Social Minds in Drama. Golnaz Shams

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Chapter 1 Introduction

      1.1 Topic and Major Questions

      Within the rapidly expanding field of cognitive studies, how are we able to incorporate a useful study of the consciousness of characters in drama? I would like to propose a cognitive approach to analysing playscripts. My main focus is the rendering of characters’ minds and their intersubjectivity in drama in particular. In this study I am primarily concerned with the construction of mentalities and intermental thought of characters in playscripts, that is I will analyse the constructions of minds, examine instances of collective thought and explain groupings of characters in drama. In this study I will work with a selected corpus of plays by Ibsen, Wilde and Shaw, but as I will explain in later chapters I do not see any hindrance in expanding the study to other plays and other literary periods.

      Cognitive sciences are focused on the study of the mental states and the relationship between minds that are involved in any cognitive interaction. This outlook makes it well suited to the analysis of the consciousness of groups of character within different storyworlds of drama.

      Ever since there were discussions about the dichotomy of the mimetic versus the diegetic, the status of drama as narrative has been a point of dispute among narratologists. Only with the advent of postclassical narrative studies have more scholars started to agree that drama can be regarded as narrative. Nonetheless there is a general disagreement on the telling versus showing problematics. One might argue that with playscripts this debate is superfluous, since the object of analysis is still, very much like the novel, a verbal manifestation of a storyworld and its inhabitants and what happens to them. Thus, the argument that in a novel there is a narrator mediating between the fictional world and the reader, which is normally missing from drama, is not valid. In any type of narrative, with or without an overt narrator – novels as well as playscripts – we are given information about the storyworld and the characters. Fludernik, who defines narrativity as based on experientiality rather than story or plot, even argues: “[a];ll drama, in fact, needs to have characters on stage, and from this minimal requirement, narrativity is immediately assured” (2008: 360). As Fludernik in her article “Narrative and Drama” further states, the reading process and staging the pictures while reading drama is different from that of reading fiction on account of “the explicit staging information in the stage directions” (363). I do not disagree with this difference between reading drama and fiction; however, I find the ←13 | 14→following similarity between the two to be more significant: the fact that readers create a mental picture of fictional characters and minds in action. The more information on the characters’ disposition, mood and state of mind the reader is given, the richer this mental picture becomes. From both novels and drama readers generate a mental picture of the characters. The obvious differences in drama are that the characters are presented in action and that the so-called lack of descriptive information only invites readers to make more use of their imagination, regardless of whether the information is provided by a narrator or not. There is no need to exclude drama from narrative on the grounds of its lack of narratorial mediation in its traditional sense.

      One of the main proponents arguing against drama being excluded from narrative fiction is Chatman. In his Coming to Terms he argues:

      Is the distinction between diegesis and mimesis, telling and showing, of greater consequence (higher in the structural hierarchy) than that between Narrative and the other text-types? I find no reason to assume so. To me, any text that presents a story – a sequence of events performed or experienced by characters – is first of all narrative. Plays and novels share the common features of a chrono-logic of events, a set of characters, and setting. Therefore, at a fundamental level they are all stories. (1990: 117)

      Jahn applies a slightly different terminology. He uses “genre” instead of “text-type” and starts with the division between narratives and non-narratives. And then, within the category of narratives, he makes the distinction between the written and the performed; this distinction is a very important one, especially for this study. Here, the focus will be on the written form of drama, what Jahn repeatedly calls the “playscript mode” (2001: 673).

      Since drama is a character-driven genre, one would assume that considerable work and research have been done on characterisation and characters’ consciousness in drama. Surprisingly, however, this is not the case. There are numerous instances of general character analysis and characterisation in drama, yet overall, there has been a marked neglect of characters’ mentalities, more specifically of characters’ construction of consciousness within narrative theories. I claim cognitive narrative studies can provide the ideal toolkit for analysing playscripts and characters. There are numerous cognitive aspects about the characters in plays to examine. In order to do this, we first have to take a step back and to take into account the common categorisations for character. Wilson (1979) in his “The Bright Chimera: Character as a Literary Term” suggests four categorisations for character:

      1. In the first category, the character is seen as mirroring the author. This type of analysis might seem old and dated, but it is still applied in certain text ←14 | 15→analyses, in particular, of those texts that are said to convey the unconscious of their author through their characters. However, this way of categorising characters is a very narrow one and is not generally applicable to all texts.

      2. In the second category, the characters are considered to have highly symbolic and thematic functions in texts. This position views characters as representing certain ideas or beliefs within a text, where one could argue that a certain character, for instance, represents “hope” or “diabolic power”, etc.

      3. In the third category, characters are seen as textual constructs: verbal, grammatical and linguistic constructs having a semantic function in the text.

      4. Finally, the fourth category looks at character as if it were a real person.

      Most critics use the third and fourth categories. It is generally believed that the first two are subcategories of the two latter ones. Thus, there are those who consider character as a mere textual function, a device on the verbal level disregarding any referential quality it might have inside or outside the textual world. Characters in this category are seen and treated as artificial constructs to be analysed in the development of the plot. The second group treats characters as if they were real people. Characters are equated with real people and their thoughts and actions are judged and evaluated accordingly. Analysing characters in this manner is equivalent to understanding how a character feels and thinks like a real person. But even Wilson states that these divisions are not mutually exclusive (1979: 737) and merging of the two categories might prove the most fruitful type of approach towards an analysis of character. Why not regard the character as if it were a real person and try to understand its consciousness, feelings and thoughts via real-world tools and techniques? Simultaneously, though, one should acknowledge that character is a construct that has a function in the narrative text and makes use of the authorial and textual techniques as further helpful means of analysis. I will apply this type of eclectic method when I reconstruct the characters’ consciousness in the plays.