Why Jane Austen was different, and why we may need cognitive science to see it.(Critical essay)

Something happened to the novel "around the time of Jane Austen" (vii) argues George Butte in his compelling reintroduction of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's discourse on phenomenology into contemporary literary and film studies, I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll Flanders to Marnie. English writers began to portray a multiply-layered and mutually-reflecting subjectivity, deep intersubjectivity, a "change so subtle and fundamental that it has been difficult to conceive and describe" (25), particularly as today we take its impact for granted in the prose of George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Ian McEwan, and others.

Butte defines deep intersubjectivity as

 
   the web of partially interpenetrating consciousnesses that exists 
   wherever perceiving subjects, that is, human beings, collect. [T]he 
   process begins when a self perceives the gestures, either of body or 
   word, of another consciousness, and it continues when the self 
   can perceive in those gestures an awareness of her or his own 
   gestures. Subsequently the self, upon revealing a consciousness of 
   the other's response, perceives yet another gesture responding to 
   its response, so that out of this conversation of symbolic 
   behaviours emerges a web woven from elements of mutually exchanged 
   consciousnesses. (27) 

For a vivid early example of deep intersubjectivity, Butte turns to the episode in Austen's Persuasion, in which Anne Elliot witnesses a silent but poignant communication between her former suitor, Frederick Wentworth, and her sister, Elizabeth, who run into each other in Molland's bakery shop:

 
   It did not surprise, but it grieved Anne to observe that Elizabeth 
   would not know [Wentworth]. She saw that he saw Elizabeth, that 
   Elizabeth saw him, that there was complete internal recognition on 
   each side; she was convinced that he was ready to be acknowledged as 
   an acquaintance, expecting it, and she had the pain of seeing her 
   sister turn away with unalterable coldness. (117) 

According to Butte,

 
   When Anne Elliot watches Wentworth and Elizabeth negotiating complex 
   force fields of memory and protocol, the enabling strategy of her 
   story is a new layering of human consciousness, or a new 
   representation of those subjectivities as layered in a specific way. 
   Deep intersubjectivity has made its appearance in storytelling in 
   modern culture, and it has altered our sense of self and community 
   and the discourses that construct and reflect them. (4)