Microcontrolador

It has already been noted by narratologists that stative verbs in the past tense make sentences of free indirect discourse indistinguishable from narration because they cannot take the progressive aspect. This class of stative verbs also poses problems for another reason. They usually denote some kind of mental state of the character and as such hover on the brink between narration and character point of view. There is disagreement as to whether such sentences should be classed as free indirect discourse or whether they stem from the narrator’s point of view. All such sentences, containing mental verbs, such as “believe, know, feel, suppose, suspect, expect”, etc. fall under Short et al.’s (1996) category of “internal nar- ration” which the authors add to Leech & Short’s (1981) cline of modes of speech and thought presentation after extensive work on a large corpus of narrative texts. The need for new categories is suggested by the numer-

ous examples drawn from these texts, or as the authors assert: “In fictional texts, narrators may provide reports of characters’ cognitive activities and emotional states which do not fall under any of Leech and Short’s categories for thought presentation” (Short et al. 1996: 124).

Short et al.’s examples of Internal Narration include sentences, such as: “Her approval filled the military young man with happiness” (Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point); “For a moment he was rendered motion- less by surprise, a kind of respect” (Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates to Hell). The reason why the presentation of these states does not fit into the Leech & Short (1981) model is that all of the categories associated closely with the character’s point of view in this initial taxonomy are verbal categories. Most importantly, free indirect thought has to be translatable into direct thought in order to qualify as such. What we have in these ex- amples, on the other hand, are states that are not necessarily verbalized or articulated in inner speech. When Short et al. (1996) introduce this new category of Internal Narration, they position it at the leftmost end of their cline, next to pure narration. This means that the narration of internal states is viewed by them as almost fully in the narrator’s control and not tinged with the character’s voice or perspective, or as they say: “we are given insights into a character’s internal states or changes, but no repre- sentation of specific thoughts of the character.” (125) The reason for their interpretation of sentences of internal narration as akin to narratorial dis- course, I think, lies not least in the fact that these states are not readily verbalized into inner speech. But no more elaboration on these decisions is given at this stage than simply to state: “clearly, NI lies at the interface between narration and thought presentation” (125). The speech and thought presentation clines then look like this:

Norm

Narrator N NV NRSA IS FIS DS FDS Character in control N NI NRTA IT FIT DT FDT in control

Norm

N—Narration N—Narration

NV—Narrator’s report of voice NI—Narration of internal states

NRSA—Narrator’s representation of NRTA—Narrator’s representation of

speech act thought act

IS—Indirect speech IT—Indirect thought FIS—Free indirect speech FIT—Free indirect thought DS—Direct speech DT—Direct thought FDS—Free direct speech FDT—Free direct thought

Sentences of internal narration are thus less closely associated with the character’s internal point of view than sentences of indirect thought or even narrative reports of thought acts, examples of which would be: “Jed thought he understood” (Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates to Hell); “As she walked down the Charing Cross Road, she put to herself a series of questions” (Virginia Woolf, Night and Day). More surprisingly, Short et al. draw a further distinction between “cognitive or emotional experi- ences” which fall under internal narration and “reports of characters’ per- ceptions, whether the stimuli are internal (‘She felt a pain in her stom- ach’) or external (‘She felt the softness of his hair’)” which they say “would be coded as narration” (Short et al. 1996: 125).

This type of sentence, rendering the mental states of characters, is classed as psychonarration by Dorrit Cohn (1978). Cohn explains that such sentences can give us a glimpse into the character’s almost uncon- scious states and as such allow for non-articulated thoughts and feelings to be presented to the reader. Fludernik later identifies psychonarration with “the narrative’s external description of figural consciousness” (Fludernik 1993: 136). Although Cohn considers the mode of psycho- narration important, she like Short et al. privileges what Palmer calls “the speech category account” of the presentation of fictional minds (Palmer 2002: 28). Palmer takes issue with this account because he thinks that all of the modes for the presentation of thoughts and states of the mind, identified by narratologists and stylisticians, tend towards viewing the content of consciousness as internalized speech and because “these con- cepts do not add up to a complete and coherent study of all aspects of the minds of characters in novels” (Palmer 2002: 28). What he identifies as missing from existing accounts of thought presentation is “the role of thought report in describing emotions and the role of behavior descrip- tions in conveying motivation and intention” (28), or all of these sen- tences that Short et al. would class under their category of Narration of Internal States.

Palmer is right in arguing that analyzing consciousness as consisting of articulated, verbalized speech would result in viewing it as highly self- reflective. This tendency is apparent in a number of stylistic accounts of free indirect discourse where features of direct discourse, such as direct questions, exclamations, imperatives, are seen as some of its central indi- ces. Only perception among the non-verbal processes of consciousness has been recognized as part of free indirect discourse and only by some theoreticians (Brinton [1980]; Banfield [1982]). But perception as a valid

component of free indirect discourse only encompasses characters’ per- ceptions of the external narrative world that surrounds them. It is usually identified by the use of deixis: progressive aspect or proximal deictic ad- verbs and its content refers to the character’s outside world. The kind of states of the mind that Palmer is arguing have been excluded from studies of narrative or simply relegated to a less important position in the pres- entation of fictional minds include, in his words, “mental phenomena as mood, desires, emotions, sensations, visual images, attention, and mem- ory” (Palmer 2002: 31). These can be exemplified by one of the extracts that he quotes from Austen’s Emma (1816):

Not that Emma was gay and thoughtless from any real felicity; it was rather because she felt less happy than she had expected. She laughed because she was disappointed; and though she liked him for his attentions, and thought them all, whether in friend- ship, admiration, or playfulness, extremely judicious, they were not winning back her heart. She still intended him for her friend. (362; cited in Palmer 2002: 35)

Here Emma is reflecting on Frank Churchill’s behavior towards her. Her emotional response to his “attentions”, which we as readers know were misjudged, is captured in a series of sentences that contain either a verb, or an adjective, or an adverb, or a noun that corresponds to a mental state of the character: “gay, thoughtless, felicity, felt, happy, expected, laugh- ed, disappointed, liked, thought, heart, intended”. Palmer captures all such narrative sentences under a category which he argues is equally, if not more, important than what has traditionally been defined as free indirect discourse: what he calls “thought report” (Palmer 2002: 30). One of the reasons behind the neglect of this category by narratologists and styl- isticians he sees in the fact that the presentation of consciousness here is done by the narrator, whereas narratologists have tended to privilege modes of presentation that stem more directly from the character or are perceived as more mimetic (cf. 31).

Palmer’s argument then clashes with the other stylistic and narrato- logical accounts reviewed here in respect of the importance of the dif- ferent categories used for the presentation of minds in fiction. He argues for a more inclusive and more comprehensive analysis of the different ways in which readers can have a glimpse of characters’ fictional minds. But he concurs with them on one important point: that the report of in- ternal states which corresponds to Short et al.’s category of internal nar- ration is under the narrator’s control. I would agree with Palmer that bracketing out the internal states of characters from our analysis would mean to miss out a very important dimension of characterization in nar-

rative. But I would question the understanding of internal states as closely related to narration and as stemming entirely from the narrator.