Social Minds in Drama. Golnaz Shams

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СКАЧАТЬ mind in the storyworld, the way the mind/consciousness experiences its world and “what-it’s like” quality becomes very important. Inadvertently, in a cognitive approach where the mind and consciousness of the characters move to the centre of attention, plot is no longer what makes a narrative narrative, but it is instead the evocation of an experiencing human or human-like consciousness that fulfils this role (Fludernik 1996: 12). The narrative centres on the impact the events have on a fictional mind and how that mind experiences the storyworld and the dynamics with other fictional minds within that storyworld.⁴²

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      Similarly, qualia, with the attention to the mind’s experience of concepts in terms of raw feeling, suggest a “what it’s like” quality of a certain concept being presented (Herman 2009: 143–4). With the focus on qualia, the attention of narrative again moves away from a traditional plot-centred approach and a more character-based approach becomes possible since the attention shifts to the nature of consciousness and how it feels like for characters to engage in a particular experience. This includes inner thought or monologue as well as more non-verbal-based feelings and thought.

Non-verbal thought incorporates the dispositions, the beliefs and the attitudes of the characters in a narrative. This type of approach succeeds in including dispositions and emotions as constituents of consciousness, concepts that traditionally were neglected in most of the studies of the mind. When we talk about disposition while analysing a narrative world, we are often dealing with the mind of characters in that storyworld and how they react to specific situations and events. As far as emotions are concerned, Palmer believes that they are more linked with cognition than one would grant them. In a storyworld, emotions are usually more closely linked to the thoughts of the characters and are shown either by means of thought report or as an overt depiction of the state of the emotion itself. Palmer deals with all types of emotions as one single category and refrains from dividing them into the popular primary/secondary division as proposed by Damasio.⁴³ He does take into account the duration of emotions. There are short-term emotions that happen at a moment of time, there are medium-term emotions that Palmer calls moods and there are long-term emotions that come closer in nature to dispositions (Palmer 2004: 114). This is why it sometimes is difficult to determine the boundary between one and the other; but, in Palmer’s analysis he tries to deal with all of these categories as a general state of mind constituting a “whole fictional mind” and demonstrates how both emotions and dispositions are ways to show the social and public nature of thought and consciousness.

Besides emotions and dispositions, actions also play a very important role in Palmer’s approach. He argues that actions bring about a change in a character’s environment and/or beliefs. Nevertheless, the concept of action and thought are inseparable in his analysis. There exists a mental network behind action which is enmeshed with it. This mental network is made up of memories, motivations ←48 | 49→and intentions that are all connected to the consciousness of the characters. Palmer argues that there is no binary opposition between thought and action, but that they are two poles of a scale and neither can exist without the other. This concept of the thought-action continuum will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Five.⁴⁴ Thus when we are talking about the fictional mind, we are not only talking about what a character is thinking, but also what she is saying and doing. Consequently, whenever we have the description of a joint action, we are dealing with the interaction of various mental networks of more than one character.

      All of these concepts and tools facilitate an approach towards the mind that can be more public, social and external. Palmer believes that not enough attention has been paid to this public and social dimension of consciousness within narrative studies. The focus is most often on the private and internal aspect of the mind. With this new point of view, a different access to the social mind is made possible. Palmer adopts an externalist view towards the construction of fictional minds since he believes that most narrative theories have failed to do so. That is why although 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 СКАЧАТЬ