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

trimester of gestation. “These early intentional acts motivate an exten-
sion of the imaginative use of the body into the future, guided by prospec-
tive perceptual awareness which is beginning to inform a memory of
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consciousness.” “Imaginative” here is used to signify not the mental
images I may be having about a date next Thursday or a fantasy about
wal ing on the moon, but rather what might be termed a form of “op-
erative imagination” in deliberate movement that includes an immediate
future, the extension of which is of extremely short duration. They men-
tion fetal touching of “external objects” — the uterus or the body of a
twin. I do not dispute that such gestures may well constitute a pre-re-
flective, proprioceptive form of intentionality, present even in inverte-
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brates. It is more difficult for me to see how every action performed by
an animal with “intentionality” is imbued with narrative structure.
What is further remarkable about the authors’ contention, how-
ever, is that the second-trimester fetus, floating in amniotic fluid and
a ached by the umbilical cord to the feto-maternal organ, the placenta
(created from the tissues of both), which in turn is a ached to the wall
of the uterus, is treated by the authors as a kind of autonomous ho-
munculus, distinct from the larger survival system inside its mother
of which it is a part. The mid-gestation fetus is not an independent
being. Although some preterm infants do well with considerable med-
ical intervention (even those born near the end of the second trimester)
many suffer handicaps, including neurological disorders such as cere-
bral palsy, learning disabilities, mental retardation, blindness, deaf-
ness, and respiratory illnesses. 59
The pregnant woman is not merely the fetal “environment.”

57 Delafield-But and Trevarthen, 11.
58 See M.S. Laverack, “External Proprioceptors,” in Structure and Function of
Proprioceptors in the Invertebrates, ed. P.J. Mill (London: Chapman & Hall,
1976), 1-63. See also Dorothee Legrand, “Bodily Intention and the Unreason-
able Intentional Agent,” in Naturalizing Intention in Action, ed. Fanck Gram-
mont, Dorothee Legrand, and Pierre Livet (Cambridge, Massachuse s: Brad-
ford Books, MIT Press, 2010), 161-180.
59 Richard E. Berman and Adrienne Stith Butler, eds., Preterm Birth: Causes,
Consequences and Prevention (Washington D.C.: National Academies Press,
2007).

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