Abstract
How can providing less textual information about a fictional character make his or her mind more transparent and accessible to the reader? This is the question that emerges from an empirical study of reader response conducted by Kotovych et al. Taking my cue from this study, I discuss the role of implied information in readers’ interactions with characters in prose fiction. This is the textual strategy I call ‘character-centered implicature.’ I argue that the inferential work cued by implicature creates an intersubjective dynamic analogous to what philosophers Zahavi and Rochat discuss under the heading of ‘experiential sharing.’ Effectively, readers complement the textual evocation of mind by drawing on their own past experiences, which leads to a distinctive first-person plural (‘we’) perspective—a sharing of cognitive resources that is responsible for the perceived transparency of the character’s mind. While this experiential sharing may result in empathetic perspective-taking, not all instances of empathy for fictional characters involve sharing.
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Notes
‘Folk psychology’ refers to the skills we use to make sense of other people’s minds (see Churchland 1991). There is an ongoing debate in the philosophy of mind about those skills, and whether they involve an innate theory of how the mind works (Leslie 1987), internal simulations (Goldman 2006), or a combination of embodied and narrative engagements (Gallagher and Hutto 2008). I won’t enter that debate in this article, but Dan Zahavi’s phenomenologically inspired work—on which I draw in Sect. 3—falls into the third camp.
The term ‘focalization’ was introduced by Gérard Genette in Narrative Discourse (1980), which contains an extensive—and seminal—discussion of internal focalization.
Of course, the idea of ‘sharing’ cognitive resources with a fictional being is metaphorical and presupposes the character-centered illusion, or the willingness to approach character mimetically. Cf. the discussion in the opening paragraphs.
Thus, Zahavi and Rochat use the term ‘empathy’ in a different sense from the cognitive or emotional perspective-taking I discussed in the introduction, which is the standard understanding of empathy in discussions of audience-character interactions. In this article, I will not take up Zahavi and Rochat’s phenomenological account of empathy, only their concept of experiential sharing.
Again, as I pointed out in the introduction, I’m not claiming that this coordination underlies readers’ imagination of all characters, but only of those—typically, the protagonists or first-person narrators—whose experiences and mental processes occupy the foreground of a fictional text.
For more on the possibility of ‘consciousness enactment,’ see Caracciolo (2014b, pp. 122–132).
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This study was funded by the European Research Council (Grant Number 714166).
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Marco Caracciolo declares that he has no conflict of interest.
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Caracciolo, M. Fictional Characters, Transparency, and Experiential Sharing. Topoi 39, 811–817 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9593-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9593-x