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

working paradigms and what they hope to discover. The “innate” ver-
sus “learned” debates are alive and well across disciplines, even
though cries for the four E’s — embodied, enacted, embedded, and ex-
tended — are loud and frequent and should warn champions of either
innateness or environmental construction that the dichotomy is inher-
53
ently false. However, there are more studies that have found imita-
tion in newborns than those that haven’t, and the phenomenon has
54
been documented in photographs and film. In terms of narrative de-
velopment, I can see how imitation might be construed as an innate
pre-reflective ability to “imitate an action,” which was Aristotle’s defi-
55
nition of mimesis (He would have blanched at the idea of crediting
infants with mimetic powers, however) and that it may indicate the
newborn’s early mirror system, but does this qualify it as an act
demonstrating eagerness for collaborating in storytelling? Imitation in
child’s play is clearly important to both imaginative and narrative de-
velopment — to pretending a spoon is a person and giving the spoon-
person an adventure — but this comes about later in a child’s life. 56
What about Delafield-But and Trevarthen’s argument that narra-
tive consciousness originates in the pre-reflective, operative intention-
ality of fetal movements, the “I can” of a prenatal embodied reality? This
is the only “stage” of development they mention that is not dyadic, not
an example of Trevarthen’s “primary intersubjectivity.” Pre-narrative
form is present in the “purposeful actions” of a fetus in the second

53 See Dave Ward and Mog Stapleton, “E’s are Good: Cognition as Enacted,
Embodied, Embedded, Affective and Extended,” in Consciousness in Interac-
tion: The Role of the Natural and the Social in Shaping Consciousness, ed. Fabio
Paglieri (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012), 89-104.
54 See Andrew N. Melzoff and M. Keith Moore, “Explaining Facial Imitation:
A Theoretical Model, Early Development and Parenting 6 (1997): 179-192.
55 Aristotle, Poetics, Complete Works: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol.
2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 16.
56 Lev. Vygotsky, “The Role of Play in Development,” in Mind in Society: The
Development of Higher Psychological Processes, ed. Michael Cole, Vera John
Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, and Ellen Souberman (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1978), 92-104. See also S. Hustvedt, “Freud’s Playground,” in Liv-
ing, Thinking, Looking, 196-222.

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