The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English ed. by David Herman (review)

This volume, the thirteenth to appear in the distinguished Frontiers of Narrative Series edited by David Herman, collects nine essays arranged chronologically to cover "trends in the representation of consciousness in English-Language Narrative Discourse from 700 A.D. to the present" (vii). Through comparison or contrast, many of its observations on character depiction and on the "developmental trajectories" of stories can of course be applied to fictional characters and narratives created in other languages, cultures, and media. The essays aim to inspire research on "narrative universals" such as "constraints on consciousness representation built into narrative as a discourse genre" (3). The book also aspires to promote dialogue among narratologists, philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists (2), not to mention neurologists.

The authors consulted each other closely. They deepen their surveys with "snapshots" analyzing specific passages. At times they evaluate the efficacy of various elements of a text as revelations of character: linguistic categories such as speech acts; modalities of discourse (direct, indirect, and free indirect) (as usual, free direct discourse is the neglected orphan in this range); thought report; and reports on characters' feelings. One finds much less emphasis on framing discourses such as authorial intervention, background, and description (of landscapes, structures, artifacts, and persons), and on the narrator's or implied author's allusions, foreshadowing, or implicatures. On these last two elements, see Gary Saul Morson's noteworthy Narrative and Freedom (Yale, 1996).

David Herman's introduction argues cogently against "the Exceptionality Thesis." Although he concedes that narrative fiction has certain distinctive language patterns and discourse features, such as "verbs of consciousness in third-person contexts, interior monologues, and temporal and spatial adverbs [deictics] referring to the characters' here and now" (7), he disagrees with the claim that "only fictional narratives can give us direct, 'inside' views of characters' minds, and that fictional minds are therefore sui generis" (9). From everyday life, Herman invokes the counter-examples of folk psychology—the body of cultural conventions for inferring and reasoning about other people's reasons for acting—and simulation (the act of psychic projection whereby you "put yourself in another's place" in order to try to understand their motives). He adds a third argument derived from phenomenology: from observing others' facial expressions, gestures, postures, and actions, we can often infer their thoughts and feelings with relative accuracy. Herman concludes: "it is not that folk-psychological abilities support the construction and interpretation of a story of self or others; instead, the construction of the story facilitates reasoning about one's own and others' mental states, in fictional as well as real-world scenarios, by allowing those states to be intermeshed with broader contexts for acting and interacting" (18). He concludes his introduction (23-30) with a diachronic analysis comparing three passages from the 18^th, 19^th, and 21^st centuries respectively. He modestly admits that his comparisons are tenuous, but adds that they "nonetheless indicate the kinds of questions that can be asked, and potentially translated into quantitative, corpus-based procedures of analysis" (29).

At this point, Herman could have reinforced his position by generalizing beyond humans to other highly evolved species. Lest this suggestion seem too far-fetched—and leaving aside fables and anthropopsychic animals—note, for example, the extensive thought reports of animal minds in Ernest Thompson Seton, the memorable evocations of a donkey's and a rooster's sensorium in Driss Chraïbi's The Mother of Spring, and the many accounts of animal teamwork and altruism in other fictions. Neurologists' research with the "mirror neurons" that allow other creatures as well as humans to observe kindred beings and learn from their behavior can be readily confirmed by observations in daily life. For instance, one spring I observed two fledgling robins that had just left their nest. One started eating the seeds that had fallen on the ground from our bird feeders. The other...