University of Oregon

Narrated Monologue: Definition of a Fictional Style

Author(s): Dorrit Cohn
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring, 1966), pp. 97-112
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1770156 .
Accessed: 31/05/2012 14:37
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
University of Oregon and Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Comparative Literature.
http://www.jstor.org
volume xviii
spring
g966
number 2
DORRIT COHN
^
Narrated Monologue:
Definition of a
Fictional S ty le
XJ 'ET
S HE COULD NOT be
purely
this,
this
thing
of sheer
reciprocity . S urely , though
her
woman's
nature was
reciprocal
to his
male, surely
it was more than that!
S urely
he and she were not
two
potent
and
reciprocal
currents between which the
Morning
S tar
flashed like a
spark
out of nowhere.
S urely
this was not it ?
S urely
she
had one
tiny Morning
S tar inside
her,
which was
herself,
her own
very
soul and star-self !"1 The
foregoing
is from a
lengthy
section in D. H.
Lawrence's The Plumed
S erpent,
in which Kate Leslie reflects about
her Mexican "demon lover." The character's consciousness is rendered
in an idiom that is so habitual in modem fiction that its
sty listic
pe-
culiarities
pass
unnoticed. If we
stop
to
analy ze,
we find that the re-
flecting
mind is
presented
in the third
person
and in the
customary epic
tense of
narration,
the
preterite.
But at the same time the
sy ntactical
structure is that of direct
discourse,
with the
rhy thms
of
spoken
lan-
guage
rendered
through exclamations,
rhetorical
questions, repetitions
("surely ... surely ... surely ")
and
exaggerated emphases ("one tiny
Morning S tar";
"her own
very
soul and
star-self"). By changing
all
the verbs to the
present tense,
and the
appropriate third-person
pro-
nouns to the first
person,
we
get
Kate's inner voice in direct
quotation.
"S urely
this is not it?
S urely
I have one
tiny Morning
S tar inside
me,
which is
my self..."
Our
quotation
from Lawrence is an
example
of the narrative
sty le
that German critics call erlebte Rede. It can be most
succinctly
de-
1
The Plumed
S erpent (London, 1955), p.
386.
97
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
scribed as the
rendering
of a character's
thoughts
in his own
idiom,
while
maintaining
the
third-person
form of narration. Its
transposition
into
present
tense and first
person,
as we have
seen, y ields
an interior
monologue.
It would
appear
from our
example,
then,
that these two
techniques
for
rendering
a character's
psy che
differ
only by simple
grammatical
details. But when we see erlebte Rede in a
surrounding
epic context,
its distinctiveness becomes clear:
by maintaining
the
per-
son and tense of authorial
narration,
it enables the author to recount
the character's silent
thoughts
without a break in the narrative thread.
This
may
be observed in an
example
from a different
text;
in A Portrait
of
the
Artist,
Joy ce
describes
S tephen waiting
for confession:
The slide was shot to
suddenly .
The
penitent
came out. He was next. He stood
up
in terror and walked
blindly
to the box.
At last it had come. He knelt in the silent
gloom
and raised his
ey es
to the
white crucifix
suspended
above him. God could see that he was
sorry .
He would
tell all his sins. His
confession
would be
long, long. Every body
in the
chapel
would
know then what a sinner he had been. Let them know. It was true. But God had
promised
to
forgive
him
if
he was
sorry .
He was
sorry .
He
clasped
his hands and
raised them toward the white
form, pray ing
with his darkened
ey es, pray ing
with
all his
trembling body , sway ing
his head to and fro like a lost
creature, pray ing
with
whimpering lips.2
Unlike Kate's
thoughts, S tephen's-which
are not italicized in the
orig-
inal-are
presented
in alternation with outer
happenings, including
his
own actions. He
waits,
stands
up, kneels,
raises his
ey es, clasps
and
raises his
hands, and so forth. At the same time he thinks his
thoughts
of fervent
penitence
in erlebte Rede form
(past
tense3 and third
per-
son).
If we
transpose
this
passage
to the first
person
and
present tense,
as we did for the Lawrence
quote,
we
get:
The slide is shot to
suddenly .
The
penitent
comes out. I am next. I stand
up
in terror and walk
blindly
to the box.
At last it has come. I kneel in the silent
gloom
and raise
my
hands to the
crucifix
suspended
above me. God can see that I am
sorry ...
It is
hardly necessary
to continue the
experiment
to make it
apparent
that this
transposition
cannot be
successfully accomplished.
It can
render
effectively only S tephen's thoughts,
not his actions. "The slide
is shot to
suddenly " may
still
pass
as a brief moment of narrative
pres-
ent. But "I
clasp my
hands and raise them" takes on the tone of an
athletics instructor
explaining
an exercise: an internal
monologue
that
2A Portrait
of
the Artist as a
Young
Man
(New York, 1928), p.
165.
3
The deviation from
past
tense to conditional and
pluperfect
is
explained
in
n. 23.
98
NARRATED MONOLOGUE
related a character's actions as he
performed
them would be unrealistic
and almost ridiculous.4
An
entirely
different situation arises if we
change
to the first
person
while
remaining
in the
past
tense:
The slide was shot to
suddenly .
The
penitent
came out. I was next. I stood
up
in terror and walked
blindly
to the box.
At last it had come. I knelt in the silent
gloom
and raised
my ey es
to the white
crucifix
suspended
above me. God could see that I was
sorry ... But God had
promised
to
forgive
me if I was
sorry ...
In this
idiom, S tephen's
actions and the events around him take on an
acceptable, though considerably
altered look. The reader now sees the
scene out of the
perspective
of the
reminiscing
hero,
across the
span
of
time that
separates
the
narrating
self from the
experiencing self,
and
the
immediacy
of the
experience
has been lost. When we come to
S tephen's
reflections and
feelings, however, they have,
in the new cir-
cumstances,
become
altogether incongruous.
S uch
thoughts
as "God
could see that I was
sorry "
can no
longer
be
distinguished
from the
rest of the narration and
thereby
lose their
quality
as
meditation,
be-
coming quasi-factual report.
A
first-person
narrator cannot
ordinarily
tell his
thoughts
in a
past
situation without
introducing
them
("I
thought
to
my self")
and
presenting
them as indirect or direct dis-
course.5
Our two unviable
transpositions
have shown that a narrative situa-
tion
using
the first
person,
whether it can be couched in the continuous
present
of an interior
monologue
or in the remembered
past
of first-
person
narration cannot
represent
the inner and outer scene with
nearly
the same
degree
of
continuity
and
simultaneity
as the
third-person
mode
of narration found in the
Joy ce passage. Through
its use of erlebte
Rede,
the text can weave in and out of
S tephen's mind,
can
glide
from
narrator to character and back
again
without
perceptible
transitions.
By allowing
the same tense to describe the individual's view of
reality
and that
reality itself,
inner and outer world become
one,
eliminating
explicit
distance between the narrator and his creature. Two
linguistic
levels,
inner
speech
with its
idiosy ncrasy
and author's
report
with its
quasi-objectivity ,
become fused into
one,
so that the same current
seems to
pass through narrating
and
figural
consciousness. Erlebte
Rede thus
captures
the
spirit
and
sty le
of interior
monologue
within
4
I am aware that there are
exceptions:
Kafka's
story
"Der Landarzt" is told
in the first
person
and
largely
in the
present
tense. But this article is concerned
with
standard,
not
exceptional
narrative situations.
5
Again,
there are
exceptions.
Faulkner's The S ound and the
Fury
is
mostly
told in
first-person monologues
that use the
past
tense.
99
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
the texture of a
third-person story ,
and at the same time casts the im-
mediacy
of the
present experience
into a
past
narrative.
In both France and
Germany ,
erlebte Rede has been the
subject
of
critical discussion ever since it was first identified at the
beginning
of
the
century .6
In French
sty listics
it bears the name
"sty le
indirect
libre,"
more
unwieldly
but less
imprecise
than the German term. The first stu-
dents of erlebte Rede were
grammarians
and
linguists. But,
since lit-
erary scholarship
in both these countries maintains a close
relationship
with
philology
and
sty listics,
the
phenomenon
was soon discussed in
the context of narrative
prose by
such eminent
literary
scholars as Leo
S pitzer,
Oskar
Walzel,
and Albert Thibaudet.7 Of
late,
there has been
a revival of interest in erlebte Rede in
Germany ,
which has thrown new
light
not
only
on this narrative mode
itself,
but also on the evolution of
the modern novel and the
phenomenology
of the fictional
genre.8
The virtual
neglect
of erlebte Rede in
Anglo-American
criticism
would seem to indicate that in the
study
of fictional
technique
bounda-
ries of
language
still have a
tangible
existence.9 S cholars
writing
in
6
S everal of the
early
articles on erlebte Rede
appeared
in the Germanisch-
romanische
Monatsschrift
before World War
I, notably
those of Charles
Bally
and
Eugen
Lerch.
During
the 1920s the
following
books discussed the
subject
at
length:
Etienne
Lorck,
Die "erlebte Rede"
(Heidelberg, 1921) ; Marguerite Lips,
Le
S ty le
indirect libre
(Paris, 1926);
Werner
Gunther,
Probleme der Rededar-
stellung (Marburg, 1928).
7
Leo
S pitzer,
S tilstudien
(Munich, 1922), II, 166-207, 421-422, 478-482,
and
"Zur
Entstehung
der
sog.
'erlebten
Rede,'" GRM,
XVI
(1928),
327
ff.;
Oskar
Walzel, "Von 'erlebter Rede'" in Das Wortkunstwerk
(Leipzig, 1926);
Albert
Thibaudet,
Gustave Flaubert
(Paris, 1935), pp.
246-254.
8
S ee
esp.
Kate
Hamburger,
"Zum
S trukturproblem
der
epischen
und drama-
tischen
Dichtung," DVLG,
XXV
(1951), 1-26;
"Das
epische Praeteritum,"
DVLG,
XXVII
(1953), 329-357;
Die
Logik
der
Dichtung (S tuttgart, 1957), pp.
72-114;
Franz
S tanzel,
Die
ty pischen
Ersihlsituationen im Roman
(Vienna,
1955), pp. 145-156; "Episches Praeteritum,
erlebte
Rebe,
historisches
Praesens,"
DVLG,
XXXIII
(1959), 1-12;
Norbert
Miller,
"Erlebte und verschleierte
Rede,"
Aksente,
V
(1958),
213-225.
9
To
my knowledge,
the
only
discussions of erlebte Rede available in
English
are the
following:
the article
by
the German
Anglicist
Bernard Fehr
(quoted
in
n.
12),
who coins the
English
name
"substitutionary speech"
for the
sty le;
the
passing
mention
by
Erich Auerbach in Mimesis
(trans.
Willard Trask
[New
York,
1957],
pp. 472-473),
who
points
to its use in modern
authors, notably
in
Virginia
Woolf;
and an
essay by
the Romance
philologist S tephen Ullmann, "Reported
S peech
in
Flaubert,"
in
S ty le
in the French Novel
(Cambridge, 1957).
Ullmann
is familiar with both the French and the German work on the
subject
of erlebte
Rede and
gives
a clear and concise
description
of
it;
he uses the translated French
name "free indirect
sty le" throughout. Harry
Levin refers to le
sty le
indirect
libre,
a term which "seems to have no
English equivalent,"
in connection with
Flaubert, Zola,
and modern American novelists
(The
Gates
of
Horn: A
S tudy of
Five French Realists
[New
York,
1963],
pp.
254 and
348).
In
addition,
I found a
100
NARRATED MONOLOGUE
English,
at
any
rate,
tend to dismiss the
concept
of erlebte Rede as an
equivalent
of stream of
consciousness,10
or
they regard
it as a
super-
fluous
category . Way ne
C.
Booth,
author of The Rhetoric
of
Fiction
(the
most ambitious recent
approach
to the
theory
of the novel in this
country ), may
serve as an
example:
... the author who counted the number of times the word "I"
appears
in each of
Jane
Austen's novels
may
be more
obviously
absurd than the innumerable scholars
who have traced in endless detail the
"Ichersdhlung,"
or "erlebte Rede" or "mono-
logue
interieur" from Dickens to
Joy ce
or from
James
to Robbe-Grillet. But he
is no more irrelevant to
literary judgment.1'
While the terms
"first-person
narrative" and "interior
monologue"
will
hardly
strike the reader as "absurd" even in their French and German
forms,
erlebte Rede
successfully
evokes Germanic
pedantry .
Mr.
Booth,
who is one of the rare American scholars familiar with the
term,
is
perhaps referring
to the fact that German
Anglicists, finding
the
subject
largely unexplored by
native critics of the
English
and American
novel,
have been
among
the most zealous erlebte Rede
students.l2
But Booth's
impatience, though
it
appeals
to
parochialism
in his
reader,
is connected with a serious critical
problem.
His stated intent is
to do
away
with ineffectual
classifications,
notably
with the distinction
between the first and the third
person
in fiction:
"Perhaps
the most
brief
grammatical
discussion in The
Philosophy of
Grammnar
(London, 1924), by
the Danish
philologist
Otto
Jespersen,
who
suggests
the name
"represented speech"
(pp. 290-292).
10
S ee Melvin
Friedman,
S tream
of
Consciousness: A
S tudy
in
Literary
Method
(New
Haven, 1955), p.
3. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren
regard
erlebte
Rede,
le
sty le
indirect
libre,
and le
monologue
interieur as variants of a technical device
of the
"objective novel,"
for which the
English phrase
"stream of consciousness
... is the
loose,
inclusive
correspondent" (Theory of
Literature
[New York,
1949],
p. 233).
11 "Distance and Point of View: An
Essay
in
Classification," Essay s
in Criti-
cism,
XI
(1961),
60.
12
The
following
list makes no
pretense
of
completeness:
Otto
Funke,
"'Erlebte
Rede' bei
Galsworthy ," Englische S tudien,
LXIV
(1929),
450
ff.;
Fritz
Karpf,
"Die erlebte Rede im
Englischen," Anglia,
LVII
(1933),
a
grammatical
discus-
sion illustrated with
examples
from
English literature;
Willi
Biihler,
Die "erlebte
Rede" im
englischen
Roman. Ihre
Vorstufen mnd
ihre
Ausbildung
imn Werke Jane
Austens
(Zurich
and
Leipzig, 1937);
Bernhard
Fehr, "S ubstitutionary
Narration
and
Description,"
in Von
Englands geistigen
Bestinden
(Frauenfeld, 1944);
Lisa
Glauser,
Die erlebte Rede im Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts
(Bern, 1948),
a
sequel
to Biihler's
study ;
Franz
S tanzel,
Die
ty pischen Ersihlsituationen imt
Roman
(Vienna, 1955), pp. 150-153,
about
Henry James'
use of erlebte Rede in The
Ambassadors;
Albert
Neubert,
Die
S tilformen
der "erlebten Rede" irm neueren
englischen
Roman
(Halle, 1957),
a
sample
of East German Marxist
scholarship
which contains
good bibliographical
and factual
information,
but is
practically
useless in other
respects;
Kurt Robert
Mey er,
Zur erlcbten Rede im
englischen
Roman des
zwanzigsten
Jahrhunderts
(Bern, 1957).
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
overworked distinction is that of
person.'
"13 And Thomas H. Uzzell
follows suit when he affirms that "the first and third
person
differ in
no
way
in
'bringing
out'
any thing.
I can see no
significant
connection
whatever between the
angle
of
narration,
or
perspective
of a
story
and
the use of 'I or 'he'... whatever can be said in one
person
can be
said
in the other."14
On the basis of the
foregoing quotation
it seems to me
possible
to
trace the
effacing
of the distinction between fictional first and
third
person
back to a
misunderstanding
of the
point-of-view theory .
The
arguments
in favor of an internal
angle
of
vision,
so
forecfully
stated
by Henry James, Percy
Lubbock,
and
Joseph
Warren
Beach,
have led
to the belief that the
separate
narrator is absent from the dramatized
novel,
and that therefore the "central
intelligence"
is himself the nar-
rator,
in the same sense as the "I" is the narrator of a
story
told in the
first
person.
Lubbock
may
have started this
misapprehension
when he
referred to the character in whom the vision rests
by
such names as
"dramatized
author," "spokesman
of the
author,"
or "fresh narrator."
But
despite
these
misleading metaphors,
Lubbock himself was
fully
aware that in all
third-person
novels the
figural psy che
is
supplemented
by
"someone else...
looking
over his shoulder":
The
seeing ey e
is with
somebody
in the
book,
but its vision is
reinforced;
the
pic-
ture contains
more,
becomes richer and
fuller,
because it is the author's as well as
his
creature's,
both at once.
Nobody notices,
but in fact there are now two brains
behind the
ey e;
and one of them is the author's ...
15
This
passage
turns out to be a
description
of the
precise
narrative situ-
ation in which erlebte Rede is most
usually found;
and it is
only by
insisting
on the
presence
of the unobtrusive narrator and the
ensuing
doubleness or
ambiguity
of the vision that this
sty le
for
rendering
con-
sciousness can be
accurately
defined.16 Other
critics, however,
have
generally accepted
Beach's "Exit Author" as a motto for the modern
novel. As a result of this
oversimplification,
it is usual either to
regard
the central
intelligence
as the
narrator,
or to insist on the total
disap-
pearance
of
any
narrator whatsoever.17
Only
with the first studies of the
stream-of-consciousness novel did
13
Booth, op. cit., p.
64.
14
The
Technique of
the Novel
(New York, 1964), p.
198.
15
The
Craft of
Fiction
(New York, 1957), p.
258.
16
Both
James
and Lubbock were also
acutely
aware of the vast difference be-
tween
grammatical persons
in narrative
technique (see James'
famous
preface
to
The
Ambassadors,
and
Lubbock, p. 252).
17
Cf.
Booth,
The Rhetoric
of
Fiction
(Chicago
and
London, 1961), p. 164,
and
Norman
Friedman,
"Point of View: The
Development
of a Critical
Concept,"
PMLA,
LXX
(1955),
1176.
102
NARRATED MONOLOGUE
American scholars
begin
to
analy ze
the
problem
of
rendering
conscious-
ness in a
third-person
novel. David
Daiches,
in his book on
Virginia
Woolf,
comes
very
close to
identify ing
erlebte Rede when he
speaks
of
her
"compromise
between
reported thought
and direct unedited tran-
scription
of
consciousness";18
he
seems, however,
to
regard
this in-
between
sty le
as
special
to
Virginia
Woolf,
and shows no awareness of
the
technique
in
general.
Melvin Friedman in S tream
of
Consciousness:
A
S tudy
in
Literary
Method mentions Flaubert's
"sty le
indirect libre"
as a forerunner of stream of
consciousness,
and
again
alludes
toi this
technique
in connection with
James, Woolf,
and
Joy ce.19
Most
impor-
tant of
all,
Robert
Humphrey
in S tream
of
Consciousness in the Mod-
ern Novel identifies a
technique
in the modern novel that he names "in-
direct interior
monologue,"20
and that differs
markedly
from the usual
first-person
interior
monologue
"both in the
way they
are
manipulated
and in their
possible
effect"
(p. 29).
He illustrates with a
passage
from
the
Gerty
MacDowell
episode
in
Uly sses,
and one from Mrs.
Dalloway .
Apparently unacquainted
with the French and German work on the
subject, Humphrey
has
thereby
discovered erlebte Rede in
English.
Unfortunately
he is not
entirely
clear in his
description
of the
sty le.
While "indirect interior
monologue" gives
the reader "a sense of the
author's continuous
presence,"
it nonetheless
"presents unspoken
ma-
terial as if it were
directly
from the consciousness of his characters."
Throughout
his
explanations, Humphrey alternately applies
and re-
tracts the criterion of "directness": "the author intervenes between
the character and the
reader";
"what is
presented
of consciousness is
direct";
the consciousness
(in
the
example
from
Joy ce)
"is never
pre-
sented
directly ";
indirect interior
monologue
comes
"directly
from the
psy che" (pp. 29, 30, 35, my italics).
The reason for these contradictions is
evidently
that
Humphrey
has
not
correctly grasped
the essential
ambiguity
of this narrative
technique.
The
rendering
of a character's
thoughts
in third
person
cannot be direct
(only
direct
quotation
can
be)
;
but neither is it
indirect,
since the act
of
reporting
is in no
way expressed
in the text. For this reason the term
"indirect interior
monologue"
is
misleading:
while interior
monologue
is direct in the same sense as direct
discourse,
erlebte Rede is not in-
18
Virginia Woolf (New York, 1963), p.
68.
19
New
Haven, 1955, pp. 21, 44-45, 198, 233. Friedman believes that "this device
excludes intervention on the
part
of the
author,"
and that
Flaubert,
who "refuses
to
disappear
behind his
creation,"
has used it
indirectly
and
imperfectly (p. 21).
20
Berkeley
and Los
Angeles, 1954, p.
29.
Humphrey adopts
this term from
Dujardin who,
in his famous Le
Monologue
interieur
(Paris, 1931), briefly
en-
visions the existence of this
monologue "employ ant
la troisieme
personne,"
and
establishes a
misleading analogy
between this mode and indirect discourse
(pp.
39-40).
103
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
direct in the same sense as indirect discourse. The
analogy
to the latter
in the
rendering
of consciousness is a mode in which the
characters'
thoughts
and
feelings
are
reported
in subordinate clauses
following
he
hoped, feared, knew, ignored, concluded,
a
technique
most
usually
re-
ferred to as "internal
analy sis."21
But erlebte Rede is somewhere be-
tween direct and indirect
discourse,
more
oblique
than the
former,
less
oblique
than the latter. In
searching
for a better
English
label,
I hesi-
tate between "narrated consciousness" and "narrated
monologue"
;22
the second term in both these
phrases expresses
the
immediacy
of the
inner voice we
hear,
whereas the first term
expresses
the essential fact
that the
narrator,
not a character in the
novel,
relay s
this voice to
us;
the fundamental
ambiguity
and
complexity
of this
sty listic
device
would thus be maintained in both these names. S ince "narrated con-
sciousness" carries an undesirable association with "stream of con-
sciousness,"
I
tentatively prefer
"narrated
monologue."
We are now in a
position
to discuss a number of
important problems
connected with this narrative mode. We must first define more
closely
both its
grammatical
structure and the narrative situation in which it
will be used. Next we will sketch its historical
development
and con-
sider its connection with the stream-of-consciousness novel. This will
in turn lead us to the
question
of the
relationship
between narrator and
character,
and to the
ly ric
and ironic
possibilities
of the narrated mono-
logue.
Though
the narrated
monologue
differs from both direct and indirect
statement,
it has certain
sy ntactical
elements in common with both.
With indirect statement it shares not
only
the reference to the
speaker
in the third
person,
but also the
transposition
of verbal tenses,
using
preterite
for the
present
in the
analogous
direct
statement,
pluperfect
for
past,
and conditional for future
(all these tenses
may
be observed
in our
quotation
from
Joy ce).23
With direct statement it shares its ex-
21
Cf. Lawrence E.
Bowling,
"What is S tream of Consciousness
Technique?"
PMLA,
LXV
(1950), 342-343;
and
S tanzel,
Die
ty pischen
Erzidhlsituationen, pp.
146-147.
22
I owe the term "narrated
monologue"
to the
suggestion
of Kurt Muller-
Vollmer,
who first used it in a
paper
delivered before the
S ociety
for Aesthetics
and Art Criticism in
April
1965.
23
The
following
table shows the
correspondence
between tenses:
Direct statement Indirect statement Narrated
monologue
He said: I am rich He said he was rich He was rich
He said: I was rich He said he had been rich He had been rich
He said: I will be rich He said he would be rich He would be rich
The
grammatical
situation in narrated
monologue
varies somewhat from one lan-
guage
to another. In
French,
the use of the
imperfect in narrated
monologue,
as
in indirect
quotation,
sets it off more
markedly
from the narration
(usually
in
104
NARRATED MONOLOGUE
pression
in
principal
clauses and its emotive modulations
(questions,
exclamations, interjections, repetitions,
and so
forth).
One
element,
however,
separates
it
widely
from both traditional forms of discourse:
the absence of a verbum dice,ndi. This
particularity ,
more than
any
other,
assures the smooth
passage
from the narrator's
report
to the
character's
thought.24
When a statement is
reported
in indirect
discourse,
the adverbs of
time and
space
are
usually adjusted
to the
reporter's point
of view. The
sentence "He said: 'I did not come here
y esterday ' "-reported
at a
later time and different
place-will
become "He said that he had not
gone
there the
day
before." In a narrated
monologue, however,
we
would find: "He had not come here
y esterday ."
The effect of
using
the
temporal
and
spatial
indicators of direct discourse in the narrated mono-
logue
is one of the most
powerful
tools available to the novelist for lo-
cating
the
viewpoint
within the
psy che
of his characters. The
following
quotation
from the
early pages
of Kafka's Die
Verwandlung
will illus-
trate this
point
with
particular precision:
Und er sah zur Weckuhr
hinfiber,
die auf dem Kasten tickte. "Himmlischer
Vater !" dachte er. Es war halb sieben
Uhr,
und die
Zeiger gingen ruhig vorwarts,
es war
sogar
halb
voriiber,
es naherte sich schon drei Viertel. S ollte der Wecker
nicht
gelautet haben? Man sah vom Bette
aus,
daB er auf vier Uhr
richtig einge-
stellt
war; gewiss
hatte er auch
gelautet. Ja,
aber war es
moglich,
dieses mobel-
erschiitternde Laiuten
ruhig
zu verschlafen?
Nun, ruhig
hatte er
ja
nicht
geschla-
fen,
aber wahrscheinlich desto fester. Was sollte er aber
jetzt
tun? Der nachste
Zug ging
um sieben
Uhr;
um den
einzuholen,
hatte er sich
unsinnig
beeilen
miissen,
und die Kollektion war noch nicht
eingepackt,
und er selbst fiihlte sich durchaus
nicht besonders frisch und
beweglich.25
The time indications in this
passage
are
precise:
it is a little
past
six-
thirty
in the
morning,
we see the hands of the clock
progressing
toward
six-forty -five,
the next train leaves at seven. Leaves? The text say s:
"Der nachste
Zug ging
um sieben Uhr." We are
capable
of
reading
this
sentence in context without
noticing
the
incongruity
of
conjugating
a
past
tense with an adverbial
phrase referring
to future time. We
know,
as
Gregor
S amsa
knows,
that the seven o'clock train leaves in the
future,
passe simple)
than in
English.
In
German,
the
subjunctive required
in indirect
discourse is not used in the narrated
monologue,
from which it therefore differs
more
markedly
than either in
English
or in French. For a further discussion of
the
grammatical problems,
see Harald
Weinrich, Ternpis:
Besprochene
und
ersahlte Welt
(S tuttgart, 1964).
24
In the
present
article I am concerned
exclusively
with the
sty le
as it is used
for the
rendering
of consciousness. All the
grammatical
features I have mentioned
hold
equally
true for a
way
of
reporting
audible
speech,
a
sty le
that we
might
call narrated statement
(speech, discourse). Many
of the
early
critics of erlebte
Rede were more interested in this
aspect
of the
technique;
see also
Ullmann, op.
cit.
25
Erziihlungen
und kleine Prosa
(New York, 1946), p.
71.
105
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
in
fact,
a future so immediate that "we" cannot
hope
to catch the
train.26
The Kafka
quotation
demonstrates
dramatically
the narrative
situa-
tion within which the narrated
monologue
arises: it is the one
preferred
by James
and
Lubbock,
in which the
viewpoint
coincides as
closely
as
possible
with that of one
character,
while the
knowledge
of the
narrator
is limited to the
psy che
and field of
perception
of that character at the
moment of narration.7 It is
usually
not
sufficiently emphasized
that this
incarnation of the
viewpoint
sets not
only spatial
limits for the narrative
medium,
but
temporal
limits as well: the author creates the illusion that
the future is a true
(that is,
unknown)
future for
him,
that he
experi-
ences the
present
with the character
(a
situation that
Jean
Pouillon has
aptly
called "vision
avec").28
He thus
plunges
the reader into the im-
mediate here and now of the
experiencing
consciousness.
The "inward
turning"
of the novel-its
development
from
epic
narra-
tion,
active
adventure,
and social concern to dramatic
presentation,
spiritual experience,
and
introspection-has
been traced in numerous
studies:
by
Joseph
Warren Beach and Leon Edel in
English,
Wolf-
gang Kay ser
and Richard Brinkmann in
German,
Claude-Edmonde
Magny
in
French,
to mention
only
a few well-known
examples.29
With-
in the
general development,
the
increasing frequency
of the narrated
monologue
may
be attributed to a
gradual
refinement in the
techniques
for
presenting
the inner life of a fictional
figure. S umming up
this evolu-
tion,
Oskar Walzel wrote in 1925: "Durch erlebte Rede wird
Erzahlung
im
strengen
S inn des Wortes zu
eigentlicher
Darstellung" (Das
Wort-
kunstwerk,
p. 226.).
26
The
conjunction
of future adverb and
past
tense in fiction has been used
by
Kate
Hamburger
to show that the
preterite
in fiction loses its
temporal function
(Die Logik
der
Dichtung, pp. 27-49).
S tanzel has
argued
that this is true
only
in a narrative where the
viewpoint
is incarnated in a character
(Die ty pischen
Erzihlsituationen, p. 152). Wolfgang Kay ser analy zes
the
problem
from a differ-
ent
standpoint
in his
essay
"Wer erzahlt den Roman?" in Die
Vortragsreise (Bern,
1958), pp.
95-97.
27
This
viewpoint corresponds roughly
to the one
designated
as
"partly
omnis-
cient
viewpoint" by S hipley
in the
Dictionary of
World Literature
(New York,
1953), p. 240,
as "selective omniscience"
by
Norman Friedman in "Point of View
in
Fiction,"
as "inside views"
by
Booth in The Rhetoric
of Fiction, p.
163.
28
Temps
et roman
(Paris, 1946), pp.
74-84. S ee also Eberhard
Lammert,
Bauformen
des Erzihlens
(S tuttgart, 1955), pp.
70-71.
29
Beach,
The
Twentieth-Century
Novel
(New York, 1932); Edel,
The Mod-
ern
Psy chological
Novel
(New York, 1955); Kay ser,
"Die
Anflnge
des modernen
Romans im 18.
Jahrhundert
und seine
heutige Krise,"
DVLG XXVII
(1954),
417-446; Brinkmann,
Wirklichkeit und Illusion
(Tiibingen, 1957); Magny ,
His-
toire du roman
franCais depuis
1918
(Paris, 1950).
106
NARRATED MONOLOGUE
Like other innovations in
technique,
the narrated
monologue
shows
up occasionally very early
in literature. Isolated
examples
have been
found in the seventeenth and
eighteenth century (notably
in the fables
of La
Fontaine),
and even in the mediaeval
epics.
The first writer who
made more extended use of the
sty le
is
Jane
Austen,
who narrates
Emma's consciousness as follows:
How could she have been so deceived! He
protested
that he had never
thought
seriously
of Harriet-never ...
The
picture!
How
eager
he had been about the
picture!-and
the charade!
And a hundred other
circumstances;
how
clearly they
had seemed to
point
at
Harriet! To be
sure,
the
charade,
with its
"ready
wit"-but
then,
the 'soft
ey es'-
in fact it suited
neither;
it was
simply
a
jumble
without taste or truth. Who could
have seen
through
such thick-headed nonsense?30
And so
forth,
for a few more
pages.
We can see how
Jane
Austen rend-
ers the
rhy thm
of inner debate
(rhetorical
and
highly
self-conscious,
to
be
sure)
without
letting
the narrator's voice interfere. This
happens
at
moments of inner crisis in several of her novels. Later in the
century
occasional
examples
can be found in most Victorian
novelists, notably
in Eliot and Meredith.31
In
France,
Flaubert is the first to make
frequent
and
highly
influen-
tial use of the
sty le.
"Et c'est a sa
suite,"
writes
Thibaudet,
"qu'il
[le
sty le
indirect
libre]
entre dans le courant commun du
sty le romanesque,
abonde chez
Daudet, Zola,
Maupassant,
tout le monde"
(Flaubert, p.
230).
In
Germany
it had been used in
mid-century by
Otto
Ludwig,
in
a
heavy -handed
Novelle entitled Zwischen Himmel und
Erde;
in this
connection,
it is
interesting
that
Ludwig,
who was a better critic than
novelist, developed
a
theory
of the novel that advocates a "scenic"
form
very
similar to that of
Henry James.
With
James'
first
major
novels we move into an era where we find the narrated
monologue
with
tout le monde indeed. In German
literature,
the
technique
is most
closely
associated with the so-called
Impressionist
writers of the
fin
de
siecle,
notably
with
S chnitzler, who,
after
Dujardin,
but
long
before
Joy ce
and
Woolf,
filled entire works with
every
manner of interior discourse.32
As we move into the twentieth
century ,
erlebte Rede has become a
standard
sty le,
used at least
occasionally
in most
third-person
narra-
tives. And with the works of
Dorothy Richardson,
Virginia Woolf,
Joy ce, Mann, Kafka,
and
Broch,
we have arrived at the
very
center of
30
Emma
(London, 1948), p.
117. Cf. Biihler's
chapter
on Austen in Die "erlebte
Rede" im
englischen
Roman.
31
Cf. Lisa
Glauser,
Die erlebte Rede im Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts.
32
Cf. Werner
Neuse,
"'Erlebte Rede' und 'Innerer
Monolog'
in den erzahlenden
S chriften Arthur
S chnitzlers," PMLA,
XLIX
(1934),
327-355.
107
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
the narrated stream. But in order to define
correctly
the
relationship
of
the narrated
monologue
to the stream-of-consciousness
novel,
we must
first come to terms with the terms themselves.
There is a
growing tendency
in the critical
writings
of the last fifteen
y ears
to
distinguish
the
concepts
of stream of consciousness and in-
terior
monologue.
The
general
consensus seems to be that the
designa-
tion "stream-of-consciousness novel" should refer to a
sub-genre
of the
novel,
whereas "interior
monologue"
should
designate
one of several
techniques
most often used to
convey
the inner world of the characters
in a stream-of-consciousness novel.33 Robert
Humphrey ,
for
example,
defines stream-of-consciousness novels as "novels which have as their
essential
subject
matter the consciousness of one or more characters"
(p. 2).
There can be no
objection
to this
label,
as
long
as we use it with
full awareness that William
James' original metaphorical meaning
has
been left far
behind,
and that the consciousness rendered in modern
novels,
more often than
not,
assumes models of the
psy che
that differ
from the one
sy mbolized by James
in his river
image.
What is
more,
we
must
clearly
realize that "stream of consciousness" is a
very general
and somewhat
impressionistic
label,
which delineates no
precise
criteria
that
help
one to determine whether a
given
novel
is,
or is
not,
a stream-
of-consciousness novel.
The two
demands,
most
frequently
made on the stream-of-conscious-
ness novel are
(1)
that it render the consciousness
directly ,
without the
presence
of a
narrator;
and
(2)
that it render not the
speech,
but the
"prespeech"
level of consciousness.34 Consider for a moment what a
novel would be like that followed both those criteria
simultaneously :
it
would have to transcribe on the
printed page,
without the intervention
of a
narrator,
the nonverbal content of the mind. I would
suggest
that
the closest one can come to
answering
these
prescriptions
is
Morgen-
stern's "Fisches
Nachtgesang."
It is true that one can detect in certain
33
Cf.
Humphrey , p. 24;
C. D.
King,
"Edouard
Dujardin,
Inner
Monologue
and the S tream of
Consciousness,"
French
S tudies,
VII
(1953), 124-125;
and
Melvin
Friedman, p.
4. A different
position
is taken
by Bowling,
who
regards
stream of consciousness as a
techinque (Bowling, p. 337).
34
Bowling
demands of the stream of consciousness "that it introduce us di-
rectly
into the interior life of the
character,
without
any
intervention... on the
part
of the author"
(p. 345).
At the same
time,
he wishes to exclude from the
stream of consciousness what he calls "the
language
level of consciousness"
(p. 341)
or the
"language
area"
(p. 345) ; Humphrey
likewise believes the stream-
of-consciousness novel is
primarily
concerned with the
"prespeech
level"
(pp. 3-4).
I would
agree
with
King,
who has
argued
that the distinction between
speech
and
prespeech
levels of consciousness
is,
in critical
practice,
an
impossible
criterion to
apply (King, pp. 124-125);
for a similar criticism of these
concepts
see
S tanzel,
Die
ty pischen Erzidhlsituationen, p.
149.
108
NARRATED MONOLOGUE
modern authors a
feeling
that
language
is an
impediment
to the
rhy thmic
and
imagistic
flow of
consciousness,
and their use of
dots, dashes,
parentheses
and other
punctuation
marks
(in
Broch's Der Tod des
Vergil
one finds not
infrequently agglomerations
like
"?!-,")
is
sy mptomatic
of this
tendency
to
go bey ond
or below
language.35
But
the unalterable fact is that literature uses
words;
it leaves the writer
only
these two alternatives: to let the character
recite,
or to let the
narrator narrate.
Whereas an interior
monologue
cannot
represent
the
prespeech
speech
of its
speakers,
it can
present
the material of his consciousness in
more or less
logical
order. The
disruption
of
organized speech
can take
place
at different levels:
(1)
a rational train of
thoughts
can
give way
to
an associative
sequence
of
thoughts; (2)
the
grammatical logic
of nor-
mal
sy ntax
can
give way
to disconnected words and
phrases; (3)
finally ,
the words themselves can be
fragmented
and
regrouped.
All
these devices are of course familiar from
Joy ce's
interior
monologues.
The
problem
is
only
to decide what
degrees
of inchoateness is
required
for
legitimate
interior
monologue.
At this remove from
Dujardin,
we
need no
longer
adhere to his
my th
that no
monologue
interieur was writ-
ten before Les Lauriers son
coupes,
nor to his
division-point
at a
sty le
"anterieur a toute
organisation logique,"
but
expressed "par
le
moy en
de
phrases
reduites au minimum
sy ntaxial" (i.e.,
somewhere after our
first
stage
and before our second and
third).
These
criteria,
both arbi-
trary
and
vague,
should
give way
to
simple grammatical
ones: whenever
the
thoughts
of a character are rendered in direct discourse
(referring
to the self in the first
person
and to the
present
moment in the
present
tense),
we have interior
monologue.
From the
epic
hero who "se dist a
lui
meme,"
through
the brief snatches of self-address in the
eighteenth-
and
nineteenth-century novel,
to the
lengthier monologues
of the heroes
in
S tendhal,
Tolstoy
or Dostoevski and
finally
the works of
Dujardin,
S chnitzler and their
progeny -where monologues may
fill the entire
narrative-there is a
single development
that
goes
hand in hand with
the internalization and dramatization of the
genre.
In the modern
stream-of-consciousness
novel,
these silent
soliloquies
become more
extended and less
coherent,
and
they
are less often
explicitly quoted.
But these
differences,
no matter how
important,
are of
degree,
not of
kind.
In like
manner,
if we define the narrated
monologue grammatically ,
as we have done above
("the presentation
of a character's
thoughts
in
the third
person
and the tense of
narration"),
the term can be
applied
35
S hiv K.
Kumar,
in
Bergson
and the S tream
of
Consciousness Novel
(New
York, 1953),
traces this
tendency
back to
Bergson's theory
of
language (pp. 17-35).
109
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
to the silent exclamations found in
early
fiction
just
as
meaningfully
as to the narrated meditations that stretch over entire novels. At one
extreme we would have the laconic words of Buchner's Lenz
("-kalt,
kalt,"
"Und
jetzt
so
tot"),
which are
usually regarded
as the earliest
German
examples
of erlebte
Rede,
at the other extreme the hundred
and some
pages
of
virtually uninterrupted
inner discourse in the sec-
ond
part
of Hermann Broch's Der Tod des
Vergil.
Neither the direct nor the narrated interior
monologue
can thus be
regarded
as
techniques
that
belong exclusively
to the stream-of-con-
sciousness novel.
Just
as a
sy mbol
in a
poem
was a
sy mbol long
before
the
S y mbolists
made it into the
purposive
center of their
art,
the silent
monologue,
both in the first and in the third
person,
was a
literary
device
long
before
Virginia
Woolf's
generation
filled entire books with
"an
ordinary
mind on an
ordinary day ."
With the narrated
monologue
we move closer to the
possibility
of
rendering
such
thoughts
and
feelings
of a character as are not
explicitly
formulated in his mind. S ince the
figural
voice is not
quoted directly ,
as it is in the interior
monologue,
this
technique
lends itself better to
the
twilight
realm of consciousness. It can
give
a more
nearly
con-
vincing presentation
of that
part
of the
psy che
which is hidden from
the world and half-hidden from the
censoring
self
(Natalie
S arraute
speaks
of
sous-conversation) ;36
it can also more
readily
show the mind
as
recipient
of
passing images
and
"sensory impressions"
than the more
rhetorical
first-person monologue.
But as the narration
departs
from
the character's formulated train of
thoughts,
the narrator's own voice
is heard more and more
frequently interjecting phrases
of the
ty pe
"it
seemed to him" or "he
barely
heard." In this
manner,
the narrated
monologue
shades into internal
analy sis,
where the author
reports-
no matter how
unobtrusively -on
the inner life of his
figures, making
the haziest
thoughts
accessible to
language, translating
an
unorganized
inner world into a communicable idiom.37
The narrated
monologue,
no less than the interior
monologue, posits
the existence of an inner voice with which a consciousness addresses
itself;
and its narrator
is,
in a
sense,
the imitator of his character's
silent utterances. This mimetic
quality
of the narrated
monologue
was
repeatedly emphasized by
its
early
theorists.38 Now imitation
implies
36L'Are du
soup9on (Paris, 1956).
37
Cf. Auerbach's
analy sis
of Madame
Bovary (Mimesis, pp. 427-428).
38
S ee
esp. S pitzer,
"Zur
Entstehung
der
sog.
'erlebten
Rede'," Walzel,
and
Neuse. It is not without
interest,
in this
respect,
that a number of critics main-
tained that the narrated
monologue originates
in an oral
speech pattern
for imi-
110
NARRATED MONOLOGUE
two basic
possibilities:
fusion with the
subject,
in which the actor
identifies
with,
"becomes" the
person
he
imitates;
or distance from the
subject,
a mock-identification that leads to caricature.
Accordingly ,
there are two
divergent
directions
open
to the narrated
monologue,
de-
pending
on which imitative
tendency prevails:
the
ly ric
and the ironic.
Joy ce,
for
example,
narrates
S tephen's monologues ly rically , Gerty
MacDowell's
parodistically . Virginia
Woolf and D. H. Lawrence in-
variably
use the
sty le seriously ,
whereas both
possibilities
are found
in
Flaubert,
Thomas Mann or Musil. The
following examples
from
Hermann Broch and
Jean-Paul
S artre will illustrate the widest
possible
divergence.
Broch's
early story
"Die Heimkehr des
Vergil"
shows the
ailing
Virgil
on a
ship entering
the harbor of Brundisium:
Doch unterhalb der
Befestigungen
bis herab zum
steinigen
Ufer war der
Hang
mit S trauchern
bewachsen,
und
gleichsam
nach ihrem Laube
greifend,
streckte
der Kranke die Hand aus. Wie weich war die
Luft,
Bad des Innen und
Au3en,
Bad der
S eele,
fliessend aus dem
Ewigen
ins
Irdische,
Wissen vom Kommenden
im
Diesseitigen
und im
Jenseitigen!
Am
Bug
des S chiffes
sang
ein Musikanten-
sklave,
und Lied wie
S aitenspiel,
Menschenwerk beides, waren in sich
beschlossen,
menschenentfernt, menschenerlost, S phiarenluft,
die sich selber
singt.
Die Tone
in sich
eintrinkend,
atmete
Vergil,
die Brust schmerzte
ihn,
und er hustete.39
Outer event becomes sensation and in turn
shapes
itself into
thought,
in a
process
of emotive abstraction that is characteristic of this writer.
It is
hardly possible
to talk of a
separate
narrator in this
passage;
the
fusion of his voice with the character's
corresponds
on the level of fic-
tional
technique
to the
ly ric
oneness
expressed by
the text: as the
air
fluidly joins together
breath and
soul,
outer and
inner,
man-made
music and
harmony
of the
spheres,
life and
after-life,
so the
poetic prose
effaces the line between
narrating
and
figural psy che.
The narrated
monologue
is the choice
prose
medium for this
portraiture
of an artist
as an
artist,
where
poet
and
poetic spokesman
coalesce.
At the other
extreme,
S artre's "L'enfance d'un chef"
gives
us the
narrated
monologue
of inauthentic man. Toward the end of this
story ,
the
y oung
Lucien discovers in anti-S emitism a
long
searched for
identity
and
virility .
I1 fallait absolument trouver des mots
pour exprimer
son extraordinaire decou-
verte. II eleva
doucement, precautionneusement
sa main
jusqu'a
son
front,
comme un
cierge allume, puis
il se recueillit un
instant, pensif
et
sacre,
et les
tating
another
person's
discourse. Thibaudet insists: "Avant de devenir une forme
grammaticale,
il
[le sty le
indirect
libre]
est une intonation"
(p. 249),
and he main-
mains that its
presence
in Flaubert is due to his
genius
for renewing
French
literary
sty le
with the vital
rhy thms
of the
spoken language.
39 In Die unbekannte
Grop/e (Zurich, 1961), pp.
204-205.
111
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
mots vinrent
d'eux-memes,
il murmura:
"J'AI
DES DROITS !" Des Droits!
Quelque
chose dans le
genre
des
triangles
et des cercles: c'etait si
parfait que ca
n'existait
pas,
on avait beau tracer des milliers de ronds avec des
compas,
on
n'arrivait
pas
a realiser un seul cercle. Des
generations
d'ouvriers
pourraient,
de
meme,
obeir
scrupuleusement
aux ordres de
Lucien,
ils
n'epuiseraient jamais
son
droit a
commander,
les droits c'etait
par
dela
l'existence,
comme les
objets
mathe-
matiques
et les
dogmes religieux.
Et voila
que Lucien, justement,
c'etait
ca:
un
enorme
bouquet
de
responsabilites
et de droits.40
The distance between narrator and character is
immediately apparent;
through
the use of the narrated
monologue
it remains
implicit,
ironic.
The
exaggerations
of
expression ("extraordinaire
... sacre ...
scrupu-
leusement . . .
norme"),
the
pompously
narcissistic
imagery ("son
front,
comme un
cierge allume"),
the false
analogy
between mathe-
matical,
religious,
and social
absolutes,
all these elements build
up
the
parody .
And
y et,
no matter how
devastating
the
picture,
the
attempted
empathy implied
in this narrative situation is not
entirely canceled,
and
the
story
leaves one with a
feeling
of
having
understood the
ty pe
"from
within."
The
degree
of association or dissociation between an author and his
creature is not
alway s
so
easy
to establish as in our two last
examples.
In this
respect,
the narrated
monologue
often sustains a more
pro-
found
ambiguity
than the other modes of
rendering consciousness;
and
the reader must
rely
on
context,
shades of
meaning, coloring,
and other
subtle
sty listic
indices in order to determine the overall
meaning
of a
text. This
equivocation
is
perhaps
one of the essential attractions of
this narrative
sty le,
both for the novelist and for the critic. But while
the novelist can
easily dispense
with a theoretical awareness of the
narrated
monologue,
the critic
may
find it
helps
him to a clearer under-
standing
of the
language
of fiction.
Indiana
University
40
In Le Mur
(Paris, 1939), p.
220.
112