Social Minds in the Novel by Alan Palmer (review)

Alan Palmer rightly observes that most existing studies of fiction do not discuss “The Social Mind” of fictional characters, although that concept enriches our understanding of the novel and contains vast heuristic potential for understanding other genres with narrative content, such as theater or film. His main examples, in path-breaking analyses of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, come from nineteenth-century British literature, but they should inspire studies in other areas.

Jane Austen sometimes provides a starting point for studies of the social mind in English literature; these studies often betray confusion between what is represented in her novels (middle-class social life) and the ways that the mental lives of those characters are represented. Social intercommunication in Austen is important, but what particularly distinguishes this novelist is her subtle use of free indirect discourse. In itself, this device does not depict a homodiegetic (storyworld) “social mind” but only a heterodiegetic one, outside the story, comprising communications between two entities (virtual author and virtual reader) who are not necessarily dramatized as characters. Perhaps her greatest achievement is her depiction of the cybernetic (self-correcting) quality of her protagonists’ thoughts, which distinguishes them from lesser characters imprisoned within their initial dispositions. For her admirable characters, Jane Austen masterfully interweaves the inner life and social life. She depicts their self-deception, based on their keen observation of others, and then as self-corrected after further communication with and about those others (as in chapters 34-36 of Pride and Prejudice). Their insights finally receive reward when the characters recognize an appropriate partner. At times, as at the conclusion of Mansfield Park, happy mutual recognition and contentment become general.

For a more complete view of the social mind in fiction, however, one must consider how the “inside” of the storyworld relates to its “outside”—that is, to the integral part of the text that is its frame. At any point in the text, a fictional character can emerge as a narrator who addresses the implied reader (rather than another character). Then this former storyworld character crosses the boundary into the teller-and-listener world in the (heterodiegetic) frame of the story, as in the famous “Reader, I married him” conclusion to Jane Eyre. Then the inner and outer worlds blur. Alan Palmer appropriately focuses on the homodiegetic social mind, but because the storyworlds of the English novel (to mention only that domain) so often mingle with their frames—a practice continued into but not initiated by the nineteenth century—one should trace the social mind in fiction back at least as far as Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, and to the “self-conscious tradition” (Cervantes, Sterne, Romantic ironists such as Byron, etc.); to the picaresque novel, intended to provide a portrait gallery of social milieus; and to satire. However, the nineteenth- century narrator often provides commentary that makes the presence of the social mind more explicit.

It is helpful to begin by unpacking the concept of “The Social Mind” in literature. It varies with each new context, whenever a new element is introduced (example: when a character enters or leaves, a new scene in a play conventionally begins; a new narrative unit in fiction often changes the location, time, or characters present). Beyond that, the social mind has at least five aspects: 1) The sociolect of the storyworld; 2) mutual awareness among the characters; 3) collective activity by the characters; 4) the heterodiegetic sociolect (what the author and the reader both “know”); and 5) heterodiegetic mutual awareness, visible only when transcribed into the text, between the implied author and the implied reader (the banter in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy offers an excellent set of examples). Palmer focuses on the characters, that is, on points 2 and 3.

Both sociolects (items 1 and 4) consist of a collective archive, much of the content of which is culturally relative, fictional, false, or obsolete. Leaving aside embodied cognition and distributed cognition, this archive has two major parts: first, a body of...