Fictional Minds

Fictional Minds

by Alan Palmer
Fictional Minds

Fictional Minds

by Alan Palmer

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Overview

Fictional Minds suggests that readers understand novels primarily by following the functioning of the minds of characters in the novel storyworlds. Despite the importance of this aspect of the reading process, traditional narrative theory does not include a complete and coherent theory of fictional minds.

Readers create a continuing consciousness out of scattered references to a particular character and read this consciousness as an "embedded narrative" within the whole narrative of the novel. The combination of these embedded narratives forms the plot. This perspective on narrative enables us to explore hitherto neglected aspects of fictional minds such as dispositions, emotions, and action. It also highlights the social, public, and dialogic mind and the "mind beyond the skin." For example, much of our thought is "intermental," or joint, group, or shared; even our identity is, to an extent, socially distributed.

Written in a clear and accessible style, Fictional Minds analyzes constructions of characters' minds in the fictional texts of a wide range of authors, from Aphra Behn and Henry Fielding to Evelyn Waugh and Thomas Pynchon. In its innovative and groundbreaking explorations, this interdisciplinary project also makes substantial use of "real-mind" disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science.

Alan Palmer is an independent scholar living in London, England. He has a PhD from the University of East London.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780803218352
Publisher: Nebraska Paperback
Publication date: 05/01/2008
Series: Frontiers of Narrative
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 276
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author


Alan Palmer is an independent scholar living in London, England. He has a PhD from the University of East London.

Read an Excerpt

Fictional Minds


By Alan Palmer

University of Nebraska Press

Copyright © 2004 University of Nebraska Press
All right reserved.




Chapter One

Introduction

"We never know them well, do we?"

"Who?" "Real people."

"What do you mean, 'real people'?"

"As opposed to people in books," Paola explained. "They're the only ones

we ever really know well, or know truly.... Maybe that's because they're the only ones about whom we get reliable information.... Narrators never lie." - Donna Leon, A Sea of Troubles

1. Background

Fictional Minds is about "people in books." In particular, it is about the amount, range, variety, and reliability of the information on the fictional minds of people in books that we are able to obtain from those books.

A little personal history may be helpful here in order to explain the purpose of this book. I began studying fictional minds in 1995. I did this by looking at the Box Hill chapter in Jane Austen's Emma and the Waterloo ball chapter in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair to see how the minds of the characters in those chapters were constructed. I chose those two texts because I thought that it would be interesting to examine the consciousnesses of characters interacting in groups. At that time, I am ashamed to say now, I was not even aware of the existence of narrative theory, or narratology, although as it happened this direct approach to primary texts turned out to be anabsolutely inspired idea. Then once I had discovered that there was such a thing as narrative theory, I thought that it would be interesting to find out what it said about my chosen area of study. After all what could be more central to the theoretical analysis of fiction than the workings of characters' minds? My first encounter with narrative theory was with what I will call the speech category approach, and I was immediately struck by the fact that it did not provide a convincing explanation or even description of how the whole minds of characters in action were constructed. It seemed to me that there was a good deal that was going on in the Austen and Thackeray chapters that had not been captured by classification of the specific examples of direct access to fictional minds into the various speech categories. I felt as though I had stumbled into a large, fascinating field that I very much wanted to explore further. A small corner of it had been tended and retended with, perhaps, obsessive care, while the rest of it appeared to me at that time to be neglected.

I read more widely within narrative theory and soon discovered the concept of focalization or what used to be called point of view. So another small corner of the field had been cultivated. Focalization was informative, but it was still only a small part of the story. The third corner turned out to be story analysis-the structuralist study of the basic elements of plot structures. Next I came across characterization and, in particular, how the reader brings to the text preexisting cultural and literary stereotypes in order to construct satisfying patterns of behavior and convincing fictional personalities. Finally, and inexcusably late in the day, I encountered possible-worlds theory. This has proved very helpful indeed, although I soon found out that in certain ways it is not that well suited to the study of fictional minds. (You may have noticed that there are five corners-it is an irregularly shaped field.)

So, the corners of the field are well tended, but in the middle there remains a very large and apparently unexplored patch of land that still looks just as interesting to me today as it did at the beginning. But the oddest thing of all, as I continued my search within narrative theory for a comprehensive treatment of the whole of my area of interest, was that I found very little recognition of the fact that there was an area of interest at all. The various corners adjoin other fields and appear to be viewed primarily as adjuncts to those other fields: the analysis of spoken speech in the case of the speech categories; various aspects of discourse analysis in the case of focalization; intertextuality in the case of characterization; classical structuralism in the case of story analysis; and modal logic in the case of possible-worlds theory. This seemed strange to me then, and it still does now. In fact, it is this continued sense of strangeness that drives this book. Even now, I still think, Why don't other people ask themselves what aspect of literary theory could be more important than fictional minds? This study is an attempt to mark out the boundaries of the field as a well-defined subject area in its own right by linking together the previously well-trodden parts of it and by tending a few new patches of my own. I decided on the title Fictional Minds, instead of other possibilities such as The Presentation of Consciousness in the Novel, because it sounds to me as much the name of a new subject area within narrative theory as it does the title of a single study.

I will describe my exploration of the field with the use, I am afraid, of another and final agricultural metaphor. Somewhere (I have been unable to find the exact reference) the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that there are two ways of exploring a piece of land such as a hill. One way is to attempt to define it by establishing its boundaries with precision. In this way once you have drawn an exact line around the land in question, you can say with confidence that the hill consists of all the land within the border created by the line and whatever lies outside the boundary is something else. The other way to do it is to explore the hill by criss-crossing it from various directions. That way you get to know it intimately, and you have a fairly clear idea about what is the hill and what is not, even though you do not ever draw a precise line around it. Each method has its own kind of value, and of course they are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps he had in mind a comparison between the early working method of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the later, very different approach of the Philosophical Investigations. I would say that the modus operandi of Fictional Minds is the criss-crossing of the field, rather than the strict delineation of its exact borders, although I hope that it will become clear that the boundaries of the fictional mind in discourse extend much further than have previously been recognized.

During my studies, I discovered reader response theory, which proved to be of great value. I will pick out one specific issue here: the sheer scale of the input required from readers in constructing minds from novels. Have you ever, while rereading a novel containing a scene or a character that had a profound effect on you when you first read it, been surprised at how little there actually was to that scene or character and how few words were used to describe them? You think, Does that scene really last for only a page? Or, Does that character really only appear in only those scenes? (A particularly good example of this phenomenon is Orson Welles's Harry Lime character in the film The Third Man. Lime does not appear until after the best part of an hour and says almost nothing apart from the famous cuckoo-clock scene.) On rereading a scene of this sort, you find yourself surprised that your imagination, as it then was, contributed so much to flesh out the words in the text, and it can sometimes happen that your current imaginative state does not do the same. It is almost as though the text is simply the scaffolding on which you build the vivid psychological processes that stay with you for so long afterward. I recently felt this sort of disappointment while rereading Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose, which is ironic since he is a leading reader response theorist! It can also happen with historical narrative, as it did for me with Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou. I find that the same sensation can also occur when someone recommends that I read an episode in a novel or see a scene in a film. I think, I am not really sure that there is enough here for me to feel that it justified the build-up that it got. There is a good deal that has been brought to this scene by the other person, and I am not sure what it is. All this is an illustration of what the narratologist Monika Fludernik refers to in the vivid phrase the "human urge to create significance" (1993, 457). What I am describing is one of those rare occasions when you are acutely aware of the creative nature of the reading process in general and the strangeness of character construction in particular. Any theory that attempts to explain this process, or a part of it, has to recognize the intense power of reader response to fictional minds.

I decided at an early stage that it would be rewarding to illuminate the study of fictional minds by making use of the insights of some of the disciplines relating to real minds. For example, I noticed right at the beginning that during my analyses of the Emma and Vanity Fair passages I was finding it difficult in a number of cases to separate out presentations of consciousness from descriptions of action, and I was aware that an illuminating perspective on this issue could be derived from the philosophy of action. (By the way, this point is a perfect illustration of the benefits of theorizing about novels before reading literary theory: the theory that I read later appeared to assume that dividing the two was entirely unproblematical, while the naïve reader that I then was could spot immediately that this was not the case.) In addition to philosophy such as the philosophy of mind as well as the philosophy of action, this book also makes use of other real-mind disciplines such as cognitive science, psychology, and psycholinguistics. I hope that the result is a rich, flexible, sensitive, and inclusive paradigm of the fictional mind that is well suited to capturing as much information as possible from fictional texts. Fictional Minds is an interdisciplinary project that is in a sense designed to be a source book for non-specialists of some of the ideas about the mind that are current in the various real-mind discourses. However, it is worth pointing out right from the start that a good deal of humility is required when theorizing about the mind. The relationship between knowledge and its representation in the brain was characterized by the psychologist William James (brother of the novelist Henry James) in 1890 as "the most mysterious thing in the world" (1981, 216). And for every mystery that has been dispelled since James's time, three more seem to arise to take its place.

One particular aspect of my approach is worth emphasizing here. The entry by Colwyn Trevarthen in The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (1999) (from now on referred to as MITECS) on the topic of intersubjectivity describes two different perspectives on the mind: the subjective first and the intersubjective first.

The Western philosophical tradition (as exemplified by René Descartes and Immanuel Kant) generally assumes that human minds are inherently separate in their purposes and experiences, seeking rational clarity, autonomous skills, and self-betterment.... [People] construct an awareness of the self in society but remain single subjectivities.... We will call this view of intelligent and civilized cooperation as an artificial acquisition the ... "subjective first" position....

A different conception of human consciousness ... perceives interpersonal awareness, cooperative action in society, and cultural learning as manifestations of innate motives for sympathy in purposes, interests, and feelings-that is, that a human mind is equipped with needs for dialogue [and] intermental engagement with other similar minds.... We will call this view of how human cooperation arises the ... "intersubjective first" position. (1999, 417)

Mine is very much an intersubjective first approach to fictional minds, but not because I deny the importance of the subjective first approach. It is important to stress that both perspectives are equally valid, informative, and, indeed, necessary. The reason why this study favors the intersubjective first approach is that the subjective first position has become the dominant paradigm for the study of consciousness within narrative theory, and the bias contained in this book is intended to redress the balance a little. For a contrasting and very subjective first approach to the relationship between the novel, narrative theory, and cognitive science, see Consciousness and the Novel (2002) by the narrative theorist and novelist David Lodge.

It is probably the case that anyone working in the field of narrative theory has a working definition of narrative that they may make explicit or that may remain implicit. To make things easier for you, I will now make mine explicit. My thesis is a fundamental one: narrative fiction is, in essence, the presentation of fictional mental functioning. I state my thesis here in this bald, stark manner for purposes of clarity. The full implications of it will emerge later on. If I am right, then it follows that the study of the novel is the study of fictional mental functioning and also that the task of theorists is to make explicit the various means by which this phenomenon is studied and analyzed. This is another way of making the point made earlier that the study of fictional minds should be established as a clearly defined and discrete subject area within literary theory.

I do not know how many narrative theorists will agree or disagree with my claim regarding the centrality of fictional minds to any informative definition of fictionality, although I refer to some potential skepticism in the next section. I hope that it will strike some as obviously true, even though I am aware that the world is full of people who have advanced theories that they thought were obviously true but then found to their astonishment that they were bitterly contested. But, true or not, and obvious or not, I am not aware that it has been explicitly formulated before, with the possible exception of Monika Fludernik's emphasis on her notion of experientiality in Towards a "Natural" Narratology (1996). My thesis has always been implicit in discussions of fictionality, and should be made explicit. As the narratologist Dorrit Cohn points out, in narratology, "as elsewhere, norms have a way of remaining uninteresting, often even invisible, until and unless we find that they have been broken-or want to show that they have not been broken" (1999, 43). The description of fictional mental functioning has been regarded as an uninteresting and even invisible norm within narratology, and it would be of benefit to the discipline if it were given the central place within the conceptual framework of the subject that it deserves.

(Continues...)



Excerpted from Fictional Minds by Alan Palmer Copyright © 2004 by University of Nebraska Press. Excerpted by permission.
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