Spoiler Alert

Abstract

What is the audience of an interdisciplinary book? Vera Tobin's Elements of Surprise seems at first glance to belong to an increasingly robust field of cognitive literary studies books that use the findings and theoretical framework of cognitive psychology to explain aspects of literary form. Most previous works in this subfield, though, have been avowedly by and for literary scholars (Lisa Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction [2006], Alan Richardson's The Neural Sublime [2010], Blakey Vermeule's Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? [2010], Natalie Phillips's Distraction [2016]), offering a primer on concepts from psychology and neuroscience while taking for granted a certain familiarity with literary history and theory. Elements of Surprise takes none of this for granted, and the book's true audience seems to be a (lightly idealized, but one can dream) version of the general reader, one who not only consumes and enjoys fictions but is curious about why he or she enjoys them. Tobin does an exceptional job of writing for such a reader: her prose is clear and engaging, her reference points well distributed among the accessible (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, The Princess Bride) and the esoteric (Villette, The Adventures of Roderick Random).The breadth of Tobin's appeal owes as much to her subject as to her style. Insofar as Elements of Surprise is a book about the way authors exploit the predictable limitations of human cognition to produce surprise effects, it represents an entry into the growing scholarly and popular literature—spanning not only psychology and neuroscience but fields like management and education—on cognitive biases. Arguably useful when we need to make quick decisions in “complex, ambiguous situations,” these heuristics nonetheless make us less-than-perfect reasoners in ways that continue to fascinate experimental psychologists, who have demonstrated how poorly humans evaluate risk, probability, responsibility, and more (63–65). The term bias, like many of the others used in the psychological literature, has a negative valence, creating an association between cognitive heuristics and “moral weakness and failure” that Tobin is at pains to dispel (4). The reliable errors of reasoning that humans make in specific situations, in Tobin's view, are prerequisites for “the pleasures of narrative reassessment” that readers and viewers derive from well-structured fictional surprise (28–29). Well-structured surprises, in this account, steer the reader “in the direction of one set of assumptions” only to suddenly offer or demand “a new interpretation that overturns those assumptions” (35). Surprise, in other words, is a form of aesthetic pleasure that depends on having been wrong—and, as such, makes for an especially well-chosen literary object for analyses grounded in psychological research on biased thinking.Tobin groups the cognitive phenomena that interest her most under the rubric “mental contamination effects.” (“Contamination,” to me, sounds not much nicer than “sin” or “bias,” but it is Tobin's preferred term.) Mental contamination occurs when “information we encounter in one context seeps into our representations of other perspectives, contexts, and domains” (17)—a slippage that clearly underlines many moments of insightful and creative thinking but can also lead us to conclusions that, depending on whether they apply to real life or to literature, are either disastrously or delightfully wrong. Most of Elements of Surprise is devoted to explaining specific contamination effects, the textual devices by which writers can produce them, and the readerly emotions generated by their eventual correction. Take, for instance, “the curse of knowledge,” a broad term that psychologists use to describe how difficult it can be to bracket, disregard, or otherwise un-know information that we know (or think we do). In life, the curse of knowledge leads us to assume that other people share our knowledge and beliefs; in literature, as Tobin points out, it can lead us to assume that characters have access to all the information that readers do, even when some of those details were introduced through third-person narration. Similarly, readers may be ready to accept a partial or false answer to an unresolved narrative question when it seems confirmed by something they already “know,” even when the story's true reveal is yet to come.From the vast and sometimes overwhelming field of documented cognitive biases, Tobin skillfully identifies those that have the most potential for authorial exploitation and narratological analysis. Elements of Surprise pays special attention, for instance, to failures of source monitoring that lead us to misremember or simply forget the origin of a piece of information. Apart from accounting for the bane of every literature teacher's existence—the readiness with which students attribute a character's statements to the author of the text—imprecise source monitoring blurs the boundary between narration and diegetic dialogue or between one character's account and another's, an effect that can be heightened, Tobin tantalizingly suggests, by “the experiential texture of narrative” (83). Ambiguities regarding the reliability of a text's narrator, or indeed whether a diegetic narrator exists at all, account for many of Tobin's readings, and she devotes two full chapters to tracking these dynamics as they unfold over narrative time (chapters 6 and 7, 202–69).Elements of Surprise is at its strongest, though, when it moves from relatively broad and familiar narratological concepts (like the unreliable narrator) to implicature and inference at the level of the sentence. Tobin has published widely in cognitive linguistics, and chapter 4, “The Naming of Things,” mobilizes that expertise by using insights from pragmatics—the branch of linguistics concerned with the contribution of discursive context to meaning—to unpack the subtle ways that authors introduce semantic content without stating it. Such smuggled information is often introduced through presuppositions, “proposition[s] whose truth is taken for granted by some utterance” (127), which can in turn be activated by specific lexical or syntactic forms. Tobin offers a rich catalogue of these forms: from factive verbs that subtly presuppose the truth of their complement (like know, regret, or realize) to implicative verbs that presuppose a prior condition for their complement (succeed, fail) to change-of-state verbs that presuppose that some state of affairs was already or not yet happening (begin, stop); from cleft sentences like “It is Zelda who wants a drink,” which presuppose that “some entity exists that fills the variable set up by the subject,” to definite descriptions like “the queen of Russia” that presuppose some individual that meets that description (127–30).Presuppositions possess the special power of being unaffected by syntactic embedding or even negation: the proposition that Leon has been drinking coffee, as Tobin shows, is presupposed not only by the sentence “Leon stopped drinking coffee” but also by “If Leon has stopped drinking coffee, I'll be very surprised!” or “Leon hasn't stopped drinking coffee yet” (138–39). This unusual feature, which makes presuppositions particularly handy for introducing seemingly true propositions that will later be disproved, derives in part from a principle central to pragmatics: in most circumstances, speaker and hearer (or, Tobin's analysis implies, writer and reader) try to work together to produce a successful utterance. If presuppositions are “a sort of precondition for . . . felicitous utterances,” as Tobin frames it, then those preconditions will be “accommodated by the cooperative reader” in order to keep the narrative running smoothly (144). If Elements of Surprise has its own presuppositions, perhaps the most important is the idea that writer and reader work together (or “collude,” in one of Tobin's favorite terms) to produce meaning and that surprise occurs when this collaboration is at first encouraged and then violated—when an author structurally encourages a presupposition that turns out to be false. While we are perhaps used to seeing reading as a kind of cooperation on a semiotic level (as in Barthes's S/Z), Tobin's attention to the structural requirements of this coproduction of meaning is indispensable and holds much promise for close reading. “The Naming of Things” will make both an excellent primer on pragmatics for literary theorists and a useful tool to help undergraduates in introductory literature classes focus their attention on the profound implications of small discursive choices.While the application of pragmatics to literature is, in this reader's opinion, Tobin's most significant methodological intervention, Elements of Surprise also offers a refreshingly realistic theoretical perspective on the role of cognitive science in the humanities. Tobin's confident command of current research in psychology and neuroscience makes her willing to take aim at some concepts that have been accepted uncritically in past works of cognitive literary studies. In distancing herself from evolutionary psychology, for instance, Tobin reminds us of the prohibitive difficulty of “reverse-engineering” behaviors and cognitive processes, noting that such teleological claims confuse “selection pressures, which can be temporary, local, strange, and obscure, with ‘purposes’ that are easy to divine in retrospect” (79)—a useful corrective not only to just-so stories about the evolutionary function of storytelling or art but also to hasty narratives of cultural selection for particular aesthetic forms. Tobin is hardly the first to question the conclusions of evolutionary psychology, but her critique is pithy, clear, and, crucially, grounded in the episteme and practices of the sciences.Similarly, while an innate theory-of-mind capacity has often been taken for granted as a cognitive prerequisite of the novel, and perhaps of narrative itself, Tobin is skeptical of attempts to draw a firm boundary between typical and atypical social cognition. Instead of representing theory of mind as absent or broken in autistic people, for instance, she sees the latter group's struggles with mind reading as continuous with flawed reasoning patterns that neurotypical people often share. “Rather than thinking of social cognition as something characterized primarily by the presence or absence of a working theory of mind,” Tobin argues, “it may be more accurate to think of both adults' and children's ways of thinking about other minds as reflecting shared tendencies and biases” (76). Insofar as this reframing resists the reification of cognitive faculties or modules and instead represents cognition as a field of situation-dependent strategies, it models an approach to the mind—one open to the “temporary, local, strange, and obscure”—that will prove generative and useful to cognitive literary theorists. The latter will also benefit from the example set by Tobin's rigorous analysis of experimental methods: rather than simply make use of a study's conclusions, Tobin shows a subtle grasp of how decisions about experimental design can impact one's findings, bringing critical reading and reasoning skills to scientific studies in a form accessible to (and imitable by!) humanists.In these respects, Elements of Surprise improves upon and adds to existing scholarship in cognitive literary studies and cognitive humanities more broadly; what shortcomings the book has are largely shared by other works in this subfield. A literary critic will notice the cultural and historical flatness of many of Tobin's claims, which tend to treat “surprise” as an experience with a consistent definition, cultural valence, and set of prerequisites. (Nor does Tobin typically reach for ideological explanations of the phenomena that interest her; this is not necessarily a problem, but it makes the text's few references to cultural critique—for instance, an invocation of D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police [52]—feel rather jarring.) This sweeping generality can be invigorating but may not be sustainable in a discussion of cultural artifacts—not least because many of the heuristics that lead us to ignore or fixate on particular pieces of information in a text are grounded not in cognitive universals but in expectations about genre and form. The interaction between relatively stable cognitive heuristics and cultural formations that script particular reasoning patterns makes a rich and promising field for cognitive literary studies, one for which this book lays indispensable groundwork—but, for better or worse, does not tackle itself.It may seem unfair to criticize Elements of Surprise for neglecting a domain that simply lies outside its scope of concern, but an attention to cultural difference and historical change in cognitive habits is not simply necessary for useful readings of literary texts; it will also be crucial to any truly reciprocal relationship between cognitive science and the humanities. Tobin suggests more than once that fictional narratives provide a “laboratory” for cognitive investigations, manipulating our inferential processes in a way that makes them easier to see (15, 55). For this to be more than a figure of speech, however, it would have to be possible for literary findings to disconfirm, or at least call into question, a hypothesis derived from psychology: a laboratory that only produces positive results would quickly and rightly fall into suspicion. If literature is to move from the status of illustration to that of evidence in cognitive studies, cognitive literary scholars will have to demonstrate that texts can reveal patterns of thinking, and interdependencies between cognition and culture, that tend to escape the scope of experiments or large-scale surveys—in other words, that literature can help us generate new hypotheses about the workings of the mind. This might happen by many different means, but one possible route would be to emphasize rather than downplay cultural and historical variation, using texts to investigate cognitive models to which we might not have experimental access (whether because of historical distance or because of their radical individuality or context-dependence).In the process, cognitive literary studies might well end up moving away from the fascination with biases that arguably dominates current psychological research. One of the odder consequences of cognitive psychology's focus on the situation-specific bias is the implicit assumption that human cognition is a faulty machine capable, in principle, of being optimized—to what end is never quite clear (“information processing”?). If this end does exist, though, how does it relate to the ends of literature? Tobin, like other narratologists before her, views plot dynamics as a balance between frustration and satisfaction—and notes the aesthetic virtues of the former, a “perhaps higher and more sophisticated object” (159). Like many literary critics, I do believe “withholding or thwarting expected resolutions” to be one of the more aesthetically interesting and valuable things literature can do (ibid.), but I have little justification for this belief, and Tobin's book provides a thorough and convincing window into the truly complex machinations involved in constructing even the most clichéd “twist.” After reading the novels that most matter to me, as Tobin suggests, I am especially aware of my own cognitive frailties and their potentially pleasurable effects. Still, these texts also leave me especially uncertain of the purpose from which these “curses” are supposedly diverting me. That uncertainty is often less pleasurable, but it may be one with which empirically minded humanists are no less obligated to reckon.