Dorrit Cohn on Free Indirect Discourse (FID) (Reader-117-138; McKeon, 493-514)

I: Free Indirect Discourse = FID (let's agree on this term, since "narrated monologue" simply did not take)
Formal Definition: FID = "the technique for rendering a character's though in his own idiom" + "while maintaining the third-person reference" + "and the basic tense of narration"
Effect: FID creates a "seamless junction between [free indirect discourse] and their narrative context…fusing outer with inner reality."

Historical horizon: FID is introduced when novelists have abandoned various 1st person forms, but want, within 3rd person narrative to introduce "the subjectivity of private experience… by imperceptibly integrating mental reactions into the neutral-objective report of actions, scenes, and spoken words." (503)

Effect upon the reader of this technique: because the character's idiom is introduced into the narrative there can be an effect of "sympathy" for feelings given the authority and objectivity of the 3rd person narrative (this is often the way Austen's main characters win sympathy from us); but, that position can also, if they seem overblown or absurd, that positionality can "throw into ironic relief all false notes struck by a figural mind."(504)

Key ideas:
1: It is not a way to maximize our knowledge of the mind of a character (as presented in 1st person forms like journal, letter, or stream of consciousness), nor to create an illusion of immediacy (since it lodges the representation of character within the 3rd person narrative of the novel; but to get a subtle interplay of interiority and exteriority, 1st and 3rd person perspectives, such that the reader has a reflective, thoughtful, ironic or sympathetic response to the character it his or her world.

2: FID is a way to create an effect (or illusion) of objectivity in the presentation of subjectivity (Flaubert's claim to scientific objectivity ["great Art is scientific and impersonal"]; James's quite erotically charged, slightly gothic account of the author's relationship to his character emphasizes the "intensity of the creative effort to get into the skin of the creature; the act of personal possession of one being by another at its completest." (Cohn, 503)

Contrasting narrative technique in three novels--all moments where the reader is presented with the fact of the love of the heroine.

Pamela, 248 (Oxford) [from http://www.gutenberg.net/etext04/pam1w10.txt]
This letter, when I expected some new plot, has affected me more than any thing of that sort could have done. For here is plainly his great value for me confessed, and his rigorous behaviour accounted for in such a manner, as tortures me much. And all this wicked gipsy story is, as it seems, a forgery upon us both, and has quite ruined me: For, O my dear parents, forgive me! but I found, to my grief, before, that my heart was too partial in his favour; but now with so much openness, so much affection; nay, so much honour too, (which was all I had before doubted, and kept me on the reserve,) I am quite overcome. This was a happiness, however, I had no reason to expect. But, to be sure, I must own to you, that I shall never be able to think of any body in the world but him.-- Presumption! you will say; and so it is: But love is not a voluntary thing: Love, did I say?--But come, I hope not:--At least it is not, I hope, gone so far as to make me very uneasy: For I know not how it came, nor when it began; but crept, crept it has, like a thief, upon me; and before I knew what was the matter, it looked like love.

Q: How does Richardson bring the heroine's feelings to the fore?

Let it suffice then to say, that Fanny, after a thousand entreaties, at last gave up her whole soul to Joseph; and, almost fainting in his arms, with a sigh infinitely softer and sweeter too than any Arabian breeze, she whispered to his lips, which were then close to hers, “O Joseph, you have won me: I will be yours for ever.” Joseph, having thanked her on his knees, and embraced her with an eagerness which she now almost returned, leapt up in a rapture, and awakened the parson, earnestly begging him “that he would that instant join their hands together.” Adams rebuked him for his request, and told him, "He would by no means consent to anything contrary to the forms of the Church,…" (Oxford, 139-140)

Q: how does Fielding's narrative mediate the reader's access to this moment of passion?

"… A counteraction, gentle and continual, is the best safeguard of manners and conduct."

Full well could Fanny guess where his thoughts were now: Miss Crawford`s power was all returning. He had been speaking of her cheerfully from the hour of his coming home. His avoiding her was quite at an end. He had dined at the Parsonage only the preceding day.

Q: what is the effect of the use of FID in our experience of Fanny's response to Edmund's love?

General questions:
Is this a superior technology of writing?
With none of the theatrical distance of Fielding (but his sense of reflective, objective distance)?
W ith none of the self-motivated performance of Richardson's Pamela (but with a sense of access to inner feeling that Pamela's letter-novel conveys)?
Does Austen's use of FID dialectically reconcile (as ome literary histories have claimed) Richardson's psychological intensities with the authoritative objectivity and dialogic variety found in Fielding's histories?

Key moves in Edward Said's reading of Mansfield Park:

1: What justifies imperialism (after 1857, after the scramble for Africa starts later) is certain "positive ideas of home, of a nation and its language, of proper order, good behavior, moral values."
2: Thus, these positive ideas don’t' just validate our world; they also "devalue other worlds and, perhaps more significantly from a retrospective point of view, they do not prevent or inhibit or give resistance to horrendously unattractive imperialist practices."(81) In other words, the victims of imperial appropriate (like native Americans after AR) are refused the protection of these positive English ideas and ideals.
Tht: isn't there a retroactive logic at work in S's argument?: after overt imperial appropriation, earlier domestic home building and home-worlding is found to be its compliment and covert rationale.
3: Interpretive gambit: "…perhaps then Austen, and indeed, pre-imperialist novels generally, will appear to be more implicated in the rationale for imperialist expansion than at first they have been."
4: Both Fanny and Sir T are (in very different ways) taking control of spaces (Antigua; Mansfield Park; …)
The deficiency at the heart of the Bertram’s, and Sir Thomas’s regime, (a deficiency that enables Tom and the two girls to stray) (91-92) is made up for by two imports: the wealth from Anigua and the niece from Portsmouth.
This connection is further emphasize by saying that they complete each other: "they require each other and then, more important, they need executive disposition, which in turn helps to reform the rest of the Bertram circle." [But reader must do the final "disposing".]

Q: Do you buy this alignment of Fanny and Antigua?

General critical problems with Mansfield Park

Although this novel is widely admired for its ambition, its geographical and historical range, and its deft plotting

1. Fanny Price: the heroine is difficult to enjoy or even like: the shyness, "passivity", intensely moral and even religious cast of the main character (with none of the playful zest of Elizabeth Bennett; the calm authority of Elinor Dashwood; the passion of Marianne Dashwood; the confidence or ambition of Emma Woodhouse; the poise in duress Anne Eliot)
2. Does this novel finally offer Austen a way to lay her moral and ideological cards on the table? (~Said suggests this)
3. In Mansfied Park the love story never arrives: for most of the novel love is expressed rather indirectly through Fanny Price's balked, silenced, jealous love for her own cousin Edmund who loves Mary Crawford .
4. All the witty and charming lines go to the Crawfords--characters whom the plot teaches us to see as a source of evil
5. The novel gives us almost no moments of authorized fun
   

Austen in Literary History: what is the best framework for helping us to distinguish what is important, in the long history of the novel, about the Austen novel?

• the development of a technology for objectifying the interior, between 1st and 3rd person narrative (FID as a way to represent the subjectivity of the character embedded in the social; a way around the problematic 1st person modes of performing subjectivity);
• as exposing the hidden ubiquity of empire: not just the class Austen represents, but the novel she develops, is covertly indebted to the great event off stage--imperialism (Said…even in Jane Austen…);
• as perfecting the genre of the nation: a way to bring the differences of the nation into a manageable aesthetic experience (Moretti);
• as becoming the locus of collective desire (Lynch on the Janeites)—giving up on grand narratives or thought systems of Western culture; buying into the local; miniaturization and monumentalizing with the Jane Austen Society
• as a writer who, as in Manfield Park, can offer a naïve opposition in Fanny (sincerity/ duplicity; "I can't act"/ social action), but then deconstruct that common sense opposition through the ambiguities of "true acting" (Marshall)
• An earlier ethical reading of Jane Austen (Trilling): as the practitioner of an aesthetically refined species of secular spirituality: she trains the reader be part of a moral-aesthetic elite (~ F.R. Leavis--the beginning of "The Great Tradition" of the novel that includes Eliot, James, Hardy and Conrad);

The Liberal Humanist Reading of Austen of Mid 20th Century: Lionel Trilling, from the Opposing Self

Austen invents a system by which each of us much be evaluated, not by the old ways of religion and character, but as a secular spirituality that submits us to the judgment of our friends and of ourselves on the quality of our “personality”:
”She is the first to be aware of the Terror which rules our moral situation, the ubiquitous anonymous judgment to which we respond, the necessity we feel to demonstrate the purity of our secular spirituality, whose dark and dubious places are more numerous and obscure than those of religious spirituality, to put our lives and styles to the question, making sure that not only in deeds but in décor they exhibit the signs of our belonging to the number of the secular-spiritual elect.” (138)

In other words the novels are way to internalize this austere practice of judging ourselves and our friends (and after learning this “metaphysics of sincerity and vulgarity” (139), then all the modernist texts (Joyce, Yeats, and Eliot, Proust and Gide are easy). To demonstrate this “Terror” she quotes the passage about “large fat sightings” of Mrs. Musgrove over her dead son; Trilling goes on to claim that what is of great moment is “the kind of selfhood one wishes to assume.”

Question: does Austen's use of FID, and her way of drawing us into the movement and life of the characters, become a way to make us party of an elite of the more aware, the more alive, the more humane and the more ethical? For example to make these distinctions that will lead us to favor Fanny and Edmund over the more lively and attractive Henry and Mary? Is this part of the work of the novel? The work (and its moral desire) of the novel is to separate the good from the evil.
Novel’s climactic scene: not a proposal scene between putative hero and heroine, but Edmund confiding in Fanny his agonized feelings about his last interview with Mary, where he finally sees her moral “evil”.

Q: Larger issue posed by Trilling 50 years after: do we implicitly make our canonical texts secular scripture that allow us to ground and establish our moral and aesthetic superiority?

Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Chapter 6, "Jane Austen and the Social Machine"

• how would you describe Lynch’s account of Austen and the Social Machine?
• do you buy the argument that the Austen heroine must learn to read deeply by rereading?
• how does L position Austen's novels in relation to the market culture?
• how, finally, does A articulate the “business of inner meaning”? The proposal scene in Persuasion
  

Jane Austen and the invention of the classic novel

• defining “classic”: an aesthetic style that has, through creative revivals of the orders of Greece and Rome, is associated with simplicity, decorative restraint, symmetry, balance; in the 18th century that style is articulated with republicanism, a political ideology that values disinterestedness attachment to public good, virtue, equality, and personal self-sacrifice for the nation
• removal of the framing apparatus: of the dedication or the preface (from Behn to Defoe to R/F to Burney, one finds this effort to justify and shape reading)
• the tri-part (three volume) form of the novel as inaugurating the Victorian triple-decker [also found in Scott]
• the removal from sight of a mediating narrator so as to produce an effect of maximum transparency: here FID can be seen not so much as a technology for representing subjectivity or inner meaning, but as a way to make that process appear objective;
• plot content: the abstention from and discrediting or qualification of
  • a: the various enthusiasms of wonder (travel),
  • b: adventure (travel, picaresque),
  • c: the supernatural (gothic),
  • d: the extra-ordinary (heroic),
  • e: the extremity of passion (sentimental),
  • f: overt didacticism (Richardson and followers)
• character of the hero and heroine: the gentleman who has (potentially) an equal and wide survey; the lady of sensibility (both feeling and sense) and virtue and taste are protagonists of balance, fairness, judgment—they can grasp the folly of the world but affirm and embed their lives in its best institutions (the country great house in balance with nature, house as a vessel of cultural memory, religion as an agency of human improvement, the marriage of true hearts)
• the special interpretive opacity and renewability of the classic text:: ‘in which individuals prolonged the act of interpretation and thereby probed their sensibilities: that the classic must be “never entirely comprehensible. But those who are cultivated and who cultivate themselves must always seem to learn more from it.” (Lynch, 218, quoting Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, in The Literary Absolute, 112, quoting August Schlegel.
  

Literature and the Nation

Introduction to Hyppolyte Taine's Introduction to the History of English Literature:
"HISTORY, within a hundred years in Germany, and within sixty years in France, has undergone a transformation owing to a study of literatures. The discovery has been made that a literary work is not a mere play of the imagination, the isolated caprice of an excited brain, but a transcript of contemporary manners and customs and the sign of a particular state of intellect. The conclusion derived from this is that, through literary monuments, we can retrace the way in which men felt and thought many centuries ago. This method has been tried and found successful." http://www.bartleby.com/39/46.html

Authors and the Nation: a quote from Emma

"The considerable slope, at nearly the foot of which the Abbey stood, gradually acquired a steeper form beyond its grounds; and at half a mile distant was a bank of considerable abruptness and grandeur, well clothed with wood;--
and at the bottom of this bank, favourably placed and sheltered, rose the Abbey Mill Farm, with meadows in front, and the river making a close and handsome curve around it.

It was a sweet view--sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive.

In this walk Emma and Mr. Weston found all the others assembled; and towards this view she immediately perceived Mr. Knightley and Harriet distinct from the rest, quietly leading the way. Mr. Knightley and Harriet!--It was an odd tete-a-tete; but she was glad to see it.--"
http://www.knowledgerush.com/paginated_txt/emma10/emma10_s1_p312_pages.html

Benedict Anderson and the Novel: Two Key Concepts

1st concept: temporality:
Modernity and the novel is about the collective surpassing of the figural typological sacred unity of time and cosmos, such that the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham can in some way be co-extensive with (NOT just prefigure) the sacrifice of Christ by God (written about by Auerbach, quoted p. 24READ).

This quote reminds us that most of Western history did not supposed the linear, homogeneous, highly contingent temporality that is familiar to us.
The novel turns out to be a way to train us to live within that contingent linear temporality: example of pot-boiler (25).

Contrast: end of Joseph Andrews with the end of Mansfield Park:
JA: the cascading coincidences that resolve the problems in the novel are a) a novelistic expression of Providence; or, b) an implausible gratification of the reader's desire (I think F suspends the text between these two possibilities--in part to disengage from the more clearly Providential idea proclaimed in Richardson's subtitle to Pamela: "Virtue Rewarded"

Mansfield Park: several factors in the novel give us a sense that we are in linear, homogeneous, contingent time

• · The moral charge of the novel's plot is based on two near misses: Edmund almost marries Mary, and Fanny Henry
• narrator's rather bizarre counter-factual assertion (in the 1st person in the middle of the text--D. Marshall pointed us to this--181), AND in the final chapter (367): both insist that Fanny would have married Henry if Edmund and Mary had married: this implies several ideas:
  • Austen posits the essential autonomy of the characters (this is one of the main fictions of the modern 'realistic' novel): free of their author, as well as free to make their way, to have an adventure in a world from which God has withdrawn (Lukacs); here characters are unprotected by an author with providential designs
  • They live in a contingent world, where a) events matter (like Henry meeting Maria at a party given by Mary's host) and b) decisions/acts matter (like Henry following Maria to Richmond to start an affair)
• the plot concludes, but does not have fully satisfying end (in the sense of a full culmination or fruition of time--what we get in PP, given cliché expression in the "lived happily ever after"): it is unsatisfactory for at least two reasons:
  • the climactic scene does not represent the resolution of the love story (Fanny/Edmund), but Edmund's confessional narrative of his agonized final interview with Mary: we see Edmund balked desire, and Mary's final regrets. This is less a love story (that is central to the courtship novel), than a story of balked desires; here we feel Austen's refusal of the conventions of the courtship novel and our desires as readers,
  • in the odd coda Fanny gets her man--but in such a way that any romantic-erotic pleasure is withheld from characters and reader…it is a sop to the reader. [369: the heroine, Fanny, becomes a "Mary substitute" for Henry: the transfer of Henry's affections from Mary to Fanny happens in the dash, and its timing is made the reader's responsibility]
  • What do you think Austen is doing with this gesture? Does it work for you as a reader?
    

2nd concept from Anderson: that after the arrival of print media, an imagined community emerges from a sense that you are reading separately together:

• Newspaper: if you ask what connects the many news items in the New York Times, one would answer:
  1) calendrical coincidence—a time that links very different events (and conceptualized as homogeneous, contingent, non-sacred)
  2) print of the newspaper is the matrix that supports a mass ceremony (Hegel compare to morning prayers) of reading, a ceremony that those who read are confident is practiced by a huge imagined community of common, and parallel practicing readers
  
• Applied to the novel: the emergence of the novel (during the late 18th century) as the most popular form of entertainment, the imagined community of fellow readers (of Austen, Scott, Dickens, etc.) is one of the practices that forge an experience of national identity.
  

William Galeprin, The Historical Austen

Key features of reading:
1: All of the novels revised and/or written with 6 years: so there is a high degree of coherence and self-consciousness in the Austen project
2: His reading is deconstructive: using "allegories of representation" and "metairony" to destabilize the overt designs of the romantic plots
3: Persuasion is a supplement, in Derrida's sense--that both completes a totality, but also "supplants" and destabilizes the totality. So in Persuasion Austen is doing things differently than in earlier novels:

1: Anne’s plight (her lost love and beauty), her "having a history" in the way that Elizabeth Bennett does not, makes creates a sense of isolation and loss and melancholy, at the same time it makes her more capable of making a difference in her social world (than in E or MP)
2) as in MP there is a similar alignment of sympathy and judgment in the heroine (Fanny and Anne); but, there is not the same need to engage in social regulation (so that in MP possibilities are foreclosed—e.g. Fanny and Henry; Mary and Edmund); Anne can oversee and then benefit from a transfer of social authority from the old to the new professional class (of the Navy).
3) the reader's changed relationship to the heroine—where there is an acknowledgement that being in love means being in language (the discourses of romance or persuasion), and that something is irretrievably lost for the body in the loss of the 1st love, but something is also gained (autonomy, effectiveness); and that the 2nd love only brings a simulacrum of that body, means that FID can take on a less regulatory function than it has had (219)

G circles around the complex paradox of the tension between "learned romance"; where there is a tension between discourses of self and prudence, but also discourses of love and romance mattering; but didn't Anne's refusal then and her continued resistance now part of a self-regarding prudence…and isn't this just as powerful and important as the sexual desire that is a work in her attraction to Wentworth? Two discourses: romance à ß prudence
In other words: Anne's refusal + loss of bloom à Anne's agency, autonomy, effectively eluding "heteronormative economy and its strictures." (223)
Wentworth's new desire is in part a response to the new autonomy she has won through her refusal and persuasion.
QUESTION: Do you buy this argument?

G argues that the ending produces a kind of double bind for the reader: love and autonomy are important, but they exist in tension with one another:
READ: 227
1) that the heroine has said no to love, allows us to see what lies as a positive possibility on the other side of a refused romantic plot (she becomes useful, strong, effective); this refusal of Wentworth's love is being "out of quotation"--out of the discursive tug of this love as in the phrase "something like Anne Elliot" [what Anne suddenly looks like after the glance from Mr. Elliot in Lyme]; but of course this autonomy is renounced in the second change new romantic plot
2) but being out of quotation, and opposing romantic "normativity" also entails the "ravages" of Anne's face; she can only recover that face by inserting herself back into the romance plot

Wentworth's "castration"
Wentworth failure to catch--cancels his ease and self-possession (as when someone is stricken with desire); now suddenly he falls into quotation, as Anne takes charge.
228: there is a reversal of positions: Anne gains, while Wentworth loses "captaincy".

229-239: Anne's meditation on persuasion (as conceived by Wentworth) is read by G as a symptom of a more general critique of, but acceptance of, social regulation. In a sense the narrator sides with Anne, and both accepts (or are persuaded) to the romance ending as the best result in an imperfect world.

Do you buy Galeprin's reading against the grain?