Fiction and Theory of Mind

Theory of Mind (ToM) is a cognitive psychology term for the capacity to 'read' and 'interact' unstated cues. I'm reading a book contextualizes ToM into literary studies and attempts to answer "What is the value of reading fiction?"  That is a question I have been asking myself personally for many years now. What is it about a novel or short story that can captivate and continue to inspire long after the author is gone? It's like a textual form of time travel. The realm of story is like an invisible web linking our collective imaginations.

The book is simply called Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel by Professor of English Lisa Zunshine of the University of Kentucky, Lexington. I came across the book while undertaking a literature search for an academic project that inquires into the power of telling stories and focusses on two works by Jeanette Winterson. My question hinges on the value of fiction as a means of sublimation and empowerment; and how these artful retellings give a frame and make meaning out of a sometimes unfair and unjust world.

Simply put, words can capture experience and give it form.

Around the 1980s there was a lot of focus on the healing journey in terms of how survivors of childhood (and other) abuse needed to break the silence, connect with their true voices and find language to express the locked away terrors in order to heal the schism.

This question of true voice naturally is predicated upon the idea that small children who experience trauma have not yet developed the cognitive capacity to verbally formulate and reflect upon their experiences. Trauma can remain unnamed and suppressed by the psyche. It is dissociative reaction where the disturbing experience is walled off--essentially a kind of splintering of one's experiential narrative.

Zunshine's book is not focussed on these questions of trauma, but more on why we read fiction and do we benefit from it. It points to the capacity to suspend disbelief and try on another character's point of view--i.e. an act of imagination.

I think of all of the stories that remain untold and all of the uncountable millions of souls who have been silenced throughout history by one kind of oppressive force or another. I agree with Winterson when she states, "life plus art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead."

Fiction is a place where the 'dead' (and the non-existent) can be given their due. We can imagine what it is like to be crawling through the trenches of WWI with the relentless din of machineguns and the stench of smoke and fear. We can imagine the dilemma of four ship wreck survivors in a lifeboat off the Florida Keys. We can imagine the alien world of Dune, or the burden of being the living allegory of Dream and Death happens to be your older sister.

Fiction allows us to step into multiple lives.