Free Indirect Style Research Articles

A Scientific Justification for Literature: Jane Austen’s Free Indirect Style as Ethical Tool

A Scientific Justification for Literature: Jane Austen’s Free Indirect Style as Ethical Tool

Voice and Expressivity in Free Indirect Thought Representations: Imitation and Representation

AbstractThis article addresses issues in the philosophy of fiction from the perspective of a relevance theoretic approach to communication: first, how should we understand the notion of ‘voice’ as it is used in the analysis of free indirect style narratives; and, second, in what sense can the person responsible for free indirect representations of fictional characters' thoughts be regarded as a communicator?The background to these questions is the debate about the roles of pretence and attribution in free indirect style. I argue that the role of expressives in sustaining the illusion that fictional characters speak their inner thoughts suggests that ‘voice’ should be understood in two distinct ways. On the one hand, there are cases in which the use of expressive devices leads to the formation of thoughts which are understood to resemble other (attributed) thoughts. On the other hand, there are other cases in which expressives are used as a means of simulating a fictional character's behaviour or style.At the same time, I argue that in order to accommodate free indirect thought representation in a relevance theoretic model of communication, the responsibility for ensuring that the effort of processing the text will be rewarded by optimal relevance must be decoupled from the point of view that is being represented. While the (constructed) author is responsible for orchestrating our interpretation of free indirect thought representations so that the effort of processing will result in optimal relevance, the reader does not necessarily assume this function is being performed by someone who intends to communicate their own thoughts: the relevance of the act of narration may instead lie in the sense of mutuality achieved between reader and character.

Kate Halsey. Jane Austen and Her Readers, 1786–1945.

Kate Halsey. <i>Jane Austen and Her Readers, 1786–1945</i>.

Subjetividad y espacio en &lt;i&gt;El camino&lt;/i&gt; y &lt;i&gt;Mi idolatrado hijo Sisí&lt;/i&gt;, de Miguel Delibes

This article focuses in the relationships between subject and space in El camino and Mi idolatrado hijo Sisi , by Miguel Delibes. Both novels show the reflection on infantry, the formative process and the environment. An important difference appears in the contrast of city and the country area, symbolically present and past. In the two texts there is not a single thesis about man and society, but what the reader has, through dialogues, third person narrative and free indirect style, is a consciousness deciding freely. When we try to establish a relationship between both novels, their time and space, it seems that the second could be in the origin of a society that produces a critical answer in the reader.

The Creative Voice: Free Indirect Speech in the Cinema of Rohmer and Bresson

This article examines a particular use of the voice in cinema which conveys character reflexivity and generates expressive ambiguity in a film's narrative point of view. Drawing on Pasolini's notion of the free indirect style and Deleuze's elaboration of this into his concept of the free indirect speech-act, two different creative uses of speech are analysed: one in Rohmer's Claire's Knee (1970) and the other in Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951). The essay finds that when characters narrate their thoughts, feelings, actions or experiences in a reflexive manner (that is, to themselves, even if also to another), and this activity becomes for a time the primary event of the film, these characters step into the role of storyteller. They become both subject and object of their utterances which take on the style of the free indirect. With this, the voice enters into a new relationship with the image – directing, counterpointing, or disconnecting from it – changing the function of voice and image while seeming momentarily to supplant the film's narration. The symbolic nature of language gives words the power to create images and meaning that cannot be captured or conveyed by the camera alone. Privileging speech as a creative force not only dimensionalises character but, on a formal level, creates a role for voice that allows it to exist not as an appendage to the image but for its own sake. In order to suggest practical uses for these theoretical considerations, Bresson's and Rohmer's reflections on the role of the voice are also discussed.

The Beast's Storied End

The best readings of James's "The Beast in the Jungle"—by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Leo Bersani—regret its ending; these very different accounts agree that James there merges with his character. Exploring free indirect style, prospopoeia, and apostrophe, this essay examines two series of "faces" in the text—one figuring knowledge acknowledged or evaded, the other performing linguistic acts of address. The often incoherent anatomies to which their intercalation gives birth signals the complexity of voice and knowledge in James's tale. Reconsidering the story's end, the essay also reflects on vicariousness, voice, and knowledge in Sedgwick's epochal, field-founding essay.

Cinematic Free Indirect Style: Represented Memory in Hiroshima mon amour

Cinematic Free Indirect Style:Represented Memory in Hiroshima mon amour Leah Anderst (bio) He: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing. She: I saw everything. Everything. —Duras 151 These opening lines of Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour inaugurate the film's focus on vision and highlight its distrust of vision as a form of knowledge. She, a French actress, a tourist about to depart, wants to see Hiroshima. She wants to know the city, the remains of its traumatic history; and the monuments it has erected to preserve that history. He, a Japanese architect living in Hiroshima, knows that she cannot "see" the city, cannot know its past through her vision. And so he disputes her vision of Hiroshima; he disputes her knowledge of his city and his past. "From the first moments of Hiroshima mon amour, therefore, the central epistemological question of the film is laid out for us: how and what can we 'know,' through the epistemological instrument of the gaze" (Craig 27). Film narrates by "seeing" scenes and images, and it narrates with sound and with editing. Hiroshima mon amour interrogates not just seeing but also cinematic agency and narration, especially narrative representation of memory and history. This film narrates memory, and it narrates history. In the fabric of its narration, however, in its use of cinematic free indirect style, Hiroshima mon amour creates moments of "plural narration," moments of dual or multi-visioned seeing where narrative agency becomes uncertain, and the film thereby dramatizes the difficulty of capturing history and memory through narrative. Hiroshima mon amour tells the story of the brief love affair between an unnamed Japanese architect played by Eiji Okada and Emmanuelle Riva's unnamed actress on her final day shooting a film that takes place in Hiroshima. The film opens with a [End Page 358] fifteen-minute prefatory sequence, a series of scenes that juxtapose close-up images of the lovers' bodies embracing with images of Hiroshima. The two characters speak over the Hiroshima images, and their voices are "flat and calm, as if reciting" (Duras 15). With its combination of voice-over narration, documentary and fictional images, and a score that at times complements the images and at other times conflicts with them, this opening takes advantage of cinema's multiple tracks to move between perspectives and distinct registers of discourse. This opening establishes the multiple cinematic perspectives that will "see" and narrate this film. The first portion of the opening sequence details what Riva saw while visiting Hiroshima: a hospital, a museum visited four times, and a public square. The image track matches her slow and deliberate voice-over narration. We see the hospital, the museum, and the square while she describes them in voice-over. Among these images are short intercut scenes of the lovers' bodies. Following a shot of the hospital corridor, following an image of Peace Square outside the museum, following explanations and ephemera related to the dropping of the bomb, and following reenactments and archival newsreels documenting the bomb's immediate aftermath, the scene cuts to extreme close-up shots of the intertwined arms of the two lovers. Complementing this visual return is a corresponding return on the sound track. This opening sequence begins with a slow, melancholy series of notes that becomes the musical "theme" of Riva and Okada's relationship. Each time the image cuts away from Riva's descriptions of Hiroshima and back to their lovemaking, the sound track marks the same change, even if only for the duration of two or three notes. In one of the newsreels of this opening, injured children and adults receive care in a crowded hospital, and Riva's voice-over narration remains present over these images. Nurses and doctors lightly dab the victims' deep wounds and burnt skin with small pieces of cotton while Riva speaks. "Hiroshima was blanketed with flowers" she says, "there were cornflowers and gladiolas everywhere, and morning glories and day lilies that rose again from the ashes with an extraordinary vigor, quite unheard of for flowers till then" (Duras 19). As we watch these victims receiving care, Riva describes a city covered in flowers, a city in the process of rebirth...

On the descriptive ineffability of expressive meaning

This paper addresses the question of whether there can be a unitary account of expressive meaning by considering the descriptive ineffability of expressives such as damn or bastard, on the one hand, and certain kinds of repetition, on the other. Drawing on my (2002) work on the semantics of discourse markers and Wharton's (2009) work on the pragmatics of non-verbal communication, I show, first, that the notion of procedural meaning can provide an explanation for the descriptive ineffability of expressives such as damn; and, second, that why linguistic expressives are similar to non-linguistic expressive behaviour such as gesture and tone of voice. Finally, I show that the descriptive ineffability of expressive meanings conveyed by repetition must be given a different sort of explanation. In particular, it follows from the hearer's assumption that the processing effort entailed by the repetition can be offset by weakly communicated cognitive effects – effects which the speaker trusts the hearer to derive for himself on the basis of his memory and imagination. The paper concludes by speculating on why these two different sorts of expressive meaning are not distinguished in work on free indirect style (cf. Banfield, 1982; Fludernik, 1993).

Viewpoint and construction grammar: The case of past + now

The combination of a past tense verb with a proximal deictic has been identified in the literature as one of the formal markings of free indirect style (Adamson, 1995). In this article, I examine corpus-derived, non-literary occurrences of the pattern, arguing that construction grammar can provide an adequate, all-encompassing framework for both literary and non-literary uses. Defined as conventional pairings of meaning and form, constructions can accommodate all kinds of semantic, pragmatic, discoursal and textual information as part of their meaning. In the case of the past + now pattern such specifications include a particular discourse or text type, namely narrative, which is the licensing context, and whose conventional association with the particular form constitutes precisely a distinct (discourse) construction. Within this constructional context, the past tense makes a predictable, compositional contribution while the present deictic suppresses part of its meaning signalling instead an anchoring to the current experience, thought, perception of the other. Where present, the progressive aspect enhances further this shift in perspective in a way fully consistent with its basic (non-truth conditional, cognitively defined) semantics. I attempt to show that a constructional approach to past + now may therefore pinpoint the source of the viewpoint effect associated with the pattern in all its uses, and illuminate the relationship of free indirect style with constructions of non-literary discourse.

The roots of a literary style: Joyce’s presentation of consciousness in Ulysses

In this article I explore the controversial issue of the origin of free indirect style. While its most rigorous analyst, Banfield (1982), claims that the style is purely literary and cannot be found in ordinary spoken discourse, Adamson (1994) has located its origin in everyday linguistic practices, such as empathetic deixis and quotative modality. I add a new dimension to the study of these issues by moving beyond the level of individual sentences. In particular, I focus on referential choices for the designation of characters. My case-study is Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel which Leavis (1948) once characterized with trademark polemic as a ‘dead end’. By way of contrast, Wales’s study of its language claims for it the highest praise by dint of the text’s exemplary Bakhtinian polyphony. I complicate the Bakhtinian reading of Joyce by not taking dialogicity to mean simply a co-existence of different discourse varieties, but by trying to find parallels between the presentation of character consciousness and spoken interaction. My examples of Joyce’s use of pronouns to refer to characters in free indirect style seem to create discourse inconsistencies (often interpreted with regard to the disintegration of the Modernist self), rather than allow readers to interpret pronominal references automatically. I argue that the best way to account for this bizarre strategy is by aligning it to spoken discourse where vague pronominal references, in the form of personal and demonstrative pronouns, are commonly found. The argument advanced by spoken discourse analysts, that the construction and understanding of reference is a joint endeavour of speaker and addressee, allows me to construct Joyce’s text as dialogical in Bakhtinian terms and thus locate once again the origin of free indirect style in everyday discourse.

Unspeakable Phrases: The Tragedy of Point of View in Nadine Gordimer's &lt;em&gt;Get a Life&lt;/em&gt;

The fragmentary and interruptive style of Nadine Gordimer’s novel Get a Life has met some critical resistance. This article defends the continuity of Gordimer’s late-modernist writing and accounts for stylistic anomalies by invoking the narrative productivity of free indirect style. In Gordimer’s expert hands, this device serves the broader ideological agenda of dramatizing a plural consciousness ailed by dislocation, inertness, and unspeakableness. The novel thus unfolds as a tragedy of point of view, a vocal drama of moral representativeness climaxed in a “crisis of authority” (Gramsci). The centrality in the novel of the term quarantine attests to Gordimer’s enduring concern with the persistency of the South African interregnum , an exceptional sociopolitical condition hindering both utopian commitment and moral agency. Get a Life enacts this stasis through a verbal performance characterized by an unspeakable (yet readable) multivoicedness which however manages to yield the modernist hope of “another life.”

Communication and the representation of thought: The use of audience-directed expressions in free indirect thought representations

This paper examines the use of audience-directed or inherently communicative expressions (discourse markers and interjections) in free indirect thought representations in fiction. It argues that the insights of Banfield's (1982) no-narrator approach to free indirect style can be accommodated in a relevance theoretic framework. The result is an account in which the author's act of revealing a character's thoughts communicates a guarantee of optimal relevance – a guarantee which justifies the effort which the reader invests in deriving meta-representations of those thoughts from the evidence which the author provides. However, the reward for this effort is a meta-representation of a character's thoughts which is unmediated by the thoughts of the author who is responsible for producing the text. Using examples from fiction, I show that within this framework, the use of procedurally encoded discourse markers and interjections contribute to this sense of immediacy by imposing constraints on interpretation which leave the reader with the responsibility for deriving his own interpretations of a character's thoughts and thought processes.

Parentheticals and point of view in free indirect style

This article explores the functions of parentheticals in Free Indirect Style (FIS), and in particular their role in enabling the author to represent thoughts from a variety of perspectives — including his own. I argue that while there is a sense in which a FIS text can achieve relevance by creating a sense of mutuality that is unmediated by the presence of the author, there are also features which allow the author to signal his own attitudes towards the characters whose thoughts he is representing. Indeed, as Dillon and Kirchhoff (1976) and Fludernik (1993) have shown, an author is able to communicate a sense of ironic distance even if he does not necessarily explicitly comment on his characters. Using examples from Katherine Mansfield, Malcolm Lowry and Virginia Woolf, I show that parentheticals play a role both in establishing a sense of affective mutuality between reader and character and in establishing a sense of irony by placing represented thoughts in a ludicrous light.

Apposition and affective communication

This article focuses on the rhetorical effects of structures that involve the apposition of two (or more) segments with similar, but not identical, interpretations — for example, He felt depressed, flattened. Building on existing relevance theoretic accounts of poetic effects, it aims to show how these structures can be used to communicate an impression of emphasis or intensification that can be compared with the effects achieved by repetitions. It argues that these effects are not achieved in the same way, and that three different cases can be distinguished. First, the use of this structure may lie in the way it encourages the reader to explore the differences between the interpretation of the second segment and the interpretation of the first. Second, it may encourage the reader to explore the total set of contextual assumptions made accessible by both (or all) segments for the derivation of an interpretation that cannot be derived from any one segment alone. Finally, the article considers the use of these structures by authors who use free indirect style to represent a character's struggle to identify an emotion s/he is experiencing.

Pastiche

Before reading Richard Dyer's new book, I had never thought of pastiche as being much more than a superficial aesthetic mannerism, a way of evoking outmoded forms of representation through stylistic imitation. Dyer, however, corrects such a commonplace yet limited understanding of the term. Pastiche, he argues, not only has a robust, lively and varied history in film, music, art and literature, but is a significant means of representing historicity in terms of feeling. Dyer recognizes that pastiche is itself a loose term to start with; hence the difficulty in discerning it, let alone in identifying it categorically with the eye of a critic. The looseness, he explains, is semantic. ‘Pastiche’ is contiguous with many other terms for ‘copying’ and these are too often treated as its synonyms: plagiarism, forgery, hoax, homage, parody. To be sure, much like those other terms, pastiche involves imitation and is often readable as a straightforward and uncritical ‘copy’. But pastiche does not imitate in the sense of achieving an exact reproduction; in contrast with, say, a plagiarism or a forgery, the point of a pastiche is not to be indistinguishable from its source. The term's looseness, furthermore, has to do with its origin in ‘pasticcio’, an Italian word that initially referred to a pie combining various ingredients yet without fully blending them together and hiding their distinctive flavours. From the perspective offered by the pasticcio's flavourful mixture, Dyer demonstrates how pastiche involves combination as well as imitation – or more precisely, it can readily and promiscuously combine imitations without regard to formal wholeness or generic unity. A text that pastiches can therefore be hybridic and heterogeneous, mixing modes, genres or styles; or it can set off what is being pastiched by framing it within a primary narrative that does not pastiche (as in the play within a play in Hamlet or the ‘Follies’ numbers in the Sondheim musical Follies); or it can more seamlessly incorporate pastiche within another discourse (as in the free indirect style of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary).

Reader responses to narrative point of view

This empirical study addresses a problem in the analysis of free indirect style, one of the linguistic forms used for the presentation of narrative viewpoint. Free indirect style, or the presentation of speech, thought and perception has been a contentious issue in linguistic and literary scholarship inviting conflicting theoretical accounts. The empirical study reported here contributes to this debate by presenting reader responses to point of view in a passage from Sons and Lovers, with the aim of replacing critics’ idealisations of the form and function of free indirect style with real readers’ interpretations. I discuss the results from the experiment in light of two hypotheses put forward for the interpretation of the style: the single and the dual voice hypothesis. I also try to correlate the informants’ interpretations with formal features of the technique elicited by theoreticians. The outcome shows that dual voice, as well as single voice, is a prominent interpretative choice that readers make and so I conclude that linguistic theories of the style should reflect these spontaneous readerly intuitions. The responses also raise questions about the analysis of free indirect style as discourse, showing that discourse links interact with linguistic indicators of voice in complex ways, a fact that has to be accounted for in a discourse theory of free indirect style.

Early Discussions of Free Indirect Style

Early Discussions of Free Indirect Style

Connectives in Free Indirect Style: Continuity or Shift?

This article re-examines the role of connectives in free indirect style. Connectives in sentence-initial position have been singled out as a marker of the style because of their frequency in spoken discourse (Fludernik, 1993). They have also been analysed as continuative devices which help the reader to sustain an already established interpretation of perspective across sentences of free indirect style (Ehrlich, 1990). My concern here is with a newly exemplified role of connectives to shift perspective and I have selected passages from D. H. Lawrence which have elicited critical comment in relation to point of view (Adamson, 1995; Baron, 1998). I turn to the contribution of conversation analysis and correlate the uses of connectives turn-initially with their use at points of perspectival shifts. My main conclusion is that connectives also relate viewpoints to each other much in the way that they relate utterances in conversation. Finally, this correlation between the interactive role of connectives and their shifting role in point of view presentation bears on the theories of free indirect style more generally. It strongly supports Bakhtin’s dialogical model.

The Tested Woman Plot: Women's Choices, Men's Judgments and the Shaping of Stories by Lois E. Bueler (review)

MLRy 99.1, 2004 151 poetry was a form of knowledge. Nevertheless, Peter Robinson has done wonderful things with Searle's narrow categories. University of Plymouth Alan Munton The Tested Woman Plot: Women's Choices, Men's Judgmentsand theShapingof Stories. By Lois E. Bueler. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2001. viii + 312 pp. $50. ISBN 0-8142-0872-x. In this study Lois Bueler argues for the existence and importance of a plot type: the tested-woman story. This concerns not just any woman or any test; it is an archetype that begins in the ancient world and lasts until the twentieth century,when, Bueler argues, the weakening of patriarchy reduces it to a cultural echo, albeit still a resonant one. Tracking this archetype through differenteras and genres, she uses narratology, loosely inflected by structuralism, to identify the functions of this plot and the characters who are its vehicle. Historicism explains differences between eras: so Bueler argues that sensibility in the late eighteenth century requires characters to develop their own moral agency in response to a declining patriarchal authority; hence women's choices are less dependent on men's judgements, which is why Fanny Price's struggles to maintain her integrity are lonely, silent, and interior ones, and manifested in free indirect style. Bueler's premiss poses methodological problems for everyone?what is the relationship between culture and literary form? Can you write a book about what you see as a transhistorical literary phenomenon without oversimplifying the twin history of ideas and forms which that literary phenomenon expresses? There are few models for this, as the author observes: we do not know in much depth how literary plots work across periods and genres, and perhaps one has to start with breadth, which this book certainly supplies. Bueler offersa balancing act in which she combines attention to context with read? ings of texts meant to exemplify cultural tendencies and changes. Whether you think this works depends on your predilection for lucid summaries of orthodox ideas and your approval ofthe texts selected. Some less obvious choices, like Charles Johnson's play Caelia (1732), contrast imaginatively with the largely canonical field. Bueler is more specific about patriarchy as ideology than practice?Filmer's Patriarcha does its usual star turn as a repository of ideas about male authority in overlapping domestic and political institutions?yet in her readings of texts she shows a sensitivity to genre that helps explain the functions and nuances of tested-women plots as they differ between classical, biblical, medieval, Renaissance, neo-classical, Enlightenment, and nineteenth-century stories. Against that generic diversity, she puts an insistence that tested-women plots are actually as much about men as women. Women's choices, especially their sexual choices, appear to be the substance ofthe tested-woman plot, but Bueler sees the point as being much more to dramatize competition between men. She is alert to the functions of fathers and brothers, tempters and seducers, and how they are consonant with patriarchal ideas of hierarchy and authority available to the authors discussed. Her range of texts offerssomething to everyone: from Euripides' Iphigenia inAulis to William Trevor's Felicia }sJourney,with special attention given to works by John Ford and Samuel Richardson. How farwomen writers adopted rather than adapted the tested-woman plot is discussed with reference to novels by Austen, Eliot, and Gaskell, though were iiterary' to be defined more widely, there would be plenty of other and earlier comparisons to make. One misses a sense of ideological contestation through literature, and given how important these stories make trial set? tings, evidence, judgement, and punishment, a nod to juridical thought would have been helpful. Yet the continuities are thought-provoking?echoes of Milton's take on 152 Reviews the tested woman, Eve, turn up in Adam Bede?and Bueler's readings refresh one's sense of how archetypes operate in historical moments. More importantly, she wants to explain why. The challenges of such a project make this book as interesting as its success in meeting them. King's College London Clare Brant The Heege Manuscript: A Facsimile of National Library of Scotland MS Advocates ig.j.i. Intro. by Phillipa Hardman. (Leeds Texts and...

A Gustave Flaubert Encyclopedia (review)

Laurence Porter and a hard-working team of Flaubert scholars have accomplished the daunting task of assembling an encyclopedia devoted to Flaubert's life and literary works. The book will be a valuable resource for Flaubert specialists as well as for students and nonspecialists. Entries treat not only Flaubert's major works but also his unpublished projects and juvenilia. Historical and biographical information features prominently, and includes places (e.g., Rouen, Croisset, Paris, Trouville), events (e.g., the Franco-Prussian War), nineteenth-century critics (e.g., Sainte-Beuve), family and acquaintances, cultural and aesthetic tendencies (e.g., roman-ticism, classicism, orientalism, postmodernism), as well as relevant physiological and psychological phenomena such as disease, neurosis, sadism, androgyny, fetishism, and the œdipus complex. One also finds entries for writers and philosophers who influenced Flaubert or were influenced by him (e.g., Nabokov, Faulkner, and Tolstoy; Sartre, Spinoza, and Hegel). A number of essays deal deftly with such hallmarks of Flaubert's style as irony, free indirect style, indeterminacy, and focalization.