href="#ulink_7ab93618-cb70-5d74-81f1-ee47d092af6f">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)
2.2.3 Palmer’s Intermentality
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:
