Social Minds in Drama. Golnaz Shams
definitely have shaped the basis of Palmer’s approach, but he modifies and adds a few other cognitive frameworks in order to argue his point. The next section will provide a summary of Palmer’s main arguments in his approach.
2.2 Alan Palmer’s Construction of Fictional Minds and Intermentality
2.2.1 Palmer and His Work
In his seminal work Fictional Minds (2004), Palmer discusses his approach regarding the construction of fictional minds within a storyworld and then moves on to explain the interaction between these minds and the formation of an intermental mind and collectives in narratives.33 Since my own approach is based on Palmer’s, it is important to review his arguments. Palmer’s interest from the beginning was to study fictional minds and to find out how readers are able to glean information about the construction of fictional minds in a narrative. His first analyses on Austen’s and Thackeray’s works, in particular, established his primary focus on the construction of the minds of characters in (those) storyworlds and those characters interacting in groups. Palmer makes use of (postclassical) narrative study’s inclusion of the mind and consciousness and draws on its terminology and frameworks. His research, and in particular his Fictional Minds, is concerned with the range and variety a narrative offers for the construction of the minds of the characters within the storyworld. In his studies, he goes through ←39 | 40→different disciplines and major concepts in order to prove his point that the construction of the fictional mind is at the core of the construction of any narrative. He surveys the speech-act approach, focalisation, story analysis, characterisation and possible-worlds theory (PWT henceforth). He concludes that none of these in isolation will provide a comprehensive theory on the dynamics of the minds of the characters and their intersubjectivity. Palmer suggests that an eclectic approach would serve best to clarify his ideas on mentality and collectivity within fiction.
What sets Palmer apart from the contemporary theoretical trends is the attention he pays to the ideas of “intermentality” and an “external” depiction of consciousness. The term “intermentality” is used in Palmer’s approach almost synonymously with intersubjectivity and collectivity. Palmer explains at length the connection between two or more minds in a narrative and calls this interrelation between minds intermentality. He expands the idea and argues that in storyworlds these intermental connections lead to group formation and that groups have one collective, an intermental thought. The “external” depiction of consciousness is also a concept that is not very common in narrative studies. Most theories are concerned with an “internalist” depiction of consciousness: the psychological depth and the innermost, hidden emotions, and thoughts of the characters’ minds. Palmer believes externalist renderings of consciousness have been neglected up until now within narrative theories and that cognitive studies would benefit immensely from the analysis of narrative through an internalist as well as an externalist viewpoint.
Palmer’s approach thus comprises the examination of the way fictional minds are constructed and how they work within the context of a given storyworld. Most of the existing theories, if they deal with the concept of the characters’ mind and thought at all,34 regard them to a great extent as inward and private. Especially whenever there is mention of the concept of thought, within the more common theories the preference seems to be to trace that concept back to the unconscious and what lies hidden in the characters’ unconscious mind. Not so for Palmer: he believes that while it is true that part of the mental functioning and characters’ thought does belong to the unconscious including the hidden parts of the mind, there is an important part of thought and consciousness that is public, extrovert and “out there” for everyone to see. Since the construction of the minds of fictional characters is central to our understanding of novels, and ←40 | 41→since the essence of narrative is the description of mental functioning, Palmer argues that narrative studies would gain much from acknowledging the public side of the mind as well. After all, much of the characters’ construction comes from understanding and the analysis of their speech and behaviour, which are both external and public manifestations. In order to tackle the external representation of consciousness, and later collectivity, Palmer forms his own eclectic approach, drawing from narrative theory and complementing it with concepts from cognitive approaches (Palmer’s take on cognitivist ideas will be discussed in the next subchapter). He applies different concepts, he draws upon narrative theory, such as PWT, characterisation, frames, and focalisation to construct his analytical framework.
2.2.2 Palmer in the Context of Cognitivist Ideas
Palmer states that three different approaches have made contributions to his understanding and reading process of narratives:35
Cognitive narratology: allows the findings of various studies from different cognitive sciences like philosophy, psychology, and cognitive sciences to be traced. Narrative is seen as a key cognitive tool and cognitive narratology takes narrative as its object of study.
Cognitive approaches to literature: according to Palmer, this approach, has generally emerged from literary criticism rather than from narrative theory. Whereas cognitive narratology is mainly concerned with novels and short stories, a cognitive approach takes drama and poetry into consideration as well.
Cognitive poetics: is also concerned with drama and poetry as well as novel and short story, but it is a type of applied linguistics and as such it concentrates on the specific use of linguistic tools in the analysis of texts.
Palmer does not believe that these approaches stand alongside each other; he is convinced the cognitive approach is the basis of the other two and includes toolkits and disciplines from them. His own cognitive approach, as mentioned before, is an eclectic one and as he puts it a: “pragmatic, non-dogmatic, and non-ideological one” (2011: 199–200).
PWT, one of the disciplines Palmer uses, facilitates a liberation from the strict formal story/discourse binary of the more classical approaches and shifts the focus to the fictional world as a possible ontologically valid world in itself. PWT ←41 | 42→regards fictional world ontologically in reference to the real or the actual world (AW). Readers assume the laws and states of an alternative possible world are the same, or very similar to that of the AW unless specifically stated otherwise. In this way, if in the storyworld a flying car is mentioned, readers assume the car looks like a car in the AW and abide by all the laws of the AW except that it can fly (principle of minimal departure).36 Granting PWs (storyworlds) their own ontological existence would allow granting their inhabitants (fictional characters) the same. By doing so, both PWs and their inhabitants follow the principle of minimal departure and can be treated “as if” dealing with AW and “real minds”. This is the point of interest for Palmer, since he is interested in the main semiotic channels through which readers access the workings of fictional minds in the storyworld. PWT allows Palmer to argue that since everything in the storyworld (PW) works ontologically like the AW, so do character and consciousness construction. Thus, readers can apply the same techniques and procedure they apply for reading and interpreting minds in the AW to storyworlds. Relying on the principle of minimal departure, Palmer grants the fictional storyworld and its inhabitants an ontologically complete existence. Thus established, readers can fill in the gaps that are inherent in the storyworld with reference to their experience and knowledge of the real world, except when instructed otherwise by the textual information.
There are several ways to construct a fictional mind. One of the most popular and acknowledged ways is the narrator’s construction of fictional minds by direct performative utterance on a diegetic level. Another way would be the construction of fictional minds through the views and utterances of other characters and minds in the storyworld. The third possibility is to infer the mental traits and characteristics of fictional minds