of my properties, my selfhood components, knowable features like the properties of atoms, or of God in The Prayer Book, “whose property is always to have mercy”. Novelists have acted on the assumption that each of us has what George Eliot thought of in Middlemarch (1871-2) as a unique “centre of self” - what Eliot’s Dorothea finds hard to feel in relation to Mr Casaubon: “that he had an equivalent centre of self” - equivalent to her strong sense of Figuring it Out 97 her own particularity an otherness which makes “the lights and shadows ... always fall with a certain difference” (Ch. 21). This ‘self’, this major concern of novelists, this knowable, or at least explorable, thing, is from the beginning of the English Novel perceived as not a simple entity; but rather as a combined complex, in fact, of body and mind, of feeling and thinking; never as a matter of a dualistic either-or, a splitting of the spatial and the non-spatial (to use those McGinn terms). The Novel fails to recognise an absolute ‘Cartesian’ cogito ergo sum. And of course the combination makes this ‘self’ all the more difficult to access. Crusoe’s conversion, for example, takes place as a totally combined event of mind and body. A sick man; reading his Bible; thinking about his bad behaviour to his father; feeling sorry for his sins; repenting of his primal disobedience to the father; finding the joy of salvation for the ‘soul’ and also recovering from his bodily ill as he drinks copiously of a rum and tobacco mixture: here’s a spiritual, mental and physical cure all in one. It’s no more separable into a dualistic body-event and a mind-event than when Crusoe sees the footprint in the sand, and is grossly panicked, running for his life back to his den, and unable to recall how he got there. Spatial and non-spatial events, simply or rather complexly interact, both of them, all together: the complexly mixed nature of which, the way the connection works, is way beyond easy explication. (The history of Defoe criticism is, of course, a history of misguided separation of the two: Crusoe’s ‘conversion’ being seen now as wholly material, now as wholly spiritual.) George Eliot’s Dr Lydgate, the Middlemarch neuro-physiologist, wants to get to the bottom of this complex - to expose the connectivities, the transition place or places. And he never does get to the bottom of the puzzle. He’s rather like George Eliot’s common-law husband George Henry Lewes, whose own effort to engage the tricky combination of physiology and psychology in the human being - what he called sentience (the neuro-muscular activity) and consciousness (or “reflection”, “the particular mode of Sentience”) - was going on even as George Eliot was writing Middlemarch. Lewes’s life proved too short for him to crack the problem. He managed to produce only three volumes of his projected big work, the Problems of Life and Mind (1873-7), before he died in November 1878. Struggling, he was wont to call his project ‘the key to all psychologies’, after Casaubon’s unfinished “Key to all Mythologies”. (The last two volumes of The Problems, The Study of Psychology and Mind as a Function of the Organism, which appeared in 1879, were ‘edited’, anonymously, by Eliot herself: the latter volume is in places no more than mere notes and jottings.) It’s Lydgate’s delusion that he can do better than Lewes in solving the spatial/ non-spatial mystery. This task is, by definition, a matter of trying to inspect the invisible; it takes Lydgate into mysterian territory; the microscope is no help; what’s required is the highest kind of imagination (not just any old cheap narrative, or what we might call a toocasual thought experiment): V ALENTINE C UNNINGHAM 98 Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration: reports of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat’s wings and spurts of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to reflect life in a diseased dream. But these kinds of inspiration Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar and vinous compared with the imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space. He for his part had tossed away all cheap inventions where ignorance finds itself able and at ease: he was enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye of research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness. (Ch. 16) ‘Arduous invention’. What’s required in this pursuit is useful metaphoricity, the highest and best kind of fiction. Metaphor is necessary. “Metaphors were not wanting”, says Middlemarch’s narrator of Banker Bulstrode and his selfjustifying course of unethical trading as a money-making pawnbroker (Ch. 61). And according to George Eliot metaphors never are wanting, certainly not in novels. Such is the fictionist’s way, the fictionist’s view. “[We] all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors”, says that narrator, again, of Casaubon’s misunderstanding of what marriage will bring him. He “had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large drafts on his affections whould not fail to be honoured” (Ch. 10). And he was wrong, wrong in the expectations his metaphors brought along. Fatally wrong, as George Eliot would put it. You have to be wary of metaphor, because metaphor changes things. A thing becomes what you metaphoricize it as; i.e. metaphor does as metaphor is. The novelist knows this well. This is story-teller’s truth, the as if truth which fiction offers the reader. It’s the contention on which George Eliot powerfully reflects in that astonishing passage in The Mill on the Floss (1860) about a necessary but tricky metaphoricizing of the brain. Maggie and Tom Tulliver are at Mr Stelling’s school; Tom is no good at Latin or Geometry - his Eton Grammar and his Euclid; and so Mr Stelling concluded that Tom’s brain being peculiarly impervious to etymology and demonstrations, was peculiarly in need of being ploughed and harrowed by these patent implements: it was his favourite metaphor, that the classics and geometry constituted that culture of the mind which prepared it for the reception of any subsequent crop. I say nothing against Mr Stelling’s theory: if we are to have one regimen for all minds his seems to me as good as any other. I only know it turned out as uncomfortable for Tom Tulliver as if he had been plied with cheese in order to remedy a gastric weakness which prevented him from digesting it. It is astonishing what a different result one gets by changing the metaphor! Once call the brain an intellectual stomach, and one’s ingenious conception of the classics Figuring it Out 99 and geometry as ploughs and harrows seems to settle nothing. But then, it is open to some one else to follow great authorities and call the mind a sheet of white paper or a mirror, in which case one’s knowledge of the digestive process becomes quite irrelevant. It was doubtless an ingenious idea to call the camel the ship of the desert, but it would hardly lead one far in training that useful beast. (Bk. II, Ch. 1) This is the metaphorical fix. And Eliot goes on to expostulate with Aristotle for praising “metaphorical speech as a sign of high intelligence” - in that passage in the Poetics where metaphor is hailed as “the token of genius”, because “the right use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances” - but failing at the same time to lament “that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor, that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else” (Bk. II, Ch. 1). The metaphorical fix. The novelist is right in it. Like the mad serial killer in Philip Kerr’s brain-theory expert crime story, A Philosophical Investigation, a novel which gets fearfully deep into a sadist’s mentality: It’s a fascinating area, brain function …. Viewed from the top, your brain most resembles something from Dante’s Inferno, a pit to which lost souls have been consigned, their fleshy bodies coiled together with hardly a space to separate their desperate agonies of damnation. It is a sight such as might have greeted the liberators of Auschwitz as they stared into the mass piles of naked, unburied corpses. A ghastly, pressed jelly of humanity, this pâté de foie gras of thought. Seen from the side, your brain is a dancer, or an acrobat, impossibly muscled - will you look at those biceps and those pectorals - bent into a foetal position, the arm (the temporal lobe) wrapped round the leg, the head (cerebellum) resting on the shins (medulla oblongata). From underneath, your brain is something obscenely hermaphrodite. There are the frontal lobes meeting like the labia of a human vagina. And beneath them, the pons and the medualla longata that reminds you of a semi-erect penis. Dissected, sectioned coronally from ear to ear, the imperfect symmetry of your brain is like a Rorschach inkblot, that diagnostic tool of unstructured personality tests once favoured by psychologists. (97-8) Metaphor - figure, fiction - are all the story-teller has to think of mind and consciousness as. According to the novelist - and for that matter any artist, any aesthetic producer - it’s all any of us have: the truth of fiction; fiction as truth. In her epigraph to Daniel Deronda (1876) George Eliot writes of the difficulty of imagining the beginning of things, of the cosmos, of as it were the Big Bang moment, the moment, as she puts it, of transition from 0 to 1 (a kind of parallel to that ‘hard’ moment of the move from neural to mental); but difficult as it is, we do, as she says, need to imagine it: we have to have a “make-believe of a beginning”. We have to make do with make-believe; we can’t do without imagining, without metaphor, without (as we would now V ALENTINE C UNNINGHAM 100 put it) the thought-experiment. The Oxford philosopher Kathy Wilkes has protested powerfully against the extravagant unreality of so many thoughtexperiments in philosophy (Wilkes, vii, 46, 126, 198). And surely there does come a reality checkpoint, when if you can’t see the colour of a metaphor’s money on demand, it gets thrown out of the game. Metaphors do indeed point back at some reality that they are also pointing towards - or they’re of limited good. And the novelist might agree - perhaps should agree; but meanwhile he/ she has to act as if the as if is all there is, because it’s all we’ve got, really, to go on. The fictionist is locked in metaphor. But so too, arrestingly, are the scientists - scientists of all sorts - who are trying to come to terms with the human, how it is, how it evolved, especially with the relation of body and mind: the cognitive army in whose vanguard are the neuro-scientists and their close allies the philosophers of mind. All of them are locked in metaphor, sometimes awarely, sometimes less than awarely; but whether aware of it or not, all of them are in servitude to metaphor. For thinking of any kind, it would seem, does not occur, and does not progress, without metaphor, analogy, story. Metaphor is what the Wittgensteinian philosopher Peter Hacker has hailed as the “go-cart of creativity” - at the same time as he deplores the ‘mythology’ of the common contemporary metaphorical set of computer analogies for neural activities - hardwiring, hard-drives, soft-ware add-ons, and so forth (Hacker). Hacker is just one of those philosphers of mind who agree with Jerry Fodor that “The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way” (Fodor, The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way): strong objectors who haven’t stopped the popularity of the computational model. And the go-cart of this particular bit of sort of mythologising is unstoppable not least the hermeneutic practice of reading brain/ mind/ self through metaphor is unstoppable. And the metaphors - genuinely insightful and revelatory and just ones; colourful student-graspable ad hoc ones; ones merely cheap and cheerful, merely fun; even rather satirical ones (brain as meat, for instance, or porridge (Ridley) or “yeast-cells in a lump of dough” (Dennett, Sweet Dreams 2); I think of Richard Feynman’s imagining the conservation of energy as a beach-story of towels which won’t dry you because they’re already wet: Feynman) - they all of them, the good and the bad and the ugly, get instantiated, more or less, as describers of the case because, as with George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke or Dr Lydgate or schoolmaster Tulliver, they are all our imagination has to be going on with. Primal soup, black holes, strings, selfish genes: there was no soup; genes do not have selves, emotions, desires; the brain has no hard-wiring; it’s not porridge, it’s only like porridge. ‘They’re made out of meat’. ‘... the brain is made out of meat’. ‘So ... what does the thinking? ’ ‘The brain does the thinking. The meat.’ ‘Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat? ’ Figuring it Out 101 ‘Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat! Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture? ’ The consternation of Alien Centre in Terry Bisson’s satirical story “They’re Made Out of Meat” (a story much featured on the Internet and in the cognitive literature) when they hear from the alien earth-visitors about what earthling’s brains are made of is understandable (Bisson; quoted by McGinn, The Mysterious Flame 6-8 - quoting Pinker, How The Mind Works). It’s often hard to take such metaphors seriously, but we have to because they’re the best our imaginations can come up with. They’re like legal fictions, and like legal fictions they do have their point, which is the illumination of the reality they claim to be rooted in. They strain to offer the illumination we crave of realities which would otherwise remain dark. There’s no need to go as far as Roger Jones in his Physics as Metaphor in supposing that there is only metaphor, only figures of the imagination: which is the extreme allegation of some post-modernists and ultra-relativists, the argument towards which the important work of George Lakoff and his associates tends (Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy in the Flesh; Lakoff & Nuñez, Where Mathematics Comes From; Lakoff & Turner, More Than Cool Reason) - Lakoff the ‘messiah’ of metaphoricity, as Steven Pinker calls him in “The Metaphor Metaphor” chapter of The Stuff of Thought, which nicely balances the pros and cons of metaphoricity fundamentalism (235- 278). Metaphoricizing by its very nature must assume there is something there in the first place to be analogized. But where Jones and Lakoff and others - Jones builds for instance on that arrestingly sceptical work of Owen Barfield’s, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry - are right is in pointing to the metaphoric as our necessary access to reality, the reality which comes to exist for us only as if. It is indeed, in the arresting formula of Lakoff and Johnson, metaphors that we live by (Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By). We can’t, it seems, begin to think, can’t imagine, for example so-called black holes without the aid of the notorious Black Hole of Calcutta which grants them their vivid, graspable, and of course ingeniously inventive, metaphorical life. (An inventiveness that goes on and on: how delighting to learn that the stretching which would happen to any object, a human body say, sucked into a black hole, has been dubbed spaghettification! ) And the more elusive the object, the more challengingly indescribable it is, the more the metaphorical attempts at description need to accumulate about it. Consciousness, mind, self are like, say, theological persons, God in the Old Testament and Jesus in the New, in attracting necessary heaps of metaphors, all seeking, on and on, with no finally consoling end in sight, to pinpoint and pin down a felt reality. And how the metaphorical catalogue for consciousness expands, with what its devisers hope is revealing, convincing, force. So we get Roger Penrose’s fetching analogy of the conscious self as “the chairman of some large corporation who is presented only with highly processed and simplified data” coming from “the whirring computer of the brain” (Penrose, “Minds, Machines and Mathematics”). And Colin Blakemore and Susan Greenfield’s V ALENTINE C UNNINGHAM 102 story of the mind-brain relationship as like the conductor-driver of a oneman bus (Blakemore & Greenfield, “Ideas”). And Greenfield, among others, thinking of brain activities as water that turns into the wine of consciousness (Greenfield, “Minds Meet”). And Daniel Dennett - arch-metaphoricizer - analogizing consciousness as gravity, or as a pop-up toaster, and so on and on (Dennett, Consciousness Explained). All of them stories, fictions - without which, it would seem, the discussion, our thinking about consciousness, and so forth, could not proceed, because the mental life these fictions narrate exists for us, at least pro tem, only as it is imaginable in these ways: as the notorious Brains in the Vat of Hilary Putnam (Putnam, “Brains in a vat”), or as what Frank Jackson’s Mary the Colour Scientist gets up to (Jackson), or as denizens, it might be, of John Searle’s famous Chinese Room (Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs”). What all our vigorous analogists crave for their thought experimentation, their figurative work, is ontological usefulness. Which is limited, observably, by all this metaphoricity’s perennial and inevitable contemporaneity. All thinking-by-metaphor is, of course, willy-nilly time-bound. The bright cutting-edge of the modernity which is necessary to a metaphor having any force inevitably goes blunt with time. So forceful metaphors may come, but they also go. As John Searle pointed out in his 1984 Reith Lectures, our now fashionable computer-model is only the latest in a long-line of mechanistic latest-technology models for brain work which have all had their day - from the Ancient Greeks who thought of the brain as a catapult, to Leibniz who thought of it as a mill, and Freud who envisaged it as a hydraulic or electromagnetic system. Searle lists Charles Scott Sherrington, the great neurophysiologist and mind-body dualist - not accidentally, and not at all by the by I would say, a bibliophile and minor poet, greatly influenced by his schoolmaster the Victorian poet Thomas Ashe - who liked likening the brain to a telegraph system. John Searle himself was told as a boy that the brain was a telephone switchboard (Searle, Minds, Brains and Science 44, 69). Wonderfully and revealingly, George Eliot thought of the memory as a magiclantern picture show: Protestant Dorothea recalling in later life the nightmarish redness of Roman Catholic Rome, which hit her eyesight “like a disease of the retina”, in “images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze” (Ch. 20). But Eliot’s analogy, like all the rest ever, only speaks loudly to the time of its author which gave it its life. Consciousness as a stream, the metaphor which so powerfully incites the fictional practice of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce, and originates apparently with Henry James’s brother William the philosopher of mind, is utterly of its time too, when dominant philology thought of language as existing as a diachronic temporal flow. Just so, Daniel Dennett’s story (Sweet Dreams 136ff.) of consciousness as a condition of fame contingent upon the brain as television (as it were consciousness’ appearances on the brain’s TV reality show) could not be more of our time: day-time television watchers, especially US vintage, for the use of. One hears much less nowadays than formerly of Figuring it Out 103 ‘brain-grammars’ now that Noam Chomsky’s theory of language-users’ inherited deep-grammar-programmes has less of the glamour and force it once enjoyed. And so it goes. Our pictures of consciousness are - rather pathetically - geared to our contemporaneity, our current mundaneness. They inevitably run out of steam (to use an old metaphor, itself already running out of steam as steam-trains fade from memory); they have (to use more recent metaphors from the contemporary worlds of shopping and manufactures) a terrible short shelf-life, a woeful built-in obsolescence. As does the textuality of the large metaphorical field so greatly favoured by cognitive people in recent times. Our science fictionists, as we have to label them, the mind philosophers and psychologists who are such masters of the metaphorical universe, are truly Science Fictionists, Sci Fi merchants. Their thought-experiments arrive densely peopled by aliens and Martians, zombies, robots, thinking thermostats. Their stories dwell in Other Dimensions, Other Worlds, in parallel universes, among the Twin earthlings of Hilary Putnam’s Twin Earths (Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘meaning’”). Our science fictionalisers are always at some futurist flick-house. Of course Mary the Colour Scientist makes a comeback in Daniel Dennett’s pages (Sweet Dreams 103-129) as RoboMary (Robocop: Robomary). And if they’re not putting yet one more futuristic DVD into their player, they’re relaxing with some Sci Fi tome. They seem to read mostly Sci Fi novels. They are, to be sure, familiar with certain more canonical novels. Though from their quotations and referrings you notice that their canonical reading is limited to a rather tiny bunch - Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Borges - the kind of texts non-literature majors get to read on their compulsory literature courses. But still it is striking how greatly some textual source or another, films and novels, provides the going strong metaphors and analogies, the examples and illustrations which fire, which become what are in generic terms the short stories, the nouvelles, the little fictions of our cognitive people. Where does Thomas Nagel get his (foundational) idea of wondering what it’s like to be a bat, except from Kafka’s Metamorphosis? (The subatomic particles known as quarks took their name from the German curd-cheese called Quark, via their discoverer Murray Gell-Mann’s familiarity with the poem beginning “Three quarks for Muster Mark! ” on p.385 of Finnegans Wake - as explained in his letter to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, who reproduce it in their Second Edition’s entry for quark. ‘Bottom’ and ‘Top’ Quarks were at first labelled Beauty and Truth: someone in the lab, perhaps the Joyce-reading Gell-Mann himself, was up on Keats.) Steven Jay Gould thinks of these stories as Just So Stories, after Rudyard Kipling. Daniel Dennett happily recycles the “semiotic materialism” of the literary-theorist Robyn in David Lodge’s novel Nice Work to illustrate his story of “the Self as the Centre of Narrative Gravity” - odourless, colourless, authorless and so forth (Dennett, Consciousness Explained 410- 11). And so on: everywhere literary parasitism and plagiarism; the thoughts and works of novelists manqués. Like Daniel Dennett, whose story of consciousness-as-TV-fame comes illustrated by the ‘tale’ of Jim the first-time V ALENTINE C UNNINGHAM 104 novelist bumped off the Oprah Winfrey Show and the cover of Time Magazine by hotter news of a San Francisco earthquake (Sweet Dreams 141-143). Dave the disappointed novelist; Dan the disappointing one. (Colin McGinn, sharpest of the philosophical mind-experimenters, keenest attender to Sci Fi movies and stories as well as devoted fan of Martin Amis, is also that rarest of cases, the philosopher of mind who is also a real novelist. He’s the author of the very Martin-Amisian The Space Trap.) It’s inevitable, I suppose, for these would-be novelists - and occasional actual novelist - to have their sights so firmly fixed on literature. Inevitable, too, by the same sort of token, that their metaphoricity, their figuring, should not only keep drawing on literature for inspiration and example, but should draw, in a most revealing self-referential way, on poeticity, on textuality, on literariness itself. “There is a poetry in genetics”, says Jonathan Kingdon, the anthropologist - to the approval of Daniel Dennett’s hero, the biologist Richard Dawkins - who stars Kingdon in his new Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, a volume devoted not just to metaphoricizing scientists galore, but to the idea that scientists either produce wonderful writing themselves or are the cause of wonderful writing in others. And if there is a tendency to ‘poetry’ in cognitive writing - and there is - it involves a leaning also to a selfconscious poeticity. The going metaphoricity is, in other words, selfreferentially textual, literary, linguistic, bookish, to an extraordinary degree. The great model and example here, as so often in these discussions, is Charles Darwin himself, in On the Origin of Species, in that wonderful extended analogy - metaphor piled upon metaphor - for the brokenness and fragmentariness of the geological record: For my part, following out Lyell’s metaphor, I look at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating to only two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines. Each word of the slowly-changing language, in which the history is supposed to be written, being more or less different in the interrupted succession of chapters, may represent the apparently abruptly changed forms of life, entombed in our consecutive, but widely separated, formations. (Ch.9) At a base level, in our time, there’s all the talk about brain grammar and syntax and semantics: what Roy Harris calls the “neuro-nonsense about grammatical programs in the brain”; “a linguistic dud cheque that no scientific bank in the world will ever cash” (Harris). Here, characteristically of the linguistic-metaphoricity tendency, is Sydney Brenner, colleague of DNA pioneer Francis Crick, in his piece “Theoretical Biology in the Third Millennium” (it’s in Dawkins’s anthology): “Biological systems are information processing machines and this must be an essential part of any theory we may construct”; “not only must we use the vocabulary of the language machine but we must also pay heed to what may be called the grammar of the biological system” (Brenner). Must, must, the felt imperative, the call, of the lan- Figuring it Out 105 guage analogy; a summons pervading the discussion utterly. Daniel Dennett is just one of its numerous respondents. Central to his influence are, of course, his brilliant textual analogies: consciousness, for example, as an author writing multiple drafts of a text, Dennett’s very fetching model offered as a replacement for the old Humean model of the “Cartesian Theatre” which Dennett so derides (itself, obviously, an aesthetic and literary analogy) (Dennett, Consciousness Explained 101ff.). And what about memes? Richard Dawkins, of course, disowned, or at least covered up, the linguisticity of that instantly popular invention of his, the meme: the alleged “unit of cultural transmission”. Memes arrived as a lateish thought - almost an afterthought - in The Selfish Gene: what to do with all those things like “tunes, ideas, catchphrases, clothes-fashions, ways of making pots or building arches” (Dawkins’s first list was a slim one), especially the aesthetic, linguistic, cultural aspects of evolving human life and mind patently cared about by materialist Dawkins, as by so many of his materialist cognitive colleagues, but outside the materialistic, physicsalist reckonings of selfish genetics? Tunes and rituals and so forth are patently spread by imitation - their essence is that they are copyable, replicatable, mimable - so they could be thought of as like genes. Dawkins first thought of calling them mimemes for their mimable, mimicable nature, but cut mimeme down to meme to get it to rhyme with the gene whose functions it allegedly parallels. Which had the effect of concealing the metaphoricity of the item, and its birth in the textualizing intellectual climate of the Mid-Seventies. Dawkins helped on the obscuration by apologising, as he puts it in The Selfish Gene, to his “classical friends” for cutting into the Greekness of mimeme to produce meme and asking us to think of ‘memory’ or even the French word même. But it’s not any lamed ‘Greekness’, nor even the Frenchness of même, that’s at stake but rather the Frenchness of the mimeme that meme started out as. Stephen Jay Gould disconcerted Susan Blackmore (strong advocate of meme, not least in her enthusiastic The Meme Machine - a book selfcongratulatingly and enthusiastically foreworded by Dawkins) by dismissing meme as “a meaningless metaphor” (the metaphor that has spawned memetics as a branch of study, pursued by professional meme theorists, those speculators preoccupied with what are now known as memeplexes, complexes of memes such as the self or religions). Blackmore objected to Gould’s ‘meaningless’ (surely all metaphors have some meaning ...), but failed to see the importance of the allegation of metaphoricity (Blackmore, The Meme Machine 17). She is also quite ignorant - like every other cognitivist commentator I know - of this metaphor’s roots in the francophiliac Seventies, when Theory under the dominating influence of structuralist and post-structuralist thought held that everything was (in the notorious formula of Jaques Lacan) “structured like a language” (he was talking explicitly of the unconscious). And structured on the basic Saussurean signifying unit of the phoneme - or phonème - ally of a whole kin of phoneme-like structuring units coming in from linguistics, grapheme, lexeme, sememe, semanteme, morpheme, toneme - V ALENTINE C UNNINGHAM 106 which enjoyed renewed life across the then fashionably language-modelled, textualising spectrum, spawning new emic offspring, ideologeme and such. So Dawkins’s brainwave, the mimeme, was born into a busy linguistic-textual cousinhood, only to have its ancestry smothered at birth in its rebaptism as meme. The selfish mimeme, passing itself off as the merely selfish meme. Memes comes in all sizes. The question of how big a meme is permeates Blackmore’s The Meme Machine, and the answer is ‘any size’, from a musical tag (the opening four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony are a meme-world favourite example) to a whole religion (the Roman Catholic Church is another meme-ist favourite). Daniel Dennett cheekily suggests there’s a meme for Moby Dick (Consciousness Explained 203). But whether jingle-sized or Moby Dick-huge or even religion-gigantic, it’s impossible to think of memes as really having intentions and emotions, as the attribution of gene-type selfishness suggests. All of those things, jingles, novels, churches, are persons, have personality, only by dint of metaphor. Colin McGinn does cite memes as “mind-fucking” entities in his new book Mindfucking but he’d be the first to deny actual personal desire - the desire actually to have sex with your mentalité - to any of the memetic, “mind-fucking” things whose invasiveness he so deplores. Literary critics do indeed talk of texts as having intentions - ‘what Moby Dick intends’ - just as any commentator might speculate on ‘the ambitions’ of Roman Catholicism, and so on - but to do so is, of course, to indulge in what John Ruskin labelled the “pathetic fallacy” of “personification”. When Ruskin invented that potent label in his Modern Painters (Vol. III, 1856, Part 4, Sect. xii) he was chastising poets, Wordsworth, Charles Kingsley, Tennyson, for ascribing personality, emotion especially, to nonpersonal things, to natural objects. Such personification was for Ruskin simply a category error. Rivers and flowers are not persons. But Ruskin’s vexation was aesthetically shortsighted. For personification, which ancient rhetoricians knew as prosopopoeia, is a basic trope of poetry, of fiction-making, as it is of theology. Maybe Ruskin was troubled by the quasi-theological implications of personification, by what this allegorising of persons, of otherness and others, into being might lead to conceptually, by leading you down a path of belief in otherness leading, in the end, to accepting the existence of a transcendental otherness, something like a deity. Prosopopoeia is the bringing into being, a presencing, of non-present, absent persons, or ‘characters’, for the life of your poem, your drama, your novel, of your belief-system of any kind (persons who are addressed, invoked, brought on stage, made present, instantiated, by the ancient device of apostrophe - which is the trope, of course, of prayer). Nothing could be more intrinsically and fundamentally poetic than the work of prosopopoeia. And the personification of the meme - as of the gene - is an extreme, but utterly characteristic, example of the aestheticizing, whether explicit or implicit, that goes on in the cognitive discussion. (And it follows that Dawkins and Dennett, as committed atheists, have to take up the cudgels intensively against the religion and deity which such devoted personifyings as theirs might be thought of as allowing in by the Figuring it Out 107 back door: “Devil’s Chaplain” Dawkins (hero of Latha Menon’s 2003 selection of Dawkins essays, A Devil’s Chaplain) in his extended stretch of Goddismissing encounters, beginning in the pages of The Selfish Gene itself and culminating in The God Delusion; Dennett in Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.) Daniel Dennett does come clean in the matter of analogy and metaphor right at the end of his Consciousness Explained. His analogies - “intuition pumps” as he calls them - are “more art than science”. His efforts haven’t replaced “metaphorical theory, the Cartesian theatre, with a nonmetaphorical (‘literal, scientific’) theory. All I have done, really, is to replace one family of metaphors”, the Cartesian Theatre and so on, “with another”: software, virtual machines, multiple drafts and all that. So it’s all “just a war of metaphors? ” (Consciousness Explained 455). But of course it is. And one thinks of how his story, and set of stories, of consciousness, are precisely an affair of metaphor-wars and story-wars, of how eager he is to offer counter readings, midrash, on the standard cognitive narratives, the Chinese Room and Mary the Colour Scientist, doing so in a whole splurging syndrome of Marymidrash upon Mary-midrash (that Mary - Dennett’s Robomary - she just won’t go away: there’s now a whole school of Mary-Studies). Defiantly, Dennett insists that “metaphors are the tools of thought”. He could be George Eliot. “No one can think about consciousness without them, so it is important to equip yourself with the best set of tools available. Look what we have built with our tools. Could you have imagined it without them? ” That’s Dennett’s cocky last word in Consciousness Explained (455). He’s happy to be thought of as what Burton Voorhees calls “the Devil” who reduces the Self to “an abstract ‘Centre of Gravity’ which is itself nothing but a convenient fiction” (Sweet Dreams 146). Convenient fiction. And so we are to think of cognitive thought-experiments, these so ‘convenient fictions’, as the best tools for imagining consciousness? As better than the Novel, for instance, the old technology of cognitive investigation? I wonder. Utterly apt to the question is the often flawed way of the typical neuroscientist with fiction. Take the neuro-physiologist Edmund Rolls in his Emotion Explained. He’s “one of the most cited neuro-physiologists in the world”, so one of the best. And he thinks that you read novels and poems, and go to plays, in order to acquire the adaptive, evolutionary beneficial nous that comes from “unravelling the thoughts and emotions of others” as they’re depicted in fiction, and from having “empathy” with them. Which is just another of the reductive and crudely instrumental explanations amply available on the cognitive stage - those Just So Stories rightly lampooned by Jerry Fodor: “ ‘We like telling stories because telling stories exercises the imagination and an imagination would have been a good thing for a hunter-gatherer to have’. ... ‘We like music because singing together strengthened the bond between the hunters and the gatherers (and/ or between the hunter-gatherer grownups and their hunter-gatherer offspring)’. ‘We talk by making noises and not by waving our hands; that’s because hunter-gatherers lived in the V ALENTINE C UNNINGHAM 108 savannah and would have had trouble seeing one another in the tall grass.’ ... ‘We don’t all talk the same language because that would make us more likely to interbreed with foreigners (which would be bad because it would weaken the ties of hunter-gatherer communities)’ ” (Fodor, “Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings” 22). How can you rely on ‘imaginative tools’ offered by analysts whose critical theorising and practice, whose textuality and linguisticity, whose readerliness and imagination, are as poor as that? The likes, as a matter of fact, of Daniel Dennett - illustrating the complications of self and selfnaming with the ‘analogy’ of Moby Dick (for which, according to Dennett, as one recalls, there is a meme, i.e. a motor of replication, which helps you mime, mimic, repeat it): “Pick up Moby Dick and open it to page one. It says, ‘Call me Ishmael’ ” (Dennett, “Why Everyone is a Novelist” 1016). Well, no, it doesn’t; that’s not what page one of Moby Dick says; that’s not Melville’s actual make-believe of a beginning. There are two other characters who precede Ishmael, an usher in a school and sub-sub librarian, and pages of whaleetymology and literary quotations about whales. Dennett is making up his own page one. So much for miming, mimicking, repeating. Dennett, like so many others of his ilk, is by no means as good as he thinks he is with how novelists actually do their make-believings of the self. And Melville, and his kind, I’d say, do it better than Daniel Dennett and his kind. As does, I allege, the Novel at large. Which is the good point of David Lodge’s novel Thinks... . Thinks... stages the confrontation between Ralph Messenger, hot-shot director of the Holt Belling Centre for Cognitive Studies of the University of Gloucester, a dynamic exponent of the cognitive, Artificial Intelligence, and all that (strongly modelled, one guesses, on Daniel Dennett, Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University), and Helen Reed, novelist and Visiting Professor of Creative Writing. Both are shocked by the other’s take on the mind, consciousness, self. Messenger preaches the cognitive, PhysicSalist, futurist, Artifical Intelligence gospel. Reed preferring trudging, as Messenger thinks it, along the old paths of the traditional Novel. When she’s roped in to attending the big cognitive conference Messenger has organised, she’s gobsmacked by papers on subjects like “The PreFrontal Cortex as a Basic Constituent of the Self”. Aesthetic woman, she’s naturally warmer to the paper asking “Is the Brain like a Bucket of Shot or More Like a Bowl of Jelly? ” Meanwhile, it turns out that the traditional Novel keeps providing models for human being and behaviour which really do work better. For example, Helen Reed happens by chance on Messenger and his mistress in a café and makes out their adulterous relationship, in a wonderful replay of the moment in Henry James’s The Ambassadors when it slowly dawns on Strether as he sees Chad and Madame de Vionnet out boating that they are having a transgressive affair. As for Reed’s Creative Writing students, they can outstrip the cognitive thought-experimenters, any day. She gets them to compose stories on the grand cognitive themes, “Mary the Colour Scientist”, and “What Is It Like to be a Bat”, and in the style of any contemporary novelist. “Mary” from the Figuring it Out 109 famous, and in Helen Reed’s view deeply skewed thought experiment, emerges from these student stories as a variously conceived real person. As such, in one of the student stories she has no trouble at all with the colour red - nub of the original thought-experiment’s problematic - because, like all real women, she menstruates. And what, according to these young fictionists and their fiction, is it like being a bat? Even the most ephebic of novelists can tell you easily; it’s quite simple for a novelist to imagine being a bat, any and every kind of bat - freetail bat, vampire bat, blind bat. Novelists do this kind of imagining all the time, and these young ones exploit the genre’s old capacities - in the style of Martin Amis, Irvine Welsh, Salman Rushdie and Samuel Beckett. 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London: Atlantic Books, 2008. —. “License my roving hands: does neuroscience really have anything to teach us about the pleasures of reading John Donne? ” TLS 11 April 2008: 13-15. Wilkes, Kathleen V. Real People: Personal Identity Without Thought Experiments. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. G ESA S TEDMAN Brain Plots Neuroscience and the Contemporary Novel 1. To write a novel which will be successful in terms of readers, reviews, and prizes, you need the following basic ingredients: an expert on neuroscience, for instance a neurologist; a victim or patient, for instance someone with a brain impairment following an accident; the victim’s or doctor’s wife, sister or girlfriend; a generally threatening, gloomy context, preferably something to do with 9/ 11; mental illness, e.g. the Capgras Syndrome where people become unable to recognize relatives and friends and decide these are impostors; neurological jargon; dreams, nightmares, memories and stream-of-consciousness; clichés such as “the eyes are windows to the soul” or “traumatized people do not talk” or “poetry helps people overcome their problems”. In other words: a brain plot, a sure recipe for literary success. In this article, I will explore some of these successful contemporary novels based on “brain plots” - plots revolving around mental illness, the workings of the mind and how experts and victims deal with these issues. Rather than addressing the question how neuroscience can explain art or literature, or how literature may go into regions neuroscience cannot (or cannot yet, perhaps) explain, my analysis focuses on a different meeting between literature and neuroscience: it focuses on novels about neuroscience and the mind, an issue which seems to be becoming more and more popular with writers on both sides of the Atlantic. After doing a brief and of necessity superficial tour d’horizon of the way literature has attempted to represent the mind and the brain, I will look at five recent novels and their treatment of neuroscience. I want to find out why these novels are so little satisfying in literary or aesthetic terms. When reading contemporary novels that deal with the brain, the mind, or with neuroscience, whose numbers seem to be steadily growing, following David Lodge’s campus/ science novel Thinks… published in 2001, a pattern such as the one sketched above emerges. One might object, of course, and criticise my selection criteria and say that badly written novels always have hackneyed plots. Not so, I argue. The writers whose work I analyse here are well-respected, prize-winning and widely acclaimed authors such as Siri Hustved, Ian McEwan, and Richard Powers. One might further object that I G ESA S TEDMAN 114 have pared down the novels to such basic patterns that one would be able to find these patterns in almost any work of contemporary fiction. Granted - there is usually some kind of love interest or emotional entanglement between characters, so a wife, sister or girlfriend usually comes in when the protagonist is male and not gay. 9/ 11 appears all over the place, too, and other novels use stream-of-consciousness or similar narrative techniques to explain what goes on in characters’ minds. But these texts are set off from others since they contain the expert and the victim, the mental illness or mental condition and the mini-brain plots such as memory loss or Capgras Syndrome as well as the use of a lot of specialist jargon and in addition the ethical problems with which neuroscience confronts us. For want of a better term, I have called what these novels are based on “brain plots”. But rather than merely refer to the elements of the plot, this term is also meant to cover the narrative shape in which these plot elements appear. It is not so much, or at least not only, the subject matter of the novels which is problematic and repetitive, but also the way in which the authors treat this material. But of course there is a close connection between the plot and the shape it takes, since the sources of these plots - public discourse on neuroscience, popular books on neuroscience as quoted in the writers’s acknowledgement statements at the end of their own books - also have a specific shape. This shape - an emphasis on disease, the use of scientific or pseudo-scientific jargon, a focus on individual disease or health, rather than on the relation between society and health issues - then has an impact on how the writers of fiction choose to arrange the material aesthetically. Why have the authors mentioned above produced novels which are similar to the point of utter boredom? And why are these works so unsatisfactory in terms of the narration, their aesthetic treatment of their subject matter which lacks irony, originality and never surprises? Is it perhaps impossible to write really good novels which contain any or all of the above-mentioned elements - the neuroscientist, the mental patient, the impact illness or accidents have on families and friends, the contemporary context the plot is set in etc.? Is the novel as a form intrinsically not suited to represent the workings of the mind, sick or otherwise? 2. Literary history provides us with a number of interesting examples of how the mind’s workings can be represented in literature. The following selection is of course idiosyncratic and every reader will have favourite examples which may have been overlooked here. Leaving aside obvious and widelywritten-about authors such as Shakespeare, who has to take on the role of expert on just about everything human, such as emotion, the mind, and human relations, including warped ones, let’s turn to the 18th century first. Brain Plots - Neuroscience and the Contemporary Novel 115 Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is a prime example of a new way of representing what a character is thinking. The manner in which the ramblings of Tristram Shandy’s mind are rendered is humorous and at the same time convincing. Tristram jumps from one topic to the next, association follows on association. Or think of Jane Austen’s Emma, who manages to deceive herself throughout most of the novel while the reader is able to see that she is blind to what really goes on around her. We can hear Emma’s thoughts as Austen uses a sophisticated narrative technique for rendering mental phenomena and Emma’s only slowly growing awareness that she is in the wrong in her interpretations of the feelings of most of the people arround her. Or take Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, which contains dreams, visions, and unusual similes to explain why the characters are in turmoil from emotional and social upheaval. Think of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which uses elements of the Gothic novel to represent a child’s suffering, fear and nightmares, as well as the adult Jane’s experience of mental and physical deprivation. The perspective of the child is also adopted in Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield. The protagonist’s changing perceptions, growing awareness, and self-explanations of his own complex emotions are rendered with the use of the first-person narrative, allowing the reader to grow up with David Copperfield, as it were, and to follow his trajectory from confused and dejected child to young lover and finally experienced young adult. George Eliot’s uncomfortable insight into the power-wielding but rather mysterious mind of Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda is also a striking example of a narrator entering a literary character’s mind and of an author finding a memorable aesthetic shape for such a mind. Henry James followed George Eliot’s example in The Portrait of a Lady with his minute rendering of a young woman’s experience, or, as he put it in the preface to the novel: “Place the centre of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness […] and you get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as you could wish.” (James, preface p. 50) How James Joyce deals with this “beautiful difficulty” in the shape of a male character in Ulysses does not need much comment perhaps - suffice it to say that both Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway served as background plots for Ian McEwan’s Saturday, a dangerous path to tread indeed, since it is easier to fail than to succeed if one has to contend with literary giants. Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway is particularly interesting because it was written in the context of a general feeling of crisis, similar to the 9/ 11-phenomenon that we are currently experiencing; mental disturbance or even illness and the relation between individual experience and the general context is the great theme of this novel, which still seems fresh whenever one re-reads it, with very few predictable, tired or clichéd sentences to be found. I will speed up my short tour: a brief stop at Doris Lessing’s disturbing novel, The Golden Notebook, with its focus on changing gender relations and her rendition of mental health and disease, another stop with Jeanette Win- G ESA S TEDMAN 116 terson - although admittedly, some of her novels are predictable in the way they represent bodily and mental experience, to end up with, for the time being at least, Ali Smith’s novel The Accidental (2005), a book which has the different ways of experiencing events based on the way we see at its heart, and whose fragmented and experimental shape and ironic tone challenge the reader at every turn of the page. There are, obviously, many differences between these novels, but what they share is a convincing way of representing what goes on in people’s heads and minds. They also share a sense of excitement they instil in the reader - at least in me -, something that most of the more contemporary examples seem to lack. But before explaining the reasons for this lack, an account of the plots as well as the literary characteristics of the five novels chosen for this article shall follow. 3. If such an abundance of successful, interesting, intriguing novels which are about all kinds of issues but also include the human mind as an important topic exist, why are the most contemporary examples that explicitly use stateof-the-art knowledge about the brain less satisfactory? The writers whose work is analysed in greater detail in this article all know a lot about neuroscience, they all did their homework before borrowing plots and problems from another field of human activity. Not least from the list of acknowledgements at the end of their texts can we learn how much effort the writers have put in to learn about the brain and the mind from the neuroscientists and brain specialists themselves. Novelists of course always do that, they look around and pick up contemporary trends and topics. If they want to write for their readers, they will be involved in issues in which the readers are also interested, into whatever aesthetic or literary shape the writers then turn the contemporary problem or issue. So it cannot be the relation between text and context which is problematic per se - on the contrary. I will treat the five texts chronologically in order to find at least a preliminary answer to the question why brain plots have been - so far - so unsatisfactory. Ian McEwan, Enduring Love (1997) Ian McEwan set the terms and was one of the first to develop the model of what I call “brain plots”. In his successful novel Enduring Love, published in 1997, he has the tired and frustrated scientist Joe Rose - an academic turned journalist - confronted with a mentally-ill man who thinks Joe has fallen in love with him, Jed Parry. They meet when trying to save the passengers travelling in a hot air balloon that has broken away from its moorings. Joe’s relationship with his wife Clarissa becomes affected, his judgement, his professional career, his life are thrown into turmoil because of the effects of the so- Brain Plots - Neuroscience and the Contemporary Novel 117 called “Clérambault’s syndrome” from which Jed Parry suffers. Clérambault’s syndrome is the clinical term for delusional love or erotomania. The basic ingredients of a brain plot are already developed by McEwan in this novel: the expert, the madman, the love interest, the connection between mental health or disease and general unease, the unravelling of the everyday - and of course the clinical jargon. But since the novel predates by some years the contemporary craze for neuroscientific discoveries, the use of jargon is not quite so widespread as it is in the later novels. What we do get, however, is the unreliable narrator, fragmented narration, postmodern textuality and the acknowledgment of expert advice at the end of the novel. McEwan develops this successful formula further in his more recent novel Saturday, discussed below. Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room (2002) In Nicole Krauss’s novel Man Walks Into a Room, her first novel published in 2001, a man appears in the middle of nowhere, having forgotten not only his name but his complete life after the age of twelve. He turns out to have been Samson Greene, a young and successful professor of English, married to Anna who takes him home from the Nevada desert where he is first found. It turns out that he has a small brain tumor which can be removed, so his life is saved, but his memories remain permanently lost. In trying to resurrect something of his former life - a project that largely fails - Samson is assisted by Lana, a former student of his, and by his uncle Max. So far so good - what might have turned into an interesting story of a person trying to pick up the pieces of his life rather unconvincingly changes into a kind of science fiction. Samson is contacted by Dr Ray Malcolm, a brain specialist involved in a secret project in the Mojave desert where he records other people’s memories so that they can then be loaded onto other human brains and shared. He intends to save for posterity unique memories by storing them on a kind of giant ‘hard disk’. Samson’s room-mate in the desert, Donald Selwyn, has his memories recorded of a nuclear experiment involving American soldiers which he experienced as a young man. Donald’s memories of this event are transferred onto Samson’s brain who repeatedly has this nuclear bomb going off in his head, an occurrence which virtually drives Samson mad. He manages to retrieve a sense of his own self by finding his old uncle Max, talking to a stray teenage waif and finally begins a new life without his former wife Anna. The novel ends with Anna’s memory of a perfect moment with Samson, shortly before he disappeared, never to return again, at least not as his former self. Memory loss, the importance of memory for one’s own identity, a general sense of doom or threat vaguely associated with war or military experience, the lonely, slightly ruthless and certainly divorced lone male brain specialist, his victim and the latter’s illness - are all central ingredients of a brain plot. Add to this a bit of love interest here and there - the student Lana, Samson’s G ESA S TEDMAN 118 wife Anna, and you have one version of something which a number of critics where impressed by - in spite of the clichés which abound on the page. An example is the way in which Ray Malcolm, the doctor, explains his rather awful science-fiction experiment: ‘See, science is about sharing. The reason we want to quantify is so we can communicate and share more clearly. The more carefully I can define something, the better I’m able to share it. So if a guy tells me, ‘I’ve just seen the light,’ and I don’t know what he’s talking about, then I can’t share that. But if he gets me to have the same experience, that begins to be science.’ (105) This could be, of course, just a silly character, one whose warped sense of morality is exposed by the narrator or other characters. But the chief centre of consciousness of the novel, the chief focalizer, Samson Greene, is just as trite, as the following predictable paragraph illustrates: It was there in the center of his mind, the memory Ray had transferred; there was no way to get around it. The images were uncannily familiar, as if he had experienced them himself, though he knew he hadn’t, and this made them more frightening still. […] He saw and felt it all as if the memory were his own, but it wasn’t, damn it, and this is what drove him insane, more insane, even, than the blast whose force and heat seemed almost engineered to drive to madness anyone it didn’t kill. (164 and 165) A potentially more promising novel is Ian McEwan’s work Saturday, which was published in 2005, also to considerable critical acclaim. Ian McEwan, Saturday (2005) Ian McEwan being Ian McEwan, he sets himself a difficult task - namely, writing a book about a single day in the life of his protagonist, the successful neurosurgeon Henry Perowne. The day, of course, goes largely wrong. Like James Joyce’s Ulysses and even more like Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway, McEwan compresses everything he is interested in into the course of 24 hours. Perowne wakes up in the middle of the night and watches what he thinks is a burning plane on the way to Heathrow (it turns out to have been a fairly harmless fire, easily extinguished), following another terrorist attack. Post-9/ 11, the context is definitely gloomy and threatening and explicitly linked to terrorist threats and the pending war on Iraq, since it is the day of the big anti-war demonstration in London. In the course of the day, Perowne is involved in a minor car accident with a man called Baxter, who appears to be on the verge of mental illness. Perowne diagnoses him as suffering from the first onset of Huntington Chorea but at first manages to avert violence in his encounter with the man. Baxter later reappears at the Perowne’s private family party, given in honour of the return of their poet daughter Daisy from Italy where she has spent the last six months. In a shocking encounter, Baxter breaks into the Perowne’s house and forces the pregnant Daisy to strip in front of all her family, including her aged poet grandfather. The passion in Brain Plots - Neuroscience and the Contemporary Novel 119 Daisy’s recital of Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach saves the moment because Baxter can identify with the text and ends up not killing anyone with the knife he has wielded throughout the encounter. But Theo, Perowne’s son, and Perowne himself push Baxter down the stairs, who falls and hits his head, to end up in Perowne’s brain injury unit, operated on by Perowne himself. The novel closes with Perowne getting back into bed with his successful media lawyer wife Rosalind, more or less where the novel started. The successful brain specialist is affected negatively by the general gloomy context - post- 9/ 11 Britain, imminent war, unspecified terrorist threats - and by one of his later patients, Baxter, suffering from a nasty hereditary disease, Huntington Chorea, which leads to complete madness and loss of control over mind and body. In turn, the diseased Baxter upsets the whole family equilibrium, already under tension because the famous poet grandfather, John Grammaticus, and his gifted granddaughter Daisy, have fallen out and now need to make up at the family reunion. Add to this the many scenes in neurological gobbledegook when Perowne works on various diseased brains on his operating table, and you have another brain plot, this time on the European side of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, sentences as the following abound, positively heaving with meaning: “As Theo said, on the streets there’s pride, and here it is, concealing a knife. When anything can happen, everything matters.” (207) Or, even more pretentious, a kind of mini-summary of the whole novel: There’s a moment, which seems to unfold and luxuriously expand, when all goes silent and still, when Baxter is entirely airborne, suspended in time, looking directly at Henry with an expression, not so much of terror, as dismay. And Henry thinks he sees in the wide brown eyes a sorrowful accusation of betrayal. He, Henry Perowne, possesses so much - the work, money, status, the home, above all, the family - the handsome healthy son with the strong guitarist’s hands come to rescue him, the beautiful poet for a daughter, unattainable even in her nakedness, the famous father-in-law, the gifted, loving wife; and he has done nothing, given nothing to Baxter who has so little that is not wrecked by his defective gene, and who is soon to have even less. (228) This is a middle-class view of the “world out there”, or how the author-asnarrator imagines it, and the threats this world, which seems to have become less intelligible since 9/ 11 and 7/ 7, poses to the privileged life of the doctor, the journalist, the poet daughter, and the guitarist son. Somewhat similar in its conception of a doomed world is Richard Power’s novel The Echo Maker, published in 2006 to great critical acclaim. Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (2006) This time, we get both the victim’s perspective, as in Samson Greene’s story by Nicola Krauss, and the doctor’s account, as in Ian McEwan’s day-in-thelife of Henry Perowne. Richard Powers tells the story of Mark Schluter, who suffers from Capgras Syndrome following a terrible and unexplained acci- G ESA S TEDMAN 120 dent with his super-truck on a remote Nebraska road. Mark takes a long time coming out of the coma following the accident, a chance for Powers to use all kinds of stream-of-consciousness passages, detailing the ‘mad’ impressions which his surroundings make on Mark’s brain, only slowly coming back to the surface. Mark’s sister Karin Schluter gives up her job and her flat to help Mark back to life. Unfortunately, Mark does not believe it is really his beloved sister Karin, who always got him out of all the scrapes he got into, both being from a rather sad family of losers, according to Karin. Add to this the perspective of the specialist, Dr Gerald Weber, a professor of cognitive neurology and author of popular books about the brain, who reminded me of Professor Oliver Sacks. Weber’s doubts about his books, his standing, his marriage, a lot of brain babble and jargon are also included in the novel - and you have a book about memory, memory loss, and the importance of memory for one’s own identity. Furthermore, a general sense of doom and threat, embodied in the danger to the cranes, Nebraska’s special attraction in the novel punctuate the plot, which is further complicated by the various love interests between Mark’s special nurse, Weber, Karin and her former lover and once-again-partner Daniel, environmentalist and saviour of the cranes. Finally, ethical problems, the Glasgow coma scale and other familiar plot elements are included in The Echo Maker - and there we are once again, another brain plot for us to consume, one which made the final short list for the Pulitzer Prize and won a National Book Award in the US. With the binary distinction between the healthy, natural memory of the cranes migrating every year to the same places and the sick mind of Mark Schluter, the whole novel is based on a great cliché. The passages describing the dancing cranes read like a set piece for a creative writing class, whereas the parts which represent Mark’s slow awakening cannot compete with, say, Virginia Woolf’s rendition of the fits of madness which engulf Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway. Here is an example from Power’s novel: A flock of birds, each one burning. Stars swoop down to bullets. Hot red specks take flesh, nest there, a body part, part body. Lasts forever: no change to measure. Flock of fiery cinders. When gray pain of them thins, then always water. Flattest width so slow it fails as liquid. Nothing in the end but flow. Nextless stream, lowest thing above knowing. A thing itself the cold and so can’t feel it. Body flat water, falling an inch a mile. (arrangement on the page follows the original, 10) And so on - the more Mark wakes up, the clearer his syntax becomes, if not necessarily the sense of his impressions and thoughts. Just as clichéd is the sense of impending crisis which Weber experiences, feeling himself proverbially small and useless in the face of nature: That nightmare flashed across Weber’s closed lids just before he fell asleep, looking up into the million leaves of a tree towering above him, each leaf a life he had met once, a moment in a life, even a particular emotional aspect of that isolated moment, every look a separate object to identify, unique and multiplying into the Brain Plots - Neuroscience and the Contemporary Novel 121 billions, beyond anyone’s ability to simplify into names … (dots in the original) (150) That the expert is no longer convinced of his field of expertise is summed up in the following manner, another staple of the brain plot: “Neurology would never grasp from without a thing that existed only deep in the impenetrable inside.” (365) It is unclear what Powers wishes to tell us here: doubts about the explanatory power of neuroscience have been part of brain plots since, at least, Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love. But in spite of these doubts, the authors of the novels discussed in this paper all fall for the attractions of neuroscience so that the misgivings concerning neuroscientific findings do not carry the day. Similar critical acclaim, instant translation into German and other languages, many portraits and interviews in the press were also Siri Hustved’s lot, occasioned by the publication of her most recent novel The Sorrows of an American, published in 2008. Siri Hustved, The Sorrows of an American (2008) In her new book, we get most of the ingredients we are already familiar with - some with a different emphasis, so the Glasgow coma scale and brain surgery only appear briefly, as do the Capgras Syndrome which is merely mentioned in passing, and it is the lonely specialist and his love problems, his sense of identity and the role of memories, his own and his father’s, which make up the main elements of the novel’s plot. The Sorrows of an American concentrate on Dr Erik Davidsen and his life, punctuated by his father Lars’s death, his sister’s troubles concerning her late husband, a famous novelist, Erik’s tenants Miranda and her daughter Eglantine and their relationship to Eglantine’s father, as well as his own love life and the problems of the patients he treats as a psychoanalyst. Erik falls in love with Miranda and sometimes looks after Eglantine, who has an accident and has brain surgery, successful of course. Erik also reads his father’s memoirs, based on Hustved’s father’s memoirs, of life on a remote Minnesota farm as a poor Scandinavian immigrant, and uncovers his rather silent father’s most haunting memories and teenage problems. He is helped by his sister Inga, herself a rather troubled person, since she has lost her famous writer husband to stomach cancer, has to bring up her teenage daughter Sonia by herself, who had the bad luck to witness the people jumping out of the Twin Towers on 9/ 11 in 2001. Inga is a philosopher and writer of books about memory and consciousness. It turns out that Inga’s husband had a love affair with an actress and has produced a son with this woman, called Edie. Miranda, Erik’s tenant, needs help rather than Erik as a lover, and Erik has an affair which might turn more serious with an analyst colleague instead. Sonia gets over her terror and falls in love, Erik and Inga find out that their father had no dreadful secret himself; he only helped keep G ESA S TEDMAN 122 someone else’s secrets. Everything turns to the good, more or less, since a knight in shining armour, called Burton, a life-long admirer of Inga’s, saves Inga’s husband’s reputation by buying up the letters which his lover, Edie, had threatened to sell to a journalist or publicize otherwise. Burton, conveniently, is a brain specialist. His thoughts as well as Erik and Inga’s conversations about memory, the brain, its dreams, threats and losses, provide a lot of material for the many tortured and often, I found, repetitive and unconvincing brain-related musings which are characteristic of Hustvedt’s latest publication. Hustvedt’s is perhaps the worst novel of the lot in aesthetic terms, she packs her novel so full of all the different modes of perception and consciousness, diseased and healthy ones. She just loves clichés, plot-based ones that writing and painting, art in short, help with mental disease, and character-based ones, such as Erik’s sister’s utterance: “It’s all so familiar, it’s strange” (160) when they travel by car through the landscape where they grew up. Or Erik’s observation that “Every memoir is full of holes” (8). That this memoir is based on Hustvedt’s own father’s memoirs adds to the required “authenticity” which brain plots seem to demand, at least if the acknowledgement pages at the end of the novels can be used as a gauge. Whether such “authentic” material in fact adds anything to the novel in aesthetic terms is another question. 4. The novels I have briefly summarized here, and there are many more, in particular psychological thrillers, e.g. by Barbara Vine and Martin Suter, and novels about memory loss and dementia, not to mention Asperger’s Syndrome and autism, have several things in common. Apart from the plot elements which I have already mentioned, they all use fragmented narration for the representation of disturbed brains, the all include dream passages or nightmarish memories, whether they belong to the characters or to their ancestors. Fragmented narration also means that we encounter several narrators, some of them unreliable ones. Their voices are supplemented by those of authors of letters and memoirs. Changes of perspective, stream-ofconsciousness passages from further characters, or other written materials, e.g. quotations from books, are also included in the narratives. All the authors obviously are able to use, seemingly to their advantage, what narrative techniques are currently available. Authors of course can always work with those technical advances with which prior generations of writers have provided them. So it is only natural that we have postmodern and high modernist elements in the novels. The problem with all five novels, and most of the others I have encountered, is that they have not found an original language with which to treat mental phenomena, diseased or healthy. The novels are predictable not only in terms of the plot but also in terms of the way they narrate their stories. Reading them all together, one amasses so many trite Brain Plots - Neuroscience and the Contemporary Novel 123 sentences, so many pretentious full stops and ellipses, similes, and metaphors that one wishes the writers had written about something less outrageous, something more mundane. And one wishes that the fascination with weird stories of brain damage, memory and identity loss etc. had not been coupled in their texts with the political doom and gloom of post- 9/ 11 society. Mental illness or disturbance is thus tied in a rather simple way to the general context. In contrast to Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, where the same connection is made, but made in tiny, little observations, and everyday things, the weight of these connections is too much for the rather fragile and artificial narrative frames to bear. They are fragile and artificial because the writers have borrowed stories and plot lines from neuroscience and psychoanalysis without being able to give them a convincing literary shape. They have failed to come up with a narrative mode which conveys more than the strangeness and weirdness of Capgras, memory loss, depression, and tics. Instead of fleshing out the bare bones of the neuroscientist’s stories, they have pasted them into novels and loaded them with meaning. Perhaps the reason for this is the manner in which neuroscience presents itself in the media: as objectivist, teleological, “authentic”, scientific findings with a strong focus on disease rather than on health. In contrast to some modernist novels, Mrs Dalloway high on the list among them, 21 st -century writers have not been able to find a mode for the new ways of explaining consciousness and perception which neuroscience seems to offer. If, as for the generation of Virginia Woolf, “[n]ot only the conventions for representing character […] had changed, but also the very concept of character and personality”, as Elaine Showalter aptly puts it in her introduction to Mrs Dalloway (xviii), echoing Woolf’s contention that the world had changed in the early decades of the 20 th century, then one would expect something equally innovative from the writers working in the 21 st century, influenced as they are by advances in neuroscience. This, however, is not the case. Rather than finding a new way of representing sensation, memory, the mind, the five novels presented here stand for a larger trend, an unsatisfactory one because they use a hackneyed, reductionist notion of human experience which is based on illness and deformation. They use an alienating form of jargon with too little distance so that it sounds not only inhuman but also unconvincing, shows the author is fascinated by neuroscience but has little critical stance, in other words: the typical amateur approach. The novels are unsatisfactory because they have adopted plots from the field of brain research or neuroscience without managing to give them a convincing literary shape. And finally, the novels are unsatisfactory because they rest on a problematic binary division of ethical problems and health/ illness issues. Even if the inevitable crossover occurs between the confused sick victim and the seemingly knowledgeable, fit and healthy doctor or expert when the said expert is also affected by the illness of his victim, also has a crisis for instance because he can no longer write, falls in love with the wrong person or is G ESA S TEDMAN 124 afraid of his patients. This is nothing but the reverse of the cliché of the unassailable doctor - like the divorced, unhappy, alcoholic and lonely detective in contemporary thrillers and detective fiction, the doctor-in-crisis just helps to support the binary division of the healthy on the one hand and the sick on the other. Temporary crossovers into the realms of the sick serve to uphold this division rather than subvert it. In sum, then, the use of jargon, the role of the expert, and borrowed plots which are alien to literature are a hindrance to a satisfying literary representation of the workings of the mind. The question remains what this kind of fiction, this kind of brain plot and the place the authors imagine for literature or poetry in this field, has to say on a deeper, cultural level. Disturbance which is social and political in origin is located only on the level of the individual, diseased brain. But rather than making the characters have a wider impact by being identifiable as social types as well as as believable characters, the writers leave me with a sense of fatigue, of a lack of interest in these particular individuals. Even as individuals, the characters remain uninteresting with their petty love affairs, their boring creative or professional crises. Couching cultural anxiety in terms of illness or alternatively, in terms of neuroscientific jargon, is predictable and explains nothing. It takes more than a brain plot to make at least my brain tick, to make me sit up and notice, to feel disturbed, challenged, to have thoughts provoked or to feel I want to engage with the characters or the texts in any meaningful way. Brain plots, then, I argue, are not really a recipe for success if success is not defined as prizes, reviews and interviews, but rather as the way in which readers are touched, intellectually challenged and provoked by a novel. Brain plots, then, still await an interesting shape, one that sheds their neuroscientific mantle, to be turned into such provoking, challenging novels. Or, to quote Virginia Woolf’s minor character Lady Rosseter in Mrs Dalloway: “’What does the brain matter […] compared with the heart? ’” (213) Works Cited Hustvedt, Siri. The Sorrows of an American. New York: Henry Holt, 2008. Krauss, Nicole. Man Walks into a Room. 2002. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. McEwan, Ian. Enduring Love. 1997. London: Vintage Books, 2006. —. Saturday. 2005. London: Vintage Books, 2006. Powers, Richard. The Echo Maker. New York: Picador, 2006. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway.1925.London: Penguin, 2000. H ERBERT G RABES Encountering People Through Literature If literature did not give us access to the lives of other people it most probably would not exist. It would not exist because hardly anyone would be interested in it - interested enough to go on reading. It is, after all, the fates, deeds, speeches, writings, thoughts, and feelings of other people in the fictional world we encounter when reading literature that create an interest strong enough to attract and sustain our attention, often for hours on end. Sometimes this interest will extend to imagined superhuman, divine beings, to strange creatures like cyborgs or to animals who seem to be more similar to us than we assumed, but generally it is directed at other people, or what is generally called ‘literary characters’. Like people in the life-world they normally have both body and mind, an outer and an inner life, and literary texts provide information about the one or the other or usually both. Yet while the literary presentation of the former, of other people’s appearance, deeds or speech is something we know from life experience, what we never get there but often enough in literature is a direct access to the inner life, to the thoughts and feelings, the aims and desires, the joy, anxiety and pain of others. Therefore it can be said that it is this transparency of the fictional minds what makes the reading of literature so fascinating. There seems to be hardly any doubt that literary characters play a central role in the reading of narratives and plays and a great deal of poetry, and figures like Tom Jones, Uncle Toby, David Copperfield, Tom Sawyer or Holden Caulfield; Hamlet, Lear, Willy Loman or Blanche Dubois have a firmer place in the memory of many readers than any other features of the works through which they became acquainted with them. Yet in the nineteen-sixties and earlier nineteen-seventies when a structuralist approach became dominant, literary characters in the theories of leading narratologists like Greimas, Bremond, and Todorov were reduced to the function of mere agents in a plot or, rather, names and complexes of attributes linked to actions. 1 This had become possible because already in the nineteen-thirties it had become fashionable to stress the artificiality of literary characters and to ridicule as naive an older type of literary criticism in which they were treated like real people, instead of asking how it is possible that such artificial creations can become such powerful illusions. 1 Cf. Algirdas Julien Greimas, Sémantique structurale (1966), Tzvetan Todorov, Poétique de la prose (1968), and Claude Bremond, Logique du récit (1973). H ERBERT G RABES 126 I cannot refrain from re-quoting as an example of professional obtuseness a typical remark by William Gass in his Fiction and the Figures of Life on a passage from Henry James’s The Awkward Age 2 : Enter Mr. Cashmore, who is a character in The Awkward Age. “Mr Cashmore, who would have been very red-headed if he had not been very bald, showed a single eyeglass and a long upper lip; he was large and jaunty with little petulant ejaculations that were not in the line of type.” We can imagine any number of other sentences about Mr Cashmore added to this one. Now the question is: what is Mr Cashmore? Here is the answer I shall give: Mr Cashmore is (1) a noise, (2) a proper name, (3) a complex system of ideas, (4) a controlling perception, (5) an instrument of organization, (6) a pretended mode of referring, and (7) a source of verbal energy. He is not an object of perception, and nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be correctly said of him. (Gass 43-44) One can hardly be less perceptive than in this passage about what readers usually make of a sentence like the one from James’s novel , and it was not before 1978 that a more subtle structuralist analysis if not of whole literary characters but at least of the “Narrative Modes of Presenting Consciousness in Fiction” was presented by Dorrit Cohn. 3 Encouraged by the interest in the actual experience of reading literature that came up in the course of the nineteen-seventies with reader-response theory, I by that time had begun to investigate the phenomenon of what I have here called “Encountering People through Literature”, that is, encountering ‘characters’ that have been created in the reader’s mind while reading a literary text, and the results were presented in 1978 under the title “Wie aus Sätzen Personen werden... Über die Erforschung literarischer Figuren” (“How Sentences Turn into People... On Investigating Literary Characters”). Though published in one of the then leading German journals of literary theory and poetics, POETICA, 4 it did not make much of a stir, because it didn’t at all fit in with the current trend in narratology, 5 and when it became topically pertinent due to the integration of cognitive psychology in one brand of narratology twenty years later, it was not mentioned even in Germany by critics such as Ralf Schneider, because it would have made things that were being presented as new not so new after all. I was therefore amazed when I was asked to contribute a revised English translation 6 as late as 2004 to an issue of Style on German narratology. I mention all this here because I will use this article from 1978 as a foil in my present investigation of how the use of the paradigms of cognitive psychology and other cognitive sciences as well as of the new neurosciences 2 Quoted by James Wood in his recent study How Fiction Works 81. 3 Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (1978). 4 POETICA 10.4 (1978), 405-28. 5 A fact drawn attention to by Fotis Jannidis in his Figur und Person 179. 6 “Turning Words on the Page into ‘Real’ People.” Style 38.2 (2004), 221-35. Encountering People Through Literature 127 have enhanced our understanding of the formation of literary characters in the process of reading, as well as of the fact that as readers we are under the impression that we are encountering people who already exist and whom we are just getting to know more and more intimately. This paradox is not explained by stating that the latter impression is merely an illusion. Just as the quite vivid impression of a sunset had to be explained when the world picture became heliocentric and the sun was no longer really believed to be ‘setting’ at any time, so the powerful impression that we encounter persons whom we get to know by reading a work of literature needs to be explained even more so when a close analysis of the process of reading reveals that things are actually different. What I held to be of prime importance in view of the then current trend in narratology was to stress how powerful the illusions of persons we encounter in reading literature can be, and to insist that they must be given full attention as such in theoretical discourse. All the more so as the reduction of literary characters to functional adjuncts of actions and plots in structuralist narratology was followed by the poststructuralist deconstruction of the subject and by the attempt to render a construction of characters in the imagination of readers almost impossible through strategies of underor overdetermination or through an abundance of metafictional commentary in some experimental postmodern fiction. When a genuine interest in the phenomenon of literary character reentered narratology under the influence of cognitive psychology, it was dealt with as a construction in the mind of the reader. Richard J. Gerrig and David Allbritton, in “The Construction of Literary Character: A View from Cognitive Psychology,” argued in 1990 that characters result from the application of quite ordinary cognitive processes such as the ‘Fundamental Attribution Error’, categoryand person-based representation, and immersion, to the “types of information authors provide for these processes to act upon” (389). This may indeed be one of the reasons why readers deal with such constructions as if they were representations of already existing real people, yet the question of why the constructions do not appear as constructions is beyond the range of their attention. It also remained beyond the range of attention of Ralf Schneider who, in his 2001 article “Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The Dynamics of Mental-Model Construction,” came to apply to literary characters the concept of ‘mental models’ as developed by P.N. Johnson-Laird (Mental Models). Although he points out that “most ‘common’, i.e. non-academic, readers focus their interest in the fictional world on the characters” (628), he never asks why this should be so. The use of the concept of ‘mental model’, which was already in broad use within cognitive psychology, certainly had some advantages. The disadvantage was, however, that it once again undermined any attention to the power of illusion that makes us sometimes react with strong emotions to literary characters once we have become immersed in a story-world. Unfortunately, there is no close equivalent in English for the H ERBERT G RABES 128 German concept of “Vorstellung,” which indicates something that our imaginative powers put right in front of us so that it becomes as tangible as any object to the senses. Perhaps the heritage of the structuralist paradigm, which is not very suitable for explaining imaginative effects, is the reason why the power of illusion in the phenomenon of literary character is neglected not only by Schneider but also, for instance, in the often quoted critical anthology from 2003 on Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences edited by David Herman. But the situation has since improved, not least thanks to Alan Palmer’s 2004 monograph on Fictional Minds, whose very title indicates that he is well aware of the power of illusion. This also shows in his choice of terminology, for though he makes use of the cognitive paradigm, he writes about “fictional consciousnesses” that the reader constructs and points out that we “frequently finish novels with a strong sense of the individual personality of a particular character” (176). Lisa Zunshine, however, in her recent Theory of Mind and the Novel, seems to be divided in her opinion when she first quotes a more favourable opinion from 2004 and then a negative one from 1961 that is typical of its time: even though, as critics and teachers of literature, we do base both scholarly interpretation and classroom discussions on our “interest in the characters as possible people and in the narrative world as like our own,” we remain wary about our own and our students’ tendency to treat fictional personages as real people. We consider this tendency “a sentimental misunderstanding of the nature of literature.” 7 She comes closest to an explanation of the paradox when she states that “Literature pervasively capitalizes on and stimulates Theory of Mind mechanisms that had evolved to deal with real people, even as on some level readers do remain aware that fictive characters are not real people at all” (10). A genuine advance in understanding why character plays such an important role in reading literature I found in cognitive theory as presented in Gilles Fauconnier’s and Mark Turner’s well-known study from 2002, The Way We Think. Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. Here, characters are - just like frames - considered as “basic cultural instruments” because “[i]n the way we think, a character can essentially stay the same over widely different frames, and a frame can stay essentially the same when populated by widely different characters” (250). It is thus no wonder that “the stability of character across different activities - is immensely complicated and infinitely explored in the world’s literature,” and it is further pointed out that “conceptual blending plays a central role in this conception of character” (251).What seems most important is the generally found close linking of characters and frames: “aspects of human reality. You can’t have 7 Why We Read Fiction 19. The first quotation is from James Phelan’s study Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration 20; the second from Marvin Mudrick’s essay “Character and Event in Fiction” 211. Encountering People Through Literature 129 one without the other, although in some cases the emphasis falls more on character and in other cases it falls more on the frame” (253). This “folk theory” is, however, based on our cognitive functioning, in which “[a]ny identity comes with considerable attachment to frames, and any frame comes with considerable attachment to character,” because “at the neurocognitive level of actions, frames and characters are always intertwined” (262). Philosophically speaking, in order to deal with the complexity of reality, human beings must have learned to combine the ancient view of Parmenides, that being always remains the same, with that of Heraclitus, that everything is in constant flux. * What cognitive literary theory, understandably, has been most interested in with respect to literary characters is the interaction between text and reader. The need for active participation on the part of the reader, however, was already displayed in great detail as early as 1931 when Roman Ingarden published his phenomenological study Das literarische Kunstwerk (The Literary Work of Art). Ingarden showed that literary texts offer no more than “schematized aspects” of things and persons, that not only “foreign bodies” but also “’[i]nternal aspects’ of one’s own psychic processes and character traits” are “elements of a literary work” (The Literary Work of Art 271) but that each of these “as a represented object [...] is only a schematic formation with spots of indeterminacy of various kinds” (251). It was no accident that an English translation of Ingarden’s work appeared in 1973 when reception theory was beginning to shift the focus from the structure of the work to the reader. Shortly before, in 1971, Wolfgang Iser, in Die Appellstruktur der Texte (The Appeal Structure of Texts), had taken up the idea of the “spots of indeterminacy” and set out to demonstrate that it is the “gaps” in the text that prompt the reader to become immersed in it. A few years later, in Der Akt des Lesens (The Act of Reading), he showed that what makes the reading process so attractive is the retentive and protentive hypothesizing undertaken by the reader. It was under the influence of reception theory that I then attempted to analyse the formation of illusions of people in the reading process. What became evident was that it takes very little, in fact not more than a name or even a personal pronoun, to trigger the assumption that there exists a character in the story-world. Recently Lisa Zunshine has stressed the fact that we tend to infer a whole inner life from any rendering of “self-initiated action”: How much prompting do we need to begin to attribute a mind of her own to a fictional character? Very little, it seems, since any indication that we are dealing with an entity capable of self-initiated action [...] leads us to assume that this entity possesses thoughts, feelings, and desires, at least some of which we could intuit, interpret, and, frequently, misinterpret. (22) H ERBERT G RABES 130 Yet it also became clear that the manner in which characters are represented on the textual surface, the level of signifiers, is a quite complex phenomenon. And due to the merely schematic presentation of the story-world the formation of characters in the mind of the reader must be greatly influenced by what in social psychology was called the reader’s ‘implicit personality theory’, i.e. the system of social and anthropological convictions guiding his or her perception of other people. What is more, one even has to reckon in each case with two such implicit personality theories: that of the reader, which I have already mentioned, and that of the author, who chose the kind and sequence of relevant information and shaped the text in such a way as to maximize the intended effect. It is reassuring to see that this view is now being shared by Zunshine who first asserts that by imagining the hidden mental states of fictional characters, by following the readily available representations of such states through the narrator, and by comparing our interpretation of what the given character must be feeling at a given moment with what we assume could be the author’s own interpretation, we deliver a rich stimulation to the cognitive adaptation of our Theory of Mind, (25) and later points out that a text “comes to life” in the mind of the author just as richly as - if not more richly than, in some aspects - it does in the mind of her readers because it engages her ToM in a unique and pleasurable (and at time tortuous) manner. The novel, then, is truly a meeting of the minds - of the particularly inclined minds in a particular historical moment that has made the encounter serendipitously possible. (161) Regarding the dynamic nature of the process of character formation during reading, I can present here only what I consider the most important among the plethora of detailed observations that researchers have already made. First, we have the prime importance of the ongoing attempt repeatedly to synthesize all upcoming bits of information that seem pertinent, and thus to shape a unified illusion of a person, in a proven sequence, especially if one thinks of the primacy effect and the recency effect. This is crucial not only with respect to plot structure and the sustaining of suspense but also regarding character constitution. With later information that does not seem to fit easily into an already formed notion of a character, we have to adjust our initial hypothesis, but there is, of course, the welcome possibility that the character may have changed; or we may simply ignore what refuses to fit in, or assume that an experimentally-minded author intended to foreground the artificiality of literary character constitution by effecting a ‘break’ in character, a break that may, of course, occasionally also result from authorial incompetence. Whether the one or other alternative is chosen depends chiefly on the range of coping strategies available to the reader as well as on his own implicit personality theory and cognitive complexity. What was also noted is the paradox already mentioned that the literary character that is actually being shaped in the process of reading appears as the illusion of a person that already has existed, is encountered in the work, Encountering People Through Literature 131 and subsequently becomes better or even intimately known. This is a paradox that appears all the more amazing as information lacking in the text tends to be graciously replaced by the application on the part of the reader of social stereotypes and their schematic linking of outer and inner attributes. This also brought to light the assumption that there must be an identical substratum that remains unaffected by all possible changes in a character as well as the reader’s conviction that there must be an inner life in terms of a rational mind and emotions in analogy to his or her self-image, even when direct pertinent information is wholly absent. Many of these observations and insights can be found reformulated in Gerrig and Allbritton’s essay from 1990, and it is somewhat reassuring that under the newly introduced paradigm of cognitive psychology they came to the same conclusions whenever they paid attention to one of the points I had been discussing. What they focused on in regard to the formation of literary characters in the reading process is, first, the already-mentioned Fundamental Attribution Error. The FAE consists in the bias to make dispositional rather than situational attributions, an error that “may add considerably to an author’s ability to create the illusion that even the most formulaic outcomes are brought about [...] by the internal properties of character” (382). Their second important point is the application to literary character of the distinction between ‘category-based’ or ‘person-based’ representations, as introduced by Marilyn B. Brewer in her work on impression formation (“A Dual Process Model”). They suggest that “the reader’s act of constructing a literary character is initially one of trying to assimilate the character to some well-known category,” and that this “causes to overlook the import of evidence that is inconsistent with that impression” (386). The ‘categories’ mentioned in this context are largely identical with what hitherto went under the name of ‘social stereotypes’, and the third observation they present, the creation of “anomalous suspense” through the readers’ becoming immersed in literary worlds, is also a well-known phenomenon. The most ostensive innovation in Schneider’s long article from 2001, “Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The Dynamics of Mental- Model Construction,” is indeed his treatment of the formation of literary characters in the reading process in terms of “mental-model construction.” I still prefer to speak of literary characters or even of illusions of real people, because this is the way they are treated not only by naive readers but by all readers who follow the invitation into a story-world in a ‘willing suspense of disbelief’. But I have tried to replace the new term ‘mental model’ by these terms throughout Schneider’s argument, and have discovered that it makes no difference regarding the validity of the statements. So the novelty seems to consist foremost in the change of vocabulary. Schneider’s main interest lies in the description of what he calls “strategies of character reception,” which consist of “categorization”, “individuation”, “decategorization” and “personalization”. “Categorization” is a term taken over from Gerrig and Allbritton for the top-down application of social H ERBERT G RABES 132 stereotypes or literary stock characters in order to form a holistic mental model on the basis of sparse textual information, and when the model is later modified by specific details, it “enters into a stage of individuation” (624). When later information does not agree with the chosen category, the reader “must enter a process of decategorization” (624) and of new mental model construction. ‘Personalization’ is held to be the result of closer attention to textual detail or bottom-up processing, a strategy that may, however, fail - so that a process of ‘depersonalization’ sets in. Uri Margolin, in his contribution to David Herman’s volume on Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, “Cognitive Science, the Thinking Mind, and Literary Narrative,” wants above all to “demonstrate some of the benefits of an explicitly cognitivist approach to fictional minds” (271). After discussing the vexed question of the differentiation between author, implied author, and narrator, he turns to “Storyworld Participants as Minds in Action.” One of his insights is that “readers need to formulate hypotheses about the minds of agents and ascribe to them mental functioning in order to make sense of their doings in terms of human actions and interactions” (284) - a moot point, once we form illusions of real persons. Then he turns to some specific features of the representation of cognitive functions in fiction, such as the possibility of “direct (unmediated), reliable, and full access to the contents and workings of other minds,” the “great importance [...] often attributed to the character’s accompanying consciousness of the relevant states and operations, whether they involve sensations, perceptual experiences (sentience), or thoughts and propositional attitudes (awareness),” and “the qualia of what-it’s-like to be in a certain mental state” (286). Also of interest to him is the “preference of much literature for nonstandard forms of cognitive functioning, be they rare, marginal, deviant, or involving a failure, breakdown, or lack of standard pattern,” when a pattern is considered being “standard” on the basis of the “folk psychology” of an author or his intended readership, a kind of psychology that is “periodand culture-dependent”(287). Most convincing, however, is his final description in cognitive-science terms of literary characters’ visual perception. Though focusing on the historical aspect of literary characters in his monograph Figur und Person from 2000, Fotis Jannidis devotes some attention to the distinction between “Figurenmodelle” or what were traditionally character types, “figurale Schemata” or assumptions of regularities regarding persons, and “situative Schemata,” that is, typical constellations regarding situations and actions. He also points out the decisive role of teleological motivation and intentional action in the creation of literary character. Sharing the view that literary figures, as he calls them, can most fruitfully be described as mental models, he thinks that there exists a “Basistypus”, a basic structure comprising an inner and an outer aspect that all models of a figure have in common, and to which can be attributed further bits of information (cf. 192-198). Encountering People Through Literature 133 What is called by Jannidis the “inner aspect” is dealt with in much more detail by Alan Palmer in his study Fictional Minds. For him, “[c]haracterization is a continuing process. It consists of individual operations that result in a continuing patterning and repatterning until a coherent fictional personality emerges” (40). And here is his more detailed description of what happens: Characterization is an inference from an individual action, then, toward a supposed disposition or trait, and these are states of mind that extend over time. In the same way, subsequent actions are interpreted by the reader in the context of the whole of the character’s mind as hypothesized up until that point. Judgments are then adjusted by the interpretation placed on the action, and a new frame is formed within which future actions can be interpreted. (40) This sounds quite convincing, yet when Palmer then adds: “This process is not easy to theorize within the non-storyworld approaches”(40), this merely shows that he was not sufficiently aware of the research that had already been done. What proves to be particularly fruitful is his strategy of first devoting a considerable part of his book to a description of the functioning of the human mind in real-life situations before focusing on the ‘fictional mind.’ In this way, he singles out features that are typical of the latter - for instance, what he calls the “continuing-consciousness frame”: “The reader collects together all of the isolated references to a specific proper name in a particular text and constructs a consciousness that continues in the spaces between the various mentions of that character” (176). Working on the hypothesis that “[n]arrative is in essence the presentation of fictional mental functioning,” Palmer highlights the fact that because the process of creating fictional minds is “usually automatic, as Schank and Abelson say, frames and scripts ‘let you leave out the boring details when you are talking or writing, and fill them in when you are listening or reading’.” 8 I wonder, though, whether it is really the case that listeners and readers are more involved in “boring details” than talkers or writers and thus constantly invent such boring details in order to fill gaps that were intentionally inserted. Not only do I doubt this, I also presume that speakers and writers rely on a semantic structure that, simply by virtue of its specific selection of details, whether provided or withheld, allows for the creation of rhetorical and thematic emphasis. Thus, by indiscriminately filling gaps in a text, be it regarding characters or anything else in a story-world, readers would largely undo the selective work of the author and be prone to miss entirely the thematic intent of the narrative. As Roman Ingarden had already pointed out in 1968 in his Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks (The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art), 8 Fictional Minds 177. Palmer here quotes from Schank and Robert 41. H ERBERT G RABES 134 In consideration of the artistic composition, only some attributes or states of the portrayed persons are important and advantageous for the work, while the rest might better be left undetermined or merely sketched in. One can guess them approximately, but they are purposely left obscure so that they will not have a distracting influence and so that the especially important features will come more to the fore. (51) And I agree with Palmer when he says: “The reader can cope with the gaps in the continuing consciousnesses of fictional minds because in the real world we experience gaps in other, real minds too” (199).The reader will in some cases feel the need to fill them, in others rather not: apart from following indications in the text regarding a necessary filling-in of details and an automatic filling-in by a mémoire involontaire of the Proustean kind, he or she will tend to take the same short-cuts to a contextually conditioned understanding that are generally used in communication. As to the details in the construction of literary characters, we would do well to rely on the method of close reading and to exercise some patience, because, as Fauconnier and Turner have reminded us, Knowing someone means knowing what that person will do in the most diverse situations, including novel or impossible ones, and knowing that depends on knowing what the person has done in the past, and being able to apply frames in the old and new situations. (262) Of heightened interest, therefore, is Palmer’s application to discourse analysis of Marie-Laure Ryan’s concept of “embedded narratives,” 9 using it to mean the whole of a character’s mind in action: the total perceptual and cognitive viewpoint; ideological worldview; memories of the past; and the set of beliefs, desires, intentions, motives, and plans for the future of each character in the story as presented in the discourse. It is a narrative because it is the story of the novel as seen from the limited, aspectual view of a single character. (Palmer 183). And there are even “doubly embedded narratives” that present to us “a character’s mind as contained within another character’s mind,” so that “a fictional character’s identity consists, not just of his or her own embedded narrative, but of all the doubly embedded narratives of which he or she is the subject” (231). I agree that this can be said because there is only a finite number of such doubly-embedded narratives in the discourse of a particular narrative and these are open to inspection. In the life world, however, where this is not the case, we have to take resort to the body, to fingerprints and DNA to make sure of individual identity. What Lisa Zunshine works with in Why We Read Fiction regarding the description of the formation of literary characters is the “Theory of Mind” concept, “a cluster of cognitive adaptations that allow us to navigate our social world and also structures that world” (162). She shows how such an overarching concept can be useful when it comes to the description of the particu- 9 Marie-Laure Ryan, “Embedded Narrative and Tellability”. Encountering People Through Literature 135 lar preconditions of information-processing on the part of authors, readers, and fictional characters. A pertinent example is her explanation of a phenomenon already described by Erich Auerbach that we think that “the people whose story the author is telling experience much more than [the author] can ever hope to tell: ” 10 Our Theory of Mind allows us to make sense of fictional characters by investing them with an inexhaustible repertoire of states of mind, but the price that this arrangement may extract from us is that we begin to feel that fictional people do indeed have an inexhaustible repertoire of states of mind. (Zunshine 20) This has the consequence that [o]ur pleasant illusion that there are at least some minds in our messy social world that we know well is thus tarnished by our suspicion that even those ostensibly transparent minds harbor some secrets, and we therefore have to remember that the joys of reading fictional minds are subject to some of the same instabilities that render our real-life mind-reading both exciting and exasperating. (20) It is reassuring to note Zunshine’s emphasis of the fact that the very process of making sense of what we read appears to be grounded in our ability to invest the flimsy verbal constructions that we generally call “characters” with a potential for a variety of thoughts, feelings, and desires and then look for the “cues” that would allow us to guess at their feelings and thus predict their actions; (10) yet this insight is far from new. I already said so much in my essay from 1978. Most probably, however, we are in practice not so free in the attribution of particular states of mind as it sounds, because - as Mark Turner states in his recent essay on “The Way We Imagine” - People [...] extremely early in life put together blending templates that serve them thereafter for dealing with people. The templates are quickly entrenched, and people ‘live in the blend’, never aware of the work that went into the template, but able to open it back up actively and on-line when they want to do new work. We never need to construct these templates afresh again. Instead, we activate the blend directly, just like that. 11 Also worth mentioning here is Lisa Zunshine’s elaborate discussion of “Whose Thought Is It, Anyway? ” - “our tendency to keep track of sources of our representations - to metapresent them,” because the ability to keep track of who thought, wanted, and felt what, and when they thought it, is crucial considering that the majority of our fictional narratives [...] center on the characters’ reweighing the truth-value of various cultural and personal beliefs. (60) 10 Mimesis (1991) 549, quoted by Zunshine 19. 11 Quoted from: markturner.org/ Imaginative MindsWebDraft.pdf 7. H ERBERT G RABES 136 * All in all, it seems no easy task to distinguish between a ‘literary character’ and the dynamic process of its formation in the process of reading, especially since, as I stressed in my 1978 article, the sequence of pertinent information plays an important role. I therefore defined the identity of a character as the specific profile of a process based on a particular sequence of bits of information stemming partly from the text and partly from the reader. Reformulated in Palmer’s terminology, it would be the creation of a fictional mind in the reader’s mind on the basis of an embedded narrative. What I would miss there, though, are bodies - not so much the bodies of readers (although they do indeed play a role, insofar as they enforce interruptions in the mental input of long novels) as the bodies of literary characters, which are practically absent in all the studies of literary character based on the cognitive-science paradigm. Of course, it is often enough mentioned that we constantly infer inner qualities from outward appearances, but what is excluded is the fact that we equally often infer outward qualities from inner ones, because the two are closely linked in the social stereotypes we use. I therefore cannot refrain here from quoting Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: Let me have men about me that are fat Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights. Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look He thinks too much: such men are dangerous. (Julius Caesar I, ii, 189-192) However misleading such stereotypical inferences may be, it must not be forgotten that in the life-world we depend absolutely on what we get via the senses and that our cognitive strategies have been developed accordingly. A proof of the inference of outward qualities from inner ones in the reading process is the often experienced disappointment when we see the characters of a novel we have read in a filmed version. Narrative is therefore not only, as Palmer says, “the presentation of mental functioning” (187), it is the presentation of a fictional story-world peopled by fictional characters that exist and act and interact both with bodies and with minds. There remain a few other aspects of the influence of the cognitive-science paradigm on our understanding of literary characters that deserve mention. The first pertains to the influence of particular paradigms on the way in which readers construct literary characters. In “Wie aus Sätzen Personen werden,” I already drew attention to the doubtful value of so-called ‘critical’ readings of works of literature resulting from a rigid application of particular personality theories. When a narrative is, for instance, read in terms of a Freudian notion of the mind, it is no wonder that the literary characters constructed on that assumption subsequently lend themselves nicely to a Freudian interpretation. Schneider makes the same point when he writes: It is an open question whether in their first readings of a novel critics and theorists might follow nonacademic and nonprofessional reading strategies and apply their Encountering People Through Literature 137 theories only afterwards, when they produce a published or publishable reading that makes sense within the discourse of the branch of criticism they represent. (626) Lisa Zunshine is even more benign when she remarks that it seems that a majority of literary-critical paradigms - be that paradigm psychoanalysis, gender studies, or new historicism - profitably exploit, in their quest for new layers of meaning, our evolved cognitive eagerness to construct a state of mind behind a behavior. (25) I beg to strongly disagree, because by such a procedure literary works are reduced to mere source material to support the already-established mental frames of the interpreter and those who share his views, and the potential of art to question such frames and open up our minds is thwarted. It is, by the way, the same procedure of allegoresis by which medieval theologians made almost any sort of text seem orthodox if this served their purpose. From the cognitive point of view, this is not a matter to be brushed aside; after all, in the formulation of Gerrig and Allbritton, the “distinctive aspects of a cognitive theory of literary character reside [...] in the operations of ordinary processes on extraordinary literary input” (389). Only on this basis I can agree with Lisa Zunshine’s view that “our enjoyment of fiction is predicated - at least in part - on our awareness of our “trying on” mental states potentially available to us but at a given moment differing from our own” (17). We had therefore better treasure the “extraordinary literary input” or, in Derek Attridge’s terms, the “singularity of literature” 12 as a chance to expand our minds in the direction of more subtle distinction than to close them by aligning the singular to a preconceived theory or ideology. This all the more so, as recent neuro-science findings are quite encouraging for those who love literature and art and believe in its particular value. When W.H. Auden wrote in his elegy on the death of William Butler Yeats that “poetry makes nothing happen,”(“In Memory” 69) he most probably was right as far as politics is concerned (his contextual domain of reference); but all in all he was much too pessimistic. As Norman Doidge, in his recent study The Brain That Changes Itself, is able to assure us, Neuroplastic research has shown us that every sustained activity ever mapped including physical activities, learning, thinking, and imagining - changes the brain as well as the mind. Cultural ideas and activities are no exception. Our minds are modified by the cultural activities we do - be they reading, studying music, or learning new languages. We all have what might be called a culturally modified brain, and as cultures evolve, they continually lead to new changes in the brain. [...] So a neuroplastically informed view of culture and the brain implies a twoway street: the brain and genetics produce culture, but culture also shapes the brain. (288) 12 Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (2004). H ERBERT G RABES 138 It is thus well worth encountering people through literature, so long as we don’t attempt to make them fit too neatly into a procrustean interpretational frame and instead follow the rule of close reading and try to infer by a bottom-up procedure the theories of mind the author has supplied them with, however difficult that may be. Works Cited Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Auden, W.H. “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” A Selection. W.H. Auden.Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1958. 69. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Bremond, Claude. Logique du récit. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Brewer, Marilyn B. “A Dual Process Model of Impression Formation.” Advances in Social Cognition, Vol. I: A Dual Process Model of Impression Formation. Ed. Thomas K. Srull and Obert S. Wyer. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1988. 1-36. Doidge, Norman. The Brain that Changes Itself. New York: Viking, 2007. Doležel, Lubomir. Heterocosmica - Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think. Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Gass, William H. Fiction and the Figures of Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. Gerrig, Richard J., and David W. Allbritton. “The Construction of Literary Character: A View from Cognitive Psychology.” Style 24.3 (1990): 380-91. Grabes, Herbert. “Wie aus Sätzen Personen werden... Über die Erforschung literarischer Figuren.“ POETICA 10.4 (1978): 405-28. —. “Turning Words on the Page into ‘Real’ People.“ Style 38.2 (2004): 221-35. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. Sémantique structurale. Paris: Larousse, 1966. Hastorf, Albert H., David J.Schneider, and Judith Polefka. Person Perception. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1970. Herman, David, ed. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford, Ca: CSLI Publications, 2003. Ingarden, Roman. Das literarische Kunstwerk. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1931. The Literary Work of Art. Transl. George G. Grabowicz. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. —. Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1968. The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Transl. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Iser, Wolfgang. Die Appelstruktur der Texte. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1971. —. Der Akt des Lesens. München: Fink, 1976. The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Jahnke, Jürgen. Interpersonale Wahrnehmung. Stuttgart: Urban, 1975. Jannidis, Fotis. Figur und Person. Beitrag zu einer historischen Narratologie. Berlin und New York: de Gruyter, 2004. Johnson-Laird, P.N. Mental Models: Toward a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference and Consciousnes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Encountering People Through Literature 139 Margolin, Uri. “Cognitive Science, the Thinking Mind, and Literary Narrative.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 2003. 271-293. Mudrick, Marvin. “Character and Event in Fiction.” Yale Review 50 (1961): 202-18. Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds. Lincoln, NE, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Phelan, James. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Embedded Narratives and Tellability.” Style 20 (1986): 319-40. Schank, Roger C., and Robert P. Abelson. Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1977. Schneider, Ralf. “Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The Dynamics of Mental-Model Construction.” Style 35.4 (2001): 607-40. Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. Ed. T.S. Dorsch. London: Methuen, 1961. Todorov, Tzvetan. Poétique de la prose. Paris: Seuil, 1971. Turner, Mark. “The Way We Imagine.” Imaginative Minds. Ed. Ilona Roth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Also: markturner.org/ ImaginativeMindsWeb Draft.pdf Wood, James. How Fiction Works. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction. Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University, 2006. L ISA Z UNSHINE Why Jane Austen Was Different, And Why We May Need Cognitive Science to See It Something happened to the novel “around the time of Jane Austen” (vii) argues George Butte in his compelling reintroduction of Maurice Merleau- Ponty’s discourse on phenomenology into contemporary literary and film studies, I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll Flanders to Marnie. English writers began to portray a multiply-layered and mutually-reflecting subjectivity, deep intersubjectivity, a “change so subtle and fundamental that it has been difficult to conceive and describe” (25), particularly as today we take its impact for granted in the prose of George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Ian McEwan, and others. Butte defines deep intersubjectivity as the web of partially interpenetrating consciousnesses that exists wherever perceiving subjects, that is, human beings, collect. [T]he process begins when a self perceives the gestures, either of body or word, of another consciousness, and it continues when the self can perceive in those gestures an awareness of her or his own gestures. Subsequently the self, upon revealing a consciousness of the other’s response, perceives yet another gesture responding to its response, so that out of this conversation of symbolic behaviours emerges a web woven from elements of mutually exchanged consciousnesses. (27) For a vivid early example of deep intersubjectivity, Butte turns to the episode in Austen’s Persuasion, in which Anne Elliot witnesses a silent but poignant communication between her former suitor, Frederick Wentworth, and her sister, Elizabeth, who run into each other in Molland’s bakery shop: It did not surprise, but it grieved Anne to observe that Elizabeth would not know [Wentworth]. She saw that he saw Elizabeth, that Elizabeth saw him, that there was complete internal recognition on each side; she was convinced that he was ready to be acknowledged as an acquaintance, expecting it, and she had the pain of seeing her sister turn away with unalterable coldness. (117) According to Butte, When Anne Elliot watches Wentworth and Elizabeth negotiating complex force fields of memory and protocol, the enabling strategy of her story is a new layering of human consciousness, or a new representation of those subjectivities as layered in a specific way. Deep intersubjectivity has made its appearance in storytelling in modern culture, and it has altered our sense of self and community and the discourses that construct and reflect them. (4) L ISA Z UNSHINE 142 Was Austen the first English writer to construct deeply intersubjective passages? According to Butte, some of her eighteenth-century predecessors came close to but stopped short of exploring the rich possibilities opened by having a character perceive the reaction of another character to the first character’s mental state. In the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Burney, the “encounter with the other never moves beyond a two-layer exchange to multiple negotiations and perceptions,” whereas in Austen the scenes “about the observation of observations” give voice to a “new way of shaping narrative” (59). Butte’s argument thus supports the critical view that Austen was profoundly innovative in her treatment of fictional consciousnesses, a view that gets obscured when her novels are treated as archetypes of the genre. Moreover, his exploration of mutually reflecting fictional subjectivities turns out to dovetail research in evolutionary psychology that focuses on cognitive challenges of processing multiple mental states embedded within each other. In other words, although Butte does not position himself as working within the new field known as cognitive approaches to literature, 1 his argument provides a crucial first step for recognizing Austen’s prose as actively experimenting with readers’ cognition. The goal of the present essay is to articulate this interdisciplinary potential of the concept of deep intersubjectivity and, more broadly, to demonstrate how a cognitive approach encourages us to see fictional narratives as engaging our evolved cognitive adaptations: playing with these adaptations and pushing them beyond their zones of comfort. I. A Mind Within a Mind Within a Mind To speak of mental states in works of fiction, we need to borrow from cognitive science the concept of Theory of Mind. Cognitive psychologists and philosophers of mind use this term interchangeably with mind-reading to refer to our ability to explain observable behavior in terms of underlying thoughts, feelings, desires, and intentions (for example, we see somebody reaching for a cup of water and immediately assume that she is thirsty). We attribute mental states to others and to ourselves all the time. Our attributions are frequently incorrect (for example, the person who reached for the cup of water might have done it for reasons other than being thirsty); still, reading minds is the default way by which we construct and navigate our social environment. When Theory of Mind is impaired, as it is in varying degrees in the case of autism and schizophrenia, communication breaks down. 2 Cognitive evolutionary psychologists working with mind-reading adaptations think that they may have developed during the “massive neurocogni- 1 For a review of the new field of cognitive literary studies, see Alan Richardson, “Studies in Literature and Cognition.” 2 But see Gallagher, “Understanding Interpersonal Problems in Autism,” for a suggestive alternative view. Why Jane Austen Was Different ... 143 tive evolution” that took place during the Pleistocene (1.8 million to 10,000 years ago). The emergence of Theory of Mind was evolution’s answer to the “staggeringly complex” challenge faced by our ancestors, who needed to make sense of the behavior of other people in their group, which could include up to two hundred individuals. As Simon Baron-Cohen points out, “attributing mental states to a complex system (such as a human being) is by far the easiest way of understanding it,” that is, of “coming up with an explanation of the complex system’s behavior and predicting what it will do next” (21). 3 In other words, mind-reading is both predicated on the intensely social nature of our species and makes this intense social nature possible. Lest this argument strike you as circular, think of our legs: their shape is both predicated upon the evolution of our species’ locomotion and makes our present locomotion possible. Note that the words theory in Theory of Mind and reading in mindreading are potentially misleading because they seem to imply that we attribute states of mind intentionally and consciously. In fact, it might be difficult for us to appreciate at this point just how much mind-reading takes place on the level inaccessible to our consciousness. For it seems that while our perceptual systems “eagerly” register the information about people’s bodies and their facial expressions, they do not necessarily make all that information available to us for our conscious interpretation. Think of the intriguing functioning of the so-called “mirror neurons.” Studies of imitation in monkeys and humans have discovered a “neural mirror system that demonstrates an internal correlation between the representations of perceptual and motor functionalities” (Borenstein and Ruppin 229). What this means is that “an action is understood when its observation causes the motor system of the observer to ‘resonate.’” So when you observe someone else grasping a cup, the “same population of neurons that control the execution of grasping movements becomes active in [your own] motor areas” (Rizzolatti et al. 662). At least on some level, your brain does not seem to distinguish between your actions and a person you observe doing them. In other words, our neural circuits are powerfully attuned to the presence, behavior, and emotional display of other members of our species. This attunement begins early (since some form of it is already present in newborn infants) and takes numerous nuanced forms as we grow into our environment. We are intensely aware of the body language and facial expressions of other people, even if the full extent and significance of such awareness escapes us. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, the workings of our Theory of Mind make literature as we know it possible (Why We Read Fiction, 10.) The very process of making sense of what we read appears to be grounded in our ability to invest the flimsy verbal constructions that we generously call “characters” with a potential for a variety of thoughts, feelings, and desires and then to look for the “cues” that would allow us to guess at their feelings 3 For a related discussion, see also Dennett, “True Believers.” L ISA Z UNSHINE 144 and thus predict their actions. Literature pervasively capitalizes on and stimulates our Theory of Mind adaptations that had evolved to deal with real people, even as on some level readers do remain aware that fictive characters are not real people at all. Research and publications on Theory of Mind grow apace, but for the purposes of this essay, I want to focus on one particular line of that research, which explores our ability to process multiply embedded states of mind, as in, “I know that you know that I know that . . . .” Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar and his colleagues have demonstrated that we have marked difficulties processing units of information that embed more than four recursive mental states. After the fourth level, our understanding plummets sixty percent (241). For a brief illustration, look at the following three sentences (the words that describe mental states are italicized): (1) I find Butte’s argument compelling on its own terms and also full of exciting possibilities when considered in the context of recent research on Theory of Mind and its implications for literary studies. (2) I thought that she wanted me to think that she liked what I was saying, so I pretended not to notice that her eyes glazed over now and then. (3) I thought that she wanted me to think that she liked that I believed that she was interested in what I was saying.” I am certain that if I ask you which of these three sentences is the most difficult to understand, you will say the third, even though it is shorter than the other two. And indeed, the third sentence embeds six mental states, which makes it extremely challenging for our Theory of Mind. By contrast, the first sentence, though the longest of the three, is the easiest to understand because it is contains two parallel pairs of mental embedment, none raising above the third level: I think that Butte’s argument will convince people; and I think that they will be excited when they consider his argument in the context of research on Theory of Mind. The second sentence contains four levels of recursive embedment 4 and as such it must strike you as more difficult, or awkward, or contrived, than the first sentence, but certainly easier to understand than the third. For a quick illustration of this point, consider Daniel Dennett’s classic example: “I suspect that you wonder whether I realize how hard it is for you to be sure that you understand whether I mean to be saying that you can recognize that I believe you want me to explain that most of us can keep track of only about five or six orders of intentionality” (243). I have argued elsewhere that modernist writers, such as Woolf, experimented with our mind-reading capacities by pushing their portrayals of fictional subjectivity to the sixth level of recursive embedment, 5 hence the reason I am excited by Butte’s argument. Putting what he does in the context of cognitive theory, we can say that he identifies both the moment in English 4 I am focusing here only on its first part because the second part - “so I pretended …” - contains only one attribution of a mental state. 5 See Why We Read Fiction. Why Jane Austen Was Different ... 145 literary history (i.e., the late eighteenth century) when the portrayal of fictional subjectivity moved from the second-third level of mental embedment to the third-fourth level and the writer (i.e., Austen) who consummated this transition. The difference in treatment of fictional subjectivity is indeed striking when we contrast the most intersubjective moment in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) with the most intersubjective moment in Persuasion (1818). For example, Butte thinks that the scene in Defoe’s novel when Moll and her new husband “drop their masks” and “confess their mutual schemes to marry well” is “ripe with intersubjective possibilities.” Still, these possibilities remain unrealized: “never in his or Moll’s or Defoe’s text, does Jemmy reflect on Moll as a subjectivity and much less on her consciousness of him” (43). Here is one passage from that scene, following Moll’s showing Jemmy all the money that she has in the world (presumably) and offering it to him, “if he would take it”: He told me with great concern, and I thought I saw tears in his eyes, that he would not touch it; that he abhorred the thoughts of stripping me and making me miserable. (118) Or, to think about it in terms of Theory of Mind: (4) Moll knows (based even more on Jemmy’s tears than his words) that Jemmy suffers at the thought of making her miserable. This is the third level of embedment. Contrast it now with the cognitive mapping of the already-discussed scene in Persuasion: (5) Anne realizes that Wentworth understands that Elizabeth pretends not to recognize that he wants to be acknowledged as an acquaintance. This is the fourth level of embedment, reaching, perhaps, even further: up to the fifth level. I suspect that moments like this, when we are faced with five levels of mental embedment, are not too frequent in Austen, but that on the whole she does operate on at least the third level of embedment, with frequent forays into the fourth. Similarly, the moments in Defoe in which we have three levels of subjective embedment (as in the scene above) are much less frequent than the scenes embedding two levels. 6 The realization that we can “calculate” the levels of fictional subjectivity opens up intriguing interpretive opportunities. If we can locate a historical moment, and there must have been several such moments in the last three hundred years, when the novel learns to function comfortably one intersubjective level up, 7 we can speculate about particular cultural circumstances 6 Compare to Vermeule’s argument about the “low” and “high” Theory of Mind traditions in the novel (“God Novels”). 7 Note that when I speak of moments in literary history when the novel moves one intersubjective level up, I do not mean to imply that once it happens, novels operating on the lower level of mental embedment become extinct. For example, today Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway coexists peacefully with novels that never move beyond the third level of mental L ISA Z UNSHINE 146 behind this learning curve. Those may include the socioeconomics of textual reproduction, personal histories of the authors, the availability of readers open to this new, more challenging, but also perhaps more exciting construction of fictional consciousness, and so forth. Although we shall never be able to produce the exact and exhaustive list of these circumstances, 8 discussing them implies a productive interdisciplinary dialogue. Cognitive evolutionary psychology contributes to such a dialogue the awareness of challenges involved in processing multiply-embedded subjectivities. Literary and cultural studies contribute analysis of social-political, aesthetic, and personal factors influencing the production and dissemination of texts featuring such an embedment, as well as of the far-ranging effects of the deepening of fictional intersubjectivity. In the rest of this essay, I will look at several fictional and non-fictional representations of multiply embedded consciousness that precede those in Austen. My immediate goal is to understand how Austen’s experimentation with deep intersubjectivity built upon that of her predecessors. My long-term objective is to make sure that a cognitive framework indeed offers something not available through more traditional literary-critical methodologies. Specifically, I want to see if, aided by research in Theory of Mind, I will be compelled to ask questions that I would not have otherwise and trace new connections between different cultural discourses of the “long” eighteenth century. II. Representing Greedy Self-Consciousness Although (and perhaps because) Butte mentions Clarissa (1747-48) only in passing, 9 one is immediately tempted to apply his model of the new interpersonal consciousness to Samuel Richardson’s magnum opus. Surely, a novel whose protagonists spend their waking hours trying to plan each other’s emotional reactions and so to deflect, with varying degrees of success, each other’s mental gambits must create something of that “field of mutual conembedment. Different levels of embedment appeal to different readers at different times and also answer the demands of particular genres and styles. 8 For a discussion of this aspect, see Butte, 237. 9 Clarissa figures in Butte’s discussion of Pamela (1739). Butte sees that novel’s treatment of its title protagonist as subject to “curious limitations”: “[Pamela] is powerfully aware that she is the target of [Mr. B’s and her parents’] interpretation, but what perceptions, experiences, and tones of feeling give rise to those interpretations in the other? How are they part of the fabric of that consciousness in her parents or Mr. B.? Neither Pamela nor Pamela asks these questions of their world. Mr. B. reads Pamela’s letters, but she does not read his (in this matter Clarissa is a step forward). More important, Pamela does not internalize Mr. B.’s perceptions of her—she deflects them—and does not ask what consciousness those perceptions emerged from and to which her responses could be seen to return, as a thread in what could have been a tapestry of responses.” (69) Why Jane Austen Was Different ... 147 sciousness” (33) that Butte sees as coming into existence only in the novels of Austen. The readers of Clarissa may recall, for example, the “Miss Partington” episode, in which Lovelace describes himself (in a letter to Belford) observing Clarissa closely as she speaks and inferring that she does not want him to think that she thinks that he has had some ulterior motives in wanting her earlier to share a bed with a young lady of his acquaintance. Having discussed that episode elsewhere, 10 I turn now to two other texts featuring similar moments of multiply-embedded subjectivity: Rousseau’s Emile (1762) and Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768). Rousseau’s philosophical-treatise-cum-novel contains passages such as the one in which Emile’s tutor, Jean-Jacques, aware both of his pupil’s attraction to Sophie and his embarrassment at thinking that others may be aware of it as well, observes Emile sitting at Sophie’s parents’ table unable to look up at the people surrounding him: Confused, embarrassed, fearful, he no longer dares to look around him for fear of seeing that he is being looked at. Ashamed to let others see through him, he would like to make himself invisible to everyone in order to sate himself with contemplating her without being observed. Sophie, on the contrary, is reassured by Emile’s fear. (415) Here is one possible mapping of the mental embedment present in this scene: The tutor observes Sophie’s feelings as she realizes that Emile is afraid that others will understand that he is falling in love with her. It is not for nothing that Alan Bloom saw Emile as “Phenomenology of the Mind posing as Dr. Spock” (5). Though not frequent, such moments of multi-level mind-reading are crucial to Rousseau’s narrative. In A Sentimental Journey, we encounter Yorick writing a card to Madame de R**** in his hotel room while “the fair fille de chambre” is waiting for him to finish the card, so she can deliver it: It was a fine still evening, in the latter end of the month of May—the crimson windowcurtains (which were of the same colour of those of the bed) were drawn close—the sun was setting, and reflected through them so warm a tint into the fair fille de chambre’s face—I thought she blushed—the idea of it made me blush myself—we were quite alone; and that super-induced a second blush before the first could get off. (116) One way of mapping this passage is to focus on the first blush, spelling out Yorick’s speculation about the feelings of the young woman: Yorick blushed because he thought that she blushed because she thought about the two of them alone in the room; or even: Yorick blushed because he thought that she blushed because she thought that he thought about the two of them alone in the room. Pushing the appearance of the deep intersubjectivity some thirty years back, from the 1790s to the mid-century, does not quarrel with Butte’s argu- 10 See Zunshine, “Can We Speak.” L ISA Z UNSHINE 148 ment. The eighteenth-century sentimental novel (of which Clarissa and Emile are prime examples) valorized attention to the body’s “vocabulary . . . of gestures and palpitations, sighs and tears” and as such carefully foregrounded its descriptions of “mutually affecting looks” (Mullan 77). Although we do not think of Austen’s novels as sentimental, she certainly builds on Richardson’s, Sterne’s, and Rousseau’s experimentation with representing closely observed, interpreted, and misinterpreted bodies. One crucial difference between Austen and those earlier writers, however, is that they highlight their characters’ “attention to the meaning of looks and gestures” (Mullan 77), whereas she takes that attention for granted. For example, Clarissa’s friend exhorts her to be “vigilant” (41), and Clarissa repeatedly assures her that she is, and Lovelace testifies that he and Clarissa “are both great watchers of each other’s eyes” (460). Rousseau’s Jean-Jacques is convinced that his “true function” is to be “the observer and philosopher who knows the art of sounding hearts while working to form them”; accordingly, he reads in Emile’s “face all the movements of his soul,” and by “dint of spying them out, . . . gets to be able to foresee them and finally to direct them” (226). Sterne’s Yorick prides himself on being “quick in rendering the several turns of looks and limbs, with all their inflections and delineations, into plain words” and boasts that he does it constantly: For my own part, by long habitude, I do it so mechanically, that when I walk the streets of London, I go translating all the way; and have more than once stood behind in the circle, where not three words have been said, and have brought off twenty different dialogues with me, which I could have fairly wrote down and sworn to. (79) This is very different from Austen, whose prose seems to have fully internalized the assumption that some people make a careful study of the “turns of looks and limbs.” When she does portray characters who describe themselves as particularly attuned to the emotions of others and their own, she does it to parody the sentimental novels. Hence Laura in Love and Freindship (1790), written when Austen was fourteen, informs her correspondent that a “sensibility too tremblingly alive to every affliction of my Freinds, my Acquaintance and particularly to every affliction of my own, was my only fault, if a fault it could be called” (3). By contrast, in Persuasion, Anne, who apparently watches people very closely, is never explicitly described as doing so. Instead we get the results of her observation, such as the exchange of looks in Molland’s bakery shop (above), or the description of the expressive glance of Captain Wentworth as he turns quickly to see Anne’s face when he notices that a strange man looks at her “with a degree of earnest admiration” (77). Similarly, neither Elinor in Sense and Sensibility nor Fanny in Mansfield Park are explicitly characterized as being over-sensitive to other people’s body language, even though it is precisely their heightened sensitivity that makes possible the intersubjective moments present in those novels. In fact, in Sense and Sensibility, Elinor is understood to be much less “sensitive” than Why Jane Austen Was Different ... 149 her sister Marianne, a conventional understanding of sensitivity that appears particularly ironic when we realize that no moments of deep intersubjectivity can originate with Marianne because for two-thirds of the novel she is too enclosed within her own emotions to reflect and re-reflect those of other people. In other words, it seems that by freeing her heroines from the compulsion to register and praise (or lament) their emotional responsiveness to themselves and others, Austen opens up new venues for exploring such responsiveness. Studies in Theory of Mind suggest why this may work. When the character does not have to contemplate her contemplating other people’s emotions, it frees up one level of intentionality, which can then be used to add an extra level of embedment on another end. Compare the two following mappings: one, already familiar to you, describes Anne’s observing Elizabeth and Wentworth in the bakery shop; another (hypothetical) adds to it Anne’s awareness of her perceptive self: (6) Anne realizes that Wentworth understands that Elizabeth pretends not to recognize that he wants to be acknowledged as an acquaintance. (7) Anne is aware that her keen powers of observation allow her to realize that Wentworth understands that Elizabeth pretends not to recognize that he wants to be acknowledged as an acquaintance. The second sentence is a mouthful (or a mindful) because it pushes us to the sixth level of mental embedment, and the only recompense that we get for our pains as we strive to grasp its overall meaning is being reminded what a smart girl our Anne is. Apparently, she has no problems keeping track of who thinks what here. This is enough to make us feel a twinge of resentment toward the hitherto favorite heroine. If we are in the pre-Austenian world of the sentimental novel and thus insist on keeping that self-congratulatory tag, we have to simplify the rest of the sentence in order to render it comprehensive. A simplified version embedding four levels of subjectivity might look like this: (8) Anne is aware that her keen powers of observation allow her to realize that Wentworth understands that Elizabeth pretends not to recognize him. Or like this: (9) Anne is aware that her keen powers of observation allow her to realize that Elizabeth pretends not to recognize that Wentworth wants to be acknowledged as an acquaintance. Note how both of these simplified versions make Anne appear less selfsatisfied than in example 7. The cognitive perspective helps us to account for this slight shift of tone. In example 7, we had to operate on the difficult sixth level of mental embedment, and it seemed that all that difficulty originated with Anne, who smugly appreciated that she could keep track of who was thinking what and whose pleased self-awareness seemed particularly out of L ISA Z UNSHINE 150 place given all the negative emotions experienced by Elizabeth and Wentworth. 11 By contrast, examples 8 and 9 do not present us with the same cognitive challenge, which apparently makes us amenable to a different reading of Anne since we are now on the fourth level of embedment. We do not perceive her as being smugly self-satisfied anymore. Instead, she seems to be grateful for being capable of keeping track of who thinks what. After all, had she missed or misread either Elizabeth’s or Wentworth’s reaction to each other, she could have done or said something that would have resulted in mutual awkwardness and unease. You can see how tweaking the sentence to make it either more or less challenging for our mind-reading adaptations can contribute, at least to some extent, to adjusting its emotional timbre. In general, what the contrast between example 7, on the one hand, and 8 and 9, on the other, demonstrates is that a writer enters a treacherous territory when she begins to work above the fourth level of recursive mental embedment. Something has to give if she is to keep a given passage both deeply intersubjective and readerfriendly and to avoid making the heroine seem selfsatisfied about her powers of penetration. Let me make clear what I am not saying here. I am not saying that a writer who does not depict characters strongly aware of their own sensibility will necessarily end up exploring deep intersubjectivity. The case in point is Defoe, whose prose is neither sentimental nor deeply intersubjective. I am saying rather that it so happened that during this particular period of literary history, writers who came to be identified with sentimentalism (e.g., Richardson, Rousseau, Sterne) experimented with multiply-embedded subjectivity by depicting characters whose awareness of their sensibility claimed two levels of mental embedment. To adapt Butte’s memorable title, certain scenes from sentimental novels could be mapped not as “I know that you know that I know,” but as “I know that I know that you know that I know.” Austen disliked sentimentality, so she eliminated that greedy self-consciousness from her own experimentation with multiply-embedded subjectivity (I call the sentimentalist self-consciousness greedy because it requires two levels of mental embedment). Moreover, it is not the case that, in the novels of Richardson, Rousseau, and Sterne, all deeply intersubjective passages cultivate this greedy selfconsciousness by featuring protagonists who are intensely aware of the importance of observing others’ and their own body language and who carefully monitor their progress in this social game. Some passages do and some do not. It is important, however, that we do not seem to encounter any such passages in Austen, and here is why it is important: I strongly agree with Butte that Austen’s treatment of fictional intersubjectivity is different. I want to demonstrate, however, that even if we do find instances of deep intersubjectivity in earlier eighteenth-century novels, it does not invalidate his point. 11 I am grateful to the anonymous reader from Style for pointing this out to me. Why Jane Austen Was Different ... 151 Richardson, Rousseau, and Sterne all occasionally operated on the fourth (or even fifth) level of mental embedment, but Austen “learned” 12 new ways of doing it, so that her protagonists on these occasions would appear neither Machiavellian (as the two main characters sometimes do in Clarissa 13 ), nor smug (as the narrator in A Sentimental Journey), nor overbearingly controlling (as Jean-Jacques in Emile). III. Downgrading Deep Intersubjectivity Freeing up one level of embedment for other uses by making the protagonist through whose eyes we see the scene less sensitive to her own sensitivity was just one strategy adopted by Austen in her construction of “readerand-character-friendly” deep intersubjectivity. I am about to consider two other strategies, but I want to stress that these three are not exhaustive. In fact, when it comes to understanding how Austen experimented with our Theory of Mind in general and multiply-embedded subjectivities in particular, what I am doing here merely scratches the surface of that discussion. And so to a non-fictional text published around the time of Richardson’s Pamela: David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40). Hume’s Treatise contains what seems to be a perfect instantiation of Butte’s image of the self that “upon revealing a consciousness of the other’s response, perceives yet another gesture responding to its response, so that out of this conversation of symbolic behaviours emerges a web woven from elements of mutually exchanged consciousnesses” (27): In general we may remark that the minds of men are mirrors to one another, not only because they reflect each other’s emotions, but because those rays of passions, sentiments and opinions, may often be reverberated, and may decay away by insensible degrees. Thus the pleasure, which a rich man receives from his possessions, being thrown upon the beholder, causes a pleasure and esteem; which sentiments again, being perceived and sympathized with, encrease the pleasure of the possessor; and being once more reflected, become a new foundation for pleasure and esteem in the beholder. (365) The last sentence feels a bit peculiar, and mapping it out in terms of embedded intentionalities explains why: “The beholder is happy to see the possessor happy to see the beholder happy to see the possessor happy at his possessions.” This is the fourth level of embedment, which, as we know, is not the easiest level for us to function on. Moreover, my teaching experience suggests that students presented with this passage and asked to convey its meaning respond with “people are happy to see other people happy.” This simplification makes perfect sense in light of Dunbar’s findings: it still captures the gist 12 I put this term in quotation marks because I don’t want to claim that this process of learning is necessarily conscious. 13 See Zunshine, “Richardson’s Clarissa.” L ISA Z UNSHINE 152 of Hume’s example but it also downgrades the levels of intentionality from the difficult four to the comfortable two. Hence my second surmise about the difference between this type of multilevel embedment and the one encountered in Austen. It turns out that it is rather difficult to downgrade her fourth-level subjectivity to the second level and still convey the meaning of the scene. For example, were we to do it with the encounter in the Molland’s bakery shop, it would go something like this, “Anne notices the exchange of looks between Wentworth and Elizabeth.” This sounds not just simplified but plainly wrong because the first interpretation of this sentence that comes to mind is that Wentworth and Elizabeth might be interested in each other. What happens if we try conveying the gist of the scene by downgrading it not to the second but to the third level of embedment? We can say, “Anne notices the exchange of looks between Wentworth and Elizabeth and realizes that Elizabeth still dislikes Wentworth,” or, “Anne notices the exchange of looks between Wentworth and Elizabeth and realizes that Wentworth is trying to be friendly with Elizabeth.” Both of these still misconstrue the meaning of the passage! To get finally to the correct meaning we would have to say, “Anne notices the exchange of looks between Wentworth and Elizabeth and realizes that even though Wentworth is trying to be friendly with Elizabeth, she still dislikes him, and he is now becoming aware of her continuous dislike.” We are back in our fourth-to-fifth level embedment, even if the phrasing does not sound like Austen and does not convey other important nuances of the episode. Again, I am wary of generalizations here. I am not saying that none of Austen’s intersubjective scenes can be paraphrased by downgrading their levels of mental embedment to the super-comfortable second level or to the still-rather-comfortable third. Perhaps some of them can, and I would be happy to hear from the readers who find such scenes. What I am saying is that Austen learned to construct her deeplyintersubjective passages in such a way that the deep intersubjectivity is organic to their meaning: eliminate one or two levels of mental embedment, and you lose the meaning. But once Austen had this particular representational tool in her writing toolbox, she could use it on some occasions and not on others, just as she would any other rhetorical strategy. IV. The Importance of Emotional Investment To figure out yet another rhetorical strategy used by Austen in her construction of deep intersubjectivity, we need to switch genres and go further back into literary history, for it seems that at least some English playwrights waxed deeply intersubjective much earlier than their novel-writing counterparts. Why Jane Austen Was Different ... 153 George Etherege’s The Man of Mode; or, Sir Fopling Flutter, premiering at the Duke’s Theatre in 1676, remained popular with audiences until the 1750s, and was then “dropped from the repertory” apparently because “changing tastes made its sexual frankness seem objectionable” (O’Neill 526). The play showcases the sexual charm and “Machiavellian” wit (Robert D. Hume 96) of Mr. Dorimant, a character often compared to John Wilmot, the First Earl of Rochester. Dorimant simultaneously breaks up with one woman, Mrs. Loveit, seduces another, Bellinda, and falls in love with a third, Harriet. In the concluding scene, he faces and has to mollify all three of them while getting ready to follow Harriet to her family’s countryseat, where (we assume) he will court and marry her. It is in figuring out how the actions of Dorimant and Bellinda are influenced by what they know about each other’s thoughts that we become aware how deeply intersubjective this scene might be. I say might be because some of its intersubjective possibilities are easily lost in the reading, but they can be, and I think must be, magnified in the performance. To tease out those possibilities, let us establish who knows what throughout the play. Mrs. Loveit knows that Dorimant has been courting another woman and suspects that this is why he is breaking up with her, but she does not know who that other woman is. The other woman is Bellinda, but because she is Mrs. Loveit’s avowed friend and, moreover, is anxious to preserve her reputation, she does not want anybody to know that she is about to become Dorimant’s mistress. Moreover, Bellinda wants proof that the affair between Dorimant and Mrs. Loveit is over. To get this proof, she first fans Mrs. Loveit’s jealousy about the masked woman with whom Dorimant has been recently seen in the theatre (who was Bellinda herself) and then arranges it so that she is present when Dorimant quarrels with Mrs. Loveit on false pretenses and breaks with her. Witnessing Dorimant’s ruthless handling of Mrs. Loveit makes Bellinda unhappy because she is afraid that he might treat her later in the same way, but still she finds him irresistible and so spends a night with him. When she leaves his house at dawn, the chairman in attendance at Dorimant’s door mistakenly takes her not to her own house but to the house of Mrs. Loveit, since he is used to returning a woman to that particular lodging in the morning. While Belinda is at Mrs. Loveit’s, Dorimant comes in to see how much emotional power he still has over Mrs. Loveit. Bellinda and Dorimant are both surprised by the meeting and begin to suspect each other of double-dealing. And all this while, Dorimant has been pursuing Harriett, who is beautiful, witty, and rich, but will not succumb to his charms without marriage. In the last scene, Mrs. Loveit and Bellinda learn that Dorimant is about to marry Harriet. To mollify Mrs. Loveit (who can damage his standing in the eyes of Harriet’s mother), Dorimant confides to Mrs. Loveit that Harriet is the masked woman of Bellinda’s story, and, moreover, that he has been pursuing Harriet not because he loves her, since he claims that he loves Mrs. Loveit still, but because he needs to marry this heiress “to repair the ruins of [his] estate.” Dorimant tells all this to Mrs. Loveit within the hearing of Bellinda, L ISA Z UNSHINE 154 who is both relieved and mortified by these lies. She is relieved because her reputation is safe: Mrs. Loveit will not accuse her of betraying their friendship and the town will not know that she has slept with Dorimant. She is also mortified because Dorimant has now abandoned her, too, and for the woman (Harriet) whom he apparently loves. Here is how it is depicted in the play: Dorimant. [to Mrs. Loveit] . . . Be satisfied—this is the business; this is the mask has kept me from you. Bellinda. (Aside.) He’s tender of my honor, though he’s cruel to my love. Mrs. Loveit. Was it no idle mistress, then? Dorimant. Believe me, a wife, to repair the ruins of my estate that needs it. Mrs. Loveit. This knowledge of this makes my grief hang lighter on my soul, but I shall never more be happy. Dorimant. Bellinda— Bellinda. Do not think of clearing yourself with me. It is impossible—Do all men break their words thus? Dorimant. Th’extravagant words they speak in love. ‘Tis as unreasonable to expect we should perform all we promise then, as do all we threaten when we are angry. When I see you next— Bellinda. Take no notice of me, and I shall not hate you. Dorimant. How came you to Mrs. Loveit? Bellinda. By a mistake the chairmen made for want of my giving them directions. Dorimant. ‘Twas a pleasant one. We must meet again. Bellinda. Never. (585) To grasp the full irony of the scene, the spectators have to understand that Dorimant lies brazenly to Mrs. Loveit within Bellinda’s earshot because he knows that Bellinda cannot contradict his story because she is afraid that Mrs. Loveit will realize that Belinda lied to her earlier. Moreover, Dorimant understands that Bellinda knows that he knows what a vulnerable position she is in and that she resents him for happily exploiting her present vulnerability. This is why Dorimant is not surprised when Bellinda tells him that he cannot clear himself with her and it is all over between them. Mapping this scene in terms of embedded levels of subjectivity gives us the following: (10) Bellinda knows that Dorimant knows that Bellinda will not contradict his story because she is afraid that Mrs. Loveit will realize that Bellinda was deceiving her. And if this were not complicated enough already, we can uncover yet another level of mental embedment here if we ask ourselves why Dorimant chooses this exact moment to ask Bellinda what she was doing at Mrs. Loveit’s the morning after their assignation. Dorimant was “confounded” (579) by that meeting and suspected that his new mistress was playing some double game by conferring with his old mistress behind his back. By putting the question to her now, as she tells him that she can barely stand him (“Take no notice of me, and I shall not hate you”), he attempts to turn the tables on her. By asking “How came you to Mrs. Loveit? ” Dorimant reminds Bellinda that he, too, has a reason to feel injured by her (presumed) double-dealing Why Jane Austen Was Different ... 155 and that his present “cruelty to her love” is but a fit recompense for her past behavior. It is likely that Dorimant does not really feel as injured by Bellinda as he pretends to be because as soon as she explains what happened that morning (“By a mistake the chairmen made for want of my giving them directions”), he immediately relents and asks for another assignation (“Twas a pleasant one. We must meet again”), to which Bellinda, who has finally learned her lesson (one hopes), responds “never.” Thus, if we consider Dorimant’s attempt to make Bellinda think that he knows perfectly well that he is being “cruel to [her] love” but feels that as an injured lover he has a right to treat her badly, we get the following: (11) Dorimant wants Bellinda to know that he knows that Bellinda will not contradict his story because she is afraid that Mrs. Loveit will realize that Bellinda was deceiving her. We are now in such depths of deep intersubjectivity that I am reminded of what Robert D. Hume once wrote about The Man of Mode. Responding to critics’ speculations about the “central [philosophical] concern” of the play, Hume observed, “I suspect that Etherege’s ‘central concern’ was to display his own wit” (96). Indeed, imagining our author hard at work constructing his plot so that the last scene will allow for six levels of mental embedment makes one wonder what philosophical issues he might have also hoped to smuggle in as his audience struggled to keep up with Dorimant’s and Bellinda’s multilevel representations of each other’s mental states. Although mapping out those representations the way I did above shows that The Man of Mode can be “cognitively challenging,” since the sixth level of embedment is well beyond our comfort zone, simply reading the play still does not convey and may in fact misrepresent its full intersubjective potential. That potential only comes alive in actual performance. To get a flavor of the difference, let us then imagine one small part of the exchange quoted above as performed by actors on stage. Butte provides us with an excellent framework for such visualization by reminding us that in the embodied conversation, words, and gestures play against each other in the ever-increasing complexity of intended and misinterpreted meanings. He does not deal with theatre in his book, focusing instead on the movies of Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Woody Allen and thus factoring into his analysis of screen subjectivities the point of view of the camera. Still, his argument about cinematographic theatricality is highly relevant to our discussion: Theatricality is inherently intersubjective because gestures and language in ‘performance’ embody for or against the other the framer’s intentions. Theatricality becomes deeply intersubjective when its narrative tracks the embodiments of gestures responding to gestures that are themselves interpretations or distortions of yet prior signs. (134) In particular, what Butte says about the construction of deep intersubjectivity in Hitchcock movies works well when applied to the last scene of The Man of L ISA Z UNSHINE 156 Mode: “In such scenes a public conversation both conceals and exposes a private conversation that transacts its business by way of double meanings in public language and private gestures” (144). When Dorimant is assuring Mrs. Loveit that he has been pursuing Harriet because he needs a rich wife, their conversation is “public” because it includes Bellinda (who, as Mrs. Loveit’s bosom friend, is allowed into her secrets). At the same time, this public conversation also “conceals and exposes” a private conversation between Bellinda and Dorimant, which indeed “transacts its business by way of double meanings . . . and private gestures.” For example, Bellinda may visibly start at Dorimant’s claim that Harriet was the “mask [that] has kept [him] from [Mrs. Loveit],” and this gesture will be interpreted differently by Mr. Loveit and by Dorimant. Mrs. Loveit will think that Bellinda as her friend is startled by the revelation that Dorimant was hunting for a wife all this time and concealing it from Mrs. Loveit, and we will register this “public” (and incorrect) interpretation. Dorimant, however, will interpret that gesture correctly, and he will turn to Bellinda to start reproaching her for her presumed doubledealing. Moreover, Mrs. Loveit continues to dwell within the realm of “public” conversation that includes herself, Dorimant, and Bellinda. Her body language must thus reflect what Butte would call her response to “misinterpreted gestures.” We presume that she does not hear the part of the conversation in which Dorimant vindictively asks Bellinda how she happened to be that morning at Mrs. Loveit’s house. This means that she has to have some kind of explanation for the fact that Bellinda and Dorimant are still talking together. If Bellinda looks angry during that conversation—and most likely she does, given what she says to Dorimant—Mrs. Loveit will interpret her angry posture as her indignation at Dorimant’s shabby treatment of Mrs. Loveit. The body language of Mrs. Loveit may thus reflect some satisfaction at seeing her friend angry on her behalf, and the viewers will be aware that her interpretation is both correct in the context of the “public” meaning of the conversation and incorrect in the context of the private exchange between Dorimant and Bellinda. And, on top of it, Bellinda might be aware of Mrs. Loveit’s incorrect interpretation and further respond to it by her own body language, for as she leaves Dorimant and rejoins Mrs. Loveit, she may continue to look indignant, presumably still feeling bad for her friend. At least this is what I would ask actors to convey, were I to direct this scene. No matter how you direct it, however, it is clear that the actual performance deepens further and calibrates the deep intersubjectivity scripted by Etherege. The performed deep intersubjectivity thus reaches out to levels and nuances of mental embedment that are not captured by my earlier mapping of the read deep intersubjectivity. What I find most fascinating about the gap between the two is that the constraints discussed by cognitive scientists must operate differently when the deep intersubjectivity is performed, or rather, performed in some particular way. We saw already that our reading comprehension of passages featuring Why Jane Austen Was Different ... 157 multiplyembedded intentionality goes sharply down after the fourth level of embedment and continues to decline after that. In fact, this applies to some forms of embodied representations as well. Think of Bruce Eric Kaplan’s cartoon from The New Yorker, in which the gloomy husband assures the equally gloomy wife: “Of course I care about how you imagined I thought you perceived I wanted you to feel.” Although this is a somewhat embodied sentiment, we can see the alienated bodies of the speakers, its level of embedment (sixth! ) renders it almost undecipherable. (Which, of course, is exactly the point of the joke: the statement about mutual sensitivity, caring, and understanding is literally incomprehensible.) Or think of the “The One Where Everybody Finds Out” episode from the fifth season of Friends, in which Phoebe and Rachel plot to play a practical joke on Chandler and Monika, but then the plotting and counterplotting get slightly of out hand. The ever-eloquent Phoebe captures the end result as follows: “They thought they could mess with us! They’re trying to mess with us? They don’t know that we know they know we know! ” Again, as in the case of The New Yorker cartoon, much of the humor of the episode stems from its growing incomprehensibility, and that is in spite of the fully embodied nature of this representation. In other words, there is no guarantee that if you take the cognitively challenging level of mental embedment, say, sixth, and perform it instead of merely describing it, the audience’s understanding will be enhanced. In fact, the opposite could be true. The playwright who wishes to “display his own wit” may end up flat on his face because embedding more than four levels of subjectivity in a given scene runs the danger of rendering that scene incomprehensible. The author may choose to emphasize that incomprehensibility to comic effect, as the creators of Friends did, but to render the action intelligible while at the same time increasing and enriching its deep intersubjectivity via the interplay of word and gesture requires some extra work. What kind of work might it be? We are a far way off at this point from answering that question, not least because of how little we still know about our cognitive processes. For example, it is clear to me that the functioning of our mirror neurons, when our brain makes sense of other people’s gestures by “pretending” that we are making those gestures too, must play a role in enhancing our comprehension of performance. Similarly, it must matter that when we see bodies in action, we register several intersubjective exchanges almost simultaneously, while when we read about such exchanges, we process them one at a time. For example, when I teach a class, I often have the feeling that at any given moment I am aware of the body language of several students, whereas when I read descriptions of looks and gestures, I have to finish one description before I move on to another. That is, I am not sure that I can really see one student shrugging her shoulders in response to something I just said at exactly the same time as I see the other student leaning forward and whispering some- L ISA Z UNSHINE 158 thing to her neighbor, but it is obvious that it takes less time for me to register both than for you to read these two descriptions. So far I have found one thing that Etherege does differently from the creators of Friends and which, I think, enables him to enhance his spectators’ comprehension even as he constructs the scene featuring not just deep but apparently ever-deepening intersubjectivity. In Friends, the multiple embedment is built around a manifest trifle, a practical joke whose outcome has no bearing upon the characters’ fate. The stakes of understanding exactly who knows what are so very low that we can afford to give it all up and merely laugh at the enthusiasm with which Phoebe negotiates and builds the mental labyrinths with her “they don’t know that we know they know we know! ” By contrast, in The Man of Mode, the stakes of figuring out exactly who knows what are extremely high for the two characters, Bellinda and Dorimant, whose mutual readings create most of the deep intersubjectivity of the last scene. Bellinda stands to lose her reputation (if the town finds out that she is Dorimant’s mistress and now a cast-off mistress, too), her friend (Mrs. Loveit), and the man she loves. Dorimant stands to lose the woman he loves (Harriet) and his reputation as a wit. By keeping close track of the increasingly complex web of intersubjectivities, Dorimant escapes unscathed and Bellinda gets off with one serious loss instead of three. Note, too, that Mrs. Loveit, who has nothing to lose at this point because her reputation is gone and Dorimant has already left her is excluded from this inner cycle of mutual readings. She is navigating the circumference of the “public” conversation, misreading gestures, and missing private meanings. It seems then that authors wishing to facilitate their audiences’ comprehension of deeply intersubjective scenes should significantly raise the stakes for the protagonists and thus ratchet up our emotional involvement with their cogitations. Conversely, the authors wishing to impede their audiences’ comprehension and render the deep intersubjectivity an amusing spectacle in and of itself should lower the stakes and thus decrease our emotional involvement. Because (as Butte reminds us) “theatricality is inherently intersubjective,” a number of the late seventeenthcentury playwrights must have intuitively figured out this rule. I used as my case in point Etherege’ Man of Mode, but equally fascinating examples of deep intersubjectivity, calibrated now to enhance the viewer’s comprehension now to impede it, can be found in the plays of John Dryden, for example in Act III of his Marriage a la Mode (1673). I cannot claim that Austen consciously adapted this theatrical strategy of dealing with deep intersubjectivity to her novels. Still, it does constitute a crucial component of her construction of multilevel mental embedment. When Anne Elliot observes Elizabeth and Captain Wentworth in Molland’s bakery shop, the stakes of her getting just right the private meaning of their mutually reflecting body language are very high. Austen pulls us into being profoundly invested emotionally in knowing that Anne knows that Wentworth knows that Elizabeth pretends not to recognize that he wants to be Why Jane Austen Was Different ... 159 acknowledged as an acquaintance. We rise up to this cognitive challenge because we are made to believe that it matters. V. Do We Really Need Cognitive Science? Did I have to poach on the territory of cognitive scientists in the case of Jane Austen when our discipline seems to be doing just great on our own? With such studies as Butte’s I Know That You Know That I Know, which brilliantly explores Austen’s innovative use of deep intersubjectivity, why borrow the vocabulary of evolutionary psychologists and talk about “Theory of Mind” and “recursive mental embedment”? The immediate, practical answer to this question is easy. First, Dunbar’s research on cognitive challenges posed by scenes that embed more than four levels of recursive subjectivity allows me to explain why is it that when Phoebe knows that Monika knows that Chandler knows, etc., it is funny, but when Bellinda knows that Dorimant knows that Bellinda knows, etc., or when Anne knows that Wentworth knows that Elizabeth knows, etc., it is rather sad. The former takes frank pleasure in its incomprehensibility; the two latter encourage us to identify emotionally with the heroines who can decipher the complex social situations but cannot keep from losing the men they love. Second, the studies of recursive embedment allow me to explain why Austen made sure that her deeply intersubjective passages cannot be successfully paraphrased unless we retain their original level of mental embedment. Austen knew (intuitively, of course) that readers would try to downgrade that level from the challenging fourth to the easier third or even second, and she crafted prose that would resist that simplifying impulse. Third, I now have a new way of approaching the familiar topic of Austen’s complicated relationship with eighteenth-century sentimental novels. I can demonstrate that those novels’ treatment of multilevel mental embedment made possible Austen’s own exploration of deep intersubjectivity at the same time that it made her intuitively wary of the self-conscious sensibility cultivated by some earlier writers. We know that Austen disliked fictional sentimentality, but now we also can see how this dislike enabled her to free the extra level of mental embedment that she could then use elsewhere. “I know that you know that I know” comes easier for a writer who has an allergy to the hyper-sensitive “I know that I know that you know that I know.” These are three immediate observations about Austen’s prose that follow from appropriating concepts of cognitive scientists who study our mindreading adaptations. Excited as I am about them, however, I am even more interested in a larger theoretical insight that emerges from bringing together cognitive and literary studies. It seems that fictional narratives endlessly experiment with rather than automatically execute our evolved cognitive adaptations. When cognitive scientists succeed in isolating a certain regularity of our information-processing L ISA Z UNSHINE 160 (such as an apparent constraint on the number of levels of embedded subjectivity that we can process with ease), we can take that constraint and see how it plays itself out in a fictional narrative. What we discover is that where there is a cognitive constraint, there is a “guarantee” of sorts that writers will intuitively experiment in the direction of challenging that constraint, probing and poking it and getting around it. The exact forms of such probing and poking will depend on specific cultural circumstances, including mindreading profiles of individual writers and their readers. The culturally enmeshed cognitive “limits” thus present us with creative openings rather than with a promise of stagnation and endless replication of the established forms. This realization marks the possibility of a genuine interaction between cognitive psychology and literary studies, with both fields having much to offer to each other. Let me close with another question. Assuming that you agree that works of fiction constantly experiment with our cognitive constraints, we can speculate about the payoffs of experimenting with the specific constraint discussed above. Ask yourself: what exactly is achieved when the writer does manage to pack four or five levels of recursive mental embedment into a scene yet makes this difficult embedment feel natural—that is, not funny, forced, or incomprehensible? Perhaps we can speak here about some form of subconscious pleasure experienced by readers who thus are enabled to sail smoothly through a clearly demanding cognitive construction. It is as if we are made to feel that we are dealing with a genuinely complex, nay, almost intractable, social situation, but we are navigating it beautifully. Can we then say that the scenes such as the one in Persuasion extend us a promise, or rather an illusion, but a highly pleasing one, that we will be all right out there in the real world, where our social survival depends on attributing states of mind and constantly negotiating among those bewildering, approximate, selfserving, partially wrong or plainly wrong attributions? Is this lovely illusion of sociocognitive well-being one reason that some writers persist in constructing such scenes and some readers seek out texts containing them? Works Cited Austen, Jane. Love and Freindship and Other Early Works. Ed. G. K. Chesterton. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1922. —. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Ed. R. W. Chapman. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Baron-Cohen, Simon. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995. Bloom, Allan. “Introduction”. Emile or On Education. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. New York: Basic Books, 1979. 3-29. Borenstein, Elhanan, and Eytan Ruppin. “The Evolution of Imitation and Mirror Neurons in Adaptive Agents.” Cognitive Systems Research 6.3 (2005): 229-42. Why Jane Austen Was Different ... 161 Butte, George. I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll Flanders to Marnie. Columbus: The Ohio University Press, 2004. Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. Ed. Albert J. Rivero. New York: Norton, 2004. Dennett, Daniel. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987. —. “True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works.” Mind Design 2: Philosophy, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence. Ed. John Haugeland. 2nd ed. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997. 57-79. Dunbar, Robin. “On the Origin of the Human Mind.” Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language, and Meta-Cognition. Eds. Peter Carruthers and Andrew Chamberlain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 238-53. Etherege, George. The Man of Mode; or, Sir Fopling Flutter, in The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama. Ed. J. Douglas Candfield. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001. Gallagher, Shaun. “Understanding Interpersonal Problems in Autism: Interaction Theory as An Alternative to Theory of Mind.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 11.3 (2004). 199-217. Hume, Robert D. The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Hume, David. Treatise of Human Nature. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2003. Kaplan, Bruce Eric. Cartoon. The New Yorker. 26 Oct. 1998: 168. Mullan, John. Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. O’Neill, John H. “Introduction to The Man of Mode.” The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama. Ed. J. Douglas Candfield. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001. “The One Where Everybody Finds Out.” Written by Alexa Junge, directed by Michael Lembeck. Friends. NBC, 1999. Richardson, Alan. “Studies in Literature and Cognition: A Field Map.” The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity. Eds. Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 1-30. Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady. Ed. Angus Ross. London: Penguin, 1985. Rizzolatti, Giacomo, Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittoriao Gallese. “Neuropsychological Mechanisms Underlying the Understanding and Imitation of Action.” Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 2.9 (2001): 661-70. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile or On Education. Ed and trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey. Ed. A. Alvarez. London: Penguin, 1986. Vermeule, Blakey. “God Novels.” The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity. Eds. Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 147-166. Zunshine, Lisa. “Can We Teach the ‘Deep Intersubjectivity’ of Richardson’s Clarissa? ” New Windows on a Woman’s World: A Festschrift for Jocelyn Harris. Otago Studies in English. 9. Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago, 2005. 88-99. —. “Richardson’s Clarissa and a Theory of Mind.” The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity. Eds. Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 127-46. —. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: The Ohio University Press, 2006. A LAN P ALMER Small Intermental Units in Little Dorrit Theoretical context After explaining what is meant by the phrase intermental units, I will attempt to illustrate their importance in the novel by analysing their functioning in an example text, Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit. I hope to show that it is not possible to understand this novel without an awareness of these units as they operate within its storyworld. They are the chief means by which the plot is advanced. If you were to take all of the intermental thought out of Little Dorrit, a good deal of the subject matter of the novel would be lost. So, given the importance of this subject to the study of the novel, it seems to me that it is necessary to find room for it at the centre of narrative theory. Speaking very broadly, there are two perspectives on the mind: the internalist and the externalist. These two perspectives form more of a continuum than an either/ or dichotomy, but the distinction is, in general, a valid one. • An internalist perspective on the mind stresses those aspects that are inner, introspective, private, solitary, individual, psychological, mysterious, and detached. • An externalist perspective on the mind stresses those aspects that are outer, active, public, social, behavioural, evident, embodied, and engaged. The social mind and the public mind are the synonyms that I will use to describe those aspects of the whole mind that are revealed through the externalist perspective. It seems to me that the traditional narratological approach to the representation of fictional consciousness is an internalist one that stresses those aspects that are inner, passive, introspective and individual. This undue emphasis on private, solitary and highly verbalized thought at the expense of all the other types of mental functioning has resulted in a preoccupation with such concepts as free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness and interior monologue. As a result, the social nature of fictional thought has been neglected. But, as the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio suggests, “the study of human consciousness requires both internal and external views” (82), and so an externalist perspective is required as well, one that stresses the public, social, concrete and located aspects of mental life in the novel. A LAN P ALMER 164 As the following table shows, some of the concepts that are used to analyse the workings of fictional minds tend to fit easily into one or other of these perspectives. Internalist perspective Externalist perspective private mind social mind first person third person subjectivity of self subjectivity of others unreadable minds readable minds focalization aspectuality introspection theory of mind intramental thought intermental thought stream of consciousness continuing consciousness interior monologue Bakhtinian dialogicality Some of these pairs oppose each other precisely; in other cases the pairings are a little looser. Some of the terms that may be unfamiliar to narrative theorists are defined below. The term aspectuality refers to the fact that the actual world is always experienced under some aspects and not others. The storyworlds created by fictional texts are equally aspectual. They are necessarily experienced by the characters who inhabit them only ever under some aspects and not others. Within the internalist/ externalist framework, I see focalization and aspectuality as complementing each other. Focalization occurs when the reader is presented with the aspect of the storyworld that is being experienced or presented by the focalizer at that moment. But the concept of aspectuality is a reminder that, meanwhile, the storyworld is also being experienced differently, under different aspects, by the other characters who are not currently being focalized in the text. Any of those other characters could have been focalized if the narrator had chosen to do so. The term continuing consciousness stands for the process whereby readers create a continuing consciousness for a character out of the scattered, isolated mentions of that character in the text. The character continues to exist in the storyworld even when not present at a particular point in the text. The concept of aspectuality links very nicely with the idea of continuing consciousnesses. Other characters’ consciousnesses are continuing while, at any single point in the narrative, one character’s consciousness is being focalized. It is by means such as these that the internalist/ externalist framework is helpful in expanding the concept of subjectivity. As the list suggests, the term can be used in both a first person way (subjectivity of self) and a third person way (subjectivity of others). The use of the term aspectuality acts as a reminder here too, this time of the existence of the subjectivity of others, as available to us through the use of our theory of mind (our awareness of the existence of other minds which is explained in more detail below). An important part of the social mind is our capacity for intermental thought, which is joint, group, shared or collective thought, as opposed to Small Intermental Units in Little Dorrit 165 intramental, or individual or private thought (Palmer “Intermental thought“). It is also known as socially distributed, situated or extended cognition, and also as intersubjectivity. Intermental thought is a crucially important component of fictional narrative because much of the mental functioning that occurs in novels is done by large organizations, small groups, work colleagues, friends, families, couples and other intermental units. It could plausibly be argued that a large amount of the subject matter of novels is the formation, development and breakdown of these intermental systems. Little Dorrit, in common with many other novels, contains a number of general or universal statements about the typical behaviour of intermental units. For example, when Blandois arrives one evening at a French inn, “There had been that momentary interruption of the talk about the stove, and that temporary inattention to and distraction from one another, which is usually inseparable in such a company from the arrival of a stranger.” (167-8) Later in the text, Mr Meagles admits that “we do, in families, magnify our troubles and make mountains of our molehills in a way that is calculated to be rather trying to people who look on - to mere outsiders“ (370). Mr Meagles also explains to Clennam that: There is one of those odd impressions in my house, which do mysteriously get into houses sometimes, which nobody seems to have picked up in a distinct form from anybody, and yet which everybody seems to have got hold of loosely from somebody and let go again, that she [Miss Wade] lives, or was living [near Park Lane]. (373) These sorts of statements are quite common in fictional discourse, although traditional narrative theory has taken little account of them because of its preference for the internalist perspective. (However, for work by postclassical narrative theorists on distributed cognition, see Margolin and Herman). Within the real-mind disciplines of psychology and philosophy there is a good deal of interest in the mind beyond the skin: the realization that mental functioning cannot be understood merely by analysing what goes on inside the skull but can only be fully comprehended once it has been seen in its social and physical context. For example, social psychologists routinely use the terms mind and mental action not only about individuals, but also about groups of people working as intermental units. So, it is appropriate to say of groups that they think or that they remember. As the psychologist James Wertsch puts it, a dyad (that is, two people working as a cognitive system) can carry out such functions as problem solving on an intermental plane (27). You may be asking what is achieved by talking in this way, instead of simply referring to individuals pooling their resources and working in cooperation together. The advocates of the concept of distributed cognition such as the theoretical anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Clifford Geertz, the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers and Daniel Dennett, and the psychologists Edwin Hutchins and James Wertsch all stress that the purpose of the concept is increased explanatory power. They argue that the way to A LAN P ALMER 166 delineate a cognitive system is to draw the limiting line so that you do not cut out anything which leaves things inexplicable (Bateson 465). In the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, Sperber and Hirschfeld quote Wertsch's story of how his daughter lost her shoes and he helped her to remember where she had left them. Wertsch asks: Who is doing the remembering here? He is not, because he had no prior knowledge of where they were, and she is not, because she had forgotten where they were. It was the intermental unit formed by the two of them that remembered (Sperber and Hirschfeld cxxiv). In an illuminating essay entitled “Diagramming Narrative“, Marie-Laure Ryan refers to the subject matter of narrative as the “evolution of a network of interpersonal relations“ (29) and shows convincingly how diagrammatic representations of these networks in specific narratives can add a great deal to our understanding of the narrative process. It seems to me that fictional minds generally and social minds in particular could benefit from this sort of approach. For example, the complex, overlapping relationships formed by different intermental units can be thought of as resembling the patterns made by the circles in a Venn diagram. Such a diagram would show clearly how the membership of some groups are included within larger ones, some have no membership overlap at all with others, some have a partial overlap and so on. The basis of this essay is attribution theory (Palmer “Attribution theory“): how narrators, characters, and readers attribute states of mind such as emotions, dispositions, and reasons for action to characters and, where appropriate, also to themselves. How do heterodiegetic narrators attribute states of mind to their characters? By what means do homodiegetic narrators attribute states of mind to themselves and also to other characters? And, with regard to the issue of characterization, how does an attribution of a mental state by a narrator help to build up in the reader a sense of the whole personality of the character who is the subject of that attribution? Attribution theory rests on the concept of theory of mind. This is the term used by philosophers and psychologists to describe our awareness of the existence of other minds, our knowledge of how to interpret our own and other people’s thought processes, our mind-reading abilities in the real world. Readers of novels have to use their theory of mind in order to try to follow the workings of characters’ minds. Otherwise, they will lose the plot. The only way in which the reader can understand a novel is by trying to follow the workings of characters’ minds and thereby by attributing states of minds to them. (For more on theory of mind and the novel, see Palmer Fictional Minds and especially Zunshine Why We Read Fiction). Of particular importance to the concept of the social mind is the fact that this mind reading also involves readers trying to follow characters’ attempts to read other characters’ minds. A basic level of minimal mind reading is required for characters to understand each other in order to make life possible. At the next level up, characters who know each other well form intermental pairs and small groups. Because they are more likely to know what the other is thinking than total strangers will, they will Small Intermental Units in Little Dorrit 167 find it easier to engage in such joint activities as problem-solving and decision-making. These small groups will obviously vary greatly in the quantity and quality of their intermental thought. In addition, individuals may be part of larger groups that will also have a tendency to think together on certain issues. In all of these units, large and small, the individuals that belong to them will, of course, frequently think separately as well. It is this balance between public and private thought, intermental and intramental functioning, social and individual minds, that novels are preoccupied with, and Little Dorrit is no exception. An emphasis on social minds will inevitably question these twin assumptions: first, that the workings of our minds are not accessible to others; and, secondly, that the workings of our own minds are unproblematically accessible to ourselves. This essay will, in the main, question the first assumption and will make much less reference to the equally questionable second. To adapt Porter Abbott’s vivid phrase unreadable minds, I will be discussing the readable minds that are to be found in Little Dorrit. However, I must stress that I am certainly not saying that minds are always readable. Sometimes, they are; sometimes, they are not. In Little Dorrit, I will argue, on the whole, they are. But in different sorts of novels, different levels of readability and unreadability will apply. I will now illustrate these general remarks by focusing in the next section on the intermental unit of the Dorrit family. This involves looking at some of the individuals within that unit (for example, Mr Dorrit and Fanny) and also at some of the sub-units within the family (for example, Little Dorrit and Mr Dorrit, and Little Dorrit and Fanny). In the following section I will consider the most important intermental pair in the novel - the relationship between Little Dorrit and Clennam. I will examine this relationship from both points of view: that is, Clennam’s knowledge of Little Dorrit’s mind; and Little Dorrit’s knowledge of Clennam’s. I have assembled a large amount of evidence relating to the functioning of intermental units in Little Dorrit. What is presented in this essay is only a small sample. It is the second in a series of three essays on the subject of social minds in this novel. The first, called “Social Minds in Little Dorrit“ focused on physically distributed cognition, some of the specific ways in which social minds communicate with each other (such as the face, sign language and the look) and the large intermental units in the novel. This essay will attempt to focus in particular on the ethical implications of characters’ mind-reading within small intermental units by considering the relationship between cognitive attributions and moral judgments. Characters try to read other minds for a variety of motives - selfishness, altruism, curiosity, ambition and so on. Like intramental thought, intermental thought is morally neutral in itself. It is not necessarily good or bad, although, of course, specific examples may well be. The third essay will look at some of the other small intermental units in the novel such as the Meagles family, Clennam and Mrs Clennam, Mrs Clennam and Flintwinch, and Little Dorrit and Pet. A LAN P ALMER 168 The Dorrit family One of the ways in which a group of people can be identified as an intermental unit is a strong sense among those people of being in a group. Groups often have a clear self image in the sense that it is important to the individuals that comprise it that they identify themselves as belonging to that group. Some families are like this; others are not. The Dorrit family definitely has a strong self image. The narrator refers on several occasions to the Dorrit family intermental unit by using the word family in very significant contexts. During Frederick’s unforgettable outburst to William in which he complains about the family’s treatment of Little Dorrit, he refers to the “family credit“ (538). Earlier, Mr Dorrit had “felt that the family dignity was struck at by an assassin’s hand“ (511). A few pages later, the same phrase, “family dignity“ (551), is used again. These phrases refer to the shared consciousness within the family of their alleged importance and social standing. An important element in this shared consciousness is the sense of them and us, insiders and outsiders. The outsiders have to be made aware of the importance of the family name and the insiders are uneasily aware that these outsiders’ awareness of the significance of the Dorrit name can be difficult to enforce. This internalization of the conflicting perspective of another is decidedly Bakhtinian. He called it the “word with a sideways glance“ (32). Mr Dorrit is so excessively self-conscious about the family history that, for example, he takes objection to the Chief Butler looking at him “in a manner that Mr Dorrit considered questionable“ (678). This uneasy anticipation of the word, or gaze, of another occurs a few pages later when Mr Dorrit’s mind is collapsing and “his daughter had been observant of him with something more than her usual interest“. He demands peevishly, “Amy, what are you looking at? “ (701). Interestingly, Fanny also unfairly reproaches Little Dorrit for staring at her (665). The cognitive importance of the shared consciousness of the family is emphasized throughout the text. In another reference to the workings of the intermental family mind, the narrator describes Little Dorrit sighing by referring to “the whole family history in that sigh“ (648). The following passage is a remarkable one because the word “family“ is repeated four times in such quick succession that the phrases containing the word, and referring thereby to different aspects of the workings of the Dorrit intermental mind, comprise eleven words out of a total of forty-four. The passage attempts to recreate by means of this repetition a sense of the creation of what may be termed the family ideology: It was the family custom to lay it down as family law, that she was a plain domestic little creature, without the great and sage experience of the rest. This family fiction was the family assertion of itself against her services. (280, my emphasis) A good sign of the existence of an intermental mind is the heightened awareness of individuals of the thinking of others within the unit. That is, family Small Intermental Units in Little Dorrit 169 members are more likely to know what the others are thinking than nonfamily members are. Their theory of mind tends to be more successful than the norm. The background to the phrase quoted earlier about Mr Dorrit feeling that the family dignity had been struck at by an assassin’s hand is that he is excessively self-conscious about the recent family history. Fanny knows very well that it is “often running in his mind that other people are thinking about [the Marshalsea], while he is talking to them“ (647). Further evidence of the presence of cognitive intermental functioning is the fact that, within an intermental mind, individuals are easily able to understand the sign language of others within the unit. Words are often unnecessary. For example: Tip “asked her the question with a sly glance of observation at Miss Fanny, and at his father too“ (505). Also, Tip gives Fanny “a slight nod and a slight wink; in acknowledgement of which, Miss Fanny looked surprised, and laughed and reddened“ (536). As with many intermental units, though, generalizations should be employed with care. Intermental cognitive functioning is very complex. Most units have a core membership but are fuzzy around the edges. Significantly, when Wittgenstein explained the concept of fuzzy sets in Philosophical Investigations, it was the notion of family resemblances that he used to illustrate the point (32). The Dorrit family is a good example of fuzziness. The consciousness of the family credit is shared by the core family of William, Fanny and Tip. It is not characteristic of the other members of the family who, for very different reasons, are much more peripheral: Frederick and Little Dorrit. The workings of the Dorrit mind in action are evident in characteristic shared patterns of behaviour. These behavioural patterns often relate to individuals who are either inside or outside of the unit. The passage quoted above that referred to the family four times in three lines is a good example of the former. From an intramental point of view, Little Dorrit is referred to as “retiring“,“unnoticed““overlooked and forgotten“ (all in one paragraph on page 337). She is regarded in Venice as “the little figure of the English girl who was always alone“ (520) and who always “asked leave to be left alone“ (519). Similarly, it is said of her that “She passed to and fro in it [the Marshalsea] shrinkingly now, with a womanly consciousness that she was pointed out to every one“ (118). (This is a description of her intramental state of mind, but it also refers to her awareness of the intermental thinking of the prison population.) However, much of this intramental shyness arises from her treatment by William, Fanny and Tip. Its origins are intermental. As the passage quoted above makes clear, it is laid down as family law that Little Dorrit is to be treated in a certain way, and has a certain function within the unit as a plain domestic creature who does not possess their wisdom. It is a central element in the shared consciousness of the core family. Little Dorrit is intramentally aware of the place allotted her. It is stated that she “submitted herself to the family want in its greatness as she had submitted herself to the family want in its littleness“ (556-7). The intermental cognitive functioning is often clearly revealed in the joint actions that arise from these family disposi- A LAN P ALMER 170 tions to behave in certain ways. In the John Chivery affair, “Little Dorrit herself was the last person considered“ (257). Of the triumphant leaving of the Marshalsea, the narrator states that “This going away was perhaps the very first action of their joint lives that they had got through without her“ (480). And they fail spectacularly by completely forgetting her and leaving her behind! Such family customs are often very revealing about the nature of that family when they are noticed by outsiders. When Clennam hears Little Dorrit being praised by her uncle, Frederick Dorrit, he resents the family tone of voice: Arthur fancied that he heard in these praises a certain tone of custom, which he had heard from the father last night with an inward protest and feeling of antagonism … He fancied that they viewed her, not as having risen away from the prison atmosphere, but as appertaining to it; as being vaguely what they had a right to expect, and nothing more. (134) It is quite common, I think, for outsiders being introduced to a family to see at a glance how revealing certain joint patterns of behaviour are: for example, which members of it are excessively overor under-valued. The family treatment of Little Dorrit is also clear to the narrator, who comments that “She took the place of eldest of the three, in all things but precedence; was the head of the fallen family; and bore, in her own heart, its anxieties and shames“ (112). This is a very moving description of the way in which individuals may acquire and internalize some of the characteristics of the intermental unit to which they belong, and of how painful this internalization process can be. Intermental units also often function in similarly characteristic ways towards individuals who are outside of the unit. Such mechanisms as scapegoating are powerful tools for defining group consciousness. William, Tip and Fanny develop a common antagonism towards Clennam, based mainly on his scepticism regarding their core value, the family credit. Fanny says of him that “He obtruded himself upon us in the first instance. We never wanted him” (507). Clennam has some inkling of their shared hostility because of their unsubtle joint behaviour. However, when reading Little Dorrit’s letter from Italy, he learns more, and comes “to a clearer and keener perception of the place assigned him by the family“ (573). Again, though, it should be stressed that the peripheral members do not share these communal attitudes. Little Dorrit is in love with Clennam and it is not clear that Frederick has any view at all on the matter. (In Porter Abbott’s terms, his is most definitely an unreadable mind! ) It is often very rewarding to consider the sub-units that develop within a larger intermental unit. These relationships tend to illuminate the workings of the larger unit and, in turn, are themselves more comprehensible when seen within the wider context. Within the relationship between Little Dorrit and her father, much is often left unspoken. This reliance on silence, like sign Small Intermental Units in Little Dorrit 171 language, is another clear sign of intermental communication (see Palmer, forthcoming). They understand each other but do not make this knowledge of the other explicit: he because he is emotionally dishonest; she for reasons of delicacy and a reluctance to confront that dishonesty. “For a little while there was a dead silence and stillness” (271) between them, “They did not, as yet, look at one another” (272). In that silence, it is clear that she knows that he has encouraged young John Chivery to court her for his own selfish purposes; he knows that she knows; she knows that he knows that she knows and so on. Much of the relationship between father and daughter is expressed by the narrator in terms of the sign language that I referred to earlier: “To see her hand upon his arm in mute entreaty half-repressed, and her timid little shrinking figure turning away, was to see a sad, sad sight“ (123). Like Fanny, Little Dorrit knows about how her father’s mind works, in particular on the question of the family credit: “She felt that, in what he had just now said to her and in his whole bearing towards her, there was the well-known shadow of the Marshalsea wall“ (530). As is to be expected over the course of a very long narrative, their relationship changes: “From that time the protection that her wondering eyes had expressed towards him, became embodied in action, and the Child of the Marshalsea took upon herself a new relation towards the Father“ (111). The shared cognitive functioning within this intermental pair is flawed, however, by his dishonesty. He pretends that their relationship has not changed. Sign language also works well between Fanny and Little Dorrit because they too form an intermental pair within the larger unit of the whole family. Little Dorrit “looked in amazement at her sister and would have asked a question, but that Fanny with a warning frown pointed to a curtained doorway of communication with another room“ (284). Amy is very quick to pick up on behavioural cues from her sister: she “became aware that Fanny was more showy in manner than the occasion appeared to require“ (549). As a consequence of their intimacy, Fanny shares secrets with her. She tells Little Dorrit how she always knows when a man is interested in her (558). She also explains in great detail the reasons why she and Mrs Merdle will pretend that they have not met before (551). When Fanny cries with her after she tells her that she is engaged, “It was the last time Fanny ever showed that there was any hidden, suppressed, or conquered feeling in her on the matter“ (654). From that time onward, Fanny’s feelings will be hidden from others, but Amy will know of Fanny’s subsequently concealed feelings, having been shown them once. The text makes explicit Little Dorrit’s feelings of love for Fanny: Always admiring Fanny’s beauty, and grace, and readiness, and not now asking herself how much of her disposition to be strongly attached to Fanny was due to her own heart, and how much to Fanny’s, she gave her all the sisterly fondness her great heart contained. (557) A LAN P ALMER 172 When considering the attribution of reasons for actions (either first or third person), psychologists distinguish between attributions that focus on the individual (“he/ I did that because he’s/ I’m that kind of person“) and those that focus on the context (“he/ I did that because that’s what you do in that kind of situation“). Indeed, they refer to our tendency to overvalue the former and undervalue the latter as the fundamental attribution error (see Palmer Fictional Minds 244-46). It is noticeable that, in explaining that Little Dorrit is not attributing to herself the reasons why she loves Fanny, the narrator refers to the two sorts of attributions that she has chosen not to make. One relates to herself (“due to her own heart“); the other to the context (“how much to Fanny’s“). In an interestingly indirect way, the narrator is making the point that Little Dorrit is too modest to acknowledge explicitly to herself that her love for Fanny can only be due to her own loving nature because Fanny’s nature is so unlovable in so many ways. In other words, the narrator is implying that the fundamental attribution error would not apply in this case if Little Dorrit were to engage in self-attribution. Speaking more generally for a moment, there is an intriguing tension between the psychologists’ concept of the fundamental attribution error and the need for novelists to focus on the specificity and individuality of their characters. A novel in which characters behave how everyone else is likely to behave does not sound like a compelling page-turner! A focus on the workings of long-term, stable intermental units such as couples and families can give a misleading impression if it suggests that intermental thought can only occur within such units. In fact, as we know from our real life experience, mind-reading can occur in a variety of situations. It is made easier or more difficult by a variety of factors such as solipsistic characters, people with easily readable minds, familiar or unfamiliar contexts, and so on. For this reason, it is worth considering how the family behaves towards an outsider, Mrs General. Although Fanny and Mrs General form a conflicted, competitive unit, the sign language is still efficacious. When “Miss Fanny coughed, as much as to say, “You are right”“ (661), Mrs General knows exactly what she means. Fanny says of Mrs General: “I know her sly manner of feeling her way with those gloves of hers“ (666). And she concludes perceptively: “That woman, I am quite sure and confident, will be our mother-in-law“ (648). Little Dorrit is also able to decode Mrs General’s behaviour: “The perfect formation of that accomplished lady’s surface rendered it difficult to displace an atom of its genteel glaze, but Little Dorrit thought she descried a slight thaw of triumph in a corner of her frosty eye“ (704). Mind-reading also works in the opposite direction. In the following exchange, Mrs General shows that she is clever enough (or sly enough, to use Fanny’s term) to know how to flatter Mr Dorrit: “It always appears to me … that Mr Dorrit has been accustomed to exercise influence over the minds of others“ (527). From the point of view of a cognitive approach to the characters in this novel, Mrs General’s choice of words, referring to influencing minds, is significant. Small Intermental Units in Little Dorrit 173 My final example of the relationships between individuals within the Dorrit family unit and those outside is the small intermental unit formed by Fanny, Mrs Merdle and Sparkler. Fanny and Mrs Merdle understand each other so perfectly that the real subjects of their conversations need never be made explicit. It is in this way that the two of them spend the second half of the novel (“Riches“) pretending that they never met in the first half (“Rags“). Indeed, “The skilful manner in which [Mrs Merdle] and Fanny fenced with one another on the occasion almost made her quiet sister wink“ (566). In a good example of the competitive nature of encounters fought under the rules of Society, the discussion between Mr Dorrit and Mrs Merdle over the engagement between their offspring becomes a “skilful seesaw … so that each of them sent the other up, and each of them sent the other down, and neither had the advantage“ (657). The relationship between Fanny and Sparkler is much less well-balanced. Fanny toys with Sparkler over a number of pages. Her knowledge of his mind, such as it is, enables her to calibrate the torture perfectly. Fanny says of her “loved one“, “If it’s possible - and it generally is - to do a foolish thing, he is sure to do it“ (664). Her control over him, while enjoyable in itself, causes problems in terms of Fanny’s acute awareness of the perceptions of others. Miss Fanny was now in the difficult situation of being universally known [to be the object of Mr Sparkler’s affections], and of not having dismissed Mr Sparkler … Hence she was sufficiently identified with the gentleman to feel compromised by his being more than usually ridiculous. (645) She is aware of the intermental consensus that identifies her relationship with Sparkler as a serious one. She knows that such a consensus can solidify very quickly and cannot thereafter be easily changed. Fanny therefore jumps very quickly to Sparkler’s defence when, for example, Gowan ridicules him. The enslavement has consequences for Little Dorrit too, as she realizes how their two minds are working: “Thenceforward, Little Dorrit observed Mr Sparkler’s treatment by his enslaver, with new reasons for attaching importance to all that passed between them“ (651). “Little Dorrit began to think she detected some new understanding between Mr Sparkler and Fanny“ (651). She notices that “Mr Sparkler’s demeanor towards herself changed. It became fraternal“ (652). The bulk of this section has analysed intermental units that are characterized by conflict, competition, exploitation, dishonesty, solipsism and selfishness. The ideology of the Dorrit family credit, despite the complete absence of evidence for it, is imposed on others in order to devalue them. Their joint exploitation of, and dishonesty towards, Little Dorrit is morally reprehensible, as is their attempted scapegoating of Clennam. In addition, Fanny in particular forms conflicted and competitive pairings with others such as Mrs General and Mrs Merdle. This bleak picture is in stark contrast to the nature A LAN P ALMER 174 of the intermental unit formed by the relationship between Little Dorrit and Clennam, which is considered in the next section. Clennam and Little Dorrit There are different ways in which intermental units can be classified. One way is simply to trace the development of the relationship as a whole over time. Another is to examine it in terms of the variation in focalization: in this case, the relationship is mostly focalized through Clennam. A third way is to examine the degree of intermental thought: sometimes they understand each other perfectly; sometimes imperfectly; sometimes not at all. It may be that different intermental units will be illuminated by different sorts of approaches. In the case of Clennam and Little Dorrit, I will consider a few general aspects of their relationship before concentrating first on Clennam’s knowledge of Little Dorrit’s mind and then on her knowledge of his. As the reader would expect of the central romance of the novel, Clennam and Little Dorrit share a good deal of their thinking: not all, but a good deal. The following excerpt from her letter to him gives a flavour of the complexity of the very self-conscious theory of mind that is involved in their relationship: It looked at first as if I was taking on myself to understand and explain so much … But … I felt more hopeful for your knowing at once that I had only been watchful for you, and had only noticed what I think I have noticed, because I was quickened by your interest in it. (608) This is written by someone who is very well aware of the workings of her own mind, the workings of the mind of the one she loves and how the two minds function together. As is often the case, though, the mind-reading is not perfect. A common characteristic of theory of mind involving two people who know each other well is that one will often know that something is wrong with the other, but may not know precisely what: She feared that he was blaming her in his mind for so devising to contrive for them, think for them, and watch over them, without their knowledge or gratitude; perhaps even with their reproaches for supposed neglect. But what was really in his mind, was the weak figure with its strong purpose. (211-2) In this case it is clear that she knows that something is on his mind, but she is wrong about what it is. Near the end of the novel, after they have been apart for some time, he sees something in her face although he does not know what it is: As she looked at him silently, there was something in her affectionate face that he did not quite comprehend: something that could have broken into tears in a moment, and yet that was happy and proud. (885) There is a paradox that commonly occurs in narratives with a comic structure. On the one hand, the central couple in such narratives often exhibits a Small Intermental Units in Little Dorrit 175 high degree of intermentality. This is what one would expect when people are attracted to each other and are “on the same wavelength“. On the other hand, there is often a huge gap or blind spot in their joint mind reading that relates to the most important matter of all - their feelings for each other. In the case of this novel, Clennam does not know that Little Dorrit is in love with him; she does not know that Clennam is in love with her. “She was quicker to perceive the slightest matter here, than in any other case - but one“ (544). There is a certain logic to such intermental breakdowns in the relationships of lovers. It is likely that they will have a tendency to put the other on a pedestal and think something along the lines of: “he/ she is so wonderful that he/ she will not want to be interested in me“. Mind-reading involves reading one’s own mind as well as reading the minds of others, and this selfor first person attribution can be as unreliable as the third person kind. Little Dorrit’s first person attribution is accurate because she does know that she is in love with Clennam. However, Clennam is not aware of the most important fact about the working of his own mind: that he is in love with Little Dorrit. Reliable first person attribution is as necessary as third person attribution for successful participation in an intermental unit. For any such unit to function properly, with a fair degree of accuracy and concern for the feelings of the other, the individuals within it have to try to come to a reasonable working knowledge of their own feelings as well as the feelings of the other in order to make informed and sensitive ethical judgments about how to behave. Clennam becomes aware that his feelings for Little Dorrit are complex, and this awareness leads him to exercise the sort of care in dealing with her feelings that I will describe in the following paragraphs. Nevertheless, he sometimes hurts her because he does not yet know that he is in love with her or that she is in love with him. Towards the end of the novel, Clennam finds his private thoughts “remarkable“ to him (787), suggesting that he is aware of the fallibility of introspection. An important issue that arises within intermental units is control. This example relates to an early attempt by Clennam to influence Little Dorrit’s mind: “He wished to leave her with a reliance upon him, and to have something like a promise from her that she would cherish it“ (140). Later, because Clennam knows her well enough by now, he realizes that he can control Little Dorrit’s fears by getting her to focus on thoughts of her father (467). Clennam finds it uncomfortable to think about Little Dorrit and John Chivery. He is concerned that his Little Dorrit is not hers. “To make a domesticated fairy of her … would be but a weakness of his own fancy“ (305). The feeling will not go away. “Something had made her keenly and additionally sensitive just now. Now, was there someone in the hopeless unattainable distance? Or had the suspicion been brought into his mind, by his own associations? ” (309) Clennam is showing a sensitive awareness of the aspectuality of individuals. That is, every person contains many different individuals within them because they are viewed under different aspects by different people. As Walt Whitman said, “We contain multitudes“. Clennam is acutely A LAN P ALMER 176 conscious of the possibility that his Little Dorrit could become a “domesticated fairy“ and thereby lose contact with what he thinks might be her own conception of herself. He is aware that gaps of this sort can often supply the emotional needs of the other. That is, Clennam is aware that he is using her by creating an image of her in his mind that does not fit her own self-image. Importantly, he does not want to use her for his own purposes. Unfortunately, though, he then over-compensates by talking about himself as much older than he is, and this inadvertently causes him to hurt Little Dorrit’s feelings. He would not talk of himself as though he was old “If he had known the sharpness of the pain he caused the patient heart, in speaking thus! “ (432). To make matters worse, Clennam does not realize that reinforcing the age gap by calling her a child is as hurtful. “A slight shade of distress fell upon her, at his so often calling her a child. She was surprised that he should see it, or think such a slight thing“ (208). Again, this may be a familiar sensation. Many of us have inadvertently hurt the feelings of someone close to us by unsuccessfully trying to second-guess their feelings. As the narrator says of the married couple in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, “Like all their inabilities to communicate, this too had a virtuous motive“ (30). In any event, despite these difficulties, Clennam’s theory of mind is, in ethical terms, far superior to that of the Dorrit family. In a number of passages early in the novel, we see Clennam understanding completely Little Dorrit’s love for her father. “Evidently in observance of their nightly custom, she put some bread before herself, and touched his glass with her lips; but Arthur saw she was troubled and took nothing“ (122). “He understood the emotion with which she said it, to arise in her father’s behalf; and he respected it, and was silent“ (126). “He gathered from a tremor on her lip, and a passing shadow of great agitation on her face, that her mind was with her father“ (306). He is very considerate about her poverty. “He was going to say so lightly clad, but stopped himself in what would have been a reference to her poverty“ (208). Little Dorrit becomes aware that he knows her mind well. ““Can you guess,” said Little Dorrit … looking at him with all the earnestness of her soul looking steadily out of her eyes, “what I am going to ask you not to do? ”“ (214). He guesses correctly that her request is to stop giving money to her father and brother. She tells him that “I know you will understand me if anybody can“ (523). And she is right. “He saw the bright delight of her face, and the flush that kindled in it, with a feeling of shame … The same deep, timid earnestness that he had always seen in her, and never without emotion, he saw still“ (826). As stated earlier, when people know each other well, sign language becomes very efficient. “She started, coloured deeply, and turned white. The visitor, more with his eyes than by the slight impulsive motion of his hand, entreated her to be reassured and to trust him“ (121). He can read her emotional behaviour (starting and turning white); she can read the intention behind his gesture. The following small detail beautifully encapsulates the closeness of their mind-reading: ““Little Dorrit,” said Clennam; and the phrase had already begun, between these two, to stand for Small Intermental Units in Little Dorrit 177 a hundred gentle phrases, according to the varying tone and connection in which it was used“ (213). I think most readers of this essay will have had personal experience of the use of a private language within a small intermental unit. However, in a troubling and difficult scene, there is a breakdown in the communication between them. Little Dorrit confides that she does not understand why, after spending so long in the debtors prison, her father still has to pay off his debt before he is released. Clennam cannot understand why she does not understand that it is the honourable thing to do. The narrator remarks that: “It was the first speck Clennam had ever seen, it was the last speck Clennam ever saw, of the prison atmosphere upon her“ (472). I refer to this passage as troubling and difficult because I would guess that the ethical judgments made by most readers today would not necessarily be in line with Clennam’s on this issue. Most of us, I think, would regard Little Dorrit’s question as, at the very least, a reasonable one to ask. Because it is likely that the actual reader will be at some distance from the reader implied by this passage in the text, the effect is to make Clennam look heavy-handed and judgmental. As the bulk of the text is focalized through Clennam, there is less evidence of Little Dorrit’s mind reading than of Clennam’s. But it is clear, nevertheless, that, for large stretches of the novel, she is well aware of Clennam’s feelings. In addition to some of the examples given above, she knows immediately that something is wrong with Clennam after he gives up thoughts of Pet. She asks if he has been ill (431). And she knows about his anxieties about growing old. “He never thought that she saw in him what no one else could see“ (432). There is a noticeable emphasis on the face in her mind-reading of Clennam. She can read his facial expressions with ease. “As she made the confession, timidly hesitating, she raised her eyes to the face, and read its expression so plainly that she answered it“ (211). “Do what he could to compose his face, he could not convey so much of an ordinary expression into it, but that the moment she saw it, she dropped her work and cried, “Mr Clennam! What’s the matter? ”“ (465). Intermental units are not sealed off from the rest of the storyworld and Little Dorrit is very perceptive when she sees Clennam interacting with others. When Pancks comes to break the news of the Dorrit wealth, “The excitement of this strange creature was fast communicating itself to Clennam. Little Dorrit with amazement, saw this, and observed that they exchanged quick looks“ (437). Knowledge of others can also be contextual rather than relying on external indicators such as facial clues and sign language. She understands his awareness of her feelings about her father because she knows the sort of person that he is. “Little Dorrit had a misgiving that he might blame her father“ (208). I said earlier that William Dorrit is too frightened to recognize and acknowledge change in his relationship with Little Dorrit. This relationship is very different. At the end of the novel, she realizes immediately that Clennam knows that their relationship has changed. As a consequence, “He hesitated what to call her. She perceived A LAN P ALMER 178 it in an instant“ (825), and reassures him that she still wishes to be known as “Little Dorrit“. Conclusion An essay by Lisa Zunshine entitled “Theory of Mind and Fictions of Embodied Transparency“ is, superficially, on the same subject as mine: characters knowing what other characters are thinking. It is noticable, however, that our two essays are, nevertheless, completely different from each other. They make use of very different areas of cognitive theory; they feature very different example texts; Zunshine’s essay focuses on single moments of insight, whereas this is concerned with longer-term understanding and so on. That our work is so similar yet so different, and also so complementary, is a deeply eloquent statement, it seems to me, on the richness and potential of cognitive approaches to literature. I stressed at the beginning of this essay that both perspectives on fictional minds, the internalist and the externalist, are required. The narrator of Little Dorrit recognizes this truth. Employing the internalist perspective on those aspects of the mind that are inner, introspective, solitary, private, individual, psychological, mysterious, and detached, the narrator remarks of Mr Dorrit that “Only the wisdom that holds the clue to all hearts and all mysteries, can surely know to what extent a man, especially a man brought down as this man had been, can impose upon himself“ (275). Employing the externalist perspective that stresses those aspects of the mind that are outer, active, public, social, behavioural, evident, embodied, and engaged, the narrator comments of Mr Chivery that, “As to any key to his inner knowledge being to be found in his face, the Marshalsea key was as legible as an index to the individual characters and histories upon which it was turned“ (346). Nevertheless, within this balance, I have emphasised social minds and, in particular, intermental units, for two reasons. One is that they have been neglected by traditional narrative theory. The other is that, in my view, the social minds in this particular novel are more important than the solitary or private minds. It is not possible to understand Little Dorrit without an understanding of the public minds that operate within its storyworld. A good deal of the significance of the thought in the novel is lost if only the internalist perspective is employed. My intention in quoting so frequently from the novel was to show that these social minds are woven into the fabric of its discourse. I hope that the weight of evidence presented in this essay, together with the large amount of other data contained in the two companion essays on social minds in the novel (Palmer, forthcoming), are sufficient to prove the point. As to whether or not the conclusions reached here regarding the social minds in this novel can also be applied to other novels, more research is required. In particular, I hope that the work done in this essay and in the other essays that Small Intermental Units in Little Dorrit 179 I have written on social minds can be used as starting points from which to go in various historical and cultural directions. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Porter Abbott and Kate Nash for very helpful discussions on aspects of this essay. Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: A Revolutionary Approach to Man’s Understanding of Himself. New York: Ballantine, 1972. Clark, Andy, and David J. Chalmers. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis 58 (1998): 7-19. Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness. London: Heinemann, 2000. Dennett, Daniel C. Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1996. Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. 1857. Ed. John Holloway. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. London: Fontana, 1993. Herman, David. “Stories as a Tool for Thinking.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Stanford: CSLI Press, 2003. 163-192. —. “Regrounding Narratology: The Study of Narratively Organized Systems for Thinking.” What is Narratology: Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Eds. Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Muller. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003. 303-332. Hutchins, Edwin. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1995. Margolin, Uri. “Telling Our Story: On ‘We’ Literary Narratives.” Language and Literature 5.2 (1996): 115-133. —. “Telling in the Plural: From Grammar to Ideology.” Poetics Today 21.3 (2000): 591- 618. Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. —. “Intermental Thought in the Novel: The Middlemarch Mind.” Style 39.4 (2005): 427-39. —. “Attribution Theory.” Contemporary Stylistics. Ed. Marina Lambrou and Peter Stockwell. London: Continuum, 2007. —. “Social Minds in Little Dorrit.” Forthcoming. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. London: Vintage, 1996. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Diagramming Narrative.” Semiotica 165.1/ 4 (2007): 11-40. Sperber, Dan, and Lawrence Hirschfeld. “Culture, Cognition, and Evolution.” The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. Robert Wilson and Frank Keil. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1999. Cxi-cxxxii. Wertsch, James V. Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958. A LAN P ALMER 180 Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. —. “Theory of Mind and Fictions of Embodied Transparency.” Narrative 16.1 (2008): 65-92. M ARCUS H ARTNER Narrative Theory Meets Blending: Multiperspectivity Reconsidered There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; the more affects we allow to speak about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’. (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy III 12) 1 Nietzsche’s words might once have been epistemologically stimulating; to the scholar today, however, they rather appear intellectually commonplace and yawn-inducing. The idea of a fundamental plurality or polyphony of voices in text, society and comprehension has become a constant companion in the 21 st century. Particularly in the humanities we honour what the philosopher Wolfgang Welsch has called “aesthetic competence”(“aisthetische Kompetenz”), i.e. the ability to perceive differences, to sense plurality and detect disparities in the seemingly homogeneous (36). In this context it is not surprising that much of narrative theory has been dedicated to discussing the finer points of narrative perspective over the last few decades. What is surprising, however, is the 'paradoxical' fact that despite the extensive debate in this field one essential aspect of literary perspectives has been largely overlooked. Following Vera und Ansgar Nünning, I believe that the literary phenomenon - one might also call it the stylistic device 2 - of “multiple perspectives” or “multiperspectivity” has been strikingly under-theorized (cf. Nünning/ Nünning 4f). In a spirit of methodological multiperspectivity I therefore suggest that Conceputal Integration Networks, or Blending Theory, as developed by Fauconnier/ Turner (“Conceptual Integration”; The Way We Think), may remedy this particular narratological shortcoming. By linking multiperspectivity with blending this paper shall illustrate how concepts from cognitive studies and linguistics can trigger a cross-disciplinary re-conceptualization of theoretical concepts. 1 "Es gibt nur ein perspektivisches Sehen, nur ein perspektivisches 'Erkennen'; und je mehr Affekte wir über eine Sache zu Worte kommen lassen, je mehr Augen, verschiedne Augen wir uns für dieselbe Sache einzusetzen wissen, umso vollständiger wird unser 'Begriff' von dieser Sache, unsre 'Objektivität' sein." (Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol.5: 365); the English translation is taken from Nietzsche (On the Genealogy 92). 2 See, for example, Simpson. M ARCUS H ARTNER 182 Multiperspectivity, Character-Perspectives, and Perspective Structures Throughout literary history, writers have stylistically juxtaposed the subjective worldviews of characters, thus foregrounding the significance of individual perspectives. 3 The most prototypical cases of multiperspectivity can be found in repeated, successive renderings of one and the same event from different character’s points of view. 4 Although scope, style and shape of this literary phenomenon do vary significantly, multiperspectivity characteristically foregrounds some form of ‘tension’ or ‘dissonance’ that emerges from the clash of the staged perspectives. A classic example can be found in Tobias Smollett’s epistolary novel Humphry Clinker (1771). Here, inter alia, a journey to the city of Bath is successively rendered in letters by the old squire Matthew Bramble and his young niece Lydia. Though both relate their impressions of the same trip to the famous health resort, their descriptions could hardly differ more drastically. While Bath for Bramble has become “the very centre of racket and dissipation” (63), Lydia is sure she has found “an earthly paradise” (68). Her fascination with “the splendour of dress and equipage” (68) is countered by the squire’s biting condemnation of the “mob of impudent plebeians” (66); and what she believes to be a pleasant and “goodhumoured” mingling of social classes in the pump rooms, her uncle perceives as an outrageous insult to the genteel people (cf. 68; 66). Given this disparity, it is easy to conceive why literary critics have emphasized that such juxtapositions of perspectives create “effects of friction” or “dissonance” (“Reibungseffekt”; “Dissonanzeffekt”) (Lindemann 51; 53). 5 Lydia’s youthful enthusiasm and Bramble’s misanthropically bad humour oppose each other; focussing on this opposition, Wolfgang Iser (108f), for example, has argued that Smollett’s novel directs the reader’s attention to the individual nature of perception. 6 Such foregrounding of what Graumann & Sommer (35) call the “inevitable relativity of human knowledge” can be found in similar fashion in novels from Richardson to George Elliot and Ian McEwan a foregrounding that in turn creates a wide range of secondary effects including dramatic irony, epistemological doubt, or simply suspense. 7 3 The phenomenon of “multiperspectivity” as such has so far been mainly addressed by German scholars. For an overview on past research see Suhrkamp (2003: 9-18); a general outline of the use of the term perspective in art, philosophy and literary criticism can be found in Wood or Guillén. 4 For a comprehensive and useful account of multiple perspectives in literary texts, including a distinction between different basic forms of multiperspectivity, see the two introductory chapters by Vera and Ansgar Nünning in Nünning/ Nünning (3-77). 5 Such effects are not necessarily restricted to the juxtaposition of character-perspectives. Tension between other individual textual perspectives could be constituted, for example, by narrator-perspectives or implied-reader-perspectives (cf. Suhrkamp 36-49). 6 Cf. Nünning/ Nünning 19f. 7 Multiperspectivity generally leads to a semantization of narrative form on the level of discourse (cf. Nünning/ Nünning 31). Narrative Theory Meets Blending: Multiperspectivity Reconsidered 183 Yet despite the ubiquity of this literary phenomenon, narrative theory has only recently addressed multiperspectivity as a topic in its own right. Traditional approaches to point of view (particularly those in the wake of Genette) were more interested in literature as an act of narrative transmission. 8 Yet, in order to grasp the more deeply semantic content of character-perspectives, this vantage point appears to be inadequate. Consequently, yet without denying the apparent validity of the “communicative level of narrative transmission”, it seems to be necessary to adopt what Ansgar Nünning calls a “different perspective on perspectives” when analyzing multiperspectivity (207). Nünning defines a character-perspective as the constructed worldview of an individual. A character-perspective could thus be defined as an individual’s fictional system of preconditions or subjective worldview - the sum of all the models he or she has constructed of the world, or others, and of herself. A character-perspective is governed by the totality of an individual’s knowledge and belief sets, intentions, psychological traits, attitudes, ideological stance, and system of values and norms that have been internalized […] (211). 9 Interestingly, this definition of perspectives bears striking resemblance to the more recent understanding of characters as mental models. Such character models, as described in the works of Margolin, Culpeper or Schneider, describe characters as “mental files” (Margolin, “Character” 76). 10 These 'files' provide the cognitive structure “in which all further information about the corresponding individual will be continually accumulated, structured and updated as one reads on […]” (ibid.). Linking Nünning’s constructivist idea of character-perspectives with the concept of mental character models, allows us to conceive of perspectives as complex mental representations, incrementally constructed and bearing the respective character’s name. Since most novels, however, feature a number of characters the reader usually has to process not only one but several perspectives simultaneously. Thus, in a text like Humphry Clinker, a complex network of distinct, individual characterperspectives emerges during the reading process - a network that Nünning labels the “perspective structure of narrative texts”. The ‘perspective structure of narrative texts’ is a concept equally rooted in the tradition of constructivism and structuralism. It thus models the “worldmaking activity” (Ryan 110) of the recipient, while simultaneously aiming at a taxonomical description of the structures emerging during the reading process. In this way, Nünning's approach not only investigates the constructed nature of fictional characters, but also attempts a systematic depic- 8 Most influential works in narratology, like, for example, Genette; Rimmon-Kenan; Bal; Chatman; or Stanzel do not feature discussions of multiple character perspectives. 9 Nünning's definition draws on the concept of the "communicative system of preconditions" developed in Schmidt’s Foundation for the Empirical Study of Literature (30f). 10 See, for example, Margolin “Cognitive Sciences”; Culpeper; Schneider “Towards a Cognitive Theory” and Grundriß. For an overview of cognitive approaches to character, see Schneider “Cognition”. M ARCUS H ARTNER 184 tion of the interconnected net of character-perspectives that is mentally “realized in the reading process” (Nünning 215). The combination of both aspects results in a powerful heuristic tool that serves as an ideal conceptual starting point for an investigation of narrative characterperspectives. 11 Yet unfortunately, the taxonomic advantage of modelling perspectives as stable networks also limits the concept’s ability to account for the dynamic nature of textprocessing. 12 Following Pfister (60ff), Nünning construes the relationships between character-perspectives as “pattern[s] of contrasts and correspondences” (216), thereby adhering to the fundamental structuralist differentiation between paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions of language and literature. 13 Consequently, in this framework the relationship between, for example, Bramble’s and Lydia’s viewpoints is conceived of as a static connection that can be broken down into a number of fixed relations. However, in light of the dynamic nature of the reading process such an analysis seems to be incomplete. As a basic cognitive mode of operation that also accounts for "dynamic aspects of meaning construction" (Evans/ Green 400), Conceptual Integration Networks may help to surmount the structuralist limitations of the perspective structure of narrative texts. By ‘blending’ Nünning’s concept with Blending Theory, a more adequate framework for the interaction of contrasting perspectives can be developed. 11 A typology of perspective configurations is only one of the many findings that result from investigating the perspective structure of narrative texts. For a more detailed discussion and further possible applications, see Nünning; Suhrkamp; and the contributions in Nünning/ Nünning. 12 The importance of dynamic aspects during the mental construction of characters has been pointed out by Helmut Grabes as early as 1978 (cf. Grabes). 13 Nünning’s notion of perspective structures of narrative texts draws on Pfister’s concept of perspective structures in drama, which in turn has been heavily influenced by the structuralist credo that selection and combination constitute “the two basic modes of arrangement” in language and literature (Jakobson 37). Narrative Theory Meets Blending: Multiperspectivity Reconsidered 185 Blending and Multiperspectivity in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker : INPUT SPACE INPUT SPACE GENERIC SPACE BLENDED SPACE CROSS- SPACE MAPPING Fig. 1: Basic Setup of Conceptual Integration Networks Conceptual Integration Networks consist of at least four mental spaces (see Fig. 1). 14 Two, or more, input spaces, a generic space and a blended space. If the notion of ‘mental spaces’ is extended to include mental models of character-perspectives, Bramble's perspective on Bath, e.g., could be conceived as such an input space; his niece’s point of view would then, in analogy, constitute a second input space. Input spaces in general are connected by ‘cross-space mapping’ which is responsible for identifying comparable components in the input spaces. Based on such cross-space connections the ‘generic space’ provides “information that is abstract enough to be common to both (or all) the inputs” (Evans/ Green 404). In relation to narrative character-perspectives, this means that the generic space can, for example, contain the abstract general setting of a story that the character's share. In the case of Humphry Clinker this encompasses, for instance, ‘time’, ‘place’ and ‘social status’: Lydia and Bramble travel together; they visit the same places at the same time, and belong to the same family, i.e. the same social class. 14 A large number of publications on blending has appeared during the last decade. Given its academic proliferation I will forgo an introductory synopsis of this concept. For a full account see Fauconnier/ Turner “Conceptual Integration”; The Way We Think; general introductions can be found in Evans/ Green; Ungerer/ Schmid or Coulson/ Oakley. For a discussion of various aspects of blending see also the special issues in Language and Literature 15 (2006); Journal of Pragmatics 37.10 (2005); and Cognitive Linguistics 11.3-4 (2000). M ARCUS H ARTNER 186 Connected to the generic space are the input spaces, i.e. the characterperspectives. From Lydia’s letters the reader learns that Bath is “an earthly paradise” for the young woman. In her eyes “gayety, good humour, and diversion” characterize this fashionable place where “the merry bell rings round, from morn to night” (68). Her uncle on the other hand complains about “the noise, tumult & hurry” plaguing the city (63). He is enraged by the way class distinctions are blurred and the new buildings that Lydia praises as “enchanted castles”, Bramble scorns as architectural absurdities (cf. 65, 68). It becomes apparent that these contrasts create an effect of friction or dissonance between both input spaces. Yet, the reader does not cognitively stop at perceiving this dissonance. Neither is he or she likely to mentally decide for one of the perspectives, discarding the other. Instead an additional mental space is constructed: Lydia’s and Bramble’s descriptions are blended into a mental image of Bath. By merging both inputs, a new structure emerges that is more than just the sum of its parts. Dialectically embracing the element of dissonance, an image of Bath is mentally constructed that is based on information from the input spaces but also transcends this information. In the blend Bath becomes a city buzzing with people, change and entertainment; a place that is fascinating, especially to the young and pleasure seeking, but also pompous and shallow in its pleasures; a health resort that, on another level, mirrors the changes of late 18 th century British society in its many faceted architectural, cultural and economic developments. Many aspects of this blend do not originate from ‘construction’, i.e. the integration of information from the input spaces, but arise from the so-called processes of ‘completion’ and ‘elaboration’ (cf. Fauconnier/ Turner, The Way We Think 42-44; 48f). In order to think about Bath, for example, as a place of social change, a considerable amount of background knowledge has to be recruited to the blend. But once the reader starts to complete the mental image of Bath with knowledge of English history he/ she can not only increasingly refine the mental blend of the city but also elaborate on it. This means the reader can “run the blend” (44; 49) and, e.g. picture the hustling and bustling of countless maids and servants preparing food, running errands and thus ensuring that “the merry bell” keeps “ringing”. Likewise, it is possible to project a detailed mental image of Bramble and his family on a sightseeing tour through the resort in a carriage - although this tour only features as a passing remark in one of Lydia’s letters. Another crucial feature of Blending Theory is the so-called ‘backward projection’ from the blend to the input spaces. Earlier theories of meaning construction have largely overlooked the fact that many inferences essentially require the prior existence of a blended space. Lydia’s youthful naivety and Bramble’s misanthropic irritability do not directly spring from the contrasts between their respective perspectives, nor can they be traced solely to the information provided in their letters. In fact, inferences about the charac- Narrative Theory Meets Blending: Multiperspectivity Reconsidered 187 ters arise from the interaction of input and blend and are projected backwards, thereby refining and expanding the mental character models of Lydia and her uncle. Consequently, it is only by comparing Bramble’s descriptions with the more balanced blend of Bath that the reader can infer a connection between his ill-humoured judgements and the chronic bad health he is suffering from. : Bramble's characterperspective INPUT SPACE Lydia's characterperspecitve INPUT SPACE GENERIC SPACE Bath BLENDED SPACE COMPLETION COMPLETION CONSTRUCTION CONSTRUCTION ELABORATION ELABORATION CROSS- SPACE MAPPING BACKWARD BACKWARD PROJECTION PROJECTION dissonance dissonance general setting general setting time, place, social time, place, social status, etc. status, etc. Fig. 2: Conceptual Integration Networks Applied to the Character- Perspectives in Humphry Clinker. Many more examples could be found, but it may have become apparent that blending theory provides a framework that is able to conceptualize multiperspectivity in a much more detailed way than previous approaches (cf. Fig. 2). Obviously, there is a number of possible objections to my application of Conceptual Integration Networks to multiperspectivity. 15 Nevertheless, applying Ockham’s razor, blending provides the most comprehensive and at the same time parsimonious conceptualization of multiperspectivity to date. More importantly, the outlined approach also offers the possibility of going be- 15 For a short summary of potential problems with Blending Theory see Coulson/ Oakley (191-94). On a general level one could also object that my approach does not sufficiently take into account the full complexity of reception processes. Jürgen Schutte, however, has argued that any serious reception oriented analysis of literary texts ultimately has to take the form of a retrospective hermeneutic reflection (cf. 181f). As such, investigations into character-perspectives necessarily involve a schematized narratological treatment that for methodological purposes has to focus on select elements. M ARCUS H ARTNER 188 yond modelling narrative competence. In this context I would like to suggest that a revised concept of multiperspectivity can inspire new interpretations by shifting the focus of attention from the contrasts between perspectives to their correspondences. Postmodernism and Multiperspectivity in Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger Blending theory vividly demonstrates that meaning construction is a dynamic process involving multiple stages and mental spaces. Dissonance in consequence is not an immediate effect but the product of a prior matching and blending of structures. Effects of tension cognitively require the recognition of correspondences between the inputs. Contrast, more generally speaking, dialectically implies similarity. This insight might not necessarily lead to a new reading of Humphry Clinker but it has interesting consequences for many so-called postmodern texts. In the last part of this paper, I will analyze Penelope Lively’s novel Moon Tiger as an example of how considering crossspace matches between perspectives can lead to stimulating revisions of critical readings. Lively’s Booker Prize winning novel Moon Tiger is a classic example for what has come to be associated with postmodern fiction. Metafictionally charged, it presents the life of 76-year old protagonist, Claudia, in an achronological kaleidoscope of shifting perspectives. Homodiegetic and retrospective contemplations by the protagonist, who is in hospital dying from cancer, alternate with passages related by a covert heterodiegetic narrator. Completely receding into the background, this narrator renders the viewpoints of various characters, including Claudia, by use of internal focalization. The respective passages, often only a few paragraphs in length, are usually not linked chronologically or causally, but instead interconnect by association, and thereby amplify the perplexing effect created by the narrative situation. The most striking feature, however, is the pronounced multiperspectivity of the novel. Several scenes are rendered successively from up to three different character-perspectives, providing a vivid display of the incommensurable nature of individual experience. Some of these contrasts, e.g. a series of misunderstandings between Claudia and her daughter Lisa are developed and emphasized over a number of chapters. What in Humphry Clinker is, according to Angus Ross (12), “only sketched out, rather than thoroughly exploited” becomes a full-fledged and dominant characteristic in Moon Tiger. Accordingly, the protagonist herself proclaims that history and biography are “composite” and decides to tell her story in a polyphonic way: Many voices; all the voices that have managed to get themselves heard. Some louder than others, naturally: My story is tangled with stories of others - Mother, Gordon, Jasper, Lisa, and one other person above all; their voices must be heard also […]. So since my story is also theirs, they too must speak […]. (Moon Tiger 5f) Narrative Theory Meets Blending: Multiperspectivity Reconsidered 189 Lively’s skilful synthesis of experimental narrative form and historiographic metafiction has led reviewers quite naturally onto the well-trodden path of postmodern analysis and rhetoric. Taking up the novel's salient metaphor of the kaleidoscope, literary scholars have insisted that the text destabilizes the concepts of history, biography and identity. “Shake the tube and see what comes out”, says the protagonist, and critics have dutifully argued that Moon Tiger offers a kaleidoscopic disarrangement of narratives; instead of providing a complete and coherent account of Claudia’s life, Moon Tiger allegedly presents a fragmentary, associative, and often dissonant jigsaw puzzle that in the best tradition of postmodernism denies a traditional understanding of memory and personality. In this spirit, Mary Moran, for instance, argues that “Lively’s kaleidoscope technique […] suggests the lack of an objective meaning to reality” (104f). Along the same lines, Tony Jackson (174) perceives a provisional rejection of “the conventional idea of cause and effect”, and Debrah Raschke finds a “poststructuralist decentring” with the reader being stuck “between a multitude of perspectives” and confronted with “polymorphic identities” that “create the means for escaping fixed identities (125).” Without question, the novel does arrestingly and stylistically foreground the limitations and deficiencies of individual perception and storytelling. Yet in the light of blending theory, this assessment itself must seem limited and deficient. From the dynamics of blending it has become apparent that difference and dissonance build on the cognitive attempt to identify similar structures. Undoubtedly, there are experimental texts that effectively obstruct and frustrate the attempt to create narrative meaning. 16 But can the supposedly 'experimental' Moon Tiger - and many other so-called postmodern texts - be counted among them? And if not, might it not be worth while to shift the focus of attention from difference to sameness for a change? In the case of Moon Tiger, this question can definitely be answered in the affirmative. In my opinion the jigsaw-puzzle setup of the novel does not deny the creation of meaning but rather activates the process of cognitively reassembling the pieces in a causally and chronologically coherent manner. As in Humphry Clinker, differences between character-perspectives do not so much leave the reader stranded ‘between a multitude of perspectives’ but contribute to a complex blend of perspectives. Thus, the novel evokes a richer and more colourful picture of Claudia’s life than a single perspective could accomplish. By foregrounding, for example, the differences between the viewpoints of Claudia and her daughter, the text allows us to make inferences that go beyond either of the character-perspectives. From a number of scenes in the novel it becomes apparent that from Lisa’s childhood on, mutual expectations of mother and daughter remain unfulfilled. For that reason, both characters also refrain from communicating their innermost feelings, and, consequently, keep important key events in their lives a secret hidden from each 16 For example, Beckett's "Ping" (1968); Christina Brooke-Rose’ Thru (1991) or Textermination (1992); B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969), or the novels by Raymond Federman. M ARCUS H ARTNER 190 other. Drawing on these correspondences, backward projection enables us to draw psychological profiles of mother and daughter, which are based on folkpsychology and are not experimental at all. In this way, by focussing on correspondences across various input-spaces, it becomes possible to arrive at an interpretation that reads the relationship of Claudia and Lisa in a fundamentally different way: as the troubled product of mutually unfulfilled expectations and a lifelong lack of communication - an interpretation that in my opinion neither requires a particularly 'polymorphic' notion of identity nor disposes of 'cause and effect'. Undoubtedly, Mary Moran is right in saying that the novel voices “contemporary epistemological and ontological concerns” (117). Nevertheless, I believe that despite its unconventional narrative style Moon Tiger does not destabilize meaning. Rather, I think that while putting the narrative pieces together an increasingly complex but ultimately causally and temporally commonplace understanding of the protagonist’s psyche, identity and biography emerges. Only through considering all character-perspectives can one realize, for example, that none of her friends, lovers, or relations knows about Claudia’s experiences as a war correspondent. Though her story keeps circling back to wartime Egypt, where she fell madly in love, got pregnant, and lost both lover and child, nobody knows about these crucial events. The emotional intensity with which her love of the soldier Tom is depicted further enhances the inferential significance of Claudia’s apparent decision to keep this episode a secret. Thus, it not only stands in sharp contrast to the aloofness that characterizes all of her post-war relationships, but also adds a new interpretive dimension to these relations. In this way, by blending a complex set of mental spaces, an elaborate mental model of Claudia takes shape. Ultimately, it becomes apparent that the romantic love-of-a-lifetime experience during the war and the ensuing unbearable pain of death and miscarriage provide the interpretive key to the protagonist’s life; her subsequent behaviour and all of her relationships are affected by the emotional trauma she experiences during the war - a trauma from which she never recovers, and a reading that, again, does not explode or decentre common concepts of identity! 17 Methodological Multiperspectivity “[Life] has its core; its centre”, Claudia says, and her relation to the soldier, Tom constitutes the heart of her biography and the semantic and structural core of the novel. Though not all postmodern texts necessarily have a similar centre, blending theory may inspire revised readings of many texts that play 17 Margaretta Jolly arrives at a similar conclusion when analysing Moon Tiger from a feminist perspective: “Moon Tiger […] represents the superficiality of much other mainstream fiction’s take up of feminist plot and aesthetic. […] Lively’s playful style and rejection of the marital plot turn out to be, underneath, the same old romance.” (67) Narrative Theory Meets Blending: Multiperspectivity Reconsidered 191 with character-perspectives. Instead of solely focussing on differences, crossspace matches and blends should also demand the interpretive attention of the literary scholar. In this way, a bridge can be build between the descriptive and taxonomic 18 undertaking of a cognitively inspired narratology and the more creative activity of interpreting literature. Returning to the opening quote, Nietzsche probably knew very well why he put ‘objectivity’ in inverted commas. Being a forerunner of postmodern philosophy he knew that final knowledge is fundamentally elusive. But he also understood that perceiving ‘a thing’ from different perspectives often - not logically but phenomenologically - does “complete our ‘idea’ of this thing”. Following this line of thought, the humanities should not be afraid of training “more eyes, various eyes” from different disciplines (I might add) to our objects of research; for there is little to lose and perhaps much to gain from a careful and critical engagement with the perspective of the cognitive sciences. My attempt to reconceptualise multiperspectivity by means of blending is intended to serve as an example for how ideas from cognitive studies may serve as a source of inspiration for the literary scholar. By expanding rather than invalidating previous narratological approaches (cf. Nünning/ Nünning; Suhrkamp) I have tried to demonstrate how ideas from other disciplines can become valuable assets for literary analysis and theory. Works Cited Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. Chatman, Seymour B. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978. Coulson, Seana, and Todd Oakley. “Blending Basics.” Cognitive Linguistics 11 (2000): 75-196. Culpeper, Jonathan. Language & Characterisation: People in Plays & Other Texts. Harlow: Longman, 2001. Evans, Vyvyan, and Melanie Green. Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. “Conceptual Integration Networks.” Cognitive Science 22.2 (1998): 133-187. —, and Mark Turner.The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Genette, Gérard. 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Narrative Theory Meets Blending: Multiperspectivity Reconsidered 193 Schneider, Ralf. Grundriß zur kognitiven Theorie der Figurenrezeption am Beispiel des viktorianischen Romans. Tübingen: Stauffenburg-Verlag, 2000. —. “Towards a Cognitive Theory on Character.” Style 35: 4 (2001): 607-40. —.”Cognition and the Reading of Literary Character: Approaches - Problems - Perspectives.” MLA Session 539 - Cognitive Approaches to Literary Character. 29 Dec. 2006. 18 April 2008 <http: / / people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/ herman145/ Schneider%20Paper.pdf>. Schutte, Jürgen. Einführung in die Literaturinterpretation. 5 th ed. Stuttgart [et. al]: Metzler, 2005. Simpson, Paul. Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students. London [et al.]: Routledge, 2004. Smollett, Tobias. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. 1771. Ed. Angus Ross. London [et al.]: Penguin, 1985. Stanzel, Franz K. A Theory of Narrative. 1978. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Surkamp, Carola. Die Perspektivenstruktur narrativer Texte: Zu ihrer Theorie und Geschichte im englischen Roman zwischen Viktorianismus und Moderne. Trier: WVT, 2003. Ungerer, Friedrich, and Hans-Jörg Schmid. An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. 2 nd ed. Harlow [et al.]: Pearson Longman, 2006. Welsch, Wolfgang.“Postmoderne - Pluralität als ethischer und moralischer Wert.” Aufklärung und Postmoderne. Ed. Jörg Albertz. Berlin: Freie Akademie, 1991. 9-44. Wood, Christopher S. “PERSPECTIVE: An Overview.” Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics. Ed. Michael Kelly. Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 477-481. R ENATE B ROSCH The Secret Self Reading Minds in the Modernist Short Story Virginia Woolf’s “The Lady in the Looking Glass” The new inspiration which literary studies have recently found in the border country between narrative theory and cognitive science has been applied primarily to novels, while the short story remains notoriously undertheorized and largely untouched by the theoretical reorientations which have taken place in the last few decades. One of the reasons that short stories have been neglected is their enormous potential for experimentation and transformation. This capacity for innovation is not a mysterious self-renovating property of this sort of text, but a result of its manner of distribution and its reception. As its dissemination has almost always been linked to transient and casual media, the short story is a form of literary articulation particularly closely involved with its cultural context and predicated on the particular formative discourses of its time. This peculiarity also informs the manner of its reception; readers often appreciate it as a popular or topical text for quick consumption, an attitude which has led to a traditional deprecation as a lesser form in generic theories and literary histories. Hence, it is no coincidence that Edgar Allan Poe’s early attempt to attract his educated readers to the genre was based on a commendation of its brevity and its effects. Poe emphasized that the reading in “one sitting” made possible an aesthetic experience peculiar to this form. It is significant that short story theory thus had to take recourse to response aesthetics from its very beginning, as it seems that the nature of the short story cannot be explained from its specific properties as a literary text, but needs to be considered in terms of the aesthetic experience it offers. Literary experience means interaction between story and audience, between interpretive communities and texts. To approach short stories from the vantage point of the experience involved rather than as texts with a set of determinate generic characteristics allows us to look at organizational acts which depend on both the structure of the text and on the reaction of the reader. There is always “inscribed into the reception of a narrative […] a second narrative constructed by the reader”, which is why a further investigation of “the transfer between recipient and aesthetic object” is called for (Fluck 34). In the following, I want to investigate a specific aspect of character construction, the understanding of fictional minds as it is activated by modernist short story writing. I think it is one of the prime motivations for reading fiction in the first place. This approach has been given a new impetus by R ENATE B ROSCH 196 the research uniting narratology and cognitive psychology (Palmer, Fictional Minds 10). The difference between novels and short stories is one of kind not of quantity. This difference, however, lies primarily in the kind of aesthetic experience the short story promotes, because it “invites a degree of reader participation not frequently found in other narrative texts” (Korte 5). Readers tend to charge a text with meaning when it is compressed to such a degree that it leaves many things unexplained. The processing of such texts could in Mark Turner’s terms be called an “unpacking of a blend” (Turner, “The Art of Compression” 103). Lacking extensive information to go on, readers “recognize what they find in the text in terms of natural telling, or experiencing or viewing parameters” (Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology 34). Following this line of investigation, the often identified poetic and symbolic quality of the genre may be seen as resulting from “close reading” as well as the genre’s intensified recalcitrance (Wright 120). I have proposed elsewhere that the experience of reading short stories, in particular the processing involved in a first reading, depends on two apparently opposite but in effect complementary mental activities: visualization and projection. 1 By visualization I mean the formation of memorable visual images in which an essential part of the message is condensed. The extension of meaning beyond the frame of the textual fictional world I call “projection” or “projective blending”, because what Mark Turner calls our root capacity for “conceptual blending” is at work here (“The Art of Compression” 93-94). 1. Visualization and Projection As an ephemeral form of text and a transient reading experience, short stories face the problem of producing enough lasting impressions to be remembered. The mystery of memorable short stories can be solved - at least partially - by taking recourse to images as a traditional mnemonic aid. According to Wolfgang Iser, mental images are primary in any process of reading (Iser 222). Following the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, I refer to visual images created in the mind of the reader in processing a literary text as "visualisation" (Esrock 633). The images produced in visualization are not necessarily distinct, as Iser points out, as the imaginative activity accompanying the reading process allows for a high degree of indeterminacy and lack of optical definition (Iser 222 passim). Nevertheless, visualization helps to organize the complexity and indeterminacy of narrative into iconic units. These iconic units are apparently more easily produced in reading short texts, because brevity in narrative inclines readers to ‘take in’ non-sequential structures as visual “configurations” (Brown 242-243). These processes of visuali- 1 The basic theoretical arguments made here are developed at greater length in my book Short Story: Textsorte und Leseerfahrung, but the representation of interior consciousness or “the secret self” is not discussed in the book. The Secret Self: Reading Minds in the Modernist Short Story 197 zation are determined by the stimuli of the text and depend on “image schemas”, i.e. skeletal patterns that recur in sensory and motor experience and which, according to Mark Turner, inform more complex and abstract cognition because they are projected onto abstract concepts (Turner, “The Art of Compression” 16). At the same time, shorter narratives are more dependent on extrinsic ways of constituting meaning. Whereas the novel can create a large and largely interdependent intratextual system, understanding a short story must have greater recourse to contextual supplementary knowledge (Hanson 23). This is made evident by comparing interpretations of shorter and longer narratives. Interpretations diverge less in the latter case, because a long reading process educates readers in the belief system of the implied author, in compensating for dissonance and in reading “inaccessible” characters. Because stories do not have room to elaborate on the determining factors of the fictional world and its values, they demand a dual understanding in the reading process, one in which one's own perspective is constantly co-present with, projected onto and interactive with that of the fiction. Hence, short stories profit from a supplementary reaction to gaps of meaning which correlates different frames and world pictures. The metaphoric and metamorphic practice of blending prior knowledge and experience into the processing of the fictional text is promoted by short narratives. Experiencing them unfolds in a tension between verbal economy and imaginative blending. Blending, of course, designates something that is going on all the time when we process information. Whether we listen to information in ordinary conversations or we read, we are constantly adapting old knowledge to new, alternative viewpoints to former ones, adjusting our opinions and modifying them with the help of image schemas (Turner, “The Art of Compression” 16). Therefore, taking into account heterogeneous points of view forms part of normal mental operations while reading fiction and does not present any particular difficulty. Short stories, in order to engage the reader in creative participation, often deliberately provoke the mental activity of projecting beyond the textual boundary be it structural or thematic. This projective blending beyond the frame of the text occurs typically during and immediately after a first reading experience; in a conscious act of interpretation these projections are again compared and juxtaposed with the proposals of the text. Combining the arguments so far, we have seen that participation in the act of reading involves visualizing images which simultaneously construct and contain units of meaning mentally and transforming them in blendings with exterior frameworks. These historically situated activities activate the different forms of narrative potential we call short story. R ENATE B ROSCH 198 2. Reading Characters Literary fictions offer us the deeply pleasurable opportunity to enter into the minds of others, to see how they come to terms with the problems of life, and to test their characteristics against our own. Trying to read minds necessitates the building of hypotheses on hypotheses. In real life, conjecture regarding the minds of others is often neither pleasant nor correct because of the complexity and uncertainty involved. When mental states are represented in literature, by contrast, we find less difficulty and more profit in imagining them. Fiction with its circumscribed context offers the illusion that it is possible to conduct viable mind reading (Palmer, Fictional Minds 2, 10). Modernist narratives typically satisfy this urge by concentrating largely on “transparent minds”. Their predilection for representing thoughtful characters during moments of lonely self-communion tracing spiritual and emotional conflicts (Cohn 84) is shared by narrative theorists, especially in short story theory. Modernism’s concentration on “moments” or “slices of life” of an epiphanous quality privileges subjective consciousness and by implication elevates it to universal status. The culminating achievements in short story writing by great authors like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway produced a peculiar tenacity of these modernist conceptions, petrified into textbook orthodoxies in short story theory (Brosch, Short Story 39). The stress which narratology has traditionally laid on an interiority notion of consciousness was exerted even more forcefully in short story criticism, where the notion of the autonomous individual mind was prevalent as topic, theme, and favoured technique. Because of the genre’s brevity, the number of characters as well as the amount of explanation and elaboration of motivation is usually limited. Character must be inferred from visibility, dialogue, and introspection. Short stories are therefore a suitable form for expressing a limited aspect of a character’s psychological make-up and/ or a small area of a character’s experience; this explains the persistence of modernist conceptions of the revelatory moment. Descriptions of these moments in modernism typically concentrate on interior consciousness, suggesting the ineffable and the incommunicable in these experiences, and including alternative mental states mostly as a contrastive strategy to stress the isolation of the main character. Katherine Mansfield’s “Garden Party” is a case in point: a moment when the family is in agreement against Laura’s headstrong and unconventional ideas is presented in a fuzzy ‘consensus’ narrative mode, blurring the narrator’s and the family’s voices (cf. Stanzel 124), while Laura’s final insight provoked by the sight of the dead body leaves her stammering and inarticulate. The traditional narratological interest in and focus on an interior model of the mind has been convincingly challenged by Alan Palmer: the standard approach to fictional consciousness has given undue emphasis to private, solitary, highly verbalized thought at the expense of all the other types of mental functioning because of its preoccupation with such concepts as free indirect The Secret Self: Reading Minds in the Modernist Short Story 199 discourse, stream of consciousness and interior monologue. As a result, the social nature of fictional thought has been neglected. The dominant perspective on fictional minds has been an internalist one that stresses those aspects that are inner, passive, introspective and individual (Palmer, “Intermental Thought” 428). Readers can only follow a narrative if they understand minds, because “in essence, narrative is the description of fictional mental functioning” (Palmer, Fictional Minds 12), yet narratives are preoccupied not only with internal but also with “intermental” processes. Palmer’s groundbreaking revision starts from the premise that “thought is consummately social: social in its origins, social in its functions, social in its forms, social in its applications. At base thinking is a public activity [...]” (11). Its critical discussion must recognize analytical categories which reach beyond the lonely introspective self (ibid.). Here, his concept of intermental or intersubjective mapping can provide increased explanatory power for the purpose of making explicit statements about communicative functions in narrative (Palmer, “Intemental Thought”). This reconceptualization of the fictional self is immensely attractive not only as a response to discoveries in the cognitive sciences but also as an introduction of terms which allow ethical considerations to enter into the analysis of narrative. It is, moreover, a useful concept to apply not only to the fictional world but also to the act of reading. In fictions as in everyday life minds do not only work as isolated, essential entities, but in processes of exchange with others. According to George Butte, character must also be thought of in terms of intersubjectivity, and it is this intersubjectivity which constitutes narrative. These reconceptualizations are indebted to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of consciousness not as an isolated mind but as a lived and embodied experience which is constantly transformed in the mutual exchange with others (Butte 28). Intersubjectivity is seen as a web of partially interpenetrating consciousnesses that exist wherever perceiving subjects encounter one another. Butte explores these fictional representations of intersubjectivity from both a diachronic and a synchronic perspective, and claims that techniques for representing the interaction of fictional minds emerged first in the novels of Jane Austen (4). Since this “seachange in narrative”, storytelling has gradually generated ever more intricately intersubjective narratives (7). It has often been noted that the interest of modernist writers in human psychology prompted the experimental development of techniques like stream of consciousness and free indirect discourse. The linguistic challenge such passages present is enhanced for readers by their interest in character and in social situations. The report of thought, attitude, inner state, and perception of a character tends to direct the attention of the reader outward into the context of the social situation and action, whereas stream of consciousness and free indirect discourse direct the reader inward into scenes of thoughtful self-communion. Considering this centrifugal effect of thought report (Palmer, Fictional Minds 80), short story experience has a special status again: Though motivated by the same interest in “fictional minds”, short R ENATE B ROSCH 200 stories inevitably contain less intermental activity and social thought than novels. Intersubjectivity poses a real problem for short stories. Impeded by a reduction of textuality, the psychological make-up of characters becomes a mystery, and reading minds becomes a guessing game for which we collect clues scattered throughout the text. 3. The Reflector as Informant Modernist short stories, while deploying narrative techniques to present the limitations and relativity of individual perspectives, depend crucially on a myth of character “roundedness”. In the following, I will examine an extreme case of reduction in characterization and perception - Virginia Woolf’s story “The Lady in the Looking Glass” in order to consider the consequences for embedded subjectivities, i.e. the way people conjecture on other people’s mental states and motivation. I propose that this story not only questions the assumption that perception provides reliable knowledge regarding other selves but also shows the self as constituted in its acts of perception and interpretation. In other words, the story presents subjectivity at the level of intentionality. Surprisingly, considering standard assessments of modernist writing, the reading experience highlights the deep desire for, and the failed attempt at, achieving intersubjectivity. The content of the story is easily summarized as there are very few events and no overt conflict: a woman walks into her garden, while she is away the postman comes in and puts her mail on the table, then the woman herself returns and looks at the letters. How can this quotidian series of trivial actions become the main storyline of a literary text? A clue to this question is given in the subtitle “A Reflection”, the double meaning of which becomes manifest in the opening of the story, when the looking glass is used as a window onto the story to observe the appearance and to reflect on the mind of the only character. A speculation on fictional minds is here usurped by the narrative voice, made a topic and an issue of commentary by it and employed first to mislead us and in the end to shock us with an announcement of a fictional ‘truth’ which we have no means of ascertaining. 2 The first sentence issues a warning to the reader: “People should not leave looking glasses hanging in their rooms any more than they should leave an open cheque book or letters confessing some hideous crime” (Woolf, “The Lady” 86). The rhetoric recalls opening pronouncements of nineteenthcentury authorial narrators, but the statement’s trustworthiness is doubtful. We do not yet know how reliable the narrator is going to be who makes this universal assumption about a connection between mirrors and crimes. Does s/ he intend to be absurd, ironic or is this a serious hint at later disclosures? A 2 In the following I am using “The Lady in the Looking Glass” only as a test case for the effect of representing intramental subjectivity. For a reading in the context of similar stories by Woolf such as “An Unwritten Novel” or “Moments of Being” cf. Head 80-89. The Secret Self: Reading Minds in the Modernist Short Story 201 first reading must therefore take it on “suppositional format” (Zunshine 55) and register it with a strong connection to the source, i.e. the unidentified narrator. A “primacy effect” therefore sets in with the second sentence. The term “primacy effect” refers to the enduring impressions created by the beginning of a text, where the cognitive frames are set, expectations raised and therefore the most intensive closing of options occurs. As a result, “initial interpretation of the function of an event may endure even after we have been given information that contradicts it” (Kafalenos 57). This is a feature of reading often exploited in short stories, as in this one: One could not help looking, that summer afternoon, in the long glass that hung outside in the hall. Chance had so arranged it. From the depths of the sofa in the drawing-room one could see reflected in the Italian glass not only the marbletopped table opposite, but a stretch of garden beyond. One could see a long grass path leading between banks of tall flowers until, slicing off an angle, the gold rim cut it off. (Woolf, “The Lady” 86) This is how the narrator leads us literally and - as we later realize - also metaphorically “up the garden path”. The narrative voice that performs the reflection remains an unknown and unexplained presence to the last. Conspicuously, the reported perception is expressed in the most cumbersome grammatical mode of impersonal third person. Not only the above description, but the text as a whole, exploits fully the possibilities of the indefinite personal pronoun for ambiguity. As Monika Fludernik explains, the use of “one” combines the advantages of a polite or escapist eschewing of responsibility and of disguising one’s opinions behind a “projected typefication of what everybody else is thinking” with a generous license for the addressee to identify with such general consensus (Fludernik, “Pronouns of Address” 105). I will come back to the question of the success of this inclusive strategy. Why this person speaking of heror himself as “one” should have occasion to be sitting on the sofa whilst the lady of the house is out, we are not told. But in the second paragraph something strange and intrusive about this person’s behaviour is conveyed in the observation: “The house was empty, and one felt, since one was the only person in the drawing-room, like one of those naturalists who, covered with grass and leaves, lie watching the shyest animals […]” (Woolf, “The Lady” 86). These “shyest animals”, of which a fanciful description is given, seem to have in common with the absent woman that they are being pursued by a relentless “naturalist” gaze. The unidentified observer looking into the mirror sees “shy creatures, lights and shadows, curtains blowing, petals falling […] nocturnal creatures” (86). As readers we are prepared to visualize this setting and to read it - especially in the short space of a story - as indicative of the sensitivity of the character inhabiting it. But we also translate the description into the terms of ordinary experience; we blend the impressionist picture with our knowledge of what is evidently a luxuriously furnished country house. R ENATE B ROSCH 202 The narrative voice also points out a contrast: a marked difference between the subtly changeable atmosphere inside the room and the “fixed” and “accurate” reality of the garden path reflected in its “unescapable” reality, though both are visible only in the mirror: “One could not help looking from one to the other” (87). There is evidently a contradiction at work in the representation within the frame of the mirror, which points to a contrast “between the raw materials of life and the way in which they are transformed in the creative act” (Head 87), which may have ramifications for the subject of the “reflection”. We are thus well prepared to meet the human agents of this scene of referentiality. “Half an hour ago the mistress of the house, Isabella Tyson, had gone down the grass path in her thin summer dress, carrying a basket, and had vanished, sliced off by the gilt rim of the looking-glass” (Woolf, “The Lady” 87). Thus information about the character’s agency is limited to the expression “had gone”, for the verb referring to visibility (“had vanished”) does not strictly express action under the character’s control. By further qualifying the phrase with the addition “sliced off by the rim”, the text transfers agency from the character to an object, the mirror. The next sentence shifts to the mental activity of the onlooker-narrator, who can only surmise or guess at intentions: “presumably […] to pick flowers; or as it seemed more natural to suppose, to pick something light and fantastic” (87). It is not far-fetched to interpret the following reading of Isabella as a metaphor for artistic creation. Among others, Dominic Head read the story in this way, pointing out its allusion to Alfred Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott” as a source for the tension between reality and withdrawal and for the artist’s predicament within this tension. The looking glass would then be a reference to the perceptive potential of an artist and a metaphor for artistic creation as well (Head 87, 88). But the strenuous effort at decoding outward signs for interior selves also matches the mental activity of the reader when the motivations of characters’ actions remain undisclosed. In the following passage the prevalent mode of imaginative conjecture by the narrator culminates in the statement that the lady “suggested the fantastic and the tremulous convolvulus rather than the upright aster” (Woolf, “The Lady” 87). But almost immediately this image - a potent textual strategy for visualization - is irritatingly called into question. The narrative voice goes so far as to reject it wholesale as “worse than idle and superficial […] cruel even, for they [such comparisons] come like the convolvulus itself trembling between one’s eyes and the truth. There must be truth; there must be a wall” (87). In an elaboration of the image into a conceit, the wall - which a climbing tendril like the convolvulus needs to survive - comes to stand for truth. The figurative images applied to Isabella are turned upside down and become incommensurable. We are alerted to the failure of the effort to define her inner being. The failure to arrive at a comprehensive knowledge of another person recalls famous passages in Woolf’s essays, where she commends an empathetic and impressionist view of the consciousness of characters based on an interiority The Secret Self: Reading Minds in the Modernist Short Story 203 concept of the mind. If the short story at hand does not seem to endorse this interiority concept, this may be due to the specificities of short story reading which Woolf was well aware of. The narrative goes on to replace the rejected image with an implicit characterization through past and habitual acts. It summarizes Isabella’s travels, collections of fine furniture and art, and her dealings with friends and acquaintances, supposing her cabinets to “almost certainly” contain many passionate and intimate letters. The narrative voice, however, soon abandons these conjectures, acknowledging “how very little, after all these years, one knew about her” (87). The phrase “after all these years” points to a homodiegetic narrator, but the category is not as helpful as it would be in a novel, because the whole point of this story is, as it turns out, that narrator and character never meet face to face in the fictional durée, for the reflecting surface of the mirror intervenes until the end. Mirrors are an ancient critical metaphor for mimetic qualities. Semiotically speaking, a mirrored reflection is an index, a sign based on contiguity and causality. The insubstantiality of the mirrored image, its fleeting, ghostly appearance, however, can jettison the epistemology of empiricism. The recourse to the visual metaphor of the mirror can be read as an allusion to Plato’s cave and the falsity of sense impressions. The story’s presentation of the reflecting surface as an obstacle to perception and knowledge then seems informed by a modernist aesthetic which spurned mimetic representation for a more consciously composed art. That its anti-representational bias should prefer the mode of “reflection” as imaginative creation points to a loss of faith in representational techniques and referential modes. In the spirit of epistemological uncertainty Woolf shows the borderline between phenomena and conjecture to be thin, and transgressions almost imperceptible. When the narrator proceeds at this point to deduce a history of violent emotions from Isabella’s “mask-like indifference” and to notice that the setting becomes “more shadowy and symbolic”, “darker” and “more […] hieroglyphic” because of the “stress of thinking about Isabella” (88), we are likely to form some notion of unreliability. James Phelan makes a distinction between an unreliability of misrepresentation, which the audience must correct, and an unreliability of “unreporting, underregarding”, which the audience must be prepared to supplement (Phelan 53). The latter is much more effective in short stories, as it leads to a projection of the issues and themes of the story into the reader’s speculations on his or her life-world. Unreliability in general forces the reader to blend two or more perspectives of uncertain truth status. In these moments of blending or filling in gaps of indeterminacy in literary texts the reader is most challenged to participate cognitively. Participation occasions a memorable reading experience, as difficulties surmounted are always memorable and afford pleasure. Memorable short stories, as explained, rely on this effect which Lisa Zunshine describes for narratives in general: “We close such books with a strange feeling that the state of cognitive uncertainty that they induced in us may never be fully R ENATE B ROSCH 204 resolved” (Zunshine 79). Many readers, and I suspect most readers of short stories, relish this lingering ambiguity and its promptings of the imagination, but the further turn of the screw here is that the topic of this unreliable narration is reading fictional character. Unreliable reality, literally and metaphorically figured as images in a mirror, is the topic of a reflection by a narrative voice which increasingly displays signs of unreliability in its turn. Evidently, what is being mirrored in this looking glass is the reader’s participatory effort at making sense of a character from mere appearances, in the absence of any representation of interiority. The predicament of the short story writer, who must try to evoke maximum effects in a brief textual space, has often led critics to speculate on the particularly symbolic quality of this literary form (May 22). Woolf’s story suggests the more plausible explanation that the creative mind of the reader - in coping with a dearth of information on intentionality, motivation, and subjectivity - tends to enlarge the meaning of exterior information, and hence to project it into a wider contextual frame. The beginning of the next paragraph, “Suddenly these reflections were ended violently” (Woolf, “The Lady” 88), initially seems to promise a return to a less meta-representational mode and to announce imminent action. But the suspense is soon deflated when the “large black form” looming into the looking glass is identified as the postman and the unrecognizable addition by which “the picture was entirely altered” (88) turns out to be the letters thrown on the table. The description indulges in “delayed decoding”, an expression Ian Watt employed for a similar technique in Conrad (209). This technique is often related to impressionism in the visual arts because it describes a moment of incomprehension in which an object of perception becomes pure form because recognition is temporarily deferred. This modernist textual strategy can be related to the complex changes and challenges in visual culture, where an enormous number of new technologies for visual representation, illusion, and detection loosened the epistemological link between visual perception and knowledge. The description of an instance of nonplussed perception resembles the depiction of ephemeral appearances in impressionism or the relative realities of different perspectives in cubism. The story’s scene of delayed decoding contains both the relativity of truth and the problematic act of perception; it is unusual only in that an impersonal narrator is thus limited and questioned in his or her observations. The description of distorted or misapprehended vision leads to a discussion of the truth value of the “arranged and composed” picture with “that stillness and immortality which the looking-glass conferred” (Woolf, “The Lady” 89). Apparently the pictorial or iconic quality, of which the scene partakes, creates the semblance of “eternal truth”. The narrator compares the bundle of letters on the table to marble tablets containing everything there is to know about Isabella, a comparison which occasions a fantasy of her return, of her reading them and sighing over them and then locking them up in her cabinets. From this entirely hypothetical scene, the narrative voice concludes that “Isabella did not wish to be known - but she should no longer escape” The Secret Self: Reading Minds in the Modernist Short Story 205 (89). An aggressive and threatening element has now intruded into the musings of the narrative voice on the process of reading character: […] she should no longer escape. It was absurd, it was monstrous. If she concealed so much and knew so much one must prise her open with the first tool that came to hand - the imagination. One must fix one’s mind upon her at that very moment. One must fasten her down there. One must refuse to be put off any longer with sayings and doings such as the moment brought forth - with dinners and visits and polite conversations. One must put oneself in her shoes. (89) The comical images of enforced entry into another’s mind and the ironic reference to the imagination as the tool for doing so, recall the exhortations Woolf herself vented against Arnold Bennet in “Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown” or her strictures on writing character in “Modern Fiction”. In these essays Woolf argued that the outward details of a character’s circumstances could never provide access to the mutability and effervescence of “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” (Woolf, “Mr. Bennet”, “Modern Fiction”) But the obvious irony brought to bear here on the idea of imaginative and empathetic understanding is portentous. 3 Psychological speculation seems to be no help because it is working from external appearances, material reality, only (shoes of exquisite leather, jewels, scissors etc.). In the essays, Woolf had rejected Victorian and Edwardian materialism and - by extension - a positivist idea of reality. From an historical perspective, a shift towards more visual communication occurs with the introduction of modernist writing. When the representation of a consensus mind at work in the community, which Palmer demonstrates in the narratives of Dickens and Eliot, could no longer be successfully posited, these fictional mental agreements came to be replaced by representations of a network of mutual gazes which are often inconclusive or unreliable as indications of other people’s thoughts. Nevertheless, a furtive and frantic speculation about the thoughts of others is going on, all the more frantic for its lack of conviction about its results. Throughout her work, Woolf expresses a preference for a reality which is semi-transparent. The moments of vision in which fictional minds receive “a myriad impression” point to a fluid concept of the self (Woolf, “Modern Fiction” 150). In her idea of an unstable subjectivity which maintains harmony with the external world through its own mutability, she has a significant ancestor in Walter Pater (Whitworth 151). To Pater, however, the susceptibility of the mind to impressions was impaired by its isolation: “each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of the world” (Pater 235). In the story at hand, Woolf also seems to negotiate the dialectics of the profits and the losses that arise from such an enclosed and destabilized subjectivity. 3 I am relying on Banfield’s explanation of irony not as something which can be identified as part of the linguistic construction but as a discrepancy of tone or meaning, which readers pick up in reading (Banfield 222). R ENATE B ROSCH 206 The narrator emphasizes that Isabella’s person - as “she would be standing” (Woolf, “The Lady” 90) - is visible to the mind’s eye while her face and eyes are not so that “[o]ne could only see the indeterminate outline” and guess at her expression (90). Palmer mentions the importance of eyes and the look for the detection of a character’s personality, calling it “expressive of the attitude of the looker towards the ‘lookee’” (Palmer, “Social Minds”). Hence the failure to see the face and meet the eyes of the other, who is perhaps “mocking” (Woolf, “The Lady” 90), alludes to the problem of the intersubjective gaze, which may produce both fear and intimacy. As the object of another’s scrutiny, one becomes the instrument of the other to ends of which one is ignorant (Butte 31). This felt aggression of the scrutinizing gaze, has dominated gender theories of film, where scopophilia is interpreted as a reification of the female through a controlling and desirous male gaze. The frightening implications of the gaze can only be countered in conditions of reciprocity, where insistence on a mutual regard acknowledges both embodiments at work. It does not work, however, in the cinema. Woolf’s short story discusses in fictional form the subject-object problem inherent in visibility and pertinent to understanding. To be an object of secret surveillance causes anxiety and unrest, and readers will feel nagging unease about the narrated onesided observation. When the narrator attributes the failure to read the mind of Isabella to obscured vision, readers will probably relish the breakdown of the voyeuristic scenario. These feelings of distrust in the ethics of the narrator’s performance are clearly the result of an absence of intersubjectivity. The resentment increases as the narrative instance, presumably in compensation for its frustrated efforts, starts to accuse Isabella’s mind of conventionality: “She was thinking, perhaps, that she must order a new net” (Woolf, “The Lady” 90). This imagined thought immediately prompts an exclamation of disappointment from the narrator: “But one was tired of the things that she talked about at dinner. It was her profounder state of being that one wanted to catch and turn to words, the state that is to the mind what breathing is to the body […]” (90). Here, the reported thoughts offered as particles of Isabella’s consciousness in effect hide their conjectural nature behind the inclusive “one”, and they induce in the reader the suspicion that Isabella is masking her personality behind socially acceptable utterances. But are readers really seduced to share the narrator’s desire for exposing the inner recesses of interiority? Narrative soliloquy, as mentioned above, always implicates the addressee, and readers are led to feel more integrated into the musings of the voice than in other forms of narrative situation. Yet inclusiveness is not the primary result in this case: for one thing, a gentle irony is directed at the curiosity about hidden aspects of character and at the common desire for an omniscience which denies fictional creatures our privilege of keeping the secret life secret (Brosch, “The Curious Eye” 148). As appearances seem to mock an empirical attitude, the fictional character mocks the narrating instance’s insights, and the mirror mocks faithful representation, the text as a whole turns to ironic advantage the reader’s immersive imagina- The Secret Self: Reading Minds in the Modernist Short Story 207 tion and identification with gnomic speculation in an authorial grammatical mode. Returning to a hypothetical register of agency on the part of the character (Isabella’s gardening activity), the narrative voice shifts into free indirect discourse: “As [the twig] fell, surely some light came in too, surely one could penetrate a little farther into her being” (Woolf, “The Lady” 90). We witness the internal focalization of a personalized narrator who is radically separated from the world of the character s/ he is mediating. This isolation foregrounds the illusory character of the reflections and must make judgements necessarily flawed. The limitation of the narrator figure to internal focalization (Stanzel’s reflector mode, 195) is so obvious that the story must be read as a metanarrative commentary on establishing a self in fiction, proposing consciousness to be a construction of a directed intentionality. In this directed intentionality narrator and reader meet and interact. The reiterated self-assurance of the narrator that some interiority “must” emerge from the persistent effortful scrutiny is followed by a passage in which the narrative voice shifts to a different mode: So she stood thinking. Without making any thought precise - for she was one of those reticent people whose minds hold their thoughts enmeshed in clouds of silence - she was filled with thoughts. Her mind was like her room, in which lights advanced and retreated, came pirouetting and stepping delicately, spread their tails, pecked their way; and then her whole being was suffused, like the room again, with a cloud of some profound knowledge, some unspoken regret, and then she was full of locked drawers, stuffed with letters, like her cabinets. To talk of ‘prising her open’ as if she were an oyster, to use any but the finest and subtlest and most pliable tools upon her was impious and absurd. One must imagine - here she was in the looking glass. It made one start. (Woolf, “The Lady” 91) In this short passage the narrative voice changes from what seems to be authorial omniscient narration to free indirect thought and then to what Palmer calls “free indirect perception” (Palmer, Fictional Minds 80). The use of these quasi-unselfconscious forms of narration suggests a merging of narrator and reflector. The admission of being startled by the sight of Isabella reminds us that all we know of the narrator relates to the character who is now about to appear for the first time. We see the intrusive occupation of somebody else’s house, the voyeuristic surveillance of somebody else’s movements, the curious register of someone else’s material things, and most crucially the surmises as to that somebody’s state of mind. 4 All these mental activities have been going on under the guise of “imagination”, and, considering that the somebody in question is a fictional character, they are indeed the harmless indulgences readers permit themselves when reading fiction. The exercise in reading fictional minds, in the processing activity which is natural to readers, 4 Meir Sternberg proposes the term “informant” because it is more neutral than the term “reflector”. I use it in this instance for its connotations of spying and betraying (Sternberg 246). R ENATE B ROSCH 208 must implicate the reader in the threatening and disempowering aspects of this act of surveillance. The uncanny interaction between narrator and reader receives added meaning from its negotiation of the nature of signs. While indices are ruled by the past and fated to disappear, icons are available for permanence in recollection. The narrator’s predatory attempt to form and fix the shadowy apparitions into a permanent image recalls W. J. T. Mitchell’s definition of representation as driven by ekphrastic hope as well as ekphrastic fear, i.e. simultaneously by an iconophobic and an iconophilic desire (Mitchell 152-154). In addition, the atmosphere in which the reflection takes place becomes uncanny and weird, as the mind under observation mirrors its fictional location in a reversal of the usual symbolic significance of setting and material objects which we read into short stories. In the light of these allusions, it comes as a relief that the scopic and interpretative regime of this narrator’s penetrating gaze turns out to be wrong in the end. The delayed appearance of the protagonist at the end of the story is simultaneously its climax. Isabella moves into the frame of the glass, gradually and gently pushing aside the other reflections, as the narrator puts it, “to make room for her” (Woolf, “The Lady” 91). At last there she was, in the hall. She stopped dead. […] At once the looking-glass began to pour over her a light that seemed to fix her; that seemed […] to leave only the truth. It was an enthralling spectacle. Everything dropped from her - clouds, dress, basket, diamond - all that one had called the creeper and convolvulus. Here was the hard wall beneath. Here was the woman herself. She stood naked in that pitiless light. And there was nothing. Isabella was perfectly empty. She had no thoughts. She had no friends. She cared for nobody. As for her letters, they were all bills. Look, as she stood there, old and angular, veined and lined, with her high nose and her wrinkled neck, she did not even trouble to open them. People should not leave looking glasses hanging in their rooms. (92) The gaze projected in the story is the narrator’s gaze at the mediating surface of a “reflection”. It directs the reader’s visualization towards the overall configurations. The memorable visualization it creates is described in the title, and whatever individual shape this lady in the looking glass will take for a reader, it will carry a subtext of connotations from the extensive iconographic use of mirrors in Western cultural heritage. But this traditional mirroring of a subject is distorted and disturbed: it is first cut off by the frame, then blurred and fuzzy, and at last - when it has displaced the foreground - become as opaque as a wall. While this image is characterized by an emergent materiality and visibility, the text denies any knowledge of the person represented. In the course of the reading experience any definite ideas of subjectivity are rejected and the image of the “wall” comes to stand for the unattainability of character through representation. The vehicle and tenor of the images are joined in an ironic chiastic conjunction: the convolvulus in need of a wall to cling to expresses the sensitive tenderness of a feminine woman, which the narrator imagines in the absence of the protagonist. But as the woman con- The Secret Self: Reading Minds in the Modernist Short Story 209 quers a space within the frame of reflections where she seems to be “walled in” by the material objects clustered around her, it turns out that the fitting image for her would have been the wall itself, not the clinging plant. The unreadability of her character, and the resistance of any character to representation, is contained in the striking visualization of an image struggling into visibility. The primacy effect of putting trust in the first voice in the discourse is exploited to expose us to the shock of imaginative fallibility. Our desire for believing narrating instances then leads us up the garden path. This narrator, who hovers on the borderline of becoming a character, is not just omitting information on or misrepresenting, but blatantly fictionalizing the actions of the character, allowing his or her counterfactual speculation to take over and create an alternative to the “actual world”, in Ryan’s sense of the textual universe projected by the work of fiction (Ryan 23). This possible world and second-order reality, which is a third-order system for readers, enjoys greater claims to authority than such conjecture would have had if constructed by a character. At the same time, it disrupts the fictional world more thoroughly than such speculations on the part of a character would, because the latter can only produce subsystems of the actual world, whereas the narrator’s position as a mediator of the fictional world produces alternatives of equal status for as long as s/ he does not disavow them. After the constant disruptions and oscillations between alternative fictional worlds, we are disinclined to believe the narrator’s final statement about Isabella’s character being hard as a wall. We have learnt to distrust every description of her personality, and may have come to reject the idea of capturing individuality in a verbal description altogether. The true nature of Isabella, it is claimed, has eluded the narrator until the final close-up when her figure cuts through the surrounding mystery. But this ending remains equivocal in spite of its conformity with modernist story conventions (Head 88). Readers will feel somewhat disappointed when informed that the truth about Isabella consists in nothingness. The dénouement hints at the poverty of the real as opposed to the richness of the imagination. In the absence of the character the reflections occasioned by the mirrored shadows in the glass were much more poetic, beautiful, and meaningful than the nullity of her presence. And yet, both the poetic rendering as well as the prosaic undermining are performed by one and the same narrative instance, hauntingly one which we, the readers, are led to identify with. Lisa Zunshine mentions the cognitive cravings satisfied and “created (! )” by fictions, in that they “engage, tease and push to its tentative limits our mind-reading capacities” (Zunshine 4). Woolf here undermines the usual doubleness of subject and agent in character and the traditional adherence of plot to embodied subjectivity by expanding the notion of private discourse into the level of narration. In speculating on subjectivity and in foregrounding the secrecy and invisibility of the self, the narrative discourse usurps the agency traditionally associated with fictional character, nourishing a growing R ENATE B ROSCH 210 distaste in the reader concerning this vicarious mental activity. Woolf’s story may be said to parody Victorian realist conventions and to question modern ones at the same time. The dramatized narrator and frustrated eye-witness scrutinizing the surface of “reflections” in a parody of mimetic attempts to discover an object of solidity develops into an asymptotic rapprochement of narrator and “reflector”. This textual move deconstructs the modernist overemphasis on interiority even as it cheekily defeats the narrator’s loquacious urge to arrive at a character reading in spite of the character’s unyielding muteness. In a tongue-in-cheek manner, Woolf seems to want to grant her character freedom from a narrative assault on her hidden interiority. The psychological license coupled with the epistemic limitation exercised by the presumptuous narrative voice issues a warning against an encroaching, insinuating mind reading. As we are accustomed to rely on the narrator’s first voice in the discourse we find ourselves immersed in its betrayal, its failure to sympathize and its lack of empathy with human character. The story drives home with a vengeance to the reader the lack of physical contact, the absence of any sense perception but the visual, and the isolation of consciousness. Hence, it highlights the absence of a more social, corporeal intersubjectivity. On the surface it seems that the story supports Woolf’s arguments in the essays that mimetic referentiality with its minute attention to outward reality, to details of the material world and to the exterior appearance of a character will never get to the bottom of consciousness. It seems to conform to her principle of minimizing facts, events, and actions in order to concentrate on subjective, moment-by-moment experience. But “experience” in this case is a mental reflection on subjectivity. Against the usual reading of this story as a fictional demonstration of and metafictional argument for the ineffability of the self, i.e. the impossibility of transforming it into a realist representation, I would argue that it exposes the deficits of the interiority concept of consciousness. While the mind of the other remains unreadable, the mind of the reader-narrator is laid open in all its appropriating, prying efforts. Rather than celebrate an empathetic imagination, Woolf deconstructs both the transparency of fictional minds and the activity of reading them. This interpretation can be linked to a diachronic view of literature. Intersubjectivity, which in Eliot was consensual to the point of becoming a communal mind, is here condemned to subsist on the speculative imagination and hindered on two counts: it is generated by an isolated consciousness and it depends entirely on representations. Woolf’s quest for genuine inner character, which cannot be rendered with an “external” approach, famously explained in her essays, depends on this older external approach even as it is systematically subverted (Head 82). However, what has rarely been noticed in her attack on the Edwardians is that Woolf deplored the lack of communication and hence “friendship” between writer and reader: […] convention ceases to be a means of communication between writer and reader, and becomes instead an obstacle and an impediment. At the present moment we The Secret Self: Reading Minds in the Modernist Short Story 211 are suffering, not from decay, but from having no code of manners which writers and readers accept as a prelude to the more exciting intercourse of friendship. (Woolf, “Mr. Bennet” 84) By making the reader consciously participate in the intentionality of the narrative, Woolf offers a complex interaction between the desire for the intermental and its failure. It seems that in modernist narratives intermental processes are stalled or made increasingly difficult at the level of the fictional world, while such mental communication is improved and expanded at the level of interaction between fictional text and reader. On the face of it, the story discusses character as visibility and hence the exteriorizing of consciousness, a textual strategy which is essential to the short story, as it renders visible the limits of understanding character through external appearances. But visualization and projection, which are at work in any processing of short stories, here function to contradict the overt message of the text. The visualization of the reader must revolve around the figure of Isabella inserting itself into visibility. In fact, the reader’s imagination probably has no difficulty in generating an image of the gardening lady with her upper-class paraphernalia. However, this image is not a finite product, but an emergent structure, a realization of narrative and imagination interacting. This visualization contains (in the double sense) the topic that is addressed in the story. What readers are brought to distrust in “The Lady in the Looking Glass” is the act of narrating character in the absence of intersubjectivity. In contrast to what is usually seen as the modernist interest in intramental subjectivity, Woolf may be testing the limits of this idea of consciousness as isolated interiority. And her ironic subversion of the reductive tendency of hypothetical observation and penetrating gazes into a fictional character seem to equally undermine empathetic immersion and identification on the part of the reader. For us readers, the intermental emerges as a conspicuous absence. What we miss and hence learn to desire is some form of reciprocal, mutual exchange, i.e. such instances of intersubjective communication as are deliberately obliterated from this narrative. Thus, the social mind can be seen as an emergent blending space in Turner’s terms that emerges from this reading experience (Turner, “The Art of Compression” 99). What we miss is an ethical intention on the part of the figure vicariously simulating our mindreading, and what we miss we will feel inclined to supply by projective extension. Works Cited Banfield, Anne. Unspeakable Sentences. Boston: Routledge, 1982. Brosch, Renate. “The Curious Eye of the Reader: Perspective as Interaction with Narrative.” Seeing Perception. Ed. Silke Horstkotte and Karin Leonhard. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007. 143- 165. —. Short Story: Textsorte und Leseerfahrung. Trier: WVT, 2007. R ENATE B ROSCH 212 Brown, Susan Hunter. "Discourse Analysis and the Short Story." Short Story Theory at the Crossroads. Ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. 217-48. Butte, George. I Know that You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll Flanders to Marnie. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004. Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Esrock, Ellen. “Visualisation.”Routledge Encyclopedia of NarrativeTheory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan. New York: 2005. 633-634. Fluck, Winfried. “Imaginary Space; Or, Space as an Aesthetic Object.” Space in America: Theory, History, Culture. Ed. Klaus Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 25-40. Fludernik, Monika. “Pronouns of Address and ‘Odd’ Third Person Forms: The Mechanics of Involvement in Fiction.” New Essays in Deixis: Discourse, Narrative, Literature. Amsterdam. Rodopi, 1995. 99-130. —. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London, New York: Routledge, 1996. Hanson, Clare. Re-reading the Short Story. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Head, Dominic. The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Iser, Wolfgang. Der Akt des Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung. München: Fink, 1984. Kafalenos, Emma. “Not (Yet) Knowing: Epistemological Effects of Deferred and Suppressed Information in Narrative.” Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Ed. David Herman. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999. 33-65. Korte, Barbara. The Short Story in Britain: A Historical Sketch and Anthology. Tübingen: Francke, 2003. May, Charles. The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice. New York: Twayne, 1995. Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. 1873. London: Macmillan, 1967. Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. —. “Social Minds in Little Dorrit.” Unpublished manuscript, 2008. —. “Intermental Thought in the Novel: The Middlemarch Mind.” Style 39.4 (2005): 427-39. Phelan, James. Living to Tell about it: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Stanzel, Franz. Theorie des Erzählens. Göttingen: UTB, 1982. Sternberg, Meir. “Self-consciousness as a Narrative Feature: Tellers vs. Informants in Generic Design.” A Companion to Narrative Theory. Ed. James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 232-251. Turner, Mark. “The Art of Compression.” The Artful Mind. Ed. Mark Turner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 93-114. —. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. London: Chatto and Windus, 1980. Whitworth, Michael. “Virginia Woolf and Modernism.” Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 146-163. Woolf, Virginia. “The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection.” A Haunted House and Other Short Stories. 9 th ed. London: Hogarth Press, 1978. 86-92. The Secret Self: Reading Minds in the Modernist Short Story 213 —. “Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown.” A Woman’s Essays. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. London: Penguin, 1992. 69-87. —. “Modern Fiction.” The Common Reader. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San Diego, New York, London: Harvest, 1984. 146-154. Wright, Austin. “Recalcitrance in the Short Story.” Short Story Theory at the Crossroads. Ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. 115-129. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006. A NNA T HIEMANN , A NNETTE K ERN -S TÄHLER Metaphor and (Dis)Embodiment: Inside the Autistic Mind A verse is a one way conversation. You are not getting interrupted in the middle. Here only your thoughts are getting flowed in one way. There are no other thoughts to interfere with the flow. / Communication is a very primordial urge of human beings. / Being an Autistic person does not give me any other definition and I am still a human being. (Mukhopadhyay, “Questions and Answers” 124) In 1942, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges published a short story about an extraordinary character “renowned for a number of eccentricities, such as that of having nothing to do with people and of always knowing the time, like a watch” (98). After a horse accident, which left him “hopelessly crippled” and “unmoving,” “the chronometer” (99) Ireneo Funes exhibited incredible perceptive and mnemonic powers. He had the curious ability to perceive and recall his environment in minute detail. Doubtlessly, this character’s mind works differently from its ‘neurotypical’ counterpart, and today Ireneo would most likely be classified as a person with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). 1 Oblivious to this medical condition but well aware of Ireneo’s distinctive features, Borges’s narrator expresses some uneasiness about reconstructing the life of this extraordinary individual: “I shall not attempt to reproduce his words, now irrecoverable. I prefer truthfully to make a résumé of the many things Ireneo told me.” (101) Not only what Ireneo said but also how he would present his own story remains curiously inaccessible to the outsider’s perspective. The narrator explains: “The deplorable fact of my being an Argentinean will hinder me from falling into a dithyramb—an obligatory form in the Uruguay, when the theme is a Uruguayan.” (97) This comment on Ireneo’s poetic style is remarkable. We will come back to this point. Borges’s obvious reservation against exploring the ‘autistic mind’ has hindered neither scientists nor novelists from claiming authority over its description and explanation. Shortly after Borges published his short story, the Austrian-American psychiatrist Leo Kanner and the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger were the first to describe the medical condition of autism now referred to as ASD (Kanner; Asperger). Autism has been defined as a severe developmental ‘disorder’ affecting the brain’s ‘normal’ development in the first years of life. In the current absence of full etiological understanding, the 1 The suggestion to interpret “Funes” as a character on the autistic spectrum has been made by Sacks, The Man Who 219-20, and Szatmari 172-73. A NNA T HIEMANN , A NNETTE K ERN -S TÄHLER 216 ‘disorder’ is diagnosed according to behavioral characteristics. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR), last modified in 2000, criteria for autism include “the presence of markedly abnormal or impaired development in social interaction and communication and a markedly restricted repertoire of activity and interest” (70). The “puzzling constellation of symptoms in autism” has given rise to a range of theories concerning the underlying cognitive ‘impairment’ (Happé, “Language and Communication” 528). 2 Probably the most persistent and convincing theory in recent years has argued that people with autism are ‘impaired’ in theory of mind, which is “the ability to attribute independent mental states to self and others in order to explain and predict behavior” (529). Theory of mind can also serve as an explanation for why individuals with autism lack the ability to understand irony and metaphor (530). The argument runs as follows: As a lacking theory of mind renders autistic individuals incapable of grasping other people’s intentions, they will also be unable to identify figurative speech. Therefore, it is often said that people with autism show “overliteral understanding of communication” (527). The relationship between autism and metaphor has been explored in several contexts including science and literature. Examining the language of ‘autistic’ and ‘neurotypical’ writers, literary scholar Kristina Chew argues that “autistic idiolect” and creativity are metonymical rather than metaphorical (133). Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, published to great critical acclaim in 2003, foregrounds this phenomenon. The narrator Christopher Boone is an autistic boy who does not understand metaphors or jokes and prefers science over “proper novels” (Haddon 19, 5). However, the notion that people with autism are unable to cope with metaphors has recently been contested. Gyasi Burks-Abbott, member of the Asperger’s Association of New England, and psychologist Ilona Roth have argued that—contrary to common belief—many autistic individuals are able to handle figurative language effectively. We would like to support their claim from a cognitive semantic perspective focusing on the so-called embodied cognition thesis, which proposes a close relation between metaphor and embodiment. We will argue that the relationship between body and mind in autism leads not to the absence of metaphor but to a modification of its conventional uses. In order to refine and expand the scope of our theoretical framework, we will furthermore introduce the concept of the ‘body image,’ which is closely related to embodiment, cognition, and language use in autism. Before presenting our main argument, we will examine the ways in which the ‘autistic mind’ has been explored in scientific writing as well as in memoirs and autobiographies. In the course of this overview, we will introduce 2 For an overview of current theories, cf. Happé, Autism. Metaphor and (Dis)Embodiment: Inside the Autistic Mind 217 the Anglophone Indian writer Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, who will serve as a central example in our discussion. Inside the Autistic Mind The study of disease, for the physician, demands the study of identity, the inner worlds that patients, under the spur of illness, create. But the realities of patients, the ways in which they and their brains construct their own worlds, cannot be comprehended wholly from the outside. In addition to the objective approach of the scientist, the naturalist, we must employ an intersubjective approach too, leaping, as Foucault writes, “into the interior of morbid consciousness, [trying] to see the pathological world with the eyes of the patient himself.” (Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars xviii-xix) The British-American neurologist Oliver Sacks claims that “autism was not fully described as a human condition until biographical and finally autobiographical narratives began to appear” (An Anthropologist on Mars 304). One of the first and, according to Sacks, still one of the best memoirs about an autistic child is Clara Claiborne Park’s The Siege published in 1967. 3 In his foreword to Park’s sequel Exiting Nirvana, Sacks points out that The Siege was “the first ‘inside’ (as opposed to clinical) account of an autistic child’s development and life; and [that] it was written with an intelligence, a clearsightedness, an insight, and a love that brought out to the full the complete strangeness, the ‘otherness,’ of the autistic mind” (Sacks, “Foreword” ix). As the title suggests, the biography deals with the Park family’s struggle to reach the mind of their self-centered and nearly non-verbal child. In want of an explanation of her daughter’s reclusiveness, Park is sometimes tempted to regard her as a “worldless baby,” who—albeit able to interact with her environment—deliberately refuses to do so (The Siege 45). Giving an account of her daughter’s alleged unwillingness to speak, she argues: “Speech is an open gate. The personality who cannot speak is in prison, the personality who will not lives in a walled fortress” (85; emphasis added). This imagery is reminiscent of Bruno Bettelheim, who compared the ‘autistic mind’ to an Empty Fortress in 1967. When reflecting on The Siege in 2001, Park insisted that she chose the title two years before she “had ever heard of an empty fortress” (10). Although Park clearly distances herself from Bettelheim’s theory, which blames autistic behavior on the parents’ emotional frigidity, her own interpretation of the ‘autistic mind’ is not too far from his when she speculates about her daughter’s seemingly “empty” consciousness (88-89). In contrast to Bettelheim, however, Park demonstrates that she is highly aware of the danger that arises from such constructs (168, 187). In her emphasis on the constructed nature of ‘autism,’ she voices a central concern in the growing field 3 Mitzi Waltz similarly recalls that The Siege “has been credited as a watershed event in the history of autism” (429). A NNA T HIEMANN , A NNETTE K ERN -S TÄHLER 218 of disability studies. Scholars working in this interdisciplinary area of research explore disability as a cultural construction and draw attention to the perspectives and experiences of the disabled (Davis; Johnstone; Nadesan “Constructing Autism” and Constructing Autism: Unravelling the ‘Truth’). With regard to autism, most autobiographies are written by ‘highfunctioning’ individuals who are diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism in which language and cognitive development remain relatively unaffected (Happé, “Language and Communication” 532-33). Popular examples are texts written by Temple Grandin, an American animal science professor (Thinking in Pictures; with Margaret M. Scariano, Emergence), and Donna Williams, an Australian artist (Nobody Nowhere; Somebody Somewhere; Like Color). Both writers challenge the stereotypes that surround their condition not only in their autobiographies but also in guidebooks and more scientifically oriented publications (Grandin and Duffy, Developing Talents; Williams, Autism). By contrast, ‘low-functioning’ autists are often considered as “people who cannot represent themselves and must be represented” (Berubé 572). Cases of severe autism are usually reported from an outsider’s perspective, as the condition renders patients incapable of expressing their inner lives in speech or writing. Some individuals have succeeded in engaging in “facilitative communication,” in which a teacher holds the wrist of the writer as he or she taps messages on a keypad. However, this method has been widely discredited as teachers are said to prompt the writer’s responses (Smith 232-35). One remarkable exception is the autobiographical writing of Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, who was diagnosed with ‘severe autism’ when he was three years old. Tito has considerable difficulty speaking articulately, but his mother Soma showed him how to spell out words on a letter board and later taught him to write independently. Neuroscientist Michael Merzenich concedes that people like Tito “provide important insight into the neurological nature of this condition,” of which scientists “still have a relatively primitive understanding.” Drawing on James Olney, G. Thomas Couser discusses the powerful potential of such writing from a cultural studies perspective: Autobiography warrants study not just as all too rare first-person testimony about disability conditions but also as potentially powerful counterdiscourse to the prevailing discourse of disability. [...] Written from inside the experience of disability—and in some instances from inside a distinct disability culture— autobiography may represent disability in ways that challenge usual cultural scripts. (109-10) Apparently, the relationship between neuroscience and ‘illness narratives’ oscillates between synergetic and antagonistic interaction. As we will see, this complex relationship is also evident in Tito’s writings, which comprise three collections of autobiographical sketches. Between eight and eleven years of age, he composed the stories and poems contained in Beyond the Silence: My Life, the World and Autism published in England in 2000 and reissued in the United States as The Mind Tree: An Extraordinary Child Breaks the Metaphor and (Dis)Embodiment: Inside the Autistic Mind 219 Silence of Autism in 2003. After this publication, the American organization Cure Autism Now (CAN) invited Tito and his mother Soma to come to the United States, where Tito published The Gold of Sunbeams and Other Stories in 2005 and How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move? : Inside My Autistic Mind in 2008. In the course of our discussion of Tito’s works, we will also come back to Borges’s “Funes.” Thereby, we will see that not only patients’ autobiographies but also ‘fictional’ accounts of medical conditions can expand the boundaries of scientific knowledge. Metaphor and Embodiment Primary metaphors are part of the cognitive unconscious. We acquire them automatically and unconsciously via the normal process of neural learning and may be unaware that we have them. We have no choice in this process. [...] If you are a normal human being, you inevitably acquire an enormous range of primary metaphors just by going about the world constantly moving and perceiving. (Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh 56-57) Comparing Tito’s autobiographical writing to our initial ‘fictional’ example of an ‘autistic mind,’ we find one interesting similarity. In both cases, extraordinary mental abilities are correlated with unusual bodily experience. Although it is not stated explicitly in Borges’s text, it is reasonable to assume that Ireneo is paralyzed. He has to be “brought to the window,” and his condition is furthermore described as an “eternal imprisonment” (99). Ireneo himself regards the destruction of his body as a prerequisite for his mental abilities, for he points out that “previous to the rainy afternoon when the blue-tinted horse threw him, he had been [...] blind, deaf-mute, somnambulistic, memoryless” (101). Tito’s autobiographies imply a similar interdependence of embodiment and mental functions. The correlation between embodiment and cognition has received considerable attention in cognitive linguistics. According to the embodied cognition thesis, human thought and imagination are based on sensory experience. It is presumed that the nature of embodiment prescribes the nature and range of concepts that can be represented in the mind. Mark Johnson defines these concepts or “image schemas” as recurrent patterns which “emerge as meaningful structures [...] chiefly at the level of our bodily movements through space, our manipulation of objects, and our perceptual interactions” (29). Image schemas develop during early childhood (Mandler). The infant’s experience of moving itself or objects from A to B, for instance, gives rise to the FROM - TO -schema. Mark Johnson provides several examples of daily activities which correspond to this schema, for instance “walking from one place to another” and “throwing a baseball to your sister” (28). George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Metaphors We Live By) argue that image schemas serve as an unconscious experiential basis for primary conceptual metaphors. Such metaphors are formed when a schematic representation A NNA T HIEMANN , A NNETTE K ERN -S TÄHLER 220 E MBODIMENT C ONCEPTUAL S TRUCTURE image schema concrete source domain (e.g. SLEEP ) abstract target domain (e.g. DEATH ) P RIMARY C ONCEPTUAL / C ONVENTIONAL M ETAPHOR (e.g. DEATH IS SLEEP ) P OETIC M ETAPHOR (e.g. DEATH IS DREAMING ) emerging from concrete experience is projected onto an abstract domain. For instance, the abstract domain of time is often encoded in terms of motion, as in “the deadline is fast approaching.” According to Lakoff and Johnson, primary metaphors are commonly used in communication as they help us make sense of abstract everyday experience. In More Than Cool Reason, George Lakoff and Mark Turner point out that poetic thought derives from primary metaphors and is thus also based on embodied experience: “Poetic thought uses the mechanisms of everyday thought, but it extends them, elaborates them, and combines them in ways that go beyond the ordinary.” (67) Fig. 1 illustrates the process by which embodiment leads to metaphor. More precisely, it exemplifies the case of extension of conventional metaphors. In More Than Cool Reason, the term conventional metaphor is used as a synonym for primary conceptual metaphor, i.e. a metaphor which is frequently and automatically used in a linguistic community (51, 55). When discussing the case of extension, Lakoff and Turner provide us with the example of DEATH IS SLEEP . On the one hand, there is embodiment, i.e. the physical experience of sleep, which gives rise to a general concept or image schema. On the other hand, there is the abstract notion of death—abstract because, obviously, it is rather difficult to experience death and derive a concept from that experience. Thus, it is not surprising that we would take to understanding death in other terms, for instance in terms of sleep. However, not all characteristics typically associated with sleep are mapped onto death. The possibility of dreaming, for instance, is conventionally excluded from this projection. If a poet decides to ignore this convention and associates death with dreaming, s/ he has extended the primary metaphor and created an original poetic thought. (67) “What makes poetic metaphor noticeable and memorable,” Lakoff and Turner observe, “is thus the special, nonautomatic use to which ordinary, automatic modes of thought are put.” (72) Metaphor and (Dis)Embodiment: Inside the Autistic Mind 221 Fig. 1: From embodiment to poetic metaphor on the example of extension. The illustration is based on the analysis of poetic metaphors in Lakoff and Turner (More Than Cool Reason 67-72). Development and Structure of the Body Image We grasp external space through our bodily situation. A ‘corporeal or postural schema’ gives us at every moment a global, practical, and implicit notion of the relation between body and things, of our hold of them. A system of possible movements, or “motor projects” radiates from us to our environment. Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument [...]. (Merleau-Ponty 36) Our sense of what is real begins with and depends crucially upon our bodies, especially our sensorimotor apparatus, which enables us to perceive, move, and manipulate, and the detailed structures of our brains, which have been shaped by both evolution and experience. (Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh 17) The capacity to experience spatial movements and to develop image schemas and conceptual metaphors requires a ‘sound’ body image or schema, 4 i.e. “a psychic representation of the body that is constructed over time” (Salamon 109). Psychoanalysis, phenomenology and neuroscience have explored the psychological and physiological dimensions of the body image since the beginning of the twentieth century. The first extensive study of this phenomenon was Paul Schilder’s The Image and Appearance of the Human Body, published in 1950. The development of the body image has been prominently investigated in psychoanalysis. According to Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, the infant perceives its body as fragmented and fused with the maternal organism until it recognizes its image in the mirror for the first time. The specular image conveys to the child the imaginary idea of its discrete and unified existence: “The mirror stage [...] manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality” (Lacan 1288; emphasis in the original). The mirror stage marks the emergence of the “Ideal-I” (1286) and is succeeded by the child’s ability to use the corresponding pronoun when referring to itself. According to phenomenology, the body image informs us “how our body is positioned in space relative to the people, objects and environment around us,” and it “provides us with a reliable sense [...] of what our corporeal possibilities are at any given point in time” (Weiss 9, 17). The basic foundation of 4 Whereas the terms “image” and “schema” are used interchangeably in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Gallagher and Stamenow argue for a distinction between the unconscious neural representation (“schema”) and the conscious mental representation (“image”) of the body. A NNA T HIEMANN , A NNETTE K ERN -S TÄHLER 222 spatial perception, the body image helps us to plan and coordinate our bodily movements. Neuroscientists, who are interested in the physiological basis of the body image, agree that body image and perceptual experience are complexly interrelated and interdependent. A ‘sound’ body image appears to be a prerequisite for ‘normal’ perception and vice versa. For if the brain does not get the “usual sensory information,” body image and motor control can be disturbed (Sacks, The Man Who 45-6; De Preester and Knockhaert 4-5). It has been found that the brains of people with ‘normal’ perceptual experience are organized topographically, with sensory and motor brain maps mirroring the order of body parts. It is presumed that in autistic people genetic and environmental factors lead to ‘atypical’ neurodevelopment leaving these individuals with “an undifferentiated cortex,” an assumption which often serves as an explanation of autistic ‘impairments’ (Doidge 82). Investigating autistic behavior from a psychoanalytic perspective, François Sauvagnat deplores the “laboriously repetitive literature” on theory of mind in research in British institutions, which entails “the elimination of the clinical interest for body image disturbances in children exhibiting the ‘autistic spectrum’” (167): Whoever is engaged in tackling the issue of the consistence of the body image in psychotic and autistic children will apparently find little support in most of the recent scientific literature on such disorders, although most of the direct testimonies—especially among parents of such children—abound in material. (153) According to Sauvagnat, autistic individuals are unable “to experience their body as a closed, controllable totality” (161). He claims that their ‘defective’ body image provides us with an explanation for several symptoms in autism such as “automutilation” or “psychotic language disorders,” including echolalia and “the incapacity to use correctly [sic] personal pronouns” (162, 161). Autism, (Dis)Embodiment and Metaphor The very thought of my mind makes me wonder at its mysteries. What else is a mind but a mysterious possession, which allows all those fortunate and unfortunate things to be experienced, giving us the gift of pleasure and pain? (Mukhopadhyay, How Can I Talk 184) The interrelation between embodiment, cognition, and language use is evident in both Borges’s tale and Tito’s autobiographies. In Borges’s “Funes,” the narrator’s first recollection of Ireneo is that of “a boy running along the narrow, cracked path as if he were running along a narrow, broken wall” (98). During their first encounter, the narrator is presented not only with an Ireneo ‘in motion’ but also with an impressive demonstration of his exact temporal perception. When Bernardo, the narrator’s brother, asks Ireneo about the time, the running boy locates the present moment by correlating it to a future point in time: “Without looking up, without stopping, Ireneo re- Metaphor and (Dis)Embodiment: Inside the Autistic Mind 223 plied: ‘In ten minutes it will be eight o’clock, child Bernardo Juan Francisco.’” (98) This parallel occurrence of motion and linear time perception is too prominent to be merely accidental. Apparently, Ireneo skillfully uses embodiment in order to understand more abstract experience, such as that of time. In the course of the tale, however, Ireneo loses his ability to abstract from concrete experience. This development is evident in both his perception and his use of language. For instance, he is no longer able to correlate terms and their extension: It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front). (104; emphasis in the original) Apparently, Borges’s text consciously plays with the notion that embodiment and cognition are interdependent. Although the ‘mind-body problem’ has always been a central topic in Western philosophy, it is nevertheless remarkable how precisely Borges anticipates findings of cognitive scientists of the twenty-first century. 5 In our discussion of Tito’s writing, we will see how their notion of cognitive development can be used to challenge prevalent notions of creativity in ‘low-functioning’ autism. 6 Tito Mukhopadhyay’s autobiographical sketches demonstrate how autism affects not only his view of the world but also his poetic impulses. Tito’s sensory perception is clearly modified by his condition. Since he is unable to connect simultaneous sense experiences, he often focuses on his auditory sense, which he considers more powerful than his vision (How Can I Talk 112). Besides, Tito has “partial synesthesia” (184) which is why he often perceives sounds or emotions as color (110, 113; The Mind Tree 157). Tito’s “fragmented sensory experience” (How Can I Talk 212) inhibits him from forming a coherent body image. Tito frequently experiences a sensation of losing his body. Sometimes, he describes himself as a disembodied being; at other times, his body seems to be scattered and incontrollable. In The Mind Tree, in which Tito mainly talks about himself in the third person, he reports that “[t]he boy refused to accept the existence of his body, and imagined himself to be a spirit” (19). As a result of his virtual being, he “was losing control over his body. A sense of denying its existence was so strong that he could not respond to any situation the way it should have been done” (22). 5 Cf. Gallagher and Pfeiffer. 6 In Autism and Creativity, Michael Fitzgerald points out that people with low-functioning autism are not capable of true creativity. He agrees with Beate Hermelin, who holds that ‘low-functioning’ individuals lack “true creative ability,” which she defines as “the search for new forms of expression that characterise the history of Western art” (176). In his Asperger’s Syndrome and High Achievement, Ioan James jumps to similar conclusions when he differentiates between “classical autism” and “Asperger’s syndrome” (10). A NNA T HIEMANN , A NNETTE K ERN -S TÄHLER 224 Tito’s ability to ignore and lose his body turns into a painful experience when his mother challenges him to do puzzles and play games. Tito is fascinated by these new activities, but, at the same time, he becomes very frustrated about his apparent incapacity to initiate and control his body movements. Accordingly, “[h]e reasoned out that he might give it a try to be a ‘body’ instead of a ‘spirit’. But that was not any easy work. He felt that his body was scattered and it was difficult to collect it together” (The Mind Tree 28). Tito soon maps out several adaptive strategies that enable him to cope with this problem. For instance, he starts flapping his hands or rocking rhythmically with his entire body. In an interview conducted for the New York Times, Tito explains his nervous behavior as follows: “I am calming myself. My senses are so disconnected, I lose my body. So I flap. If I don’t do this, I feel scattered and anxious.” (qtd. in Blakeslee) In his autobiography, Tito reports that a rotating fan gave him another idea of how to recollect his scattered body parts, as he took to imitating its rotation. However, rather than enabling his body to interact with the environment, the spinning rendered them both transparent and unintelligible: I began to miss out on the richness of the surroundings because, when I rotated at that speed [...] my thoughts were too focused in the kinesthetic sensation of my movement. The sense of rotation, speed, direction, trying to remain below the fan, belief of becoming transparent like its blades, and losing my other thoughts, other than being in a state of total happiness, kept my heart occupied. (How Can I Talk 60-61) Due to his synesthetic experiences and scattered senses, Tito seems to have missed out on developing image schemas at an early age. Even the most basic schemas like the FROM - TO -schema are absent from Tito’s mind. Remember that Johnson identifies “walking from one place to another” and “throwing a baseball to your sister” as experiential sources of this schema. These basic activities, which ‘normal’ people perform every day without thinking about them, constitute an insurmountable obstacle to Tito’s daily endeavor to act in the world. The mere wish to write a few lines must remain a plan if it requires him to walk into another room in order to get his pencil and notebook: “My pencil and my notebook were in the next room, and I could not map my body to go and bring them, although I could very well visualize the process of opening a page and write. Mother asked me to break my plan into step-by-step actions.” (126) The acquisition of every new skill requires the same lengthy procedure. With the strategy of learning step-by-step and a lot of practice, Tito gradually conditions his body to perform the desired movement. In a chapter entitled “A Game of Catch,” Tito reports that he could not use a ball in the right way when he was five years old. His mother and speech therapist had to teach him to handle the ball in minute steps, beginning by dropping the ball into his outstretched hands (129-32). Tito’s mother finds interesting rewards for her son’s endeavors. For instance, she shoots a picture of him at the end of each day. The prospect of seeing himself in a photograph is highly motivating for Tito, most likely Metaphor and (Dis)Embodiment: Inside the Autistic Mind 225 because it provides him with an image of his whole and unscattered body (151). Not only physical but also cognitive improvements are visually (re)constructed. Thanks to his excellent education, Tito is well aware that his brain is plastic and adaptive as long as he makes an effort to change its circuits: With every new skill I learn, more areas of my brain are exercised. [...] Mother would come home and draw diagrams to show me what my nerves were doing when I struggled with taking down dictated words. On the first few days, she would draw the dendrites and make a chain of them. She would draw them very lightly to show a feeble connection among them. As days passed, she would show a darker connection between them because they were supposed to be gaining in strength as I practiced. I could imagine the neurons making a pathway in my brain, as I showed more motivation and less resistance. (How Can I Talk 171) Here, Tito refers to the relatively recent scientific discovery that the brain is malleable and adaptive not only in infancy but in adulthood as well. New findings on neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to reorganize itself as a result of experience, have led to significant breakthroughs in the treatment of autism. The organization Cure Autism Now, which invited Tito to come to the United States, has established the so-called Neural Retraining Initiative. As Erin Dooley points out, “[t]he initiative’s first project, led by Michael Merzenich of the University of California, San Francisco, [designs] [...] nonpharmaceutical tools and techniques, including one to prevent the emergence of fullblown autism in at-risk infants.” Together with Steve Miller, Merzenich has founded the company Scientific Learning (Oakland), which, based on the findings that the brain is not rigidly fixed but plastic (Kilgrad and Merzenich), develops computer games that help rewire the brain (Miller and Tallal). 7 Soma Mukhopadhyay’s successful work with Tito can be considered the result of intuitive neural retraining. By challenging her son to acquire new skills, no matter how long it takes, she considerably improves Tito’s condition. However, despite its enormous potential, this approach can achieve only limited functional recovery, depending also on how early the condition is detected. In his autobiographies, Tito frequently points out that he is far from feeling unscattered and safe. He keeps flapping or rocking in critical situations in which he feels he is loosing his body, or he makes use of specular ‘body prostheses’ like his mirror image or photograph (How Can I Talk 139, 151). Even scientific knowledge cannot make up for his ‘deviant’ cognitive development: “Of course from my knowledge of biology I knew that I had voluntary muscles and involuntary muscles. But I experimented with myself that when I ordered my hand to pick up a pencil I could not do it.” (The Mind Tree 117) At the beginning of his learning process, Tito “could relate his thoughts to words and express them [...] only when somebody held 7 We are grateful to Steven Miller, Ph.D., co-founder and senior vice-president of Scientific Learning, Oakland, and his team for showing us around their premises and for generously sharing their expertise in the field of neuroplasticity. A NNA T HIEMANN , A NNETTE K ERN -S TÄHLER 226 his shoulder” (48), and even today his mother Soma needs to be at least present for Tito to be able to write. Apparently, he is not able to perceive his body as a discrete unit which can act by itself. Tito’s ‘deviant’ embodiment leads to ‘atypical’ image schemas. When a scientist asks him how he remembers the laws of motion, he gives a surprising response: “I remembered it [the laws of motion] by envisioning a brown dog chewing on the wooden handle of a hammer, sitting on a mosaic floor. That picture had nothing to do with inertia or momentum or reactions in opposite directions.” Most interestingly, concepts that are acquired at a later stage of development, such as those of geometrical forms, for instance, seem to be more properly represented in Tito’s mind. He explains: “Certain facts may give me a closer mental picture. For example, when I became interested in trigonometric ratios, I could actually envision myself as an angle, looking at the base and the hypotenuse.” (How Can I Talk 208) Not only Tito’s image schemas but also the conceptual metaphors that derive from them are far from ordinary. For instance, he perceives time in terms of stagnation rather than of momentum. For him, time delineates isolated, unconnected events or happenings. “[I]t limits the events within its set up boundaries. [...] What else is time, if it does not cover happenings? ” (The Mind Tree 180, 195) In a poem he muses on the mystery of linear time: As with the graph of linear time, I stood on a land so far from it, And think of it with a longing mind. (How Can I Talk 103) As a matter of course, Tito’s perceptual and cognitive ‘disturbances’ affect his memory, or, to be more precise, his experiential memory. Experiential memory comprises “memories of having had a certain experience or of performing a particular deed, as opposed to remembering facts or remembering how to perform certain actions” (Matthews 146). Tito is acutely aware that his condition could undermine his credibility as an autobiographer. Although he embraces his ‘otherness’ to a certain extent, he feels obliged to address his reliability. Accordingly, he testifies: I would never be able to forgive myself if I narrated an episodic memory, which was recorded by an overindulgence, partial indulgence, selective indulgence, or underindulgence of my senses. […] I have written only [sic] those selected experiences about which I knew there were witnesses. […] I did not talk about those surroundings and happenings around me where I was not backed up by someone who could verify it. I do not want anything to undermine the effort I put into this work. (How Can I Talk 204, 206; emphasis added) Tito assumes that his ‘neurotypical’ audience may be highly skeptical of his achievements. Thus, authentication and authorization are recurrent topics in his works, for instance in the passages in which he reflects on the significance of his handwriting. According to him, the primary purpose of acquiring this Metaphor and (Dis)Embodiment: Inside the Autistic Mind 227 skill was to prove to his logocentric audience his ability to think and to compose his own stories: I needed people to believe that they were my own stories because I had the proof of my handwriting. If they doubted it, they could see me write my words. I knew very early on in life that if you happen to be born with autism, you will need to give plenty of proofs to doctors, psychologists, teachers, therapists, disbelieving uncles and neighbors, and who knows who else? (157) Despite his efforts to conform, Tito finds it very difficult to escape the colonizing and othering forces of hegemonic discourse. Apparently, the notion that people with autism are ‘differently abled’ rather than ‘disabled’ has not yet sunk in among the ‘neurotypical’ majority. As Oliver Sacks points out, mental ‘disorders’ and ‘defects’ “can play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence” (An Anthropologist on Mars xvi). Tito’s mental mapping entails not only ‘deviant’ perception but also creative potential. In his latest autobiography, he explains how his poems come into being: As my mind goes beyond the physical definition of light and air, I can easily transfer my thoughts to some other observation, far from physical interpretation. So it is very natural for me to feel that the air from the table fan is trying to blow away some of the intensity of the light from the surface of this page. Although it is not physically happening, it is the story my mind has formed. While I experience this situation, I am also putting my thoughts into language, so I can write them down exactly as I experience it. (How Can I Talk 198-99) Note that Tito “feels” that light is a substance; therefore, he does not form a secondary conceptual metaphor here but refers to his primary sensory experience. Another source of inspiration is Tito’s notion of emotion which he perceives in terms of color. For instance, he reports that one day, when he realized he was lonely, “things started to change their actual colours” to gray. Thus for him, “[t]he colour of loneliness is gray” (The Mind Tree 157). Above all, Tito’s unusual mental abilities give rise to some of his most powerful metaphors. As already mentioned, Tito gave the US version of his first autobiography the rather puzzling title The Mind Tree. This is also the title of the second-last chapter of the book. In this section, Tito uses the metaphor of the mind tree to describe his own existence. Most notably, he takes to using first-person narration in this part of the book, indicating that the poetic language he uses here is particularly suited for giving an authentic account of his inner self. As a tree which has been gifted a mind, he is unmoving and incapable of interacting with his environment: “I cannot see or talk. [...] I can do nothing but wait.” (168) As the tree feels a reptile crossing its roots, any movement makes him envious and he wonders “where it could go” (171). Similarly, a group of camping travelers induce in him the wish to walk. But he can only follow his wish in his dreams: “I could dream of being a gypsy-tree, walking A NNA T HIEMANN , A NNETTE K ERN -S TÄHLER 228 beyond and across anywhere and everywhere.” (197) Sometimes—usually in the late afternoon—a group of happy men come by to sit under his shade. In an arduous attempt to communicate with them, the tree tries to wave his branches even though there is no wind helping him: “Of course, I have to make an extra effort to move my branches without any help from the wind. Yet I think that my welcome gets unnoticed as the happy men sit under my shadow and talk.” (172-73) This imagery is grounded in Tito’s unusual bodily experience. Not even the most complex composition of conventional metaphors can account for his poetic imagination. Thus, Tito discloses the originality of autistic language, which Borges’s narrator had to withhold from his reader. 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W OLFGANG H ALLET The Multimodality of Cultural Experience and Mental Model Constructions of Textual Worlds 1 Reader-cognition, Experientiality and Textual World Construction It seems to be a common experience and a consensual critical assumption that reading fiction implies some sort of imagining of the world that the literary text presents. Probably, this is what makes fiction fascinating and what makes readers read: encountering ‘people’ they normally don’t meet, moving through spaces they have never inhabited or visited, exploring worlds that are normally not accessible. The vast amount of implications of a theory of literary imagination can, of course, not be discussed here. Instead, the reader’s imagination of agents, events, spaces and a whole range of other constituents of the literary world is here regarded as a necessary precondition for successful acts of reading a literary text. This article therefore concerns itself with the factors and cognitive processes that eventually result in a reader’s imagination of the world in which imaginary characters live and act, think and feel, suffer and enjoy themselves. One must be aware, of course, that the ‘textual world’ is itself a metaphor, “one possible conceptualization among many others” (Ryan, Narrative 90), metaphorical concepts such as the text as ‘game’, ‘network’ or ‘assemblage’ (cf. 90). Since, after all, a literary text is hardly more than “a sequence of signs”, a linguistic realm “made of names, definite descriptions, sentences, and propositions” (91), it seems most evident that complex and intricate cognitive operations are required which, in a variation on Herbert Grabes’ early cognitive approach on mental character construction (Grabes, “Turning Words”; also cf. Grabes’ contribution in this volume), can turn ‘words on the page’ into a whole ‘real’ world. According to Ryan, such a textual world is defined by four essential features: “connected set of objects and individuals; habitable environment; reasonably intelligible totality for external observers, field of activity for its members” (Ryan, Narrative 91). The concept of the textual ‘world’, in other words, is necessarily holistic, it emphasizes totality and comprehensiveness and, generally speaking, shows all features of the real world. Therefore, readers must and will intuitively draw upon every possible experience from their own real world to understand the ‘words on the page’. It follows that the cognitive approaches available in literary criticism will probably have to be expanded beyond familiar grounds and single constituents of literary texts like the literary character or the causality of ac- W OLFGANG H ALLET 234 tions and events. A cognitive theory of the literary text that accounts for the totality of a reader’s construction of a textual world, this article argues, must integrate all the cognitive operations that are also involved in, and part of, the reader’s making sense of perceptions and experiences in the real world. In order to clarify the notion of, and the need for, a more holistic cognitive approach a bit further, it may be useful to briefly draw upon cognitive approaches to literary character that have gained a lot of ground after 2000, although an essay by Herbert Grabes on the reader’s cognitive activities that are involved in character construction dates back to as early as 1978. There are three major reasons for why it may be advisable to take the cognitive theory of literary character as a starting point. The first and most important one is that it has drawn attention to the fact that “understanding literary characters requires our forming some kind of mental representation of them”, “a complex interaction of what the text says about the characters and of what the reader knows about the world in general, specifically about people, and, yet more specifically, about ‘people’ in literature” (Schneider, “Toward a Cognitive Theory” 608). Schneider (Grundriß, “Toward a Cognitive Theory”) and Jannidis, in a more differentiated, systematized and historicizing approach, have proposed that the notion of mental representation of character is best conceptualized in terms of mental model construction. This notion will be taken up in section 4 of this essay, generalizing it beyond character construction and expanding it to other textual constituents and to the fictional world at large. The second aspect is the role of world knowledge which cognitive theories of literary character have introduced to explain how readers imagine literary characters. As Schneider (Grundriß, “Toward a Cognitive Theory”) has convincingly shown, the construction and the construal of character require various types of knowledge on the reader’s side. Yet, although Schneider explicitly states that “practically everything he or she knows about the world can be used in reception” (Schneider, “Toward a Cognitive Theory” 611), this cognitive approach to character, in a sense, remains rather limited, since eventually the types of knowledge that are considered relevant are all character-centred and personality-related. They mainly revolve around: • social knowledge structures, i.e. concepts of human behaviour, personality theories, social schemata or stereotypes; • literary knowledge structures, i.e. a reader’s literary experience and familiarity with genre conventions concerning character; • emotional and evaluative response to literary characters, e.g. likeability, empathy etc. (cf. Schneider, Grundriß 35-135; “Toward a Cognitive Theory” 612-613). As much as all of this definitely applies, it seems fairly obvious that the reader’s construction of a literary character must draw upon categories that are not included in these types of knowledge, like, e.g., the possession of a sensory and sensual apparatus, the materiality and corporeality of a given world or an individual’s need and the ability to make sense of his or her per- The Multimodality of Cultural Experience ... 235 ceptions. It is therefore advisable to use ‘experience’ as an additional dimension since this is a holistic category that can stand for an individual’s conceptualizations and mental appropriations of the world. For instance, in order to be able to construct a character properly it may be necessary for the reader not only to know what ‘joy’, ‘hunger’ or ‘pain’ mean, i.e. possess some knowledge about it, but to have at least a faint idea of how these physical and emotional states feel, i.e. to have experienced them. In other words: the ability to construct literary characters requires different kinds of knowledge and experience that refer to individuals as active, conscious and experiencing beings in the broadest sense. After all, any of these experiences, acts or feelings may occur in a literary text, and they are difficult to imagine if readers cannot draw on similar or comparable experiences in their own real world. In section 3, the notion of ‘experience’ will therefore be elaborated. Since characters in narrative fictions are embedded in physical-material and social environments in which they act and interact, suffer or enjoy themselves, environments which affect them in manifold ways, it is also necessary to account for an individual’s different ways of making sense of the world both in the literary text and in the reader’s world. There is a whole range of different modes of world-making that have been translated into the language of the literary text, and literary characters constantly engage in signifying processes and in attempts of making sense out of data and perceptions of all sorts, whether visual, acoustic, olfactory or tactile. In such acts of sensemaking, a literary character will be presented as drawing upon semiotic resources of all sorts, from colour, commodities and all kinds of objects to rooms, whole spaces and social situations. Understanding this world may be far more important in the act of constructing or empathizing with a literary character than the mental representation of the character itself in the narrow sense. Therefore, no matter how different or unusual and unprecedented acts of meaning-making in a literary text may be, understanding a literary character can hardly be separated from the reader’s own ways of making sense of perceptual data and signifying practices. Since the concept of multimodality has theorized different types of semiosis and their integration into single acts of meaning-making, this essay will attempt to integrate ‘multimodality’ into a cognitive approach to the cognitive construction of textual worlds. A short excerpt from Paul Auster’s novel Moon Palace may serve to illustrate all of what has been argued so far. There are two reasons for this choice: On the one hand Auster’s novel is a fine example of various bodily and physical experiences like hunger and blindness, enclosure in caves and small apartments or orientation in wide open spaces. On the other hand, long parts of this novel narrativize acts of signification through which the characters and Marco Stanley Fogg, the autodiegetic narrator, in particular, position themselves in their world and make sense of it. In the passage in question, it is the narrator’s job to identify and describe objects and the urban environment of New York to his employer, a blind old man in a wheelchair called Thomas Effing (a name he has given himself), who has appointed Fogg W OLFGANG H ALLET 236 mainly to write down his obituary and who later turns out to be his grandfather. In this passage, the novel foregrounds the narrator’s perceptions, sensory processes and sense experience as well as his attempts to find a language that makes them accessible to his master: I began to consider it as a spiritual exercise, a process of training myself how to look at the world as if I were discovering it for the first time. What do you see? And if you see, how do you put it into words? The world enters us through our eyes, but we cannot make sense of it until it descends into our mouths. […] I had seen these things before, I told myself, and how could there be any difficulty in describing them? A fire hydrant, a taxi cab, a rush of steam pouring up from the pavement - they were deeply familiar to me, and I felt I knew them by heart. But that did not take into account the mutability of those things, the way they changed according to the force and angle of light, the way their aspect could be altered by what was happening around them: a person walking by, a sudden gust of wind, an odd reflection. Everything was constantly in flux, and though two bricks in a wall might strongly resemble each other, they could never be construed as identical. More to the point, the same brick was never really the same. (122) It can hardly be overlooked that the focus in this part of the novel is on the shape, features and physical qualities of objects and their materiality. On the reader’s side, understanding this part of the novel therefore requires some familiarity with the forms, physical or material features and functions of these objects (fire hydrants, cabs) and even some sort of science-based knowledge (steam, force, angle) as well as sensory and perceptual experiences (fire, light, wind). In other words: The reader finds himself in a position analogous to that of the blind old man to whom Fogg’s descriptions are addressed. While the narrator attempts to find words that can best convey his perceptions, the reader, like the blind man, will be looking for experiences that match the narrator’s words: a taxi, a brick, a wall. Only if the reader, at least approximately, succeeds in recalling and representing these experiences and various types of schematic knowledge is she or he able to construct the fictional world in which this narrator lives, through which he moves on his daily excursions with the old man in the wheelchair, and in which he struggles to communicate his perceptions adequately to the old man. The mental representation of the textual world therefore depends on the experiences and the world knowledge that readers have at their disposal and on their ability to integrate them into a coherent and consistent whole: a mental model of the ‘world’ presented in the literary text. Presumably, the narrator’s experience as narrated in this episode is paradigmatic of the perceptions of narrators and literary characters in general. In order to understand what they perceive, sense, recognize and feel, readers must, at least to some extent, draw upon their own ways of perceiving the world and their ways of making sense of these perceptions. Therefore, ‘experientiality’ is a narratological category which, on the one hand, provides for the (re-)mediation or narrativization of experiences in literary texts and which, on the other hand, accounts for the reader’s cognitive (re- The Multimodality of Cultural Experience ... 237 )construction of these experiences in the reception process. The next section of this essay is therefore devoted to ‘experience’ as a narratological and a cognitive category. 2 Experientiality as a narratological category Whenever we read a narrative text we encounter all sorts of beings, objects, phemonena, spaces and places, actions and events. Therefore, any act of reading requires the activation of the reader’s world knowledge, i.e. all sorts of schemata, scripts and concepts which the reader uses to categorize and understand the actions, motives, occurrences and phenomena in the textual world. Otherwise we are not able to understand what we are reading (cf. Zerweck). In a complementary communicative act, the author anticipates the reader’s schematizations. This does, of course, not mean that the author simply provides the textual signals that match them, but the reader’s world knowledge and schemata will often be irritated, challenged, expanded and applied in unusual ways in the literary text. And yet, in order to be communicable, such unusual, innovative, disturbing or disruptive configurations must rely on the reader’s schemata that make up his cultural knowledge. How, then, can ‘experience’ in the broad sense be conceptualized in a narratological context so that it accounts for the reader’s active part in constructing the textual world? In Monika Fludernik’s ‘natural’ narratology, experientiality is the central paradigm. Independent of what the term comprises and how narrow or wide it is conceived, to her, ‘experientiality’ is the core of narrativization, i.e. the naturalization of textual information in a narrative text that makes it possible to construct a fictional world: ‘[N]atural’ narratology, as I envisage it, relies on a definition of narrativity as mediated human experientiality (which can be plotted on the level of action or on the level of fictional consciousness). […] Narrativity is then established by readers in the reading process on the basis of four levels of natural categories […] which are combined to ‘project’ the fictional world.” (Fludernik 36) The definition of the first level that Fludernik provides sounds very general and seems to include all acts of schematization mentioned above, including very basic ones. She formulates: “axiomatic natural parameters of real-life experience form the most basic experiential and cognitive level.” (43) But when she goes on to specify these natural parameters, she appears to be narrowing experientiality down to the actional and processual side of narratives, stating that her first level is identical to Ricoeur’s ‘Mimesis I’ and that it comprises the schema of agency as goal-oriented process or reaction to the unexpected, the configuration of experienced and evaluated occurrence, and the natural comprehension of observed event processes including their supposed causeand-effect explanations.” (43) W OLFGANG H ALLET 238 Fludernik’s definition of experientiality thus seems to be centred around the structuring and ‘recuperation’ of narrative information - data that constitute a text’s narrativity - and therefore around agency, sequentiality, goaloriented processes and reactions to or the comprehension of events and processes. No explicit mention is made of the phenomenological dimension of the narrative world (a self-restriction that resembles the exclusive focus on character and person in the cognitive theory of literary character) and the corresponding real world frames and schemata. Presumably, this may be owing to narratology’s notorious preoccupation with temporality and sequentiality and the neglect of other dimensions of narratives, such as space or materiality. But in order for ‘experientiality’ to really make sense as a narratological category that is able to comprehend the textual and the cognitive construction of a whole narrative world, a broader definition is required that incorporates all kinds of real world experiences, actually every possible category that is needed to cope with everyday life and to make sense of the real world. The obvious reason for this is that characters and agents in a narrative are situated or position themselves in or make sense of their world - the textual world - in recognizably similar ways as people in the real world do, or, to use a more cautious formulation, literary characters are presented as being challenged by phenomena and perceptions of their world and as attempting to make sense of them. One could even say that in most literary texts this is their main enterprise and concern, no matter whether they succeed or fail. Therefore, it seems quite obvious that narrativization and agency, which are experiential by definition in a cognitive approach, require the integration of experiences of time and space, of objects and phenomena as well as of the materiality of the world and of artefacts. This is, of course, on top of what has been said about the schematizations involved in character construction as conceptualized by Schneider, and in narrativization as theorized by Fludernik. Summing up the brief discussion of one of the most seminal theories of experientiality in the field of narratology, it can be claimed that a cognitive approach that seeks to conceptualize the factors and processes that are involved in, and contribute to, a reader’s mental ways of constructing and representing the fictional world cannot be constrained to the narrativization of events or processes and their ‘recuperation’ by the reader. Instead, it must be conceived of as a holistic category that incorporates virtually any number and type of phenomena, encounters and occurrences that an individual may experience in real life and any type of knowledge that is part of a reader’s world knowledge. This is a prerequisite in any reader-oriented cognitive approach because otherwise it cannot be explained how a reader transforms linguistic data from the literary text into an imagination of the literary characters’ thoughts, feelings and actions and the physical, social and cultural environment they inhabit. It can even be contended that a literary text is mainly either concerned with the characters’ attempts to make sense of their manifold encounters with objects and phenomena, objects, other beings and The Multimodality of Cultural Experience ... 239 actions in this environment, or the narrator is occupied with mediating such attempts to the reader. Of course it might be argued that such a wide narratological concept of experientiality is bound to be essentially mimetic. In fact, this is totally true; but it is hard to see how any cognitive approach could not, at least to a certain extent, be mimetic. Actually, mimesis in that sense is part of Fludernik’s narratology, too; it is even pivotal in her theory since otherwise the whole concept of ‘naturalness’ would be at stake: Mimesis is indeed to be located at the very core of a ‘natural’ narratology […], [it] needs to be treated as the artificial and illusionary projection of a semiotic structure which the reader recuperates in terms of a fictional reality. This recuperation, since it is based on cognitive parameters gleaned from real-world experience, inevitably results in an implicit though incomplete homologization of the fictional and the real worlds. (Fludernik 35) In accordance with Fludernik’s theory it must also be conceded that mental representations of fictional worlds, which necessarily resort to real world categories in order to be able to construct a coherent, plausible textual world, confine this narratological approach to narrative fiction in a realistic or representational mode. Non-representational and experimental narrative texts are a different case for which Fludernik explicitly accounts by conceiving alternative world-building strategies and interpretative naturalizations. […] Experimental fiction can be read as intertextual play with language and with generic modes, and this - since it projects an intentional meta-narrative function - is a mimetic strategy just like any other. […] [Such] experimental texts are therefore not mimetic in terms of reproducing, if in a different medium, a prototypical version of narrative experience, but are mimetic in their structured anticipation of readers’ attempts at reinterpreting them mimetically if only at a meta-meta-realist level of a self-reflexive, explicitly anti-mimetic language game. Phenomenology and language critique need not therefore be at odds but can be subsumed under the cognitive faculty of sense-making (35) With regard to modernist and post-modernist types of literature, such a broad concept of mimesis is, of course, indispensable. And in cognitive theories of literature it is the only way to explain why readers are able to understand literary texts of all kinds: sense-making “is by definition mimetic”, Fludernik rightly states, “since it always relies on natural categories of cognition” (36). 3 Multimodal semiosis and semiotic remediation A broad concept of experientiality that seeks to explain how fictional worlds are inhabited by characters, how they relate to the environments in which they live and how they make sense of the aspects of the fictional reality with which they are faced, requires closer investigation. Therefore, in this part of the essay the concept of multimodal semiosis is briefly introduced since it is W OLFGANG H ALLET 240 deemed to be suited to explain how individuals draw upon virtually all aspects of a world that they encounter in order to make sense of it and thus enable themselves to initiate, or participate in, meaningful actions and practices. The theory of multimodal semiosis seems to correspond with the need for a holistic concept of experientiality as well as for a concept of a whole world that is represented and evoked in the reader’s mind by the linguistic signs of a literary text. The main reason is that it accounts for the integration of virtually every resource that individuals may use to make meaning and turn any phenomenon that they encounter into something meaningful. In the theory of multimodality, a mode is a semiotic resource “used in recognisably stable ways as a means of articulating discourse” (Kress & van Leeuwen 25) and of producing cultural meaning, so that colour, a handwritten letter or a blackand-white photograph as well as a newspaper article or a ground plan are all regarded as semiotic modes (cf. Hallet, “Multimodal Novel”, “Multimodalität”, “Multimodality of Cultural Knowledge“), provided they are drawn into acts of meaning-making. In contrast to modes, media are defined as merely physical and material resources “used in the production of semiotic products and events, including both the tools and the materials used (e.g. the musical instrument and the air; the chisel and the block of wood)” (Kress & van Leeuwen 22). Therefore, modes are abstract semiotic concepts (like, e.g., genres) that “can be realised in more than one production medium” (22). For instance, narrative is a mode that can be realised in written words, in a film or in a cartoon. A concept of multimodality that is derived from different disciplines and fields of study - mainly discourse theory, semiotics, visual culture studies and art design - allows for an integrative approach that seeks to respond to the growing importance of visual and other modes in cultural processes of signification and to overcome the one-sided theorization of verbal communication as a monomodal approach. Instead, the concept of multimodality focuses on the integration of verbal and non-verbal symbolization in signifying processes: ‘meaning’, in this theory, is no longer explained as resulting solely from human language, but as a result of an integration of visual, auditory and other sensual modes and acts of meaning-making in individual as well as in cultural semiotic processes. Therefore, a multimodal theory of semiosis attempts to explain and describe how meaning is made across, and simultaneously through, a variety of different semiotic symbol systems, media and generic modes, and how a combination of modes and media can result in an integrated meaning. For instance, a wall poster may communicate a single coherent meaning through the simultaneous use of language, different font types and sizes of letters, colours, photographs and graphic elements. Evidently, such an approach contrasts strongly with monomodal concepts, in which “language was (seen as) the central and only full means for representation and communication” (45). This may partly explain the preoccupation with textual structures and narrativization as a verbal enterprise The Multimodality of Cultural Experience ... 241 in narratology and even in traditional cognitive approaches, and the neglect of all non-discursive processes and experiences that a literary text mediates in linguistic form. In contrast to this, a multimodal theory of signification defines modes as “semiotic resources which allow the simultaneous realisation of discourses and types of (inter)action” (21). Such resources may be very basic modes like colour or sound, but also more complex resources like textual or medial genres, or cultural artefacts like furniture, or even whole rooms; or they may be established social practices that cultural agents can draw upon in social interaction and communication (cf. 24ff.). ‘Narrative’, too, is a mode, because it allows discourses to be formulated in particular ways (ways which ‘personify’ and ‘dramatize’ discourses, among other things), because it constitutes a particular kind of interaction, and because it can be realised in a range of different media. (21f.). In all of these cases, the concept of multimodality allows for communicative and social practices that incorporate various modes and media in discursive acts of meaning-making or in the cultural negotiation of meaning. As a matter of fact, a closer inspection reveals that almost no act of communication (let alone discursive formation in the Foucauldian sense) is, or has ever been, monomodal. This applies all the more in the age of globalized televison networks, electronic multimedial communication and digital photography or videography. One of the implications of such an approach that is relevant in a cognitive theory of textual world construction, is an increased awareness of and attention to the materiality, physicality and sensousness of experience since the materiality of modes, i.e. the written word in printed form, the digital photograph, the newspaper cartoon etc., “interacts with the materiality of specific senses, even though modes are conventionalisations produced through cultural action over time, and therefore abstract in relation to any particular action” (28). This raises interesting questions, since in a literary text the material or physical quality of an object, the spatial dimension of movement and social interaction or the corporeal implications of perceptions - pain, feelings of well-being etc. - are all translated, or mediated, into verbal language. Gesture, colour or taste, for example, as experiential and semiotic categories, “may be fully articulated and yet not have a correspondingly articulated set of labels in language, spoken or written.” (28) Colour may be a case in point: How can the experience of colour be transformed into verbal language? Or, in the cognitive version: How can a person who has never experienced ‘blue’ or ‘red’ possibly understand the meaning of the words ‘blue’ and ‘red‘ and the perceptions that are connected with them? Evidently, colour is an almost exclusively experiential category because it is very difficult to define ‘red’ or ‘blue’ in verbal form without resorting to other colours in the spectrum, the grammar of colours, as it were. The same applies to many other experiences like weight, distance and time or any tactile qualities of materials. W OLFGANG H ALLET 242 Since a literary text engages in such semiotic translations, it must be regarded as a specific semiotic remediation practice and as a link in the chain of semiotic remediations that reaches from material resources, physical actions and situatedness of actions over human perception and thought (by the author, conceptualized and mediated in verbal discourse through a narrator) to reader-reception and thought, and, possibly, a reader’s discourse, action or social interaction. Interestingly enough, this is exactly the process in which the narrator in Moon Palace engages in the episode in the quotation above: His main concern is indeed how to ‘perceive’ properly (he must learn to see), how to conceptualize his perceptions (in an experiment on the subway he closes his eyes and tries to imagine the people whose voices he hears) and how to find an appropriate discursive form to communicate them to his mentor and employer: “Now I was being plunged into a world of particulars, and the struggle to evoke them in words, to summon up the immediate sensual data, presented a challenge I was ill prepared for.” (121). As a point in fact, Moon Palace stages this epistemological-linguistic challenge on the level of narrative discourse as a series of instructions and training periods during which Effing teaches Fogg how to develop an adequate language that conveys the world to him (cf. Rohr, “The World”, and Rohr, Die Wahrheit 19-74 and 263-291). The narrator (as much as Auster, the author) is well aware of “the immensity of this task” (Weisenburger 141), as his continuous reflexions on adequate ways of verbalizing reality demonstrate. Immediately before his master’s death, when the narrator, for one last time, describes the inventory and the objects in the bedroom to the blind man - “an unobtainable realm of ordinary miracles: the tactile, the visible, the perceptual field that surrounds all life” (Auster, Moon Palace 219) - he characterizes this challenging enterprise as a multimodal semiotic act in the above sense: In some sense, I worked harder for him in that room than I had ever worked before, concentrating on the minutest details and materials - the wools and cottons, the silvers and pewters, the wood grains and plaster swirls - delving into each crevice, enumerating each color and shape, exploring the microscopic geometries of whatever there was to see.” (219) By contrast, at the beginning of his appointment Fogg lacks almost every ability to give Effing “a precise account” (120) of any object that Effing would point to on their daily wheelchair journeys through New York, and as a consequence “the results were dreadfully inadequate” (121). At first, his attempts to find the appropriate language are “overly exact” (122), “piling too many words on top of each other” (123). As a result, his acts of signification are entirely overdetermined, “obscuring” (123) and “burying” the objects of description “under an avalanche of subtleties and geometric abstractions” or “lengthy catalogues” (123) of words and phrases. 1 Only gradually does Fogg learn that 1 Interestingly enough, Marie-Laure Ryan states exactly the same when discussing the immersive qualities of descriptions of space in narrative texts: “A description that mere- The Multimodality of Cultural Experience ... 243 [his] job was not to exhaust him with lengthy catalogues, but to help him see things for himself. In the end, the words didn’t matter. Their task was to enable him to apprehend the objects as quickly as possible, and in order to do that, I had to make them disappear the moment they were pronounced. (123) Eventually, Fogg learns that signifying needs blanks, “apertures of whiteness” (141) in which the meaning of signs and words rests: [T]he more air I left around a thing, the happier the results, for that allowed Effing to do the crucial work on his own: to construct an image on the basis of a few hints, to feel his own mind travelling toward the thing that I was describing for him. (123) Also, Fogg finally becomes aware that no single signification can ever be perfect, that signification remains a constant challenge even for the skilled and trained. He knows that he can never be “entirely satisfied with [his] efforts. The demands of words are too great for that; one meets with failure too often to exult in the occasional success.” (123) Of course it is not difficult to detect a precise description of the roles of the writer (with whom Fogg explicitly identifies) and the reader behind these words so that, as a result, writing and reading the novel perform the very acts of signifying that Fogg renders to his readers. Effing, the blind reader who cannot see what the writer (Fogg) sees and experiences, has to rely on the evocative power of his mediator’s words and on his own imagination. We could also say: Drawing upon his own lived experiences, he has to retranslate his mediator’s discursive remediations of perceptions into mental representations of the world. He thus cognitively constructs the people and the things that surround him, the world that he inhabits: the streets of New York, the buildings, the people, the cars and the cabs as well as his bedroom and his apartment. This holistic process that integrates all sorts of material and social resources in a semiotic act in order to create a meaningful, inhabitable world can be regarded as the mental model construction of a textual world that is created through Fogg’s words. 4 The Mental Model Construction of the Textual World As in all other acts of signification, a reader's response to a fictional narrative requires the cognitive ability to understand and interpret the real world, to process sensual data and perceptions into categories and experience-based knowledge, to apply social and cultural schemata, and to employ cognitive strategies to master the challenges provided by real life. These experiences and types of knowledge are required and activated in the reading process when words on the page are turned into mental worlds. The mind’s tool to ly accumulates details lets its object run through the reader’s mind like grains of sand through the fingers, thus creating the sense of being lost in a clutter of data.” (Ryan, Narrative 124) W OLFGANG H ALLET 244 cope with the task of creating a world that enables it to understand and to make sense of what is read, to transform all the data into a coherent whole that represents a ‘world’, is the formation of mental models. These models are, on the one hand, informed by the mind’s top-down schematizations (experiences, knowledge, concepts, scripts etc.), and, on the other hand, by textual data and signals that determine the boundaries of a given world, the selection of entities and objects, the emphasis on certain features, relations between elements and so forth. It is important to keep in mind, though, that a mental model is quite a holistic representation of (a part of) the actual world or a textual world; it fulfils a ‘unifying’ function that makes it possible to produce coherence and to make sense of diverging, often incomplete data by means of inference: [M]ental models play a central and unifying role in representing objects, states of affairs, sequences of events, the way the world is, and the social and psychological actions of daily life. They enable individuals to make inferences and predictions, to understand phenomena, to decide what action to take and control its execution, and above all to experience events by proxy; they allow language to be used to create representations comparable to those deriving from direct acquaintance with the world; and they relate words to the world by way of conception and perception. (Johnson-Laird 397) Since the reader’s mind must select the most important features of phenomena from the text and transform them into cognitive structures by resorting to his own experiential background, no two individual mental models will ever be identical. On the other hand, due to the shared meanings which all conceptualizations and schematizations represent, mental models are not totally subjective, but can be communicated intersubjectively. The other feature that is of interest in an experiential approach is the fact that the fictional world of the novel and the actions of a literary figure as well as the reader's own imagination of an alternative world (the dream of a better world, a vision, a nightmare etc.) have the same cognitive status as mental models based on real world experiences. This is why all mental models, no matter whether they represent an actual (real) or a textual world, incorporate real world experiences as required and why conceptions, ways of thinking and living, attitudes, values etc. from literary texts can enter real life models and become effective in real life. This explains the performative power of literary texts. The third point is that what is called evocation through words can, in terms of mental model construction, be regarded as the transformation of verbal symbols into cognitive representations. Again, in order for such a transformation to be conducted successfully, the whole range of experience and knowledge must be available if the text signalizes that a particular schema or type of knowledge is required to make sense of the text. This is why, as readers, we can ‘understand’ what literary characters do and why we can regard them as social, interactional and signifying models. The Multimodality of Cultural Experience ... 245 Marco Stanley Fogg in Auster’s novel is mainly presented as a person that engages in acts of meaning-making and signifying. Actually, since in long passages the novel also thematizes these processes, e.g. in the conversations between Fogg and Effing, and since the novel also presents Fogg’s ‘mind in action’ during these processes, the novel as a whole can be regarded as a model of signification. In particular, this concerns spaces, rooms and places all of which Fogg draws into semiosis, and in all of which he tries to define his own position, from a cave in Central Park and his apartment in which he assigns the meaning of furniture to boxes that are filled with books, and the streets of New York which he gradually appropriates semiotically in his wheelchair-journeys with Effing, to the deserts of the American West and, eventually, the West coast. This emphasizes that ‘narrativity’ comprises more than a chronological sequence of events, a change of status and agency. Rather, it must incorporate and narrate all those features of real worlds which the reader must draw upon if they want to make sense of the narrative text. Mental model construction comprises all modes of perception and signification and all kinds of cultural experience. Although readers will more or less ‘naturally’ construct mental models of the spaces represented in narrative fictions in order to “orient themselves on the map of the fictional world” and to “picture in imagination the changing landscape along the routes followed by the characters” (Ryan, Narrative 123), such mental models will presumably never be representations of abstract (empty) spaces or mental graphic maps (for examples of such maps, see Ryan, “Cognitive Maps”). Instead, they will represent a topography that is inhabited by agents and furnished with objects and entities; they will provide for actions, movement and change, and they will integrate all sorts of elements and features that are normally or may be part of a real world. A small empirical experiment in a seminar in which the students were asked to visualize their imagination of the most important elements in Chinua Achebe’s short story “Dead Men’s Path” suggests that readers, while imagining the spatial dimension of the textual world, will simultaneously represent the fictional topography as an inhabited world, including buildings, agents, objects, itineraries, actions and interactions and so forth (cf. Figure 1). W OLFGANG H ALLET 246 Handwritten inscriptions intgrated in the model • Figure, top left corner: "the white supervisor, far away from the reality of the village"; • cloud or bubble in the middle: "hopes and wishes of Michael Obi"; • lower path: "traditions"; upper path: "the traditional ways"; • flashes: "conflicts"; • top of school-building: "modern times"; • school yard: "the wife's influence" and "pride and arrogance"; • village: " the old village" and "poor people"; • fence: "the 'border' built by the modern school"; • bottom, right corner: "between hopes & wishes & reality". Fig. 1: A student’s visual model of "Dead Men's Path", with a transcription of inscriptions The student’s drawing in Fig. 1 is a striking example of the unifying role in the reading process that Johnson-Laird assigns to mental models: this visualization of the student’s mental model of Achebe’s story integrates a wide range of experiential modes and all sorts of semiotic resources upon which the student draws to transform the language of the story into a whole imagined world. These resources and experiences range from buildings and settlements to social practices and constellations (marriage, head of the school etc.). The integration of all these resources into a mental model that turns the signs of the literary text into a meaningful whole requires the full range of lived experiences and world knowledge, including an awareness of people’s imaginations and dreams (the inscription in the bubble). Narrative fiction, it can be concluded, mediates all sorts of experiences, knowledge and semiotic modes in linguistic and aesthetic form. In an act of imagined multimodal semiosis, the reader re-integrates (“recuperates”, as Fludernik says) all these modes and experiences into their imagination of the textual world as a more or less coherent, meaningful whole to make sense of the world (or a slice of it) and of the actions, perceptions, beliefs, thoughts and feelings of those that inhabit it. The Multimodality of Cultural Experience ... 247 5 Narratological Implications It is no easy task to identify possible implications for narratological and literary analysis. But the following aspects of a cognitive-semiotic approach to literature that defines ‘experientiality’ in terms of the full range of perceptual, sensual and cognitive experiences and schemata that are available to a reader and that he or she draws upon when reading narrative fiction, may come to mind: (1) It is impossible for readers not to engage in the formation of cognitive representations of the textual world, however restricted, limited or abstract it may be. This assumption rests on the fact that reading is a communicative act in which readers attempt to understand and make sense of what is being communicated. Readers’ acts of meaning-making principally rely on world categories, concepts and sensual or perceptual experiences when they plausibilize events and occurrences in the narrative world. This is the essence of a cognitive-experiential approach to narrative fiction and literature in general. (2) Mental representations of the textual world rely on a holistic concept of ‘the world’ and of experiencing it, since in everyday life it is a synthesis of a wide range of perceptions that contributes to our cognitive conceptualization of the world and to its mental representation. In particular, these experiences refers to • agency (‘character’, ‘social interaction’, ‘doing’, ‘responsibility, ‘dependence’, a ‘you’, third persons); • corporeality and physical experiences (hunger, pain etc.); • spatiality (experiences of distance, enclosure, empty spaces, movement, settling and appropriating places, travels etc.); • temporality (time, duration, chronology), • materiality and material qualities; • sensory experience and synaethesia (the senses: taste, tactile, olfactory, auditory, visual senses); • the laws of nature (gravity, cause-and-effect relations etc.); • cognition (including emotions). Incomplete as the list may be, it conveys the notion that all of these experiential qualities and types of knowledge and all of these different modes of perception and semiosis may simultaneously apply and be drawn upon in acts of reading in the reader’s attempts to make sense of the words in literary texts. Only a multimodal concept of experience can explain why readers can make sense of a narrative text by constructing a mental model that represents the textual world as a whole. For instance, it is almost impossible to imagine a colourless world - unless the literary text engages in the more or less explicit textual construction of such a world and presents textual signals that force the reader to imagine a world without colour. Still, a reader will have to resort to his knowledge of colour to imagine a colourless world. W OLFGANG H ALLET 248 (3) It can be assumed that character formation, and identity processes in particular, can better be conceptualized in terms of a multimodal experiential process (Hallet, “Plural Identities” 48-50; Hallet, Paul Auster 105-110). As Jürgen Schlaeger has shown, space may be one of the essential experiential categories that are drawn into meaning making processes and acts of signification. Identity processes are also often narrated in terms of physical-bodily transformations which require corporeality as an experiential category (Hallet, “Multimodality of Cultural Knowledge“ 106-108); also, as is prominently the case in Moon Palace, visual experiences are of paramount importance for all identity processes (Hallet, Paul Auster 130-133). (4) There is a growing number of novels that incorporate other semiotic modes in the narrative discourse by actually reproducing them, i.e. by integrating photographs, graphs, newspaper articles, e-mails etc. (cf. Hallet, “Multimodal Novel”). Examples are, e.g., Michel Oondatje’s Running in the Family, almost all of W. G. Sebald’s novels and stories, but also more recent novels by Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident) or Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close). Thus, the reader, too, is compelled to integrate nondiscursive modes represented in the novel in graphic form into the mental construction of the textual world. (5) Possibly, such a multimodal concept that reads narrative discourse as a link in a chain of semiotic remediations is better suited to read narrative texts in an ethnographic way, in terms of a ‘thick description’, since it must take every single semiotic resource and all related signifying processes that are presented or represented in a narrative text into account. ‘Translational’ strategies, remediation practices, selections of particular dimensions of experiences, features of particular sensual and perceptual processes and their integration into narrative discourse or into identity processes could be very fruitful for cultural and cultural historical analysis, as, e.g., acts of looking and the art of seeing in Auster’s Moon Palace (Hallet, Paul Auster 130-133). (6) Presumably, the notion of multimodal experientiality is required to conceptualize all forms of intermediality. The notion of the musicalization or the visualization of fiction depends on the reader’s ability to incorporate visual or musical experience in the construction of the mental textual model. Otherwise they will miss the intermedial dimension of the narrative. (7) Finally, a holistic experiential concept will have to account for cases in which no or only little information about the textual world is available or in which the reader’s real world experiences are violated. If a literary text deviates from this experiential dimension of the reader’s construction of the textual world it will have to provide more or less salient textual signals to plausibilize and naturalize such a world and its implications. For instance, as long as no explicit mention is made of the colour of objects, nature, spaces and places or whole environments, the reader will imagine the textual world as a world in colours. A colourless (maybe not even black-and-white) textual world would require a number of respective textual signals to prevent the reader from applying ‘colour’ as an experiential dimension. Furthermore, The Multimodality of Cultural Experience ... 249 ‘colourlessness’ would be such a salient feature in a literary text that a particular significance and reflexive potential of such a textual feature can be assumed. Possibly, this is the point where a reader’s mental model would at least partly have to depart from experiential categories and allow for or actively construct a non-experiential alternative world, i.e. expand their ‘real’ everyday mind and add a non-actual dimension to it, transform it into a literary mind. Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. “Dead Men's Path.” 1953. Caught Between Cultures. Colonial and Postcolonial Short Stories. Eds. Ellen Butzko and Susanne Pongratz. Stuttgart: Klett, 2005. 118-121. Auster, Paul. Moon Palace. London: Faber and Faber, 1989. —. “Reznikoff x 2. 1: The Decisive Moment.” 1978. Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, and Collaboration with Artist. London: Picador, 2005. 373-388. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a 'Natural' Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. Grabes, Herbert. “Wie aus Sätzen Personen werden … Über die Erforschung literarischer Figuren.“ Poetica 10 (1978): 405-428. —. “Turning Words on the Page into ‘Real’ People.” Style 38.2 (2004): 221-235. Hallet, Wolfgang. “Plural Identities: Fictional Autobiographies as Cultural Templates of Multitextual Self-Narration.” Narrative and Identity. Theoretical Approaches and Critical Analyses. Eds. Birgit Neumann, Ansgar Nünning and Bo Petterson. Trier: WVT, 2008. 37-52. —. “The Multimodal Novel. The Integration of Modes and Media in Novelistic Narration.” Narratology in the Age of Interdisciplinary Narrative Research. Eds. Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer. Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter, 2008. [in press] —. “Multimodalität.” Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie: Ansätze - Personen - Grundbegriffe. Ed. Ansgar Nünning. 4th rev. and enl. ed. Stuttgart/ Weimar: Metzler, 2008. 521-523. —. “The Multimodality of Cultural Knowledge and Its Literary Transformations.” La conoscenza della letteratura. The Knowledge of Literature. Ed. Angela Locatelli. Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, 2008. 173-193. —. Paul Auster: Moon Palace. Stuttgart: Klett, 2008. Herman, David, ed. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford, Ca.: CSLI, 2003. Jannidis, Fotis. Figur und Person: Beitrag zu einer historischen Narratologie. Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter, 2004. Johnson-Laird, P.N. Mental Models. Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference and Consciousness. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Kress, Gunther, and Leo van Leeuwen. Multimodal Discourse. The Models and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold, 2001. Rohr, Susanne. “The World as ‘Ordinary Miracle’ in William Dean Howell’s A Hazard of New Fortunes and Paul Auster’s Moon Palace.” Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (REAL) 15 (1999). 93-110. —. Die Wahrheit der Täuschung. Wirklichkeitskonstitution im amerikanischen Roman 1889- 1989. München: Fink, 2004. W OLFGANG H ALLET 250 Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality. Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. —. “Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Narrative Space.”. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Stanford: CSLI, 2003. 214-42. Schlaeger, Jürgen. “Selves for the Twenty-First Century.” Anglistentag 2005 Bamberg. Proceedings. Eds. Christoph Houswitschka, Gabriele Knappe and Anja Müller. Trier: WVT, 2006. 425-436. Schneider, Ralf. Grundriß zur kognitiven Theorie der Figurenrezeption am Beispiel des viktorianischen Romans. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2000. —. “Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The Dynamics of Mental Model Construction.” Style 3.4 (2001): 607-640. Weisenburger, Steven. “Inside Moon Palace.” Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Ed. Dennis Barone. Philadelphia, Penn.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. 129-142. Zerweck, Bruno. “Der cognitive turn in der Erzähltheorie: Kognitive und 'Natürliche' Narratologie.” Neue Ansätze in der Erzähltheorie. Eds. Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning. Trier: WVT, 2002. 219-242. Call for Papers Literary Journalism Literary journalism is an emerging field of study that is sometimes called the literature of fact and is related to the genre of creative nonfiction. It combines the reportorial skills of journalists with the literary and narrative skills of writers of fiction. Notable recent practitioners include Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Tracey Kidder, and Hunter Thompson. Frequently cited predecessors in Britain include Defoe, Addison, and Steele and in the United States, Twain, Crane, Riis, and Hersey. The 2010 volume of REAL seeks essays that define, describe, or provide an historical account of this genre as well as those that analyze individual works or writers. Send essays (MLA style sheet with list of Works Cited at the end of the essay) for consideration to: Brook Thomas, Department of English, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA, by October 1, 2009. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de This volume brings together a selection of papers read at the 2006 Geneva conference on »American Aesthetics«. Contributors address the question of how, from our contemporary perspective, the heavily-theorized historical categor y of the aesthetic can be used. The investment of American writers and thinkers in the concept of the aesthetic, from the eighteenth century to the present, is discussed from a diversity of positions ranging from the colonial American novel, through the work of such canonical writers as Emerson and Thoreau, to contemporar y »minority« ethnic and feminist texts. Indeed, the notion of »minor« literatures is interrogated here. In these essays contributors ask how the recent critical move away from the canon, from American Literature to American literatures, shapes our understanding of aesthetic issues. While the focus is on American cultural production, the primary intellectual contexts of the book are provided by the rise of Enlightenment aesthetic theory and the so-called »crisis of representation« that is Modernity. Deborah L. Madsen (ed.) American Aesthetics Swiss Papers in Language and Literature 20 2007, 242 Seiten € 49,00/ SFr 77,50 ISBN 978-3-8233-6372-9 089007 Auslieferung November 20011 11 15.11.2007 8: 14: 48 Uhr Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.francke.de · E-Mail: info@francke.de Die Beiträge des vorliegenden Bandes betrachten auf interdisziplinäre Weise das vielschichtige Verhältnis zwischen Amerika und Europa. Im Fokus liegt hierbei der ideengeschichtliche Austausch, wie er in und über Literatur, Philosophie, Kunst und Musik beider Kontinente stattgefunden hat. Die Perspektiven auf diesen transatlantischen Dialog reichen dabei vom 18. Jahrhundert über die amerikanische Renaissance und Moderne bis ins 20. Jahrhundert. Ein Schwerpunkt ist der kreative Umgang mit den Texten anderer Denker, wie er beispielhaft in der Rezeption Goethes durch Emerson beobachtet werden kann. Insgesamt rückt der Band die vielfältigen, gegenseitigen Verbindungen zwischen den Kulturräumen stärker ins Blickfeld als ihre Grenzen oder Abgrenzungen. Astrid Böger / Georg Schiller / Nicole Schröder (Hg.) Dialoge zwischen Amerika und Europa Transatlantische Perspektiven in Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Musik Kultur und Erkenntnis, Band 33 2007, 300 Seiten, geb. €[D] 68,00/ SFr 107,00 ISBN 978-3-7720-8206-1 009307 Auslieferung Februar 200735 35 02.03.2007 17: 19: 36 Uhr