Jane Austen by Tom Keymer

Jane Austen by Tom Keymer

Author:Tom Keymer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192606488
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2020-05-13T16:00:00+00:00


Free indirect discourse

Free indirect discourse—the illusion by which third-person narrative comes to express, as though infiltrated by, or emanating from, the intimate subjectivity of fictional characters—was first conceptualized by Gustave Flaubert in the 1850s. Austen has long been seen as the first major exponent of this technique, so central to the modern novel, for filtering narrative through the consciousness of its subject, though few would now call her its inventor. Sporadic instances of free indirect discourse—indirect because mediating a character’s speech or thought via the narrator; free because able to roam from viewpoint to viewpoint—exist in Burney, Richardson, and earlier writers. Some linguisticians argue that deep structures of language make the style broadly available and apparently natural, with no one historical point of origin.

Yet before Austen, or after her until Flaubert and Henry James, it’s hard to find any comparably sustained exploitation of free indirect discourse, and her novels beautifully illustrate the typical markers of the technique in both speech and thought. These include, fundamentally, an absence or suspension of reporting clauses (he said that/she thought that), and the anomalous presence within third-person, past-tense narrative of linguistic features indicating a character’s perspective and voice. Several of these features stand out: proximal deictics (now/here/tomorrow instead of then/there/the next day); backshifted exclamations (‘How differently did every thing now appear in which he was concerned!’ (II.xiii)); exclamatory questions (‘What could be the meaning of it?’ (I.xv)); unshifted modals (‘She must own that she was tired of great houses’ (II.xix)); syntactical informalities and fragments (‘A few weeks, he believed’ (III.xi)); character-specific locutions, especially inanities and vulgarisms (‘how shocking it was to have a bad cold, and how excessively they disliked being ill’ (I.viii)); ‘it was much better worth looking at in the summer’ (II.vi)).

Free indirect discourse is at its most prominent in Austen’s last novels, and its presence in Northanger Abbey probably indicates late revision. Even so, it’s already a pervasive resource in Pride and Prejudice, most obviously as a way of catching in narrative prose the distinctive qualities of a character’s speech, often for satirical effect. Consider the first visit to Longbourn of bloviating Mr Collins, which opens as detached, impersonal narration before shading into mocking ventriloquism (Box 4). Thanks to the preparation provided for this exquisite paragraph by Collins’s preening introductory letter and Mr Bennet’s amused response, it’s easy to tune in to Collins’s unctuous voice, and first to Mr Bennet himself, whose mischievous prompt can be reconstructed verbatim from the second sentence. Austen then shifts into narrative summary (‘Mr. Collins was eloquent…’) and reported speech (‘he protested that…’) before indicating the onset of Collins’s effusion with an interruptive dash and two of his favourite terms for monstrous Lady Catherine—who, he elsewhere says, ‘is all affability and condescension’ (II.v).



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