Narrated Monologue- Dorrit Cohn

University of Oregon

Narrated Monologue: Definition of a Fictional StyleAuthor(s): Dorrit CohnReviewed work(s):Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring, 1966), pp. 97-112Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1770156 .Accessed: 31/05/2012 14:37

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volume xviii spring g966 number 2

DORRIT COHN ^

Narrated Monologue: Definition of a Fictional Style

XJ 'ET SHE COULD NOT be purely this, this thing of sheer reciprocity. Surely, though her woman's nature was reciprocal

to his male, surely it was more than that! Surely he and she were not two potent and reciprocal currents between which the Morning Star flashed like a spark out of nowhere. Surely this was not it ? Surely she had one tiny Morning Star 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 Serpent, 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 stylistic pe- culiarities pass unnoticed. If we stop to analyze, 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 syntactical structure is that of direct discourse, with the rhythms of spoken language rendered through exclamations, rhetorical questions, repetitions ("surely... surely... surely") and exaggerated emphases ("one tiny Morning Star"; "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. "Surely this is not it? Surely I have one tiny Morning Star inside me, which is myself..."

Our quotation from Lawrence is an example of the narrative style that German critics call erlebte Rede. It can be most succinctly de-

1 The Plumed Serpent (London, 1955), p. 386.

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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, yields an interior monologue. It would appear from our example, then, that these two techniques for rendering a character's psyche differ only by simple grammatical details. But when we see erlebte Rede in a surrounding epic context, its distinctiveness becomes clear: by maintaining the person 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, Joyce describes Stephen 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 eyes 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. Everybody 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, praying with his darkened eyes, praying with all his trembling body, swaying his head to and fro like a lost creature, praying with whimpering lips.2

Unlike Kate's thoughts, Stephen's-which are not italicized in the original-are presented in alternation with outer happenings, including his own actions. He waits, stands up, kneels, raises his eyes, 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 person). 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 Stephen's thoughts, not his actions. "The slide is shot to suddenly" may still pass as a brief moment of narrative present. 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.

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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 eyes 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, Stephen'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 Stephen's reflections and feelings, however, they have, in the new circumstances, become altogether incongruous. Such 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 myself") and presenting them as indirect or direct discourse.5

Our two unviable transpositions have shown that a narrative situation 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 Joyce passage. Through its use of erlebte Rede, the text can weave in and out of Stephen'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 idiosyncrasy 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 style 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 Sound and the Fury is mostly told in first-person monologues that use the past tense.

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the texture of a third-person story, and at the same time casts the immediacy 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 stylistics it bears the name "style indirect libre," more unwieldly but less imprecise than the German term. The first students of erlebte Rede were grammarians and linguists. But, since literary scholarship in both these countries maintains a close relationship with philology and stylistics, the phenomenon was soon discussed in the context of narrative prose by such eminent literary scholars as Leo Spitzer, 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 Scholars writing in

6 Several 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 Style indirect libre (Paris, 1926); Werner Gunther, Probleme der Rededar- stellung (Marburg, 1928).

7 Leo Spitzer, Stilstudien (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 See esp. Kate Hamburger, "Zum Strukturproblem der epischen und drama- tischen Dichtung," DVLG, XXV (1951), 1-26; "Das epische Praeteritum," DVLG, XXVII (1953), 329-357; Die Logik der Dichtung (Stuttgart, 1957), pp. 72-114; Franz Stanzel, Die typischen 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 style; 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 Stephen Ullmann, "Reported Speech in Flaubert," in Style 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 style" throughout. Harry Levin refers to le style 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 Study of Five French Realists [New York, 1963], pp. 254 and 348). In addition, I found a

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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. Wayne 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 "monologue interieur" from Dickens to Joyce 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 See Melvin Friedman, Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method (New Haven, 1955), p. 3. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren regard erlebte Rede, le style 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," Essays in Criti- cism, XI (1961), 60.

12 The following list makes no pretense of completeness: Otto Funke, "'Erlebte Rede' bei Galsworthy," Englische Studien, LXIV (1929), 450 ff.; Fritz Karpf, "Die erlebte Rede im Englischen," Anglia, LVII (1933), a grammatical discussion 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, "Substitutionary 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 Stanzel, Die typischen Ersihlsituationen imt Roman (Vienna, 1955), pp. 150-153, about Henry James' use of erlebte Rede in The Ambassadors; Albert Neubert, Die Stilformen 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 Meyer, Zur erlcbten Rede im englischen Roman des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Bern, 1957).


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' anything. 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 narrator, 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 psyche is supplemented by "someone else... looking over his shoulder": The seeing eye is with somebody in the book, but its vision is reinforced; the picture 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 eye; and one of them is the author's ... 15

This passage turns out to be a description of the precise narrative situation 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 style for rendering consciousness 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.

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American scholars begin to analyze the problem of rendering consciousness in a third-person novel. David Daiches, in his book on Virginia Woolf, comes very close to identifying 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 style as special to Virginia Woolf, and shows no awareness of the technique in general. Melvin Friedman in Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method mentions Flaubert's "style indirect libre" as a forerunner of stream of consciousness, and again alludes toi this technique in connection with James, Woolf, and Joyce.19 Most important of all, Robert Humphrey in Stream of Consciousness in the Mod- ern Novel identifies a technique in the modern novel that he names "indirect 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 Ulysses, 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 style. While "indirect interior monologue" gives the reader "a sense of the author's continuous presence," it nonetheless "presents unspoken material 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 Joyce) "is never presented directly"; indirect interior monologue comes "directly from the psyche" (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 "employant la troisieme personne," and establishes a misleading analogy between this mode and indirect discourse (pp. 39-40).

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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 referred to as "internal analysis."21 But erlebte Rede is somewhere between 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, relays this voice to us; the fundamental ambiguity and complexity of this stylistic device would thus be maintained in both these names. Since "narrated consciousness" carries an undesirable association with "stream of consciousness," 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 consider 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 lyric and ironic possibilities of the narrated monologue.

Though the narrated monologue differs from both direct and indirect statement, it has certain syntactical 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 Joyce).23 With direct statement it shares its ex-

21 Cf. Lawrence E. Bowling, "What is Stream of Consciousness Technique?" PMLA, LXV (1950), 342-343; and Stanzel, Die typischen 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 Society 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 language 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 yesterday' "-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 yesterday." The effect of using the temporal and spatial indicators of direct discourse in the narrated monologue is one of the most powerful tools available to the novelist for lo- cating the viewpoint within the psyche of his characters. The following quotation from the early pages of Kafka's Die Verwandlung will illustrate 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. Sollte 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 says: "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 Samsa 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 (Stuttgart, 1964).

24 In the present article I am concerned exclusively with the style 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 style 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.

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in fact, a future so immediate that "we" cannot hope to catch the train.26

The Kafka quotation demonstrates dramatically the narrative situation 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 psyche 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 immediate here and now of the experiencing consciousness.

The "inward turning" of the novel-its development from epic narration, 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 Kayser 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. Summing up this evolution, Oskar Walzel wrote in 1925: "Durch erlebte Rede wird Erzahlung im strengen Sinn 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). Stanzel has argued that this is true only in a narrative where the viewpoint is incarnated in a character (Die typischen Erzihlsituationen, p. 152). Wolfgang Kayser analyzes the problem from a different 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 Shipley 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. See also Eberhard Lammert, Bauformen des Erzihlens (Stuttgart, 1955), pp. 70-71. 29 Beach, The Twentieth-Century Novel (New York, 1932); Edel, The Mod- ern Psychological Novel (New York, 1955); Kayser, "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).

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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 style 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 eyes'- 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 rhythm 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 style. "Et c'est a sa suite," writes Thibaudet, "qu'il [le style indirect libre] entre dans le courant commun du style 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 Schnitzler, who, after Dujardin, but long before Joyce 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 style, used at least occasionally in most third-person narra- tives. And with the works of Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Joyce, 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

Schriften Arthur Schnitzlers," PMLA, XLIX (1934), 327-355.

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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 years to distinguish the concepts of stream of consciousness and interior 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 psyche that differ from the one symbolized 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-consciousness 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 Stream of Consciousness," French Studies, 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 directly 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 Stanzel, Die typischen Erzidhlsituationen, p. 149.

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modern authors a feeling that language is an impediment to the rhythmic 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 symptomatic of this tendency to go beyond 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 syntax 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 Joyce'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 myth that no monologue interieur was writ- ten before Les Lauriers son coupes, nor to his division-point at a style "anterieur a toute organisation logique," but expressed "par le moyen de phrases reduites au minimum syntaxial" (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 Stendhal, Tolstoy or Dostoevski and finally the works of Dujardin, Schnitzler 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 Shiv K. Kumar, in Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (New York, 1953), traces this tendency back to Bergson's theory of language (pp. 17-35).

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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 second 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-consciousness novel. Just as a symbol in a poem was a symbol long before the Symbolists 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. Since 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 psyche which is hidden from the world and half-hidden from the censoring self (Natalie Sarraute 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 type "it seemed to him" or "he barely heard." In this manner, the narrated monologue shades into internal analysis, 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 analysis of Madame Bovary (Mimesis, pp. 427-428). 38 See esp. Spitzer, "Zur Entstehung der sog. 'erlebten Rede'," Walzel, and Neuse. It is not without interest, in this respect, that a number of critics maintained that the narrated monologue originates in an oral speech pattern for imi-

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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 lyric and the ironic. Joyce, for example, narrates Stephen's monologues lyrically, Gerty MacDowell's parodistically. Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence in- variably use the style seriously, whereas both possibilities are found in Flaubert, Thomas Mann or Musil. The following examples from Hermann Broch and Jean-Paul Sartre 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 Strauchern 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 Seele, fliessend aus dem Ewigen ins Irdische, Wissen vom Kommenden im Diesseitigen und im Jenseitigen! Am Bug des Schiffes sang ein Musikanten- sklave, und Lied wie Saitenspiel, Menschenwerk beides, waren in sich beschlossen, menschenentfernt, menschenerlost, Sphiarenluft, 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 fictional technique to the lyric 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 psyche. 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, Sartre's "L'enfance d'un chef" gives us the narrated monologue of inauthentic man. Toward the end of this story, the young Lucien discovers in anti-Semitism 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 style 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 style with the vital rhythms of the spoken language.

39 In Die unbekannte Grop/e (Zurich, 1961), pp. 204-205.

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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 ... scrupuleusement . . . 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 yet, 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 type "from within."

The degree of association or dissociation between an author and his creature is not always 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 stylistic indices in order to determine the overall meaning of a text. This equivocation is perhaps one of the essential attractions of this narrative style, 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.

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Article Contentsp. 97p. 98p. 99p. 100p. 101p. 102p. 103p. 104p. 105p. 106p. 107p. 108p. 109p. 110p. 111p. 112

Issue Table of ContentsComparative Literature, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring, 1966), pp. 97-192Front MatterNarrated Monologue: Definition of a Fictional Style [pp. 97-112]Old Testament Poetry and Homeric Epic [pp. 113-131]Wycherley's First Comedy and Its Spanish Source [pp. 132-144]The Russian Poet-Critic, S.P. Shevyrv, on Goethe [pp. 145-161]Marie de France's Le Laustic and Ovid's Metamorphoses [pp. 162-166]Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 167-169]Review: untitled [pp. 169-172]Review: untitled [pp. 172-173]Review: untitled [p. 174]Review: untitled [pp. 174-175]Review: untitled [pp. 176-177]Review: untitled [pp. 177-179]Review: untitled [pp. 179-182]Review: untitled [pp. 182-183]Review: untitled [pp. 184-186]Review: untitled [pp. 186-189]Review: untitled [pp. 189-190]Review: untitled [pp. 190-191]

Books Received [p. 192]

Documents

Narrated Monologue- Dorrit Cohn