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Palmer states that three different approaches have made contributions to his understanding and reading process of narratives:³⁵

Cognitive narratology: allows the findings of various studies from different cognitive sciences like philosophy, psychology, and cognitive sciences to be traced. Narrative is seen as a key cognitive tool and cognitive narratology takes narrative as its object of study.

Cognitive approaches to literature: according to Palmer, this approach, has generally emerged from literary criticism rather than from narrative theory. Whereas cognitive narratology is mainly concerned with novels and short stories, a cognitive approach takes drama and poetry into consideration as well.

Cognitive poetics: is also concerned with drama and poetry as well as novel and short story, but it is a type of applied linguistics and as such it concentrates on the specific use of linguistic tools in the analysis of texts.

Palmer does not believe that these approaches stand alongside each other; he is convinced the cognitive approach is the basis of the other two and includes toolkits and disciplines from them. His own cognitive approach, as mentioned before, is an eclectic one and as he puts it a: “pragmatic, non-dogmatic, and non-ideological one” (2011: 199–200).

PWT, one of the disciplines Palmer uses, facilitates a liberation from the strict formal story/discourse binary of the more classical approaches and shifts the focus to the fictional world as a possible ontologically valid world in itself. PWT ←41 | 42→regards fictional world ontologically in reference to the real or the actual world (AW). Readers assume the laws and states of an alternative possible world are the same, or very similar to that of the AW unless specifically stated otherwise. In this way, if in the storyworld a flying car is mentioned, readers assume the car looks like a car in the AW and abide by all the laws of the AW except that it can fly (principle of minimal departure).³⁶ Granting PWs (storyworlds) their own ontological existence would allow granting their inhabitants (fictional characters) the same. By doing so, both PWs and their inhabitants follow the principle of minimal departure and can be treated “as if” dealing with AW and “real minds”. This is the point of interest for Palmer, since he is interested in the main semiotic channels through which readers access the workings of fictional minds in the storyworld. PWT allows Palmer to argue that since everything in the storyworld (PW) works ontologically like the AW, so do character and consciousness construction. Thus, readers can apply the same techniques and procedure they apply for reading and interpreting minds in the AW to storyworlds. Relying on the principle of minimal departure, Palmer grants the fictional storyworld and its inhabitants an ontologically complete existence. Thus established, readers can fill in the gaps that are inherent in the storyworld with reference to their experience and knowledge of the real world, except when instructed otherwise by the textual information.

There are several ways to construct a fictional mind. One of the most popular and acknowledged ways is the narrator’s construction of fictional minds by direct performative utterance on a diegetic level. Another way would be the construction of fictional minds through the views and utterances of other characters and minds in the storyworld. The third possibility is to infer the mental traits and characteristics of fictional minds through their own speech and actions. Palmer finds fault with the PWT’s preference towards the first type of consciousness construction and their approaches’ preference for a narrator who overtly provides semiotic information for the readers. Although PWT tries to overcome the deficits of classical narratology’s preference of plot over character, its dependence on a narrator is still limiting. By criticising this dependence on and preference of having a narrator, Palmer already anticipates the existence of a broader spectrum of texts as narratives, regardless of the presence of a narrator. Palmer focuses on “behaviourist” narratives where the role of the narrator is minimised. ←42 | 43→My purpose in this study is to take a first step and venture into the genre of drama where generally there is no narrator at all.³⁷

Characterisation is another concept Palmer makes use of in his approach. Whereas the concept of character was very much limited to structural and functional roles of actants in classical narrative theory and the more non-mimetic models of characterisation, much has been done in more modern trends to modify and redeem this limited approach towards character. These improvements are of great value to Palmer’s approach, since his idea of a fictional character and characters’ mind is much more dynamic and thus in need of a more dynamic access. According to the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory, there are several approaches to the study of character that, although similar in some points, do contain differences in their points of departure (Herman et al. 2005: 53–6). To Semiotic theories, characters are non-actual individuals and only semantic constructs. Everything needed in order to reconstruct a character is provided by the text and thus character construction is very text-bound. Since characters are presented textually through a discontinuous set of clues, they are inevitably incomplete. Communicative theories still deal with textual clues, but they believe that in order to authenticate the information given by the text, readers have to cross-reference it with contextual information. The information thus might prove to be right or wrong on a gradual scale according to different factors at play in the contextual concept of the narrative.

Cognitive theories state that the character is not much different from an actual person. Hence the concept of character is mentally generated in response to textual clues as well as contextual information. Readers engage in a bottom-up character construction procedure where they assemble explicit and implicit data about a character from the text and generate them into a model character and simultaneously, through a top-down procedure, use all the information they have to complete their mental concept of that character throughout the narrative. At the heart of the cognitive approach lie inference-drawing mechanisms, and it seems Palmer – though he is sympathetic to mimetic approaches to characterisation – has a preference for the cognitive one, because a cognitive approach to analysing characters in fiction is what essentially improves the readers’ experience of the whole narrative. In this Palmer seems to be in accord ←43 | 44→with Jaén and Simon who state: “Theorizing about characters and trying to read their intentions on one hand, and simulating them and sharing their emotions on the other, maybe at the core of our literary experience” (2012: 21).

Palmer also makes references to and use of the concept of Theory of Mind (ToM). ToM allows one to project, either in real life or in fiction, a mind onto the characters one encounters and thereby try to understand and read their minds and anticipate their future moves. One might say that ToM is the ability to read the mind of a person – or in our case, a fictional character – from the information one gets on her thoughts, feelings, behaviour, and intentions; all of which are ready to be understood from the storyworld. This ties in with Palmer’s belief that the foundation of fiction is to understand the consciousness of the characters and their interaction in their storyworld. This sounds almost identical to Lisa Zunshine’s account of ToM:

Thus one preliminary implication of applying what we know about ToM to our study of fiction is that ToM makes literature as we know it possible. The very process of making sense of what we read appears to be grounded in our ability to invest the flimsy verbal constructions that we generously call “characters” with a potential for a variety of thoughts, feelings, and desires, and then to look for the “cues” that allow us to guess at their feelings and thus to predict their actions. (2011: 274)

This projection and mind-reading are not only a great cognitive toolkit for the readers to understand and appreciate the characters, but they also contribute to a real-life model of cognition between the characters within the storyworld. It accounts for why and how the characters are able to understand each other, develop sympathies or antipathies, and anticipate other characters’ feelings and possible future reactions.³⁸

Palmer heavily draws on Uri Margolin’s ideas and concepts on character and character construction, and Margolin, in turn, seems to employ an integrated model from different concurrent approaches on character presentation. Palmer refers to Margolin’s typology³⁹ of character where Margolin introduces diverse types of character representation ranging from character as a grammatical unit/person to the other end of the scale, character as a fictional being. The last one marks out the type of approach Palmer likes to apply to characterisation. The only fault Palmer finds with a characterisation technique such as Margolin’s is that in this approach the dispositions of characters are seen as belonging to the ←44 | 45→subject area of characterisation, and the mental events are seen as belonging to the subject area of thought presentation. Consequently, these two are dealt with separately. Palmer proposes to establish one subject area designated for both concepts, as characterisation and thought-representation are more interlinked than what has been realised up until now.

While making use of different frameworks and toolkits from different approaches in order to assemble his own, Palmer realises that the cognitive turn provides him with a lot of advantages for his ideas. He becomes very intrigued by its context-oriented emphasis and focus on human cognition in different levels of the narrative. Palmer uses the term cognitive sciences in its “broad sense”.⁴⁰ What makes a cognitive turn in sciences in general, and in narrative theory in particular, all the more attractive to Palmer is the concept of frames and scripts commonly used within this paradigm. The idea that narratives are ordered contextually by frames or schemata and scripts is in accord with Palmer’s approach of reconstructing patterns through given clues from the text. In The Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory Jahn states: “Frames and scripts specify ‘defaults’ to encode expectations, ‘nodes and relations’ to capture categories and hierarchies, and ‘terminals’ and ‘slots’ to provide data integration points…” (68). To Palmer, in a fictional storyworld, cognitive “frames” and “scripts” construct not only the storyworld but also the fictional mind. They “encode” the clues in the text, and the “nodes and relations” to capture categories and hierarchies, which are, to Palmer, foremost manifested in the construction of interaction between characters and ultimately in the construction of intermental units. Palmer’s target area is more specific than Jahn’s; he concentrates not on the entire storyworld but only on its inhabitants. He applies the concepts of frames and scripts to encode the construction of the mentality of the characters in the narrative in order to determine their expectations and motivations and to analyse their dynamics within groups.

One more component in the eclectic approach Palmer combines in order to emphasise his approach is focalisation. Palmer puts a great deal of emphasis on focalisation and states that it “is clear that the concept of focalisation is crucially relevant to the study of fictional minds because it is concerned with the decisions that readers make about which consciousness is being presented in ←45 | 46→the text at any one time” (2004: 48). Focalisation determines “who perceives” at any given moment in the narrative and thus the focaliser can be said to be a medium between the reader and the storyworld. Thus, Palmer acknowledges that focalisation is very helpful in explaining or representing a storyworld through the perceptual viewpoint of the characters’ consciousness. Apart from the limitations caused by the over-dependent on a narrator figure (mentioned before⁴¹), what he finds fault with is the confusion, in some narratives, between the perspective rendered by the character and the narrator. At the same time, Palmer argues that the current debates about and around focalisation are mainly focused on perception and leave out very important factors such as cognition and emotion in the construction of the fictional consciousness. Because of these two shortcomings, Palmer does not rely heavily on the concept of focalisation but handpicks its major argument as a complementary paradigm to the other paradigms he uses for the construction of the fictional mind.

Drawing on these paradigms and disciplines Palmer provides his picture of a reconstruction of fictional minds. He finds a balance between different views and discourses in the cognitive sciences in order to achieve a more thorough theory of the representation of consciousness in narratives. One of these achievements consists of finding a balance between intentional acting and a more private thought or interior thinking that goes on in the mind. Palmer’s ideas come close to, and are influenced by, Lubomir Doležel’s ideas, but Palmer contends that even Doležel does not see thought and action as being equally important. It is true that Doležel acknowledges a relationship between the two concepts and he states: “[a];ll mental faculties, from sensory perception to emotionality to thinking to remembering and imagination, operate between the poles of intentional acting and spontaneous generation” (1998: 73); yet, Palmer believes that Doležel favours the former pole. Palmer bids for a more balanced approach where the (fictional) mind could be analysed not only through fantasies, free associative thinking, stream of consciousness and interior monologue, but also through an extension towards the other pole, as suggested by Doležel. Here the mental states would be presented in a more functional way where they fulfil information-processing and goal-orienting functions. According to Palmer, once we combine the states of mind and their functions, we are able to have a much better understanding of the whole fictional mind.

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This turn towards a more functional role of consciousness would also undo the restriction so many theories instigate by insisting on a language-based thought concept. Though verbal thought is important and does play a role in the representation of fictional minds, there is by no means any theory of construction thereof in any approach available. There is a great portion of the fictional mind that is based on the non-verbal version of thought. Needless to say one should not dismiss the role of language altogether. Despite the fact that cognitive science seems primarily to be occupied by scripts, frames, blends and concepts where at first glance language does not seem to have a central role, it is just one of the cognitive tools among others that help shape the fictional mind. The discussion of non-verbal consciousness is one of the most important issues of debate within cognitive studies. Fludernik in her Fictions of Language (1993) opens up the discussion to allow a schematic representation of language that incorporates thought as well. With such a cognitive viewpoint, like the one she suggests, one could analyse the speech and thought processes of characters in fiction by means of language and linguistic devices. This cognitive framework facilitates a much broader access to the consciousness of fictional characters than the older theories since:

[w];hat is important is the gist of the reported utterance in compressed and idiomatic form. In literature, however, expressive devices, particularly because of their predominant deployment for the representation of consciousness, trigger a reading of point of view and character’s voice, which in turn produces the illusion of immediacy of presentation, of a quasi-literal transcription of consciousness. (Fludernik 1993: 429)

Two of the closest related terms in this category, as mentioned before, are experientiality and qualia. Considering that Palmer’s main issue is the function of the fictional 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 and demands an extended cognitive processing.⁴⁶ In this way, readers keep constructing the mind of the characters, through doubly embedded narratives and the frames and scripts they have come up with about that character in a storyworld so far, even when the characters are not overtly present at the very scene of narration.

The theoretical application of embedded narratives makes it possible to experience the storyworld through the embedded narratives of the characters, the way in which they perceive and experience their storyworld and also through the doubly embedded narratives of how each character perceives and understands other characters. This facilitates various means of accessing the mind of a character other than the direct and overt information given by the author. In this way, details of characters’ minds can be embedded in the way other characters see, describe and experience them. This information can be very useful and constructive since readers tend to make use of every clue they can glean from the narrative, as unimportant as it may seem, and reconstruct fictional minds around it. Palmer uses the term “contextual thought report” for any short unobtrusive sentence, phrase or even single word that describes the characters’ mind in the storyworld (2004: 209). This concept is a combination of thought, action, intention and motivation for action and contextual information, which Palmer believes form a unity and often cannot be easily separated into distinct categories.

All these theoretical backgrounds and subframes conjoin to shape one of the major cognitive frames in Palmer’s theory. They culminate in his application of the “thought-action-continuum”, which constitutes the basis of most of his practical analysis to narratives. Palmer talks in detail about the relationship between thought and action. Often when the consciousness of a character is constructed, it is done not only by means of direct clues into the mind and thought of that character, but also by means of the delineated actions. What a character does provides readers with as much information about his motivation and intentions as directly stating what is going on inside the mind, hence the term “continuum”. It is not easy to dichotomise the descriptions and attributes of characters to either thought or action because thought and action form a continuum. Any description can be placed either at the thought end of the scale, at the action ←51 | 52→end or in the middle of the continuum. No action is unpremeditated and most thought precedes an action or at least an outward physical indication of it. The way characters in a narrative are constructed, whether the descriptions are more thought-based, action-based or taken from the mid-section of the continuum, influences the quality of the narrative and the reading process. The use of “indicative descriptions” – Palmer’s term for those descriptions situated in the middle of the continuum – for example, will give the whole narrative an ironic quality. Through the application of different approaches in order to build up his own theoretical framework, Palmer

envisage[s]; a holistic view of the whole of the social mind in action in the novel which avoids fragmentation of previous approaches such as those which focus on the speech categories, characterization, actants and so on. It is a functional and teleological perspective which considers the purposive nature of characters’ thought in terms of their motives, intentions, and resulting behaviour and action. (Palmer 2003: 324)