Violeta Sotirova

Connectives in Free Indirect Style: Continuity or Shift?

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

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

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

Virginia Woolf’s Transparent Selves

‘The sensible world’ writes Ann Banfield in a study pairing Bertrand Russell with Virginia Woolf, ‘presents a broken surface. Contact, so essential initially, blocks access to its geometry. To reach it one must leave behind the dinner table and the streets, “escape... from the common sitting-room” (Room, 118)’1 (Banfield, 2000: 179). For Woolf, as for the mathematical philosopher Russell, it would appear, human contact is part of the sensible world of phenomena which veils the true ‘geometry’ of the world. And Banfield continues her patchwork of quotations: ‘Only after an exposure can one withdraw into a region where “all the being and doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated” (TL, 95). Each aspirant to knowledge must shed the “I”, opening to the world, then return to privacy’ (Banfield, 2000: 179). So, withdrawal into a private space, both literally and metaphorically, as the route to knowing, is only possible after exposure to communality, and thus ‘a core of impenetrable privacy is ultimately reached, “cleared of chatter” (TL, 170), inaccessible to any intruder’ (Banfield, 2000: 180).

The Modernist Revolution

The striking opening of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is still seen by critics as the example par excellence of all the revolutionary innovations that Modernism brought to the novel. Thus, in a recent introduction to the Modernist novel, Jesse Matz, quoting the first sentence of the novel,1 writes: The first words here are familiar enough. What could be more traditional than beginning ‘once upon a time’? But what follows was (in 1916) new and strange: the words seem to be said and heard directly from life itself, without planning or purpose, they let silly baby- talk cheapen the language of literature; they make a joke of storytelling customs, and they plunge us directly into an unfamiliar world, without the kind of preparation (scene- setting, introductory explanations) that might normally ease us in. Gone is any welcoming narrator, any clear or ‘objective’ descriptions – any proper beginning. (2004: 2)

James Joyce’s Extratextual Dialogicity

Joyce’s engagement with consciousness presentation, although hailed by critics as the most innovative in the Modernist canon, is strikingly unengaged with shifts across different characters’ viewpoints. The different episodes of Ulysses are typically filtered through the consciousness of one character. Joyce himself describes the composition of the episodes pretty much in these terms: ‘Each adventure is so to say one person although it is composed of persons — as Aquinas relates of the angelic hosts’ (Gilbert, 1957: 147). There is, however, a less immediate way in which the consciousnesses of characters are connected and this is through coincidence, or recurrent elements that seem to traverse the boundaries of a character’s individual psyche. Udaya Kumar, writing on the different forms of repetition in Ulysses from a post-structuralist perspective, notes that when identical elements, such as the phrase ‘smell of burn’ in Bloom’s interior monologues, recur in a character’s stream of consciousness, it is feasible to naturalise such examples as a form of recollection (1991: 18). The recurrent element may appear at moments which are far apart in the progression of the narrative or in the movement of ‘real’ time, and one can interpret them as unconscious reminiscence of past experience, triggered by, and embedded in, a new context. But recurrent phrasing, Kumar explains, is harder to naturalise, when ‘repetition seems to function as a strategy that goes beyond character- subjectivity and its memory’ (1991: 19) and when a phrase appears first as part of the consciousness of one character and then of another. Kumar provides the following example:

D.H. Lawrence’s Dialogic Consciousness

It is in Sons and Lovers that D.H. Lawrence first begins his experiments with a more complex technique for consciousness presentation. While in his earlier novel, The Trespasser, there are isolated attempts to present the thoughts of the two main characters in juxtaposition, these attempts are there simply to expose the differences in their thinking in response to the outside world. In Sons and Lovers the simultaneous presentation of different viewpoints is complicated, so that the characters seem to respond subliminally to each other’s feelings and emotions:

The Novel of Consciousness

In a sense, the Modernist revolution in form is most strikingly visible in the narrative genre. As Eysteinsson points out: The entire issue of modernism is especially momentous and fore-grounded in the case of narrative, for the aesthetic proclivities of modernism seem bound to go against the very notion of narrativity, narrative progression, or storytelling in any traditional sense. (1990: 187)

Modernist Style and Contemporary Philosophy

In November 1935 Edmund Husserl, one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, gave a series of lectures at the German and the Czech Universities in Prague on ‘The Crisis of European Sciences and Psychology’ which later formed the basis of his last work: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (see Carr, 1970: xvii). Three years before his death, reflecting on a lifetime of rapid scientific developments, Husserl wrote: We make our beginning with a change which set in at the turn of the past century in the general evaluation of the sciences. It concerns not the scientific character of the sciences but rather what they, or what science in general, had meant and could mean for human existence. The exclusiveness with which the total world- view of modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be blinded by the ‘prosperity’ they produced, meant an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity. Merely fact- minded sciences make merely fact-minded people. (1970[1936]: 6)

Charting stylistic change: D. H. Lawrence's handling of point of view

For Lawrence himself, as well as for a number of critics, Sons and Lovers marks the beginning of a new phase. It is generally viewed as his best earlier novel (in comparison with The White Peacock and The Trespasser) and as his first mature piece. Lawrence is clear about the superiority of the third novel to the earlier two: ‘‘Paul Morel is better than The White Peacock or The Trespasser. I’m inwardly very proud of it, though I haven’t yet licked it into form—am still at that labour of love.’’ He is also very dismissive of The Trespasser: ‘‘I don’t care for The Trespasser so much as the first book. My third will be out in February. Of course, I think it’s great.’’ The centrality of Sons and Lovers becomes obvious from Keith Sagar’s widely accepted periodisation of Lawrence’s career: