Changing Minds in Narrative

What is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere? --Oscar Wilde, Intentions In his important essay on Social Minds, Alan Palmer continues his longstanding mission to reconfigure the field of narratology and thus redefine our understanding of the nature of narrative by turning attention to our minds and the relationships between different forms of consciousness. Like all good paradigm-shifts, it is an ambitious concept founded on simplicity. The fundametally significant insight is that narrative should be regarded as being driven not by event but by person. In classical narratology, even where viewpoint and perspective were the topics in focus, often the discussion was about the effect on how events were perceived, how events were motivated, how events were telescoped or extended; beyond this, narrative itself was defined by the nature of its story or plot. This classical line, of course, is divergent from the popular conception of narrative: stories gain their tellability because of their human significance, whether for the people involved (the characters) or the person telling or hearing. So Palmer's approach rests on the evident truism that narratives are about relationships between people. Of course, his argument goes far beyond this, but the foundational tenet that narratives are motivated by the interactions of minds has important consequences. First, as he indicates, Palmer's approach forms part of the wider cognitive rum in the arts and humanities. After early polemical and programmatic positioning, this movement has been producing significant and irreversible insights into consciousness and our articulation of it in both high art and more prosaic discourse. Though his convincing arguments are illustrated largely by nineteenth-century fiction, there is enough in his position to allow other researchers to explore the validity of his ideas more widely. Second, Palmer, by argument and example, shifts the means of discussion from an exclusive focus on text (typical of traditional stylistics) to a principled connection with the context of reading, writing, and social positioning. This has the benefit of speaking to the current historicising paradigm of literary scholarship, while retaining a sense of his more rigorous and systematic stylistic inheritance. If this leads literary scholars back to their abandoned skill in language study, so much the better. At the same time, Palmer avoids the extremism within the cognitive turn in literary studies by grounding his discussions of mind and consciousness in a textual and textured sensibility: he pays attention to style. This prevents him making wild and untestable assertions about consciousness, evolution, cultural universals, or the internal nature of thought--grand statements about consciousness that engage with the theory while neglecting the linguistic grounding or empirical base in texts. Importantly for cognitivism broadly, Palmer's work argues for a strong and practical social theory alongside the psychological understanding of narrative. His reading here relies on social psychology and social theory; I believe much progress could be made here, too, by applying some of the concepts and methods of sociolinguistics. Probably the key feature in modern sociolinguistics is the social articulation and management of identity. Conversations between pairs or small groups usually involve identity markers, expressive aspects of register and perspective, all of which are evident (in other terms) in Palmer's analysis of the Middlemarch passage. In Palmer's analysis, minds tend to be discrete, with definite boundaries and stable cores, and his notion of intermental thought represents a transition from one core to another (group) core. A more developed sociolinguistic analysis would also go on to explore the ways in which the different minds represented in a novel were presented as dynamically interacting and shifting against each other: how do minds adapt and change at their edges? …