Unreadable minds and the captive reader.

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 is 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 is 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 is that they work best when we allow ourselves to rest in that peculiar combination of anxiety and wonder that is aroused when an unreadable mind is accepted as unreadable. In this regard, my stance is 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 "mindblindness" (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 is 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" is 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 is 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 is 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 is the mind that defies all efforts to read it. The usual default reading of such a mind is as one or another opaque stereotype, of which the most common is that the character is crazy. It is 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" is 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. (2) Putting Kurtz into the category of the insane confers permission to "terminate" him. Captain Willard, recognizing the game in play, replies "Yes, sir. Very much so, sir. Obviously insane" (Milius 13). But from there on, using Willard as its principal focalizer, the film revaluates the term "insane," transferring it to the war effort that the general represents while at the same time conferring on Kurtz a degree of complex readability. A similar revaluation can be seen in Pat Barker's superb novel of World War I Regeneration, in which the opaque place holder for unreadable behavior is "shell shock." A central drama of the novel is the gradual decoding of shell shock by a historically real figure, Dr. William Rivers. Rivers learns to read shell shock as a language of protest that, given the political climate and a soldier's need to "be a man," cannot be given voice. It is a protest, moreover, rooted in a sane assessment of the madness of war. (3)

In what follows, I shall be dealing with characters that disallow the default reading of opaque stereotypes through lack of sufficient narrative action to release them from their unreadability. I shall also be isolating a second and third default response to unreadable minds in fiction that have the potential to displace the immediate experience of unreadability.

1. Reading the Unreadable Mind

My single nineteenth-century example is Herman Melville's classic story "Bartleby the Scrivener." It stands out vividly in the rich social tapestry of canonical nineteenth-century fiction that Palmer has described so well. It is hard to think of another like it in Victorian fiction, and indeed all the other characters in "Bartleby" are as readable as those of Melville's contemporary Charles Dickens. Our decent, kindly narrator is a comfortable sort, "one of those unambitious lawyers who never addresses a jury, or in any way draws down public applause" (Melville 92-3). His veteran scriveners, Turkey and Nippers, and the office-boy, Ginger Nut, are as vividly Dickensian in their look and manner as their names suggest. Together they make the story buzz with the thick "intermental" life of accessible minds so common to the Dickens world. At the same time, they effectively frame the mystery of Bartleby, a silent, pale, diligent copyist who could as easily play the role of a readable character except that, when requested to do any other task than copying, he politely replies, "I would prefer not to." As such, the tale unfolds like a kind of experiment in which an inaccessible mind is dropped into a conventional nineteenth-century storyworld.

Predictably, the default reading of the unreadable that I mentioned above is ready to hand in this story. As Ginger Nut puts it: "I think, sir, he's a little luny" (103). The narrator himself is driven to think that "the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder" (111-12). But, strangely, it doesn't work for him, and he must repeatedly return to the stubborn fact that "Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable." This was, he writes, "an irreparable loss to literature" (92)--a comment that is as understandable, given our evolved narrative expectations, as it is ironic, given the tale's achieved canonicity. The crisis that Bartleby brings on in the heart and mind of his employer is caused by the way he undermines what Ernst Mayr has called the human tendency to engage in "typological" thinking--our assumption of an inner classifiable essence that generates what we see on the outside (165-6), to wit, the thinking of the jail's grubman who assumes Bartleby was "a gentleman-forger" because "they are always pale and genteel-like, them forgers" (130). (4) It is a tendency that Dickens relied on extensively and provides much of the great pleasure of his work. And perhaps Melville was provocatively mimicking Dickens in this regard when he gave his character the ...