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

ing machine, a purely symbolic system (a kind of software that can be
realized in the hardware of the human brain or in other materials —
silicone, ba eries, wiring) as first generation cognitive science pro-
claimed and, if the mind is not purely a social construction either, a
disembodied carrier of cultural discourses, but is rather part of a dy-
namic body-subject in the world with others, then it is reasonable to
look for the roots of narrative, that ubiquitous human activity, some-
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where in a developmental trajectory that begins in utero. Rhythm is
a necessary element of verbal storytelling: necessary but not sufficient
to produce story. Drumming is rhythmic, temporal, and emotionally
potent, but do its beats tell a story? Some argue for music as a narrative
form, but others conceive of it as proto-narrative. 23
Changing thought about the origins of narrative in human de-
velopment is in part the result of a “new newborn” in infant research.
No one disputes that humans are a neotenic species or that the human
being is born unusually helpless and dependent when compared to
other mammals or that without help from other people, it cannot sur-
vive. And yet in the last half century the view of the newborn has
metamorphosed from an undifferentiated, unconscious blob that
didn’t know where it or its mother began and ended to a social, cor-
poreally defined, active, highly sensitive being that can recognize its
mother’s voice (even before birth), can imitate the faces of others at
the tender age of 45 minutes and will soon participate in what
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Catherine Bateson first called “protodialogues,” the musical, rhythmic
exchanges between baby and parent that characterize early social in-
teraction and what Stein Bråten has referred to as a “primary dyadic

22 Siri Hustvedt, “The Delusions of Certainty,” in A Woman Looking at Men
Looking at Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 137-340.
23 See Fred Evere Maus, “Music as Narrative,” Indiana Theory Review 12
(1991): 1-34. See also Jean-Jacques Na iez, “The Narrativization of Music.
Music: Narrative or Proto-Narrative? Human and Social Studies 2, no. 2 (2013):
61-86.
24 Andrew N. Mel off and M. Keith Moore, “Imitation in Newborn Infants:
Exploring the Range of Gestures Imitated and the Underlying Mechanisms,”
Developmental Psychology 25, no. 6 (1989): 954-962.

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