Free Indirect Style in Modernism by Rundquist Eric;

Author:Rundquist, Eric; [Rundquist, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Published: 2017-11-13T17:22:25+00:00

Chapter 3

FIS and the voice of the Other in The Rainbow

Some critics identify The Rainbow as Lawrence’s first truly Modernist novel. According to Sotirova (2013), his previous novel, Sons and Lovers (1913), “fell between two traditions, narrator-dominated representation in Realism and character-absorbed portrayal in Modernism” (13). In The Rainbow, she explains, “Lawrence has extended the dialogic portrayal of character consciousness so that the thoughts and feelings of characters occupy more narrative space” (83). With this change of strategy between the two novels, she claims, “Lawrence is representative of that stage in the novel’s development at which the narrator loses his or her supreme authority and the views of characters are accorded more space without being summarily judged” (51). Other scholars, however, have claimed that all of Lawrence’s novels, including The Rainbow, evoke the felt presence of a traditional authorial narrator reminiscent of realist fiction, much more so than in quintessentially Modernist novels like Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. This chapter analyses the linguistic features that evoke the presence of an authorial narrator in The Rainbow and examines the role it plays within the fiction. I argue that this figure does need to be taken into account as a subject in the text, albeit one which serves a complicated and very Modernist function.

In The Rainbow, the authorial voice often manifests as a presence within the FIS representation of character consciousness, which otherwise dominates the narrative discourse. This presence, I wish to argue, is a crucial component of Lawrence’s unique narrative style that straddles the border between the authorial narratives of Realism and the figural narratives of Modernism (Stanzel 1984). The analyses in this chapter demonstrate two ways in which Lawrence’s FIS differs from Woolf’s stream of consciousness technique: he distorts narrative subjectivity within FIS in a manner that provides two distinct but simultaneous perspectives on his characters’ experience; and he deploys a subjective narratorial voice within FIS to provide access to a psychological realm that is hidden from the character: the unconscious. With these effects, Lawrence’s experimental forms of FIS evoke a dual subjectivity (see Chapter 1.3c).

This chapter combines stylistic analysis with an examination of narratological and literary critical ideas about The Rainbow. The first section concerns the existing scholarship that has asserted the centrality of the authorial narrator’s voice in Lawrence’s work, and I explore some initial ideas about how this figure might relate to characters’ minds within the novel. Section 2 provides an analysis of the opening passage from the novel which demonstrates how a narratorial presence is established in spite of, or rather in tension with, an array of FIS implications. I also analyse how this presence is maintained throughout the novel by means of various forms of narratorial prolepsis. Section 3 concerns an unusual passage of overtly FIS discourse in which the representation of the character’s consciousness is combined with an expansive summary of narrative time, evoking a simultaneous narratorial perspective. Section 4 demonstrates how Lawrence uses poetic metaphor within FIS to give the reader the impression of

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