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Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media
By David Ciccoricco UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8473-9
CHAPTER 1
Tragic Misperceptions in a Novel of Twin Consciousness
In any list of the most reviled literary characters of all time (even in the "love-to-hate" sense of the term), from the manipulative Iago of Othello to the volatile Tom Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, or even the codependent and emotionally abusive Edward Cullen of Twilight, it would seem that Waldo Brown has a little something of the worst of all of them. Of course, it is all a matter of perception, and the person who is by any measure closest to Waldo, his twin brother, Arthur, would see things much differently. In The Solid Mandala (1966), Patrick White relies on a mode of dual presentation to convey the mental life of the fraternal twins. The two largest sections of the novel are anchored by the subjectivity of each one in succession, with many of the life events of their suburban Sydney existence — they never leave their childhood home — first told through the perspectival filter of the arrogant, humorless, and misanthropic pseudointellectual Waldo and then retold and refiltered through Arthur, the physically taller, stronger, and heavier of the two but, apparently, much more slight in terms of intellectual and verbal ability.
The conceptual pairing of attention and perception opens a productive path of analysis for the narrative, tethering longstanding narrative-theoretical concerns of perspective and focalization to newer and more complete cognitive-theoretical explanations of how we see and attend to our surroundings and ourselves. Given that White's novel has already been the subject of rich readings of focalization along narratological lines (Collier 1992, Jahn 2007), it serves as an ideal case for further analysis along cognitive-narratological ones. Historically, aesthetic treatments of perception were often considered to be moving beyond or too broadly away from mental functioning proper, as is the case in Cohn's (1978) landmark study of techniques for representing thought and consciousness in narrative fiction. More recently, cognitive narrative theory has followed contemporary cognitive science and psychology in bringing perception more clearly under its purview. The same move allows for literary and narrative-theoretical accounts of point of view and focalization — "understood in terms of deictic anchoring, intentionality, attention and perception, cognitive processing and resultant mental representation of a domain" — to be integrated into the general cognitive view "on perception and its products" (Margolin 2003, 283, original emphasis).
In this chapter, I focus on the ultimately catastrophic disjunctions in the way the two protagonists perceive each other and their shared world. The novel unsettles the idea that twins, familiar targets as controls in so much of experimental psychology, should embody a shared consciousness and provide a picture of intersubjective or intermental functioning. From their hand-in-hand neighborhood walks to their cherished sugared bread and milk meal, much of their lives are intertwined, even inseparable, at the level of daily routines and habitual domesticity. At one point, Waldo even refers explicitly to their paradoxically restrictive and empowering "twin consciousness" (White 1966, 77). Intersubjective breakdowns are rife and irreversible, however, and go hand in hand with chronic failures of self-perception. We come to have a front row seat for all the damage done by the human wrecking ball that is Waldo Brown. Indeed, one of the rare fascinations of narrative fiction is its attempt to observe perceptual processes by impeding them and concretizing them in language — to trace, in Woolf's often-cited description, the "incessant shower of innumerable atoms" that take shape as one's conscious perception (1994, 160). But surely another fascination of fiction must be witnessing, from a safe distance, a downpour of delusion when it comes to characters perceiving themselves.
I'll first establish how the text's figural narration stages the attentions and perceptions of the characters and how it turns seeing into a thematic preoccupation. In addressing this theme, which treats vision also in the mystical or self-revelatory sense, I'll explore the ways in which the novel is indebted to Jungian thought and symbology and how its extant criticism — fixated, so to speak, on psychoanalytical approaches to literary theory — reflects the same influence. Some detailed engagement with psychoanalytic approaches to the novel is needed to establish exactly what I depart from in rereading Waldo and Arthur through today's sciences of mind. Without diminishing, in James Phelan's (1989) terms, the "synthetic" or "thematic" significance of the twins as a figure for a deeply vexed psychic totality, I treat them first and foremost as mimetic individuals with individual minds struggling to make sense of their world and, in the words of Arthur, trying to understand "whose side anybody was on" (284). In doing so, I seek to update some of the prevailing literary-critical treatments of the (Freudian and Jungian) unconscious with recourse to contemporary understanding of nonconscious operations that guide our attention and perception. More specifically, I consider the functional role of what has come to be seen as an adaptive unconscious in shaping our disposition and personality (Wilson 2002).
The chapter also draws on social psychological theories of attribution to explain the cataclysmic slippage in the way Waldo responds to his world and the way he rationalizes that response (and it is worth noting that I am here more concerned with perception in terms of social cognition and self-concept rather than with sensory perception strictly speaking, which is taken up in the following chapters of part 1). Attribution theory describes how we automatically and habitually assign thoughts, beliefs, and intentions to minds (including our own) based on dispositions and actions. It is often treated as a subset of the broader philosophical and cognitive-scientific domain of theory of mind, which is concerned with what is commonly thought to be the evolutionary objective of predicting the behavior of others. Theory-of-mind research is also invested in (often developmental) disorders inhibiting the ability to infer the mental activity of others, and literary scholars have tested both its powers, in the context of reading embedded levels of motivation ("I think that you think that she thinks ..."), and its limitations, in the context of impaired or self-deceived narrators. While the foundations of attribution theory have been in place since the midtwentieth century (see Morris, Ames, and Knowles 1999, for the landmark studies), it has more recently been invigorated by empirical studies (see Wilson 2002, 130–31), and it has been popularized in literary studies by narrative theorists seizing on the kinds of mindreading that is inevitable in and arguably constitutive of narrative fiction (Palmer 2004; Zunshine 2006; and see Pollard-Gott 1993, for an earlier application). In The Solid Mandala, although Arthur is superficially and selectively portrayed as impaired developmentally and typically taken for granted by critics as a "clinical case of simplemindedness" (Collier 1992, 53), it is Waldo who fails to — or at least refuses to — read the thoughts of others in a productive, causal manner. The disjunction between Waldo's own conscious self-narratives and the stable dispositional patterns of his personality set by his adaptive unconscious, moreover, marks his most profound failure of his self-perception.
While the language of contemporary cognitive science helps reframe the chronic cognitive disjunctions of Waldo and Arthur, it is ultimately White's staging of a tragic twin consciousness in varied modes of narrative discourse that offers a unique and artful view of fictional minds. As the narration reveals, by degrees, Waldo's self-perceptual malfunction, it also reveals the extent to which the reader has been misreading the story-world and, most importantly, its other protagonist. The chapter concludes by dissecting some of the mechanisms responsible for what is perhaps the most dramatic case of misattribution: the reader's initial reception of Arthur. I'll illustrate how the novel — through its dual figural narration and manipulations of discourse order, frequency, and paratext — orchestrates a misapprehension of literary character and a manipulation of the reader's own attention and perception in turn.
Fraternal Attention and Perception
The novel's opening section, "In the Bus," serves to spotlight the social reticence, isolation, and provinciality of Sarsaparilla, an imagined midtwentieth-century Australian suburb White locates outside Sydney. The scene is anchored by what two neighborhood women, longtime resident Mrs. Poulter and relative newcomer Mrs. Dun, see, think, hear, and say to one another on their bus ride to the larger suburb of Barranugli, which — as a parsing of the (fictional) name suggests — is probably not much more appealing or attractive than their hometown or their aptly named street, Terminus Road. The section also serves to introduce the (by then) elderly Brown twins, who are first mentioned by Mrs. Poulter in passing and then serendipitously spotted moments later by the women from the moving bus holding hands on one of their customary walks. On an otherwise awkward and "suffocating" ride, during which both women contemplate the unsatisfying nature of their friendship (16), the bus nonetheless becomes "a comfort" that counteracts their social deprivation: "Even when it jumped ... the two ladies were not unpleasantly thrown against each other" (12). Such minor comforts are short-lived, and a lack of social intimacy and disconnection is reinforced when they pass by Mrs. Poulter's husband sweeping gutters for the Council and he fails to attend to his wife's automatic wave from the bus window, for "it was against Bill Poulter's principles to acknowledge his wife in public" (13).
The bus ride also announces a central mechanism of mobilizing the presentation of thought by putting the characters in some form of physical transit. The bus ride marks the opening occasion for reflection on the town and its inhabitants, and it is Mrs. Poulter who senses the bus "jolting" and "bowling along like your own thoughts" (16). Similarly, the often painful memories that comprise the majority of the narrative's structure are mobilized by Waldo's insistence that they go for what is to his larger and largely inert brother yet another seemingly interminable walk (23). As Pierre François notes, Waldo's memories tend to "spur him on to a trot, with Arthur and the dogs panting in the rear" (128). More than just metaphorically underscoring the perambulatory nature of thought in a work that has been rightly described as a supreme "novel of consciousness" (Collier 1992, 468), the device is an acknowledgement of how an acute awareness of one's environment informs even the most inward of turns. In addition, the women's conversation on the bus ride augurs a major tension that plays out in the narrative concerning our access to the minds of others. If contemporary research supports the notion that we infer the thoughts and intentions of others more effortlessly, automatically, and effectively (if not always accurately) than we might have previously understood (Baron-Cohen 1995), then that does not mean we always necessarily want to do so. In response to Mrs. Dun questioning what the twins are doing so far away from Terminus Road and casually saying, "You wonder what goes on in some people's minds," Mrs. Poulter says, "What goes on in other people's minds is private. I wouldn't want to know what goes on inside of my own husband's mind" (21). Her response and her sudden oversensitivity — she has "turned mauve" and is "too loud" (21) — has much to do with what we later learn is a period of estrangement from Arthur, with whom she had developed an intimate bond. But it also foreshadows the relationship of the twins, which is replete with thwarted attempts at shared attention and pathological refusals of mutual understanding.
The primary narratological vehicle conveying the intersubjective failings of the twins is the fixed focalization of the two subsequent and most substantial sections titled "Waldo" and "Arthur" (with the first and fourth sections acting much like a prologue and epilogue). In the concept of focalization we can see how cognitive-scientific concerns with attention and perception overlap with narrative-theoretical ones. Narrative fiction involves the organization of fictional space by subjectively situated characters or narrators and representations of their perceptual acts. As David Herman notes, stories use an array of formal and linguistic techniques to "index modes of perspective-taking" (2000). Describing the phenomenon of attention in his 1890 Principles of Psychology, William James wrote that "focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence" (403–4). With focalization, James uses a term that French literary theorist Gérard Genette (1980) would employ nearly a century later in narrative theory's structuralist prime to describe the expressly literary mode of filtering of narrative information with varying degrees of subjectivity via any number of vantage points of characters and narrators.
The concept of focalization has proved to be an enduring one in literary theory. Historically, however, there has been confusion with regard to framing it in terms of a restriction of either vision or knowledge. If the common distillation of "who speaks?" and "who sees?" is too vision oriented, then the substitution, "who perceives?" — endorsed by Genette in his Narrative Discourse Revisited (1988) — does not do justice to conception, as in "who conceives?" or "who thinks?" As Alan Palmer notes, focalization was "envisaged primarily for, and works very well for, one aspect of mental functioning — perception," but not necessarily for other aspects of consciousness (2004, 49). At the same time, even the original shorthand "who sees?" can refer to a restriction of narrative information with respect to a character's own individual, private mental activity. Manfred Jahn suggests as much when he comments that "perception, thought, recollection, and knowledge are often considered criterial features of focalization, and all these mental processes are closely related to seeing, albeit only metonymically or metaphorically" (1996, 243). Ultimately, at the heart of this polemic is the basic distinction that cognitive science describes as overt and covert attention, with overt attention involving active movement or direction of the sense organs to register some environmental stimulus and covert attention signaling the sort of mental focus that can occur — in the form of a cognitive redirection or drift — without redirecting the senses.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media by David Ciccoricco. Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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