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

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organization of mind.” In just a few months, the infant will gain de-
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clarative, explicit memory. Depending on the researcher and her in-
terpretation of the data, this new newborn has various innate a rib-
utes, including a native predisposition to storytelling.
Are we born storytellers? Is narrative founded on an innate bi-
ological pa ern? What kind of consciousness is required for narration?
Consciousness (that “hard” problem) has haunted philosophy and the
sciences for centuries, but it has been given a Hegelian split by many
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who have jumped into the embodied camp. Consciousness is not a
single unified state of knowing that one knows. Instead there is a pri-
mary, core, or pre-reflective self-consciousness, a state of an sich (in it-
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self) an awake, able consciousness shared by many animals. A rat is
a conscious, feeling being with a core self, actively engaged with other
rats. It seeks food and comfort and efficiently navigates its surround-
ings. It remembers, learns, and moves with purpose in its world. It is
a creature of habit and its rhythms, but it is probably not meditating
on “waves” in its mind, and it is definitely not writing novels.
Secondary, extended, or reflective self-consciousness, für sich
(for itself) is the ability to reflect upon, represent, and narrate one’s
own thoughts, actions, and life as a whole. This appears to require a
particular kind of explicit, declarative memory, also called autobio-
graphical memory, noetic, or extended consciousness, an ability to
turn oneself into an other to oneself in memory and fantasy. Human
beings eventually acquire an internal narrator — the verbal accompa-
niment of extended consciousness. No one is born narrating. Early

25 Stein Bråten, “Dialogic Mind: The Infant and the Adult in Protoconversa-
tion,” Nature, Cognition and System 1, ed. Marc E. Carvallo (Dordrecht: Kluw-
er, 1988): 187-205.
26 Emily J.H. Jones and Jane S. Herbert, “Exploring Memory in Infancy: De-
ferred Imitation and the Development of Declarative Memory,” Infant Child
Development 15 (2006): 195-205.
27 See Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind: An In-
troduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science (New York: Routledge,
2008), 45-65.
28 Jaak Panksepp, Affective Consciousness: Core Emotional Feelings in Animals
and Humans, Consciousness and Cognition 14, no. 1 (2005): 30-80.

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