Social Minds in Drama. Golnaz Shams
construction and their approaches’ preference for a narrator who overtly provides semiotic information for the readers. Although PWT tries to overcome the deficits of classical narratology’s preference of plot over character, its dependence on a narrator is still limiting. By criticising this dependence on and preference of having a narrator, Palmer already anticipates the existence of a broader spectrum of texts as narratives, regardless of the presence of a narrator. Palmer focuses on “behaviourist” narratives where the role of the narrator is minimised. ←42 | 43→My purpose in this study is to take a first step and venture into the genre of drama where generally there is no narrator at all.37
Characterisation is another concept Palmer makes use of in his approach. Whereas the concept of character was very much limited to structural and functional roles of actants in classical narrative theory and the more non-mimetic models of characterisation, much has been done in more modern trends to modify and redeem this limited approach towards character. These improvements are of great value to Palmer’s approach, since his idea of a fictional character and characters’ mind is much more dynamic and thus in need of a more dynamic access. According to the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory, there are several approaches to the study of character that, although similar in some points, do contain differences in their points of departure (Herman et al. 2005: 53–6). To Semiotic theories, characters are non-actual individuals and only semantic constructs. Everything needed in order to reconstruct a character is provided by the text and thus character construction is very text-bound. Since characters are presented textually through a discontinuous set of clues, they are inevitably incomplete. Communicative theories still deal with textual clues, but they believe that in order to authenticate the information given by the text, readers have to cross-reference it with contextual information. The information thus might prove to be right or wrong on a gradual scale according to different factors at play in the contextual concept of the narrative.
Cognitive theories state that the character is not much different from an actual person. Hence the concept of character is mentally generated in response to textual clues as well as contextual information. Readers engage in a bottom-up character construction procedure where they assemble explicit and implicit data about a character from the text and generate them into a model character and simultaneously, through a top-down procedure, use all the information they have to complete their mental concept of that character throughout the narrative. At the heart of the cognitive approach lie inference-drawing mechanisms, and it seems Palmer – though he is sympathetic to mimetic approaches to characterisation – has a preference for the cognitive one, because a cognitive approach to analysing characters in fiction is what essentially improves the readers’ experience of the whole narrative. In this Palmer seems to be in accord ←43 | 44→with Jaén and Simon who state: “Theorizing about characters and trying to read their intentions on one hand, and simulating them and sharing their emotions on the other, maybe at the core of our literary experience” (2012: 21).
Palmer also makes references to and use of the concept of Theory of Mind (ToM). ToM allows one to project, either in real life or in fiction, a mind onto the characters one encounters and thereby try to understand and read their minds and anticipate their future moves. One might say that ToM is the ability to read the mind of a person – or in our case, a fictional character – from the information one gets on her thoughts, feelings, behaviour, and intentions; all of which are ready to be understood from the storyworld. This ties in with Palmer’s belief that the foundation of fiction is to understand the consciousness of the characters and their interaction in their storyworld. This sounds almost identical to Lisa Zunshine’s account of ToM:
Thus one preliminary implication of applying what we know about ToM to our study of fiction is that ToM makes literature as we know it possible. The very process of making sense of what we read appears to be grounded in our ability to invest the flimsy verbal constructions that we generously call “characters” with a potential for a variety of thoughts, feelings, and desires, and then to look for the “cues” that allow us to guess at their feelings and thus to predict their actions. (2011: 274)
This projection and mind-reading are not only a great cognitive toolkit for the readers to understand and appreciate the characters, but they also contribute to a real-life model of cognition between the characters within the storyworld. It accounts for why and how the characters are able to understand each other, develop sympathies or antipathies, and anticipate other characters’ feelings and possible future reactions.38
Palmer heavily draws on Uri Margolin’s ideas and concepts on character and character construction, and Margolin, in turn, seems to employ an integrated model from different concurrent approaches on character presentation. Palmer refers to Margolin’s typology39 of character where Margolin introduces diverse types of character representation ranging from character as a grammatical unit/person to the other end of the scale, character as a fictional being. The last one marks out the type of approach Palmer likes to apply to characterisation. The only fault Palmer finds with a characterisation technique such as Margolin’s is that in this approach the dispositions of characters are seen as belonging to the ←44 | 45→subject area of characterisation, and the mental events are seen as belonging to the subject area of thought presentation. Consequently, these two are dealt with separately. Palmer proposes to establish one subject area designated for both concepts, as characterisation and thought-representation are more interlinked than what has been realised up until now.
While making use of different frameworks and toolkits from different approaches in order to assemble his own, Palmer realises that the cognitive turn provides him with a lot of advantages for his ideas. He becomes very intrigued by its context-oriented emphasis and focus on human cognition in different levels of the narrative. Palmer uses the term cognitive sciences in its “broad sense”.40 What makes a cognitive turn in sciences in general, and in narrative theory in particular, all the more attractive to Palmer is the concept of frames and scripts commonly used within this paradigm. The idea that narratives are ordered contextually by frames or schemata and scripts is in accord with Palmer’s approach of reconstructing patterns through given clues from the text. In The Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory Jahn states: “Frames and scripts specify ‘defaults’ to encode expectations, ‘nodes and relations’ to capture categories and hierarchies, and ‘terminals’ and ‘slots’ to provide data integration points…” (68). To Palmer, in a fictional storyworld, cognitive “frames” and “scripts” construct not only the storyworld but also the fictional mind. They “encode” the clues in the text, and the “nodes and relations” to capture categories and hierarchies, which are, to Palmer, foremost manifested in the construction of interaction between characters and ultimately in the construction of intermental units. Palmer’s target area is more specific than Jahn’s; he concentrates not on the entire storyworld but only on its inhabitants. He applies the concepts of frames and scripts to encode the construction of the mentality of the characters in the narrative in order to determine their expectations and motivations and to analyse their dynamics within groups.
One more component in the eclectic approach Palmer combines in order to emphasise his approach is focalisation. Palmer puts a great deal of emphasis on focalisation and states that it “is clear that the concept of focalisation is crucially relevant to the study of fictional minds because it is concerned with the decisions that readers make about which consciousness is being presented in ←45 | 46→the text at any one time” (2004: 48). Focalisation determines “who perceives” at any given moment in the narrative and thus the focaliser can be said to be a medium between the reader and the storyworld. Thus, Palmer acknowledges that focalisation is very helpful in explaining or representing a storyworld through the perceptual viewpoint of the characters’ consciousness. Apart from the