Читать книгу Social Minds in Drama - Golnaz Shams - Страница 23

Storyworlds are social by nature; they deal with complex dialogic relationships between their inhabitants. Thus the way the consciousness of a single character is constructed directly influences the way that character interacts with other characters in that storyworld. Palmer does start out to analyse the construction of individual characters on an “intramental” level, but ultimately he finds it impossible to understand any character outside its social context. He believes “fictional mental functioning should not be divorced from the social and physical context of the storyworld” (2011: 201). In order to understand the public nature of thought, to understand the consciousness of the characters it is necessary to understand them in their context, in interaction with other characters. Understanding a fictional mind means understanding how a character is experiencing its storyworld; that is, how a character is, not only perceiving herself but also other characters in relation to herself. To do so, often it is not enough to only focus on the individual. Since any storyworld hardly ever consists of only one character, it becomes evident how important it is to study the character’s consciousness in relation to the other characters. In this context, the interaction between them becomes the focus of analysis because “[t];he thought and language of the individual arise out of, and are necessarily oriented toward, the social group to which they belong” (Palmer 2004: 151).

This whole idea of understanding the character in its social environment proper is not, in fact, a new one. Vološinov’s ideas on how every utterance, be it addressed towards another character or be it a more introvert, internal type ←52 | 53→of speech, ultimately makes sense and is stabilised only within a social group (1973: 85–6). Bakhtin is another proponent of the idea that consciousness is something that realises itself in a dialogic relationship and through interaction (1981, and 1984: 32). Bakhtin is not talking about the multiplicity of different voices or just the existence of more than one character in a narrative. His ideas are more focused on the interrelation and even discrepancies of diverse worldviews and ideologies. Yet Palmer believes that essentially the ideas of theorists such as Vološinov and Bakhtin are just initial steps towards acknowledging the importance of the social nature of consciousness in narrative discourse.⁴⁷ Palmer believes the status of the intermentality of fictional consciousness needs yet to be established. Making this his mission, Palmer regards every fictional mind as an individual part of the storyworld in which it exists. This storyworld, in turn, always has a social structure of its own. Since storyworlds are socially set, the individual fictional minds inhabiting them are always in interaction with other fictional minds. That always entails an interaction between the private thoughts of each fictional mind and the social group it refers back to; the interaction between the fictional minds will result in acts of intersubjectivity or intermentality. Ultimately a major part of what narratives make up deals with the intermental units: their formation, their development and their breakdown (Palmer 2005: 427).

Intermentality becomes one of the key concepts in Palmer’s approach. We will never properly understand characters in a vacuum, but only within the groups and collective units in which they are situated. The concept of intermental thought makes it possible to understand how two or more people, as a group, form a unit to which one can attribute a single consciousness or mind and a single mental functioning. It should be noted that whenever Palmer talks about intermentality or intermental thought the idea of action is already included within the concept. The thought-action continuum is a valid concept here too. In the social context of a storyworld, we are always dealing with intersubjectivity that includes what the other characters are thinking about a specific character as well as how they behave and act towards that character. This interrelationship of thought and action underlines once more the public nature of fictional consciousness.

The concept of intermentality is a major subframe in Palmer’s theory. He argues that intermental thought is a shared and collective thought as opposed to intramental thought which is individual thinking. He is interested in small ←53 | 54→informal groups that take shape in narratives and is interested in their shared thinking or the dynamics of their collective thought. The emphasis is placed on how the members of a group connect. Furthermore, although the focus is on a shared, collective consciousness (within the thought-action continuum), the interaction between the members is important as well, since “[j];oint action requires at least a measure of joint thinking, and joint thinking will often result in joint action” (2004: 220). Within this theory, the process of group formation in itself becomes important too. Thus the focus is not just on the relationship of a member of a group with the collective, but the analysis of the whole process of group formation, the relationship between the individual and a group, the relationship between two groups and the relationship between the individual and a different group. Also taken into account are negative dynamics, which may explain why an individual might choose to abandon a group or be dismissed by a group. Within these different dynamics, in order to be able to perceive intermentality, there needs to be an initial shared judgement or shared perception and a shared decision that might or might not lead to a shared action-taking. It is important to note that intermental thinking is not just a sum total of the mental processes of the individuals who are part of the same group. It usually leads to achieving something together that each of the individuals probably could not have done on their own.

Intermental systems will vary depending on the extent, duration and success of their cognitive quality. Palmer distinguishes between three different types (Palmer 2005):

Intermental thought: This is at a minimal level of interaction and group thought, such as would be necessary for strangers to have a conversation and actually understand each other.

Intermental units: These are groups that are more familiar with each other and employ intermental thinking regularly. Connections and interactions between colleagues, friends and families are often of this type.

Intermental minds: This is the strongest connection between members of a group or two people. Couples who understand each other without uttering a word or have the same thought at the same time belong to this group. Obviously such a bond usually takes place over a long time span.

Since in the genre of drama, we usually deal with a second type, which is the most common type to start with, I will refer to Palmers intermental system as intermental units henceforth. Only where there are exceptions, will I point them out.

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Intermentality is often taken to have the same meaning as communicative action. It is important to note here that to Palmer the term has a more extended meaning. Though intermentality does incorporate communication and joint decision-making, it also means joint states of mind and also competitive or conflicting actions between two minds (Palmer 2003: 340). If an intermental functioning brings about a group dynamic between two or more people, we can say that we have an intermental unit or group. Sharing knowledge is very common between social minds and usually a strong motivation for group formation, but then secrecy and keeping information will also contribute to the dynamics of intermental units. It is noteworthy, however, that not all groups have to be intermental. Sharing the same belief but not acting upon it and sharing the same state of mind without a shared dynamic resulting from it leaves us with a group that does not have intermentality.

Palmer talks about and applies his new approach only to the novel and frequently states his preference for “behaviourist narratives/novels”. He elaborates that these types of narratives are narratives in which the narrator provides a minimal amount of input and one perceives the characters through their words and actions. Palmer believes the analysis of these narratives will prove very rewarding:

My point is merely that behavorist narratives contain a good deal more information about fictional minds than has generally been appreciated. Specifically, I hope to show that this particular discourse is saturated with meanings that are closely related to the inner lives of characters. A character’s name is a space or vacuum into which readers feel compelled to pour meaning: characteristics, dispositions, states of mind, causations. (2004: 207)

These statements are by no means novel-specific. In fact, from the way in which Palmer goes on about behaviourist narratives, it seems as though the subject of discussion is more relevant to drama than to the novel. After all, is not drama the most obvious genre in which we experience the characters as they talk and act and have minimum interference of the narrator more than in novels? Questions like these call for more investigation as to why so little theoretical work has been done on drama and these narrative issues. As mentioned earlier, in classical narratology, drama was automatically excluded from the corpus of analytical work. The following section will briefly assess the status of a narratology of drama within general narrative studies and trace what has been done till now to place the genre of drama within a proper theory and provide models of interpretation for it.

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