Reviewed by:

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

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...

审核人：

• 现代主义的虚构思想：从亨利·詹姆斯到克里斯托弗·伊舍伍德编辑的叙事认知。里卡多·米格尔-阿方索
• 卢克·穆勒

现代主义小说的故事通常涉及“内向转向”：反对 19 世纪现实主义者高度塑造的社会世界，反对他们的道德困境和表面上客观的描述，现代主义（如故事所述）戏剧化了与世界接触的私人思想是透视的、局部的和脆弱的。的确，现代主义小说深切关注心灵，但内向转向提供了一幅心理体验图景，在最近的认知研究工作中显得过于简单化。这部作品探讨了思想如何总是已经存在于世界中，并且它一直是开创性作品的主题，例如艾伦·帕默( Alan Palmer) 的虚构思想(2004)、丽莎·赞欣 (Lisa Zunshine) 的《我们为什么阅读小说：思想理论和小说》 ( Theory of Mind and the Novel) (2006) 和大卫 (David)赫尔曼的收藏心灵的出现：英语叙事话语中意识的表征（2011）。Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso 在The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood 中，将这种更广阔的心灵图景直接带入了现代主义叙事领域，这是一本对“内向转向”提出深思熟虑挑战的论文集。

Miguel-Alfonso通过论证现代主义叙事（以格特鲁德·斯坦 (Gertrude Stein) 的作品为例）从根本上是关于“思想与世界之间的连续性”(12) 来开始现代主义的虚构思想。叙事既是一种精神行为，赋予现象以顺序和结构，同时也是一种可供其他人使用的精神行为。换句话说，叙事基本上是公开的。但米格尔-阿方索承认这种公开是有问题的，他认为现代主义叙事参与“对思想、语言和现实之间关系的无情质疑”（9）。这本书的撰稿人接受了这种无情的质疑，寻求更细致的心灵图景，而不是简单地分为“内部”和“外部”方面。

在第二篇文章中，Jukka Mikkonen 警告不要过快地接受虚构的思想作为学习“关于思想的运作”的手段（18）。米科宁认识到读者倾向于将现实的心灵品质归因于虚构人物，但他认为虚构的心灵也必须服从叙事必要性的要求。叙事心灵既有模仿的一面，也有诗意的一面，这些诗意的一面给那些声称现代主义文学可以忠实地代表心灵的人带来麻烦。在弗吉尼亚伍尔夫的达洛维夫人例如，克拉丽莎·达洛维 (Clarissa Dalloway) 理解他人的能力近乎非凡，而震惊的塞普蒂莫斯·沃伦·史密斯 (Septimus Warren Smith) 的描绘则被伍尔夫可能不是“真正的精神分裂症专家”这一事实所困扰（21）。换句话说，有叙事的心灵之间的差异感觉真实，是真实的。虽然米科宁对那些[End Page 192]声称“文学叙事可以拓宽我们的‘精神世界’或‘人类意识的认知视野’”的人表示同情，但他总结说，这些说法“与他们的支持证据不成正比——不管证据是如何被理解的——有时甚至看起来像教条”（25）。

虽然米科宁的怀疑是有道理的，但随后的两篇文章认为正常的心理表现总是已经是概念性和语言性的——这使得诗歌成为心理体验调查的关键部分。Marco Caracciolo 认为，心灵的隐喻打破了内在和外在生活之间的障碍，因为它们用“我们可以直接感知的具体事物”来表达“内在”的东西（34）。卡拉乔洛探索心灵的隐喻在三部小说：凯特·肖邦的觉醒，费德里戈托齐的昆仑GLI occhi丘西（闭着眼睛），并在达洛卫夫人. 他展示了心灵是如何在感官活动（感知、视觉、幻觉等）、空间（托齐的主人公觉得他的心灵是一个“大厅”[42]）以及与物理事物的关系方面被概念化的和过程（Tozzi 的叙述者对主角的叙述，“一种熟悉的疼痛像冷风一样掠过他的大脑，从不让他做任何事情”[42]）。卡拉乔洛认为，这些隐喻的“思维方式……