Social Minds in Drama. Golnaz Shams

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СКАЧАТЬ stories and social groupings of characters in stories.²⁹ Most of these characterisation techniques work hand in hand with other cognitive fields such as transmedial narratology in order to facilitate a better understanding of a cognitive interpretation of any story-like structure and its components across semiotic media.³⁰ Folk psychology, studies of emotion in ←37 | 38→a narrative context and studies exploring how narratives about counterfactual scenarios support interpretation also often contribute to a better understanding of different cognitive approaches.

Along these lines, recent developments have underlined and expanded notions and concepts of consciousness and cognition in cognitive narrative theory. Monika Fludernik’s experientiality is one of these new concepts that shows the important role the mind plays in a narrative.³¹ To Fludernik the core property of a narrative is an experiencing consciousness. The relation between human experience and the semiotic representation of characters’ experience will guarantee the narrativity of a narrative. This representation is channelled through cognitive faculties: the understanding, perception, and the evaluation of emotions. Thus, the very common ideas in many narrative approaches, such as the notions of narrator and plot, become secondary: if the deep structure of narrativity is experientiality, then traditional restrictions of classical narratology do not apply. As long as there is an anthropomorphic experiencing mind engaged in the happenings of a storyworld then we are dealing with a narrative. It is this experientiality that makes a narrative interpretable. Such a stance towards mind and narrative would incorporate the second type of the above-mentioned (page 6) relations between mind and narrative (b): interaction between the minds of the readers and the narrative. This type of narrativity is not something that is already within the text to be decoded, but something that readers bring to the text with their reading and interpretation. In Fludernik’s case, the focus of the mind is the interplay between the characters in the storyworld and the readers, which is very close to Herman’s (2009) contribution to cognitive studies with his ideas on qualia.

Herman too believes that the consciousness factor is one of the basic elements of narrative.³² Simply put, it is the “what-it’s-like for someone or something to have a particular experience” (2009: 144) that makes a narrative a narrative. Herman mainly situates this felt, subjective property of consciousness within the storyworld, and states that it includes sensations, perceptions and thoughts. He elaborates on this what-it’s-like dimension when the consciousness of readers and the storyworld interact, but he also often focuses on instances when minds within the storyworld are affected by qualia. According to Herman, the mind is

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      spread out as a distributed flow in what the characters do and say (as well as what they do not do and do not say), in the material environment that constitutes part of their interaction, in the method of narration used to present their verbal and nonverbal activities, in the readers’ own engagement with all of these representational structures. (2009:153)

      As Ryan had mentioned before, the concept of mind and cognition in relation to narratives in cognitive narrative theory might relate to the interaction between the consciousness of the readers and the text (b) and the consciousness of the inhabitants of a storyworld (c). It is not always easy to tell the two apart since the act of interpretation hinges on both aspects. However, theorists have their preferences, and whereas Fludernik and Herman emphasise the interaction of the minds of readers and characters (Herman’s examples privilege characters a bit more), theorists like Alan Palmer base their approach on the storyworld and on the characters’ minds entirely. The ideas of experientiality and qualia most 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 СКАЧАТЬ