The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood ed. by Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood ed. by Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso Luke Mueller MIGUEL-ALFONSO, RICARDO, ed. The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 236 pp. $99.00 hardcover; $79.20 e-book. The story of the modernist novel usually involves an “inward turn”: against the nineteenth-century realists’ highly wrought social worlds, against their moral dilemmas and ostensibly objective descriptions, modernism (as the story goes) dramatizes private minds whose contacts with the world are perspectival, partial, and tenuous. It’s true that modernist novels are deeply concerned with the mind, but the inward turn offers a picture of mental experience that looks simplistic in the context of recent work in cognitive studies. This work examines how minds are always already in the world, and it has been the subject of seminal works such as Alan Palmer’s Fictional Minds (2004), Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006), and David Herman’s collection The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English (2011). Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso brings this broader picture of mind squarely into the realm of modernist narrative in The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood, a collection of essays that thoughtfully challenges the “inward turn.” Miguel-Alfonso begins The Fictional Minds of Modernism by arguing that modernist narrative (exemplified by Gertrude Stein’s work) is fundamentally about the “continuity between mind and world” (12). Narrative is both an act of mind, giving sequence and structure to phenomena, and also an act of mind made available to other minds. In other words, narrative is fundamentally public. But Miguel-Alfonso acknowledges this publicness is problematic, contending that modernist narratives engage in “relentless questioning of the relationship between mind, language, and reality” (9). The book’s contributors take up this relentless questioning, seeking a more nuanced picture of mind that is not simplistically bifurcated into “internal” and “external” aspects. In the second essay, Jukka Mikkonen warns against too quickly accepting fictional minds as means for learning “about the workings of the mind” (18). Mikkonen recognizes the propensity of readers to ascribe realistic qualities of mind to fictional characters, but he argues that fictional minds must also obey the demands of narrative necessity. Narrative minds have both mimetic and poetic aspects, and these poetic aspects make trouble for those who would claim modernist literature can faithfully represent minds. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, for example, Clarissa Dalloway’s ability to understand others borders on extraordinary, and the portrayal of the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith is haunted by the fact that Woolf may not be “a real expert of schizophrenia” (21). In other words, there is a difference between narrative minds feeling real and being real. While Mikkonen is sympathetic to those who would [End Page 192] claim “that literary narratives could widen our ‘mental universe’ or ‘the cognitive horizon of human awareness,’” he concludes that such claims “are not proportional to their supporting evidence—no matter how evidence is understood—and at times look even like dogmas” (25). While Mikkonen’s skepticism is warranted, it is somewhat tempered by two following essays that argue that normal presentations of mind are always already conceptual and linguistic—making poesis a crucial part of investigations of mental experience. Marco Caracciolo argues that metaphors for mind break down barriers between inner and outer life because they express what is “internal” in terms of “concrete things that we can directly perceive” (34). Caracciolo explores metaphors of mind in three novels: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Federigo Tozzi’s Con gli occhi chiusi (Eyes Shut), and in Mrs. Dalloway. He shows how mind is conceptualized in terms of sensory activities (perceiving, seeing, having illusions, etc.), in terms of space (Tozzi’s protagonist feels his mind is a “large hall” [42]), and in relation to physical things and processes (Tozzi’s narrator reports of the protagonist, “A familiar ache dashed his brain like a cold jet that never let him get anything done” [42]). Caracciolo believes that these metaphorical “mind styles...