construction comes from understanding and the analysis of their speech and behaviour, which are both external and public manifestations. In order to tackle the external representation of consciousness, and later collectivity, Palmer forms his own eclectic approach, drawing from narrative theory and complementing it with concepts from cognitive approaches (Palmer’s take on cognitivist ideas will be discussed in the next subchapter). He applies different concepts, he draws upon narrative theory, such as PWT, characterisation, frames, and focalisation to construct his analytical framework.
2.2.2 Palmer in the Context of Cognitivist Ideas
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
