Parentheticals & point of view in free

indiret style (FIS)Diane Blakemore (2009)

Discussant: Joey Z. Balsomo, PhD student

De La Salle University Dasmariñas

Purpose The article focuses on the use of

parenthetical structures by writers of free indirect style/thought (FIS)

Materials under Analysis The paper exhausts the examples from

Katherine Mansfield, Malcolm Lowry, and Viriginia Woolf

Theoretical Framework Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995) is used to

analyze the texts. It states that communicated information comes

with a guarantee of Optimal Relevance, so that the invested effort of an audience in its interpretation is rewarded by cognitive effects or by an improvement to the mutual cognitive environment (i.e. common knowledge) of communicator and audience.

Focus 1: FIS as ‘internal speech’ Free indirect style is sometimes compared

to a narrative style in Japanese –non-reportive style (Kuroda, 1973) – in which the narrator identifies with the characters involved in the described events so that we view or witness events from their perspective

Focus 1: FIS as ‘internal speech’ The author adopting this style

reveals/shows the thoughts or ‘inner speech’ of his characters (Chatman, 1978; Ehrlich,

1990) rather than tell the reader what those characters thought and did.

No one has a direct line to another person’s thoughts.

Focus 1: FIS as ‘internal speech’ Public utterances are not ‘inner speech’ but

are evidence from which we can derive meta-representations of someone’s thoughts and his state of mind.

In FIS the linguistic evidence that the author provides for a character’s thought cannot be seen as a quasi-verbatim representation of actual utterances or speech or of actual thought.

FIS material is a representation of a character’s expressions or thoughts.

Focus 1: FIS as ‘internal speech’ The literature on FIS draws the attention to the

use of Speaker Oriented expressions and constructions such as expressive adjectives, expressive epithets, and parentheticals.

These are speaker oriented because whatever they communicate must be attributed to the speaker even when they are used in an utterance which attributes a thought to another person. EXTRACT 26

Extract 26 He would go to Clarissa’s party, because

he wanted to ask Richard what they were doing in India – the conservative duffers.

Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 1976

Focus 1: FIS as ‘internal speech’ NOTE: a speaker may not necessarily

engaged in a communicative act, he may be engaged in an act of thinking

Focus 1: FIS as ‘internal speech’ Contextual assumptions is used in

processing FIS utterances in order to recover information EXTRACT 28

Extract 28 As for Buckingham Palace (like an old

prima donna facing the audience all in white) you can’t deny it a certain dignity, he considered, nor despise what it does, after all, stand to millions of people (a little crowd was waiting at the gate to see the King drive out) for a symbol, absurd though it is.

(Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 1976)

Focus 1: FIS as ‘internal speech’ FIS includes expressions and constructions

which do not correspond to conceptual constituents of thoughts but which simply serve as a means of triggering a process that yields an impression of a character’s state of mind.

Focus 1: FIS as ‘internal speech’ The use of expressive adjectives (damn),

epithets (the bastard), and exclamations (God almighty!) do not encode concepts, but rather reveal… the perspective from which the utterance is made;’ thus, ‘have a dramatic impact on how current and future utterances are perceived (Potts, 2007).

Focus 2: Role of the Narrator in FIS (Examples of passages are authorial in origin. They provide

backdrop for the discussion of the parenthetical phenomena)

In FIS the narrator uses deictic expressions which indicate current time or proximate referents even though the fictional world is located in the past and in a distal location (31) and (32)

Extract 31 How continually, how startingly, the

landscape changed. Now the fields were full of stones.

(Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1962)

Extract 32 And the echo came back: ‘Orio – Why, the

mad pictures of the wolves!

He had forgotten they were here.

(Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1962)

Focus 2: Role of the Narrator in FIS

The narrator may use a distal demonstrative (that) with a character’s proximate demonstrative (this) in order to intrude on the character’s thoughts (33)

Extract 33 It was her deep distrust of her husband –

this was what darkened the world.

That was a sentiment easily indicated, but not so easily explained.

(James, Portrait of a Lady,(James, Portrait of a Lady, 1936)

Focus 3: Parentheticals Self-interruptions, digressions, and

revisions are characteristics of spontaneous, unplanned discourse.

A speaker may be prompted to interrupt his own utterance because of an event or state of affair in the environment which is perceived by the speaker as requiring an immediate response.

Focus 3: Parentheticals Ex. an utterance of ‘Fire’ during a lecture or

‘Pass me a pen’ in the middle of telephone conversation.

An author whose aim is to represent thoughts which themselves are unplanned should produce utterances containing similar kinds of interruptions and revisions. Consider (37)

Extract 37 But just at that moment steps sounded,

and, looking in the mirrow, she saw George bowing in the doorway. How queerly he smiled! It was the mirror, of course. She turned round quickly. His lips curled back in a sort of grin, and – wasn’t he unshaved? – he looked almost green in the face.

(Mansfield, ‘Revelations,’ The Collected Short Stories, 1981)

Focus 3: Parentheticals Author provides parentheticals to: capture the difficulties a character has when he

experiences a feeling which he does not recognize or which surprises him;

capture the intensity of a feeling or thought a character is feeling,

Capture the way that the train of a character’s thoughts may be interrupted because it reminds him of another or simply because he has just noticed something in the environment.

Focus 3: Parentheticals Parentheticals allow the reader to gain an

impression that he is recovering a more accurate meta-representation of a character’s thoughts and though processes – an impression of affective mutuality between himself and a fictional character

Focus 3: Parentheticals The author may establish the sort of

dissociation that is required for irony.

Focus 4: Parentheticals in Extracts Parentheticals is pragmatically integrated

with its host in the sense that the assumptions they communicate alter the context for its interpretation. (8)

Focus 4: Parentheticals in Extracts The and-parenthetical refines the

audience’s search for the contextual assumptions which enable them to interpret the repetition in the host. (44)

Focus 4: Parentheticals in Extracts Parenthetical (used as a descriptive

commentary by the author) allows the reader to recover a meta-representation of a character’s thought and a metarepresentation of the processes involved in having it; thus, increasing the sense of immediacy or affective mutuality between reader and character (45)

Focus 4: Parentheticals in Extracts Parenthetical commentary ensures that the

reader not only recovers a meta-representation of a character’s thought, but also a meta-representation of a character’s emotions as he has this thought (46)

Focus 4: Parentheticals in Extracts Parenthetical commentary provides the

reader a physical context in which the character is engaged in thought (47)

Focus 4: Parentheticals in Extracts Parentheticals may also play a role in

shifting the focus from one perspective to another. In Some cases, they simply establish a contrast between two different points of view. (48)

Focus 4: Parentheticals in Extracts Parenthetical establishes a distance or

dissociation between two subjects of consciousness so that one places the other in a ludicrous light. (49)

Focus 4: Parentheticals in Extracts In (49), the parenthetical ironically

described the character.

Conclusion FIS contains features enabling the author to

establish the illusion of a direct line between the reader and the character, or

A sense of affective mutuality between reader and character

The effort in the interpretation of an FIS text is rewarded by an increased sense of intimacy between reader and character.

Conclusion There are features of FIS that lead to an

increased sense of mutuality between reader and author, and a corresponding impression of distance between reader and character.

The reader is rewarded by a sense of absurdity and a sense of collusion with the author – for example, ironic forms of address, the use of vocabulary that is more characteristic of the narrator than of the character whose thoughts are being represented.

Conclusion Parentheticals in FIS play both type of role The interruptions, revisions and digressions

contribute to the sense of affective mutuality between reader and character

Conclusion Parentheticals that describe the context in

which a character is having the thoughts represeted can encourage the reader to create meta-representations of thoughts not actually revealed by the narrator, thereby increasing the sense of intimacy between reader and character.

Conclusion Parentheticals can also be used to place a

character’s thoughts in a ludicrous light thereby contributing to a sense of ironic distance between reader and this character.

The reader may feel that in recognizing this impression of absurdity he is in collusion with the author.

Conclusion Parentheticals play an important role in

enabling the narrator to represent thoughts from a variety of perspective – including his own.