The CEA Forum

Summer/Fall 2007: 36.2

__________________________________________

Book Review:

Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.

by Lee Brewer Jones, Georgia Perimeter College

In Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, Lisa Zunshine undertakes a very large task: she “makes a case for admitting the recent findings of cognitive psychologists into literary studies” (4). Zunshine proposes to show “how their research into the ability to explain behavior in terms of the underlying states of mind–or mind-reading ability–can furnish us with a series of surprising insights into our interaction with literary texts” (4). According to Zunshine, three significant arguments support her thesis. First, mind-reading, which she also calls “Theory of Mind” (or “ToM”) allows readers to attribute mental states to literary characters based on their actions or words. Second, metarepresentationality calls upon readers to ask themselves who is narrating a text and when the point of view presented occurs. Finally, in a section entitled “Concealing Minds,” Zunshine explores at length the detective novel, which she believes particularly engages both Theory of Mind and metarepresentational ability.

Each of Zunshine's major concepts is highly theoretical and requires a good deal of explanation. Fortunately, the book refers to many primary literary sources for evidence. Zunshine includes extensive discussion of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Richardson's Clarissa, Nabakov's Lolita, and Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. References to Austen, Hemingway, James, Defoe, Sterne, Dostoyevski, Beowulf, Cervantes, Agatha Christie, Poe, and even the television show Friends abound. Zunshine grounds her literary argument with observations from critics and theorists as varied as Stanley Fish, Wayne Booth, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, James Phelan, Margery Allingham, and others. As seems necessary in a book designed to blend cognitive psychology and literature, Zunshine also extensively employs the work of Simon Baron-Cohen, Robin Dunbar, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Oliver Sacks, and the highly controversial Steven Pinker.

The section on mental attribution makes some strong points. By demonstrating the ways autistic people usually can't attribute states of mind to literary characters, Zunshine develops the ways in which the rest of us are able to do so. She also shows how most of us successfully attribute to the fourth level, particularly in oral epics such as Gilgamesh and The Iliad, while we find the Bruce Eric Kaplan New Yorker cartoon captioned “Of course I care about how you imagined I thought you perceived I wanted you to feel,” which is embedded to the sixth level, both “[o]verwrought” (29) and “literally incomprehensible” (30). All the same, a particularly skillful writer like Virginia Woolf may use an episode–namely the one in Mrs. Dalloway when Mrs. Bruton writes a letter to the editor of the Times–to take her assiduous reader to the sixth level of intentionality.

Similarly, the unit discussing metarepresentation introduces the “tag,” a notion that constantly requires to reader to ask who is speaking or thinking at any given moment in a text. Zunshine brilliantly shows how asking such a basic question time and again unmasks unreliable narrators, such as Robert Lovelace in Clarissa and Humbert Humbert in Lolita. After Zunshine reveals Humbert as Nabokov has created him–an eloquent, sociopathic pedophile who preys upon a helpless orphan–she then quotes a blurb, attributed to Vanity Fair, from the Vintage International Lolita which describes the novel as “the only convincing love story of our century” (109). Given how her readers may have been deceived into feeling sympathy for Humbert the first time we read Lolita, as Zunshine confesses about herself, metarepresentation leads to potentially chilling conclusions.

The portion about detective novels, while interesting, does not inform as much as does the rest of the book. Zunshine shows how Theory of Mind and metarepresentation both function in reading detective novels, but aside from the discussions of The Maltese Falcon, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the seemingly irresistible 1907 Maurice Leblanc short story “The Red Silk Scarf,” and several interesting anecdotes, this section seems to lack the intellectual heft of the rest of the book. Perhaps Zunshine would have been served better here by carrying her techniques to other canonical works.

Two examples instantly spring to mind that might produce more compelling writing than that on detective stories. First, at one point in Frankenstein, the nearly frozen Robert Walton writes a letter to his sister, Mrs. Saville, describing a story Victor Frankenstein tells him about a confrontation Frankenstein has with the creature, who reports a conversation he overhears the De Lacey family having. How do mind-reading and mental attribution contribute to our reading of Frankenstein, and what might metarepresentation help us discern? Then, on an ostensibly simpler level, Faulkner's The Reivers begins with the interesting, unexplained tag, “GRANDFATHER SAID.” What might metarepresentation teach us about how to read this tag?

Beyond this mild objection, however, I found Why We Read Fiction a compelling book that offers new possibilities for reading. Zunshine also does literary criticism a real service when she cites the provocative statements Steven Pinker makes in Blank Slate and then records the responses from sources like PMLA. Zunshine argues persuasively that “instead of simply ignoring Pinker's assertion that modernist writers have, by and large, cast aside ‘the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate,' we should engage his argument” (41). While Zunshine disagrees emphatically with what Pinker says, she believes dismissing Pinker, a cognitive scientist, as simply an inadequate “'authority on literature'” (44) undermines literary critics' basis for disputing the truth of what Pinker has said.

Only at the end does Zunshine directly address the first part of her title, why we read fiction. She explains that literature “offers a pleasurable and intensive workout for my Theory of Mind” (164). In this statement, Zunshine hopes not only to give a partially scientific explanation of aesthetics but moreover to initiate, or even at minimum foster, an interdisciplinary discussion involving literature, cognitive psychology, and other disciplines. I find her motives admirable and her efforts largely persuasive. Zunshine has written a thoughtful and thought-provoking book.

Return to Table of Contents