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SIRI HUSTVEDT, Pace, Space and the Other in the Making of Fiction

for the future. If the bus never comes, it could be the opening for a story,
but it isn’t the whole story. Intentionality has a complex philosophical
history that began with Brentano and has twisted and turned in several
directions ever since. For Brentano, intentionality involved the mental
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object of a thought, a conscious psychic act. In his late writings, Edmund
Husserl hinted at but did not develop an idea of fungierende Intentionalität,
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operative intentionality, an unconscious intentionality. Maurice Mer-
leau-Ponty developed this concept further. For him, the body is an
anonymous, pre-reflective, subpersonal dynamic system of action-pro-
jection and motor intentionality shaped by habit and skill over time,
which in turn shapes consciousness. “Consciousness,” Merleau Ponty
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states, “is in the first place not a ma er of ‘I think that’ but ‘I can.’” Such
a definition of intentionality is not about mental objects or self-reflective
thoughts—I know that I know—which guide a machine-like body to ac-
tion; intentionality is present before words “are made to fit in.”
Despite the fact that there is general agreement that narrative ex-
ists in every human culture and that it may take gestural and pictorial,
as well as verbal form, its origins in phylogeny and ontogeny remain
both sketchy and controversial. The turn toward an embodied
metaphorical understanding of human thought in the cognitive sciences
but also in many other disciplines has reconfigured the idea that narra-
tive is a purely linguistic phenomenon that begins with language acqui-
sition. Intellectual weather changes, and the motor-sensory-affective in-
tentional body as a vehicle of mental life has come roaring back in vari-
ous incarnations to echo Wilhelm Dilthey’s words wri en in 1882, “I am
a being that does not merely represent, but also wills and feels.” 21
If the human mind is not a neo-Cartesian information-process-

18 Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Antos C.
Rancurello and Linda McAlister (London: Routledge, 1995), 88.
19 See J.N. Mohanty, “Husserl’s Concept of Intentionality,” in Husserl: Critical
Assessments of Leading Philosophers, ed. Rudolph Bernet, Donn Welton, and
Gina Zavota (London: Routledge, 2005), 15.
20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 137.
21 Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, ed. Rudolph A.
Makreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 493.

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