Social Minds in Drama. Golnaz Shams

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      In this study, I explore the social aspect of characters in late-Victorian drama. I demonstrate the construction of the characters’ individual mentality and then concentrate on how they interact collectively within different group dynamics throughout the play. I start out from the assumption that drama is a narrative genre, and therefore, follow in the steps of Bal (1991, and 1997), Fludernik (1993, 1996, 2003, 2005, 2008, 2009a, and 2015), Richardson (1988, 1997, and 2001) and Nünning/Sommer (2008). Although drama is generally still perceived to be more mimetic than diegetic, the aforementioned scholars have pointed out a number of diegetic features in plays. Thus playscripts should not be discredited because of the mimetic/diegetic dichotomy. After all, it is true, as Richardson ←15 | 16→states that the boundary between the two is “more porous and unstable than is usually imagined” (2001: 691).

1.2 (Intermentality and) Social Minds

The title and idea of this book draw on Alan Palmer’s ideas on “social minds in fiction” and his concept of “intermentality”. Palmer is an independent scholar, whose seminal book Fictional Minds (2004) deals with the concept of the constructions of mentalities and collectives in novels. He finds fault with the general trend of privileging of direct thought and free indirect thought over thought report and believes that often while analysing the thought or consciousness of characters, their emotions and states of mind are ignored. Moreover, Palmer advocates a more active and social view instead of the more traditional, passive and private approach. He criticises existing theories of character by stating that they apply an internalist approach which pays more attention to the psychology of the characters. The important features become the ones that are inward, hidden and unconscious. According to Palmer, cognitive studies would benefit immensely if they included externalist approaches where characters are analysed through their outward behaviour. The attention here shifts to the social and public side of the characters. In order to do this, he deconstructs the thought/action dichotomy and regards these two concepts as belonging to one continuum. Thus, all descriptive statements range on a thought-action continuum,¹ dealing in various degrees with the thoughts and actions of the characters in a storyworld. The thought-action continuum is the foundation of Palmer’s approach. Palmer believes fictional minds are inevitably intertwined with action and that decoding characters’ actions could give access to their minds. Thus, characters’ actions are described in terms of their mental functioning, for example X decided to do A, Y wanted to do B, etc. (2003: 333). He is very much aware that it is not always easy to undertake such a decoding.

Palmer believes the very key to fictionality is the construction of fictional minds (2007: 205). He then states that there are at least two minds in action in ←16 | 17→any given narrative²: these (minimally) two characters each have a consciousness of their own. We attribute a consciousness to the characters because we see them as if they were real people³. In order to do so, we use every piece of textual evidence we have at our disposal. We use every clue from the introductory/explanatory passages, stage directions and from the embedded/doubly embedded narratives of the characters provided by the other characters to form an illusion of the whole consciousness of each of the characters throughout the entire narrative.

      Here I need to introduce two more key terms of Palmer’s terms, which I am also going to use in my project. According to Palmer, embedded narratives are composed of all the information a character provides about himself/herself. Everything readers are able to glean from a character’s thoughts and actions (including speech) belong to the embedded narrative of that character. By contrast, Palmer calls all the information a character provides about another character doubly embedded narratives. Everything readers are able to understand about the thoughts and actions (including speech) of a character that gives them information about another character is the doubly embedded narrative of that character. Since drama mostly consists of dialogue, naturally the embedded and doubly embedded narratives play an important role in my analysis of the playscripts. It is important to note that the term “embeddedness” has been used very differently in many narratological studies. For example, following Genette the term indicates СКАЧАТЬ