:K\'R:H&DUHDERXW/LWHUDU\&KDUDFWHUV"E\%ODNH\ 9HUPHXOH UHYLHZgreyman. Volume 30. pp.0021 For additional information about this article http://muse. Number 2. Yulia Greyman Literature and Medicine.1353/lm.2.html Access provided by University College London (UCL) (10 Nov 2014 14:35 GMT) . Fall 2012.2012.edu/journals/lm/summary/v030/30.jhu. 378-382 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\7KH-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10. First. they cannot provide a return on the investment of our affections? The book poses these questions to the mind sciences as well as to literary theory. Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? is grounded in eighteenthcentury British literature. Vermeule sees literature as more than just a pleasurable pastime or a byproduct of other sets of . Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. $62. reading fiction is good for us. in other words. from Homer’s The Iliad to “Curious George. that it has a function. may dismay traditional humanists because they value literature for its utility rather than its art.00. 296 pp. Blakey Vermeule poses a provocative question right out of the gate with her title: Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? If we stop to think before we start to read her book. and how to navigate the ins and outs of coalitions and manipulative social systems.” The “care” in Blakey’s Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? is twofold: it refers to both attention and empathy. and that it is a human necessity” (161).” Vermeule sets out to explore exactly what functions narrative serves and what those functions reveal about how our minds work. it doesn’t make much sense that we respond emotionally to characters who we know aren’t real. Vermeule’s theories about the purpose of literature. Hardcover. why do we give our time—a precious and limited resource—to people we know do not exist? Second. engaging with the work of literary critic Lisa Zunshine on “theory of mind” and levels of intentionality. In her recent book. how to detect cheaters. cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker on literature as a space for exploring and resolving hypothetical problems. and literary Darwinist Joseph Carroll on the arts as an emotional compass. but they are worth considering if we are to keep the Humanities alive and relevant in an age where every academic subject must constantly justify its “use.378 literature and medicine Blakey Vermeule. As a work of literary criticism. which draw on cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. why do we care about them if. Socially. but it expands its scope to find evolutionary threads throughout a wide range of narratives.00. unable to care about us. $30. 2010. She maintains that our minds are “of ancient stock” (xiii) and the world around us has not succeeded in changing them: “The sheer profusion of narratives in all known human cultures suggests that storytelling is a human universal. Paperback. So why do we care? Vermeule’s general answer is that “literary characters are tools to think with” (245)—that they teach us how to develop our mind-reading abilities. a character from J. Vermeule. which allows her to place both into the category of “fictional characters. Coetzee’s Disgrace. and they invite speculation on the guilt of the “character. maintains that the novel as a form serves particular psychological needs that arose with modern culture. who frames her argument with narratives from her own personal and teaching experience. Vermeule. to other types of information. The “social novel. compares gossip-magazine readers’ reactions to Kobe Bryant’s alleged rape of a young woman with those of her students to the problematic sexual act committed by David Lurie.” says Vermeule. M. She invokes the literary historian Catherine Gallagher to show how modernity requires “skeptical and flexible habits of mind. In both cases. the media represent them in flattened ways that capture our attention and elicit ready-made responses. not in the aggregate. The argument for the similarity between literature and gossip rests on Vermeule’s collapse of the difference between literary characters and real-life people we will never meet. global spectrum. At this time especially.” is an eighteenth-century invention (129). and she connects the emerging commerce among strangers to an increased paranoia over whether those strangers are trustworthy. At the core of her argument is that narrative directly benefits survival. “most stories are gossip literature” (7).” she asserts. “In my view. Vermeule’s first answer to the titular question is that fictional characters fulfill our desire for gossip: “we need to know what other people are like. are not “real” people to us: in addition to the unlikelihood of us ever encountering them. the sexual sins are ambiguous and open to interpretation. and our capacity for it has been inherited via natural selection. we prefer gossip. Though many of the book’s points deal with longstanding reasons for human interest in fiction. or social information.” interpretive skills related to the new difficulties readers were facing in their financial lives (8). but in the particular” (xii).” as if he were real and as if readers’ judgments of him were somehow important to their personal lives. Vermeule points to how financial and information revolutions in late seventeenth-century Britain opened economic markets for trade across a wider.Book Reviews 379 survival mechanisms.” She argues that celebrities. and thus their distance from our real lives. “keeping track of other people’s inner compass became a . “the novel in which the narrative interest comes from the way the characters interact and from the vast question of what other people are like. for instance. Vermeule also argues that there is evolutionary value in this response to characters. whose background is in eighteenth-century literature. In fact. Simulation theory holds that the guesswork is actually based on imagination and empathy. although she also states that both theories are necessary to account for the phenomenology of the reader’s experience. depends on it. in the modern world. the most useful habit of mind is one Vermeule calls “Machiavellian. Instead. “is an incredibly powerful source of literary interest because it is an incredibly powerful source of human interest” (31). especially skeptical mind reading. Vermeule engages with the work of Lisa Zunshine. Like Zunshine. Literature. the most important internal state to identify is that of a fraud. and its most important tool is mind reading. is thus a survival toolkit. Vermeule finds it a more promising hypothesis for explaining our interest in fiction. Because the theory emphasizes the imagination. negotiating for status and resources at every turn.380 literature and medicine necessary and rather anxious pastime” (9). the early novel discourages blind faith in other people. In other words. guessing at their motives. when Vermeule discusses the cognitive basis of caring about literary characters. In terms of the mind-reading benefits of reading fiction. rather than an innate system. The novel was fueled by these anxieties: with its tropes of kind-hearted and gullible characters deceived by rakes and liars. and planning our interactions with them accordingly. she connects her work to Nicholas Humphrey’s “Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis. and by extension our survival.” which holds that the complexities of social groups have been more influential on the evolution of human intelligence than nonsocial environmental problems (30–31). it shows readers how to develop the social competence necessary for survival in their new environment. . or social intelligence. determining whether they mean us harm. Vermeule extends her discussion of mind reading to explain why the most Machiavellian literary characters are also the most popular. Vermeule proposes that literature stimulates and experiments with our “theory of mind. Ultimately. Machiavellianism. the problem of other minds puts a greater stress on our intellect than questions of how to get food or shelter. which teaches us how to navigate social environments.” neurological inference systems that enable us to guess at the mental states of other humans. Vermeule stresses that. who also views literature as a kind of training ground for “reading” people. We want to understand human cognition because our social lives. she also considers “simulation theory” to explain how literary characters serve as mind reading practice. We think deeply about fictional people so that we can improve our interpretation of real-life people. Unlike Zunshine. Our survival depends on orienting ourselves with respect to others.” With this term. We are drawn to unusually perceptive characters because that is the quality we would most like to replicate. Vermeule feels that “the founding gesture (or was it a sin?) of literary criticism may have been to suppress a psychological interest in character in favor of more difficult topics. Schadenfreude stories. chapters on Jane Austen and J. We must remember that art has always competed with other forms of entertainment. Vermeule’s commitment to integrating the study of literature with cognitive science affects her approach to close readings. a myth that serves to deter those that would hide information and use it for evil means. Instead. While she includes formalist analysis—including. we can at least propagate and enact the idea that justice ultimately prevails. are eternally fascinating for readers because they provide the pleasure of “detecting and punishing rules-violators and cheaters” (7). As Vermeule’s students made clear in their discussions of Disgrace’s sexually transgressing character David Lurie. like Sherlock Holmes. then. possess “lots of mind reading appeal because their perceptive powers lie just slightly outside the limits of what ordinary humans are capable of” (52). the question of judgment and justice is also intrinsic to our reading (and gossip) strategies: if we cannot have access to other minds. that an omniscient character endowed with unlimited access to other minds would fulfill our most fundamental mind-reading desires and would thus be the most appealing. That untrustworthy characters get punished—cheating celebrities by the public and villains by the plot of the moralistic author—feeds into our desire for fairness in a world where crucial social information is unevenly distributed. Coetzee and the eighteenth-century novel—she is careful to avoid formalism purely for formalism’s sake. M. nor is any character better at meting out justice. its prevalence indicates . No character has a more desirable theory of mind than God. for instance. as when she argues that the technique of free indirect discourse suited the eighteenth century novelist’s desire to expose the psychology of character in new ways. It follows. she contextualizes form historically and cognitively. mainstream criticism’s opposition to the emotional and instinctual carries us away from understanding why and how we relate to fiction. And in fact. Vermeule wonders whether there are connections between the spirit of religion and the spirit of gossip: she speculates that “the gossip-shaped hole in our souls certainly overlaps with the God-shaped hole in our souls” (10). for instance.Book Reviews 381 The characters that endure are those who. For Vermeule. a gesture born of the modernist reading practices with which the ruse of criticism was historically twinned” (14–15). 00. thus encouraging readers to care not only about literary characters. Vermeule’s integration of scientific studies into the cultural conversation never veers from a human. she says. Rather. contemporary literary criticism has become too elitist and stifling. Since.382 literature and medicine that it must possess some kind of competitive advantage. they are shaped by them” (9). while Vermeule writes that she appreciates the more scientific direction in which the field is headed. $17. as for other literary Darwinists. Nevertheless. $25. the cognitive and the cultural are inextricably bound: history alone cannot explain cultural and artistic patterns. but Vermeule stresses that without it. literature would never have existed at all. 224 pp. Hardcover. The cognitive literary criticism movement of which Vermeule is a part has caused discontent in some quarters. but also literary criticism. but the claim that they are of paramount importance is a view that is . “flesh and blood” approach (249). Critics of the movement feel that the encroachment of science into art misses the point entirely and reveals nothing significant about what really matters in literature. it must say something vital about our instincts. Art cannot be only about lofty ideals and sophisticated reading practices. too far removed from what attracts us to literature in the first place. High-minded critics want to believe that art rises above this quality. Frank. But Vermeule stresses that the research being done in evolutionary psychology and cognitive science can help tell a heretofore missing part of the story. for Vermeule. Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology. as it has been designed to entice and stimulate them. rather. she is not turning to scientific theories for more of the same. For her. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2010. Yulia Greyman Graduate Center of the City University of New York Arthur W. claiming that her study “might be called palpitational rather than empirical” (249). The idea that stories are important to people is hardly new.00. “evolutionary literary criticism appeals to me because it is charitable towards the sorts of things humans care about” (161). Paperback. and probably more than. since it shows how “humans have evolved psychological capacities that shape cultural forms at least as much as. she keeps her own work more personal and contemplative.
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