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Fictional consciousnesses: A reader’s manual

Marco Caracciolo (University of Bologna, Italy)

marco.caracciolo2@unibo.it

To appear in Style, vol. 46 (2012)

Abstract

It is sometimes said that fictional consciousnesses are represented in narrative texts. I aim to show why this

kind of representationalism is fundamentally flawed. Drawing on the work of philosophers who, like Daniel D.

Hutto, have advocated the “enactivist” approach to cognition, I argue that consciousness and subjective

experience cannot be captured in representational terms; consciousness can either be had (in a first-person way)

or attributed (in a third-person way). I suggest that we tend to adopt the same basic stance towards real people

and fictional characters: we make a “consciousness-attribution” on the basis of external signs (such as gestures

and language) thought to be expressive of consciousness. In some special cases, however, literature invites us to

adopt another stance (which I call “consciousness-enactment”), whereby we enact (or perform) the experience

that we, at the same time, attribute to a fictional character. In my article, I explore the consequences of these

ideas on major narratological problems, such as the experientiality of narratives and focalization.

Introduction

In the last years, a surge of interest in what David Herman has called the “nexus of narrative and mind”

(Basic Elements of Narrative 137-160) has swept through narratology and its related disciplines. Alan Palmer

and Lisa Zunshine have published two important monographs (Fictional Minds and Why We Read Fiction),

which Herman himself lists under the heading of “Issues of consciousness representation” in the entry

“Cognitive Narratology” for the de Gruyter Handbook of Narratology. On a broad understanding of the word

“consciousness,” Herman‟s label is perfectly fitting. However, if we run a quick search for the word

“representation” in Palmer‟s and Zunshine‟s books, we find out that it‟s almost never used in tandem with

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“consciousness.” What Palmer and Zunshine focus on is the reader‟s attribution of mental states to the

characters; they don‟t seem to devote special attention to consciousness proper. To clarify, I would like to

introduce David Chalmers‟s (11-16) distinction between “two concepts of mind.” One may want to explore the

mind‟s role in influencing behavior, and admit of the existence of mental states only in so much as they can

cause people‟s actions. Or, one may focus on the subjective quality of our experience. The former is a disciple of

functionalism, and his or her object of study is what Chalmers calls “the psychological mind.” The latter is

interested in “the conscious mind” or, simply put, in consciousness or subjective experience. My hunch is that

both Palmer and Zunshine devote most of their books to the psychological mind (Palmer [Fictional Minds 87-

91], for instance, openly declares his allegiance to functionalism), leaving the issue of fictional consciousnesses

unsolved.

In John Searle‟s words, consciousness is “an inner, first-person, qualitative phenomenon”; it “refers to those

states of sentience and awareness that typically begin when we awake from a dreamless sleep and continue until

we go to sleep again, or fall into a coma or die or otherwise become „unconscious‟” (5). Consciousness and

experience are intrinsically related, since you cannot have a subjective experience without being conscious—as

opposed to self-conscious—of it. In turn, you cannot be conscious of anything without experiencing it somehow.

This is why I will use these terms interchangeably in the next pages. Philosophers of mind love to talk about

zombies—beings identical to us from a functionalist viewpoint, but which (unlike us) have no subjective

experience. Just as functionalism has led to important scientific discoveries, defining fictional characters in

functionalist terms has yielded deep insights, well exemplified by Palmer‟s and Zunshine‟s books. And yet, it is

important to remind ourselves that readers do not just attribute mental states to fictional characters—they

attribute them mental states with a qualitative aspect. In short, they attribute them a consciousness. This is the

angle from which I‟ll approach fictional characters in this article.

I aim my argument to have bearing on two longstanding narratological beliefs: first, the idea that in internal

focalization readers experience the fictional world through the consciousness of a character; second, the claim

that narrative fiction is unique in that it gives us direct access to the experience of people other than ourselves (a

view first advanced by Käte Hamburger and Dorrit Cohn). With regard to the issue of focalization, I will argue

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that we shouldn‟t view characters‟ consciousnesses as “things in the text.” Readers can enact a fictional

consciousness, they can perform it on the basis of textual cues—but this phenomenon, which I will call

consciousness-enactment, cannot be simply identified with internal focalization. Not all internally focalized texts

induce the reader to enact the character‟s consciousness. Moreover, I will follow Herman (“Introduction”) in

contending that reading fiction harnesses the readers‟ folk-psychological skills, so there cannot be any downright

“uniqueness” of fiction. As Daniel D. Hutto puts it in a recent article for this journal, “when dealing with certain

kinds of narratives, „like it or not‟, consumers of fiction will bring the same sorts of skills (or at least a subset of

them) to bear that they use when dealing with actual minds” (“Understanding Fictional Minds”). The strategy I

will label “consciousness-attribution” is a case in point. However, I would like to leave the door open (although I

won‟t be able to pursue this line of argument here) for the idea that the readers‟ access to other consciousnesses

can be more direct when dealing with fictional characters than with real people. In other words, I believe that our

engagement with fictional consciousnesses differs in degree, but not in kind, from our engagement with real

ones, in particular when it comes to consciousness-enactment: we can enact the experience of another person in

real life too, but we don‟t do it as often (and as intensely) as in reading what I will call “consciousness texts.”

What does it mean that we shouldn‟t view characters‟ consciousnesses as “things in the text”? It means that

a consciousness (be it fictional or not) cannot be represented—and this is my chief complaint against Herman‟s

section heading (“Issues of consciousness representation”). Drawing on the work of philosophers of the

“enactivist” stripe such as Kevin O‟Regan, Alva Noë, and (in particular) Hutto, I would like to show that

consciousness and subjective experience resist capture in representationalist terms. This will be my task in

section 1. In section 2, I will argue that fictional consciousnesses are (just like the consciousnesses of real

people) attributed on the basis of external signs, such as gestures and psychological language. By my lights,

consciousness-attribution is readers‟ most basic strategy for dealing with fictional consciousnesses. I will then

turn to the more complex issue of consciousness-enactment. After examining how consciousness-attribution and

consciousness-enactment can work together in a reading of the first lines of William Faulkner‟s The Sound and

the Fury (section 3), I will focus on the reader‟s subjective experience and on how the reader can always be said

to experience the storyworld, even in the absence of experiencing characters (section 4). Finally, in section 5, I

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will contend that consciousness-enactment involves a merging of the reader‟s consciousness with the

consciousness attributed to a fictional character.

1. Beyond representationalism

After a decade in which representationalist theories of consciousness have flourished in the philosophy of

mind (see Lycan), the balance has begun to tilt away from this position. The “enactivist” approach to cognition

has played a major part in this paradigm shift. With a ten-year delay on Varela, Thompson, and Rosch‟s

groundbreaking The Embodied Mind, philosophers associated with enactivism have effectively challenged the

idea that consciousness can be understood in representational terms (see e.g. O'Regan and Noë; Noë; Torrance).1

Instead, they have emphasized the active, embodied, hands-on aspect of our experience. In a key passage, Hutto

writes:

The only way to understand „what-it-is-like‟ to have an experience is to actually undergo it or re-

imagine undergoing it. Gaining insight into the phenomenal character of particular kinds of experience

requires practical engagements, not theoretical insights. The kind of understanding „what-it-is-like‟ to

have such and such an experience requires responding in a way that is enactive, on-line and embodied

or, alternatively, in a way that is re-enactive, off-line and imaginative—and still embodied.

(“Impossible Problems” 52)

Before arguing that the enactivist approach gives the lie to the belief, seeping through narratology and

cognitive narratology in particular, that fictional consciousnesses can be represented, a linguistic caveat is in

order. Surely, cognitive scientists and narratologists do not mean the same by “representation.” Cognitive

scientists will either equate representation with intentionality (the mind‟s directedness upon its objects) or use it

to refer to the abstract, language-like structures of thought (“mental representations”) on the Fodorian view of

the mind as a computational device. By contrast, narratologists will use this word with the meaning it has in art

criticism and aesthetics: a “depiction or portrayal of a person or thing, typically one produced in an artistic

medium; an image, a model, a picture” (Oxford English Dictionary, sense 6a). I don‟t mean to deny this

difference, or to bundle together these two largely independent concepts. However, I believe that the enactivist

approach can still be used to call into question narratological representationalism about fictional

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consciousnesses. To begin with, I will draw a line between two versions of this representationalism. I will call

one “naïve representationalism,” the other “cognitive representationalism.” Both doctrines hold that fictional

consciousnesses are represented by texts. However, naïve representationalism seems to downplay the

importance of the reader, and this leads to the conclusion that fictional consciousnesses are (to a certain extent)

“things in the text”—they are embedded in textual features. This position may remind one of classical,

structuralist narratology, even though, in her seminal Transparent Minds, Dorrit Cohn was remarkably reluctant

to talk about “representation” (indeed, from the very subtitle of her book she preferred the word “presentation”).

On the contrary, cognitive representationalism holds that fictional consciousnesses are mental representations

constructed by readers on the basis of textual cues.

Naïve representationalism is, indeed, too naïve to have been openly endorsed by any narratologist, past or

present. Yet, it seems to emerge here and there in the literature. For instance, in his book on the narrative

representation of intersubjectivity, George Butte simply refuses to discuss the problem of reader-response, as if

fictional consciousnesses could be stand-alone entities (22). This is even more striking, considering that Butte‟s

phenomenological framework is roughly parallel to the one I‟ll develop in this article. If, as Butte insists,

drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty‟s work, “subjectivity is fundamentally intersubjective” (24), why should we

regard fictional consciousnesses as things independent from the reader‟s own intersubjective relations with

them? In my view, Butte‟s approach to fictional consciousnesses is inevitably objectifying. By contrast, as a

corollary to his anti-representationalist barrage, Hutto (Beyond Physicalism; Menary, Radical Enactivism) has

argued that consciousness and experience cannot be incorporated into an object-based schema; they cannot be

reified or treated as objects, since they are, quintessentially, activities. Linguistically, one can refer to or “index”

(this is Hutto‟s preferred term) an experience, but only as a pointer to something beyond language itself: a

similar experience undergone by the listener or reader. Talk about the ineffability of “qualia” (or the felt qualities

of experience; see Tye) boils down to the same idea: authors cannot hope to depict a character‟s experience

without drawing on the reader‟s past experiences (more on these “experiential traces” in section 4).

This is, of course, where cognitive representationalism comes in. This view holds that readers construct

mental representations of fictional consciousnesses and keep them continuously updated while they read. It can

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be found in Palmer‟s Fictional Minds and in Herman‟s entry for the Cambridge Companion to Narrative

(“Cognition, Emotion, and Consciousness”). For example, Palmer argues that the “the reader collects together all

of the isolated references to a specific proper name in a particular text and constructs a consciousness that

continues in the spaces between the various mentions of that character” (Fictional Minds 176). For his part,

Herman argues that readers “build up a model of the characters‟ minds on the basis of textual cues” (“Cognition,

Emotion, and Consciousness” 251). I have two objections to lodge against this position. First, Palmer‟s idea that

readers “construct a consciousness” is likely to cause a relapse into Hutto‟s “object-based schema”: if fictional

consciousnesses are constructed, it is reasonable to infer that the readers‟ activity leads to a finished product, and

hence that consciousnesses are “objects.” This is why I prefer to say that fictional consciousnesses are “enacted”

(in the sense of “performed”). Second (and we return to the ambiguity of Herman‟s section title, “Issues of

consciousness representation”), all these theories are actually theories of the reader‟s engagement with

characters (or, at best, with their psychological minds, in Chalmers‟s phrase), not with their consciousnesses. It

makes perfect sense to say that readers keep track of fictional characters by constructing psychological models of

them—just as they do with real people. This conception has been developed by Ralf Schneider in an insightful

article on the reader‟s mental modeling of literary characters (see Schneider). But notice that Schneider uses the

word “consciousness” very sparingly, and never pairs it up with “representation.” I would conclude that

Schneider, Palmer, and Herman have proposed an excellent representational model of how readers conceptualize

the characters‟ psychological states and traits, but that they miss the mark when it comes to consciousnesses. As

I have tried to show, fictional consciousnesses cannot be represented (neither in the text nor in the reader‟s

mind), since consciousness and subject experience seem to be largely impervious to representationalism. In the

next sections, I will outline an alternative scenario, based on the concepts of “consciousness-attribution” and

“consciousness-enactment.”

2. Consciousness-attribution

Consider this question: do dogs have a consciousness? I take for granted that most readers will answer in the

positive. Following Dennett (447), we can deny that consciousness is a binary phenomenon, and ask the subjects

of a hypothetical experiment to position various “things” on a scale of consciousness: I believe that they would

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tend to place dogs very close to humans—closer than, say, trees or lobsters. And yet, what reasons do we have to

attribute consciousness to dogs? There are, of course, external signs such as tail-wagging or jumping around,

which we usually interpret as expressing happiness. But this is a risky strategy, since we have no independent

means of verifying that a tail-wagging dog is subjectively experiencing happiness. For all we know, the dog

could be a robot (or, as philosophers of mind say, a zombie) programmed to express happiness in order to gratify

his master.

And consider the person sitting next to me in the library: unlike dogs, she expresses her happiness not only

through bodily signs (such as smiling), but also through language. She may say: “I‟m happy today.” Am I to take

her statement as a clear, incontrovertible proof of consciousness? Hardly so. She may be lying—and even if

she‟s not, I cannot demonstrate that she feels happy today. The upshot is that, in Hutto‟s words, “when faced

with the question of whether or not another being is conscious, we do not, and cannot, settle the issue by appeal

to reasoning, criteria, theories or the like. . . . We do not ascribe consciousness to dogs or mice on reasoned

grounds” (Beyond Physicalism 51-52). Nor do we to humans; as Hutto explains later on, Wittgenstein “has

reminded us that in treating others as conscious beings, we are always engaged in an interpretative project,

broadly conceived—one which is informed by our form of life” (Beyond Physicalism 130). If attributing

consciousness to real people involves embarking on an “interpretative project,” where do we draw the line

between real people and fictional characters? Aren‟t we constantly engaged in an interpretative project with

regard to fictional characters as well? These questions may seem silly, and to some extent they are. But, for all

the self-evidence of the distinction between real people and fictional characters, we shouldn‟t forget that the

boundary line is porous: just as we don‟t attribute consciousness to real people on reasoned grounds (because

there is, simply enough, no way to demonstrate that the person sitting next to me has conscious experience), so

we don‟t attribute consciousness to fictional characters on reasoned grounds. In both cases, our attributions are

based on our first-person understanding of what having a consciousness or subjective experience involves.2

Consider this passage from the fourth (externally focalized) section of Faulkner‟s The Sound and the Fury:

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Dilsey answered [to Mrs Compson‟s call] and ceased clattering the stove, but before she could

cross the kitchen Mrs Compson called her again, and before she crossed the diningroom and brought

her head into relief against the gray splash of the window, still again. (267)

There are relatively few hints of subjectivity (either of the narrator‟s or of the characters‟) in this passage—

but readers are likely to attribute consciousness to both Mrs Compson and Dilsey while they read it. The

description of the gestures of the characters (and, possibly, the fact that they are given a name) is enough to

invite readers to make a consciousness-attribution. No doubt, this is due to the irresistible lure of the

anthropomorphic (or mimetic, in Phelan‟s term) view of fictional characters, according to which characters are

like real people. If asked about it, however, readers would still deny that characters can be conscious in the way

real people are. But notice that the spontaneous and apparently irrational nature of our consciousness-attributions

to characters matches up with the spontaneous nature of our consciousness-attributions to real people. Of course,

there are (it seems) good reasons to believe that real people are conscious, whereas there are none for having the

same belief about characters. But we tend to attribute consciousness to both nevertheless. Why is that?

To answer this question, we‟ll have to carefully consider why there are good reasons to believe that real

people are conscious. We‟ve already seen that dogs (are thought to) express their happiness by wagging their tail

or jumping around. Like dogs, humans can express their conscious states through bodily movements. Unlike

dogs and other animals, however, they can use a more powerful tool to express themselves: language. In Hutto‟s

words, one‟s “linguistic utterances of pain are natural extensions of, or replacements for, [one‟s] earlier ways of

expressing pain—i.e. shouting, bawling, and the like. A development of more primitive, nonconceptual forms of

response that we share with animals” (Beyond Physicalism 128). Thus, language is commonly considered to be a

telltale sign of consciousness. It enables us to express our experience with a level of detail that is beyond the

reach of nonverbal animals. A yell is a coarse-grained way of expressing pain; through language, we can

characterize a pain as piercing, burning, throbbing, and so on. But then, consider these words from Herman

Melville‟s Moby Dick:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November

in my soul . . . —then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. (21)

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If these or similar words were repeated to you by someone in a bar, you wouldn‟t have any problems

interpreting them as expressive of consciousness. We easily grasp the meaning of the words “a damp, drizzly

November in my soul” because we are familiar with the gloomy mood they express; we think we‟ve felt like that

in the past, and we regard the stranger‟s words as expressing the way it is like for him to be in that mood. But

then we can see why we, just as naturally, attribute a consciousness to the fictional character whom we imagine

speaking these words. These lines seem to express an experience, and thus a consciousness. Of course, it could

be objected that they only seem to do so, whereas if they were spoken by a real person they would express a

consciousness. But this objection misses the target, since every linguistic statement only seems to express a

consciousness; there is no way to prove that another human being (real or fictional) is conscious.

In sum, consciousness-attributions to fictional characters are an inevitable consequence of our tendency to

interpret first-person talk as expressive of consciousness. As we‟ve seen, there is an interpretation involved both

in my attributing a consciousness to the person sitting next to me (she could be a robot, she could be a zombie)

and in my attributing a consciousness to Melville‟s Ishmael (he could be a fictional character). The difference is

that, while it is reasonable to assume that fictional characters are not conscious, it is reasonable to assume that

real people are. But, as Hutto has pointed out, consciousness-attributions are not based on reasoning. And there

is more to be said about experience and consciousness: several philosophers (see e.g. Bruner, Acts of Meaning;

“The Narrative Construction of Reality”; Dennett ch. 13) have highlighted the link between narrative and

experience, arguing that narrative has a key role in structuring our self-consciousness. Indeed, Dennett has gone

as far as to say that the self (the subject of experience) is constituted by narrative—but this is a dubious claim, on

which I won‟t expand here. Rather, I accept the less controversial thesis that, in Richard Menary‟s words, “the

self is constituted both by an embodied consciousness whose experiences are available for narration and

narratives themselves” (“Embodied Narratives” 63).3 If this is true, if the subjective experience of the person

sitting next to me is (in part) constructed by the stories she tells about herself (to herself, and to other people),

what‟s the difference between her narratively constructed but—in some sense of the word—real self and the

narratively constructed but undoubtedly fictional self of Ishmael? Again, another silly question crops up. Like

the others, it can help us understand why it is so natural to attribute a consciousness to fictional characters: both

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the experience of real people and the experience of fictional characters like Ishmael are (to some degree)

narratively constructed.

Hedging phrases like “in part” and “to some degree” are quite justified, however. The reason why Dennett‟s

claim that consciousness is constituted by narrative is absurd is that, in short, it doesn‟t acknowledge the role of

the human body, and of what phenomenologists have called our “bodily self-apprehension” (see Gallagher and

Zahavi 148). This is why human experience is not narratively structured all the way in. It is also structured by

our physical makeup. My embodied experience is, as Menary puts it, “available for narration”—but it is far from

being, in itself, narrative. The upshot is that, because of the inextricable link between experience and

embodiment, we tend to attribute to fictional characters an embodied consciousness. But here the difference

between fictional characters and real people starts to matter. I can perceive the body of the person sitting next to

me in the library, whereas I only imagine Ishmael to have a body. Note the asymmetry: I attribute to real people

and fictional characters a consciousness on the basis of signs (such as gestures and speech) that are real in the

case of the former, fictional in the case of the latter. But the basic move—the attribution—is fundamentally

similar, because it is not made on reasoned ground. By contrast, the embodiment of fictional characters is as

evidently fictional as that of real people is real. There‟s a great deal of difference between perceiving a body and

imagining one, and authors strive very hard to keep readers under a mimetic illusion with regard to the

characters‟ embodiment.

This could explain the tendency to view characters as if they were “pure” narrative selves, deprived of a

body (outside the fictional world to which they belong) but still somehow populating our cultural landscape. For

instance, Thomas Pavel once wrote that “Don Quixote is the classic story of a life invaded by fictional

characters; ironically, Quixote himself became an archetype and extensively traveled through the actual world”

(85). When Dennett (430) made the rather extravagant claim that, since our self is constituted by narrative, it is

possible to achieve immortality, he was obviously downplaying the importance of the body. As narratively

constructed selves that circulate among readers, or are transmitted from storytellers to storylisteners in an infinite

chain of retellings, fictional characters can become so deeply ingrained in a culture as to be retold in a variety of

versions and media (think of Oedipus, Hamlet, or Don Juan), attaining something akin to immortality in

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Dennett‟s sense. But this is a line of inquiry I won‟t pursue here. It is sufficient to have shown that

consciousness-attribution is the most natural stance readers assume towards fictional characters, because of the

similarity in the way real people and fictional characters express their consciousness or subjective experience.

3. Enacting Benjy: a case study

So far, I have argued that fictional consciousnesses are not represented by narrative texts, but that they are

attributed by readers to all the fictional existents that seem (through gestures or, in particular, through language)

to express a consciousness. Thus, consciousness-attribution involves the adoption of what phenomenologists

would call a third-person perspective (see e.g. Gallagher and Zahavi 40); it involves imagining characters from

the outside—just as we see real people from the outside, and attribute them a consciousness. But we know that

narrative (and especially written narrative) is capable of a remarkable feat: it lets readers experience a fictional

world through a consciousness different from their own. This is made possible by homodiegetic narration and by

the use of internal focalization in heterodiegetic contexts—two narrative situations that I will group under the

heading of “consciousness texts” here.4 In both cases, readers can share the character‟s experience of the

fictional world, imagining it from the inside. We can map the distinction between imagining from the outside

and imagining from the inside onto Peter Goldie‟s distinction between acentral and central imaginings: central

imaginings involve imagining from a fictional character‟s perspective.

Since, as Tim Crane (4) points out, having a consciousness means having a perspective on the world,

imagining from someone‟s perspective boils down to imagining from someone‟s consciousness. But this is far

from straightforward, for three reasons: first, it requires bridging the gap between the third-person approach of

consciousness-attribution and the first-person approach (having a consciousness).5 Second, despite visual

metaphors such as point of view and perspective, a consciousness is not a place from which we experience the

world—it is, first and foremost, the medium through which we experience it (Hutto, Beyond Physicalism 135).

Third, as I have argued in my critique of representationalism about fictional consciousnesses, a character‟s

consciousness is not “a thing in the text”; it is not a thing at all. But then, how do readers manage to experience a

fictional world through a consciousness different from their own?

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The brief answer is that fictional consciousnesses are enacted by readers in their interaction with

consciousness texts. Beside containing a reference to the enactivist approach to cognition, the verb “to enact”

means “to perform” here. In my view, fictional consciousnesses are the experiences undergone by readers whilst

reading a consciousness text, coupled with a consciousness-attribution. This, of course, is too fast. I‟d like to

show how this works by analyzing one of the canonical “consciousness texts” of 20th century literature, Benjy‟s

monologue from Faulkner‟s The Sound and the Fury. The first line reads:

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. (1)

Because of the first-person pronoun, these words are easily interpreted by readers as indicative of a

consciousness. Thus, we attribute to the character who says “I” the visual experience of a fence, and of some

unnamed characters beyond the fence, surrounded by flowerbeds, hitting something as yet undetermined. The

reader‟s imaginings are sketchy, and—at this early stage—they don‟t have a distinct first-person character;

indeed, the indeterminacy in which this sentence is steeped (who are “they”? what are they doing?) is likely to

induce us to distance ourselves from the fictional character, as if we were standing in front of a stranger who‟s

about to disclose some important details of his story. In sum, even if narratologists would label this sentence as

“internally focalized,” I‟m convinced that readers would tend to imagine the character from the outside. This is

why they are prone to make a consciousness-attribution, adopting a second-person stance towards the character.

They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. (1)

In Ruth Ronen‟s (137) term, this sentence further “definitizes” the fictional world, since both the spatial

relations and the “hitting” of the previous sentence are brought into focus: on the one hand, the verb “coming”

establishes a character-centered spatial framework (see Herman, “Beyond Voice and Vision”), suggesting that

the flag is closer to Benjy‟s position than the unnamed men; on the other, we infer that these men are playing

golf. The second part of the sentence invites the reader to visualize the character‟s movement along the fence,

but it is as yet unclear whether at this point we are imagining someone moving along a fence or imagining

moving along a fence. Following Manfred Jahn (“Frames”), I would argue that readers are more likely to retain

the frame they have used to make sense of the previous sentence, imagining the character from the outside.

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Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting.

Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on,

and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and

they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

“Here, caddie.” He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going

away. (1)

In this passage, there is both a definitization of “they” (we infer that they must be two men, and that the

character who says “I” is already familiar with one of them, named Luster) and a strengthening of the opposition

between “I” and “they.” It is true that, at one point, all the characters move in unison, but the short-livedness of

the first person plural (“we”) ends up widening the rift between Benjy and the other men. This rift (which could

be easily interpreted as a metaphor for the narrating character‟s mental retardation) has a fictional anchor in the

fence that physically separates the “I” and “they.” In a way, readers realize that the fence functions as the

dividing line between perceiver and perceived, subject and object, “I” and “they,”6 and this demarcation

gradually reduces the indeterminacy of their imaginings: it becomes more evident that they imagine standing on

this (the narrating character‟s) side of the fence. Even if the character is still imagined to some extent from the

outside, the reader‟s imaginings seem to move toward the character‟s perceptions—an effect maximized by the

circular insistence on the character‟s vision—both at the beginning (“I could see them hitting”) and at the end (“I

. . . watched them going away”) of this paragraph—and by the correlation between “coming toward” and “going

away,” which firmly establishes the narrating character as the deictic center7 of this passage.

The following paragraph marks an important stage in the “interiorization” of the reader. Interestingly, this

coincides with an intersubjective contact between the character who says “I” and Luster:

“Listen at you, now.” Luster said. “Aint you something, thirty three years old, going on that way.

After I done went all the way to town to buy you that cake. Hush up that moaning. Aint you going to

help me find that quarter so I can go to the show tonight.” (1)

Here Luster scolds Benjy for his loud moans. The difficulty of this text is that we, as readers, didn‟t know

that Benjy was emitting moans while moving along the fence and observing the golfers. We infer it from

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Luster‟s words. This inference reinforces the impression that we are confined to Benjy‟s consciousness, which is

our only means of access to the storyworld. Indeed, we‟ve seen that, while reading this beginning, the readers‟

imaginings are likely to flicker between two possibilities: imagining seeing Benjy seeing people through a fence;

and imagining seeing people through a fence. The former is an acentral imagining, in Goldie‟s term; it consists

in attributing a visual experience to the character (on the basis of his words). The latter is a central imagining,

and involves enacting the character‟s consciousness—experiencing on his behalf. So far, I have cautiously

argued that there‟s no need for readers to entertain “internal” imaginings; but Luster‟s words tip the scale in the

opposite direction. It is very hard to see how we can imagine the character from the outside and still not hear his

moans. By contrast, it is more likely that we are unconscious of Benjy‟s moans (and learn about them from

Luster‟s line) because we are enacting his consciousness—and the character himself is not fully conscious of

them. As a matter of fact, he never says anything like “I was moaning.” This lack of self-consciousness on the

character‟s part paradoxically makes the readers more conscious of their attempts at integrating—by way of

inferences—the information Benjy has omitted. It is as if the reader and the character were engaged in

teamwork, with the reader‟s inferential work making up for the character‟s limitations. This, of course, sharpens

the sense that we are sharing Benjy‟s experiential perspective, while remaining aware of its partiality. Moreover,

not only do we quickly adjust to the frame implied by this passage (which I will call “consciousness-

enactment”), but we allow it to reinterpret the previous sentences, in accordance with Jahn‟s (“Frames”)

“recency preference rule”: in other words, it seems as if we had enacted the character‟s consciousness all along.8

And yet, we don‟t lose sight of our initial consciousness-attribution. We enact the character‟s consciousness, but

at the same time we attribute this consciousness to another person (a fictional character).

The foregoing analysis has raised a number of critical points, which I would like to discuss before moving

on. To start with, I don‟t pretend to have offered anything like a realistic, empirically testable description of how

readers react to this relatively short passage. Mine is a slow-motion analysis, and I can‟t prove that readers

would pay attention to the details on which I‟ve decided to focus, such as the opposition between “I” and “they,”

the function of the fence, or even Luster‟s revealing words. But neither was this the purpose of my reading.

Rather, I aimed to highlight, in a condensed, manageable form, some aspects of the reader‟s imagination that are

15

usually revealed by much longer texts. One of these aspects is the sketchy nature of our imaginings. “Internal

focalization” is a useful label, but—when it is applied to the tension between the reader‟s imaginings and the

perceptions of a fictional character9—it only predicts a response to the text that may be delayed, and may not be

produced at all. I have argued that, in the passages quoted above, our enactment of Benjy‟s consciousness

becomes the preferred response only after realizing that we are actually collaborating with the character in

making sense of the storyworld. In sum, most consciousness texts are ambiguous, and it is only by applying

Jahn‟s primacy and recency rules and by examining the overall context that we can hypothesize whether readers

are likely to enact the consciousness of a fictional character.

These remarks, however, do not solve the larger problems posed by my analysis of Faulkner‟s text. They

can be summarized in two questions: what does it mean to enact a fictional consciousness? And how can the

strategy I have called consciousness-enactment coexist with consciousness-attribution? I will try to address these

key questions in section 5. Before that, I will make a necessary detour through what Monika Fludernik has called

the “experientiality” of narrative (see e.g. Fludernik 12), its quasi-experiential “feel.”10

4. Whose experience?

Experientially speaking, readers never start from scratch, since they bring to bear on the reading process

their own past experiences. As psycholinguists put it, narrative texts activate readers‟ past experiential traces—

the memories of their past sensorimotor interactions with the environment (see e.g. Zwaan and Madden; Zwaan).

Let‟s go back for a moment to the idea that consciousness and experience cannot be represented. If this is true

(and I believe it is), narrative texts will always fall short of representing what it is like for a character to undergo

an experience—in my Faulkner example, what it was like for Benjy to watch the golfers through a fence. They

may represent (or, as I prefer to say, invite the reader to imagine) Benjy watching the golfers through a fence,

but they will always miss the felt, subjective quality (or qualia, as they are sometimes called) of his watching.

And yet, defending the thesis that fictional consciousnesses can sometimes be enacted, i.e. performed by the

reader‟s own consciousness, involves showing that these qualia come in at some point in the reader‟s interaction

with the text. Because of the impossibility of representing qualia, it has to be on the reader‟s end; this is why I

argue that, without being experientially acquainted with vision and the sensorimotor patterns that characterize it

16

(in other words, the movements that we perform with our body, head, and eyes in order to visually perceive the

world around us)11

readers would fail to understand the meaning of the foregoing passages from Faulkner‟s The

Sound and the Fury. We imagine, on the basis of past experiences, what it must be like to watch some people

through a fence, and this enables us to enact the character‟s consciousness.

However, the experiential direction of flow is not only from the reader to the text, but also from the text to

the reader. Just like dreams, narrative texts draw on memories of real experiences but at the same time provide

novel experiences. They are experience-providing machines that come with the instruction “imagine that . . .”12

and run on the readers‟ own past experiences. But we shouldn‟t leap to the conclusion that the new experiences

I‟m talking about here are those undergone by fictional characters. My point of departure was that the characters‟

experiences cannot be represented—they are not things in the text. These new experiences are undergone by

readers, and by no one else. In a sense, then, it makes no difference if a passage contains a reference to an

experiencing character or not; it would still have an experiential quality for readers. Consider this descriptive

passage, from the fourth, heterodiegetically narrated section of The Sound and the Fury:

The rain had stopped. The air now drove out of the southeast, broken overhead into blue patches.

Upon the crest of a hill beyond the trees and roofs and spires of town sunlight lay like a pale scrap of

cloth, was blotted away. Upon the air a bell came, then as if at a signal, other bells took up the sound

and repeated it. (287)

This passage constructs, in Ann Banfield‟s (273) words, an “empty deictic center,” since it makes no

reference to any act of perception within the storyworld. And we can be sure that no such act is implied, since

Dilsey enters a building just before the description, and leaves it as soon as the description ends. The hints of

subjectivity are, therefore, kept to a minimum. And yet, this description clearly has an experiential quality. It

“indexes” the reader‟s experiential traces, transforming them into a new experience. Consider the third sentence,

where we are first invited to imagine the “crest of a hill,” then “the trees and roofs and spires of town,” and

finally (over the hill) a patch of “sunlight.” It is as if someone stared at the hill from a high platform, then turned

her gaze downward, fixating on the trees, the roof and the spires (in this order), before directing her gaze with a

jerky upward movement of the head to the sunlight on the top of the hill. At least, this is the way I imaginatively

17

reconstruct this space, and the “as if” prefixed to the sentence is meant to convey the idea that imagination

consists in the simulation of a perceptual act (see e.g. Currie, “Visual Imagery”; Goldman 149-160). In this case,

the simulated perceptual act is not anchored to a fictional perceptual act, but the reader experiences the described

landscape nonetheless. As Fludernik (198) writes in her treatment of Banfield‟s “empty deictic center” texts, the

reader imaginatively projects into the empty center.

No doubt, I‟ve already pointed out that the reader may not imagine distinctly the bodily movement I‟ve

described, or may find another way to “connect the dots” between the various locations. What is sufficient for

my argument to hold is that readers draw on their memories of past sensorimotor interactions (visually scanning

a landscape from a high position) to imagine this scene. Contrast how hard it can be to imagine this variation on

Faulkner‟s text: “Upon the roofs beyond the trees and the hill and spires of town sunlight lay like a pale scrap of

cloth.” The problem with this hypothetical description is that our familiarity with the sensorimotor patterns of

vision makes it very hard for us to imagine a way through this landscape.

On the other hand, despite being based on our lived experiences, the imaginings stirred by Faulkner‟s text

enable us to experience a fundamentally new space. This is especially evident in the simile (“sunlight lay like a

pale scrap of cloth”), which casts a different light on an extremely common experience. Indeed, I agree with

David Lodge that metaphors and similes are “the primary means by which literature renders qualia” (13), i.e. the

felt qualities of experience. But this is not so much about rendering as about helping the reader to new

experiences: the defamiliarizing effect of literary metaphors and similes (which David Miall, following on the

footsteps of the Russian formalists, has linked with aesthetic value) could arise from their power to turn familiar

experiences into novel and often disturbing ones.

Returning to the issue of fictional consciousnesses, we may ask: if it is the reader who does the experiencing

all the time, what‟s the difference between an externally focalized (or non-focalized) passage such as the one

we‟ve just examined and an internally focalized passage? For instance, what would happen if Faulkner‟s

description were introduced by the words “Dilsey surveyed the landscape for a moment”? Let me take the

second question first. My short answer is: not much. Readers would have very similar imaginings in both cases,

except that (in the presence of a fictional perceptual act) they would tend to couple their own experience of the

18

fictional space with a consciousness-attribution. We shouldn‟t overestimate the importance of this

consciousness-attribution in this kind of text: it‟s an on-off switch of little consequence, in terms of the

phenomenology of the reader‟s imaginings (try reading the description twice, with and without the perception

tag). However, we shouldn‟t be too hasty in concluding that consciousness-attribution never makes any

difference. In my hypothetical version of Faulkner‟s text, consciousness-attribution is not accompanied by

consciousness-enactment, since—if the character enters the readers‟ imaginings at all—she could be easily

imagined from the outside. This is made even more likely by two facts: first, the character‟s act of perception is

alluded to only once (at the very beginning); second, the description has no emotional overtones that can be

directly traced to the character‟s consciousness and to her larger “embedded narrative,” in Palmer‟s term.13

By

contrast, as I‟ll try to show in the next section, consciousness-attribution is highly instrumental in the reader‟s

enactment of fictional consciousnesses.

5. Consciousness-enactment

Not all internally focalized texts invite readers to enact the experiencing character‟s consciousness, since

they may be left free to imagine the character from the outside. The reverse is not true, however: consciousness-

enactment requires internal focalization. Interestingly, Coplan (141-143) has presented a comprehensive review

of the empirical evidence suggesting that readers can imagine from the inside (or enact) the experience of

characters. In what cases, then, can readers be said to enact a character‟s consciousness? More research is needed

on this topic, but it seems reasonable to suppose that insistence on the perceptual acts, emotions, and in general

on the qualitative “feel” of a character‟s conscious experience—especially if protracted over a long text—can

trigger consciousness-enactment.

When this happens, the text helps readers to an experience that they see as their own, and someone else‟s, at

the same time.14

This is why consciousness-attribution (i.e., attributing a consciousness to a fictional character)

plays such an important part in consciousness-enactment. But let‟s proceed with caution. The reason why it has

been so difficult to isolate consciousness-enactment in the passages we‟ve examined so far is that it usually

concerns larger portions of text, since it needs some time to build up in the reader‟s own consciousness. In my

analysis of the beginning of Benjy‟s monologue, I‟ve tried to emphasize this aspect of the reader‟s engagement

19

with fictional consciousnesses: we don‟t enact a consciousness from the very beginning; consciousness-

enactment is a gradual process, driven by the accumulation of textual clues. We‟ve seen that the reader‟s

imaginings always have an experiential character, that the encounter between the reader‟s consciousness and the

text results in an experience. What consciousness-enactment does is finely adjust the reader‟s consciousness

until it becomes, to some extent, the consciousness of another person—a fictional character‟s.15

Consider

Benjy‟s monologue again: as we read, we feel that we are penetrating deeper into the character‟s consciousness,

that we are increasingly familiar with his mental processes. But a fictional character has no mental processes,

and only seems to be conscious: in fact, our illusion is produced by the combined effect of consciousness-

attribution (it seems as if the character who says “I” has a consciousness independent from ours) and of

consciousness-enactment, whereby we shape our own consciousness until it merges with the consciousness we

attribute to the character. It is through this reshaped consciousness that we experience the fictional world.

Since the experiences undergone in the first person are, paradoxically, attributed to the character, the divide

between the first-person and the third-person approach to consciousness is bridged. This, it is often claimed

(Lodge; Herman, Basic Elements of Narrative 147), is one of the distinguishing features of narrative. What I

would like to point out here is that readers are capable of such a feat because they stand poised between the

attribution of a consciousness and its enactment, i.e. its performance. As Hutto and the other enactivists have

repeatedly stressed, consciousness is an active, embodied exploration of the world; if consciousness could be

faithfully represented, straddling the divide between the first-person and the third-person approach would be no

problem at all. But since consciousness cannot be represented, the reader‟s initial encounter with a fictional

character results in a consciousness-attribution—that is to say, in the adoption of a third-person stance. However,

in the presence of specific textual instructions, readers gradually begin to enact that consciousness, and this

involves imagining the character‟s experiences in a first-person way by drawing on the memories of one‟s past

embodied interactions with the world. The upshot is that readers quite literally incorporate the consciousness

they‟ve initially attributed to the character, without losing sight of their consciousness-attribution.

To better understand this point, we can return to one of the central features of experience—its being, at least

in part, narratively constructed (see section 2). What happens when we enact a fictional consciousness? In a few

20

words, our own, narratively constructed self slips into the background of our consciousness, and we make room

for another narratively constructed self—the character‟s. I may now add that the reader‟s body plays a part in

this process, because of the sensorimotor memories triggered in his or her imagination. Indeed, a word I haven‟t

used so far, but which is clearly relevant to this discussion, is “simulation.” I‟ve taken care to avoid this word

because it could have introduced a mimetic fallacy: if I had said that fictional consciousnesses are “simulated”

(as opposed to enacted), it could have seemed that there really is, somewhere, in the text or in the mind of the

reader, a consciousness that we try to simulate. Moreover, the concept of “mental simulation” is still the subject

of much debate in cognitive science. With these caveats in mind, it is possible to equate consciousness-

enactment and simulation, pointing out that—if neuroscientists like Vittorio Gallese are right—the reader‟s

simulation of fictional consciousnesses is embodied “not only because it is neurally realized, but also because it

uses a pre-existing body-model in the brain, and therefore involves a non-propositional form of self-

representation” (Gallese 42). In a way, then, when they enact a fictional consciousness, readers lend their real

body to the purely fictional body of a character.16

Conclusion

In this article, I‟ve tried to address the problem of why readers view fictional characters not only as

psychologically “minded” beings (functionally analogous to humans), but also as beings capable of having

conscious mental states, or of undergoing subjective experience. The existing literature on readers‟ engagement

with literary characters seems to favor a functionalist approach to fictional minds, sidestepping the issue of

consciousness.

In my attempt to tackle this issue, I have called the readers‟ default stance towards fictional consciousnesses

“consciousness-attribution.” This strategy consists in treating the gestures and the psychological language of

fictional characters as expressive of consciousness, and has a close parallel in the way we attribute consciousness

to real people. In fact, because of the subjective nature of consciousness, consciousness-attribution is always, in

both real and fictional contexts, an interpretative move. I‟ve then directed the focus of my attention towards the

reader‟s enactment (or performance) of fictional consciousnesses—a strategy readers are likely to adopt while

reading internally focalized texts, especially when the qualitative “feel” of the character‟s experience is strongly

21

hinted at. Consciousness-enactment, I have argued, is always complemented by consciousness-attribution: our

consciousness merges with the consciousness attributed to the fictional character, and we experience a fictional

world through the narrow gap between being ourselves and not being ourselves. This is why the texts that invite

us to enact the consciousness of someone dramatically different from ourselves (for instance, Benjy, or the

young Stephen in the first pages of James Joyce‟s Portrait) are the most striking. Narratives have the power to

defamiliarize our everyday experience by letting us see the world in a different light.

The idea that consciousness and experience cannot be subsumed under the framework of

representationalism runs as a thread through my article. A consciousness is not an object that can be pinpointed

in some textual features, or that can be mentally constructed by readers. It can only be attributed in our

intersubjective relations with others, or had in the first person. As I‟ve tried to show in my discussion of the

reader‟s experience and of “experiential traces,” having a consciousness or a subjective experience involves

engaging with a world (be it the real world or a storyworld) in an active, embodied, hands-on way.

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Notes

I am indebted to Bart Vervaeck for his challenging observations on an earlier draft of this essay. I would also like to

thank Lars Bernaerts, John Knapp and the anonymous readers for Style for their insightful comments and helpful

suggestions. 1 According to Hutto (“Knowing What?”), however, the enactivism of O‟Regan and Noë is not as “radical” as it

sounds, since their talk about “sensorimotor knowledge” is inherently suspect of representationalism. As Hutto puts it,

“despite advertisements and avowals of anti-intellectualism, the account as presented seems to rest on a tacit appeal to

„inner representations and rules‟ after all” (“Impossible Problems” 64) 2 This claim could seem to be at odds with the externalist approach to fictional characters Palmer has developed in

Fictional Minds and, more recently, in Social Minds, attempting to overcome the internalist bias of most narratological

works on the topic. Actually, Palmer‟s focus on intersubjectivity and on intermental thought complements, rather than

contradicts, my insistence on subjective experience. Internalist and externalist approaches are mutually irreducible, as

Gallagher and Zahavi explain in this passage: “The second- (and third-)person access to another person differs from the

first-person access to my experience, but this difference is not an imperfection or a shortcoming. Rather, the difference is

constitutional. It is what makes my experience of the other, rather than a self-experience” (187). 3 A similar view has been advanced by Dan Zahavi (see Zahavi).

4 Along similar lines, Currie (Narratives 123-147) speaks of “character-focused narration” for stories narrated by an

author/narrator in a way that is oriented to the point of view of a character. However, unlike my “consciousness texts,”

Currie‟s label does not include stories narrated by a character; and this is quite strange, since these stories would fit

perfectly with Currie‟s imitative account of point of view (see Narratives 135): in writing a first-person fictional narrative,

an author strives to imitate the style, worldview, etc., of a person other than him- or herself. I will avoid here the tricky

question of whether readers can be said to experience a fictional world through the consciousness of the heterodiegetic

narrator in external (Bal) or zero (Genette) focalization (but I have reasons to doubt it).

26

5 As one of the anonymous readers for Style has pointed out to me, my statements about the need to bridge the gap

between first-person and third-person approaches to consciousness would seem to run counter to the enactivist project,

since—radical enactivists like Hutto insist—there simply is no gap to bridge in our basic engagement with others (or “mind

minding,” as Hutto calls it in his “Elementary Mind Minding”). However, denying the existence of this gap in more

sophisticated cases of interaction with others seems to me completely counterintuitive. And our engagement with fictional

characters, being linguistically and conceptually mediated, is surely one of such cases. 6 As Butte (28-29) points out, Merleau-Ponty used a similar metaphor (the wall) for intersubjectivity.

7 On deictic centers and deictic shifts, see Duchan et al. and Herman (Story Logic 271).

8 Jahn‟s primacy and recency preference rules are drawn from Ray Jackendoff‟s concept of the preference rule system

(see Jackendoff). 9 Among the scholars who have highlighted the reader-dependence of focalization are O‟Neill, Jahn (“Windows of

Focalization”; “More Aspects of Focalization”), and Bortolussi and Dixon (166-199). 10

It should be noted, however, that in Fludernik‟s definition of experientiality (see e.g. Fludernik 27) the emphasis falls

on the representation of characters‟ experiences, whereas my approach is reader-centered and anti-representationalist. 11

Noë has built his enactivist theory of perception around these sensorimotor patterns (see Noë). 12

The idea that texts are sets of instructions to imagine stems from Wolfgang Iser‟s classic The Act of Reading (64-65).

For a similar view, see Scarry (36). 13

Here‟s how Palmer defines this term: “the whole of a character‟s various perceptual and conceptual viewpoints,

ideological worldviews, and plans for the future considered as an individual narrative that is embedded in the whole

fictional text” (Fictional Minds 15). 14

Cf. Coplan: “Through the experience of empathic engagement, readers are able to connect to characters while still

remaining separate from them. In other words, readers can become deeply involved in characters‟ experiences without

relinquishing their separate identities” (148). 15

It is well-known that, in the 1960s, phenomenological critics like Georges Poulet described the act of reading in

terms of a joining of consciousnesses (see Poulet). In that case, however, the consciousnesses involved were the reader‟s

and the author‟s. 16

I explore the problem of the reader‟s embodiment more in detail in my “The Reader‟s Virtual Body.”