(Frontiers of Narrative) David Herman - The Emergence of Mind - Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English (2011, University of Nebraska Press)
(Frontiers of Narrative) David Herman - The Emergence of Mind - Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English (2011, University of Nebraska Press)
(Frontiers of Narrative) David Herman - The Emergence of Mind - Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English (2011, University of Nebraska Press)
Frontiers of Narrative
Series Editor
David Herman, Ohio State University
T HE
EMERGENCE
OF MIND
Representations of Consciousness
in Narrative Discourse in English
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The emergence of mind:
representations of consciousness
in narrative discourse in English /
edited by David Herman.
p. cm. — (Frontiers of narrative)
Includes bibliographical
references and index.
isbn 978-0-8032-1117-9
(pbk.: alk. paper)
1. English literature—
History and criticism.
2. Consciousness in literature.
I. Herman, David, 1962–
pr149.c665e64 2011
820.9'353—dc22
2010030151
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
david herman
Contributors 299
Index 303
Acknowledgments
vii
My work on this volume was supported in part by a research
fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and
a supplemental external fellowship subsidy awarded by the Col-
lege of the Arts and Humanities at Ohio State University. I am
grateful to both institutions for affording me the time needed
to complete this study.
Finally, I thank Susan Moss not only for her loving support
of all my endeavors, narratological and other, but also for dis-
covering Anna Shipstone’s “Blue Lady,” used as cover art for the
volume.
1
course in English has been written and read. In doing so, the
book’s chapters collectively outline new directions for studying
Àctional minds — not only across different epochs of English-
language narrative, but also (by extension) vis-à-vis the world’s
many narrative traditions.
The volume seeks to promote genuine dialogue among schol-
ars of narrative, on the one hand, and researchers in the many
disciplines concerned with the nature and functioning of the
mind, on the other hand, while also beneÀting specialists and
students working within various subÀelds (or historical peri-
ods) of English-language literature. Target audiences thus in-
clude not just narratologists, philosophers of mind, linguists,
psychologists, and anthropologists, but also researchers con-
cerned with different literary periods who share an interest in
the power of narrative to Àgure the mind in all its complexity, as
it perceives, assesses, remembers, and imagines situations and
events. Each contributor uses several case studies from his or
her focal period to examine techniques for presenting Àctional
consciousnesses; in addition to novels, these case studies encom-
pass verse narratives (Lockett, Fludernik, Hart, Bradburn, and
Vallins), romance tales in prose (Hart and Zunshine), allegory
(Bradburn), hagiography (Fludernik), children’s narrative (Zun-
shine), and hypothetical narrative vignettes used in the service
of philosophical treatises (Zunshine). Yet the volume delimits
its focal object more narrowly than this initial characterization
would suggest, because all the chapters discuss narratives that
originated from what are now Great Britain and Ireland. By fo-
cusing on methods of mind portrayal as they evolved in a geo-
graphically localized area of narrative practice, the contributors
can point to critical junctures in the history of consciousness rep-
resentation within a particular narrative tradition — while also
suggesting how other developmental trajectories might be traced
in other such traditions.
Thus, in addition to the variety of the methods used to explore
representations of Àctional minds, the historical or diachronic
focus of the volume makes it relevant for several (overlapping)
Àelds of study. Literary historians and theorists of the novel, for
2 david her m a n
example, can use the volume as a kind of source book, given that
each chapter features detailed case studies in discussing tech-
niques for mind presentation that were more or less dominant in
a given period. Further, the chapters cumulatively provide a basis
for investigating the dividing line between “narrative universals”
(Hogan 2005) — in this instance, constraints on consciousness
representation built into narrative as a discourse genre — and vari-
able, period-speciÀc techniques for representing minds. At the
same time, the volume’s diachronic proÀle will make the book
useful for historians of the English language and specialists in
such Àelds as historical pragmatics (Jucker 2008), and also for
cultural and intellectual historians who use developments in the
literary domain as a window onto changes and innovations in
the wider sociocultural context.2
In the realm of narrative studies, Àctional minds and the strat-
egies used to present them have become a prominent concern,
thanks to a number of convergent research initiatives.3 Relevant
work includes not only Cohn’s (1978) groundbreaking analysis,
which attempts to map categories of speech presentation on
to the representation of characters’ mental processes, but also
other pioneering studies of the linguistic texture of speech and
thought representation, conducted by scholars such as Brian
McHale (1978), F. K. Stanzel (1984 [1979]), Geoffrey Leech and
Michael Short (2007 [1981], 255–81), Ann BanÀeld (1982), Mi-
chael Toolan (2001 [1988], 116–42), and Monika Fludernik (1993,
1996, 2003).4 Another important strand of work focuses on the
thought-worlds or “subworlds” of Àctional characters, as analyzed
by Marie-Laure Ryan (1991) and Paul Werth (1999), among oth-
ers. At issue are the embedded worlds in which, in the context
of a larger storyworld evoked by a Àctional narrative as a whole,
characters make plans, deliberate among possible choices, and
imagine wished-for states of affairs. Still more recently, schol-
ars of story have begun to draw explicitly on ideas from psychol-
ogy, philosophy, linguistics, and other Àelds clustered under the
umbrella discipline of the cognitive sciences to explore aspects
of Àctional minds. Pertinent here is Alan Palmer’s (2004) re-
thinking of Cohn’s “speech-category approach” via research on
introduction 3
what Palmer terms the social mind in action. Pertinent, too, are
some of the contributions assembled in Herman (2003a); Patrick
Colm Hogan’s (2003, 2005) reanalysis of the surface structure
of Àctional plots in terms of deep structures of emotion; George
Butte’s (2004) use of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas to examine moments
of “deep intersubjectivity,” or characters’ multilayered attribu-
tions of mental states to one another; Lisa Zunshine’s (2006)
discussion of similar phenomena from perspectives afforded by
work in cognitive and evolutionary psychology rather than phe-
nomenology; and several of the evolutionary-psychological and
other studies included in Abbott (2001).5
Yet with some exceptions (e.g., Cohn 1978; Fludernik 1996;
Palmer 2004, 240–44; Stanzel 1984 [1979]), rather than study-
ing the evolution of the system of mind-revealing techniques
over time most of the existing work on consciousness represen-
tation aims to give a snapshot of the possibilities for represent-
ing minds in narrative at a given moment in the history of the
system’s development. Thus, while building on previous scholar-
ship in this area, the present volume seeks to extend the earlier
studies by developing an approach grounded in the historicity of
narrative forms and the mutability of their representational func-
tions. Collectively, the chapters of this book throw new light on
the history of the interface between narrative and mind over the
past thirteen centuries; they do so by using case studies to exam-
ine changes in the way English-language narrative discourse has
cued readers to build storyworlds that are more or less densely
populated with Àctional minds.6
4 david her m a n
[1] Celia thought privately, “Dorothea quite despises Sir James Chettam;
I believe she would not accept him.” [2] Celia felt that this was a pity. [3]
She had never been deceived as to the object of the baronet’s [Sir James
Chettam’s] interest. [4] Sometimes, indeed, she had reÁected that Dodo
would perhaps not make a husband happy who had not her way of look-
ing at things; and stiÁed in the depths of her heart was the feeling that
her sister was too religious for family comfort. [5] Notions and scruples
were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down,
or even eating. (Eliot 1910 [1872], 25)
introduction 5
too religious for family comfort. Notions and scruples were like spilt nee-
dles). In sentence 5, although Eliot continues to use past-tense
verbs, these can be read as “backshifted” from the present tense
that would have been used in a direct thought quotation (along
the lines of Celia thought, “notions and scruples are like spilt needles”).
At the same time, the evaluative appraisal expressed through the
simile, as well as the use of terms like “notions” and “scruples”
rather than “convictions” or “beliefs” for the tenor of that com-
parison, can be assumed to reÁect Celia’s own tacit construal
of the situation. Granted, the impersonal pronoun “one” makes
the sentence read like a general maxim or gnomic sentiment;
but given the larger context, that sentiment, rather than Áoating
free from the particulars of this Àctional world, can be anchored
in Celia’s vantage point on events.7 Meanwhile, sentence 4 can
be viewed as a hybrid construction, combining aspects of indi-
rect and free indirect thought. Although the sentence is largely
a third-person report of Celia’s act of reÁection and of the con-
tents or result of that act, in the Àrst clause the use of the nick-
name or term of endearment “Dodo” (for Dorothea) colors the
report with Celia’s subjectivity. Then, in the second clause of sen-
tence 4, the mention of a feeling stiÁed in the depths of Celia’s
heart returns the sentence to the mode of indirect thought, or
perhaps the mode that Leech and Short (2007 [1981]) call “nar-
rative report of thought act,” which in comparison with indirect
thought is less closely tied to or indicative of a particular subjec-
tivity or quality of mind.8
As should already be evident, Cohn’s study and work related to
or taking inspiration from it afford a powerful investigative lens
for studying representations of consciousness in narrative. This
research suggests how even a single passage from just one text
can present readers with multiple species of discourse cues, each
prompting interpreters to draw, with more or less latitude, partic-
ular sorts of inferences about Àctional minds. In the years since
Cohn developed her pioneering approach, however, commenta-
tors concerned with the representation of consciousness in stories
have factored in other kinds of discourse cues and other contexts
for interpreting them, with some of those theorists also propos-
6 david her m a n
ing, more broadly, new ways to frame the study of Àctional minds.
The chapters of this volume reÁect some of the major innovations
in the Àeld, and to provide further context for the project I turn
now to an overview of two main areas of interest within this do-
main of inquiry — areas concerned with distinct but interrelated
questions. For the Àrst area, the key question is: what is the best
way to study the structure of Àctional minds and to character-
ize their functioning? For example, if analysts seek to go beyond
the speech-category approach set out by Cohn and others, what
tools should they use to describe and explain mind-evoking fea-
tures of a passage like the one taken from Middlemarch? For the
second area of interest, the key question is: what trend lines can
be discerned in the development of narrative strategies for rep-
resenting the states and activities of Àctional consciousnesses?
For instance, how do Eliot’s methods of presenting minds com-
pare with the methods used in earlier and later texts, and what
broader patterns in the history of consciousness representation
do those commonalities and contrasts reveal?
introduction 7
80; Gorman 2005, 166–67). Or in Hamburger’s own words: “epic
Àction [i.e., third-person or heterodiegetic Àctional narration]
is the sole instance where third-person Àgures can be spoken
of not, or not only[,] as objects, but also as subjects, where the
subjectivity of a third-person Àgure qua that of a third-person
can be portrayed” (1993 [1957], 122).
Yet recent developments in the philosophy of mind, cognitive
and evolutionary psychology, and related Àelds call into question
the claim that readers’ experiences of Àctional minds are differ-
ent in kind from their experiences of the minds they encoun-
ter outside the domain of narrative Àction — a claim that I will
refer to in what follows as the “Exceptionality Thesis.” Of par-
ticular importance here is work on the competencies and prac-
tices bound up with what has come to be called folk psychology,
or people’s everyday understanding of how thinking works, the
rough-and-ready heuristics to which they resort in thinking about
thinking itself. We use these heuristics to impute motives or
goals to others, to evaluate the bases of our own conduct, and to
make predictions about future reactions to events. In short, folk-
psychological rules of thumb are what people use to character-
ize their own and others’ reasons for acting in the ways that they
do.9 Although the nature and origins of humans’ folk-psycholog-
ical practices are matters of lively dispute, that dispute itself pro-
vides grounds for questioning the Exceptionality Thesis — that is,
the purportedly unique capacity of Àctional narratives to repre-
sent the “I-originarity” of another as a subject, in Hamburger’s
parlance. Drawing on this recent work in the sciences of mind, I
question the supposed Exceptionality of Àctional minds by high-
lighting the Cartesian dualism that underlies arguments such
as Cohn’s and Hamburger’s — and also later scholarship build-
ing on their arguments.
Dualism of the Cartesian kind informs two related assump-
tions underpinning the arguments at issue: Àrst, that because
the mind is “inside” and the world “outside,” in contexts of ev-
eryday interaction others’ minds remain sealed off from me in a
separate, interior domain; and second, that this sealed-off-ness
of actual minds means that it is only in Àctional contexts that I
8 david her m a n
can gain direct access to the subjectivity of another. As I discuss
in my chapter in this volume, however, a variety of post-Cartesian
frameworks for research, moving away from older geographies of
the mental as an interior, immaterial domain, suggest the extent
to which minds are inextricably embedded in contexts for action
and interaction, and arise from the interplay between intelligent
agents and the broader social and material environments that
they must negotiate. In turn, if minds are not closed-off, inner
spaces but rather lodged in and partly constituted by the social
and material structures that scaffold people’s encounters with
the world, then access to the I-originarity of another is no lon-
ger uniquely enabled by engagement with Àctional narratives. A
binarized model that makes Àctional minds external and acces-
sible and actual minds internal and hidden gives way to a scalar
or gradualist model, according to which minds of all sorts can
be more or less directly encountered or experienced — depend-
ing on the circumstances.
Let me clarify here that my quarrel is not with the claim de-
veloped by Hamburger and then Cohn that certain language
patterns, or collocations of discourse features, are unique to or
distinctive of narrative Àction.10 Thus I am not disputing what
a reviewer of this volume called “the distinctiveness of literary
modes of articulation and representation.” What I am disput-
ing, rather, is the further inference, based on this initial claim
about Àction-speciÀc techniques, that only Àctional narratives
can give us direct, “inside” views of characters’ minds, and that
Àctional minds are therefore sui generis, or different in kind
from everyday minds. In the subsections that follow, I dispute
this further inference by arguing on the one hand that (what-
ever their distinctive repertoire of representational techniques)
Àctional narratives do not provide wholly direct or immediate
views of others’ minds, and on the other hand that experienc-
ing someone else’s I-originarity is not limited to the domain of
Àction. In a further disagreement with the reviewer whom I just
mentioned, I deny that in making these arguments I am sur-
reptitiously changing the subject from matters of technique to
matters of theme when it comes to the study of narrative repre-
introduction 9
sentations of mind. Instead, my focus is on how narratively or-
ganized discourse prompts interpreters to populate storyworlds
with minds, a process that encompasses both the “what” and
the “how” of mind representations.
To be sure, it is a basic convention of Àctional discourse that
in distanced, third-person narration reports about what is hap-
pening in a storyworld are “authenticated” in a way that reports
given by characters, including characterized Àrst-person narra-
tors, are not (Doležel 1998, 145–68). Thus, in the passage from
Middlemarch quoted previously, the structure of the narrative au-
thenticates the narrator’s report of what Celia is thinking, but
not (or at least not to the same degree) Celia’s own inferences
about Dorothea’s beliefs and attitudes — inferences that remain an-
chored in a particular character’s vantage point on the storyworld.
As Doležel (1998) puts it, “a general rule deÀnes the character
of the dyadic authentication function [i.e., the way authentica-
tion works in narratives that alternate between the discourse of
a third-person narrator and the direct speech of Àctional indi-
viduals]: entities introduced in the discourse of the anonymous
third-person narrator are eo ipso authenticated as Àctional facts,
while those introduced in the discourse of Àctional persons are
not” (148). Nonetheless, it is important to disentangle issues of
authentication, in this case the manner in which Àctional nar-
ratives can stipulate as true a character’s mental contents and
dispositions, from issues of accessibility, or the strategies that
interpreters use to make sense of those stipulated contents and
dispositions, not to mention other, non- or less fully authenti-
cated mind-contents. And as I go on to discuss, the procedures
used to engage with the minds evoked in Àctional narratives nec-
essarily piggyback on those used to interpret minds encountered
in other contexts (and vice versa).
At the same time, the post-Cartesian frameworks for inquiry
that I also describe in more detail below can be used to resist the
dichotomization of Àctional and actual minds from another di-
rection. These frameworks suggest how in contexts of everyday
interaction another’s I-originarity is not locked away inaccessibly
in some inner recess of the self, but rather spread out across the
10 david her m a n
elements of a given social encounter and situated within that en-
counter’s spatial environment and temporal Áow. From this per-
spective, it is not the case that third-person Àctional narration is
unique in providing access to another’s subjectivity. Rather, in
any communicative encounter, I can experience another’s I-orig-
inarity by engaging with the propositional content of that per-
son’s utterances as well as his or her facial expressions, bodily
orientation, gestures, and so forth — and also with the way our
encounter is situated within a broader material and social con-
text. As P. F. Strawson (1959) argued some Àfty years ago, part
of the meaning of the concept of person is having a constellation
of interlinked mental and material predicates (e.g., “doesn’t feel
well” and “is lying down with a Áushed appearance”); hence the
very idea of person entails that mental states and dispositions
will be self-ascribable in one’s own case and other-ascribable in
the case of others.
Thus, to preview the two subsections that follow: from one
direction, dichotomous treatments of Àctional and actual minds
can be questioned via research suggesting that readers’ knowl-
edge of Àctional minds is mediated by the same kinds of rea-
soning protocols — namely, reasoning about people’s reasons for
acting — that mediate encounters with everyday minds. In this
sense, Àctional minds are accessible but not transparent. A sec-
ond argument, trending in the opposite direction, can also be
grounded in recent work in the sciences of mind. Now the claim
is that, contrary to the assumptions of Exceptionality, people do
in fact experience others’ minds, encountering the I-originarity of
others in everyday settings as well as Àctional narratives. Every-
day minds are not transparent, but they are accessible. Though
these two arguments follow divergent paths, their force is ulti-
mately the same: they provide a basis for disputing the Excep-
tionality Thesis, as developed by theorists like Hamburger and
Cohn, and extended in more recent work on modes of Àctional
narration that are taken to be “anti-mimetic,” or to challenge real-
world understandings of (for example) the nature of conscious-
ness (Mäkelä 2006; Richardson 2006; Alber, Iversen, Nielsen,
and Richardson 2010).11
introduction 11
Positively, these two arguments against Exceptionality sug-
gest the need not to Áatten out historical or stylistic variation in
methods for presenting and experiencing Àctional minds, or to
ignore what the reviewer called “the distinctiveness of literary
modes of articulation and representation,” but rather to develop a
uniÀed picture of mind representations of all sorts, Àctional and
other. By connecting consciousness representation in narrative
with other discourses of mind, a uniÀed picture of this sort can
prevent the cordoning off of Àctional discourse as an anomalous
case, incapable of illuminating the nature of conscious experi-
ence more broadly.12 Again, in working to develop counterargu-
ments to Exceptionality I am not trying to deny the difference
between Àctional and other kinds of representations; indeed,
according to a number of specialists on children’s cognitive de-
velopment, acquiring the ability engage in symbolic, Àctional-
izing play and to recognize its distinctiveness from nonÀctional
representations of the world is a crucial growth point in the on-
togeny of human intelligence (see, e.g., Boyd 2009, 177–87; Har-
ris 1991; Hobson 2002, 76–78, 110–22; Leslie 1987; Tooby and
Cosmides 2001, 14–15). Yet acknowledging (the cognitive bene-
Àts of) the ontological divide between Àction and nonÀction is
consistent with hypothesizing that the same protocols for en-
gaging with minds cut across this divide. In outlining that hy-
pothesis, my aim is to underscore the importance of bringing to
bear on Àctional narratives the full battery of tools being devel-
oped in mind-oriented research and, conversely, the broad rele-
vance of research on narrative representations of consciousness
for disciplines such as psychology and the philosophy of mind,
among others.
12 david her m a n
reÀnement of scientiÀc theories.13 The two accounts of folk psy-
chology that have been dominant within the philosophy of mind
and related Àelds over the past several decades took shape against
the backdrop of two presuppositions supporting Premack and
Woodruff’s argument: namely, (1) that to detect intentional-
ity in others’ behavior is to have some knowledge of the oth-
er’s mind, and (2) that in order to acquire such knowledge one
needs to have some sort of theory (Slors and Macdonald 2008,
154). According to one of the dominant accounts, which accepts
both presuppositions 1 and 2, folk psychology is a kind of low-
level theory; it is based on a set of rules or explanatory princi-
ples similar in kind to those associated with scientiÀc theories
but targeted speciÀcally at propositional attitudes such as believ-
ing X and motivational attitudes such as desiring Y. This account
is standardly called “theory theory,” with some variants empha-
sizing how the theory at issue is an innate endowment, bestowed
upon humans in the form of an inherited Theory of Mind mod-
ule, and others stressing the way children use a trial-and-error
procedure to build up and reÀne a theory of the minds of oth-
ers — just as scientists (dis)conÀrm theories about the structure
of the world on the basis of observational data. According to
the second account, which denies presupposition 2 but at least
on some versions accepts presupposition 1 (Slors and Macdon-
ald 2008, 156), folk psychology is a simulative ability — that is,
an ability to project oneself imaginatively into scenarios involv-
ing others. By running off-line a simulation of what one would
do in similar circumstances, one can explain or predict what an-
other has done or will do in the target scenario. This second ac-
count of folk-psychological practices and abilities is standardly
called “simulation theory.”14
In turn, to characterize the assumptions and inferences that
readers make about the minds of characters in Àctional worlds,
story analysts have developed both theory- and simulation-based
accounts of the mind-reading practices that, according to the Àrst
argument for the non-Exceptionality of Àctional minds, are re-
quired for such narrative engagements. This research, by mapping
aspects of theory theory (e.g., Zunshine 2006 and this volume)
introduction 13
as well as simulation theory (e.g., Currie 2004, 176–88) on to the
heuristics used by interpreters to make sense of characters’ ac-
tions in storyworlds such as Middlemarch, suggests that the same
basic folk-psychological competencies and practices cut across
the Àction/nonÀction divide (for additional discussion, see Her-
man 2008, 249–52; Palmer 2004, 143–47). In other words, folk-
psychological heuristics, whether described in terms of theory
or of simulation, are no less necessary a support for authors,
characters, and readers than they are for participants in every-
day communicative exchanges.
A theory-based account of the passage from Middlemarch, for
example, would develop the assumption that narrative under-
standing requires explaining behaviors via unseen, hypothesized
mental states. Eliot’s narration could be read as attributing a va-
riety of mental states to Celia, which involve, in turn, further at-
tributions by Celia that are designed to explain Dorothea’s overt
behaviors.15 From this perspective, Celia interprets Dorothea’s
earlier conduct (during her conversation with Sir James Chettam)
by hypothesizing that Dorothea despises Chettam; Celia then
uses that hypothesized aversion to predict, in turn, that Dorothea
would reject any proposal of marriage by Chettam. The passage
also prompts readers to attribute to Celia, Àrst, the recognition
that Chettam is interested in Dorothea, even though Dorothea
herself, who thinks that Chettam favors Celia, is “deceived as to
the object of the baronet’s interest”; and, second, the belief that
Dorothea is too inÁexible to accommodate others with perspec-
tives different than her own. At another level, readers’ constru-
als of Celia’s behavior can be described in terms of attributions
of the same general kind, whereby Celia can be assumed to want
her sister to thrive in marriage but also believe (fear) that Dor-
othea holds potential suitors to too strict a standard.
For its part, a simulation-based account of Eliot’s text would
likewise focus on the relation between interpreting the passage
and the problem of knowing other minds (cf. Slors and Macdon-
ald’s Àrst presupposition), but would posit a different mechanism
to account for how the knowledge of minds comes about (cf. the
second presupposition). SpeciÀcally, the simulationist would ar-
14 david her m a n
gue that Celia makes sense of Dorothea’s reasons for acting by
using her own mind to model her sister’s conduct and the beliefs
and desires that might account for it — just as, at another level,
readers rely on comparable simulation routines to make sense
of Celia’s responses to Dorothea’s conduct.16
introduction 15
pragmatic understanding for some reason breaks down, for in-
stance if the other behaves in an unexpected and puzzling way,
that other options kick in and take over, be it inferential reason-
ing or some kind of simulation” (38). Along similar lines, Hob-
son (2002), focusing on children’s psychological development,
argues that “infants perceive and respond to people’s bodies [in
contrast with objects that are not person-like] in very special
ways”; speciÀcally, infants appear to “apprehend feelings through
the bodily expressions of others” (243). Extrapolating from the
developmental process to the more general business of making
sense of the minds of others, Hobson draws on Wittgenstein’s
ideas (see also Strawson 1959) to suggest that “we have a kind
of direct route into the minds of others. We do not perceive a
smile as an upturned conÀguration of the mouth and by an in-
tellectual process decide that this conÀguration means the per-
son is happy” (244).
At the same time, work questioning theory- and simulation-
based approaches takes issue with the privileging of third-per-
son over second-person contexts in research on folk psychology,
which has led to the assumption that making sense of others’
minds is a detached or “spectatorial” affair (cf. Hutto 2008, 1–21).17
As developmental research going back to Vygotsky (1978) sug-
gests, crucially formative experiences for children are direct,
second-person encounters with caregivers (cf. Hobson 2002,
2007) — these encounters being ontogenetically prior to third-
person contexts like those often discussed in formal studies of
folk psychology. And Gallagher (2005) argues that subsequent
deployments of folk-psychological abilities follow suit, contend-
ing that “only when second-person pragmatic interactions or our
evaluative attempts to understand break down do we resort to
the more specialized practices of third-person explanation and
prediction” (Gallagher 2005, 213).18
Consider the structure of the passage from Middlemarch in
light of these arguments for the accessibility of everyday minds.
Prima facie it appears that Celia’s assessment of Dorothea’s rea-
sons for acting does involve detached or spectatorial attributions
of mental states, as she considers her sister’s conduct toward
16 david her m a n
Sir James Chettam. Recall, however, that Celia is not distanced
from but rather closely involved in the situation, insofar as she
is party to Chettam’s visit with the Brookes and insofar, too, as
Dorothea mistakenly thinks that Celia is the object of Chettam’s
romantic regard. Recall, further, that Celia’s assessment derives
both from her conversation with Dorothea immediately prior to
the scene at issue and also from a much longer history of direct,
face-to-face interactions with her sibling. These interactions in-
form Celia’s understanding of Dorothea’s attitude toward Chet-
tam speciÀcally, her more general diagnosis of Dorothea’s lack
of tolerance for divergent perspectives (and its bearing on Doro-
thea’s prospects for marriage), and her analysis of the role of re-
ligion in Dorothea’s life vis-à-vis her family. In portraying how
these characters draw on a variety of contextual and interac-
tional resources to make sense of one another’s minds, Eliot’s
text models methods of folk-psychological reasoning that do
not centrally involve theorizing about or simulating invisible,
internal mental states. Instead, the emphasis is on how minds
are lodged in the structure of social interactions. The passage
thus accords with research suggesting that the I-originarity of
others is accessible across various types of encounters and that
such accessibility therefore cannot serve as a criterion for dis-
tinctively Àctional minds.
Indeed, Celia’s intimate familiarity with Dorothea’s life course,
and the manner in which she undoubtedly draws on her famil-
iarity with that larger context to assess probable reasons for her
sister’s actions, points to the plausibility of another way of char-
acterizing the relationship between narrative discourse and folk
psychology. This other perspective inverts the approach used
by analysts who argue that folk-psychological competencies are
needed for people to be able to make sense of stories, and in-
stead suggests that storytelling practices are at the root of folk
psychology itself (Bruner 1990; Hutto 2008; Herman 2009b).
On this account, Celia is engaged in story-based procedures for
action modeling; that is, Celia uses her own evolving sense of
Dorothea’s life story to construct a model of how the actions
Dorothea performs are situated in time and (social) space, and
introduction 17
of how they emerge from and impinge upon the larger pattern
of actions that constitutes her life course. Accordingly, it is not
that folk-psychological abilities support the construction and
interpretation of a story of self or other; instead, the construc-
tion of the story facilitates reasoning about one’s own and oth-
ers’ mental states, in Àctional as well as real-world scenarios, by
allowing those states to be intermeshed with broader contexts
for acting and interacting.
This subsection has provided only a bare sketch of some of the
key issues bound up with research on folk psychology and how
it bears, in turn, on studies of the structure of Àctional minds.
But my larger point is that what I have termed the Exceptionality
Thesis can be questioned from two directions: on the one hand,
by arguing that encounters with Àctional minds are mediated by
the same heuristics used to interpret everyday minds (call this the
Mediation argument); on the other hand, by arguing that every-
day minds can be experienced in ways that the Cartesian prem-
ises of commentators like Hamburger and Cohn disallow (call
this the Accessibility argument). Furthermore, the questioning
of the Exceptionality Thesis is in a sense the starting point for
all the approaches to Àctional minds outlined by the chapters in
this volume — approaches that diversify the routes along which
both the Mediation and Accessibility arguments can be pursued.
In the following subsection, I therefore provide a synopsis of the
chapters viewed as contributions to a more general case against
Exceptionality. I should stress that the authors themselves do
not cast their analyses in these terms. Nonetheless, I believe that
linking their chapters to the issues under discussion may help
highlight interconnections among the contributors’ framing as-
sumptions, interpretive procedures, and conclusions.
18 david her m a n
narratives. More speciÀcally, Lockett argues that the Old Eng-
lish narratives that she discusses are grounded in a nondualist,
corporeal conception of mind. Previous scholars have sought to
use conceptual metaphor theory to characterize Old English rep-
resentations of the mind as metaphoric projections of the source
domain of bodily, physical processes into the target domain of
mental phenomena. According to these accounts, conceptual met-
aphors facilitated the interpretation of the nature, causes, and
signs of mental distress — for example, by affording a construal
scheme based on the mechanisms of heat energy. By contrast,
Lockett suggests that Old English narratives were shaped by and
in turn helped shape folk understandings of the mind as literally
corporeal, or localized in and inextricably interconnected with
the body. Such folk models predated and conÁicted with “Neo-
platonic philosophy and early Christian anthropologies that em-
phasize the ontological and moral opposition between the Áeshly
body and the soul.” Not only are pre-Christian representations
of Àctional minds mediated by the corporeal model, then; what
is more, those represented minds helped consolidate the model
itself and make other minds legible — accessible — via observed
bodily processes and behaviors.
Monika Fludernik’s chapter on Middle English narratives like-
wise gives support to both the Mediation and Accessibility ar-
guments. She extends Palmer’s (2004) critique of the verbal
bias of the speech-category approach, arguing that the heuris-
tics used to make sense of representations of speech in medi-
eval narratives need to be supplemented with other strategies
when it comes to interpreting Middle English methods for pre-
senting Àctional minds. But at the same time, Fludernik’s ap-
proach points up how the mind-relevant heuristics straddle the
divide between Àctional and nonÀctional contexts. For exam-
ple, basic and general folk-psychological abilities are needed to
parse Àctional presentations of — as well as ordinary encounters
with — gestures and bodily movements indicative of emotional
disturbance; the same goes for the discourse cues used by medi-
eval writers to prompt inferences about collective or group minds.
The folk-psychological abilities activated by such cues are argu-
introduction 19
ably trans-situational, and hence support Mediation while also
accounting for the Accessibility of everyday minds.
Meanwhile, in an interesting twist on both arguments against
Exceptionality, F. Elizabeth Hart, in the Àrst of the two chap-
ters contained in part 2, “Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century
Minds,” suggests that the spread of literacy had by the 1500s cre-
ated a new, “reading-based consciousness,” leading to new possi-
bilities for immersion in storyworlds such as those evoked by the
late sixteenth-century romances Hart discusses. In turn, these
unprecedented narrative engagements led to new strategies for
representing human interiority; characters now exhibited men-
tal traits and aptitudes that were encountered for the Àrst time
(on a large scale) by early modern readers, thanks to the cogni-
tion-extending and-enhancing nature of written language itself.19
On Hart’s account, then, engagements with Àctional minds, far
from being Exceptional, afforded prototypes for emergent forms
of mental activity, while the written texts in which those Àctional
consciousnesses were presented afforded a new form of scaffold-
ing for memory and for thinking — and thus new routes of access
to the everyday mind. Bradburn’s approach, too, is at odds with
the Exceptionality Thesis. Drawing on the cognitive-linguistic
work on conceptual metaphors, to which Lockett also alludes,
Bradburn’s chapter explores how Àctional texts from the seven-
teenth century deploy, at multiple levels, imagery deriving from
humans’ embodied experience — speciÀcally, imagery allowing
the mind to be construed, across any number of discourse en-
vironments, as a body moving in space. Representations of
Àctional minds, in other words, are mediated by the same body-
anchored and -oriented imagery as representations of minds cir-
culating in other, nonÀctional contexts. What is more, by allowing
for the sustained elaboration of conceptual metaphors and in-
depth exploration of their semantic entailments, Àctional nar-
ratives like the ones Bradburn discusses extend and strengthen
the semiotic web in which our own and other minds can be sit-
uated, both within and outside of the domain of Àction.
Part 3 of the volume turns to eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-
tury methods for presenting Àctional minds. Zunshine draws
20 david her m a n
explicitly on the theory-based approach to folk psychology char-
acterized earlier in this introduction to explore ubiquitous scenes
of triangulated mind reading in contexts of benefaction; such
scenes, in eighteenth-century narratives as well as other texts,
involve constellations of more or less deeply layered attributions
of mental states by givers, receivers, and observers. Zunshine’s
approach is anti-Exceptionalist not only because it uses a gen-
eral account of folk-psychological competence to investigate Àc-
tional representations of characters engaged in efforts to read
other minds, but also because it combines this approach with
a historicist argument that “the Àctional hierarchy of mental
complexity involving the giver, the receiver, and the observer
was co-implicated in eighteenth-century constructions of class
boundaries and social mobility.” Fictional minds must be read
via the same folk-psychological abilities used to attribute men-
tal states to nonÀctional minds; in turn, those abilities both
shape and are shaped by sociocultural situations in which they
are more or less commonly exercised.
The two chapters devoted to nineteenth-century representa-
tions of Àctional minds develop other strands of the Mediation
argument. David Vallins suggests that in contrast with realist
narratives, where characters’ physical environments color but
do not constitute their subjectivities, in Romantic storyworlds
landscapes and the moods they evoke are mutually implicated
in one another, such that experiences of the natural world afford
an indissoluble nexus of perceptual and affective states. Hence,
following up on Lockett’s and Bradburn’s analyses of the links be-
tween metaphor and mind, Vallins points to complex metaphor-
ical equations between landscapes and psychological states, in
which the mind is at once tenor and vehicle. Engaging with Ro-
mantic minds requires engaging with the landscapes for action
and interaction — and vice versa. Nicholas Dames, meanwhile,
shows how narrative representations of interiority later in the
nineteenth century were inÁuenced by emergent materialist or
physiological understandings of the mind-brain. Here the Medi-
ation argument doubles back on an extreme form of the Acces-
sibility argument. Demonstrating how physiological psychology
introduction 21
impinged on novelists’ strategies for representing Àctional minds,
Dames’s chapter also explores ideas that contributed to the de-
velopment of behaviorist models in the early twentieth century,
in which mental states are evacuated — as merely epiphenome-
nal, of no explanatory value, vis-à-vis observed conduct.20
Part 4 of the volume, Ànally, focuses on models of the mind
in modernist and postmodernist narratives, with my own and
Alan Palmer’s chapters outlining anti-Exceptionalist approaches
to Àctional consciousnesses created from 1880 to 1945 and from
1945 to the present, respectively. My chapter disputes accounts of
modernism based on the claim that early twentieth-century writ-
ers participated in and radicalized an “inward turn,” a movement
away from the external, material world into an internal, mental
domain.21 Rather, taking issue both with internalist or cognitivist
conceptions of the mind and with efforts to align modernist nar-
ratives with such internalist models, my chapter explores parallels
between early twentieth-century texts and “enactivist” theories
of mind premised on tight linkages among action, perception,
and cognition. In a way that offers support to both the Media-
tion and Accessibility arguments, I contend that, like enactivist
theories, modernist narratives foreground “action loops” (Clark
1997, 35) that arise from the way intelligent agents are embed-
ded in their surrounding environments. Per Accessibility, minds
are lodged in, knowable from, what people do; per Mediation,
the quality or character of Àctional minds, like that of everyday
minds, is a function of how they are understood to be situated
in broader contexts of action and interaction. Finally, Palmer’s
discussion of postmodern Àctional minds uses attribution the-
ory — or the study of “how narrators, characters, and readers at-
tribute states of mind to others and to themselves” — to explore
instances of “attributional unreliability” in texts marked by on-
tological playfulness, or a foregrounding of issues related to the
making and unmaking of worlds. Rooted in part in theory-based
approaches to folk psychology, Palmer’s concern with procedures
for attributing mental states provides direct support for the Me-
diation argument. At the same time, his emphasis on the dis-
22 david her m a n
cursive contexts of attribution, or how minds are grounded in
certain ways of producing and interpreting discourse, also con-
nects up with the Accessibility argument.
introduction 23
mind representation that are built into narrative viewed as a sys-
tem for worldmaking. At issue is whether the system has been
used differently, at different times, to build storyworlds popu-
lated with minds.
Diachronic research, then, allows the methods of mind repre-
sentation found in a given text to be compared with those used
in earlier and later narratives; the focus is now on commonali-
ties and contrasts among narratives from different epochs and
any trajectory of change that the narratives might reveal when
examined together.23 Over the longer term, story analysts will
need to employ — and ideally combine — many kinds of investi-
gative tools to study patterns of change of this sort. Some of rel-
evant tools are those being developed as part of quantitative,
corpus-based research that uses large, often multimillion-word
narrative corpora either to test or to generate hypotheses about
the structure of stories — including hypotheses about changing
distributions of mind-evoking cues in stories written at different
times. Also relevant are tools of the kind deployed by contribu-
tors to the present volume. Rather than involving calculations of
the rates of occurrence of targeted features in large collections of
narrative data, these tools have been developed as part of qualita-
tive approaches based on in-depth examinations of case studies.
Such approaches and the tools developed under their auspices
can help model how communities of readers (as represented by
the analyst) typically engage with or experience Àctional minds;
identify which textual cues bear most saliently on that process of
engagement; and thereby create a broader framework for inquiry
in which the quantitative methods just mentioned can also be
rooted — as a means for testing and reÀning concepts that grow
out of the phenomenology of reading.24
Reading the chapters of this volume in sequence will afford a
sense of how qualitative approaches grounded in a small cluster
of sample narratives can help generate new research questions
for studying the development of techniques for representing Àc-
tional minds.25 These research questions can be probed more
fully either through further elaboration of the models in which
24 david her m a n
they were formulated or by expanding the corpora under consid-
eration and using quantitative methods to test the robustness of
the patterns of constancy and change identiÀed on the basis of
qualitative analysis. Hence, taken together, the volume’s chap-
ters provide the foundation for an entire program for research,
or several such programs, focused on mapping trajectories of
change in narrative methods for mind presentation. In order to
crystallize just a few of the issues at stake, the passage from Mid-
dlemarch, which I reproduce here as passage B, can be compared
with the following two excerpts. Passage A is from a text pub-
lished about 125 years before Eliot’s: namely, Henry Fielding’s
1749 novel Tom Jones; passage C is from a narrative published 135
years later: namely, Ian McEwan’s 2007 novel On Chesil Beach.
Taken from chapter 3 of Fielding’s narrative, passage A registers
the reaction of Deborah Wilkins, Squire Allworthy’s servant, to
the initial discovery of the foundling (Tom Jones) in the squire’s
bedroom. Passage C is the Ànal paragraph of McEwan’s text. In
this part of the novel, set some four decades after the disastrous
attempt at sexual intercourse on their wedding night that effec-
tively ended Edward and Florence Mayhew’s marriage, Edward
reevaluates events associated with that night and his own sub-
sequent response to those events.
Passage A: [1] It will not be wondered at that a creature who had so strict
a regard to decency in her own person, should be shocked at the least de-
viation from it in another. [2] She therefore no sooner opened the door,
and saw her master standing by the bedside in his shirt, with a candle in
his hand, than she started back in a most terrible fright, and might per-
haps have swooned away, had he not now recollected his being undrest,
and put an end to her terrors by desiring her to stay without the door till
he had thrown some cloathes over his back, and was become incapable
of shocking the pure eyes of Mrs Deborah Wilkins, who, though in the
Àfty-second year of her age, vowed she had never beheld a man without
his coat. [3] Sneerers and prophane wits may perhaps laugh at her Àrst
fright; yet my graver reader, when he considers the time of night, the sum-
mons from her bed, and the situation in which she found her master, will
highly justify and applaud her conduct, unless the prudence which must
introduction 25
be supposed to attend maidens at that period of life at which Mrs Deb-
orah had arrived, should a little lessen his admiration. (Fielding 1861
[1749], 56–57)
Passage B: [1] Celia thought privately, “Dorothea quite despises Sir James
Chettam; I believe she would not accept him.” [2] Celia felt that this was
a pity. [3] She had never been deceived as to the object of the baronet’s
[Sir James Chettam’s] interest. [4] Sometimes, indeed, she had reÁected
that Dodo would perhaps not make a husband happy who had not her
way of looking at things; and stiÁed in the depths of her heart was the
feeling that her sister was too religious for family comfort. [5] Notions
and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sit-
ting down, or even eating. (Eliot 1910 [1872], 25)
Passage C: [1] When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had
let that girl with her violin go. [2] Now, of course, he saw that her self-
effacing proposal [Florence’s unorthodox but well-meant suggestion that
they remain married but that Edward sleep with other women] was quite
irrelevant. [3] All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his
reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.
[4] Love and patience — if only he had had them both at once — would
surely have seen them through. [5] And then what unborn children might
have had their chances, what young girl with a headband might have be-
come his loved familiar? [6] This is how the entire course of a life can be
changed — by doing nothing. [7] On Chesil Beach he could have called out
to Florence, he could have gone after her. [8] He did not know, or would
not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her dis-
tress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more
hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance,
and she would have turned back. [9] Instead, he stood in cold and righ-
teous silence in the summer’s dusk, watching her hurry along the shore,
the sound of her difÀcult progress lost to the breaking of small waves, un-
til she was a blurred, receding point against the immense straight road of
shingle gleaming in the pallid light. (McEwan 2007, 202–3)
26 david her m a n
that are more detached from her vantage point on and stance
toward the unfolding events. As mentioned before, sentence b5
anchors a generalized or gnomic sentiment about religious “no-
tions and scruples” in Celia’s own take on Dorothea’s attitudes
and behaviors. By contrast, in sentence a1 narration of Deborah’s
response is subordinated to the statement of a general maxim
about how people tend to be shocked in direct proportion with
the degree to which they hold themselves to a strict regimen of
conduct — and, by implication, the degree to which they are anx-
ious about deviating from that regimen themselves. Sentence a2,
spanning ten clauses, redescends into the particulars of the sit-
uation and the characters’ reactions to it. The sentence moves
from an event sequence involving Deborah’s action (opening the
door to Squire Allworthy’s bedroom), perception (seeing Allwor-
thy in his nightshirt), and emotional response (starting back in
fright), to a report of the Squire’s own reaction via a counter-
factual statement; this statement highlights what might have
happened had Allworthy not recalled his state of undress and re-
quested that Deborah wait outside the door till he could clothe
himself more fully. But even here the Ànal three clauses of a2
detach themselves from the characters’ vantage points, ironiz-
ing Deborah’s response by alluding to her “pure eyes,” despite
her relatively advanced age. Sentence a3 continues this move-
ment away from reporting the speciÀcs of the characters’ per-
ceptions, inferences, and emotional reactions. The Àrst part of
the sentence contrasts the mocking reactions of “sneerers and
prophane wits,” who are likely to laugh at Deborah’s elaborate
show of modesty, with the approving reactions of “graver read-
ers,” who are likely to view her conduct as warranted by the cir-
cumstances. But the rest of the sentence then appeals to broader
social norms regarding “prudence,” thereby aligning the evalu-
ative standpoint of the narration more closely with that of the
prophane wits than that of the graver readers. More generally,
whereas sentence b5 restricts the scope of its assessment of re-
ligion and its effects, embedding that evaluation in Celia’s atti-
tudinal stance, sentence a3 subordinates the narrated events to
broader social frameworks for evaluating them.
introduction 27
But does passage C continue the trajectory that can be dis-
cerned in the movement from passage A to passage B? In other
words, when the excerpt from McEwan is compared with the
passage from Eliot, are storyworld events — and assessments of
those events — anchored even more Àrmly in standpoints situ-
ated within the world of the narrative? The Àrst part of the pas-
sage does ground the worldmaking process in Edward’s vantage
point on events. Sentences c1 and c2 exemplify what speech-
category theorists would call thought report, though the phrase
“of course” in c2 is ambiguous in scope: does it reÁect Edward’s
own sense of how far he has come in his understanding and eval-
uation of the events involving Florence, or is this assessment rel-
atively detached from Edward’s thought-processes, growing out
of the narrative report of that mental activity? Sentences c3–c5
continue to anchor the narration in Edward’s retrospective eval-
uation of the events of his wedding night, with discourse cues
included in c4 functioning especially overtly as markers of Ed-
ward’s subjectivity. Relevant here is the use of the counterfactual,
“if only” construction, embedded in another, larger counterfac-
tual statement. The “if only” clause underscores the ongoing
regret that Edward can be assumed to feel about this unactual-
ized combination of traits (love plus patience). Then the subse-
quent use of the hedge “surely” afÀxes a degree of doubt to the
supposition that that same combination of traits, if Edward had
possessed them both simultaneously when he was married to
Florence, would in fact have seen the newlyweds through any
difÀculties.
But with sentences c6 and c7 the excerpt’s center of grav-
ity begins to shift. True, the generalized diagnosis, in c6, that
an entire life course can be changed by inaction, is followed in
c7 by further counterfactual statements of what Edward him-
self might have done on Chesil Beach that night so long ago. Yet
sentence c8 detaches itself from Edward’s vantage point, using
more counterfactual constructions to report what he did not know
(or would not have cared to know) about Florence’s own state of
mind on that occasion. Here readers learn that the sound of Ed-
ward’s voice would have been a deliverance to Florence, and that
28 david her m a n
she would indeed have turned back had he called out to her. Fi-
nally, in sentence c9 the Àrst part of the report provides an ex-
ternalized evaluation of Edward’s “cold and righteous silence”;
arguably this assessment issues neither from Florence’s stand-
point on their wedding night nor from Edward’s retrospective
standpoint four decades later. As the sentence proceeds, however,
the narration is again tied to Edward’s mental activity, speciÀ-
cally to his past visual and auditory perceptions when Florence
walked away, on her route back to the hotel and then out of Ed-
ward’s life altogether.
Overall, then, no direct, linear trajectory of change describes
the variation in methods of mind presentation used in passages
A, B, and C. Excerpts A and C both deploy modes of narration in
which generalized reports or assessments become detached from
characters’ vantage points on the storyworld, meaning that the
degree to which the narratives are perspectivally grounded does
not, in these three excerpts, increase steadily over time. And a
different pattern characterizes the changes in the amplitude of
variation within each passage. To synopsize: passage A reveals
considerable variation in the degree to which parts of the nar-
ration are grounded in characters’ perceptions and evaluations;
passage B, less variation on this score; and passage C, even wider
variation than A when it comes to shifts in the degree to which
reports are tied to characters’ standpoints.
Clearly, the foregoing comments about trajectories of change
are impressionistic, based on three short excerpts taken from a
very limited corpus of stories from a comparatively narrow tem-
poral span of narrative discourse in English. Hence the patterns
just outlined are of dubious robustness; they may not bear up
when subjected to further scrutiny through a wider sampling of
mind-representing passages from these three texts or through
cross-comparisons between these texts and the many other nar-
ratives that can be used as data points — both within the time
span at issue and also across a wider range of periods. These brief
remarks nonetheless indicate the kinds of questions that can be
asked, and potentially translated into quantitative, corpus-based
procedures of analysis, when one adopts a diachronic perspec-
introduction 29
tive on consciousness representation. My discussion also sug-
gests why this book is more than just the sum of its parts. Each
of the chapters that follows contributes to the larger, collabora-
tive project of building a corpus of period-typical mind represen-
tations and using that corpus to try to understand better what
(Àctional) minds are and how they have evolved.
Notes
I would like to express my gratitude to Jan Alber and Henrik Skov Nielsen for their
astute comments on an earlier draft of this introduction.
30 david her m a n
niques for consciousness representation, my own working assumption is
that the study of mind as theme or narrative topic and the study of strate-
gies used to portray minds are interdependent areas of inquiry. Techniques
for consciousness representation are rooted in and shaped by conceptions
of what the mind is and how it works, while, conversely, understandings of
the mind cannot be studied in isolation from the methods by which they
are Àgured in Àctional and other narratives. See Alan Palmer’s chapter for
a parallel argument: namely, that considering how Àctional minds are pre-
sented in narratives (at the discourse level) entails considering their struc-
ture and contents (at the story level). See also note 8 below.
4. For an especially rich treatment of issues of speech and thought rep-
resentation from a cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary perspective, see
Tammi and Tommola (2006).
5. For her part, Maria Mäkelä (2006) questions what she views as a “ref-
erential bias” both in earlier research on consciousness representation and
in later reassessments of the research that adapt ideas from the cognitive
sciences. As Mäkelä puts it, “recent cognitive approaches tend to regard Àc-
tional and actual minds as being based on precisely the same cognitive sche-
mata” (231). In developing her critique (see also Alber et al. 2010, 119–24),
Mäkelä articulates a version of what I term the “Exceptionality Thesis,” or
the claim that readers’ engagements with Àctional minds are different in
kind than their engagements with minds outside the domain of narrative
Àction. In what follows I sketch counterarguments to this thesis.
6. As discussed in F. Elizabeth Hart’s contribution to this volume, “story-
worlds” can be deÀned as the worlds evoked by narratives, while, reciprocally,
narratives can be deÀned as blueprints for a speciÀc mode of worldmaking.
For an account of narrative as a system for creating, transforming, and ag-
gregating storyworlds, see Herman (2009a, 105–36).
7. Here I follow other commentators (e.g., Fludernik 1993, 227–79; McHale
1978; Toolan 2001 [1988], 130–40) in acknowledging the role of context in
decisions about what counts as an instance of free indirect discourse. Fur-
thermore, I should note that in suggesting that free indirect speech, though
couched as a narrative report, also contains expressivity markers that point
to the speech patterns of a particular character, my comments resonate with
the “dual-voice hypothesis” disputed by BanÀeld (1982, 2005). Arguing that
“certain sentences of Àction do not occur in the spoken language and can-
not be said to be enunciated by a narrator” (2005, 396; cf. 1982, 183–89),
BanÀeld takes issue with the assumption that narrative Àction is a form of
communication. Instead, she subdivides Àctional narratives into two kinds
of sentences, “both distinct from sentences of discourse [which are in fact
introduction 31
governed by a logic of communication]: sentences of narration per se and sen-
tences which represent consciousness” (1982, 143). Drawing on the ideas of
Hamburger and the linguist Emile Benveniste, BanÀeld contends that sen-
tences of third-person narration present events without the mediation of
a narrator, their “tenses . . . anchored to no now” (164). Sentences of free
indirect thought are similarly speakerless, or not governed by the rules of
communicative discourse, because for BanÀeld it is impossible for a speak-
er’s discourse and another’s subjectivity or “self” to co-occur (1982, 94).
Though I will not take up BanÀeld’s arguments in detail in what follows, I
do see them as harmonizing with the Exceptionality Thesis regarding Àc-
tional minds — a thesis against which this volume I think militates.
8. For further discussion of the geography of mind at work in this tradi-
tion of research — that is, the assumption that modes of thought represen-
tation can be arranged along a scale corresponding to degrees of distance
from the interior domain of the mind — see my chapter in this volume. Note,
too, that this scalar model exempliÀes the entanglement of the “what”
and “how” aspects of mind representation, as described earlier. The scale
at issue, like the claim that particular narrative techniques occupy incre-
ments upon it, is interlinked with a conception of the mind as situated on
the proximal end of an axis that stretches between the realm of individual
consciousness or subjectivity “in here” and the realm of the larger social
and material world “out there.”
9. Daniel Dennett characterizes such folk-psychological rules of thumb
in the following way: “very roughly, folk psychology has it that beliefs are
information-bearing states of people that arise from perceptions and that,
together with appropriately related desires, lead to intelligent action” (1987,
46). In my discussion the term “folk psychology” is meant to refer in a ge-
neric way to the heuristics used to make sense of the conduct of self and
other. By contrast, the term “theory of mind” effectively predecides the na-
ture of the heuristics at issue by suggesting that they have the same struc-
ture as (scientiÀc) theories. But as Jens Brockmeier pointed out in a personal
communication, the term “folk psychology” carries potentially problem-
atic connotations of its own. SpeciÀcally, it may be used to draw an invidi-
ous distinction between a properly scientiÀc psychology, on the one hand,
and everyday understandings of how actions relate to reasons for acting,
on the other hand (see, e.g., Stich 1983). In contrast with pejorative usages
of this sort, I construe the concepts, classiÀcations, and reasoning proce-
dures bound up with folk psychology as comparable to those at work in a
broad range of folk-taxonomic systems, ethnobotanical, ethnolinguistic,
and other (cf. Herman 2007). Like these other systems, ethnopsychology,
32 david her m a n
as it might be called, comprises methods for interpreting minds that need
to be studied in parallel with — rather than viewed as a deÀcient precursor
to — the methods of interpretation that have been developed in scientiÀc or
academic psychology (see also Sorrell 1991, 147–48).
10. Nor am I suggesting that interpreters of Àctional narratives adopt the
same stance toward the situations portrayed in those texts that they adopt
toward situations in narratives that make a claim to fact. Rather, as analysts
such as Doležel (1998), Cohn (1999), Pavel (1986), and Ryan (1991) have ar-
gued, interpreters orient differently to stories that evoke what is taken to
be a (falsiÀable) version of our more or less shared, public world than they
do to Àctional narratives, which evoke what Doležel (1998) terms “sover-
eign” worlds. In connection with the autonomous, stand-alone worlds of Àc-
tion, it simply does not make sense to try to conÀrm or falsify reports about
what goes on, in the way that a prosecuting attorney seeks to corroborate
via the testimony of multiple witnesses a version of what happened during
the commission of a crime. Hence it would be a category mistake to attempt
to characterize as true or false the events surrounding Dorothea Brooke’s
marriage with Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch; any additional retellings
of these events would, rather than provide corroborating or disconÀrmatory
evidence vis-à-vis what happens in Eliot’s narrative, instead create new Àc-
tional worlds. However, acknowledging the ontological autonomy or nonfal-
siÀability of storyworlds like Eliot’s does not provide warrant for the further
claim that only Àctional narratives afford access to the I-originarity of an-
other. Granted, Àctional narratives have the power to stipulate as true re-
ports about characters’ mind-contents. But the onus is on Exceptionalists
to demonstrate that readers have to use different interpretive protocols to
make sense of such stipulated mental states and dispositions, in compari-
son with the protocols they use for construing actual minds. Again, then,
I stress the need to disentangle questions about the authentication of re-
ports about minds from questions about how to interpret those reports in
order to gain access to the minds at issue.
11. Thus, Richardson (2006) argues that “the trajectory of recent liter-
ary practice” reveals “extreme narrators and acts of narration [that] have
continued to move ever further beyond the established boundaries of re-
alism, humanism, and conventional representation, and these new works
pose severe problems for narratological models that are solely based on
mimetic works” (138). Earlier, Richardson describes as follows the conven-
tions for representing minds in texts he characterizes as mimetic: “A Àrst
person narrator cannot know what is in the minds of others, and a third
person narrator may perform this, and a few other such acts, but may not
introduction 33
stray beyond the established conventions of depicting such perceptions:
the thought of one character may not be lodged within the mind of another
without any intervening plausible explanation” (6–7). I would argue by con-
trast that, in light of the research on folk psychology that I discuss in this
section, the modes of narration that Richardson characterizes as unnatural
or “anti-mimetic” converge with present-day understandings of how minds
actually work. Especially pertinent in this connection are accounts of the
accessibility of others’ minds via the embodied, socially situated practices
in which they are lodged.
12. Hence the volume seeks to avoid the unidirectional borrowing — that
is, the importation of ideas from the cognitive sciences into traditions of
narrative study but not vice versa — that Sternberg (2003) rightly charac-
terizes as problematic.
13. As Sodian (2005) puts it, Premack and Woodruff “argued that the
ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others requires theoretical
knowledge because mental states are unobservable and are inferred, like
theoretical terms in the sciences. Because the attribution of mental states
improves our predictions and explanations of human behavior, the con-
ceptual system underlying these attributions has the explanatory power
of a theory” (95).
14. I am grateful to Dan Hutto for discussions about some of the ideas
developed in this paragraph. For more details about the two accounts of
folk psychology, see Gallagher (2005), Hutto (2008), Hutto and Ratcliffe
(2007), Nichols and Stich (2003), Slors and Macdonald (2008), and Za-
havi (2007).
15. For more on the concept of attribution and the way attributions play
out in narrative contexts, see Alan Palmer’s chapter in this volume.
16. Currie (2004) argues that, although engagement with narrative Àc-
tion requires simulation of some kind, and often involves imaginative pro-
jections into the situation of characters (species of simulation for which
Currie reserves the term “empathy” [179–88]), simulative responses can also
sometimes be of a more impersonal sort. In such impersonal simulation, I
will, while interpreting a narrative like Eliot’s, engage in “belief-like imag-
inings” or “desire-like imaginings” but without simulating a speciÀc char-
acter’s mental state. For example, having encountered Casaubon prior to
the passage I have excerpted, readers (especially rereaders of the novel) may
experience desire-like imaginings that Dorothea not fall under Casaubon’s
spell — imaginings that extend beyond Celia’s desires, for example.
17. Stawarska (2007) characterizes this bias as follows: “received thinking
about folk psychology . . . privileges a third-person approach towards one’s fel-
34 david her m a n
low beings, about whom one needs to theorize or whom one needs to model
by means of simulational routines, [to] the exclusion of the second-person
approach, where the interaction is a direct source of mutual understand-
ing” (79). That same bias is evident in Wimmer and Perner’s (1983) classic
study of false beliefs. In one version of the study children observe, from a
distanced position, others engaging in activities that require a modiÀcation
of the observer’s beliefs about what the observed parties believe.
18. Compare here Bruner’s remark: “Only by replacing [a] transactional
model of mind with an isolating individualistic one have Anglo-American
philosophers been able to make Other Minds seem so opaque and impen-
etrable” (1990, 33).
19. Hart bases her analysis, in part, on Donald’s (1991) account of the de-
velopment of written language as an especially powerful support system for,
and transformer of, cognitive processes and abilities. Along the same lines,
Clark (1997) has argued that the use of linguistic and other props as tools
for thinking provides grounds for a view of the mind as extended or criss-
crossing between intelligent agents and their surrounding environments:
“Just as a neural-network controller for moving an arm to a target in space
will deÀne its commands to factor in the spring of muscles and the effects
of gravity, so the processes of onboard reason may learn to factor in the po-
tential contributions of textual ofÁoading and reorganization, and vocal re-
hearsal and exchange” (214).
20. See Herman (2010) for further discussion of the place of this ex-
treme form of the Accessibility argument in the broader context of recent
research on the mind.
21. Indeed, this understanding of modernism and the Exceptionality The-
sis are mutually reinforcing, with the thesis positioning narratives of the
period as paradigmatically concerned with otherwise inaccessible psycho-
logical depths and the narratives of the period ostensibly foregrounding the
experiences of interiority that are taken, by Exceptionalists, to be the hall-
mark of readerly engagements with Àctional minds. See Cohn (1978, 8–9)
and, for counterarguments, my chapter in this volume.
22. For an analysis of focalization strategies along these lines, see Her-
man (2003b, 310–17).
23. As Palmer (2004) puts it, “the diachronic study of Àctional minds
might . . . suggest some answers to the following two questions: What are
the features of the Àctional-mind constructions of a particular historical pe-
riod that are characteristic of that period and different from other periods?
What are the similarities in Àctional-mind constructions that obtain across
introduction 35
some, most, or all periods?” (240–41). See also Fludernik’s (2003) sugges-
tive account of the beneÀts of the “diachronization of narratology.”
24. See Herman (2005) and Salway and Herman (2011) for further discus-
sion of the possibilities and limitations of quantitative methods of this sort,
including both top-down or hypothesis-driven methods, and bottom-up or
data-driven methods. For a corpus-based approach to thought (and speech)
representation speciÀcally, see Semino and Short (2004). For more general
discussion of the qualitative/quantitative distinction itself, see Johnstone
(2000). To paraphrase Johnstone’s account, whereas qualitative methods
address questions about how and why data have the particular character
that they do, quantitative methods address questions about how much (the
degree to which) and how often (the frequency with which) those data dis-
play a given property or set of properties.
25. The contributors’ chapters can be read in tandem with wider-scope ac-
counts of the development of consciousness representation, such as Lodge’s
(2002) and Wood’s (2008, 139–68). These commentators’ bird’s-eye per-
spectives complement the Àner-grained, more historically localized anal-
yses presented here.
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40 david her m a n
Part I
Representing Minds in
Old and Middle English Narrative
1. 700–1050
Embodiment, Metaphor, and
the Mind in Old English Narrative
leslie lockett
No man, no hero under heaven, knows how my mind fails, occupied with
books; sometimes a Áame rises up in me, my mind seethes oppressively
near my heart. (aspr 6:33, ll. 59b–62)1
Since the late 1990s, most studies of Old English (oe) represen-
tations of the mind interpret such passages as manifestations
of conceptual metaphors, such as mental distress is heat
energy (see, for example, Low 1998 and Mize 2008). Although
the application of conceptual metaphor theory has shed valu-
able light on oe narratives of mental activity, it is worth paus-
ing to consider whether it is entirely appropriate to use the term
“metaphor” in this context. To do so presupposes that the An-
glo-Saxons regarded mind and body as discrete domains and that
the supposedly abstract mind takes on concrete characteristics
solely by virtue of metaphorical mappings from the domain of
the human body or of other objects observed in nature. Current
43
metaphor theory, insofar as it interprets all forms of conceptu-
alization as blends of source and target domains, seems to ren-
der moot the question of whether a given conceptual system is
viewed as literal or metaphorical by those who deploy it in dis-
course. In this chapter, however, I maintain that it is proÀtable
to distinguish between conceptual systems that have literal ver-
sus metaphorical status for members of particular textual com-
munities. oe narrative abounds in depictions of an embodied
mind, and I maintain that for the Anglo-Saxon audience, this
mind was not only “embodied” in the sense used by metaphor
theorists but also literally corporeal; they thought of the mind
as the part of the body responsible for thought. Modern audi-
ences misconstrue this model of the mind as a conceptual meta-
phor because our own habitual mind-body dualism predisposes
us to expect that our linguistic forerunners likewise believed the
mind was incorporeal and intangible.2
In the Àrst part of this chapter I survey typical characteriza-
tions of the mind in oe narratives of mental distress. Next, in
support of my argument that these texts depict a literally embod-
ied mind, I draw on ideas proposed by Lakoff and Johnson un-
der the rubric of embodied realism, which they deÀne brieÁy as
“the view that the locus of experience, meaning, and thought is
the ongoing series of embodied organism-environment interac-
tions that constitute our understanding of the world” (Johnson
and Lakoff 2002, 249). Embodied realism, although typically in-
voked in nonhistorical discussions of the cognitive processes be-
hind metaphor generation, also suggests a mechanism by which
a particular model of mind might begin as a literal expression
of folk psychology but gradually become metaphorical. Finally,
I turn to the discipline of transcultural psychiatry, which aims
to remedy the tendency of Western psychiatric practitioners to
impose upon non-Western patients illness categories based on
their own mind-body dualism. I argue that readers of oe nar-
ratives should similarly set aside their preconceptions about
the mind-body relationship, including the assumption that An-
glo-Saxon narratives of the embodied mind were necessarily
metaphorical.
44 leslie lockett
Learned and Folk DeÀnitions of the Mind
Because users of oe had no exact equivalent for our Modern Eng-
lish word “mind,” it is useful to begin with a few remarks about
what the mind was in the surviving texts of the Anglo-Saxon
period. oe texts of all genres use the word mod to refer to that
part of the human being responsible for all kinds of mental ac-
tivity — rational, emotional, contemplative, mnemonic, and so
forth — and poets also had recourse to the near-synonyms hyge,
sefa, and ferhð. However, as Malcolm Godden Àrst demonstrated,
the corpus of oe literature preserves two mutually irreconcilable
opinions on the relationship of the mind to the other elements
of the human being. A few texts by highly learned Anglo-Saxon
authors subscribe to the “classical tradition,” informed by Neo-
platonic philosophy and early Christian anthropologies that em-
phasize the ontological and moral opposition between the Áeshly
body and the soul. In this tradition, the mod is merely one com-
ponent of the soul (oe sawol or gast); this soul serves the mul-
tiple functions of enlivening the Áesh, carrying out all mental
activities including the governance of the body, and participat-
ing in the afterlife when the body has died (Godden 1985, 271–
85). Straightforward textual evidence for the classical tradition is
easily identiÀed, because this tradition characteristically inhab-
its nonnarrative, explicitly didactic texts whose express purpose
is to render a model of the human being that can be considered
theologically or scientiÀcally authoritative (Low 1998, 43–44).
In the “vernacular tradition” (Godden 1985), by contrast, the
sawol has an exceedingly limited role as long as it resides in the
living body; its chief function is to represent the individual in the
afterlife. In this tradition, all types of thought are carried out by
the mind (mod, hyge, sefa, ferhð, and related compounds), which
is substantially and functionally separate from the soul (God-
den 1985, 285–95). If this understanding of the human being can
be considered dualistic, it is a dualism that pits the soul against
a close-knit partnership of mind and body. “[T]he soul . . . is
the helpless victim (or beneÀciary) of a separate mental faculty
which is associated with the body,” says Godden in his analysis
of the oe Soul and Body poems (1985, 289); his observation holds
Cardiocentrism
Mental activity of all kinds occurs within the container of the
breast (breost or hreðer) or within the organ of the heart (heorte).
One may perform a mental function in the breast, as when Satan
urges Eve, “gehyge on þinum breostum þæt þu inc bam twam
meaht / wite bewarigan” (consider in your breast that you both
can guard yourselves from punishment) (Genesis B, aspr 1:20,
46 leslie lockett
ll. 562–63a). Alternatively, a mental state may impinge directly
upon the chest cavity, as when the Andreas-narrator says, “Sar eft
gewod / ymb þæs beornes breost” (Grief again traveled through-
out the man’s breast) (aspr 2:36, ll. 1246b–47a), or when the nar-
rator of The Rhyming Poem complains, “Nu min hreþer is hreoh,
heofsiþum sceoh, / nydbysgum neah” (Now my breast is trou-
bled, fearful in its mournful journeys, close to troubles) (aspr
3:167–68, ll. 43–44a). Mental activity may also belong to the heart
and breast by virtue of genitive constructions (heortan geþoht) and
compound nouns (breostceare):
A young man must always be sorrowful in mind, the thought of his heart
must be cruel. Likewise must he have a cheerful countenance as well as
anxiety in his breast, a multitude of endless miseries. (Wife’s Lament,
aspr 3:211, ll. 42–45a)
Cardiocentric Heat
Heating of the mind and heart occurs in conjunction with many
intense mental states: anger, aggression, love, licit and illicit de-
sires, anxiety, grief (but compare Gevaert 2005, 10), intellectual
frustration, and cognitive impairment. The heart may be heated
while the mind experiences distress, as when the eponymous
48 leslie lockett
me bryne stigeð, / hige heortan neah hædre wealleð.” Emotional
“surges,” represented by the noun wylm or a related compound,
may afÁict the heart, as when the Exodus-narrator reports that
“wæron heaðowylmas heortan getenge, / mihtmod wera” (surges
of aggression, the rage of men, were touching their heart) (aspr
1:95, ll. 148–49a); or the whole chest cavity may seethe under the
inÁuence of mental distress, as when Beowulf’s “breost innan
weoll / þeostrum geþoncum, swa him geþywe ne wæs” (breast
seethed inwardly with dark thoughts, which was unusual for
him) (Fulk, Bjork, and Niles 2008, 80, ll. 2331b–32).
oe authors also commonly signiÀed mental swelling with
words related to the intransitive verb belgan “to swell (with rage).”6
Ælfric retells the Old Testament episode in which Naboth re-
fuses to sell his vineyard to King Ahab, which sends the king to
bed in a rage: “þa gebealh hine se cynincg and to his bedde eode,
wende hine to wage, wodlice gebolgen” (Then the king swelled
up [with rage] and went to bed, turned to face the wall, insanely
swollen [with rage]) (Skeat 1966 [1881–1900], 1:394). Conversely,
according to Vercelli Homily 4, the virtuous man is “ne eaðbilge
ne hatheort” (neither easily swollen nor hot-hearted) (Scragg
1992, 96). Less frequently, the verb seoðan, whose primary mean-
ing is “to cook in boiling liquid” (usually in culinary and medical
contexts), appears in narratives of mental activity, where it sug-
gests a prolonged state of “stewing” in one’s own misery. When
Hygelac admits to having harbored doubts and anxieties about
the undertakings of his nephew Beowulf, for instance, he says,
“Ic ðæs modceare / sorhwylmum seað, siðe ne truwode / leofes
mannes” (I simmered my worry about him in surges of sorrow;
I did not have faith in the journey of the dear man) (Fulk, Bjork,
and Niles 2008, 67, ll. 1992b–94a).
[S]æt swiðe unrot on stane beforan þære healle, & ongon mid monegum
hætum his geþohta swenced beon: & ne wiste, hwider he eode oðþe hwæt
him selest to donne wære. þa he þa longe mid swigendum nearonissum
his modes & mid þy blindan fyre soden wæs, þa geseah he semninga on
midre niht sumne mon.8
Very unhappy, Eadwine sat on a stone in front of the hall, and he began
to be oppressed by the manifold heat of his thoughts, and he did not know
where he should go or what would be best for him to do. Then when he had
for a long time been stewed in the silent constrictions of his mind and by
the inward Àre, then suddenly in the middle of the night he spied a cer-
tain man. (Miller 1959–63 [1890–98], 1:128)
50 leslie lockett
Elements of the hydraulic model are already present in Bede’s
Latin but are ampliÀed by the oe translator. Bede reports that
Eadwine “is troubled by the manifold heat of the thoughts” (mul-
tis . . . cogitationum aestibus afÀci), but where Bede says Eadwine
is “troubled,” the oe translator says he is “burdened” or “op-
pressed” (geswenced). Bede’s Latin also mentions Eadwine’s “con-
strictions of mind” and “inward Àre” (mentis angoribus et caeco . . .
igni), but where Bede says that Eadwine “was devoured” (car-
peretur) by these forces, the oe translator writes that Eadwine
was soden, that is, “cooked” or “stewed” (soden is the past partici-
ple of the verb seoðans, discussed earlier). (For the text of Bede’s
Latin, see Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 178.)
If the translator of the oe Bede has merely Áeshed out hydrau-
lic-model imagery found in his Latin source, the translator of the
Latin De consolatione Philosophiae by Boethius (d. 524) has gone
further, inserting a complex hydraulic-model narrative where
Boethius has none. In the Latin, Lady Philosophy explains that
those who are superÀcially the most powerful and wealthy suf-
fer from other insidious psychological afÁictions:
For here desire overthrows the heart with avaricious poisons; here roil-
ing anger brings on surges that batter the mind, which is worn down by
repressed sorrow or tormented by slippery hope. (Bieler 1957, 70, IV
m. 2, ll. 6–8)
if ever a change should come to him later on, a remedy for the trouble of
his injuries, and if his seething cares should become cooler. (Fulk, Bjork,
and Niles 2008, 12, ll. 280–83)
52 leslie lockett
diocentric heat that Beowulf hopes to assuage by cooling. Like-
wise, in Genesis B, when Satan is bitterly envious of the Àrst human
beings, the narrator reports that “weoll him on innan / hyge ymb
his heortan” (his [i.e., Satan’s] mind swelled inwardly around
his heart) (aspr 1:14, ll. 353b–54a). Later, pleased to have caused
Adam and Eve’s downfall, Satan’s messenger says, “Forþon is min
mod gehæled, / hyge ymb heortan gerume” (Therefore my mind
is healed; my mind is roomy around my heart) (aspr 1:26, ll.
758b–59a). The association of cardiocentric roominess with calm-
ness has not survived in Modern English, but when we set these
two passages together as before-and-after snapshots of the dev-
ils’ mental condition, the meaning of gerume becomes clear: the
seething and spatial constriction concomitant with their earlier
distress have ceased to squeeze the heart. Similarly, when the
Old Testament heroine Judith must slay Holofernes, she prays to
God for an end to the psychological heat that afÁicts her breast,
and God grants her relief in the form of mental spaciousness:
“þa wearð hyre rume on mode, / haligre hyht geniwod” (Then
it became roomier in her mind; hope was renewed in the holy
woman) (aspr 4:102, ll. 97b–98a).
54 leslie lockett
tual blending. A serious consideration of the relationship between
embodied realism and literal conceptual formation has been dis-
couraged by the cognitive-linguistic turn in metaphor studies,
which emphasizes the processes of mapping and blending that
dominate the human brain’s methods of conceptualization. This
ahistorical, process-oriented approach sets aside content- and con-
text-based distinctions among literal, metonymic, and metaphor-
ical language — that is, distinctions that depend upon whether a
given community of language users might perceive the semantic
content of an utterance to be literally true within the framework
of contemporary folk or learned bodies of knowledge (see Flu-
dernik, Freeman, and Freeman 1999, 384–85; Hogan 2003, 91).
Yet literary and intellectual historians cannot ignore these
content- and context-based categories, because many of the tex-
tual communities that we study did maintain a sharp distinction
between Àgurative and truth-bearing utterances. The responsi-
ble literary or intellectual historian neither throws out the dis-
tinction that his historical subjects might have made between
Àgurative and truth-bearing utterances, nor imposes upon his-
torical subjects his own framework for assessing metaphoric-
ity, but rather aims to interpret his historical subjects’ literal
and Àgurative utterances according to a historically appropri-
ate framework. In what follows, I suggest that Lakoff and John-
son’s account of embodied realism (whatever its stated purpose
or goals) can be recruited for this endeavor.
To begin, consider a spectrum of possible relationships be-
tween source and target domains, as perceived by the historical user
of a given concept. At one end of the spectrum, where source
and target domains are perceived to be wholly discrete, we have
metaphors (be they conceptual or ornamental), or statements
of the type “X is not -X.” At the other end of the spectrum, we
have statements that are perceived to be literally true, in which
source and target domains are not wholly discrete (e.g., “X1 is an
X”). In this case, the mapping of one conceptual domain onto an-
other, as happens in deductive arguments, does not involve met-
aphoric extension of the domains in question. Metonymies may
occupy intermediate positions on this spectrum, when source
56 leslie lockett
der for that embodied concept to be transformed from a literal
to a metaphorical usage, it must be challenged by an extremely
persuasive and authoritative rival conceptualization. If a rival
concept that does not conform to embodied experience merely
coexists with the embodied concept, without being either inher-
ently more persuasive or backed by a greater Àgure of author-
ity, it will be unable to supersede the embodied concept, which
is continually reinforced by subjective experience (now strongly
culturally conditioned) and everyday language.12
If I am correct in these propositions, ideas of embodied realism
can beneÀt historical study of processes by which literal concepts
acquire the status of metaphors. The metaphorization of an em-
bodied concept can scarcely begin to occur without a sustained
challenge from a scientiÀcally or theologically authoritative ri-
val, which (in the case of any culture whose scientiÀc and theo-
logical learning are transmitted in writing) we would expect to
leave discernible traces in the textual record. It may be easier to
identify the point when a rival concept Àrst arises in discourse
than when it actually eclipses the literal use of the embodied con-
cept in narrative, because the textual communities that produce
learned discourses may embrace a counterintuitive rival concept
more readily than the less learned general public, depending on
the degree to which the rival theory is promoted as authorita-
tive. During the period when counterintuitive concepts coexist
with embodied concepts, the historian might expect to Ànd ev-
idence of conceptual stratiÀcation, with the embodied concept
remaining in literal use in narrative and other discourse types
even while the counterintuitive rival has supplanted the embod-
ied concept in specialized modes of discourse.
My hypothesis is that the hydraulic model of the mind (includ-
ing the corollary notion of a corporealized mind located in the
chest cavity) has undergone a transformation of this sort in the
history of the English language: this model of mind originated
as a series of literal articulations of how the mind-body complex
was perceived to behave, and over several centuries new medical
and theological doctrines divided the single domain of the mind-
body complex into separate domains of mind and body. A defense
58 leslie lockett
either in non-Western countries or in immigrant communities, by
heightening these practitioners’ awareness that Western views of
the mind-body relationship are neither “natural” nor “objectively
true” but culturally constructed and idiosyncratic. The rationale
that supports their approach to synchronic, cross-cultural stud-
ies of models of mind and mental illness can be equally useful
in our diachronic, cross-cultural study, for although the Anglo-
Saxons are our linguistic ancestors, they can hardly be said to
inhabit the same culture as modern-day speakers of English (who
are, in any case, inhabitants of many disparate cultures).
60 leslie lockett
and in Chinese traditional medicine (which are both still highly
inÁuential today). In Ayurveda, “every facet of illness and disease
can involve phenomena that cross the mind-body duality of the
West”: for instance, the migration of excess humors to the heart,
where the mind resides, may result in both epilepsy (apasmara),
typically treated as a physical disorder in the West, and mental
insanity (unmada) (Fabrega 1991, 186). It is crucial to clarify that
the Ayurvedic etiology of epilepsy and insanity is not the product
of a naive or “primitive” understanding of the coactivity of chest-
centered sensations with pathological mental distress; rather, a
sophisticated series of cultural mediations has shaped the inter-
pretation of chest-centered sensations within an elaborate theo-
retical framework. Yet the mediating cultural inÁuences, despite
many centuries’ contacts with Western concepts of mind-body
opposition, have not themselves brought about the widespread
assimilation of body-mind dualism or the splitting of the mind-
body complex into discrete domains, a transformation that would
presumably have relegated Ayurvedic holism to the status of con-
ceptual metaphor. Instead, the “ontological distinction between
mental and physical disease,” which is a prerequisite to the cate-
gory of somatization, “did not gain dominance in India. The the-
ory of Ayurvedic medicine is powerfully unitary and functional
in nature and does not distinguish ontologically among types or
nature of medical disease” (Fabrega 1991, 185).
Fabrega extends a similar historical observation to traditional
Chinese medicine, in which the organ of the heart is “respon-
sible for the expressions of a person’s individuality, including
consciousness, concentration, reasoning, and organized social
action” (1991, 188). Cardiocentric psychology “underscores the
holism implicit in Chinese medicine,” and this holism explains
why “in classical Chinese medicine the idea of somatization as
exaggerated, excessive, displaced, or peculiarly manufactured
bodily symptoms simply does not exist” (188–89). Kirmayer, Dao,
and Smith (1998) likewise assert that the lack of distinction be-
tween mental and physical illness “does not mean that Chinese
medicine . . . dissolved the mind-body dualism of Western med-
icine: they never treated it in the Àrst place. The holism of Chi-
62 leslie lockett
education and middling literacy, had no sustained exposure to
the key texts of the “classical tradition” of Neoplatonist-Chris-
tian psychology, nor was there widespread practical or theoret-
ical use of Galenic medicine (Lockett 2011). Other “distinctive
values and practices” that helped to relegate the corporeal mind
and the hydraulic model to the status of metaphor in Modern
English postdate the Anglo-Saxon period altogether (e.g., Carte-
sian dualism, knowledge of the circulatory system, and the many
modern Western social teachings that are founded Àrmly upon
the premise that one’s will and intellect thrive or fail indepen-
dent of the conditions of one’s bodily and material existence; see
Johnson 2007, 1–4). Transcultural psychology and embodied real-
ism can be used to bring these historical observations to bear on
the issue of the metaphorization of the hydraulic model. Trans-
cultural psychology uproots the dualist prejudices that we typi-
cally bring to our reading of other cultures’ psychologies, while
embodied realism allows us to predict that a folk belief rooted in
embodied experience will be long lived in the face of counterin-
tuitive rival theories, and that in literate cultures the battle be-
tween rival theories will be detectible in the textual record.
To clarify, I am not suggesting that all oe hydraulic-model nar-
ratives were intended or interpreted by their target audiences as
literal articulations of the mind-body relationship. Instead, my
recommendation is that readers of oe approach the hydraulic
model with the expectation that it is probably a literal usage un-
less it can be demonstrated otherwise — essentially, we should
shift the burden of proof to those who would maintain that the
hydraulic model is a metaphor, rather than taking its metapho-
ricity for granted.
Consider, for instance, the poem Beowulf and the prose oe
Boethius, both quoted above. Neither the text of Beowulf nor the
other works copied alongside it in the same manuscript suggest
that the author(s), copyists, or audience of this poem had been
exposed to learned philosophical discourse on the soul or medi-
cal discourse on the mind. I will remain convinced that the vivid
hydraulic-model imagery of Beowulf represents literal articula-
tions of an Anglo-Saxon folk model of the mind unless further
Notes
I am very grateful to Ethan Knapp, Lisa Kiser, Drew Jones, and especially David Her-
man for their insightful comments on drafts of this chapter; any errors that remain
are entirely my own.
1. Quotations from Old English (oe) poems, except Beowulf, are drawn
from the six volumes of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (Krapp and Dobbie
1931–42), hereafter called aspr and referenced by volume and page num-
bers. All translations of oe and Latin texts are my own.
2. For more information about conceptual metaphor theory, see my dis-
cussion below as well as Elizabeth Bradburn’s contribution to this volume.
Stanley (1956), predating the cognitive turn in metaphor theory, questions
whether the modern observer is able to distinguish poetic embellishments
(i.e., metaphors in the old “literary” sense) from statements that would have
held up to the Anglo-Saxons’ standards of scientiÀc or theological verac-
ity. Low (1998), focusing on oe poetic representations of the mind, invokes
Lakoff and Johnson’s work on conceptual metaphor but, like Stanley, con-
64 leslie lockett
cludes that we cannot know whether certain expressions were metaphori-
cal from the point of view of the Anglo-Saxons.
3. The term “hydraulic model” is employed in numerous disciplines’ stud-
ies of the mind, including cognitive linguistics (see Kövecses 2000, 142–63),
transcultural psychiatry, and the philosophy of emotions.
4. Nearly all extant oe poetry resists attempts to assign dates of compo-
sition; however, manuscript copies of oe poetry are roughly datable and pro-
vide a terminus ante quem for the poems’ composition. I have quoted passages
from the following poems and manuscripts: Andreas from the Vercelli Book
(Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare, Cod. CXVII), copied circa 975 ad; Christ II
(Ascension), The Rhyming Poem, Guthlac B, and The Wife’s Lament from the Ex-
eter Book (Exeter, Cathedral Library, 3501), circa 975; Genesis B and Exodus
from Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11, the Àrst part of which was com-
piled circa 960–990; Beowulf and Judith from the Nowell Codex (London,
British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, fols. 94–209), circa 1000; and Solo-
mon and Saturn from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, manuscripts 422
(late tenth century) and 41 (early eleventh century). I also quote from sev-
eral prose texts: Homily 4 in the Vercelli Book (see above); Ælfric’s Lives of
Saints (composed within a brief span just before and after the year 1000);
and the oe Boethius and the oe Bede, associated with the circle of King Al-
fred (d. 899) and composed during the late ninth or early tenth century
(see Godden 2007).
5. Recent studies of the mind in oe generally agree with Godden’s (1985)
claim that the Anglo-Saxons regarded the heart as the literal seat of all men-
tal activity; compare with McIlwain (2006), whose claim that the Anglo-
Saxons had both direct and indirect knowledge of cephalocentric theories
of mind is most persuasive for the period from around 990 onward.
6. Extant occurrences of the verb (ge)belgan refer strictly to the psycho-
logical condition of being “swollen with rage” (Cameron, Amos, and Healey
2003; s.v. belgan, gebelgan, bylgan2 , gebylgan, gebylged). This raises the possi-
bility that the Anglo-Saxons would not have recognized the connection be-
tween (ge)belgan and its spatial swelling.
7. I have removed the editors’ semicolon after bitolden.
8. At the words “þa he þa lange mid,” I follow the reading of Cambridge,
Corpus Christi College 41 (Miller 1959–63 [1890–98], 3:121) because the read-
ing preserved in Miller’s base text (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tanner 10) is
syntactically awkward.
9. A full chapter of Lockett (2011) is devoted to discussion of the ancient,
medieval, and modern analogues of the hydraulic model.
10. One notable exception is the work of Caroline Gevaert, who argues
that oe representations of the mind refute Kövecses’s claims of diachronic
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2. 1050–1500
Through a Glass Darkly;
or, the Emergence of Mind in Medieval Narrative
monika fludernik
69
prior scholarship on the representation of consciousness in me-
dieval English narrative, and it will also question the catego-
ries we have been using for analyzing the emergence of mind.
More speciÀcally, my chapter will begin by discussing how cat-
egories of thought representation have relied on a preconcep-
tion that all thought is verbal. I will then outline six categories
of thought representation used in Middle English texts from the
thirteenth century onward, exploring the broader implications
of those categories for the study of consciousness representa-
tion in narrative.
Forms of Consciousness
Since consciousness comprises areas of mental activity that are
not verbal, it may be helpful to start out with a list of verbal and
nonverbalized states and processes of consciousness. In my us-
age, thoughts are understood to be units of verbalized mind suf-
Àciently concrete to be articulated in propositional form, as for
instance in arguments and actual internal speech (in literature
soliloquies could be argued to provide a generic mold for internal
speech and self-debate). Beyond this realm, there are unarticu-
lated, vague half-thoughts that Áit across the mind without being
captured and pressed into speciÀc syntactic shape. Thoughts of
this sort are less pertinent to medieval literature than they are to
Modernist texts, where they sometimes appear in the one-word
sentences of interior monologues — as is the case with many of
Leopold Bloom’s thoughts in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Secondly, emo-
tions clearly fall outside the verbalized realm (although they are
verbalizable), and these may include anything from moods and
predispositions to more speciÀc feelings such as fear, joy, anger,
frustration, or jealousy. I here take the lexemes emotions, feel-
ings, and sentiments to be largely synonymous, but cognitive sci-
entists sometimes distinguish between them.2 Emotion is often
treated as the hyperconcept, with moods and feelings the subor-
dinate categories. Attitudes, beliefs, and views belong to another
The Representation of
Consciousness in Middle English Narrative
This section explores how various types of mental activity mani-
fest themselves in Middle English narrative. In particular, I focus
on two thirteenth-century, two fourteenth-century, and several
Àfteenth-century texts in order to suggest how medieval writ-
ers evoked consciousness and also to sketch the trajectory of
change in these techniques over the centuries from which my
1.1. They took the children, who were wringing their hands, to the
beach.4
1.2. Then Rymenhild began to worry and to sigh. She started to move
her arms [to and fro] and fell down fainting. Horn was very sorry
in his heart [grieved to see it].
1.3. The King went to his chamber and repeatedly collapsed fainting
on the Áoor and made such grieving moans that [it seemed as if] his life
were almost spent.
In this example from Sir Orfeo, the king, who has just lost his
queen, faints and then loudly laments his situation; it remains
unclear, however, whether the diol and mon (“doleful cry” and
“moan”) are to be taken as the verbal or nonverbal expression
of woe. Even more difÀcult is the decision of how to categorize
the Ànal line (“so that he nearly died [with grief]”). This is an
expressive narrative comment on the depth of Orfeo’s emotional
prostration, which can (but need not) be read as an instance of
psychonarration.
(2.1) And so the nyght fell on hym, and than was he ware in a slade of a
pavylyon of rede sendele. “Be my feyth,” seyde sir Launcelot, “in that pavy-
lyon woll I lodge all this nyght.” (Malory 1971, VI 153, ll. 19–21)
2.1. And then it turned night and he saw a pavilion of red sandalwood
in a glade. “By my faith,” said Sir Launcelot, “in this pavilion will I rest
this night.”
(2.2) þemperour þo gan drawe his her . & sore sike & grone Mahoun he
seide hou schal ich do . schal ich beleue alone Whi neltou raþere fecche me .
& bringe me of þis lyue þan suffri to leose alle mi men . after mi leoue wyue
(sel 1967–69, “St. Katherine” 541, ll. 267–70)
2.2. Then the emperor began to pull his hair and to sigh and moan. “Ma-
homet,” he said, “what shall I do? Must I be left by myself? Why won’t
you rather fetch me and take my life away than allow [me] to lose all my
men after [I have already lost] my dear wife?”
2.3. Love has sent his Àery arrow so smartingly through my faithful and
anxious heart that I was killed even before the arrow reached my shirt.
You slay me with your eyes, Emily!
2.4. “Horn, you have now been gone a great while. You gave me Rymen-
hild to take care of her. I have kept her [safe] all this time. Come now or
never — I can no longer safeguard her. For sorrow I now weep.”
3.1. The children were afraid of this [“grew afraid”]. They thought they
knew that they would be killed [literally: “to miss their lives”].
3.2. And in a tower, in anguish and in woe this Palamon and his friend
Arcite . . .
3.3. She loved Horn so much that she nearly went mad. She was afraid
of people. . . . Her sorrow and her woe seemed neverending.
3.4. He sang Rymenhild’s song and he expressed his grief (“sang wala-
way”) Rymenhild fainted. . . . It smote Horn’s heart so keenly that
it hurt.
3.5. Palamon, who imagined that he felt a cold sword suddenly pierce his
heart, shook with anger . . .
3.8. Finally his anger was assuaged, for pity soon Áows through a gentle
heart. Though he Àrst quaked and shook for anger, to state the
case in brief, he soon considered [historical present] their crime
and its cause. Although his anger accused them, his reason excused
them, in the following manner: he reÁected that every man in love will
help himself, if possible, and will deliver himself from prison. His heart,
(3.9) thus departed fferant the Senesshall . . . til that he approched the
Reaume of Sizile, auisyng alwey his newe seruaunt / consideryng withyn
hym self / his persone, his beaute / his maner, his humbles / wherof he was
moche ameruailed / for he wende not that yn the body of any one man
might haue ben so many vertues to-gedir / So thought he wele / that if
he had as moche worthynesse and prowes as he had persone & maner, he
3.9. And so Fferant the Seneschal departed . . . until he came to the realm
of Sicily. He considered again and again his new servant [Prince Philip],
weighing in his mind his handsomeness, his comportment [and] his hu-
mility. He wondered at these, since he could not believe that in any man’s
body so many virtues could be lodged together. So he thought that if he
should have as much nobility and valor as handsome features and proper
conduct he would be the most perfect man that God [Christ] had made
since his passion.
4. Narratorial Empathy
A fourth method for representing consciousness in Middle Eng-
lish narrative, one that does not have a place in traditional narra-
tological accounts, is the empathetic assumption of a protagonist’s
feelings by the narrator or bard. Narratorial addresses to the
narratee vicariously sympathizing with the protagonist also oc-
cur in texts with an “engaging narrator” (Warhol 1986), but the
narrative status of such empathetic exclamations has received
no detailed analysis as far as I am aware. Moreover, the possi-
ble connection of such passages with the representation of con-
sciousness is a narratological lacuna. A character’s supposed
verbal mind-content has always been taken to be prior to its
narrative representation. Yet in the empathetic exclamations to
be discussed in this section, it is impossible to tell whether the
narrator is reporting the feelings of a character, expressing his
own analogous emotions, or fantasizing about what the charac-
ter might have felt in the circumstances.
For example, (4.1) can be read as an omniscient statement
by the narrator, yet the exclamation mark and emotional ex-
pressivity of the two lines indicate the narrator’s empathy for
Horn’s situation.
4.2. Lord! Who can tell the pain that this King suffered for ten years or
more!
4.3. Now God help Saint Thomas, for he was [left] all to himself.
4.4. In darkness, in the horrible strong prison Palamon has sat for seven
years, wasted by woe and by distress. Who but Palamon, so af-
Áicted by love that he is almost out of his mind with grief, feels
double pain and depression?
5.1. The king descended from his horse, . . . and [so did] his two knights.
All too few they were [literally: had he then].
Here the relevant sentence reads: “Allas, allas, that he had ever
been born [by a woman].” This is clearly not direct discourse,
since the ruler’s presumptive I has been shifted into alignment
with the surrounding third-person past-tense narrative. The ab-
sence of a past perfect, a relatively rare form in Middle English,
is no counterargument to the reading. The passage cannot be in-
terpreted as indirect speech (if one takes seyd to be “he said [to
himself]”): indirect speech usually does not include interjections.
More important, if one removes the interjection, the resulting
meaning contradicts the original passage: he seyd that ever he was
born of wiif would in fact mean “He said that he had ever been
born of a woman.” Since all humans are born of women, that
utterance makes no sense, and the ever loses its function in the
clause. In fact, the that clause depends on the interjection allas
(Alas that he was ever born), and as such is syntactically a complete
exclamatory sentence (“O that I should ever have been born”).
As a consequence, the introductory seyd does not serve as an in-
troductory verb whose object is the that clause, but as a verbum
dicendi introducing direct speech. In modern English one would
place a colon after seyd; what follows is a separate clause with
shifted reference, hence: fid. There is even the remote possibil-
ity of interpreting seyd not as “said” but as “sighed,” but this is
too contentious a reading of the past tense of siȝȝen “sigh.”
The most obvious example of fid in my case studies is (5.3).
The passage deals with Thomas à Becket in his struggle against
King Henry II:
(5.3) Sein Thomas isei wel þo . þat þer nas wei bote on
þat he moste stif wiþstonde . oþer is riȝtes forgon
He þoȝte þat Holy Churche . he nolde neuere bitraye
And þat he nolde neuere in such seruage . hure
bringe bi is daye
Raþer he wolde [as] oþer were . to martirdom be ido
þane Holy Churche were so bineþe . iredi he was þerto
6.1. Many a man and woman laughed at this; some of them said, “It is
only a lie! The king is quite feeble, the queen is rather old: [how] could
she now groan [in childbirth], [how] could she now scream? Is it possible
that she at her age could lie in childbed? This is not likely at all!” So they
all said, the ladies in the chamber and the lords in the hall.
Again, it is likely that the scholars tell one another of their con-
viction that St. Katharine is superior to them in intelligence and
knowledge; but it also makes sense for each of them to come to
this realization one by one singly, and then this would be a rep-
resentation of consciousness versus speech.
7.1. And in a grove, at the time and place that they had set, Arcite and
Palamon met. The color in their faces then began to change, just like the
hunters in the realm of Thrace who stand with a spear at the clear-
ing when lions or bears are being hunted. They hear the animal rush for-
ward in the thicket, breaking [through] the boughs and leaves, and think:
“Here comes my mortal enemy! Now, without fail, either he or I must be
dead: for either I must kill him in the clearing or he may kill me, if I am
unlucky” — just so behaved these two men as their color rose as
they looked one on the other.
Notes
1. On the problematic status of indirect thought, see Fludernik (1993,
311–12).
2. For instance, emotions are sometimes treated as “measurable physi-
cal responses to salient stimuli,” whereas feelings are considered to be “the
subjective experiences that sometimes accompany these processes” (Wiki-
pedia, entry on “Emotion”). Some scientists include hunger among feel-
ings and therefore do not see the categories of emotions and feelings as
coinciding entirely, and dispositions and moods are also set apart from the
former two categories (cf. the discussion in Robinson 2007, 5–6). Other dis-
tinctions are those between affect, affect display, disposition, feeling, and
mood. The terminology also crucially depends on which emotion theory
one takes as one’s basis; judgment theories tend to foreground the cogni-
tive aspect of emotions, whereas appraisal theories encompass other di-
mensions of emotions.
3. See, for instance, Hogan (2003) and Keen (2007).
4. All translations are mine. Also, italics, bold italics, and underlining are
all emphases added by me to distinguish between different forms of thought
representation or to highlight individual words or phrases.
5. Obviously, this count takes each case of direct speech as one instance;
when counting lines of text (since these internal speeches often extend over
several lines), direct speech becomes the most prominent category. Only a
rough estimate is here provided for the texts analyzed. For a more robust
statistical analysis, more texts would need to be analyzed and utterance/
word counts compared across the corpus.
6. Jäger and Bartsch (2006) employ the concept of meta-emotion to
characterize conÁicting feelings such as guilt and malicious joy, which re-
quire a superordinate emotional level from which the subject can resolve
the conÁict between them.
7. Another example from Chaucer, this time from The Man of Law’s Tale
is: “O blood royal, thet stondeth in this drede, / Fer been thy freendes at
thy grete neede!” (O royal blood [i.e., Custance], you who are in dread [of
your life], far away are your friends when you need them most urgently)
(1988, B, ll. 657–58). The narrator here empathizes with Custance, who has
been accused of murder.
References
Source Texts
Capgrave, John. 1973 [1893]. The Life of St. Katharine of Alexandria. Ed. Carl
Horstmann. eets os 100. Millwood ny: Kraus Reprint Co.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. 1988. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Horstmann, Carl. 1881. Altenglische legenden. Neve Folge. Heilbronn: Hen-
ninger.
Malory, Sir Thomas. 1971. Works. Ed. Eugène Vinaver. 2nd ed. Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press.
Middle English Verse Romances. 1993. Ed. Donald B. Sands. Exeter Medieval
English Texts and Studies. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Radcliffe, Ann Ward. 1998 [1794]. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Ed. Bonamy Do-
breé. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The South English Legendary. 1967–69. Corpus Christi College Cambridge ms
145. Ed. Charlotte D’Evelyn and Anna J. Mill. 3 vols. eets 234, 235, 244.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The Three Kings’ Sons. 1895. Ed. Frederick James Furnivall. eets es 67. Lon-
don: Kegan Paul.
Scholarly Works
Aers, David. 1992. “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, ReÁec-
tions on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject.’” In Culture
and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing,
ed. David Aers, 177–201. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Amodio, Mark C. 1995. “Tradition, Modernity, and the Emergence of the
Self in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Assays: Critical Approaches to Me-
dieval and Renaissance Texts 8:47–68.
Sixteenth- and
Seventeenth-Century Minds
3. 1500–1620
Reading, Consciousness, and
Romance in the Sixteenth Century
f. elizabeth hart
103
Narratives across the period’s important genres, from the
Bible to romance, epic poetry, and staged drama, presented Àg-
ures of humans who now possessed a head-centered (and mind-
centered) interiority, a quality of inwardness that even aspires, at
times, to simulate the act of thinking. In the sixteenth century,
we still Ànd representations of humans whose thoughts and emo-
tions are expressed by the external means familiar from medi-
eval literature — for example, spoken dialogue, gestures, or other
somatic signs.5 Only now, we also glimpse brief representations
of conscious self-awareness and introspection: people pausing in
the midst of action to wrestle with their inner conÁicts, to specu-
late about others’ intentions, or to lose themselves in imaginary
worlds. While such representations occur only rarely through-
out the sixteenth century, by the century’s Ànal decades they had
become a recognizable feature of romance Àction and a distin-
guishing trait of the theater, particularly of Shakespeare’s plays.6
Within another half century, the impulse to inhabit purely imag-
inary worlds occasionally dominated such diverse literary works
as Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” (ca. 1650–52) and Margaret
Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666, 1668).
But might this tendency toward richer portraits of interior-
ity in the early modern period indicate a phenomenological as
well as a literary sea change? In this chapter, I argue that it does.
SpeciÀcally, I claim that the heightened impulse to represent
consciousness bespeaks a shift in people’s actual experiences of
themselves, insofar as the act of engaging one’s consciousness as
such became an aspect of human life newly worth telling, writ-
ing, and reading about. The fairly obvious agency behind such
a change would be the introduction of print technology to Eng-
land in 1476; but the more direct cause — itself arguably an ef-
fect of print — was a massive shift in people’s cognitive abilities
toward reading in particular. Print technology, in conjunction
with humanism and the Protestant Reformation, both of which
placed enormous emphasis on text reading, supported an un-
precedented increase in English literacy rates across geograph-
ical, class, and gender boundaries. Many more people learned
to read — and some to write — than had previously been able to;
Sixteenth-Century Literacy
Near the end of Canto 9 in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene, Sir Guyon
and Prince Arthur, while on a tour through Alma’s Castle, stum-
ble upon the blind sage Eumnestes surrounded in his garret
chamber by books and parchment scrolls — “old records from
auncient times” (57.7). The hermit antiquarian has been collect-
ing history texts to form a small library within the castle, and
the knights, pausing in the doorway, are drawn in with a sud-
den passion to explore. They comb the shelves; then each pulls
down a title appropriate to his own personal narrative: Arthur
Ànds Briton moniments, which tells how multiple “Regiments” in
England became the provenance of a single gifted leader; Guyon
selects “Antiquitie of Faerie lond,” a genealogy of his ElÀn peoples
(59.8, 60). Sitting down immediately, Arthur and Guyon become
so deeply immersed in their silent reading that all past and fu-
ture quests — indeed all “action” we might consider prototypi-
cal of both epic and romance genres — are suspended for the full
length of Canto 10. In the meantime, Alma, the knights’ gracious
tour guide, is summarily dismissed: “Wherat they burning both
with feruent Àre, / Their countries auncestry to vnderstond, /
Crau’d leaue of Alma, and that aged sire, / To read those bookes;
who gladly graunted their desire” (Canto 9, 60.6–9).
It is hard to imagine an English literary artist constructing
this scene prior to the introduction of mass-produced printed
texts. Even granting that Spenser’s intended reader was proba-
bly a courtly one, someone likely to have remained as comfort-
Literacy skills change the functional organization of the brain and deeply
inÁuence how individuals and communities of literate individuals perform
their cognitive work. Mass literacy has triggered two kinds of major cog-
nitive reorganizations, one in individuals and the other in groups.
To become fully literate, [an] individual must acquire a host of neural
demons that are completely absent from anyone who lacks literacy train-
ing. . . . There is no equivalent in a preliterate mind to the circuits that hold
the complex neural components of a reading vocabulary or the elaborate
procedural habits of formal thinking. (Donald 2001, 302)
Reading Storyworlds
With such focus on, and tolerance for, complexity comes the
greater likelihood that readers can engage meaningfully with
challenging texts involving high levels of abstraction or content-
area training such as formal argumentation or debates within
speciÀc disciplines of learning. Silent, private reading thus un-
doubtedly supported both the rise of humanism and the spread
of the Reformation, movements requiring complex interaction
between readers and texts and among readers themselves. But
silent, private reading must also have provided the optimal con-
ditions for a non-content-speciÀc form of reading that we may
mistake as less challenging and therefore less instructive: the
reading and processing of literary narratives.
The relative effortlessness with which humans process nar-
rative texts as compared to texts organized by other rhetorical
principles (e.g., description, declamation) belies the complexity
inherent in even simple stories (whether in Àction or nonÀction,
literary or popular traditions). The complexity of narrative has
to do with the requirement that readers or listeners create and
then immerse themselves in an alternative reality that springs to
vivid existence out of the exchange between a narrative’s for-
mal elements — its language — and the receivers’ minds. When a
narrative’s linguistic elements are relatively stabilized by being
cast in the form of a written text, the imagined scenarios may
achieve greater complexity as a function of greater Áexibility.
“My sweet one, are you truly with me, still alive? Or have you too fallen
by chance a victim to the Àghting . . . ?” “On you,” she answered, “it rests
whether I live or die. Now, do you see this?” she added, showing a sword
that lay upon her knees. “Hitherto it has been idle, withheld by your breath-
ing.” As she spoke she sprang from the rock: the men [watching, were]
struck, with wonder and alarm by the sight. (Heliodorus 1997, 4)
Direct Reference,
Simulation, and the Birth of Character
By itself, the direct reference to Àctional people’s minds consti-
tutes a signiÀcant shift in romance’s strategies for representing
human beings. Despite the fact that Heliodorus’s people are con-
stantly planning, remembering, loving, fearing, anticipating, and
maintaining loyalty to one another, they somehow manage to
do all this without the author drawing speciÀc attention either
to their heads or the brains/minds encased within them. Not so
for Sidney or Greene, who are both self-consciously emulating
The Ethiopian Story but also tentatively experimenting with treat-
ing Àctional minds differently than does their model: as substan-
tive, mysterious, even powerful entities worth making explicit in
a variety of ways. Sidney is less experimental in this sense than
Greene, but occasionally Sidney does offer a good example: such
as the moment in Arcadia, Book 1, when Pyrocles slips away from
Musidorus during a hunting party and secretly disguises himself
as an Amazon warrior. Pyrocles’s disguise does not fool Musido-
rus, who, once he Ànds him, berates his friend for having the
poor judgment to take on a “womanish habit” (1987 [1577/1590],
133). In one of the speeches that follows, Musidorus uses terms
that not only refer directly to Pyrocles’s “mind” but assign that
mind a noticeably independent and supervisory agency:
Then turned he his thoughts to all forms of guesses that might light upon
the purpose and course of Pyrocles, for he was not sure by his words that
it was love as he was doubtful where the love was. . . . But the more he
thought, the more he knew not what to think, armies of objections rising
against any accepted opinion. (117)
Ah Franion, treason is loved of many, but the traitor hated of all: unjust
offences may for a time escape without danger, but never without revenge,
thou art servant to a king, and must obey at command. . . . What shalt
thou do? . . . Egistus is a stranger, to thee, and Pandosto thy soveraigne.
. . . Yea but Franion, conscience is a worme that ever biteth, but never
ceaseth. . . . Preferre thy content before riches, and a cleare mind before
dignitie: so being poore thou shalt have rich peace, or els rich, thou shalt
enjoy disquiet. (Greene 2005 [1588], 624)
4
Thy name o soueraigne Queene, thy realme and race,
From this renowmed Prince deriued arre,
Who mightily vpheld that royall mace,
Which now thou bearst, to thee descended farre
From mightie kings and conquerours in warre,
5
The land, which warlike Britons now possesse,
And therein haue their mightie empire raysd,
In antique times was saluage wildernesse,
Vnpeopled, vnmanurd, vnprou’d, vnpraysd,
Ne was it Island then, ne was it paysd
Amid the Ocean waues, ne was it sought
Of marchants farre, for proÀts therein praysd,
But was all desolate, and of some thought
By sea to haue bene from the Celticke mayn-land brought.
(Spenser 1978 [1590], Canto 10, 329)
Spenser places the trace frame in the last line of Stanza 4: “As
in that old mans booke they were in order told” (4.9), referring
cryptically to Eumnestes. But this Áickering signal is not sufÀ-
cient to help us get fully oriented before we Ànd ourselves deep
in the interior of Briton land, accessed through the historical
mindscape that Arthur now inhabits. The reader remains im-
mersed inside Arthur’s storyworld and consciousness — the two
now synonymous — through the end of Stanza 68, over an im-
pressive span of Àfty-two stanzas. Poetically, this seamless en-
folding of storyworlds achieves a complex cognitive blend of the
heritages of Arthur and Elizabeth, a consistent trope through-
out The Faerie Queene but one arrived at here speciÀcally through
the embedding of Arthur’s consciousness within the storyworld
of the Elizabethan Tudor dynasty.
Character Proper
This trick — this device — of Àction would not have been possi-
ble for the generation before Spenser, Greene, and Sidney, before
the rise in reading literacy had reinforced all the many effects of
printing in its aftermath. The result was an emergence of fresh
Notes
1. oed. Minde and braine are not treated as evenly synonymous in the oed,
but they both intersect with faculty, which includes memory, sense, thought,
intentionality, imagination, and other properties commonly attributed to
both minds and brains. Hamlet often cites “brains” when he is obviously
referring to thought processes: “About, my brains! / Hum, I have heard /
That guilty creatures, sitting at a play” (Hamlet, 2.2, ll. 588–90).
2. These authors’ meditative works and others by both Reformist and
Counter-Reformation spiritualists were hugely inÁuential throughout the
Renaissance, the Christian Platonists contributing to core curricula in gram-
mar schools, universities, and princes’ studies. Elizabeth I was said to have
consulted Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy on a daily basis (by William
Camden), and she famously produced her own translation in 1593.
3. See Stevens (1997, 270): “Though the heart is the seat of our life force
and necessary for the continued existence of the body, it falls short of the
brain in deÀning our selves. The brain, according to [Robert] Burton, ‘is the
most noble organ under heaven, the dwelling-house and seat of the soul, the
habitation of wisdom, memory, and in which man is most like unto God.’”
See also Crane (2001, 7) for a discussion of Stevens’s Àndings in the context
of contemporary cognitive literary and cultural theory.
4. Stevens (1997, 273) writes: “The heart was still discussed both as a
muscle in material terms and the seat of the soul in what would be seen in-
creasingly as metaphoric terms. Descartes’s mechanistic conception of the
body still contained mysteries, but it was increasingly obvious from Harvey’s
work onward that the heart was a muscle best understood as a pump. If the
body offered a ‘real’ reiÀcation of the self it was to be found in the brain.”
5. See Monika Fludernik’s chapter in this volume.
6. See Shapiro (2005, 284–302). Shapiro offers a brief analysis of Ham-
let as a striking innovation in the representation of consciousness on stage,
seeing in Hamlet no less than Shakespeare’s reconÀguration of the ontol-
ogy of the tragic protagonist.
References
Baron-Cohen, Simon. 1995. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of
Mind. Cambridge ma: mit Press.
Burke, Peter. 1994. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Rev. ed. Alder-
shot: Ashgate.
Cavallo, Guglielmo, and Roger Chartier. 1999. “Introduction.” In A History
of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, 1–36.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Chafe, Wallace. 1994. Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Dis-
placement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Charlton, Kenneth. 1999. Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern Eng-
land. London: Routledge.
Charlton, Kenneth, and Margaret Spufford. 2002. “Literacy, Society and Ed-
ucation.” In The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed.
David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller, 15–54. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Chartier, Roger. 1995. Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences
from Codex to Computer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Crane, Mary Thomas. 2001. Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive The-
ory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cressy, David. 1980. Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor
and Stuart England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Donald, Merlin. 2001. A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness.
New York: W. W. Norton.
132
In order to demonstrate the diversity of metaphorical repre-
sentation during this transitional literary historical period, I will
focus on a speciÀc metaphor, the mind is a body moving
in space, so that we can see how it is manifested at different
levels, both across the corpus of seventeenth-century narrative
and within individual texts. The four narrative works that I have
chosen range, in their representations of consciousness, from the
relatively simple to the highly complex. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress (1678) and Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666)
show how the representation of the mind as a moving body can
shape narrative plots. In her protonovel Oroonoko (1688), Aphra
Behn uses the metaphor of movement to begin developing dis-
tinctively novelistic techniques for representing consciousness.
And, Ànally, we will see how the integrated use of metaphor at
thematic, narrative, and linguistic levels creates the textual in-
tricacy of the last great English prenovel narrative: John Milton’s
Paradise Lost (1674).1
Mind as Motion
In order to perceive the many ways in which metaphors shape
literary works, we must understand metaphor as more than a
literary device. The work of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and
others in the Àeld of cognitive linguistics is quite useful here. La-
koff and Johnson argue persuasively that metaphor is a cognitive
mechanism, one that can generate abstract concepts from con-
crete experience and create mental imagery to help explain and
draw inferences about internal and external data. They call this
type of mechanism “conceptual metaphor” (Johnson 1987; Lakoff
and Johnson 1999). Conceptual metaphor theory hypothesizes
that all experience is embodied and that attempts to express ab-
stract concepts are grounded in metaphor systems deriving from
such embodied experience.2 Here it should be stressed that con-
ceptual metaphors are not Àgures of speech; rather, they indicate
how thought itself is intrinsically metaphorical. Metaphors that
exist in ordinary linguistic expressions are not random but form
consistent patterns based on conceptual metaphors anchored in
our experience as embodied beings situated in time and space.
That the reader is being asked here to see an image, and not to
hear a song, demonstrates that very different conceptual meta-
phors shape Milton’s and Pound’s poetic representations. Both
of these metaphors are special cases of the more general meta-
phor the mind is a body moving in space. In each, a men-
tal activity — composing a poem — is conceptualized as a physical
experience (looking) or action (singing).
Narrative forms, too, exhibit a reciprocal relationship between
the structures of conceptual metaphor and techniques of repre-
sentation. Just as poetry is often conceptualized as song, narra-
tive is often conceptualized as travel. The metaphor narrative
is travel is also a special case of the mind is a body mov-
ing in space. The sequence of developments that character-
izes the mental activity of narration are thought of as the shifts
in location that accompany the physical movement of travel. The
importance of this conceptual metaphor is one reason that travel
narratives such as Behn’s Oroonoko played such an important
role in the development of the novel. Travel narratives often par-
The path-way was here also exceeding narrow, and therefore good Chris-
tian was the more put to it; for when he sought in the dark to shun the
ditch on the one hand, he was ready to tip over into the mire on the other;
also when he sought to escape the mire, without great carefulness he would
be ready to fall into the ditch. Thus he went on, and I heard him here sigh
bitterly: for, besides the dangers mentioned above, the path way was here
so dark, that oft times when he lift up his foot to set forward, he knew not
where, or upon what he should set it next.
About the midst of this Valley, I perceived the mouth of Hell to be,
and it stood also hard by the way side: Now thought Christian, what
shall I do? (62–63)
Oroonoko
Like The Blazing World, Oroonoko resembles the travel writing — nar-
ratives of journeys to exotic (and often colonized) lands describing
unfamiliar people, cultures, and natural phenomena — that was
gaining popularity in seventeenth-century England. But whereas
No sooner was the Lady brought before the Emperor, but he conceived her
to be some Goddess, and offered to worship her; which she refused, telling
him, (for by that time she had pretty well learned their language) that al-
though she came out of another world, yet was she but a mortal; at which
the Emperor rejoycing, made her his Wife, and gave her an absolute power
to rule and govern all that World as she pleased. (162)
Here his “designs” are explicitly linked with his ability to move.
God “permits” Satan both to move at this moment and, by de-
sign, to Áy toward Earth to corrupt the humans. Later in Book 1
Satan states his intentions toward the Almighty in this way:
For Eve, as for Adam, Paradise itself has become entirely meta-
phorical, the equivalent of an internal state. Just as Satan’s con-
tinuing demise is represented by the assimilation of Hell itself
into his consciousness, Adam’s and Eve’s redemption is repre-
sented by the assimilation of Paradise into their consciousnesses.
Satan takes Hell with him everywhere he goes; Adam will take
Paradise with him everywhere, and thus will himself be Para-
dise for Eve.
Milton’s use of this system of metaphors in Paradise Lost pro-
vides an especially sophisticated example of the way that au-
thors consciously elaborate and call attention to the conceptual
metaphors that unconsciously structure our thinking. Earlier I
pointed out that in the ordinary sentence The group reached con-
Notes
1. A few critics have suggested that Paradise Lost can be seen as a novel.
Thomas N. Corns has argued that Paradise Lost could be considered “tem-
porarily and provisionally dialogic” (1994, 289). Damrosch (1985) and Rap-
paport (1986) have drawn on Lukács’s theory of the novel to argue that the
representation of Adam and Eve as a domestic couple anticipates the rep-
resentation of bourgeois consciousness that will arise as part of the devel-
opment of the English novel.
2. For more on conceptual metaphors and issues of embodiment, see
Leslie Lockett’s contribution to the present volume. For a different ap-
proach to Àgurative language vis-à-vis representations of mind, see Da-
vid Vallins’s contribution. Finally, see Mandler (1992) for an explanation
of how perceptual experience translates into the development of cognitive
mechanisms in infancy.
3. For a more general account of the role of conceptual metaphor in poly-
semy, see Sweetser (1990).
4. A recent essay by Kai Mikkonen, which considers some of the theo-
retical implications and limitations of the conceptual metaphor narra-
tive is travel, focuses on a modern novel, Graham Greene’s Journey
without Maps, that deliberately foregrounds and ultimately questions the
metaphor of narrative as travel (Mikkonen 2007). As is the case with Mil-
ton’s Paradise Lost, Journey without Maps pays explicit attention to the cog-
nitive and cultural structures that organize experience, giving the work a
special complexity.
5. The witnessing narrator is one form taken by the “anthropomorphic
experiencer” that Fludernik (1996, 13) says is essential to any narrative.
6. Mikkonen (2007) says something similar in his discussion of the
narrative is travel metaphor. Although he is investigating not the
representation of consciousness but the ways in which narrative itself is
like travel, he observes that “the cognitive foundations and communicative
References
Behn, Aphra. 1997 [1688]. Oroonoko. Ed. Joanna Lipking. New York: W. W.
Norton.
Bunyan, John. 1960 [1678]. The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which
Is to Come. Ed. James Blanton Wharey and Roger Sharrock. Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press.
Cavendish, Margaret. 2000 [1666]. A Description of a New World, Called the Blaz-
ing World. In Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, ed. Sylvia Bower-
bank and Sara Mendelson, 151–251. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview.
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161
tentive gaze of Buhanun’s trusty servant — his occasional almo-
ner and another crusty man with a heart of gold.
Similar scenes of observed benefaction occur in Samuel Rich-
ardson’s Clarissa (1747–48), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), To-
bias Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle (1751), Eliza Haywood’s Jemmy and
Jenny Jessamy (1753), Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782), and Thomas
Holcroft’s Anna St. Ives (1792). In fact, it is difÀcult to think of an
eighteenth-century novel, from Clarissa on, that does not con-
tain one or several such scenes. And even before this pattern
establishes itself in the novel, it is already present in Addison
and Steele’s Spectator, in which the narrator observes Sir An-
drew Freeport giving money to a group of beggars in the street
(1965 [1711], 2:405).
How do we account for the popularity of this scenario in eigh-
teenth-century Àction? Traditional criticism offers two ways of
approaching it. First, we can consider such scenes of observed
charity in the context of the period’s “sentimental” discourse.
We can thus speculate that Àctional accounts of induced empa-
thy and shared benevolence struck a particular chord for a cul-
ture as invested in the representation of embodied sentiments
as was the culture of the Enlightenment. Second, we can think
of sociohistorical developments that challenged the established
practices of giving alms and thus rendered philanthropy a newly
fascinating and controversial topic. After all, Henry Fielding pro-
claimed charity “the very characteristic virtue [of his] time” (1988
[1752], 247), referring to such new forms of philanthropic associa-
tion as hospitals (such as the Foundling Hospital, the Magdalene,
the Lying-In Hospital, the Lock Hospital, and others) whose
number rose from two before 1700 to thirty-one by 1800, a sta-
tistic that reÁects deeper transformations in the social fabric
of early modern England. Eighteenth-century men and women
had to deal with such issues as the redeÀnition of the concept
of the “deserving” poor, the secularization of philanthropy, and
the changes in the relationship between private and public giv-
ing. Any one of these factors, as well as a combination of them,
can be used to construct a plausible narrative about the inter-
Historicizing Fictional
Representations of Three-Way Mind Reading
Given these two factors — the importance of triangulated mind
reading to our social life and the deep engagement of Àctional
narratives with our Theory of Mind — we must expect scenes fea-
turing three interacting minds to be present in all cultures and
historical periods. And so they are. Stories that do not triangulate
minds can, of course, also be found in any culture, but they indi-
cate something about their intended audience and genre rather
than about that period’s overall narrative engagement with three-
way mind reading. For instance, early twenty-Àrst-century books
for toddlers often feature only two interacting minds, but that
tells us something interesting about their authors’ intuitive per-
ception of their audience’s mind-reading capacities rather than
about the dominant pattern of mind reading in our culture.
But if representations of mental triangulation constitute a
narrative universal, can we historicize it? SpeciÀcally, given this
volume’s goal of tracing the emergence of the mind in narrative
discourse in English from its beginnings to the present day, can
we say that eighteenth-century writers developed particular, his-
Formulaic Triangulations
The most traditional pattern of mental triangulation found in
all national literatures involves a person observing two people
who are in love or falling in love. We get access to the mind of
the observer and, through it, to the mutually reÁecting minds of
the two lovers. Eighteenth-century writers heavily rely on this
pattern; indeed, it seems to constitute the majority of the three-
way Àctional mind readings of the period.
As a paradigmatic example of this pattern harkening back to
the earliest days of the novel, consider a scene from Heliodorus’s
An Ethiopian Romance (third century ad), in which an Egyptian
priest, Calasiris, tells the story of the Àrst meeting between the
At Àrst they stood in silent amazement, and then, very slowly, she handed
him the torch. He received it, and they Àxed each other with a rigid gaze,
as if they had sometime known one another or had seen each other before
and were now calling each other to mind. Then they gave each other a
slight, and furtive smile, marked only by the spreading of the eyes. Then,
as if ashamed of what they had done, they blushed, and again, when the
passion, as I think, suffused their hearts, they turned pale. In a single mo-
ment, in short, their countenances betrayed a thousand shades of feeling;
their various changes of color and expression revealed the commotion of
their souls. These emotions escaped the crowd and Charicles. . . . But I oc-
cupied myself with nothing else than observing these young people. (73)
Topical Triangulations
We can now rethink our initial analysis of the genealogy and ef-
fects of eighteenth-century Àctional scenes of observed benefac-
tion. First, we may say, quoting Vermeule’s work on three-way
mind reading, that such scenes “sponsor the experience of what
we think of as literariness — the special buzzing thickness, the
strange harmony of the faculties that Kant described when he
found himself in the presence of serious art” (2010, 221). Or, to
take the same cognitive-evolutionary argument and frame it in
social rather than aesthetic terms: The depiction of an observer,
Flat characters may not be especially psychologically realistic but they can
be extremely psychologically compelling. When Áat characters interact
with round characters, they mine a rich vein of Theory of Mind. In liter-
ary narratives from ancient to modern times, some version of the follow-
ing pattern repeats itself over and over again: a Áat or minor character
Notes
1. For an important related analysis, see Palmer (2006, 2010).
2. We need to differentiate between the overall number of minds pop-
ulating a given work of Àction — which could be quite large — and the num-
ber of minds we deal with within one particular scene. Of particular use
here are James Stiller’s concept of “time slice” (Stiller, Nettle, and Dunbar
2004, 399), Catherine Emmott’s work on “frames of reference and contex-
tual monitoring” (1994, 158–63), David Herman’s work on “hypothetical fo-
calizers” (2002, 311–21), and David Miall’s analysis of “episode structures
in literary narratives” (2006, 119–41).
3. Freud’s theory of ego, superego, and id is a classical example of three
mental states driving the actions of one body. From a cognitive perspective,
one reason that this theory has been so inÁuential is that it makes possible
numerous interpretations that impose a three-minds model onto a variety
of cultural contexts. As such, it is literally “good to think with.”
4. Daniel Nettle, e-mail, June 28, 2006. Also, see Herman’s suggestive
argument about “thinking about thinking — or intelligence about intelli-
gence” (2006, 372).
5. Arguably, however, a phrase such as, “When we could not think of him,
he thought of us; before we could ask him to bless us, he had already given
us many blessings” (38) presupposes three minds: God’s, the young chil-
dren’s, and the older children as they reÁect back on their younger selves.
To me, this indicates the difÀculty faced by an author who tries to avoid the
three-way mind reading: the third mind worms its way in.
6. See F. Elizabeth Hart’s discussion of Heliodorus’s narrative, in a dif-
ferent context, in her contribution to the present volume.
7. For a related discussion, see Grenby (2002, 190).
References
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Psychology 6 (1): 3–24.
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and the Interpretation of Narrative Discourse.” In Advances in Written Text
Analysis, ed. Malcolm Coulthard, 157–66. London: Routledge.
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Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 25:185–202.
187
with states of transgression, isolation, and horror more closely
resembling Burke’s description of the sublimely “terrible” than
a Kantian vision of transcendence. In Wordsworth, on the other
hand, the affective signiÀcance of landscape resembles the more
familiar and spontaneous variety familiar from Radcliffe’s Àc-
tion. In his autobiographical narrative, The Prelude, for example,
landscape is often a metaphor of subjective elements that seem
impossible to envisage in its absence, such as the “correspon-
dent breeze” of the poet’s returning creativity in Book 1, which
echoes that of nature’s revival in spring, or the “dim and undeter-
mined sense / Of unknown forms of being” which, in the same
book, arises from his perception of a mysterious mountain crag
appearing to pursue him across a lake. Precisely because their
subjective meanings are so spontaneously apparent, yet also so
inseparable from the images themselves, however, the dramatic
spaces of Radcliffe’s or Wordsworth’s narratives seem to express
similarly formalized types of affective content, often involving
the dualistic extremes of emotion that are familiar from Gothic
Àction. This form of unity or inseparableness of image and af-
fect, I argue, is interestingly connected with the characteristi-
cally Romantic theme of the unity of mind and nature, or (more
philosophically) of the physical world as merely one of the modes
in which a transcendent unity of subject and object expresses
itself, alongside the more obvious forms of (mental) creativity.
Hence the metaphorical structure of Romantic narrative can be
described as a form of dialectic, in which the synthesis of land-
scape and consciousness parallels their theoretical uniÀcation
in Romantic philosophy.
This integrated, self-contained relation of tenor and vehicle on
several levels of meaning at once uniÀes consciousness with the
landscapes depicted in the narrative and makes that conscious-
ness an aspect of the text or of the metaphor to a far more obvi-
ous extent than any form of subjectivity that arises more freely
and randomly from an encounter with society or the physical
world. This difference between the consciousness depicted in Ro-
mantic narratives and that described in realist narrative, which
characterizes the physical world as fundamentally shaping expe-
. . . can I think
A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed
Such ministry, when ye through many a year
Haunting me thus among my boyish sports,
On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills,
Impressed upon all forms the characters
Of danger or desire; and thus did make
The surface of the universal earth
With triumph and delight, with hope and fear,
Work like a sea?
(Wordsworth 1979, 55, ll. 464–75)
“Devil,” I exclaimed, “do you dare approach me? And do not you fear the
Àerce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head? Begone, vile
insect! Or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust! And, oh! That I
could, with the extinction of your miserable existence, restore those victims
whom you have so diabolically murdered.” (Shelley 1994 [1818], 96)
“I expected this reception,” said the daemon. “All men hate the wretched.
. . . Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou
art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us.” (Shel-
ley 1994 [1818], 96)
“and that also on the island, almost concealed amongst the foliage of those
lovely trees; and now that group of labourers coming from among their
vines; and that village half hid in the recess of the mountain. Oh, surely
the spirit that inhabits and guards this place has a soul more in harmony
with man than those who pile the glacier, or retire to the inaccessible peaks
of the mountains of our own country.” (Shelley 1994 [1818], 150–51)
The passage thus draws a contrast between the unity of the spir-
its who inhabit the glacier with Frankenstein and his creature,
on the one hand, and human fellowship with a domesticated na-
ture, on the other hand. Such fellowship, despite resembling that
evoked by Wordsworth in his celebration (in “Tintern Abbey”)
of “farms, / Green to the very door,” notably eschews the idea of
a metaphysical unity (Wordsworth 1940–49, 2:259, ll. 16–17). Yet
the passage from “Tintern Abbey” that Frankenstein chooses to
express Clerval’s imaginativeness suggests a failure to appreci-
ate this distinction.
“Be happy, my dear Victor,” replied Elizabeth; “there is, I hope, noth-
ing to distress you; and be assured that if a lively joy is not painted in
my face, my heart is contented. Something whispers to me not to depend
too much on the prospect that is opened before us, but I will not listen
to such a sinister voice. Observe how fast we move along, and how the
clouds, which sometimes obscure and sometimes rise above the dome of
Mont Blanc, render this scene of beauty still more interesting. . . . What
a divine day! How happy and serene all nature appears!” (Shelley 1994
[1818], 186–87)
Notes
1. For other perspectives on the role of metaphor in narrative represen-
tations of mind, see Leslie Lockett’s and Elizabeth Bradburn’s contribu-
tions to this volume.
2. See, for example, Bachelard (1964 [1958], xxii–xxiv) on how “space
which has been seized upon by the imagination . . . has been lived in, not in
its positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination,” so that our im-
ages of houses “move in both directions: they are in us as much as we are
in them.” See also Lefebvre (1991 [1974], 11–12).
3. In addition to the examples from MansÀeld Park discussed by Said
(1995), Captain Wentworth’s assistance of Anne Elliot’s friend Mrs. Smith
at the end of Persuasion, whereby he puts her “in the way of recovering her
husband’s property in the West Indies” (Austen 1985 [1818], 253), highlights
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ford University Press.
———. 1983 [1817]. Biographia Literaria. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson
Bate. 2 vols. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press.
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tations. 2 vols. London: Samuel Richardson.
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Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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son-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell.
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durance of ‘Frankenstein’: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and
U. C. KnoepÁmacher, 3–30. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Frederick Garber. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1993 [1790]. A Sicilian Romance. Ed. Alison Milbank. Oxford: Oxford
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Symbiosis 5:51–68.
I had now arrived at that particular point of my walk where four roads
met — the road to Hampstead, along which I had returned, the road to
Finchley, the road to West End, and the road back to London. I had me-
chanically turned in this latter direction, and was strolling along the
lonely high-road — idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland
young ladies would look like — when, in one moment, every drop of blood
in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and
suddenly on my shoulder from behind me.
I turned on the instant, with my Àngers tightening round the han-
dle of my stick.
There, in the middle of the broad bright high-road — there, as if it had
that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven — stood
the Àgure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white gar-
ments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the
dark cloud over London, as I faced her.
I was far too seriously startled by the suddenness with which this ex-
traordinary apparition stood before me, in the dead of night and in that
lonely place, to ask what she wanted. The strange woman spoke Àrst.
“Is that the road to London?” she said. (Collins 1973 [1860], 15)
215
consciousness at all — at least what conventionally goes under the
umbrella of such a term. The complicated by-play of memory,
desire, and inner negotiation, the standard basis for novelistic
analysis since Richardson, at least, is replaced here by a series
of sudden, and automatic, physical responses. Hartright’s blood
is “brought to a stop” in a vivid, if now rather clichéd, image
for the physiological response of fear; his hand (involuntarily?)
clenches; his powers of speech desert him. All but visual acu-
ity is removed, and what presents itself to Hartright’s vision is
oddly still, as if his sensorium can only process a frozen image.
Furthermore, the scene is literally momentary, dotted with re-
minders of a speed — “in one moment,” “on the instant” — that is
closer to the speed of neural operations than to fully conscious
deliberation. Lest we imagine this sudden seizure of fright and
shock as an interruption of a fully self-aware process of thought,
we are told that Hartright had been previously walking “me-
chanically,” engaged in a half-formed reverie, his mind proceed-
ing numbly on the rails of mental drift. In the terms of, say, Jane
Austen’s alert and continually ratiocinative protagonists, Har-
tright is, we might say, not all there. Hartright himself seems to
conÀrm it shortly thereafter: “Was I Walter Hartright? Was this
the well-known, uneventful road, where holiday people strolled
on Sundays? Had I really left, little more than an hour since, the
quiet, decent, conventionally-domestic atmosphere of my moth-
er’s cottage?” (Collins 1973 [1860], 18).
Neither is it anachronistic to point to the various psychic au-
tomatisms on display in this scene. In her acute and aestheti-
cally conservative 1862 attack on the sensation novel, Margaret
Oliphant mounted a full-scale close reading of this scene, and
one other from The Woman in White much like it, to demonstrate
its odd dependence on nerves rather than conscious thought. “It
is a simple physical effect, if one may use such an expression,”
Oliphant claims. “It is totally independent of character, and in-
volves no particular issue, so far as can be foreseen at this point
of the story . . . these two startling points of this story do not
take their power from character, or from passion, or any intellec-
tual or emotional inÁuence. The effect is pure sensation, neither
When one thinks of Micawber always presenting himself in the same sit-
uations, moved with the same springs, and uttering the same sounds . . .
one is reminded of the frogs whose brains have been taken out for physi-
ological purposes, and whose actions henceforth want the distinctive pe-
culiarity of organic action, that of Áuctuating spontaneity. . . . It is this
complexity of the organism which Dickens wholly fails to conceive; his
characters have nothing Áuctuating and incalculable in them, even when
they embody true observations; and very often they are creations so fan-
tastic that one is at a loss to understand how he could, without halluci-
nation, believe them to be like reality. (Lewes 1872, 149)
Why should she be ashamed of that which, to her thinking was so great an
honour to her? She had heard of girls who would not speak of their love,
arguing to themselves cannily that there may be many a slip between the
cup and the lip. There could be no need of any such caution with her. There
could surely be no such slip! Should there be such a fall, — should any such
fate, either by falseness or misfortune, come upon her, — no such caution
could be of service to save her. The cup would have been so shattered in
its fall that no further piecing of its parts would be in any way possible.
So much as this she did not exactly say to herself; but she felt it all, and
went bravely forward, — bold in her love, and careful to hide it from none
who chanced to see it. (Trollope 1980 [1864], 93)
I had never read, never been told anything of his nature or his habits; and
at Àrst the strong hieroglyphics graven as with iron stylet on his brow,
round his eyes, beside his mouth, puzzled and bafÁed instinct. Ere long,
however, if I did not know, at least I felt, the meaning of those charac-
ters written without hand. There sat a silent sufferer — a nervous, mel-
ancholy man. Those eyes had looked on the visits of a certain ghost — had
long waited the comings and goings of that strangest spectre, Hypochon-
dria. (Brontë 1979 [1853], 290)
Nervous maladies abound, and while they are legible on the sur-
face of the body, they are described in the language of Gothic
hauntings, as if any more particular source — such as, for in-
stance, autobiography, the facts of a personal past — were beside
the point. This elision of Damasio’s autobiographical self is par-
ticularly striking in what is, after all, a Àctional autobiography.
Brontë and her narrator seem committed to the notion, common
to physiological psychology as well as the more speciÀc theo-
ries of mind that Brontë knew well, that interiority is constitu-
tional rather than developmental, that the core self supersedes
and renders merely accidental the facts of personal history.6 In
some very strange fashion, even narrative itself — the succession
of incidents in a given story, the events that make up a reader’s
experience — is powerless to plumb the wordless depths of the
mind’s neural substrate. Villette is an extreme instance, but it is
nonetheless representative of one of the strongest paradoxes of
Victorian prose: the great age of autobiography was also the age
most openly skeptical of the truths autobiography might yield.
Young love-making — that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to — the
things whence its subtle interlacings are swung — are scarcely percepti-
ble: momentary touches of Ànger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and
dark orbs, unÀnished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest
tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indeÀnable
joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, in-
deÀnite trust. And Lydgate fell to spinning that web from his inward self
with wonderful rapidity, in spite of experience supposed to be Ànished
off with the drama of Laure — in spite too of medicine and biology. (El-
iot 1988 [1872], 284)
I remember then letting go the tiller and saying “God help me!” But then
I was forced to take it again and go on; and the evil longings, the evil
prayers came again and blotted everything else dim, till, in the midst of
them — I don’t know how it was — he was turning the sail — there was a
gust — he was struck — I know nothing — I only know that I saw my wish
outside me. (Eliot 1967 [1876], 761)
“I saw my wish outside me”: this is the only possible form of self-
alienation possible for consciousness in Eliot. Unlike the alien-
ation of retrospection in Austen, which can be offset by a free
indirect discourse conÀdent in its relation to agency and judg-
ment, Gwendolen can only recognize the foundational split be-
tween a desire and its actualization, without knowing how, or
in what ways, inner springs created the outer reality. One can
recognize one’s wish, and one can recognize its presence in the
world alongside other competing wishes and facts, and that is the
best one can do. For the faculty psychologies that preceded phys-
Notes
1. See Taylor (1988) and Winter (1998, 320–31) for the most detailed treat-
ments of sensation Àction’s relation to the mental sciences.
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243
as a reÁector in the opening paragraphs of James Joyce’s A Por-
trait of the Artist as a Young Man; this 1916 Künstlerroman traces the
development of the protagonist and the emergence of his desire
to Áy by the nets of “nationality, language, religion” so as to be
able to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience
of my race” (Joyce 1964 [1916], 203, 253). The beginning of the
novel represents not only Simon Dedalus telling his very young
son a story but also the quality of Stephen’s experience as he en-
gages with that narrative; the father’s storytelling act is refracted
through the perceptions of a child still in the process of acquir-
ing basic linguistic competence:
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow com-
ing down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along
the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. . . .
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass:
he had a hairy face. (Joyce 1964 [1916], 7)
But he would not go mad [sitting with his wife, Rezia, in Regent’s Park
in London]. He would shut his eyes; he would see no more.
But they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves
being connected by millions of Àbres with his own body, there on the seat,
fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made that state-
ment. The sparrows Áuttering, rising, and falling in jagged fountains
were part of the pattern; the white and blue, barred with black branches.
Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them
were as signiÀcant as the sounds. A child cried. Rightly far away a horn
sounded. All taken together meant the birth of a new religion —
“Septimus!” said Rezia. He started violently. (Woolf 1953 [1925],
22)
well theyre not going to get my husband again into their clutches if I can
help it making fun of him then behind his back I know well when he goes
on with his idiotics because he has sense enough not to squander every
penny piece he earns down their gullets and looks after his wife and fam-
ily goodfornothings poor Paddy Dignam all the same Im sorry in a way
for him what are his wife and 5 children going to do unless he was in-
sured comical little teetotum always stuck up in some pub corner. (Joyce
1986 [1922], 636)
Remapping Modernism/Modernist
Remappings: New Geographies of Mind
As some of the comments quoted in my previous section suggest,
a prominent conception of mental phenomena is buttressed by
a Cartesian geography of the mental, whereby the mind consti-
tutes an interior space separated off from the world at large. In
turn, frameworks for studying narrative representations of mind
have inherited this Cartesian geography of mind. Analysts typi-
cally identify an array of positions or increments along an inter-
nal-external scale to which various methods of narration can be
assigned — with some more proximal to the internal domain of
the mind being represented, others closer to the characters’ out-
ward actions and thus more distally related to mind. For example,
Stanzel (1984 [1979]) sought to mark off the authorial narrative
situation from both the Àrst-person and Àgural narrative situ-
ations by proposing a continuum that stretches from noniden-
tity to identity between the narrator and the protagonist — that
is, from a position external to the protagonist’s experiences to
one that is internal to those experiences. Similarly, Leech and
Short (2007 [1981], 276–77) suggest that methods of thought rep-
resentation can be mapped out along a cline or scale stretching
from relatively externalized views of characters’ minds, which
they term “narrative reports of thought acts” (e.g., Leah sat and
thought about home), to progressively more internalized views,
ranging from indirect thought (Leah sat and thought how far away
home seemed), to free indirect thought (Leah sat there quietly; home
seemed so far away now), to direct thought (Leah sat there quietly
The slide was shot back. A penitent emerged from the farther side of the
box. The near slide was drawn. A penitent entered when the other peni-
tent came out. . . . A soft whispering noise Áoated in vaporous cloudlets
out of the box. It was the woman: soft whispering cloudlets, soft whis-
pering vapour, whispering and vanishing.
He beat his breast with his Àst humbly, secretly under cover of the
wooden armrest. He would be at one with others and with God. He would
love his neighbor. . . . It was a terrible and a sad thing to sin. But God
was merciful to poor sinners who were truly sorry. How true that was!
That was indeed goodness.
The slide was shot to suddenly. The penitent came out. He was next.
He stood up in terror and walked blindly into the box.
At last it had come. He knelt in the silent gloom and raised his eyes to
the white cruciÀx suspended above him. God could see that he was sorry.
(Joyce 1964 [1916], 142–43)
Like some dumb creature who has been brought up to a gate for an un-
known purpose, and stands there longing to gallop away, Elizabeth Dal-
loway sat silent. Was Miss Kilman going to say anything more?
“Don’t quite forget me,” said Doris Kilman; her voice quivered. Right
away to the end of the Àeld the dumb creature galloped in terror. . . .
Elizabeth turned her head. The waitress came. One had to pay at the
desk, Elizabeth said, and went off, drawing out, so Miss Kilman felt, the
very entrails in her body, stretching them as she crossed the room, and
then, with a Ànal twist, bowing her head very politely, she went.
She had gone. Miss Kilman sat at the marble table among the éclairs,
stricken once, twice, thrice by shocks of suffering. (Woolf 1953 [1925],
132–33)
Storyworlds/Umwelten:
Exploring Worlds-as-Experienced
In this chapter, I have argued for the need to rethink standard
accounts of modernism as engaging in (or deepening and radi-
calizing an already-unfolding) inward turn, a movement away
References
Beckett, Samuel. 1957 [1938]. Murphy. New York: Grove Press.
Botar, Oliver A. I. 2001. “Notes towards a Study of Jakob von Uexküll’s Re-
ception in Early Twentieth-Century Artistic and Architectural Circles.”
Semiotica 134 (1/4): 593–97.
Clark, Andy. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again.
Cambridge ma: mit Press.
———. 1998. “Embodied, Situated, and Distributed Cognition.” In A Com-
panion to Cognitive Science, ed. William Bechtel and George Graham, 506–
17. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. 2008. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Exten-
sion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clark, Andy, and David J. Chalmers. 1998. “The Extended Mind.” Analy-
sis 58 (1): 7–19.
Cohn, Dorrit. 1978. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Conscious-
ness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cole, Michael. 1999. “Ecological Validity.” In The mit Encyclopedia of the Cog-
nitive Sciences, ed. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil, 257–59. Cam-
bridge ma: mit Press.
Doležel, Lubomír. 1980. “Truth and Authenticity in Narrative.” Poetics To-
day 1 (3): 7–25.
Edel, Leon. 1955. The Psychological Novel, 1900–1950. New York: J. B. Lippin-
cott.
Fernighough, Anne. 2007. “Consciousness as a Stream.” In The Cambridge
Companion to the Modernist Novel, ed. Morag Shiach, 65–81. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Fowler, Roger. 1977. Linguistics and the Novel. London: Methuen.
Gallagher, Shaun. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Gangopadhyay, Nivedita, and Julian Kiverstein. 2009. “Enactivism and the
Unity of Perception and Action.” Topoi 28:69–73.
Gardner, Howard. 1985. The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Rev-
olution. Boston: Basic Books.
Gibson, J. J. 1979. An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Hough-
ton-MifÁin.
Harré, Rom, and Grant Gillett. 1994. The Discursive Mind. London: Sage.
273
kind of lens that can expose both commonalities and contrasts
among texts written in different periods or in different styles.
In using attribution theory as a parameter for cross-comparing
the four case studies, I will consider, in particular, whether texts
with an ontological dominant present particular challenges to
attribution theory since processes of attribution operate in fun-
damentally different ways for texts that foreground the mak-
ing and unmaking of worlds. The analysis will involve ranging
the four texts along a scale in terms of how they relate to stan-
dard or default mechanisms of attribution, and I will suggest
that their positions on this scale correlate exactly with their po-
sitions on the neorealist/modernist/postmodernist continuum
referred to above.
The discussion that follows will consider two separate but
related issues. One is the story-level issue of the mind treated
as a theme in narrative, the nature of the Àctional minds that
are constructed by texts, the what that is the content of those
minds. The other is the discourse-level issue of the techniques
used to represent consciousness in narrative, how minds are pre-
sented in the discourse. It will, however, soon become apparent
that it is difÀcult in practice to maintain a distinction between
the two issues. Although, in the treatments of the four novels,
I will be focusing primarily on the second issue, the how, it is
impossible to talk about the how without also talking in detail
about the what. You have to describe the contents of Àctional
minds when you are considering how those minds are presented
in the text. Also, the techniques for Àctional mind presenta-
tion will determine, to a certain extent, what thoughts are de-
scribed. The repellent preoccupations of Gregory and Terry in
Success are more appropriately presented in their deeply un-
reliable homodiegetic (or Àrst-person) narrative streams than
they would be by the calm, measured, heterodiegetic (or third-
person) narration of Men at Arms. The mind is treated as a theme
in Atonement, and the choice of this theme strongly inÁuences
the means by which the minds of its characters are presented
in its discourse.
274 a l a n pa lmer
Modernism and
Postmodernism, Epistemology and Ontology
The modernist novel is characterized by a move away from the
omniscient third-person narration that is typical of the realist
novel and toward an experimental and impressionistic emphasis
on subjectivity, inner states of consciousness, and fragmentary
and discontinuous character construction.1 However, the mod-
ernist novel is still based on a belief in truth and reality. Modern-
ist writers’ use of the techniques of stream of consciousness and
interior monologue reÁects their interest in the problems raised
by the attempt to record as faithfully as possible the workings
of Àctional minds. Postmodern narratives, on the other hand,
are often arbitrary and indeterminate. They reveal a delight in
disorder, discontinuity, and ambiguity and a correspondingly
cavalier attitude toward the conventions of coherent plot, real-
istic characterization, and clearly identiÀable settings. Both time
and space in the postmodern novel can be unstable and incom-
prehensible. There is a self-reÁexive interest in the processes of
narrative and a frequent use of metaÀctional devices that draw
attention to the Àctional status of the text. The notion of subjec-
tivity is problematical because the self is viewed as a construct
and a Àction. However, arguments that certain features are char-
acteristic of, or, worse, speciÀc to, a particular type of Àction are
vulnerable to counterarguments that these features can also be
found elsewhere. “So novels in the second half of the twentieth
century are ontologically destabilizing? So what! So is Don Quix-
ote.” This does not leave much room for maneuver. I will not,
therefore, be claiming that the characteristics of modernist or
postmodern Àction are exclusive to such Àction.
It is tempting to regard the terms “modernism” and “postmod-
ernism” as labels for discrete historical periods. But, as McHale
(1992) remarks, modernism and postmodernism “are not suc-
cessive stages in some inevitable evolution from less advanced
to more advanced aesthetic forms, but rather alternative con-
temporary practices, equally ‘advanced’ or ‘progressive,’ equally
available, between which writers are free to choose” (207). Part
276 a l a n pa lmer
and plurality of worlds, and how such worlds are made and un-
made. It is preoccupied with such questions as, What is a world?
How is a world constituted? Are there alternative worlds? If so,
how are they constituted? How do different worlds, and different
kinds of world, differ, and what happens when someone passes
from one world to another? (McHale 1992, 247; 2005, 457). The
two dominants result in differing constructions of self and sub-
jectivity, the subject matter of this volume. “Modernist perspec-
tivism . . . multiplied points of view on the world, but without,
for the most part, undermining the underlying unity of the self.
. . . Each perspective is lodged in a subjectivity which is itself
relatively coherent, relatively centred and stable” (McHale 1992,
254). By contrast, “postmodernism’s shift of focus to ontologi-
cal issues and themes has radical consequences for literary mod-
els of the self. A poetics in which the category ‘world’ is plural,
unstable and problematic would seem to entail a model of the
self which is correspondingly plural, unstable and problematic”
(McHale 1992, 253).
In making his distinction, McHale (1987) quite rightly stresses
that epistemological questions cannot be raised without imme-
diately raising ontological questions and vice versa. However,
the dominant “speciÀes the order in which different aspects are
attended to, so that, although it would be perfectly possible to
interrogate a postmodernist text about its epistemological im-
plications, it is more urgent to interrogate it about its ontologi-
cal implications” (11). My perspective will, I think, reinforce the
argument that ontological and epistemological concerns are so
intertwined that it is difÀcult to keep them apart for long and
that any differences are of emphasis only. Though a particular
text’s dominant determines which concern is more urgent, in
practice, questions of knowledge are necessarily intimately en-
tangled with questions of being and vice versa.
Attribution Theory
I will be considering the making and unmaking of the Àctional
worlds in all four novels in turn, attempting to show how the in-
sights contained in the framework described above can be illumi-
278 a l a n pa lmer
games and are always embedded in speciÀc social contexts. Attri-
butions tend to be discursively constructed as apparently factual
and objective, but they often contain self-interested attributions
of motives. Pure mental descriptions are rare. A mental state or
event will be described in a certain way and not in other ways
for particular purposes, and these alternatives can vary greatly
as to how they ascribe agency, impose responsibility, justify be-
havior, explain motivations, assign praise, deÁect criticism and
blame, and so on. This approach has obvious relevance to the
novel, where mental functioning can only exist within the words
of a Àctional discourse.
An analysis of the nature of the attribution of mental states to
characters in the four novels within McHale’s framework raises
a number of questions. How reliable or secure can these attribu-
tions be in view of the disruptions to be discussed below? How
can attributions be used by the reader to build up a picture of
a character’s whole mind when narratives typically foreground
the world-creating power of narrative itself, generating multi-
ple ontologies within any given Àctional domain and hence on-
tologically plural minds? In particular, how can attributions of
speciÀc states of mind be used to build up a picture of the whole
mind when, as I will suggest in the case of the narrator-char-
acter in The Third Policeman and the main characters in Atone-
ment, there are doubts over whether or not there is one whole
mind? In summary, different sorts of attributional unreliability
are in operation in the three nonrealist novels. The unreliabil-
ity in Success is obvious to the reader, as the two narrators pro-
vide wildly different accounts of the same events for obviously
self-justiÀcatory purposes. The third-person attributions in The
Third Policeman are extremely odd and, as the narrator does not
know he is dead, his Àrst-person attributions are unreliable in
the sense that he thinks they are taking place in one ontological
plane when they are in fact taking place in another. Many of the
attributions in Atonement are sensible and plausible, and so ap-
pear at Àrst to be reliable. It is only later that these apparently
authoritative judgments are shown not to be so or, even worse,
to be simply false.
280 a l a n pa lmer
tive man” (21). The sections of the narrative relating explicitly
to Àctional minds satisfy Grice’s four conversational maxims of
quantity (being just informative enough), quality (not saying
what you do not know to be true), relevance, and manner (be-
ing clear, brief, and orderly). The humor in this extremely funny
novel is beautifully controlled by means of the Áow of attribu-
tion and often arises from the mismatch between a particular
situation and the response to it that is attributed to a particular
character. Guy Ànds that “any Àrm passage between Apthorpe’s
dreamlike universe and the world of common experience was
a thing to cherish” (107–8). However, the dislocations between
the solipsistic “dreamlike universe” of Apthorpe’s mind and the
“world of common experience” shared by everyone else’s minds
are clear to everyone but Apthorpe himself.
The nature of the attribution in the novel can be illustrated by
a description of the development of Guy’s relationship with his
regiment. At Àrst, Guy has difÀculty in adjusting to being part
of this intermental unit. (Intermental thought [Palmer 2010] is
joint, group, shared, or collective thought.) Initially, he feels iso-
lated and separate and is aware that he is setting himself apart
from the other ofÀcers. Eventually, though, he comes for a while
to feel much closer to the group:
282 a l a n pa lmer
is a pathetic fantasist, his job is humiliatingly menial, he has no
money, and his “friends” exploit him. Terry, on the other hand,
turns into a ruthlessly Thatcherite success as he becomes more
attractive and earns more money. The novel ends with Terry as
the dominant Àgure in his adopted family. The homodiegetic
narration is shared between Gregory and Terry. All of the twelve
chapters, titled “January” through to “December,” are divided
into two parts, with Terry always narrating the Àrst part. There
is minimal departure from the real world. The book is very un-
comfortable to read because both main characters’ motives and
intentions are generally extremely sordid, scatological, misan-
thropic, and misogynist. A deeply Swiftian disgust and rage is
expressed in a curiously arch, Baroque prose style.
The following is a heavily edited version of the long passage in
which the true nature of Gregory’s mental functioning is made
clear (the background is that Gregory has admitted to having
panic attacks on the Underground):
I turned and looked into the pit of harm from which I had triumphantly
climbed. Well, I thought, that’s put paid to that.
Recognize the style (I suppose I’d better change that too now)?
If you believed it, you’ll believe anything. It was a lie. The very entrance
to the Underground makes me want to pee with dread. . . .
It was a lie. I tell lies. I’m a liar. I always have been. I’m sorry. Here
come the secrets.
My job, for instance, is, and always has been, fucking awful. . . .
I expect, too, that you think that my sexual life is as gleaming and ripe
as Terence’s is joyless and jejune. . . . But then all that’s gone bad on me
too, bad and sad, bad and sad and mad. . . .
Why? Is it part of the same thing? (Suddenly I keep needing to ask all
these questions. Why? Tell me, someone, why won’t someone tell me?) I
know there are other bits of my life just waiting to go next; they have no
other function but to snuff out when it will do me most harm. I wander
into the kitchen Àrst thing, and it looks intensely familiar and yet intensely
irritating, as if all night I had wearily dreamt of forks and spoons; and the
lies of the past are already queuing up to point their Àngers. . . .
284 a l a n pa lmer
late in the novel when, principally because Gregory becomes
more honest, they are much more consistent with each other.
Nevertheless, these epistemological difÀculties take place against
a stable ontological background. There is only one London that
the two minds are experiencing, albeit in completely different
ways. Terry refers, in fact, to “the distance between how [Ursula,
his stepsister,] sees things and how things actually are” (148).
The importance of this remark is that the existence of an objec-
tive “how things actually are” is acknowledged. Gregory Ànally
admits in the quoted passage that it is undeniably true to say of
the storyworld that he is having panic attacks.
There certainly is what may be called an epistemological shock
that transforms the two main characters into very different peo-
ple by the end of the novel. The balance of power between them
is wrenched so violently that it becomes clear that the actual sto-
ryworld is nothing like the one presented in most of the text. The
continuing consciousness frames remain in place, but with ma-
jor adjustments: pathetic fantasist instead of arrogant young toff,
and Thatcherite success story instead of embarrassing oik. There
is one “objective” storyworld only, but the reader is profoundly
misled about its nature until the end. Readers are obliged to re-
construct their storyworld (although, as mentioned earlier, the
point at which this happens will vary from reader to reader). The
postmodern edge to this predominantly modernist novel arises
from the disintegration of Gregory’s self due to his inability to
cope with the world that he inhabits. There is a certain continu-
ity to Terry’s development but not to Gregory’s far more discon-
tinuous transformation. Terry’s may be the relatively coherent
and stable self of the modernist novel, but Gregory’s selves are
different. As he says above, “I know there are other bits of my life
just waiting to go next,” and, elsewhere, “all the bits that were
me have been re-shufÁed yet again” (213). Once the arrogant fop
is recognized as an invention, and once the fantasies have ended,
Gregory does not know what is left. He does not know which bits
of the self to attribute beliefs, motives, and feelings to. In the
nightmarish scene quoted above, Gregory is in the kitchen see-
286 a l a n pa lmer
just as if it had held the universe standstill for an instant, suspending the
planets in their courses, halting the sun and holding in mid-air any fall-
ing thing the earth was pulling towards it. (24–25)
Atonement
Within the modernist/postmodernist continuum, Atonement can
be placed a stage further along from The Third Policeman, despite
Àrst impressions to the contrary. In part 1 of the novel, a 1930s
country house party includes Briony Tallis, an imaginative thir-
teen-year-old, her older sister Cecilia, and Robbie, a working
class young man whose university education has been paid for
by the Tallis family. (The positions occupied by Terry in Success
and Robbie in Atonement are curiously similar: both are work-
ing class boys who are fully or semi-adopted by an upper middle
class family.) When Briony discovers Robbie and Cecilia mak-
288 a l a n pa lmer
ing love in the library, she misinterprets it as an assault. Then
Briony’s cousin, Lola, really is raped, and Briony wrongly claims
that she saw Robbie do it. Part 2 follows Robbie, now a soldier
after his imprisonment, in northern France in 1940 during the
retreat to Dunkirk. In part 3, Briony, now a nurse in London, vis-
its Cecilia and Robbie to ask for their forgiveness. They are not
quite able to give it. However, in a short epilogue titled “London
1999,” written by Briony when she is an old woman who has just
been diagnosed with progressive dementia, it becomes clear that
the previous three parts comprise a novel within a novel writ-
ten by Briony herself as an act of atonement. The scene in which
she asks for forgiveness never happened because Robbie died at
Dunkirk and Cecilia was killed by a bomb soon after.
Until the homodiegetic epilogue, Atonement appears at Àrst
reading to be a traditional heterodiegetic narrative in which there
is minimal departure from the real world. Brian Richardson (2006)
has very perceptively drawn attention to the use by a large num-
ber of writers of this device of replacing one fundamental cogni-
tive frame, that of the omniscient heterodiegetic narrator, with
another, the unreliable homodiegetic narrator. Examples include
Camus’s La Peste, Robbe-Grille’s Dans le Labyrinthe, and Borges’s
“The Shape of the Sword” (10–11). When compared with The Third
Policeman, Atonement is even more explicitly concerned with the
structure and dynamics of world creation; as McEwan’s text un-
folds, it foregrounds the relationship between the storyworld of
Briony’s novel and the larger storyworld in which it turns out to
be embedded. In fact, Briony’s epilogue, by frequently drawing
attention to the constructed and contingent nature of her novel
storyworld, goes some way to unmaking that world. In addi-
tion, Atonement is also deeply and seriously concerned with the
purposes of world construction: that is, not just how alternative
worlds are made and unmade but why they are. The clue is given
in the title of the novel; Briony’s purpose is atonement. Again,
the text raises a number of epistemological issues related to Àc-
tional minds, such as, How can Briony attribute states of mind
to Cecilia and Robbie? And, How does the reader know what re-
ally happened in the whole storyworld of the novel when most of
290 a l a n pa lmer
cally, it is about the development of the thirteen-year-old Briony’s
theory of mind and her growing ability to attribute mental states
to others. There are many explicit references to this issue:
Was everyone else really as alive as she was? . . . If the answer was yes,
then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two
billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and
everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique,
when no one was. (36)
292 a l a n pa lmer
ing the point that Briony is admitting that she has not written
her novel in the service of realism.
In addition, it is revealed in the epilogue that the Briony novel
has gone through many drafts. This hardly suggests that the À-
nal draft is a transparent and unmediated view of events. While
Briony is musing on the various drafts of her novel, she refers
to the one that we read (dated March 1999) as the latest draft
(369). She then states: “It is only in this last version that my lovers
end well” (370). Generally, the use of the words draft and version
does not give much conÀdence that the novel that we read is a
deÀnitive and unproblematically accurate account. Would there
have been further drafts if she had been well enough to com-
plete them? More speciÀcally, she is explicitly saying that this
latest version is less accurate than previous drafts. And there are
other indicators of the provisional, contingent, and arbitrary na-
ture of Briony’s storyworld, its constructedness. The “Robbie” of
part 1 becomes “Turner” in part 2. The difference in perspective
is signiÀcant. It draws attention to the fact that, like all individ-
uals, Robbie is aspectually presented. He differs depending on
the perspective from which he is viewed and so a complete pic-
ture is never possible. Finally, the epilogue draws attention to
the various, admittedly minor, errors of fact in the draft of the
novel that are corrected by a retired soldier. If she gets the small
things wrong, why should we believe that she gets the larger
things right?
James Phelan has pointed out that the following passage can
be seen as “marking the seam between history and Àction”:
She left the café, and as she walked along the Common she felt the distance
widen between her and another self, no less real, who was walking back
towards the hospital. Perhaps the Briony who was walking in the direc-
tion of Balham was the imagined or ghostly persona. This unreal feeling
was heightened when, after half an hour, she reached another High Street,
more or less the same as the one she had left behind. (329)
294 a l a n pa lmer
Briony explicitly draws attention to the factual errors contained
in this section.
Robbie 3 is the one we meet in the Balham Áat. This Rob-
bie never existed. He was dead before this scene could ever take
place.
Robbie 4 is the real Robbie: the one who exists outside of Bri-
ony’s novel and who the reader never has direct access to. This is
the one who, we are told in the epilogue, died at Dunkirk.
And there are others. As Briony states that the novel that we
read has gone through several drafts, this means that there will
have been a Robbie 5 (for example, the one who is described in
Briony’s novella — the Àrst draft of the novel), a Robbie 6, and
so on.
To reinforce the point, let us look at the number of Brionys
who are present speciÀcally at the point when we are reading
Cyril Connolly’s comments on Briony’s novella (311–15):
296 a l a n pa lmer
riod to be reviewed, from the Second World War to the present
day, it was hardly to be expected, I suppose, that a discussion of
some of the ontologies of consciousness contained in it would
end on an exhilarating, life-afÀrming high note.
Notes
1. But see David Herman’s contribution to this volume for a contrasting
account of modernist narratives.
2. For more on theory of mind and the novel, see Zunshine (2006).
References
Abbott, H. Porter. 1996. Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Amis, Martin. 2004 [1978]. Success. London: Vintage.
Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London: Rout-
ledge.
Lodge, David. 1981. “Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism.” In Work-
ing with Structuralism, 3–16. London: Routledge.
McEwan, Ian. 2001. Atonement. London: Vintage.
McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen.
———. 1992. Constructing Postmodernism. London: Routledge.
———. 2005. “Postmodern Narrative.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 456–
60. London: Routledge.
O’Brien, Flann. 1988 [1967]. The Third Policeman. London: Paladin.
Palmer, Alan. 2004. Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
———. 2010. Social Minds in the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University
Press.
Phelan, James. 2005. “Narrative Judgments and the Rhetorical Theory of
Narrative: Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” In A Companion to Narrative Theory,
ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, 322–36. Oxford: Blackwell.
Richardson, Brian. 2006. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and
Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991. Possible Worlds, ArtiÀcial Intelligence, and Narrative
Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Waugh, Evelyn. 1964 [1952]. Men at Arms. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Zunshine, Lisa. 2006. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Co-
lumbus: Ohio State University Press.
299
Shakespeare have appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly and Studies
in English Literature, and she is currently working on a book about
the character sketch in seventeenth-century English literature.
300 contributors
and Hong Kong. He is the author of Coleridge and the Psychology of
Romanticism (2000) and the editor of Coleridge’s Writings: On the
Sublime (2003). His essays on Akenside, Coleridge, Mary Shelley,
Emerson, Virginia Woolf, and other authors have appeared in a
number of books and journals, including Journal of the History of
Ideas, elh, Modern Philology, Prose Studies, and Symbiosis.
contributors 301
Index
303
Botar, Oliver A. I., 268n12 cognitive approaches to literature:
Boyd, Brian, 12 and evolved cognitive adapta-
Bradburn, Elizabeth, 20, 21, 209n1 tions, 167–68, 175; relation of, to
brain. See consciousness historicist approaches, 163–64,
Bridget Jones (Fielding), 174 175–80, 181, 183; and unidirec-
Brockmeier, Jens, 32n9 tional borrowing from cog-
Brontë, Charlotte, 237n6; Villette, nitive science, 34n12. See also
229–30 conceptual metaphor theory;
Bruner, Jerome, 17, 35n18 consciousness; consciousness
Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s Progress, representation; Exceptionality
133, 137, 139–43 Thesis; mind as theme
Burke, Edmund, 188, 210n8 cognitive linguistics. See concep-
Burney, Frances: Cecilia, 179 tual blends; conceptual meta-
Butte, George, 4, 15, 168 phor theory; mental spaces; text
worlds
Capgrave, John: The Life of Saint cognitive maps, 268n12
Katharine, 90–92 cognitive psychology, 8, 114, 176,
cardiocentric models of mind. See 255
consciousness cognitive science, 255–56. See also
Cartesianism. See consciousness cognitive approaches to litera-
representation; Exceptional- ture; consciousness
ity Thesis; post-Cartesian mod- cognitivism, 256. See also post-
els of mind Cartesian models of mind;
Cavallo, Guglielmo, 112 postcognitivism
Cavendish, Margaret: The Blaz- Cohn, Dorrit, 1, 3, 4, 5–6, 7–8, 9,
ing World, 104, 133, 137, 143–45, 23, 33n10, 35n21, 69, 247
146, 149 Cole, Michael, 264
Caygill, Howard, 211n9 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 191, 192,
Cecilia (Burney), 179 195–96, 198, 211n10
cephalocentric models of mind. See collective consciousness. See con-
consciousness; emotion sciousness representation; inter-
Chafe, Wallace, 72, 128n20 mental thought
Chalmers, David J., 253, 256 Collins, Wilkie: The Woman in
characterization. See consciousness White, 215–17, 219, 222
representation conceptual blends, 44, 54–55, 56,
Charlton, Kenneth, 108–9, 128n21. See also conceptual meta-
128nn13–14 phor theory
Chartier, Roger, 111–12, 128n19 conceptual metaphor theory: and
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 81–83, 85–86, a community’s standards of lit-
96n7, 97n9 eralness, 55–59; and embod-
children’s narratives (stories writ- ied experience, 133–34, 145; and
ten for children), 170, 171–72, 178 embodied realism, 44, 53–59,
The Citizen of the World (Gold- 63–64, 66n10; and folk psychol-
smith), 161, 180 ogy, 134; and genre, 137–38; lim-
Clarissa (Richardson), 162, 167, 174 its of, vis-à-vis Old English
Clark, Andy, 22, 35n19, 253, 256, narratives, 19, 43–44, 53–59,
257, 260, 265 64n2, 65n10; and literary meta-
Clark, Edwin, 237n2 phors, 135–37, 154–55; and modes
304 index
of narration, 138–39, 147–50; as theme; neuroscience; noncon-
and narrative structure, 137–39; scious; post-Cartesian models
and seventeenth-century nar- of mind; postcognitivism; self-
ratives, 20, 133, 135–38, 139–56. consciousness; sensation novel;
See also conceptual blends; con- sensorimotor coupling; Shake-
sciousness representation; met- speare, William; silent reading;
aphor; metonymy; transcultural somatization; soul; unconscious;
psychiatry unreliability
consciousness: and attention, consciousness representation: and
222, 224–25; and the autobio- action loops, 22, 260–63; and
graphical self, 218–19, 224–25, advent of the novel, 132, 147–
226, 230; and the brain, 47, 103, 150, 175; and attribution theory,
109–11, 126n1, 218; and cardio- 22–23, 34n15, 273–74, 277–97;
centric models of mind, 46–52, and authentication (Doležel),
126n4; and cephalocentric mod- 10, 33n10, 246, 266n1; and autho-
els of mind, 58, 65n5, 103–4, rial vs. Àgural narrative situa-
119–21, 126, 126nn3–4; chang- tions, 245–47, 262–63, 267n5; and
ing conceptions of the scope of, Cartesianism, 249, 253–56, 258,
30n1, 73–74, 103, 126n1, 221–22; 261, 267n4; and characterization,
and culture, 109, 268n13; and 105–6, 122, 125–26, 177–80, 236;
evolved cognitive adaptations, and collective or group minds,
109, 164, 165, 167, 169, 175, 180; 90–92, 118; and counterfactual
and individuality, 95, 103; and constructions, 28; diachronic
literacy skills, 108, 109–12, 115, approaches to, 2–3, 4, 7, 23–30,
127n7, 128n17; materialist the- 35n23, 74, 95–96, 118–19, 132,
ories of, 220–21, 222, 225–26, 149, 170–71, 268n13; and direct
232–33; and mind-body dual- thought (direct discourse), 5–6,
ism, 44, 45–46, 58, 59–62, 63–64, 31n7, 69, 71–72, 77–79, 92–93,
253–54, 256–57, 268n13; of non- 94, 254–55; and drama, 75, 94,
human animals, 144, 265; non- 104, 105–6, 121, 126n6, 157n7, 183,
verbal elements of, 73, 74, 94; 185n8; and dream narratives,
and perception, 257; and social 141–42, 190–91; and embodied
experience, 15–18, 109, 112, 163– action, 11, 15–16, 19, 44, 75–76,
64, 165–84, 254; thematization 104, 118, 174, 233–34, 253–54, 258–
of, in Paradise Lost, 153–55; theo- 66; and enactivist models of
ries of, and Victorian novelists, mind, 22, 237n3, 249–50, 253–54,
225–26, 236n1, 237nn5–7. See also 256–66; and ethical judgments,
affordances; behaviorism; cog- 233–34, 290; and false free indi-
nitive approaches to literature; rect style, 228–29; and free
cognitive psychology; cognitiv- indirect thought (free indirect
ism; consciousness representa- discourse), 5–6, 31n7, 69, 87–89,
tion; continuing-consciousness 95, 227, 234, 237n5, 245, 254–55;
frame; core consciousness; dis- and gesture, 75–76; as grounded
tributed intelligence; ecologi- in conceptions of the mind,
cal validity; emotion; empathy; 9–10, 30n3, 32n8, 103, 126nn3–
evolutionary psychology; land- 4, 274; and heterodiegetic vs.
scapes; mass consciousness; homodiegetic narration, 147–48,
memory; mental disability; mind 274, 275, 279, 287, 289; and hy-
index 305
consciousness representation (cont.) modes of witness, 148, 155–56,
draulic model of mind, 19, 46–59, 156n5; and virtual direct speech
63–64, 65n3, 65n9, 66n11; and ide- (invented soliloquy), 92–93.
ology, 180, 204, 209; and indirect See also affordances; Austen,
thought (indirect discourse), 5–6, Jane; Brontë, Charlotte; cogni-
31n7, 69, 71–72, 79–84, 87–89, tive approaches to literature;
94–95, 96n1, 254–55; and inter- conceptual metaphor theory;
subjectivity, 4, 11, 90–92, 118, consciousness; consciousness
119, 142, 168, 235–36, 252, 281; and scene; continuing-conscious-
introspection, 226–30, 231–35; ness frame; dual-voice hypoth-
and the inward turn, 22, 35n21, esis; Eliot, George; emotion;
103–5, 248, 249, 250–54, 257–58, empathy; Exceptionality Thesis;
259–60, 263–64; and landscapes interior monologue; intermen-
in Romantic-period narra- tal thought; landscapes; mass
tives, 21, 187–209; and literacy, consciousness; metaphor; mind
20, 104–26, 127n7; and mental as theme; mind-style; Radcliffe,
embedments, 166–70, 172, 180, Ann; reÁector; Richardson, Sam-
181–82, 184n5; neglect of, in study uel; Shakespeare, William; silent
of medieval literature, 69; and reading; soliloquy; stream of
nineteenth-century physiological consciousness; sublime; Theory
psychology, 21–22, 217–36, 237n2; of Mind; Umwelt; Woolf, Vir-
in the nineteenth-century sensa- ginia; Wordsworth, William
tion novel, 216–18; and other dis- consciousness scene, 149. See also
courses of mind, 12, 34n12; and Shakespeare, William
perception, 257–66; and plot, construal systems, 259, 260, 261–63
75, 236; qualitative vs. quantita- contextual frames, 113. See also
tive approaches to, 24–25, 29–30, mental spaces; possible worlds;
36n24; and the realist novel, 69, storyworlds; text worlds
187, 226, 232, 233, 235–36, 248, continuing-consciousness frame,
252–53; and romance, 105–6, 117, 118, 278, 288
107, 115–26, 127n9; and scenes of Copland, Sarah, 266
observed benefaction, 161–64, core consciousness, 218–19, 224–
175–84; and scenes of reading, 25, 226, 230
105, 106–7, 123–25; and simu- Corns, Thomas N., 156n1
lation theory, 13–15; and social corpus-based approaches, 24–25,
class, 21, 171, 176–80; speech- 29, 36n24, 66n10, 96n5. See also
category approach to, 3–4, 5–6, consciousness representation
7, 28, 69–73; vs. speech repre- Cosmides, Leda, 12
sentation, 70–73, 94–95, 97n9; counterfactuals. See consciousness
and structure of Àctional minds, representation
7–18; and subjectivity, 6, 28, 95, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia
97n11, 187, 188, 192, 208–9, 275, (New Arcadia) (Sidney), 105, 106,
277, 284–86, 288; and theory the- 119–20, 122–23, 127n8
ory, 12–14, 21, 120–25; transcrip- coupling. See sensorimotor
tion theory of, 72–73; and travel coupling
narratives, 138–39, 145–50; and Crane, Mary, 126n3, 135
triangulation of minds, 163, 164, Cressy, David, 128n12
168–84, 184n5; and verbalized crowds, 166, 176, 181. See also
306 index
consciousness representation; Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 127n7
mass consciousness Eliot, George, 219, 230–31; Dan-
Culpeper, Jonathan, 72 iel Deronda, 233–35; Middlemarch,
Currie, Gregory, 14, 34n16 4–7, 10, 14–15, 16–18, 26–27, 29,
34n16, 231–33, 237n8
Dallas, E. S., 219, 224, 235–36 Elkins, Kate, 266
Damasio, Antonio, 218–19, 224–25, Ellenberger, Henri, 237n2
230. See also consciousness; core embedding. See framed narrative
consciousness embodied realism. See conceptual
Dames, Nicholas, 21–22, 237n2, metaphor theory
237nn5–6, 248, 267n6 embodiment. See conceptual met-
Damrosch, Leopold, 156n1 aphor theory; consciousness;
Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 233–35 consciousness representation;
Danziger, Kurt, 237n2 Exceptionality Thesis; sensori-
Dean, Cornelia, 66n12 motor coupling
Dennett, Daniel C., 32n9 Eming, Jutta, 97n11
Descartes, René. See consciousness Emma (Austen), 227
representation; Exceptional- Emmott, Catherine, 113, 184n2
ity Thesis; post-Cartesian mod- emotion: and cephalocentric mod-
els of mind els of mind, 103; and changing
developmental psychology, 12, 172 modes of consciousness repre-
diachronic approaches. See con- sentation, 27; and the conscious-
sciousness representation ness scene, 149; deÀnitions of,
Dickens, Charles, 225–26 96n2; and drama, 121; and Àc-
digital technologies, 109 tional plots, 4; in Gothic Àction,
direct thought (quoted mono- 188, 189; inscrutability of, in Vic-
logue). See consciousness torian Àction, 229–90; as key
representation element of consciousness repre-
discursive psychology, 256 sentation, 73; in medieval narra-
distributed intelligence, 256, 268n9 tive, 75–76, 78–79, 80–83, 84–86,
Doležel, Lubomír, 10, 33n10, 266n1 94–95; and meta-emotion, 96n6;
Donald, Merlin, 35n19, 110–11, 115, and Romantic-period land-
128n16 scapes, 187–88, 189–90, 194–95,
Donne, John, 145 197–99, 201, 206–9, 211n13; and
Doody, Margaret, 127n9, 129n24 social class, 179–80. See also Aus-
drama. See consciousness repre- ten, Jane; consciousness; empa-
sentation; emotion thy; Radcliffe, Ann; sublime;
dual-voice hypothesis, 31n7 Wordsworth, William
Dunbar, R. I. M., 165–66, 167, 184n2 empathy, 84–86, 95, 121, 236
Duncan, N., 165–66, 167, 184n2 enactivism. See consciousness
Dyck, Paul, 97n11 representation
engaging narrator, 84
Eagleton, Terry, 97n11 ethics. See consciousness
ecological validity, 264, 268n12. See representation
also Umwelt The Ethiopian Story (Heliodorus),
Edel, Leon, 243, 251–52 115–18, 119, 129n23, 172–75, 184n6
Edelman, Gerald M., 109 ethnopsychology, 32n9
The Egoist (Meredith), 223–24 evolution, science of, 235
index 307
evolutionary psychology, 4, 8, 168– Fleischman, Suzanne, 97n10
69, 175 Fludernik, Monika, 3, 19–20, 31n7,
Exceptionality Thesis: Accessi- 36n23, 55, 69, 72, 89, 95n1, 97n9,
bility argument against, 15–23, 126n5, 149, 156n5, 157n7, 276
34n11, 35n18, 35n20; and accounts fmri, 221. See also consciousness;
of folk psychology, 8, 11, 12–16, neuroscience
17–18, 19–20, 21, 32n9, 34nn13–14, focalization, 35n22, 247, 284
34nn16–17; and “anti-mimetic” folk psychology. See conceptual
narratives, 11, 33n11; and Car- metaphor theory; ethnopsychol-
tesian dualism, 8–11, 32n8; and ogy; Exceptionality Thesis
the concept of “person,” 11; def- Fowler, Roger, 244
inition of, 8; and the distinction Fox, Adam, 108, 128n14, 128n19
between Àction and nonÀc- framed narrative, 107, 124–25
tion, 9–10, 12, 15, 17, 18–23, 31n5, Frankenstein (Shelley), 187, 190–92,
31n7, 33n10; Mediation argument 201–8, 212nn17–19
against, 12–15, 18–23, 33n10; and free direct thought. See interior
modernist narratives, 35n21; and monologue
potential trivialization of Àction, free indirect thought (narrated
12. See also consciousness repre- monologue). See conscious-
sentation; post-Cartesian mod- ness representation; dual-voice
els of mind; postcognitivism hypothesis
experiencer, 156n5 Freeman, Donald C., 55
extended mind. See distributed Freeman, Margaret H., 55
intelligence; post-Cartesian Freeman, Walter, 109
models of mind; postcognitivism Freud, Sigmund, 184n3, 190,
209. See also psychoanalysis;
Fabrega, Horacio, Jr., 60–61 unconscious
faculty psychology, 220, 227, 234
The Faerie Queene (Spenser), 105, Gallagher, Shaun, 15, 16, 34n14, 256
106–7, 123–25, 127n8 Gallese, Vittorio, 121
Fairchild, H. N., 211n12 Gangopadhay, Nivedita, 257
false free indirect style. See con- Gavins, Joanna, 113
sciousness representation Gerrig, Richard, 113
Fauconnier, Giles, 113, 128n21 gestalt theory, 114, 128n21
Fechner, Gustav, 222 gesture. See consciousness
Ferguson, Frances, 237n5 representation
Fernighough, Anne, 253 Gevaert, Caroline, 47, 65n10
Àctional autobiography, 230 Gibson, J. J., 257
Àction vs. nonÀction. See Excep- Gillett, Grant, 256
tionality Thesis Godden, Malcolm, 45–46, 65n5
Fielding, Helen: Bridget Jones, 174 Goldsmith, Oliver: The Citizen of the
Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones, 25–27, World, 161, 180
29, 173 Gorman, David, 8
Fielding, Sarah: The History of Oph- Gothic novel, 69, 89, 188, 191, 209,
elia, 161 230
Àgural narrative situation. See con- Grady, Hugh, 97n11
sciousness representation Greene, Robert: Pandosto, 105, 120,
Flaubert, Gustave, 245 123, 127n8
308 index
Grenby, Matthew O., 178, 184n7 immersion, 114–15, 120–21. See also
Grice, Paul, 281 storyworlds
Grob, Alan, 211n13, 212n14 indirect thought (psychonar-
group mind. See consciousness ration). See consciousness
representation; intermental representation
thought; mass consciousness interior monologue (free direct
Gurwitsch, Aaron, 15 thought), 7, 69, 73, 79, 247, 248,
261, 275, 282. See also conscious-
Hamburger, Käte, 7–8, 9, 32n7 ness representation; stream of
Hamilton, Paul, 211n13 consciousness
Hamlet (Shakespeare), 123, 126n1, intermental thought, 90, 118, 119,
126n6 281. See also consciousness repre-
Hanson, Elizabeth, 97n11 sentation; mass consciousness
Harré, Rom, 256 intersubjectivity. See conscious-
Harris, Paul L., 12 ness representation; intermen-
Hart, F. Elizabeth, 20, 31n6, 184n6 tal thought
Hartley, David, 194, 196–97, 211n12 introspection. See Austen, Jane;
Haufe, Hendrikje, 97n11 consciousness representation
Haywood, Eliza: Jemmy and Jenny
inward turn. See consciousness
Jessamy, 179–80
representation; Woolf, Virginia
Hebb, Donald, 109
Iversen, Stefan, 11
Heliodorus: The Ethiopian Story, 115–
18, 119, 129n23, 172–75, 184n6
Jacyna, L. S., 237n2
The Helpmate (Sinclair), 245–46
Jäger, Christoph, 79, 96n6
Herman, David, 14, 17, 22, 31n6,
Jahn, Manfred, 267n5
32n9, 35n20, 35n22, 36n24, 113,
James, Henry, 243, 266n2
114–15, 184n2, 237n3, 256–57,
268n9, 297n1 Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (Haywood),
Herwig, Malte, 268n12 179–80
heterodiegetic narration. See con- Johnson, Mark, 44, 55, 56, 63, 133–
sciousness representation 34, 256
Hipsky, Marty, 266 Johnstone, Barbara, 36n24
historical pragmatics, 3, 30n2 Jones, Ellen Carol, 266
The History of Ophelia (Fielding), 161 Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist
Hobson, Peter, 12, 16 as a Young Man, 243–44, 245, 247,
Hogan, Patrick Colm, 3, 4, 55, 96n3 258–60; Ulysses, 73, 245, 247–48.
homodiegetic narration. See con- See also Woolf, Virginia
sciousness representation Jucker, Andreas H., 3, 30n2
Hunter, J. Paul, 175
Hurley, Susan, 257, 264 Kahler, Erich, 250
Hutchins, Edwin, 256, 264 Kant, Immanuel, 175, 188, 192, 198,
Hutto, Daniel D., 16, 17, 34n14 199, 201, 202, 204, 206, 210n8,
hydraulic model of mind. See con- 211n13, 212n16, 233
sciousness representation Kaplan, Sydney Janet, 251, 267n6
Hymns in Prose for Children (Bar- Kaufmann, Walter, 185n8
bauld), 171–72, 175, 184 Kay, Christian J., 58
Keen, Suzanne, 96
ideology. See consciousness Kern, Stephen, 30n2, 266
representation Kirmayer, Laurence J., 60, 61, 62
index 309
Kiverstein, Julian, 257 Matz, Jesse, 251, 253, 266, 267n7
Kleinman, Arthur M., 59, 60, 62 McConachie, Bruce, 121
Kleinman, Joan, 62 McDowell, Paula, 175
Knapp, Fritz Peter, 97n11 McEwan, Ian: Atonement, 273, 274,
Kövecses, Zoltán, 65n3, 65n10, 279, 288–97; On Chesil Beach, 25,
66n11 26, 28–29
Kunka, Andrew J., 246 McHale, Brian, 3, 31n7, 266, 273,
275–77, 278, 279
Lakoff, George, 44, 55, 56, 66n11, McIlwain, James T., 65n5
133–34, 135 medium speciÀcity, 113, 128n20
landscapes, 107, 140–43, 187, 188– Mellor, Anne K., 191, 212n19
89, 199. See also Austen, Jane; memory, 74, 110, 128n16
consciousness representation; Men at Arms (Waugh), 273, 274,
emotion; metaphor; Radcliffe, 280–82
Ann; Wordsworth, William mental disability, 244, 248
Lee, Vernon (née Violet Paget), 219 mental embedment. See conscious-
Leech, Geoffrey, 3, 6, 71, 254–55 ness representation
Lefebvre, Henri, 187, 192, 209n2, mental spaces, 113, 114, 128n21. See
211n9 also contextual frames; possible
Leslie, Alan, 12 worlds; storyworlds; text worlds
Levine, George, 212n17 Mentz, Steve, 127n9, 129n24
Lewes, G. H., 219, 220–22, 224, Meredith, George: The Egoist,
225–26, 230–31, 237n4, 267n6 223–24
Lewis, Pericles, 253 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 4, 15
The Life of Saint Katharine (Cap- mesmerism, 235
grave), 90–92 meta-emotion, 96n6. See also
literacy. See consciousness; con- emotion
sciousness representation metaphor: local vs. global uses of,
literary marketplace, 175 132, 134–39, 143, 150, 151–56; of
Lobsien, Eckhard, 97n11 the mind as travel, 143, 155; and
Lobsien, Verena Olejniczak, 97n11 tenor-vehicle relationships in
Lockett, Leslie, 18–19, 20, 21, 58, Romantic-period narratives, 188,
63, 65n9, 156n2, 209n1, 268n13 193, 197, 200–201, 208–9. See
Lodge, David, 36n25, 276 also allegory; conceptual blends;
Logan, Peter Melville, 237n8 conceptual metaphor theory;
Low, Soon Ai, 43, 46, 64n2 landscapes
Lukács, Georg, 156n1, 243, 252 metonymy, 55–56, 66n11, 103
Miall, David, 184n2
Macdonald, Cynthia, 12–13, 14, Middlemarch (Eliot), 4–7, 10, 14–15,
34n14 16–18, 26–27, 29, 34n16, 231–33,
Mäkelä, Maria, 11, 31n5 237n8
Mandler, Jean M., 156n2 Mikkonen, Kai, 156n4, 156n6
Mansel, Henry, 217–18 Milbank, Alison, 210n8
MansÀeld Park (Austen), 209n3 Milton, John: Paradise Lost, 133, 135–
Marnette, Sophie, 97n10 37, 150–56, 156n1
Martin, Matthew, 97n11 mind. See conceptual metaphor
Marvell, Andrew, 94, 132 theory; consciousness; con-
mass consciousness, 235–36 sciousness representation;
310 index
Exceptionality Thesis; mind as New Arcadia (The Countess of Pem-
theme broke’s Arcadia) (Sidney), 105,
mind as theme, 9–10, 30n3, 32n8, 106, 119–20, 122–23, 127n8
255, 267n8, 274. See also con- Newcomb, Lori Humphrey, 127n9
sciousness representation Nichols, Shaun, 34n14
mind-body dualism. See Nielsen, Henrik Skov, 11, 30
consciousness nonconscious, 223, 231–35
mind reading. See consciousness nonhuman animals. See
representation; Theory of Mind consciousness
mindscape, 107 non-Western psychologies. See
mind-style, 244–45, 248, 267n3 somatization; transcultural
Mize, Britt, 43 psychiatry
“Modern Fiction” (Woolf), 250– Northanger Abbey (Austen), 189–90,
51, 253, 255 210n6, 227
modernist novel, 243–56, 257–66, novel. See consciousness represen-
275–77, 282, 284, 297n1. See also tation; Gothic novel; modernist
Exceptionality Thesis; postmod- novel; postmodern Àction; sen-
ern Àction; reÁector; Sinclair, sation novel; sentimental novel
May; Woolf, Virginia
Moretti, Franco, 268n13
O’Brien, Flann: The Third Policeman,
Mrs Dalloway (Woolf), 167, 243, 255,
273, 279, 286–88, 294, 296
260–63, 268n8
Old French, 97n10
Murphy (Beckett), 256, 267n8
Oliphant, Margaret, 216–18
The Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe),
Olson, David, 110–11, 115
210n8
On Chesil Beach (McEwan), 25, 26,
28–29
narrated monologue (free indi-
rect thought). See conscious- Ong, Walter, 127n7
ness representation; dual-voice Oroonoko (Behn), 133, 145–50, 156
hypothesis Othello (Shakespeare), 157n7
narratee, 84, 284 Owen, David, 176
narration. See conceptual met-
aphor theory; consciousness Palmer, Alan, 3–4, 14, 19, 22–23,
representation 30n1, 31n3, 34n15, 35n23, 69, 74,
narrative understanding. See con- 117, 121, 170, 184n1, 223, 268n9,
textual frames; continuing- 278
consciousness frame; immer- Pandosto (Greene), 105, 120, 123,
sion; mental spaces; possible 127n8
worlds; storyworlds; text worlds Paradise Lost (Milton), 133, 135–
narrative universals, 3 37, 150–56, 156n1. See also
narrative voice, 236 consciousness
narrativity, 184 Pavel, Thomas, 33n10
neorealism. See postmodern Àc- Perner, Joseph, 35n17
tion; Waugh, Evelyn person concept. See Exceptional-
Nettle, Daniel, 165–66, 167, 184n2, ity Thesis
184n4 Persuasion (Austen), 189, 209n3,
neuroscience, 109, 110, 129n26, 210nn4–5
218, 221, 255. See also conscious- Phelan, James, 266, 293–94
ness; fmri phenomenology, 15
index 311
philosophy of mind. See cogni- consciousness representation;
tivism; consciousness; con- developmental psychology;
sciousness representation; discursive psychology; ethno-
Exceptionality Thesis; phenom- psychology; evolutionary psy-
enology; post-Cartesian models chology; Exceptionality Thesis;
of mind; postcognitivism faculty psychology; psychoanaly-
physiological psychology. See con- sis; psychophysics
sciousness representation psychonarration (indirect
Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 133, 137, thought). See consciousness
139–43 representation
plot. See consciousness representa- psychophysics, 222
tion; emotion Pye, Christopher, 97n11
Poovey, Mary, 191
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man quantitative methods of analysis.
(Joyce), 243–44, 245, 247, 258–60 See consciousness representa-
possible worlds, 3, 113, 276–77. See tion; corpus-based approaches
also contextual frames; mental quoted monologue (direct
spaces; storyworlds; text worlds thought). See consciousness
post-Cartesian models of mind, representation
249–50, 255–66. See also cogni-
tivism; consciousness represen- Radcliffe, Ann: and affect, 191–
tation; Exceptionality Thesis; 92, 194, 198–99, 201; and land-
postcognitivism scapes, 187, 191–92, 194, 198–99,
postcognitivism, 250, 256–58, 264– 201, 208; The Mysteries of Udolpho,
65, 266, 267n4, 268n10. See also 210n8; A Sicilian Romance, 210n8,
cognitivism 211n11
postmodern Àction, 237, 273, 275– Raitt, Suzanne, 246, 267n6
77, 280–82, 285–86. See also mod- Rappaport, Herman, 156n1
ernist novel Ratcliffe, Matthew, 34n14
Potter, Jonathan, 267n4, 268n10 reading. See consciousness; con-
The Prelude (Wordsworth), 188, sciousness representation
192–201, 211n13 realist novel. See consciousness
Premack, David, 12–13, 34n13 representation
Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 226, Reed, Edward, 237n2
227, 228–29, 233 reÁector, 243, 245, 247, 248, 266n2
Priestly, Joseph, 196, 197 Richardson, Brian, 11, 33n11, 276,
Prince, Gerald, 247 289
print technology, 104–5, 106–7, Richardson, Dorothy, 246, 247,
127n7. See also consciousness; 267n6
consciousness representation; Richardson, Samuel, 216; Clarissa,
literary marketplace 162, 167, 174
Propp, Vladimir, 236 Ricks, Christopher, 135
psychoanalysis, 223, 235 Robinson, Jenefer, 96n2
psychologization. See somatization romance. See consciousness
psychology. See associationist psy- representation
chology; cognitive approaches to Rosch, Eleanor, 222–23, 237n3, 249,
literature; cognitive psychology; 256, 257, 268n11
cognitive science; consciousness; Rowlands, Mark, 253
312 index
Royce, Josiah, 183 Slors, Marc, 12–13, 14, 34n14
Ryan, Marie-Laure, 3, 33n10, 113 The Small House at Allington (Trol-
Rylance, Rick, 237n4 lope), 228–29
Smith, Adam: The Theory of Moral
Said, Edward, 189, 209n3 Sentiments, 181–82, 183, 184
Salway, Andrew, 36n24 Smith, André, 60, 61
Salzman, Paul, 127n9 social class. See consciousness
Sanders, Eve Rachele, 128n14 representation
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 23 Sodian, Beate, 34n13
Scheler, Max, 15 soliloquy, 70, 77, 78, 83, 92–93,
Schelling, F. W. J., 195, 199 94, 157n7. See also consciousness
scriptio continua, 111, 128n18 representation
self-consciousness, 178. See also somatization, 59–62
consciousness; consciousness Sorrell, Tom, 33n9
representation soul, 45–46, 103, 144–45, 224
Semino, Elena, 36n24, 72, 95, 113 space in narrative. See Austen,
sensation novel, 216–18, 229, 235, Jane; consciousness representa-
236n1 tion; landscapes; Radcliffe, Ann;
sensorimotor coupling, 249–50,
Wordsworth, William
258–66. See also consciousness;
Spearing, Anthony C., 97n11
consciousness representation
The Spectator (Addison and Steele),
sentimental discourse, 162
162
A Sentimental Journey through France
speech-category approach. See con-
and Italy (Sterne), 161, 165, 168
sciousness representation
sentimental novel, 167
speech representation. See con-
Shakespeare, William, 104; Hamlet,
sciousness representation
123, 126n1, 126n6; Othello, 157n7
Shapiro, James, 126n6 Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie
Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 187, Queene, 105, 106–7, 123–25, 127n8
190–92, 201–8, 212nn17–19 Spinoza, Baruch, 193, 211n10
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 191 Spufford, Margaret, 108–9, 127n9,
Shen, Dan, 244, 267n3 128nn13–14
Short, Michael, 3, 6, 36n24, 71, 72, Stanley, Eric G., 64n2
95, 254–55 Stanzel, Franz Karl, 3, 4, 243, 245,
Shuttleworth, Sally, 237n2, 237n7 247, 252, 254
A Sicilian Romance (Radcliffe), Stawarska, Beata, 34n17
210n8, 211n11 Steele, Richard: The Spectator, 162
Sidney, Sir Philip: New Arcadia (The Sternberg, Meir, 34n12
Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia), Sterne, Laurence: A Sentimental
105, 106, 119–20, 122–23, 127n8 Journey through France and Italy,
Sieber, Andrea, 97n11 161, 165, 168
silent reading, 111–12, 113, 115, Stevens, Scott Manning, 103,
128n19. See also consciousness; 126nn3–4
consciousness representation Stevenson, Randall, 251, 267n6
simulation theory. See conscious- Stich, Stephen, 32n9, 34n14
ness representation; Exception- Stiller, James, 184n2
ality Thesis storyworlds, 4, 5, 14, 31n6, 112–15,
Sinclair, May, 246–47, 267n6; The 117, 124–26, 265–66, 273, 281, 284,
Helpmate, 245–46 289–90, 292. See also contextual
index 313
storyworlds (cont.) Torrance, Steve, 249
frames; mental spaces; possible transcultural psychiatry, 44,
worlds; text worlds 58–62. See also consciousness;
Strawson, P. F., 11, 16 somatization
stream of consciousness, 221–22, transportation, 113. See also
247, 248, 267n6, 275, 282. See storyworlds
also consciousness representa- travel narratives. See conceptual
tion; interior monologue; Sin- metaphor theory; consciousness
clair, May representation
subjectivity. See consciousness Trollope, Anthony: The Small House
representation at Allington, 228–29
sublime, 188, 195, 196, 197, 198, 201, Trotter, David, 267n6
206, 210n8, 211n13 Troy, Michele K., 246
subworlds, 3. See also storyworlds; Turner, Mark, 128n21, 135
text worlds
Success (Amis), 273, 282–86, 288, Ulysses (Joyce), 73, 245, 247–48
296 Umwelt, 265–66, 268n12
Sweetser, Eve, 156n3 unconscious, 190, 192, 209,
222, 223, 227–30, 235. See also
tag phrases, 247 nonconscious
Tammi, Pekka, 31n4 unreliability, 282, 290–97
Tannen, Deborah, 72
Taylor, Jenny Bourne, 236n1, Vallins, David, 21, 156n2, 195,
237n2 210n7, 211n10, 211n12
text worlds, 113. See also contextual van Gulick, Robert, 30n1
frames; mental spaces; possible Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 235–36
worlds; storyworlds Varela, Francisco, 222–23, 237n3,
Thackeray, William Makepeace: 249, 256, 257, 268n11
Vanity Fair, 235–36 Vermeule, Blakey, 168, 175, 177–
Theory of Mind, 120–21, 164– 78, 179
70, 278–79, 297n2. See also con- Villette (Brontë), 229–30
sciousness representation; von Uexküll, Jakob, 265–66,
Exceptionality Thesis 268n12. See also Umwelt
The Theory of Moral Sentiments Vygotsky, Lev, 16, 256
(Smith), 181–82, 183, 184
theory theory. See consciousness Warhol, Robyn, 84
representation Warner, William B., 175
Thi Hong Trang Dao, 60, 61 Watt, Ian, 243, 253
The Third Policeman (O’Brien), 273, Watt, Tessa, 127n9
279, 286–88, 294, 296 Waugh, Evelyn, 276, 282; Men at
Thompson, Evan, 222–23, 237n3, Arms, 273, 274, 280–82
249, 256, 257, 265, 268n11 Werth, Paul, 3, 113
Tolman, Edward, 268n12 Wheeler, Kathleen, 195
Tolstoi, Lev: Anna Karenina, 174 Wimmer, Heinz, 35n17
Tom Jones (Fielding), 25–27, 29, 173 Winter, Alison, 236n1
Tommola, Hannu, 31n4 witness, modes of. See conscious-
Tooby, John, 12 ness representation
Toolan, Michael, 3, 31n7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 15, 16
314 index
Wolf, Maryanne, 128n17 188, 191, 192–201, 204–6, 207,
The Woman in White (Collins), 215– 208; and landscapes, 188, 191,
17, 219, 222 192–201, 204–6, 207, 208, 211n10;
Wood, James, 36n25 The Prelude, 188, 192–201, 211n13
Woodruff, Guy, 12–13, 34n13 Wynne, Martin, 72
Woolf, Virginia, 250–51, 253, 255;
“Modern Fiction,” 250–51, 253, Zahavi, Dan, 15, 34n14
255; Mrs Dalloway, 167, 243, 255, Zunshine, Lisa, 4, 13, 20–21, 118,
260–63, 268n8 121, 167–68, 297n2
Wordsworth, William: and affect, Zwicker, Steven N., 127n10
index 315
In the Frontiers of Narrative series:
Useful Fictions
Evolution, Anxiety, and the Origins of Literature
by Michael Austin
Story Logic
Problems and Possibilities of Narrative
by David Herman
Talk Fiction
Literature and the Talk Explosion
by Irene Kacandes
Fictional Minds
by Alan Palmer
Narrative Beginnings
Theories and Practices
Edited by Brian Richardson