The Literary Mind.pdf

SINGLE LIVES 125
from a belief, "grasp" an idea or leave it "behind," and so on. Locations can also
be projected onto features or states. We may think of "true" ideas as located in
one place, "false" in another, "crazy but perhaps suggestive" in another, "counterfactual"
in another, "hypothetical" in another, and so on. We may say that we
have been "looking in the wrong places for the ideas we need" or that we have
"not been positioned properly until now to see the idea clearly." We may "focus"
on hypothetical reality from a particular political "viewpoint." We may "focus"
on the economic story of California from the "viewpoint" of a potential investor
or the alternative "viewpoint" of the governor of California.
Literary narratives are extraordinarily accomplished at indicating such mental
viewpoints. The first words of The Thousand and One Nights read,
It is related—but Allah alone is wise and all-knowing—that long ago
there lived in the lands of India and China a Sassanid king who commanded
great armies and had numerous courtiers, followers, and servants.
He left two sons. ...
The narrator takes certain mental viewpoints. First, there is the space of what
the narrator relates. There is only one thing in this space that he is certain of—
namely, people do tell the story of the thousand and one nights ("it is related").
This space is a parent space; what people in this space relate belongs to a child
space. The child space is viewed by the narrator as a space of possibility only; the
narrator will not vouch for its certainty ("but Allah alone is wise and all-knowing").
The parent space takes a temporal viewpoint on the child space: It is "long ago."
Once we decide to pay attention to these parabolic viewpoints on story spaces,
we see them everywhere, in almost every phrase of a literary work. One kind of
mental viewpoint concerns viewing the story space as real, unreal, or indeterminate.
Shahrazad imagines a predictive story in which she marries King Shahriyar;
she and her father view it as a hypothetical space and therefore unreal. But it
becomes, in their mental viewpoint as characters in the narrator's story, real. The
vizier imagines a predictive story space of the marriage; he and his daughter view
it as hypothetical and unreal. He hopes it does not become real. In fact, part of
it becomes (from his mental viewpoint as a character) real, the part it shares with
Shahrazad's hypothetical space: Shahrazad marries Shahriyar and spends the
night with him. The rest of his predictive space does not become real: Shahriyar
does not order her execution. Other kinds of spaces, such as spaces viewed as
both counterfactual and past ("If Shahrazad had visited England") are viewed as
constrained to be permanently unreal if they are meant to correspond to conventional
conceptions of reality. Of course, there are many cases of imaginative literature
in which these constraints are removed, so that in an alternative universe