Fictional Minds (Frontiers of Narrative) - Softcover

Palmer, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803218354 ISBN 13: 9780803218352

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

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

Review:

Narrative

 

THOMAS ALBRECHT AND CE´ LINE SURPRENANT

 

This chapter reviews books and journal articles published in 2004 in the field of narrative theory.

 

The 2003 YWCCT review of works published in the field of narrative theory during that year (YWCCT 13[2005]) noted that the former was marked by a ‘distinct shift towards the cognitive sciences’. The reviewer spoke of the ‘narrative turn’ taken by cognitive sciences, psychology and psychiatry, who have come to recognize the importance of narratives in their respective fields, and thus have taken ‘narrative beyond the confines of the literary critic and the linguist’ (YWCCT 13[2005] 99). The works here reviewed, especially Alan Palmer’s Fictional Minds, seek to demonstrate the extent to which narratology in turn can benefit by adopting conceptual and methodological elements imported from these disciplines (Palmer received the 2005 Modern Language Association Prize for Independent Scholars). A common idea runs through works of narrative criticism published in 2004, namely that an interdisciplinary approach to narratives is better suited to the ‘inter-medial matter’ that the latter are. It is noteworthy that the call for interdisciplinarity in narrative theory goes together with that for giving up ‘the privacy of consciousness’ as a dominant and limiting paradigm.

 

The ‘turn to narrative’ in cognitive sciences, psychology and psychiatry follows from the idea that narratives are constitutives of our Western lives, and from the discovery of their potential therapeutic and heuristic power (note that Freudian psychoanalysis never had the need to effect a ‘narrative turn’, as Roy Schafer discusses in his essay ‘Narrating, Attending, and Empathizing’, reviewed below). As for the complementary ‘shift’ by narrative theory towards cognitive and other sciences, it claims to be motivated by the need to move beyond the perceived limitations of ‘classical narratology’, specifically the latter’s alleged reliance on linguistic models and its scientistic taxonomic aims. Palmer, for example, locates his contribution in ‘post-classical narrative theory’ (p. 152), in the vein of David Herman, the editor of the collection Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (OhioStateUP [1999]), who introduced the term in order to designate the proliferation of new methodologies and hypotheses concerning the form and function of storytelling. Ge´ rard Genette (whose book Me´talepse is reviewed below) would probably disclaim the idea that ‘narratology’ constitutes only a ‘moment’ in the history of narrative study, having himself welcomed the insights of analytic philosophy (in L’Oeuvre d’art 1. Immanence et transcendance E´ d. du Seuil [1994] and 2. La relation esthe´tique [1997]) while pursuing his work on the relation between poetics and fiction. Similarly, the

2004 re-edition of Brian Rogers’ important work on the narrative techniques of A ` la recherche du temps perdu gives us an indication that we can still fruitfully engage with earlier phases of narratology, which have benefited from the advances of intertextual and genetic criticism.

 

That said, Jonathan Culler’s call, at the end of his article ‘Omniscience’—‘It’s time to remove the blinders and explore alternative vocabularies better attuned to the strange effects of literature’ (Narrative 12:i[2004] 32)—would seem to exemplify the shared, but by then already well-established, concern in works published in 2004 for transforming classical narratology. The descriptions of the paradigms to be overcome vary in precision, but there emerges in many of the works under review a picture of ‘classical narratology’ as a set of flawed conceptualizations, represented as (or, perhaps more accurately, simply called) ‘structuralist’ and ‘formalist’ narratological methodologies characterized by an exaggerated degree of abstraction, ‘purity’ and too great of a reliance on linguistics. ‘Structuralism’ denotes less the very precise series of methodological procedures which we find in classical structuralist works than any excess of theorization more or less directly linked with the historical moment of structuralism. In addition to the polemic against structuralism or ‘structuralism’, studies published in 2004 continue to question the nature of narratives and seek to expand the condition of

‘narrativity’ beyond ‘verbal media’. However, their efforts do not dispel the ambiguity that surrounds the object of narrative studies; instead, their interpretative hypotheses and methods sometimes appear to make of narratives themselves a secondary matter.

 

This sidestepping of the question of narrative as such is decidedly not the case in the anthology Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, one of the most important publications of 2004 in the area of narrative studies. Comprised largely of essays by scholars who teach narrative theory and media studies at universities in Scandinavia and the United States, it is significant among other reasons for the potentially useful contribution it makes to the ongoing paradigmatic debate about what a narrative actually is and about what it means to say that a particular medium is narrating (rather than doing something else). Broadly generalized, its explicit and implicit definition of narrative has two main components, from which it then draws two important implications for the fields of narratology and media studies.

 

In her Introduction to Narrative across Media, Ryan finds in the canonical structuralist and language-based narrative theories a shared inability to provide a tenable, satisfactory definition of narrative itself. Following the well-documented inclination of much recent work in narrative studies already described above, she proposes to shift the definition away from the traditional linguistic paradigms and towards more cognitive approaches.

 

Narrative, she argues, might be defined not as a linguistic object, but as a kind of meaning that is produced in the interaction between a semiotic object (in whatever medium) and its recipient. To qualify minimally as narrative, this meaning must somehow entail the dimensions of space (a world, characters, objects), time (changes of state) and plot (causal relations, motivations). In some cases, especially in verbal artefacts, narrative meaning is directly encoded into the object by means of signs. But in other cases, in particular in non-verbal artefacts, it is something that might be decoded by the recipient in response to the object. According to Ryan’s expanded definition, ten, the term narrative designates less an object and more a ‘mental image’ (p. 11), a cognitive construct built by a recipient interacting with the formal properties of an object. Hence, for Ryan, narrative entails not only those signifying objects that already ‘are’ narratives, but those that ‘possess narrativity’, which is to say objects that may potentially be decoded by a recipient as narrative

(p. 9). We find one example of this paradigmatic shift from the object to the recipient in David Bordwell’s contribution to the volume, ‘Neo-Structuralist Narratology and the Functions of Filmic Storytelling’. Elaborating his wellrehearsed

polemic against what he calls neo-structuralism, Bordwell maintains that narrative films must be analysed not in terms of a set of statically conceived formal features, but functionally, in terms of ‘effects registered by a perceiver prepared to grasp a narrative’ (p. 204).

 

What follows from this first component of Ryan’s definition is a ‘mediumfree’ or ‘trans-medial’ (as opposed to linguistic) understanding of narrative. Even though Ryan concedes that narrative does largely assume and lend itself to verbal forms of representation, she maintains that works in any number of different media can potentially be called narrative, assuming they possess or elicit what she calls narrativity. This would be true even for primarily or exclusively non-verbal media, as long as they allow a recipient to infer some kind of narrative meaning. Narrative across Media explores this possibility in essays by Wendy Steiner on early Renaissance oil painting, Eero Tarasti on the narrativity of instrumental music and Peter Lunenfeld on video art.

 

Complementary (and sometimes contradictory) to their view of narrative as a quality intuited by a recipient, the contributors to Narrative across Media also define narrative in formalist terms, as a representation that encodes narrative meaning by means of its media-specific signs. What distinguishes their approaches from earlier formalist approaches, however, is that they locate such signs of narrative meaning not only in linguistic texts, but in a variety of verbal and non-verbal media. Their underlying point is that various media can possess and elicit narrativity, and that this narrativity is itself always media-specific. According to this view, any narrative meaning (and any meaning more generally) an object has or elicits is dependent on its media-specific encoding and transmission of that meaning. For Ryan, this second aspect of narrative’s redefinition demonstrates ‘how the intrinsic properties of the medium shape the form of narrative and affect the [recipient’s] narrative experience’ (p. 1). According to her theory of narrative, the medium (understood as a set of formal constraints and as a set of unique possibilities) is itself the decisive category in determining the narrative quality of the given object and its reception as narrative.

 

David Herman’s essay ‘Towards a Transmedial Narratology’ offers a particularly compact example of this argument that narrative meaning is inextricable from the ‘medial support’ by means of which it reaches a recipient. Herman distinguishes between the medium-specific narrativity of oral and literary stories, for instance at the level of their respective representation of spatial and temporal relationships, in order to make the larger case for the medium-dependency of all storytelling. In advocating for ‘a general theory about the links between stories and their media’ (p. 67), he writes:

 

the story logic of a tale . . . told conversationally is bound by different constraints than those bearing on a literary tale . . . even though the two narratives [may] focus on similar experiences. Only barely initiated here, a project for future research is to determine just what sorts of constraints shape the communicative properties of each storytelling medium. (p. 68)

 

In making this point, Herman is primarily interested in calling attention to the uniqueness of each narrative medium (and in validating the accompanying traditional narratological distinction between story and discourse), but he also implies that not all media, given the specific constraints of their communicative properties, may actually qualify as narrative. This implication is explored at length in Espen Aarseth’s contribution to Narrative across Media, ‘Quest Games as Post-Narrative Discourse’. Aarseth maintains that computer games are decidedly not narratives and should therefore not be analysed according to the schemes of traditional narratology. This is because of what he calls an ‘ontological difference’ between games and stories: ‘this difference is probably best described with the word choice’ (p. 366). Aarseth goes on to elaborate the ontological rift he finds between narratives and games as a distinction, among other things, between representation and simulation, retrospection and action, and constative and performative language. In choosing the order of the selections in Narrative across Media, Ryan has suggestively juxtaposed Aarseth’s essay with her own article, ‘Will New Media Produce New Narratives?’, in which she makes a case for the narrative potential of certain forms of digital media, including some computer games.

 

Wendy Steiner’s fine contribution to Narrative across Media, an essay entitled ‘Pictorial Narrativity’, provides perhaps the best example of both aspects of Ryan’s unifying editorial argument: the potential narrativity of nonverbal media and the medium-specific character of any medium’s narrativity. Steiner’s analysis focuses on narrative paintings of the early and middle quattrocento, a transitional genre located between the non-realist narrativity of medieval art and the non-narrativity of high Renaissance realism. Through a close reading of Benozzo Gozzoli’s The Dance of Salome and Beheading of St John the Baptist, a painting in which three discrete episodes from Salome’s story are non-consecutively juxtaposed, Steiner shows how Gozzoli produces a complex narrative effect through the directionality of the figures’ gazes, through the use of spatial recession (suggesting temporal recession), and through metaphoric and metonymic echoes in the figures’ clothes, colouring, poses and facial expressions. Her compelling and often counterintuitive

discussion of the painting, a work whose narrativity seems at first glance to be limited and crude at best, makes a strong case for the argument that a given medium’s greatest narrative potential lies in its own medium-specific constraints and possibilities (rather than in its more or less successful approximations of linguistic models).

 

In its double definition of narrative (as a cognitive construct and as a medium-dependent set of signs), Ryan’s anthology has two important implications for the fields of narrative theory and media studies: a transmedial approach to narrative as such and, complementarily, a media-specific analysis of any given medium’s narrative potential. Accordingly, the collection is divided into five sections, each organized around a particular medium: face-to-face narration (which is to say oral storytelling), still pictures, moving pictures, music and digital media. The section on music is particularly valuable, in consideration of most readers’ presumed unfamiliarity with this area of research, and contains a useful overview by Emma Kafalenos of recent scholarship on the relation between music and narrative.

 

Not unlike Ryan’s discussion of the limitations of exclusively linguistic definitions of narrative, Alan Palmer’s Fictional Minds provides a detailed account of the limitations of some of the most important narratological concepts, through a study of what it calls ‘fictional minds’ (rather than of ‘characters’). Under this heading, we are not simply presented with an ‘alternative’ term, such as the ones demanded by Culler to replace inadequate isolated concepts, but with the outline of a new approach to what is shown to be an essential aspect of the process of reading fiction, namely the narrator’s and reader’s construction of characters through the ascription of consciousness to them, that is, through the attribution of a variety of thought processes to them. ‘How precisely do these groups of words [of which characters are made] become the recognizable fictional minds that are clearly contained in fictional texts?’ (p. 12). The p...

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0803218354
• ISBN 13: 9780803218352
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 276