Black Dagger Brotherhood

Me citan en este artículo narratológico:

Kendal, Evie. "The Use of Free Indirect Discourse in J. R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood Series." Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique 38 (2019): 20-43.*

         https://au-east.erc.monash.edu.au/fpfiles/20157683/Kendal2019.pdf

         https://doi.org/10.26180/5df1974e1cb20

         2022

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Retropost #1599 (8 de mayo de 2007): Transparent Minds

A summary of Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1978).

1. Consciousness in Third-Person Context.

1.1. Psycho-Narration: The narration of the character’s thoughts by a knowledgeable narrator, in the narrator’s own language and concepts. It tends towards summary and abstraction. It draws no border between feelings and perceptions. It is the classical way of presenting consciousness (e.g. in Trollope, Meredith or Proust) and it is the most apt for the analysis of the least conscious strata of psychic life. It is the equivalent of indirect discourse. Often found in authorial narrative.

1.2. Quoted Monologue. The thoughts of the character are quoted by the narrator in a literal way. Usually with quotation marks (but without them in Ulysses ch. I). Monologue, whether autonomous or not, does not portray the Freudian unconscious or the Jamesian stream of consciousness, but endophasy, a phenomenon of consciousness. The unconscious can be reflected only symptomatically by the thoughts of a character. Primitive uses are modelled on speech and rhetorical patterns. In the most mimetic instances, pronominal reference of 1st and 2nd person collapses, the coherence and unity of speech gives way to several conflicting voices or lines of thought, and there is syntactic fragmentation and lexical opaqueness. It is the silent equivalent of direct discourse and is often identified with it up to the early 19th century.

1.3. Narrated Monologue. A rendition of the character’s thoughts with his own words and attitudes, but set in the syntax of a third-person narration (3rd person reference to the character and past narrative tenses). Very often there is an ambiguity as to whether it is actual speech or merely thought which is being depicted: therefore, this mode merges into free indirect discourse, of which it is the equivalent. Due to its form, it also provides a seamless transition into psycho-narration: the difference is that no verbs of mental activity are used in narrated monologue, which therefore has grammatical independence. Narrated monologue refers to thoughts : it is different from narrated perception , although they may combine. It amplifies emotional notes, in the directions of both sympathy and irony. Often found in figural narrative. Galsworthy’s The Man of Property is a good example.


2. Consciousness in First-Person Texts.

2.1. Retrospective techniques. They are the first-person equivalents of these techniques, but with an essential difference: an element of remembrance is introduced.

2.1.1. Self-narration. Equivalent of psycho-narration. Like psycho-narration, it may be dissonant, if there is a great distance (temporal, ideological) between the narrating self and the experiencing self, or consonant , if the two are close. Consonant self-narration has been favoured by modern literature. Dissonant: Great Expectations. Consonant: L’Etranger.

2.1.2. Self-quoted monologue. Equivalent of quoted monologue. From set speeches to flickering thoughts. It is somewhat cumbersome and psychologically implausible. Usually avoided now; frequent in early memoir-novels.

2.1.3. Self-narrated monologue. Equivalent of narrated monologue. In it, "the narrator momentarily identifies with his past self, giving up his temporally distanced vantage point and cognitive privilege for his past-time-bound bewilderments and vacillations" (167). Hamsun’s Hunger.

2.2. From narration to monologue. A range of intermediary, problematic forms. In these there is no realistic motivation for the narrative; there is ambiguity about the status of the narrative and the audience addressed. E.g. Beckett’s novels, or Faulkner’s memory monologues which exclude all but past experience. Other intermediary cases may be in the direction of digressive autobiography, or the diary, when the motivation of the text is abandoned or laid bare. There is a general tendency in contemporary literature to break the rules of formal mimeticism.

2.3. The autonomous monologue. It is similar to quoted monologue, only it is not quoted by a narrator – our first and only contact is with the mind of the character.

2.3.1. Joyce’s "Penelope" monologue in Ulysses as paradigm. Predominance of exclamatory syntax; avoidance of standard narrative and reportive tenses; vague referentiality.

2.3.2. Variations of the form. The portrayal of time is not necessarily even. Sections of the same length without breaks may stand for very different stretches of story time. Or else, time gaps may be introduced in a variety of ways. Various degrees of formality or readability, sometimes motivated by the kind of mind which is portrayed.

2.3.3. The memory monologue. See 2.2. The present moment of locution of the narrator is emptied of experience: "the monologist exists as a disembodied medium, a pure memory without clear location in time and space" (247). Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Claude Simon’s novels.

2.3.4. Epilogue: The relation to drama and lyric. The autonomous monologue is no longuer a narrative technique among others used in a narrative genre. It is a narrative genre of its own, which has gradually suppressed all the originally narrative characteristics and moved in the direction of lyric and drama.

Implied author(s) in film and literature

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On FID, FDD, DD, ID, FIT, FDT, DT, IT

A question to the Narrative-L on represented discourse, and my answer:

*Dear All,*
I have a rather basic question that comes from reading the Narrative website. I was looking at free indirect discourse and found this passage as an example:

Gabriel could not listen while Mary Jane was playing her Academy piece, full of runs and difficult passages, to the hushed drawing room. He liked music but the piece she was playing had no melody for him and he doubted whether it had any melody for the other listeners, though they had begged Mary Jane to play something."
-James Joyce, "The Dead"

At first I thought that I couldn't distinguish this from indirect discourse, (I looked at the example on the website for that and indeed they seemed comparable to me) because in this passage I take the narrator to be simply describing the effect of the music on Gabriel. Then, upon further reflection, I thought perhaps its "indirectness" comes from the feeling that Gabriel himself is reflecting in these terms, suggested by the word "doubted," which shows thought. I now take it that he is thinking to himself at this moment "I like music, but this has no melody and I doubt whether it has any melody for the other listeners either." Am I right about this? If at this exact moment in time, Gabriel were listening to the music, but thinking "I'm rather hungry" while the narrator was telling us that the music is making no impact on Gabriel because of its runs and difficult passages, that would simply be the narrator's indirect discourse about Gabriel. I just want to make sure that I'm right in thinking the key to the indirectness of this passage rests on "doubted."
Yours,
Heather Morton
Centre College



Dear Heather,
Yes, I think you describe accurately the way the passage might almost be read as the narrator's reflection, but with the reflection attributed to Gabriel thanks to that verb of thought, which makes it clear he's consciously reflecting about his perception, and that this reflection is "indirectly" conveyed through the narrator's discourse. However, I think the passage would be more accurately described as "free indirect thought", since it is clear that Gabriel isn't uttering anything: he doesn't say the music has no melody, etc. —f.i.d. is about utterances, and free indirect thought is about perceptions, feelings, thoughts... although in some cases, not here really, there can be ambiguity or common ground (given that we think in part in words). As Dorrit Cohn and others made it clear, there can be free indirect / free direct / indirect or direct thoughts, or free indirect / free direct / indirect / direct discourse.

Jose Angel García Landa
http://www.garcialanda.net

James Phelan's answer is also of interest:

Heather,

At the risk of having your straightforward question--and the helpful responses from Jose and Ward--tip over into debates about the passage or the concept of focalization, here are a few more thoughts.

1. While the verb "doubted" does cue us into Gabriel's thought, the earlier verb "listened," though followed by "not," can be read as already functioning to cue us into Gabriel's consciousness. This cuing is reinforced by "liked," as Ward suggests, and that second sentence implies that the "not" that follows "listened" is less than an absolute negation: Gabriel listened enough to decide that the piece had "no melody for him." Consequently, it's plausible to read the phrase "full of runs and difficult passages" as part of his thought: he is as much (or perhaps even more) the agent of this description/judgment as the narrator.


2. The final clause of the second sentence offers a nice example of how indirection can extend "down" a level: that is, the blend of the narrator's and Gabriel's voices subsumes a blend of Gabriel's and the other characters' voices. In other words, Gabriel's thought indirectly represents what the others said--"play something" is plausibly part of the others' speech (as in "Mary Jane, please play something for us")--with "begged" as the equivocating word between his thought and their speech (did they say, "Mary Jane, please play something for us. We beg you"? or is he translating "please" or "please, please, please" into "begged"? We can't answer with any confidence, a situation common with free indirect techniques).

3. It's worth remembering that in the first sentence of the story, "Lily the caretaker's daughter was literally run off her feet," Joyce signifies indirection with the adverb rather than with a verb of speaking, thinking, feeling, or perceiving. In other words, while such verbs are excellent cues to indirection, they are not the only possible ones. 

Leyéndonos la mente: Dos artículos sobre narratología cognitiva

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