Centers of Consciousness Reconsidered

Abstract

Debates over the definition of various forms of the style indirect libre (free indirect style) continue to rage. After seventy years of scholarly activity there is still argument whether some of its fundamental aspects constitute a linguistically identifiable phenomenon. For the vast majority of FIS1 specialists, including Dorrit Cohn (1978) and Roy Pascal (1977) who have contributed major studies to it in the last few years, the most intriguing and esthetically the most fruitful element in speech and thought is its voice, the presence of a dual consciousness in what may appear as a univocal, objective text. In the case of Flaubert, at least, it would seem that to attribute unidimensional features to FIS is to negate its essence. It is precisely its multi-dimensional, indeterminate and unpredictable quality that marks its uniqueness as a stylistic device. It is a of discursive shell game, a contextual prestidigitation, in which the givens, the various pieces or elements of narrative discourse, are subject without warning to a translation from one level to another, to an unexpected expansion or contraction of their context in such a way as to keep the reader of Flaubert perpetually off his guard (Jameson 1979). Recent efforts to demonstrate the impossibility of the existence of more than one consciousness in any one sentence or expression, to prove the univocal nature of represented speech and thought, involve the extension of so-called non-reflective consciousness to the expression of feelings. The distinction between reflective and non-reflective consciousness is based on the notion that postulates the existence of two levels of consciousness: one that indicates full intellectual knowledge, and the other a kind of subconscious awareness, usually a sensory perception. One level denotes, in Bertrand