Kinds of Minds: On Alan Palmer's “Social Minds”

It is no exaggeration to say that the work of Alan Palmer has put the study of fictional minds on a new track. That it should do so may appear surprising, because he has broken the trail through common sense much more than through reliance on new theories (though Palmer is very well informed of recent developments in cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind). This makes one wonder why anybody hadn't thought of his approach before. But it could be that many readers spontaneously thought of fictional minds in the same terms; it's just that being commonsensical was not the fashionable thing to do in literary criticism. It took an independent scholar unconcerned with approval by the collective of academia to take such an approach. The basic idea was quite simple. Traditional approaches to characters in novels look at the from an perspective, according to the is an inner theater featuring a neverending film of private thoughts, images, associations, memories and desires emerging from the depth of the subconscious. This film is called stream of consciousness, and the task of narratologists is to describe the forms of discourse through narrators allow readers to look through the skull of the character and to watch the show unfold. While recognizing that the internalist plays an important role in many types of novels, especially in those of the modernist period (where the representation of the inner theater of the becomes an end in itself). Palmer argued in his first book, Fictional Minds, for an perspective that views the as something that manifests itself externally through both intentional and non-intentional behavior, and that other people can access through inductive reasoning--what cognitive psychology calls theory of mind. Whereas the traditional narratological approach regards the as a mechanism for imagining and representing, Palmer's concept of mind in action favored a much more strategic conception of the mind: not the that experiences the storyworld passively, but rather the proactive that reacts to situations, conceives goals, constructs other minds, takes actions, and makes the story advance. In this essay and in his second book, Social Minds in the Novel, Palmer takes the externalist a step further, or rather, he fully develops an idea that was already sketched in his first book by arguing for a contrast between an intramental mind, whose operations take place within the skull, so to speak (though consciousness is always directed toward the external world), and an intermental, or social mind, which is joint, group, shared, or collective thought. The idea of a social or collective is not in itself particularly new nor problematic. Literary critics have long been aware of the existence of collective ideas and of their potential for creating conflict between individuals and the groups they belong to. (Think of the many narratives that focus on the dilemma of people, such as immigrants, who are torn between individual aspirations and loyalty to the values of their native culture.) The various forms of collective thinking, beside cultural values, are stereotypes, rumors, public opinion, folk wisdom, common knowledge and what Roland Barthes calls doxa. Palmer however is not content to study the manifestations of this collective thinking in a particular novel (Middlemarch by George Eliot); he makes the stronger claim that minds are not just what exists within the skull, nor are they something that manifests itself beyond the skin, to use one of his favorite expressions, they quite objectively encompass entities that exist outside themselves. The intermental not only contains representations of other minds, it fuses them together, so that a unitary emerges out of a plurality of connected minds. This is the of the town of Middlemarch, or the of two people who know each other so well that each of them can think for the other. …