Читать книгу Social Minds in Drama - Golnaz Shams - Страница 13

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 a shift in narrative level. However, I am using the terms embedded and doubly embedded narratives in Palmer’s sense in order to be consistent with other terminology I am adopting from his approach. In Chapter Two I will explain in more detail the different uses of this term.

Following Palmer, this study argues that readers are engaging in a continuing consciousness frame as they are constantly constructing, revising and configuring the consciousness of a certain character throughout the narrative, even at moments when it is not present. Palmer uses only novels for his analyses, but he mentions that his preferred type of novels, or narratives in general, are behaviourist narratives (2004: 206–7), that is narratives where there is the least amount of the author’s (as narrator) interference and where we see the characters as they talk and act.⁴ In drama, more than in the novel, we see the characters as ←17 | 18→they talk and act and the interference of the playwright (as narrator) is minimal. Thus, I believe that the genre of drama is perfectly suited to a Palmerian type of approach based on a thought-action continuum to analyse the characters’ mentalities and interactions. Palmer uses the concept of the thought-action continuum to elaborate on the fictional mind in novels, but the usefulness of this concept is even greater in drama. Since almost everything that goes on in the storyworld of drama is presented in dialogue, or in the form of speech acts, and these speech acts indicate and incorporate the action of the plays, almost all of the thoughts of the characters are represented on a (if one may say so) thought-speech-action continuum.⁵

Palmer argues that individuals in the storyworld are based on the thought-action continuum and regards this type of characterisation as the construction of fictional minds on an intramental level. On this level, one can find out about the action, as well as disposition, dreams, wishes and expectations of the characters. However, this level does not cover the whole fictional mind or consciousness. Since characters in a storyworld almost always function in a social setting, inevitably they have to interact. It is in this interaction that a fictional mind is constructed in its entirety. This interaction in a Palmerian approach is called intermentality. Intermentality and group-formation focus on the social dimension of characters and their interactions.

Intermental thought is one of Palmer’s concepts that is central to this work. In an externalist approach, once the mind is put out there for everyone to observe, it becomes accessible to others and it starts to interact with other minds in action. It is this interaction and intersubjectivity that brings about the dynamics of the narrative. It is important to mention that, for Palmer, intermentality does not necessarily mean cooperation or only joint decision-making. He uses it in a much broader sense that not only includes joint states of mind, but also conflicts between individual minds or groups, or even competitive behaviour.⁶

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Therefore, after an analysis of the mentalities of individual characters in the narrative, Palmer discusses how these characters interact in agential constellations and how they form groups. Not all interaction automatically will lead to intermentality or shared thinking. The term “shared” in the phrase “shared thinking”, equated with the term intermentality, often proves to be misleading. For example, if two characters are listening to a third character’s tale/sermon/narrative, although they are doing the same thing and are in the same situation (listening to the same narrative), whatever is going on in their minds is only an intramental act; there is no intersubjectivity. Only when there is some information and indicating that some elements in the third character’s story affected the two listening characters are these two put in an intermental context, because they are undergoing a shared mental experience. There needs to be a shared experience or a shared intention or, more strongly, a mutual decision making and taking of action upon some occurrence.⁷

Another example of the misconception of the term “shared” in “shared thinking” is the false assumption regarding intermentality, especially in discussions about grouping and agential constellations, that the interaction between the characters has to be symmetric (Doležel 1998: 98). This is not necessarily true; it is possible for two characters to “share” a thought, but to have completely opposite intentions and/or motivations and thus act differently upon or make different decisions about it.

Groups in a play always form a unity in themselves. It is true that two or more characters interact within a group and that, especially, if we are considering more than one interaction, these interactions might have different motivations. Nevertheless, the goal and motivation of a single group are one and the same. No matter how diverse the dynamics of simple interactions between the members of a group, the group’s overall movements are invariably coherent, otherwise it will turn into a dysfunctional group and eventually dissolve. The analysis of groups is made more complex by the fact that once a group is formed it will not necessarily remain the same from the beginning to the end of a play. In fact, as the action of the play develops and the characters become more nuanced, and more interaction within a group or between members of two different groups occurs, it becomes more likely that the composition of a group changes. Members drop out of a group or are cast off by the other members. Similarly, new members join a group or are recruited by the members of that group. In this way, each group in a play is an ever-changing unit consisting of more than one interaction.

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Different types of group formation are possible. In a novel, where typically more characters are present in the storyworld and where the spatial and temporal parameters of the narrative are not limited, groups usually include more members than in drama. That does not mean that in a Palmerian approach we cannot talk about group formation, and trace intermentality when fewer characters are involved. According to Palmer, there are three different possible combinations of interaction and intermentality:⁸

Individual vs. Individual: Intermentality between two individuals. These two characters can belong to the same group, or to a different group each. They can have opposing or confirming intermental ideas. This means that for this category, we could have four scenarios of intermentality. We could be dealing with two individuals belonging to the same group who either agree or disagree. Conversely, these two might belong to two different groups and agree or disagree.

Individual vs. Group: On the one hand, there is the possibility that the interaction takes place within a single group. That is either an initiating intramental thought meets agreement inside the group to which an individual belongs and is acted upon accordingly, or the intramental thought can be met with the opposition of the other group members. This is a crucial point, since at this very moment of the story the individual drops out of that group and eventually joins another group – thus contributing to a higher level of dynamics in the play. On the other hand, we might be presented with situations in which the intramental thought of one character is confirmed or opposed by the collective of a different group than the other one to which he initially belongs. Each of these scenarios will provide the play with different dynamics. Confirmation might spark an attempt by the other group to recruit the character to join them. In case of opposition we might, in turn, encounter two possible outcomes. First, more and stronger enmity between the groups could evolve, or, second (should they not have had any problems prior to the interaction), the start of enmity or a potential struggle could begin (if they were not on good terms before the interaction). Either way, it is apparent that an initial intramental thought and its development into and engagement in an intermental one has the potential to cause a completely different storyline, which makes the progression of the play much more interesting.

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Group vs. Group: Each group has 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.