Making the World Safe for Narratology: A Reply to Dorrit Cohn

Abstract

According to DoRRiT Cohn's own description in Transparent Minds, free indirect discourse (FID) is a device for rendering a character's thought in his own idiom while maintaining the third-person reference and the basic tense of narration. Flaubert, the technique's consummate master, vividly formulated its paradoxical effect in realist fiction in a letter of 18 March 1857: illusion (if there is one) comes . . . from the impersonality of the work. . . . The artist in his work must be like God in his creation?invisible and all-powerful: he must be everywhere felt, but never seen. Thus, I argue in Imagining the Penitentiary that FID disperses authoritative presence into the very third-person grammar and syntax through which the illusion of con sciousness is created in realist fiction. The technique's historically specific emergence correlates with the array of impersonal authority epitomized in the Panopticon scheme, in which Bentham insisted upon the apparent of the inspector as a structural position rather than a personal attribute. Bentham's idealized plan?never actually built yet refined into ever more ethereal form by its author? revealed that the operational fact of the penitentiary is what he called the principle of inspection, not the person of the inspector. The point is not that the actual inspector-keeper is really omniscient, or even that the principle's operation requires the presence of a personal inspector, but rather that the imputational transparency of Panopticon architec ture?like the third-person position in the narration of consciousness? forces him to be imagined as all knowing. Reformation hinges upon the conviction that omniscience enfolds being. Imagining the Penitentiary does not claim that the inspector, or the narrating grammar in FID, exerts control in obvious ways (as Dorrit Cohn seems to believe) or, indeed, that the realist novel indoctrinates readers. On the contrary, two chapters closely analyzing both Fielding's novelistic practice and his legal career show how the exercise of power began to shift around mid-century from direct, personally embodied actors (like the intrusively omniscient narrator of Tom Jones) to an impersonal, disembodied matrix that established conditions of possibil