Why We Read Fiction

Why We Read Fiction?

Lisa Zunshine

University of Kentucky

My talk shares its title with my forthcoming book, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, and it is inspired by the question that I asked myself about fifteen years ago, when I first came to this country and was going through one of those periods of reading fiction voraciously. It was then that I first started wondering what is this strange craving? Science can explain much of what happens in our brain and the rest of the body when we want to eat, to drink, and to sleep, but what about wanting to read? It can certainly feel as strong as a mild hunger. Perhaps, if deprived for some time, one can even become seriously ravenous for fiction and wax violent when flashed with the cover of Pride and Prejudice? I wouldn't know because I have never dared to experiment with myself by not reading when I wanted to.

I remember thinking about these issues but also saying to myself that those are metaphysical and idiosyncratic questions that nobody can ever answer and that nobody would really care about. Today, however, I am reconsidering both my questions and my erstwhile certainty that they are not worth our attention. I believe that a conceptual framework emerging from recent research in cognitive science offers us a series of still tentative but nevertheless exciting insights into cravings that are satisfied--but also at the same time intensified!--when we read fiction.

My argument draws on two particular areas of research in cognitive evolutionary psychology and anthropology. The first area concerns our "Theory of Mind" (also known as our "mind-reading" capacity), that is, a cluster of adaptations that enable us to attribute to people thoughts, beliefs, and desires based on their observable behavior. The second focuses on the closely related "metarepresentational" ability, that is, a cluster of adaptations that make it possible for us to monitor sources of our representations (including our representations of other people's and our own mental states). I argue that whereas all fictional texts build on our Theory of Mind and metarepresentational ability, some works of fiction engage them in particularly focused ways. Many of us come to enjoy such engagement and need it as a steady supplement to our daily social interactions.

1. What is Mind Reading (also known as Theory of Mind)?

In spite of the way it sounds, mind reading has nothing to do with plain old telepathy. Instead, it is term used by cognitive psychologists, interchangeably with "Theory of Mind" to describe our ability to explain people's behavior in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires.[i] Thus we engage in mind reading when we ascribe to a person a certain mental state on the basis of her observable action: e.g., we see her reaching for a glass of water and assume that she is thirsty; when we interpret our own feelings based on our proprioceptive awareness: e.g., our heart skips a beat when a certain person enters the room and we realize that we might have been attracted to him or her all along; when we intuit a complex state of mind based on a limited verbal description: e.g., a friend tells us that she feels sad and happy at the same time, and we believe that we know what she means; when we compose an essay, a lecture, a movie, a song, a novel, or an instruction for an electrical appliance and try to imagine how this or that segment of our target audience will respond to it; when we negotiate a multi-layered social situation: e.g., a friend tells us in front of his boss that he would love to work on the new project but we have our own reasons to believe that he is lying and try to turn the conversation so that the boss, who, we think, may suspect that he is lying, would not make him work on that project and yet would not think that he didn't really want to, and so forth. Attributing states of mind is the default way by which we construct and navigate our social environment, incorrect though our attributions frequently are. (For example, the person who reached for the glass of water might have not been thirsty at all, but rather might have wanted us to think that she was thirsty, so that she could later excuse herself and go out of the room, presumably to get more water, but really to make the phone call that she didn't want us to know of.)

Moreover, it looks like we may not even be aware of the amount and import of much information conveyed by other people's bodies and facial expressions. Our perceptual systems register that information--a process crucial for our species' mental functioning--but they do not necessarily make that information available to us for our conscious processing and interpretation. Consider, for example, recent years' research into imitation, a "highly complex cognitive process, involving vision, perception, representation, memory and motor control." 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."^[ii] 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."^[iii] The system of the so-called mirror neurons responsible for such activation thus may "underlie cognitive functions that are as wide-ranging as language understanding and Theory of Mind."^[iv] In other words, our neural circuits are powerfully attuned to the presence, behavior, and emotional display of other members of our species. We are intensely aware of the body language and facial expressions of other people, even if the full extent and significance of such an awareness escape us.

One reason that over the last twenty years Theory of Mind has received the sustained attention of cognitive psychologists is that they have come across people whose ability to interpret behavior in terms of underlying mental states is drastically impaired--people with autism. A severe neurological deficit, autism is characterized by the profound impairment of social and communicative development, by the "lack of the usual flexibility, imagination, and pretence," and, crucially for the present discussion, by a lack of interest in fiction and story-telling.[v] On the whole, studies in autism suggest that we do not just "learn" how to communicate with people and read their emotions, including the emotions of fictional characters. People with autism, after all, generally have as many opportunities to "learn" these things as you and I. Instead it seems that we also have evolved cognitive architecture that makes this particular kind of learning possible, and if this architecture is damaged, a wealth of experience would never fully make up for the damage.

2. ToM and Fiction

One preliminary implication of applying what we know about ToM to our study of fiction is that it makes literature as we know it possible. 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 and thus predict their actions.^[vi]

It could be argued, for example, that the cognitive mechanisms^[vii] that evolved to process information about thoughts and feelings of human beings are constantly on the alert, checking out their environment for cues that fit their input conditions. On some level, then, works of fiction manage to "cheat" these mechanisms into "believing" that they are in the presence of material that they were "designed" to process, i.e., that they are in the presence of agents endowed with a potential for a rich array of intentional stances. The novel, in particular, is implicated with our mind-reading ability to such a degree that I do not think myself in danger of overstating anything when I say that in its currently familiar shape it exists because we are creatures with ToM.^[viii] As a sustained representation of numerous interacting minds, the novel feeds the powerful, representation-hungry^[ix] complex of cognitive adaptations whose very condition of being is a constant social stimulation delivered either by direct interactions with other people or by imaginary approximation of such interactions.

How much prompting do we need to begin attributing minds to fictional characters? Very little, it seems, since any indication that we are dealing with an entity capable of self-initiated behavior leads us to assume that this entity possesses thoughts, feelings, and desires, at least some of which we could intuit, interpret, and, frequently, misinterpret. Writers can exploit our constant readiness to posit a mind whenever we observe behavior as they experiment with the amount and kind of interpretation of the characters' mental states that they supply themselves and that they expect us to supply. They may conspicuously underrepresent and underinterpret their protagonists' feelings by forcing the characters' physical actions to stand in for mental states, as did Ernest Hemingway. Or, they may overrepresent and overintepret their protagonists's feelings, as did Henry James. Or, they may pointedly reduce the observable action of the characters, forcing us to construct the mental states of their characters from a seemingly negligible external action as Maurice Maeterlinck did in many of his plays (though, of course, the difference between the theatrical and the textual engagement of our Theory of Mind is a huge separate issue).

What is important to remember is that writers can afford to experiment with, say, underrepresenting their characters states of mind or external actions because we, the readers, make such underrepresenations emotionally cohesive thanks to our Theory of Mind. For example, Hemingway could engage in his deliberate undertelling because of our evolved cognitive tendency to assume that there must be a mental stance behind each act of behavior and our striving to represent to ourselves that possible mental stance even when the author has left us with the absolute minimum of necessary cues for constructing such a representation.

3. Source-Tracking Ability and Fiction

Closely aligned with our cognitive ability to read minds is our evolved capacity for keeping track of sources of our representations (also know as metarepresenting capacity), including representations of our own and other people's mental states. For example, if I tell you that Dactyl Foundation is moving its headquarters to St. Petersburg, you will not just assimilate this information uncritically and start inquiring into the exchange rates of the Russian ruble. Instead you will store the representation "Dactyl is moving its headquarters to St. Petersburg" under advisement and will look for more information that would allow you to gauge its truth-value. Which is to say that the source tag, "Lisa Zunshine claims that," will limit the circulation of this representation throughout your mental databases and protect them from being corrupted by this potentially incorrect information. If after talking to other people, you find out that Dactyl is indeed moving to Russia, you may discard the source-tag, "Lisa Zunshine claims that," or retain a much weaker version of the tag, such as "it was Lisa Zunshine who first told me that. . . ". If, however, you find out that I am the only person who thinks that Dactyl is relocating to St. Petersburg, you will retain a very strong source-tag pointing to me affixed to that representation and will, moreover, entertain a gamut of surmises about my thoughts, beliefs, and intentions that prompted me to make such a strange claim in the first place (was she joking? Has she been misled herself? Is she a pathological liar? Does she only lie to me? Is it possible that she meant something else?)

For reasons of time, I am giving you a painfully abbreviated account of the cognitive theory of source-monitoring, skipping altogether such important topics as neurological impairments associated with the malfunctioning of our ability to store information under advisement, our casual everyday failures of source-monitoring, and a variety of complications and ambiguities related to its functioning. For more information, I refer you to the volume Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, edited by Dan Sperber, and particularly the essay by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby in that volume, as well as to Christopher Frith's book The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia. Here let me just say that our tendency to monitor sources of our representations structures profoundly our interaction with literary texts. Broadly speaking, whereas our Theory of Mind makes it possible for us to invest literary characters with a potential for a broad array of thoughts, intentions, and feelings, our source-monitoring ability allows us to discriminate among the streams of information coming at us via all this mind-reading. It allows us to assign differently weighed truth-values to representations originating from different sources (that is, characters, including the narrator) under specific circumstances. The ability to keep track of who thought what and when it is crucial considering that the majority of our fictional narratives, from Homer's The Iliad and St. Augustine's Confessions, to Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Achebe's Things Fall Apart, center on reweighing the truth-value of various cultural and personal beliefs.

Let me now put forth the main assumption that underlies my work on cognition and fiction. I believe that fictional narratives constantly experiment with our adaptations for mind-reading and source-monitoring. That is, first of all, writers intuitively exploit our constant readiness to posit a mind whenever we observe behavior as they experiment with the amount and kind of interpretation of the characters' mental states that they supply themselves and that they expect us to supply. Second, when it comes to our source-monitoring, fictional texts rely on their readers' ability to keep track of who thought, wanted, and felt what and under what circumstances, experimenting with the intensity and kind of source-tagging required from the reader. The reason that writers can afford to play these endless mind-games with their readers is as follows: As a sustained representation of numerous interacting minds, fictional narrative feeds the powerful, representation-hungry complex of cognitive adaptations whose very condition of being is a constant social stimulation delivered either by direct interactions with other people or by imaginary approximation of such interactions.

By imagining the hidden mental states of various fictional characters; by following the readily available representations of such states throughout the narrative; and by comparing our interpretation of what the given character must be feeling at a given moment with the interpretations provided by other characters or with what we think could be the author's own interpretation, we deliver a rich stimulation to our mind-reading and mind-tracking cognitive adaptations. Many of us come to enjoy such stimulation and need it as a steady supplement to our daily social interactions. Viewed within this context, even the act of misinterpretation and misattribution of the protagonist's thoughts and feelings does not detract from the cognitive satisfaction allowed by the reading of fiction. To give a new twist to the well-known dictum, from a cognitive perspective, a misinterpretation of a character's state of mind is still very much an interpretation, a fully realized and thus pleasurable engagement of our Theory of Mind and source-monitoring ability.

4. How is Reading a Detective Novel Similar to Lifting Weights at the Gym?

In the longer version of this argument, I consider numerous examples of fictional texts' experimentation with our Theory of Mind and our source-monitoring ability, arguing, for example, that the emergence in the eighteenth century, of what we now call the psychological novel should be theorized as a particularly historically situated engagement of our cognitive capacities for mind-reading and mind-tracking. Today, I want to consider a case of another genre built around the exaggerated engagement of our mind-reading and source-monitoring adaptations--the detective novel.

Let us remind ourselves what a strange affair a typical detective novel is. Here is one of the masters of the genre, Dorothy Sayers, on the integrity of the craft:

There you are, then: there is your recipe for detective fiction: the art of framing lies. From beginning to end of your book, it is your whole aim and object to lead the reader up the garden; to induce him to believe some harmless person to be guilty; to believe the detective to be right where he is wrong and mistaken where he is right; to believe the false alibi to be sound, the present absent, the dead alive and the living dead; to believe in short, anything and everything but truth.^[x]

It seems that we open a detective novel with an avid anticipation that our expectations will be systematically frustrated, that we will be repeatedly made fools of, and that for several hours we will be fed deliberate lies in lieu of being given a direct answer to one single simple question that we really care about (who done it?). The question of why we may experience this state of cruel suspense as pleasurable has been addressed by many critics. The tentative answer from cognitive theory that I propose below is compatible with their explanations, and it also complements them at certain points at which they are usually at their weakest. For example, the currently available theories do not explain why plenty of people cannot stand whodunits and thus why the pleasure of being lied to in the context of the detective story is far from universal. I believe that an explanation based on what we know about theory of mind and source-monitoring ability, begins to address this question.

Let me start by suggesting that detective stories "work out" in a particularly focused fashion our ability to store representations under advisement and to reevaluate their truth-value once more information comes in. They push this ability to its furthest limits, first, by explicitly requiring us to store a lot of information under a very strong advisement--that is, to "suspect everybody"--for as long as we can possibly take it and, then, as the story comes to an end, to readjust drastically much of what we have been surmising in the process of reading it.

One may argue, then, that detective stories literally exist for assiduously cultivating what Dr. Sheppard (from Agatha Christie's novel) would consider a "rather . . . suspicious attitude" in the reader. In this respect, whodunits can be enjoyable and even addictive in the same way as weightlifting can be enjoyable and addictive: the more you train a certain muscle the more you feel that muscle and the more you want to train that muscle. Note that I am using the far-from-perfect body building analogy on purpose to stress that just as not everybody is an avid bodybuilder--though everybody has a body and is in principle able to lift weights to train isolated muscles--so not everybody is an avid detective reader or is even remotely interested in detective narratives. Those of us who do not work out with weights still get enough indirect exercise from our everyday activities to keep our muscles from atrophying, and, similarly, those of us who do not read detective stories (or even much of any fiction) still get plenty of relevant interaction with our environment to keep our source-monitoring capacity "in shape." The assumption that reading detective stories works out our source-monitoring capacity thus allows us to account both for the enjoyment that we derive from such stories and for the fact that such enjoyment is not universal.

Furthermore, even if weightlifting makes one generally stronger, and detective-novel-reading makes one a veritable expert in the genre, both experiences remain in many ways decoupled from reality. Just as overdeveloping my triceps, biceps, and trapezoids does not give me any particular advantage in my everyday activities--it certainly does not make me more adept at handling such crucial items as a pen, a laptop, a phone, and a fork--so keeping on a steady diet of detective stories does not make me a particularly discerning social player. It does not help me see through somebody's lies and it does not help me to know which "clues" to pay attention to to get to the truth of a given matter. In fact, applying what I have "learned" from a murder mystery to my everyday life could make me a social misfit: there is an important difference between being able, in principle, to revise one's views based on new evidence and going around deliberately suspecting everybody of being not what they seem, "just in case." In this respect, detective narratives may be said to parasitize on our mind-reading and source-monitoring abilities: they stimulate them without providing the kind of "educational" benefit that we still implicitly look for in what we read. Delight they do, but instruct they don't, or at least not in the traditional sense of the word "instruction."

However heavy-handed it may be, the parallel between detective fictions and weightlifting works on yet another level: in a culture that did not have a concept of weight-training facilities, or that considered muscular bodies ugly, or that frowned upon women exercising in such an "unfeminine" fashion, or that thought that there was something ridiculous about setting aside significant amounts of time and money for lugging around pieces of iron, weightlifting of the kind currently widespread in this country would not exist. By the same token, there is nothing historically inevitable about the emergence, wide cultural acceptance, and long-term prospects of the detective genre, however apt this genre happens to be in stroking our source-monitoring ability.

This emphasis on historicizing is crucial for the cognitive-evolutionary approach that I champion generally, and one of its broader ramifications applies not just to the detective genre. As we learn more and more about our theory of mind and source-monitoring ability, this knowledge may allow us to account, at least on some level, for certain fascinating regularities that we encounter in existing cultural representations, such as literary texts, but it will never predict what cultural representations we are bound to have or cannot have in the future. Those are grounded in future history and as such are unpredictable even if they build on the same cognitive predispositions that have been with us for hundreds of thousands of years.

Thinking of the detective narrative as engaging in a particularly focused way our source-monitoring ability and yet being anything but historically inevitable puts on a stronger footing our project of historicizing the "rise of the detective story" phenomenon. Briefly, although critics have offered a broad range of explanations for the emergence and cultural entrenchment of the genre, the endeavor to historicize the nineteenth- and twentieth-century detective story is often complicated by the acknowledgement that we can find "proto-detective" narratives in much earlier epochs, from the biblical story of Susanna in the garden to Sophocles's Oedipus to Voltaire's Zadig. Such acknowledgements seem to undercut, at least on some level, our attempts to situate the detective story in the nineteenth century or the twentieth century historical milieu and to explain its popularity by specific sociocultural developments of the moment. For if there is a detective story already present in the Bible, how can we speak about its "emergence" in, say, the 1840s, with the stories of Poe?

The cognitive framework lets us address this issue directly. It suggests that if (some form of) the source-monitoring ability has been with us since the dawn of the human species, then people have always had the potential for being interested in the stories that engage this ability. Consequently, by completely vindicating our suspicions that we have "always" had some sort of detective narratives lurking in our cultural history, the cognitive framework allows us to move on, so to speak, and to focus on the sociohistorical and aesthetic factors that might have contributed to the appearance, in the nineteenth-century, of the detective story as a culturally recognizable, new and special literary genre.

Furthermore, our perspective on the permutations of this genre from the nineteenth century until today may, too, change once we posit as the key underlying characteristic of the detective story its tendency to engage in a focused way our evolved cognitive ability to store information under advisement. That is, we can begin to see the recent history of the detective narrative as a cultural chronicle of writers' experimentation with our source-monitoring ability and our Theory of Mind, pushed to their limits in several different directions.

A detective story seems to be particularly fit for an analysis of such experimentation because the genre is relatively young, and we have access to the feedback received by the experimenting authors. That is, we know what initially caused an uproar in the audience but gradually became widely accepted, and what, on the other hand, continues to constitute a problem even as generations of authors have tried their hand in circumventing it. The larger point that underlies such an investigation and that carries over to our thinking about other genres is that literary history as a whole is better understood if we consider our cognitive predispositions as an important factor structuring the individual authors' attempts to break the mold of what constitutes an acceptable and desirable literary endeavor of their own day.

It seems then that once cognitive scientists succeed in isolating a certain regularity of our information-processing, say a certain apparent constraint on what we can do cognitively because of our evolutionary history, you take that constraint and you see how it plays itself out in a fictional narrative. What you 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 culturally embedded cognitive "limits" thus present us with creative openings rather than with a promise of stagnation and endless replication of the established forms.

Bibliography

Bakhtin, Michail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Edited by Michael Holquist; Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Baron-Cohen, Simon. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995.

Brook Andrew and Don Ross. Daniel Dennett. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002.

Clark, Andy. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.

Cosmides, Leda and John Tooby. "Consider the Source: The Evolution of Adaptations for Decoupling and Metarepresentations." Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective. E. Dan Sperber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 53-116.

Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. New York: Bantam Books, 1983.

Frith, Christopher D. The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia. Hove (UK): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1992.

Gopnik, Alison. "Theory of Mind." The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Eds. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999. 838-841.

Herman, David. "Stories as a Tool for Thinking." Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2003. 163-192.

Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: Norton, 1997.

Sayers, Dorothy. "Aristotle on Detective Fiction." Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robin W. Winks. Woodstock, Vermont: The Countryman Press, 1988. 25-34.

Spolsky, Ellen. Women's Work is Chastity: Lucretia, Cymbeline, and Cognitive Impenetrability. The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity. Ed. Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 51-84.

Sternberg, Meir. "How Narrativity Makes a Difference." Narrative 9.2 (January 2001): 115-122.

Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction? Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, forthcoming in 2006.