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

not follow this formula. In medias res is a very old notion. Begin in
the middle. Of course we may need to identify “beginning” to know
what “middle” is. Is this suggested schema nevertheless the funda-
mental template for all stories?
Like Imberty and Gratier, Delafield-But and Trevarthen use
quotation marks to signal that they do not want their reader to take
them literally: “The appetite for sharing a narrative is clearly demon-
strated by the powers of infants to both imitate expressive movements
and collaborate in their sequencing to ‘tell a story’ even within hours
48
of birth.” Neonatal imitation occurs in chimpanzees and in rhesus
macaque monkeys as well as human beings, and then it disappears. 49
Some infants don’t seem to have it, and there are great differences in
the capacity among individuals. Its meaning has always been con-
50
51
troversial. The phenomenon has been viewed as a genuine inborn
social act, an involuntary reflex, or merely newborn excitement. One
longitudinal study even questioned the existence of neonatal imita-
52
tion. The problem is an old one. What is going on inside the new-
born? Does she have an “appetite” for “sharing a narrative”? The au-
thors do not put narrative in quotation marks in this sentence. Is mu-
tual tongue protrusion sharing a narrative? In their four-part structure,
is full extension of the tongue the moment of climax for both parties?
Is this an imposition of structure on a fleeting vitality affect or a gen-
uine insight into narrative structure as innate biological pa ern?
Interpreting newborn imitation depends on the researchers’

48 Ibid, 1-2.
49 Ibid., 10.
50 Pier F. Ferrari et al., “Neonatal Imitation in Rhesus Macaques,” PLOS Biol-
ogy (2006), doi: org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040302. See Elizabeth Simpson et
al., “Neonatal Imitation and its Sensorimotor Mechanism,” in New Frontiers
in Mirror Neuron Research, eds. Francesco Ferrari and Giacomo Rizzola i
(New York: Oxford University Press (2015), 296-314.
51 See Susan Jones, “The Development of Imitation in Infancy,” Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society 364 (2009): 2325-2335.
52 Janine Oostenbroek et al., “Comprehensive Longitudinal Study Challenges
the Existence of Neonatal Imitations in Humans,” Current Biology 10 (2016):
1334-8.

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