is white, until someone points out, as Abel’s black friend Lula Fragd did, that
Hendrix was more popular with whites than blacks. Similarly, many black
readers might assume, as Fragd did, that Roberta’s anti-bussing stance and her
affluence mark her as white, until they learn, as Abel did from Morrison her-
self, that Morrison gives Roberta’s husband a position with IBM because that
company had a program for recruiting black executives in the 1970s (Morrison
does not regard this information as indicating that Roberta is black but rather
as helping to keep the question of her race open) (Abel 470–77).
We can now answer the question about the ethics of Morrison’s telling.
Morrison is far from the high-culture equivalent of a Mean Girl because the
effects of her withholding are to engage her audience more fully in this pro-
cess of unpacking the multiple, inescapable, and yet unstable markers we use
to assign race and class in American culture. This engagement makes the read-
ing experience not fruitless and frustrating but revealing and rewarding.
NARRATIVE PROGRESSION, SOCIAL MINDS, AND A
PROBABLE IMPLAUSIBILITY IN “RECITATIF”
As I noted above, Palmer distinguishes between internalist and external-
ist perspectives on the mind, with the internalist perspective emphasizing
“those aspects that are inner, introspective, private, solitary, individual, psy-
chological, mysterious, and detached” and the externalist emphasizing “those
aspects that are outer, active, public, social, behavioral, evident, embodied,
and engaged” (Social Minds 39). Palmer notes that the perspectives are com-
plementary, not competing, but also contends that previous work on fictional
minds has been far more influenced by the internalist perspective than the
externalist. He sets out to redress the balance, paying special attention to rep-
resentations of “social minds” characterized by “intermental thought,” that is,
“joint, group, shared, or collective” cognition (41). Palmer maintains that the
representation of social minds “looms large as a technique and as a subject
matter” in the history of the novel. Significantly, from the perspective of rhe-
torical theory, Palmer goes on to add that “techniques and subject matters are
parts of novels, not purposes of them. They are means rather than ends. What
matters, ultimately, is the purpose to which a particular sort of consciousness
representation is put” (63).^6
- Full disclosure: Palmer included these qualifications in response to my reader’s report
on the manuscript of Social Minds. Here’s the relevant passage from my report: “It seems to
me that the representation of consciousness looms large as a technique and as a subject matter
in all the novels Palmer discusses but techniques and subject matters are parts of novels not
158 • CHAPTER 8