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Evidentials and the “Hear-ator” in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” Julia Wise

No research thus far on evidential constructions suggest that “zero evidential marking”

(Fox 2001) in literature indicates a switch in point of view or narrative consciousness. However, this is just what I propose based on three key passages in James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues.” These passages break the story’s typical pattern of evidential usage. In the typical pattern, the first-person narrator qualifies inferences about the internal states of subjects with an evidential construction (underlined) in the same sentence as the inference, as in (1):

1) He [Sonny] could hardly help feeling that they had stripped him naked and were spitting on that nakedness. (p. 392)

In (1), the inference is presented from the hedged point of view of the narrator. However, in zero evidential marking passages, the narrator uses an evidential preface (underlined) in a separate sentence before representing a subject’s internal state in the following sentences, as in (2):

2) And the face I saw on Sonny I’d never seen before. Everything had been burned out of it, and, at the same time, things usually hidden were being burned in, by the fire and fury of the battle which was occurring in him up there. (p. 399)

I suggest that in situations like (2), the narrator is a “hear-ator,” empathetically narrating what he “hears” or grasps concerning another’s internal state consistent with the story’s theme of learning to deeply listen. Julia Wise

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Julia Wise Linguistics Ph.D. Application Writing Sample 13 December 2009

Evidentials and the “Hear-ator” in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” 1, Introduction: Evidentiality and Zero Evidential Marking

The use of constructions called evidentials—which in English include such words as

“hear,” “see,” “look,” “seem like,” “sound like,” and “must” (per Fox’s (2001) work on English

evidentials) indicate secondhand knowledge about a topic. According to Michael (2006),

evidential constructions “index a knowing subject and an event described by the evidentially-

marked proposition, and they denote the mode of access that the knowing subject has to the event

in question. In other words, an evidential encodes the epistemological access to a particular event

or state of affairs, relative to a particular subject” (p. 1). Such modes of access can be physical,

such as visual or auditory modes, or more abstract, such as the inferential mode (pp.1-2). An

example of a Japanese evidential construction indicating the inferential mode is given in (1),

from Kuroda (1973). The evidential marker here is the phrase ni tigainai, underlined for

emphasis1:

(1) Mary wa sabisii ni tigainai ‘Mary must be lonely’ (p. 69) Ni tigainai, translated as ‘must be,’ indicates that the speaker has inferred that Mary is lonely,

perhaps because they2 know Mary often struggles with loneliness or is struggling with it now,

whether they know this firsthand or from someone who knows her personally, or perhaps

because they infer that anyone in her situation would struggle with loneliness.

1 In this paper I underline all pertinent evidential constructions in my examples. I am indebted to Dr. Arthur Palacas for his generous help with this paper. 2 In this paper, I’ve chosen to use generic third-person pronouns for all third-person references.

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Yet often enough English speakers omit these caveat expressions and make direct

evaluations about various matters, including the internal states of others—stating what others

want or believe or even what they feel at a given moment (Fox 2001). Fox terms this

phenomenon “zero evidential marking” (2001). According to Fox, an “utterance” is “zero

marked for evidentiality” if 1) it can be analyzed as making a claim and 2) it is not marked by

evidential indicators such as “hear,” “see,” “seem like,” etc. (pp.171-172). Several of Fox’s

general examples of zero evidential marked claims in English are given in (2) – (5):

(2) The soup is good. (3) He’s the best hitter in the American league. (4) Biochemistry is primitive and medicine is barbaric. (5) No mutual fund is doing good now anyhow. (p. 172) These assertions by an unknown speaker bring that speaker close to their claim. Therefore, if a

speaker uses evidential constructions to distance themselves from responsibility for an action or

claim, as both Fox and Michael suggest,3 they use a lack of evidentials to assume responsibility

for an action or claim. As Fox argues, speakers use zero evidential marking to explicitly

associate themselves in some way with what they are asserting. And they choose whether to

identify with that person through zero evidential marking based on the social circumstances in

which they make an utterance (p. 170).

I suggest that narrators in fictional English narratives also use zero evidential marking in

the ways suggested above when they directly represent the internal states of other characters

without qualifying their observations about what they cannot possibly know with what Fox calls

“overt-evidential” markers (p.170). In fiction, narrators sometimes use evidential constructions

and sometimes do not use them, based on pragmatic circumstances (time, place, etc.), just as

occurs in real life. Moreover, sometimes when narrators observe or claim something using zero 3 Michael (2006) specifically asserts that evidentials indicate the speaker’s desire to distance himself or herself from “moral responsibility” for an action (p. 2).

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evidential marking, they are actually temporarily switching to narrate from another character or

narrator’s perspective—a literary shift in point of view. This shift in point of view indicates that

the narrator, and through them the reader, is temporarily identifying with or empathizing with

another character.

I argue that zero evidential marking indicates a shift in point of view, or what I term a

shift in consciousness, in three key passages of zero evidential marking in the James Baldwin

(1924-1987) short story “Sonny’s Blues” (1951). I argue that in these three passages, the

narrator’s shift in consciousness indicates an act of linguistic empathy with his subject.

In “Sonny’s Blues,” the first-person narrator, who is unnamed but highly involved in the

narrative, tells the story of his brother Sonny’s heroin addiction and triumph over this addiction

through playing jazz piano. As he tells this story, he also explains his own reactions to Sonny’s

addiction and triumph through music. The narrator’s words demonstrate how his attitude toward

his brother changes, as he moves from willfully misunderstanding his brother’s behavior to

understanding his brother’s very soul. This change is the heart of the story. The key to this

process is that the narrator learns to listen to his brother. Through this process, the narrator

becomes what I will call a “hear-ator”—one who represents the perspective of another based on

his intimate experience of the other, including what he has physically and metaphorically heard

from the other, as when someone might say colloquially, “I hear ya.” The passages in which the

narrator learns to be a hear-ator are the three main examples of zero evidential marking that I

will be examining.4

4My concept of the hear-ator builds on Hill and Irvine’s (1993) idea of the “animator” via Goffman (1981), as discussed in Fox (2001). To Hill and Irvine, the “animator” in an evidential expression is the individual who gives voice to the message that is received from the “principal”—the source of the message (p. 13)—through the “author.” In this paper, the “animator” is the narrator,” the “author” can be seen as equivalent to Michael’s (2006) “mode of access” (p. 4), and the “principal” is the non-narrator subject and the source of the message they want to transmit to the one the hear-ator is representing (p. 174).

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The narrator in “Sonny’s Blues” first thinks about the concept of “listening” very early in

the story. Referring to the algebra students he teaches, he says:

(6) Perhaps I was listening to them because I was thinking about my brother and in them I heard my brother. And myself. (p. 380)

As the story unfolds, the narrator continues to think about “listening,” progressing in his

thoughts from hearing direct quotes about “listening” to more deeply hearing, as first shown by

overt evidential markings and later with zero evidential markings. In (7), the narrator directly

quotes what Sonny tells him about “listening”:

(7) “I hear you. But you never hear anything I say.” (p. 391)

Later, in (8), the narrator’s own inner voice tells him about “listening,” in an indirect quote:

(8) And something told me that I should curb my tongue, that Sonny was doing his best to talk, that I should listen. (p. 395) In (9), as the narrator listens, Sonny tells him about how all humans must learn to listen to their

own inner voices. The narrator quotes what his brother tells him:

(9) “So you’ve5 got to listen. You got to find a way to listen.” (p. 396)

In the same passage, Sonny tells the narrator about his own struggles to listen to himself. This

inability to listen inwardly, he says, led to his heroin addiction. Again, the narrator directly

quotes his brother, as in (10):

(10) “I needed to clear a space to listen—and I couldn’t find it, and I—went crazy, I did terrible things to me, I was terrible for me.” (p. 397) In the next example in this progression, the narrator begins to listen well, as seen in the overt-

evidentially marked (underlined) inference of Creole’s point of view in (11):

(11) Listen, Creole seemed to be saying, listen. Now these are Sonny’s blues. (p. 399)

5 In the broader context of the passage, in which Sonny is talking about all human beings, this “you” is the universal “you,” the colloquial equivalent to “one” used in formal, academic writing for instance.

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Throughout the story, the narrator in the three zero evidentiality marked passages

experiments with hear-ating. In the third of these passages, he finally becomes a hear-ator,

empathizing with the experiences and feelings of others—and he finally learns to listen to his

brother. In (12), after the evidential constructions in his [Sonny’s] face and I heard, beginning

with the words “He had made it his,” the narrator hears Sonny’s thoughts and represents them

without direct quotes and with zero evidentiality:

12) Yet, there was no battle in his [Sonny’s] face now. I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. He had made it his [italics mine]: that long line, of which we know only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever. (p. 400) My purpose is to describe the narrator’s progression to this epiphanic moment of mature hear-

ator as evidenced in the three zero evidential marking passages mentioned before. I will show

that the zero evidential marking in these three key passages signals the narrator’s learning how to

listen, his maturing in the role of hear-ator. I will show that the pragmatic inference required by

zero evidential marking replaces overt-evidential markings as the narrator learns how to listen.

As background for these key passages, I will examine the syntactic circumstances in

which this zero evidential marking occurs in light of Kuroda’s observations on linguistic

empathy constructions in Japanese grammar (1973) and Kuroda’s multiple consciousness theory

of narration. The inspiration for my analysis comes from these distinctions in Japanese grammar.

2. Kuroda’s Linguistic Empathy Analysis and Multiple Consciousness Theory

Kuroda (1973)6 uses Japanese empathy constructions to illuminate how certain narratives

are capable of showing the narration of multiple consciousnesses, or many narrators. The

6 Susumu Kuno expanded on Kuroda’s observations about Japanese empathy constructions in chapter 5 of his study Functional Syntax: Anaphora, Discourse, and Empathy (1987).

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empathy constructions7 he discusses—in conjunction with the expressions ni tigainai and no

da—offer insight into the inferential and representational patterns of evidential constructions in

“Sonny’s Blues” that I will be discussing. The ni tigainai construction expresses an inference

much like the overt-evidentiality marked observations in “Sonny’s Blues,” and the no da

construction expresses empathy representationally much like the zero-evidentiality marked

observations in “Sonny’s Blues.”

Normally in Japanese, a speaker must describe the sensations, or internal state, of another

with a third-person verb morpheme, such as atugatte (“hot”). However, a speaker can describe

their own internal state using this verb morpheme or a special adjective morpheme specifically

for first person, such as atui (“hot”). However, there are two noteworthy exceptions to this rule.

First, when the sensation morpheme is accompanied by the evidential construction ni tigainai,8

which we have already seen in example (1), the first-person adjective form can be used to

describe another’s internal state:

(13) Mary wa sabisii9 ni tigainai ‘Mary must be lonely’

The second exception is possible when the expression no da is attached to the end of a

sentence, as in (14) (p. 70):

(14) Mary wa sabisii no da ‘Mary is lonely’

In (14),10 with its up-close-and-personal, first-person sensation adjective (perfectly acceptable

thanks to no da), the speaker does not just state that ‘Mary is lonely,’ but also implies an intimate

7 This ni tigainai is only empathetic when it accompanies a first-person adjective used to describe a first-person subject. Otherwise, it is simply an evidential construction. 8 Fox (2001) suggests that zero evidential marking is less common in non-Indo-European languages (such as her example of North Californian language Wintu, and the examples presented here of Japanese) because these languages index evidentials through a morphological construction. Indo-European languages like English, in turn, index evidentials more flexibly, throughout a discourse. (pp. 167-168) 9 Underlined emphasis mine, as in (10) and (11) as well.

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prior knowledge of Mary. In essence, the speaker is able to take Mary’s part, to represent Mary

so to speak, through an act of linguistic empathy. The speaker describes Mary’s internal state

because they know Mary’s behavior from the past or because she told them herself (p. 71).

There is one more special exception to the circumstances in which a Japanese speaker can

use a first-person morpheme when speaking about internal states of others. Kuroda explains how

in Japanese third-person, non-reportive multi-consciousness narratives—those monitored either

by an omniscient narrator or multiple consciousnesses—sensation adjectives and verbs can be

used interchangeably, without ni tigainai and without no da, and still be perfectly acceptable. It

is as if the narrative itself is the constraining structure around the use of a first-person adjective

with a third-person subject, as if the narrative is the speaker saying, “I know this about the

internal state of another because I can infer it or because that character told me so.” The narrative

itself becomes a linguistic empathy construction through which a direct representation of a

character’s internal state is possible.11 (p. 77) Multiple consciousness narratives are also possible

in other languages, such as English, which require lexical- and discourse-level structures to

indicate these shifts and overlaps in point of view—to indicate linguistic empathy.12

Nevertheless, according to Kuroda, multiple consciousness narratives are never narrated by a

first-person “I” voice.

10 Kuroda admits that the semantics of the no da expression are extremely difficult to translate. He compares it to C’est que in French but only as a distant approximation (p. 69). 11 By extension, Kuroda suggests that these “nonreportive stories have their own grammar” (p. 77). 12 Kuroda uses the following excerpt from D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers as an example: “Paul looked into Miriam’s eyes. She was pale and expectant with wonder, her lips were parted, and her dark eyes lay open to him. His look seemed to travel down into her. Her soul quivered. It was the communion she wanted. He turned aside, as if pained. He turned to the bush.” About this passage, Kuroda says the following: “The starting sentence may be taken as representing the narrator’s point of view, but it may also represent Paul’s consciousness directed toward Miriam’s through his sight. It prepares the reader for the next sentence, which represents Miriam’s image as it is reflected in Paul’s mind. And then Miriam’s eyes in Paul’s consciousness and Paul’s look in Miriam’s are where the two could seem to meet. But the third to fifth sentences represent Miriam’s consciousness directed toward herself. In the next to last sentence Miriam’s consciousness is returning outward and the narrator’s point of view may be coming back. The last sentence could be interpreted as the narrator’s indifferent point of view.” (p. 72)

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I suggest that first-person narrators can also shift their point of view, representing the

internal states of other characters with zero evidential marking. I suggest that this is precisely

what is occurring in three key passages in “Sonny’s Blues.” In the three key passages, the

narrator breaks from the pattern of over-evidential constructions that he consistently follows

throughout the narrative, so that this story essentially becomes a multiple consciousness narrative

instead of being told only by the unnamed but involved “I.”

In the next section, I will discuss the syntactic characteristics of both the typical pattern

of overt-evidential usage in “Sonny’s Blues” and the pattern of zero evidential marking shown in

three key passages of “Sonny’s Blues.” Along the way, I apply Kuroda’s insights to help

illuminate the differences between these two main patterns of evidential usage in “Sonny’s

Blues,” comparing the evidential ni tigainai construction and the grammaticized no da linguistic

empathy construction with the lexical- and discourse-level linguistic empathy structures present

in this English short story.

3. Linguistic Empathy Patterns in “Sonny’s Blues”

I illustrate the typical pattern of explicit evidential constructions in “Sonny’s Blues” with

examples (15) - (17), followed by a formula to describe the pattern. I have underlined the

evidential constructions in the examples:

(15) I guess I didn’t want to believe this. (p. 387) (16) He [Sonny] could hardly help feeling that they had stripped him naked and were spitting on that nakedness. (p. 392) (17) Yet, it was clear that, for them, I was only Sonny’s brother. (p. 398)

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The majority of the numerous evidential constructions in this story read just like examples (15) -

(17),13 in which the evidential constructions preface an observation the narrator makes about

another’s internal state and thus indicate the mode of access by which he has learned this

information (Michael 2004). Because of their placement in the sentences, I will call these

evidential constructions “evidential prefaces” (EP’s). In (15), the narrator is uncertain about what

he himself wanted at the time of the events he is narrating. He is speaking from an unspecified

later date and indexes his uncertainty about his belief with the EP I guess, which indicates an

inferential mode of access to the information he is relaying about the internal state of his prior

self. In (16), the narrator uses the EP could hardly help before he describes what he believes

must have been his brother’s feelings at a particularly vulnerable moment, again using the

inferential mode to access information about the internal state of a non-narrator (ISNN). And in

(17), the narrator uses the EP it was clear before describing how he believes Sonny’s fellow band

members perceive him—again with the inferential mode.

In this typical pattern of evidential usage, then, the narrator does not switch to narrate

another consciousness. Instead, he describes what he assumes about another’s internal state—

what he infers. There is thus a harmony between the narrator’s point of view at the time he uses

an EP and the time he describes his inference about an ISNN: at both times he is speaking from

the same point of view. With this pattern, he is thus narrating a single consciousness—his own.

A simple formula captures this recurring pattern of evidential usage:

18) Single Consciousness Structure (SCS)

13 There are apparent exceptions to this rule, as in the following backward anaphor (p. 399): “Then they all came together again, and Sonny was part of the family again. I could tell this from his face.” In this example, the evidential construction I could tell this from his face, indicating that the narrator is using the visual mode to access his information about dynamics of the band members as they play the blues, clearly does not preface but rather follows the narrator’s description of the internal state of non-narrators (ISNN’s).

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S[EP + ISNN]S Because the SCS is inferentially derived, this construction resembles the ni tigainai construction

in Japanese, which permits a speaker to comment on the internal state of another. Through a ni

tigainai and an SCS, a speaker/narrator employs an inferential narrative mode.

However, in three key passages in “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator breaks from this

inferential pattern of evidential usage by using zero evidential marking. In these three cases, the

narrator follows an EP in one sentence with an assertion in a new sentence representing another’s

internal state. Normally, this representation would take an EP in the same S to indicate what

mode of access the narrator has used to learn the ISNN. But in all three passages, an EP in a

separate S follows another S with zero evidential marking. An example from one of these three

passages is in (19):

(19) And the face I saw on Sonny I’d never seen before. Everything had been burned out of it, and, at the same time, things usually hidden were being burned in, by the fire and fury of the battle which was occurring in him up there. (p. 399)

In this example, the underlined first sentence is an EP, which should indicate that the

narrator has learned the information following this preface from seeing Sonny’s face. This EP

thus indicates a visual mode of access to the information that follows. However, the information

that follows is not strictly visual. It is impossible for the narrator to feel “the fire and fury of the

battle which was occurring in him up there” just from Sonny’s face, which is already sending

mixed signals, being both “burned out” and “burned in” at the same time. Instead, the narrator

must have deduced the intensity of the internal battle in his brother Sonny based on his intimate

prior knowledge of Sonny’s experiences and character. Or he must have heard about this battle

from Sonny himself—that is, Sonny must have told him at some point.

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Thus here the EP does not indicate the mode by which the narrator has accessed the

information that he relays after the preface; it indicates something else. I suggest that here, the

EP signals a shift in point of view or narrative consciousness. Moreover, with this example, in

which the narrator places the EP in a sentence separate from his observations about someone

else’s internal state (ISNN), the narrator has broken his previously established pattern of

evidential usage. With this new pattern, he is now representing multiple consciousnesses—his

own in the sentence with an EP, and that of another in the following sentence or sentences

describing the ISNN. The following formula (20) illustrates this new pattern of evidential usage:

(20) Multiple Consciousness Structure (MCS)

S[EP]S + S[ISNN]S . . .] = Hear-ator14

I suggest that MCS’s serve a similar purpose as a no da construction in Japanese

grammar. Again, with a no da construction, a Japanese speaker can use a first-person adjective to

represent a third-person subject because the no da construction grammaticizes the speaker’s

intimate prior knowledge of a subject’s internal state, in an act of linguistic empathy. Usually,

the speaker has obtained this intimate prior knowledge because they have personally witnessed

the subject’s experiences and reactions or because the subject has told the speaker this

knowledge. From the speaker’s perspective, the speaker has heard this knowledge from the

subject—has listened to the subject, either in the physical or metaphorical, empathetic sense.

Thus the concept of “listening” is central to understanding both the no da construction in

Japanese grammar and the MCS of “Sonny’s Blues.” And thus both a no da and an MCS are

representational, allowing for speakers/narrators to accurately represent the internal state of

others.

14 The ellipses in this formula indicate this structure’s flexibility, showing how there may be multiple sentences after the EP developing the ISNN.

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With these comparisons as background, then, I will examine the three zero evidential

marking passages in this story, demonstrating how they follow the pragmatic and syntactic

constraints already outlined in this paper. Specifically, I will show how the passages show a

maturation of the narrator’s abilities as hear-ator through the use of MCS’s.

4. Zero Evidential Marking in “Sonny’s Blues”: Key Passage #1 The first zero evidential passage in the story occurs directly after the narrator has just

read in the newspaper that his brother Sonny has been arrested for using and selling heroin. The

narrator, who teaches algebra at a school in Harlem, is reflecting on his brother’s arrest and

simultaneously, reflecting on the boys to whom he teaches algebra, in (21). As he reflects, he

compares the boys’ experiences to his own childhood experiences and thus begins the process of

learning to empathize with and listen to the experiences of other characters/consciousnesses.

This is his first experiment with hear-ating. Following the syntactic formula for MCS’s, the

narrator begins the hear-ator process with the EP’s I was sure and couldn’t have been in the first

sentence of (21). He follows this sentence with an observation about the internal state of non-

narrative subjects: the internal state of the boys he teaches. With this sentence, the narrator has

switched to representing what the boys are telling him, in a discourse-level act of linguistic

empathy. He relays what he hears to us, as follows:

(21) I was sure that the first time Sonny had ever had horse, he couldn’t have been much older than these boys were now. These boys now, were living as we’d been living then . . . (p. 379) The VP + CP of “were living as we’d been living then” and the deictic words “here” and “now”

from (21) underscore the immediate, personal knowledge the narrator has about the boys’

internal states. Therefore, the narrator’s personal experience inspires his first hear-ator moment.

In (22), the narrator’s act of linguistic empathy continues, as he further represents the

boys’ internal states with zero evidential marking:

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(22) These boys now, were living as we’d been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone (p. 379). In this example, the narrator is empathizing with his students through the medium of his own

childhood experiences. Like a Japanese speaker using the no da construction, the narrator is

essentially saying, “I know this because I went through it myself. Based on what I am hearing

from my childhood memory, I know that this is what my students are going through.”15 Though

he tries to understand what the boys are feeling “now,” the narrator is still ultimately

empathizing with his students through the common experiences he has shared with them. He thus

first tries hear-ating by identifying with subjects with similar experiences as his own. But he still

has far to go before he truly empathizes with others.

5. Zero Evidential Marking in “Sonny’s Blues”: Key Passage #2

In the second key zero evidential marking passage of “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator is at

his living room window, watching a small revival meeting taking place on the street across from

the Harlem tenement in which he and his family live (p. 393). Sonny, who is staying with the

narrator for a time, is now presumably recovering from his heroin addiction and is looking for

employment doing music gigs. Though the narrator has not yet learned to empathize with his

brother—just recently his brother has accused him of never hearing him, as seen in (7)—as the

narrator watches and listens to the revival meeting he is able to directly relay the internal states

of the revival meeting’s leaders in sentences with zero evidential marking. The narrator has

15 Kuroda in his discussion of Japanese sensation verbs-adjectives indicates that under certain circumstances, it is acceptable to use a first-person subject with a third-person sensation verb, so that the first-person speaker appears to have a “split ego,” being both “the subject of a sensation and the objective observer of the subject of this sensation” (p. 68). Obviously this ego split does not occur in a no da construction. However, I use the no da construction metaphorically, to explain circumstances in which a narrator is authoritatively representing something he cannot possibly know. For more on the “I” as a split ego, see Ann Banfield’s “The Name of the Subject: The ‘il’?” (1998).

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already learned to listen to his students through relating their experiences to his own childhood,

as in (21). Now he experiments with hearing and empathizing with others whose experiences are

more distant from his own. As usual, he precedes his zero evidential marking with an EP,

underlined in (23):

(23) It was strange, suddenly, to watch, though I had been seeing these street meetings all my life. So, of course, had everybody else down there. Yet, they paused and watched and listened and I stood still at the window. “Tis the old ship of Zion,” they sang, and the sister with the tambourine kept a steady, jangling beat, “it has rescued many a thousand!” Not a soul under the sound of their voices was hearing this song for the first time, not one of them had been rescued. Nor had they seen much in the way of rescue work being done around them. Neither did they especially believe in the holiness of the three sisters and the brother, they know too much about them, knew where they lived, and how. (pp. 393-394) In (23), the narrator represents several different aspects of the internal states of the

revival meeting participants. He describes their spiritual states when he says “not one of them

had been rescued.” And in the final sentence, he relays what they “believe,” “know,” and “knew”

about the holiness of the sisters and the brother. In this MCS, the narrator represents others

whom he has only seen (“though I had been seeing these street meetings all my life”), not others

with whom he has necessarily shared similar experiences. The process toward mature hear-ation

is now in force.

6. Zero Evidential Marking in “Sonny’s Blues”: Key Passage #3

By far the most significant and extended key passage of zero evidential marking in

“Sonny’s Blues,” however, occurs at the story’s conclusion, when the narrator watches Sonny

play jazz piano with a band at a local club. In this passage are several MCS’s in sequence,

leading to the maturation of the narrator’s hear-ator abilities.

The first example of zero evidential marking in this section is (24). It begins with the EP

All I know, followed in the next sentences by the narrator’s representations of ISNN’s with zero

evidential marking:

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(24) All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours. (p. 398) As usual, the narrator begins the MCS with an EP, All I know, before switching to

narrate an ISNN. This ISNN could belong to a musician in general16 or may belong to Sonny

specifically, especially considering how Sonny has been begging his brother throughout to listen

to him. Whatever the case, here the narrator is finally starting to empathize with his brother by

trying to understand the kinds of feelings his brother as a musician might have. This is

significant because throughout the story, the narrator has disparaged his brother for pursuing

music as a career—thinking it an unstable and unworthy profession for him. Moreover, these

words echo though do not exactly mirror what Sonny has already tried to tell his brother about

musicians’ internal struggles and desperate need to listen to themselves.

Here Sonny successfully explains his internal struggle to the narrator. As the narrator

listens, he starts to identify with his brother’s struggle, evident from his use of the subject

pronoun “we” in the second sentence (“what we mainly hear”) and his use of the object pronoun

“ours” in this MCS’s final sentence. This inclusive first-person pronoun shows the narrator’s

increasing empathy with his brother—his increasing internalization of and identification with his

brother’s feelings. Still, the narrator is not yet at the point of true empathy with his brother.

16 In an earlier, similar passage, the narrator is remembering Sunday afternoons at his parents’ house when all the “old folks” are around, his mother “rocks a little from the waist,” and his “father’s eyes are closed.” In this memory scene the narrator focuses on one particular child, “quiet and big-eyed, curled up in a big chair in the corner.” He talks about the child’s intimate feelings, stating unequivocally what the child “hopes” and “knows,” making observations such as the following: “The child knows that they won’t talk any more because if he knows too much about what’s happened to them, he’ll know too much too soon, about what’s going to happen to him.” (pp. 385-386) These general descriptions are not equivalent to the general descriptions in the passage in (23), though, because it is possible (and likely) that they describe the narrator himself. In other words, it is possible that this passage refers to the narrator. Conversely, it is not possible that (23) refers to the narrator because he himself is self-avowedly no musician. Until this point in the narrative, he hasn’t even really paid attention to music.

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The next MCS occurs in (25). Here the narrator starts trying to hear-ate with the EP as I

began to watch Creole. He follows this EP with a series of sentences detailing what Creole has

told him about his internal state at that moment, such as how Creole “was listening” and what he

“wanted” and “knew”:

(25) But as I began to watch Creole, I realized that it was Creole who held them all back. He had them on a short rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with17 Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing—he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water. And, while Creole listened, Sonny moved, deep within, exactly like someone in torment. The EP as I began to watch indicates that the narrator is switching to an ISNN, moving from

narration of himself to narration of Creole. As the narrator listens/empathizes, he is able to hear-

ate Creole and represent aspects of his inner life that he has no way of knowing but by listening

to Creole describing them himself. This linguistic empathy with Creole, a man he has just met

that night, is even more removed from the narrator’s personal experience than the narrator’s

empathy with musicians in general and Sonny in particular, as in (24). Now the narrator is

starting to empathize with Sonny’s friends, trying to understand others whom Sonny cares about.

With the last sentence, he is also beginning to empathize with Sonny, feeling how Sonny

“moved, deep within.”

With the next MCS, the narrator finally starts to hear-ate for his brother specifically,

marking a significant moment in his development as hear-ator. This passage has already been

discussed in (19):

17 This represents the process of talking and listening.

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(19) And the face I saw on Sonny I’d never seen before. Everything had been burned out of it, and, at the same time, things usually hidden were being burned in, by the fire and fury of the battle which was occurring in him up there. (p. 399) As the narrator continues to hear-ate, he learns to listen so well that he empathizes not only with

what Creole and Sonny are feeling about the music, but also with what all humans feel as they

listen to music. As he uses various inclusive first-person pronouns in the next MCS, he

represents the collective consciousness of the human race and simultaneously identifies himself

as being part of this consciousness. As usual, he precedes the examples of zero evidential

marking with an EP in a separate sentence. The EP is underlined, below:

(26) Then, for awhile, just being happy with Sonny, they seemed to be agreeing with him that brand-new pianos certainly were a gas. Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness. (p. 399) In (26), the hear-ator has identified so thoroughly with what other consciousnesses feel that he

himself is speaking in unison with them. He is not representing ISNN’s, marking the internal

states as belonging to others. Instead, the narrator has learned how to listen so well that he

immediately and naturally absorbs what others are telling him, so that essentially the moment of

telling does not even exist. Meanwhile, through listening, the narrator is discovering his own

connection with the human race.

At this point in the story, the narrator hear-ates so well that he is able to represent Creole,

finally represent Sonny, and represent the collective consciousness of the human race. Key to

this passage is the message that the narrator hears from Creole, none other than the title of the

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story: “Now these are Sonny’s blues.” In (27), Creole is telling everyone to learn to listen to

Sonny’s blues.

(27) Listen, Creole seemed to be saying, listen. Now these are Sonny’s blues. He made the little black man on the drums know it, and the bright, brown man on the horn. At the climax of this series of epiphanies, the narrator continues to act as hear-ator of the

collective human consciousness. Through linguistic empathy, the narrator/hear-ator has

connected to the human race, finding his place and at the same time, the place of everyone else,

including his own brother. In the example below, the last MCS of the story, this connection is

complete, evidenced by the words “I heard” (italicized below). The narrator uses the EP I

seemed to hear to signal his act of linguistic empathy with Sonny, in which he represents what

Sonny knows about freedom. The narrator then uses the EP in his face before hear-ating what

Sonny has discovered about Sonny’s, the narrator’s, their parents,’ the narrator’s wife Isabel’s,

and the narrator’s dead daughter’s respective places in the long line of the human race:

(27) I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now. I heard [italics mine] what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. He had made it his: that long line, of which we know only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever. I saw my mother’s face again, and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. I saw the moon-lit road where my father’s brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it. I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel’s tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment . . . Then it was over. (p. 400) After this point in the story, the narrator completely stops using evidential constructions.

He also stops using zero evidentiality and acting as hear-ator of other ISNN’s. The actions he

describes in the final paragraph are primarily concrete, details about the audience’s response to

the music and the Scotch and milk the narrator has the waitress serve to Sonny up at the piano.

His ability to hear is thus only momentary, as he says in (27): “And I was yet aware that this was

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only a moment.” Perhaps the narrator, being only human, can only absorb so many ISNN’s at

one time.

7. Conclusion

In this paper, I have shown how the narrator in James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s

Blues” uses evidential constructions to preface shifts in consciousness or point of view in three

key passages throughout the story as he develops as a hear-ator. In the final moments of the

story, the narrator has become such an accomplished hear-ator that he hear-ates other

consciousnesses for many sentences at a time with zero evidential marking, and is even able to

hear the collective consciousness of the human race. By the story’s end, the narrator has become

much more than a first-person narrator, limited to just representing his own internal state: he has

embodied the narrations of multiple narrative consciousnesses per Kuroda’s theory.18

The concept of evidential prefaces marking shifts in narrative consciousness must be

further explored before any definite, universal conclusions about narrative patterns can be drawn.

However, I have shown that this phenomenon is possible from my limited set of findings from

“Sonny’s Blues.” I have also shown that Fox’s (2001) theory that English speakers use zero

evidential marking based on particular social circumstances holds true for fictional narrative as

well. Essentially a narrative, whether fiction or non-fiction, is a kind of world, a reflection of

“real life,” housing numerous smaller social circumstances governed by the social norms of the

particular narrative world. These social norms determine appropriate interactions between

characters. In “Sonny’s Blues,” the social circumstances in which the narrator uses zero

18 Through linguistic empathy constructions, the narrator of “Sonny’s Blues” contradicts Elizabeth Black’s assessment of the effect of evidential constructions in narratives (2006). According to Black, evidentials are “terms of estrangement” that distance readers from the narrator. In “Sonny’s Blues,” evidential constructions preface acts of empathy and identification with the narrator. (pp. 55-57)

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evidential marking are moments in which he hears and empathizes with the internal states of

others in his world.

I suggest that when English speakers use zero evidential marking to describe someone

else’s internal state in “real life”, we are doing the same: we are trying to narrate life from

someone else’s perspective.19 But when we use evidential constructions, we are attempting to

evade this “narrative responsibility” for someone else’s perspective, along the lines of Michael’s

(2006) suggestion that evidential constructions index “moral responsibility” for actions or events

(p. 1). Whether we narrate another’s internal state accurately or not depends on multiple factors,

such as whether we want to put words in their mouth for some personal reason. But if an

accurate representation of their perspective is what we want, this accuracy ultimately depends on

how well we listen, how well we absorb and empathize with what that consciousness says and

does. If we do these things well, we might actually end up learning to hear life through another’s

ears, becoming hear-ators of others in our world.

19 For more on the literary nature of human beings, see Palacas (1993).

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References

Baldwin, James. (1951). Sonny’s blues. In Steven Lynn (Ed.), Literature: Reading and writing

with critical strategies (pp. 379-400). New York: Pearson Longman.

Banfield, Ann. (1998). The name of the subject: The ‘il’? Yale French Studies, 93, pp. 133-174.

Black, Elizabeth. (2006). Pragmatic stylistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Fox, Barbara A. (2001). Evidentiality: Authority, responsibility, and entitlement in English

conversation. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 11 (2), pp. 167-192.

Kuno, S. (1987). Functional syntax: Anaphora, discourse, and empathy. Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press.

Kuroda, S.-Y. (1973). Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet: A case study from

Japanese. In Stephen P. Anderson and Paul Kiparsky (Eds.), A festschrift for Morris

Halle (pp. 377-391). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Michael, Lev. (2006). The moral implications of evidentiality in Nanti society: Epistemic

distance as a pragmatic metaphor for moral responsibility. Proceedings of the Thirteenth

Symposium About Language and Society–Austin, 13, pp. 2-10.

Palacas, Arthur. (1993). Attribution semantics: Linguistic worlds and point of view. Discourse

Processes, 16, pp. 239-277.

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