The Construction of Fictional Minds

In his introduction to a recently published volume of essays, Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, David Herman explains what is meant by the term "postclassical narratology." He states, "Recently we have witnessed a small but unmistakable explosion of activity in the field of narrative studies; signs of this minor narratological renaissance include the publication of a spate of articles, special issues, and books that rethink and recontextualize classical models for narratological research" (1). He also notes that "Postclassical narratology . . . is marked by a profusion of new methodologies and research hypotheses; the result is a host of new perspectives on the forms and functions of narrative itself" (2-3). Such "recent research has highlighted aspects of narrative discourse that classical narratology either failed or chose not to explore"(2).

This is a response to that stirring call for papers. I suggest that the topic of fictional minds is an area of study that would benefit from a postclassical perspective, because classical narratology has neglected the whole minds of fictional characters in action. At first sight, this may seem to be an implausible claim. What about the study of free indirect discourse? Interior monologue? Focalization? Reflectorization? Characterization? Actants? My answer is that these concepts do not add up to a complete and coherent study of all aspects of the minds of characters in novels. Put another way, several of the devices that are used in the constructions of fictional minds by narrators and readers, such as the role of thought report in describing emotions and the role of behavior descriptions in conveying motivation and intention, have yet to be defamiliarized. As Hegel remarks, "What is 'familiarly known' is not properly known, just for the reason that it is 'familiar'" (92). Manfred Jahn refers, in a different context, to "a number of interesting cognitive mechanisms that have largely remained hidden below both the reader's and the narratologist's threshold of awareness" (168). In my view, this number includes some of the mechanisms that produce the illusion of fictional minds.

Following a critique of what I shall refer to as the "speech category account," I will analyze two very short pieces of narrative discourse in order to start the process of reconceptualizing the issue of fictional minds. This initial sketch is an attempt to begin to create a new and valuable model for the analysis of a crucially important aspect of narrative discourse. It will use what I shall call "parallel discourses" on real minds, such as psycholinguistics, psychology, and the philosophy of mind. As Herman says, postclassical narratology is "an inherently interdisciplinary project" (20). Finally, I shall comment briefly on a few of the ways in which some of the existing narratological approaches can be brought together within a new theoretical perspective and thereby formed into a coherent study of fictional minds.

The following argument lays great stress on the need to examine how fictional minds work within the contexts of the storyworlds to which they belong. Postclassical narratology's attempt to break free from the structuralist purity of classical narratology is also concerned with the question of context. For example, Gerald Prince, in considering the role of gender in narratology, argues that "narrative poetics . . . ought to be more sensitive to the role of context . . . in the production of narrative meaning" (163). He suggests that, "partly because of the growing awareness that narrative must be viewed not only as an object or product but also as an act or process, [and] partly because of the need to account for the variability of narrative message and point . . . a number of narratologists have begun to address explicitly context-dependent questions" (163). Prince has in mind the various real-world, sociocultural contexts in which narratives are produced. However, I will use the notion of context in a more narrow sense to focus on both the context of the whole fictional mind during the analysis of a particular part of that mind, and also on the social and physical context of the storyworld in which...