Social Minds in Drama. Golnaz Shams

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СКАЧАТЬ a single collective consciousness, a shared consciousness in Palmer’s terms, which acts and thinks as a representative of all members of the group, and as a result throughout the play there are interactions between two or more groups acting in accordance or in opposition to each other. It only becomes more complicated when the variable of the individual starts to unbalance the equations of each scene and act.

      Inseparable from the discussion of intermentality and groupings in the analysis of a particular text will be the question of group norms. Conventions, conforming to or dissenting from them, play a central part in the formation or malformation of groups since “group conflict can arise when then the social norms established by two or more groups are incompatible” (Palmer 2003: 346). This is crucial since it highlights the social nature of the concept of mind. Especially in the context of the analysis of groups and group formations in drama, one needs to take into consideration the fact that the individual mind is not only in constant interaction with other individual minds in a storyworld, but also with a larger social consciousness like the major ideological institutions of its society. The viewpoint each character takes towards the norms of these ideological institutions is in direct relationship to the type of interaction it establishes with the other characters. It is quite obvious that understandings are often based on shared ideological beliefs that bring forth similar mental frameworks. In a parallel manner, misunderstandings, which are considered to be a form of interaction in their own right and are by extension an intermental act, more often than not originate from a clash with a parameter of established ideology.

      In working on the social dimension of characters, Palmer’s ideas on intermental thought are invaluable. It is the relationship between the characters in a play that ensures the dynamics of a play and Palmer’s argument about the novel can definitely be applied to drama as well: he believes that readers build up expectations about characters that have a certain relationship with each other; that is, they are expected to have similar thoughts and beliefs. But these expectations exist not only on the part of the readers, but also within the storyworld the characters themselves develop certain expectations about each other. And it is the discrepancy between the expectations of two or more characters as individuals or in groups that generates the dynamics of a play. Thus, in this study, I would like to not only focus on the characters’ mutual understandings in a play, but also focus on their misunderstandings, their struggles and their competitive behaviour in the context of the play’s storyworld.

      Despite the fact that Palmer in his Fictional Minds does not go into details about the subcategories of intermental activity, it will prove helpful to indicate ←21 | 22→them in this introduction. In his article “Intermental Thought in the Novel: The Middlemarch Mind”, he further refines the concept and distinguishes between intermental thought, intermental units and intermental minds (2005: 430). Palmer further elaborates that to him intermental thought is the smallest unit of the three; it is the “minimal level” as he calls it. This level represents intermental thought or shared decision-making between two or more individuals who might not even know each other very well. The main issue here is to acknowledge that “it is not possible for two people to hold a conversation without at least a certain amount of intermental communication” (430). The next level, where the individuals involved in the intermental activity have a better knowledge and awareness of each other, is the intermental unit. The individuals who form an intermental unit engage in intermental thinking on a regular basis. According to Palmer, frequent intermental thinking between colleagues, friends, and on some occasions, family members are examples of this second level. The third level, the intermental mind, is an attribute of individuals who know each other so well that their minds can be considered as one. They have a complete understanding of and thorough access to each other’s minds. As we will see in the analysis of the plays in Chapters Six to Eight, due to generic specifications of drama, there are only few instances of intermental minds in the plays and most intermental instances are either intermental thought or intermental units.

      Not surprisingly, this constant interrelationship between individuals and groups is very important to the concept of intermentality and collectivity in Palmer. He begins with the construction of the individual fictional mind and with the help of the thought-action continuum shows the mind of that character in action. This mind or consciousness (used interchangeably) is composed of dispositions, actions, feelings, decisions, wishes, aspirations and the expectations that a character has of the other characters. This already indicates the social nature of a narrative. Trying to understand another character’s mind, anticipating their moves and expecting something of them already implies a shared mindset, and hence a potential intermentality. Thus the two concepts of intra- and intermentality are in fact interwoven. My approach will take a similar path: I will start by looking at the construction of the consciousness of individual characters in the plays and then concentrate on their interactions and intermentality within the collective.

1.3 In What Way Does This Study Go beyond Previous Studies?

      Most narrative studies on drama have concentrated on its performative aspect. The performed version requires a completely different mode of interpretation than the written version since the medium is different. Unlike the latter where the ←22 | 23→only medium used is language, in the former there is a strong tendency towards the deployment of the visual and auditory medium. With the playscript, there is a fixed and unalterable product at one’s disposal for analysis, whereas each and every performance is actually a different reading of its original playscript. Referring back to Jahn’s definition, it can be said that one is analysing a written form of the narrative genre.

      I would like to overcome the shortcomings of the two disciplines, drama studies and narrative studies, and bring them closer together. I will do so by dealing with the playscript as a narrative form and focusing on characterisation from a new, different angle: their intermental and collective function. In the past few decades, narratology and narrative studies have evolved and changed a great deal and have come to include a broad range of genres and media within their theoretical approaches. Whereas classical narratology mainly saw the novel and short fiction as the exclusive material of analysis, nowadays there are no objections to including drama in its portfolio as well. Moreover, classical narratologists dismissed drama on the grounds that it does not have a figure who narrates. There have been many attempts to overcome these shortcomings by regarding all text-types as narrative. Chatman (1990), applying a more liberal method, argues that all texts that tell a story share the basic necessary narrative elements such as characters, temporal structure and a narrator (even a covert one). Chatman introduced the term “playscript mode” – which is not exclusive to drama, but also applies to novels – that facilitated a more nuanced categorisation of different types of narratives.

      However, even though following the inclusion of all text-types into a model of literary genres, literary scholars have often made use of narratological tools to analyse drama, there continues to exist an unease in studying the written form of drama (hence playscript) as narrative. Since the 1970s, most work on drama has been primarily focused on the performance and the staging of drama and the playscript is no longer the main point of interest.

      In drama studies, there are many approaches to characterisation, but there is no systematic theory of characterisation in drama (and none with a focus on groups). It is generally believed that characters can have a textual value or a referential value. Many scholars have discussed this aspect and have given it different names: text-embedded and lifelike characters, or textual and referential characters, or as Margolin puts it, semiotic and representational characters (Margolin 1990b: 105). No matter what one prefers to call these two poles, critics agree that characters in a narrative move along this scale from the textuality pole to the representational one. They never have a fixed position and they oscillate between the two poles. As purely textual elements, characters СКАЧАТЬ