Socializing the Narrative Mind

Why is the relationship between and individual forms of mind so central to narrative fiction, indeed, to all narrative? The answer is as straightforward as is compelling: It is central to our life--it is central to the and cultural forms of life that constitute the human being in the world, a being that is essentially characterized by and through the use of that involute kind of language we call narrative. Not surprisingly, thus, the idea that human life and mind (or consciousness or thought) are inextricably individual and has haunted not only literary and narrative studies bur most human sciences since their inception. To be sure, there is a gamut of approaches, from the more internally-focused psychology, philosophy, and psychiatry to the more externally-focused history, sociology, and anthropology--a range reiterated within each disciplinary matrix. Clifford Geertz, for one, has described the entire history of anthropology as a continuous struggle to understand the cultural nature of the mind by bringing, as was variously put, individual and social, inner and outer, private and public, psychological and historical, experiential and behavioral into an intelligible relationship; and Jerome Bruner has sketched a similar history of psychology centering on the tension between the individual and the cultural--to name just two, albeit crucial, figures in the field. But there is another question that arises from cultural studies of the mind such as those by Geertz and Bruner, and here the answer is more complicated. This is whether is not precisely this presumption--that what is problematic and needs to be determined is, in Geertz's terms, some sort of bridging connection between the world within the individual mind (or brain) and the world outside of it--which brings up the problem in the first place? In this view, the problem results from a categorical (or epistemological) distinction imposed upon a seamless real-world dynamic, a view that owes much to Wittgenstein's radical critique of the idea of a private language. Wittgenstein changed the terms of the game. Since his deconstruction of the assumption that an individual has privileged access to his or her private mind and the consequent socialization of meaning and language--as proposed by cultural-historical psychologist Lev Vygotsky--the location of mind in the head and culture outside of it no longer seems to be more than obvious and incontrovertible common sense, to use again the words of Geertz. In fact, Geertz and many other cultural and linguistic anthropologists, discourse and conversation analysts, and cultural, discursive and narrative psychologists in the wake of Vygotsky and Bruner, have essentially contributed to carrying out the Wittgensteinian turn in our understanding of mind and culture. It is against this backdrop that I read Alan Palmer's forceful plea for taking seriously the mode of narrative he calls intermental and which he links to social minds. It is through this mode, Palmer argues, that narrative--his focus is on novels but his arguments surely reach farther--gives shape to phenomena such as discourses, collective thinking, and forms of consciousness that are constituted by more than one thinking, talking, and feeling individual. Solidly moored in philosophical and human-scientific traditions that conceive of the mind and the plethora of phenomena associated with as not only confined to the individual brain but embodied and widely distributed in practices and cultural artifacts, Palmer's Wittgensteinian turn in narrative studies and literary analysis is another convincing move within the new and impressively expanding field of post-classical narrative studies. This move is all the more significant in light of the long standing predominance of internalist and mentalist approaches to the understanding of literature; joins other post-classical shifts that offer new views of the narrative mind. …

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