Unreadable Minds and the Captive Reader

Abstract

Alan Palmer, Lisa Zunshine, George Butte and others have been building the case for reframing the action of novels as a busy, collective reading and misreading of minds. Their work at once draws on and supports the idea that we have an evolved craving to read the minds of others and a corollary craving for the kind of narrative action that catalyzes this reading of minds. In this essay, I wish to supplement this research with a focus on fictional minds that cannot be read, not only by characters in the storyworld but also by readers in the actual world. That they exist at all a conundrum--if, that is, these scholars are right about the role of readable minds in arousing narrative desire, and I think they are. We tend to naturalize what unreadable, mentally domesticating it either by drawing on pre-existing literary forms (Culler 134-60) or by drawing on the larger range of our real-world experience (Fludernik 31-5 et passim). I'll discuss in this essay ways in which unreadable minds are commonly naturalized or elided, but my position with regard to the examples I introduce that they work best when we allow ourselves to rest in that peculiar combination of anxiety and wonder that aroused when an unreadable mind accepted as unreadable. In this regard, my stance at odds with efforts to make sense of the unreadable, as, for example, Jan Alber's forthcoming effort to develop sense-making strategies for the impossible storyworlds of postmodern fiction--in effect, to make the unreadable readable. I should note at the outset that the inability to read minds can enter realistic fiction as a pathology. In Why We Read Fiction, Zunshine refers to fictional representations of autism or (Baron-Cohen Mindblindness). Citing the autistic narrator of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Zunshine notes that the narration in consequence is mostly lacking in attribution of thoughts, feelings, and attitudes, though we, the readers, supply those missing mental states, thus making sense of the story (12). Sociopaths belong to another type that suffers (perhaps the wrong word) an emotional deficit, which not only robs them of a full emotional life but also robs them of the capacity to understand that life as it lived by others. To do so requires an effort of triangulation that operates the way Dr. Van Helsing describes the mindblindness of Dracula, whose powerful great brain yet a child-brain ... that do only work selfish and therefore small (Stoker 363). In his recent novel Talk Talk, T. C. Boyle brilliantly renders a sociopath who similarly hobbled and consequently incapable of understanding the tenacity of the pair of lovers who pursue him} In The Essential Difference, Simon Baron-Cohen controversially extended his early work on autism to include a calibrated range of mindblindness down into the normal masculine demographic. If he right about this, both Othello and Lear might qualify for a diagnosis of mindblindness. And certainly much comedy has turned on the blindness of men to What Every Woman Knows (to cite the 1934 film starring Helen Hayes), that is, not only the minds of others but their own minds as well. But my subject the mind that defies all efforts to read it. The usual default reading of such a mind as one or another opaque stereotype, of which the most common that the character crazy. It important to acknowledge here that authors may, and often do, create characters according to stereotypes that are meant to be fully readable as such. Authors also quite commonly create characters who appear to be unreadable, and in consequence are stereotyped by others, yet who acquire readability over the course of the narrative. Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now has very obviously ... gone insane, according to the film's unnamed general. In context, insane a place-holder for the inexplicable, though here, as often, it works as a performative, that is, as an act of naming with a practical purpose. …

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