Social Minds in Drama. Golnaz Shams
he still believes that the internalist aspect of the mind is equally important, his main focus is on the social characteristics of the mind. Not that the issue of public thought has never been debated in theories such as PWT, but it has usually been readily dismissed in favour of a more internal approach. Minds can be decoded through the action of the characters as well as through the direct access the storyworld provides into their consciousness. Much of the mind is public and can only be analysed if acknowledged in its proper public and social context. Palmer states that the more public the thought of the characters, the easier it becomes to display them through a third-person ascription. This, of course, ensues from his sole focus on the novel. I believe the public manifestation of the mind can be presented in different genres like drama. The social manifestation of the mind can be traced in playscripts, through the dialogue, where one can indisputably see the enactment of thought, as well as in the introductory passages where something close to a third-person ascription takes place.
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Palmer justifies the need for a new approach by highlighting six observations all of which his new approach, in contrast to older theoretical approaches, can tackle (2004):45
(1) It is a functional approach towards the consciousness of character where one can analyse the mental functioning of a character and the disposition to act in a particular way.
(2) It is an approach that deals with the complex diversity of the state of mind with regard to a network of reasoning and motivation for the actions taken by the characters.
(3) It is an approach that encompasses consciousness, action and behaviour simultaneously without prioritising one. It analyses the intricacies of the relationship between various mental operations ranging from intentions to actions.
(4) It is an approach that specifically targets the dialogic nature of consciousness and pinpoints how it is socially situated. All fictional minds are seen as active, social and public components of the storyworld in which they interact with one another.
(5) It is an approach that incorporates the whole of each character’s mind in action in the form of an embedded narrative. This is a narrative that belongs to that character and encompasses a totality of his/her perceptual and cognitive viewpoints presented in the narrative discourse.
(6) It is an approach that simultaneously studies the consciousness of the characters as well as the context in which they are represented. In so doing the embedded narratives of each of the characters become inseparable from the plot. The functioning of the character’s mind, its motivations and intentions gain a teleological significance.
In order to construct the consciousness of a fictional mind in such a way, Palmer makes use of the continuing-consciousness frame, mentioned before. This frame makes it possible to construct the mind and mental functioning of different characters throughout a narrative. This frame is a processing strategy that readers apply when they reconstruct the consciousness of characters by means of all the references and clues given to them, not only in the parts of the narrative where the characters are mentioned but also between the various mentionings of characters. As such, it is a process that is constantly under revision since readers ←50 | 51→construct theories and infer characterisation traits for characters that need to be reformed or revised with every bit of information that is added during the reading procedure. The inferential nature of consciousness construction places Palmer in the same group of theorists who believe that a coherent understanding of the storyworld goes beyond mere textual clues and demands an extended cognitive processing.46 In this way, readers keep constructing the mind of the characters, through doubly embedded narratives and the frames and scripts they have come up with about that character in a storyworld so far, even when the characters are not overtly present at the very scene of narration.
The theoretical application of embedded narratives makes it possible to experience the storyworld through the embedded narratives of the characters, the way in which they perceive and experience their storyworld and also through the doubly embedded narratives of how each character perceives and understands other characters. This facilitates various means of accessing the mind of a character other than the direct and overt information given by the author. In this way, details of characters’ minds can be embedded in the way other characters see, describe and experience them. This information can be very useful and constructive since readers tend to make use of every clue they can glean from the narrative, as unimportant as it may seem, and reconstruct fictional minds around it. Palmer uses the term “contextual thought report” for any short unobtrusive sentence, phrase or even single word that describes the characters’ mind in the storyworld (2004: 209). This concept is a combination of thought, action, intention and motivation for action and contextual information, which Palmer believes form a unity and often cannot be easily separated into distinct categories.
All these theoretical backgrounds and subframes conjoin to shape one of the major cognitive frames in Palmer’s theory. They culminate in his application of the “thought-action-continuum”, which constitutes the basis of most of his practical analysis to narratives. Palmer talks in detail about the relationship between thought and action. Often when the consciousness of a character is constructed, it is done not only by means of direct clues into the mind and thought of that character, but also by means of the delineated actions. What a character does provides readers with as much information about his motivation and intentions as directly stating what is going on inside the mind, hence the term “continuum”. It is not easy to dichotomise the descriptions and attributes of characters to either thought or action because thought and action form a continuum. Any description can be placed either at the thought end of the scale, at the action ←51 | 52→end or in the middle of the continuum. No action is unpremeditated and most thought precedes an action or at least an outward physical indication of it. The way characters in a narrative are constructed, whether the descriptions are more thought-based, action-based or taken from the mid-section of the continuum, influences the quality of the narrative and the reading process. The use of “indicative descriptions” – Palmer’s term for those descriptions situated in the middle of the continuum – for example, will give the whole narrative an ironic quality. Through the application of different approaches in order to build up his own theoretical framework, Palmer
envisage[s]; a holistic view of the whole of the social mind in action in the novel which avoids fragmentation of previous approaches such as those which focus on the speech categories, characterization, actants and so on. It is a functional and teleological perspective which considers the purposive nature of characters’ thought in terms of their motives, intentions, and resulting behaviour and action. (Palmer 2003: 324)
2.2.3 Palmer’s Intermentality
Storyworlds are social by nature; they deal with complex dialogic relationships between their inhabitants. Thus the way the consciousness of a single character is constructed directly influences the way that character interacts with other characters in that storyworld. Palmer does start out to analyse the construction of individual characters on an “intramental” level, but ultimately he finds it impossible to understand any character outside its social context. He believes “fictional mental functioning should not be divorced from the social and physical context of the storyworld” (2011: 201). In order to understand the public nature of thought, to understand the consciousness of the characters it is necessary to understand them in their context, in interaction with other characters. Understanding a fictional mind means understanding how a character is experiencing its storyworld; that is, how a character is, not only perceiving herself but also other characters in relation to herself. To do so, often it is not enough to only focus on the individual. Since any storyworld hardly ever consists of only one character, it becomes evident how important it is to study the character’s consciousness in relation to the other characters. In this context, the interaction between