Masters of Interiority. Figural Voices as Discursive Appropriators and as Loopholes in Narrative Communication
Maria Mäkelä
De Gruyter eBooks October 25, 2011 DOI: 10.1515/9783110268645.191 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Citations | 5 |
| Key points | Argues that figural voice in consciousness representation is shaped by mediation (diegesis) even at its most seemingly immediate, with the unnaturalness of such voice already present in epistolary narration. Contends that characters who appropriate narratorial conventions to master their interiority are a recurrent motive in the modern novel, and proposes a narratological account of consciousness representation as a derivative of writing rather than speech. |
Abstract
The article addresses the peculiarities of figural voice in consciousness representation and the disruptive effect that this voice has on our narratological readings of minds and of narrative transmission.Instead of taking the natural narrative as my starting point, I base my arguments on a diachronic reconsideration of figural voices in literary fiction.First, I will argue that the seeds of the unnaturalness of figural voice are already planted in epistolary narration.The psychologically natural (mimetic) reading of fictional minds favored by both classical and cognitive narratology will be shown to foreground the unrestrained expression of thought and emotion via figural voice.Yet the conventions of consciousness representation bear in themselves the traces of mediacy ( diegesis ): conventional frames of verbalization; intentional structure; communicative features.I will continue by tracing the evolution of this charged relationship between mediacy and immediacy in the third person narrative context and in instances of focalization and stylistically unmarked free indirect discourse.The key argument of this article concerns both narrative as well as thematic conventions.Characters who master their own interiority by appropriating narratorial conventions form a recurrent motive in the development of the modern novel.This literary convention is and at the same time, peculiarly, is not in contradiction with the hierarchization and the naturalization of literary discourse prevalent in narratology.The narrativizing focalizers and the like also issue a threat to the currently much favoured rhetorical approaches to narrative fiction, since verbalized fictional minds highlight the nature of consciousness representation as incommunicable communication.Finally, encouraged by the epistolary digression, The Princess of Clèves, Madame Bovary and Coetzee s Disgrace, I wish to set forth a narratological take on consciousness representation as a 204 Maria Mäkelä derivative of, not speech, but writing (with a faint nod towards Bakhtin and Derrida).