This is the first substantive post related to the unit in literary modernism I am teaching next semester. These posts are not intended to be proto-essays, nor necessarily particularly deep. I just want to jot down quick thoughts about what struck me in reading through the set texts, with the hope and intention of stimulating further reflection and disagreement.
I want to begin with a pair of posts about the ‘subject’ of the novel (in the sense of its point of view), and the ‘objects’ described within it.
Students of modernism will soon become familiar with the literary gymnastics writers perform around the notion of narrative point of view. Rather than speaking and writing about ‘narrators’ the student of modernist literature soon learns to retrench to the more cautious, less committal notion of ‘narrative voice’, and the notion of an omniscient narrator quickly seems a quaint feature of an exhausted tradition. Finally, no course on modernism would be complete without banging the drum of ‘free indirect style’ or ‘free indirect discourse’ defined in the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms as:
A manner of presenting the thoughts or utterances of a fictional character as if from that character’s point of view by combining grammatical and other features of the character’s ‘direct speech’ with features of the narrator’s ‘indirect’ report. Direct discourse is used in the sentence She thought, ‘I will stay here tomorrow’, while the equivalent in indirect discourse would be ‘She thought that she would stay there the next day’. Free indirect style, however, combines the person and tense of indirect discourse (‘she would stay’) with the indications of time and place appropriate to direct discourse (‘here tomorrow’), to form a different kind of sentence: She would stay here tomorrow. This form of statement allows a third‐person narrative to exploit a first‐person point of view, often with a subtle effect of irony, as in the novels of Jane Austen. Since Flaubert’s celebrated use of this technique (known in French as le style indirect libre) in his novel Madame Bovary (1857), it has been widely adopted in modern fiction.
So what of the narrative voice in To the Lighthouse? Well, it’s complicated.
To begin with, free indirect style always introduces an element of doubt when there is more than one character in a scene: who, precisely, is thinking each thought? This uncertainty sometimes creates what we could almost call a common psychic ether: certain sentences just hang in the air between the characters, belonging fully and finally to no-one exclusively and as if they exist independently of individual thinkers. Two examples of this from the opening chapter of To the Lighthouse are the underlined phrases in the following two quotations:
“There’ll be no landing at the Lighthouse tomorrow,” said Charles Tansley, clapping his hands together as he stood at the window with her husband. Surely, he had said enough. She wished they would both leave her and James alone and go on talking.
The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women’s minds enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered and shivered; and now, she flew in the face of facts, made his children hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies. He stamped his foot on the stone step. “Damn you,” he said. But what had she said? Simply that it might be fine tomorrow. So it might.
In both cases we can make an intelligent guess as to whose thought is being recounted in free indirect discourse (in the first case it is most likely Mrs. Ramsay, and in the second Mr. Ramsay), but that’s not really the point. The point is that we don’t know definitively; we simply can’t tell for certain. And this does something very interesting to our experience of the novel. For one thing, it means that we find ourselves filling in the gaps, concretising the ambiguities in the text and deciding who ought to be thinking what, even though the text gives us no definitive command. Secondly, it means that thought somewhat detaches itself from individual characters and, at times, can be read to take on an existence of its own that is not straightforwardly anchored to individual characters.
How much does the narrative voice in To the Lighthouse know? Can it ever have “access” (the term is a clumsy one) to more than one individual’s thoughts at the same time? Once more, the answer is not definitive, but there are passages that could be interpreted that way. Take Mrs. Ramsay’s reflections on her advancing years:
She was now formidable to behold, and it was only in silence, looking up from their plates, after she had spoken so severely about Charles Tansley, that her daughters, Prue, Nancy, Rose–could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry, of the Bank of England and the Indian Empire, of ringed fingers and lace, though to them all there was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness in their girlish hearts, and made them, as they sat at table beneath their mother’s eyes, honour her strange severity
Is the reflection that ‘there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry’ a moment of free indirect discourse, relating Mrs. Ramsay’s understanding of her daughters’ attitude? It is likely so but, once more, it is not certain. It becomes problematic to make crisp distinction between the narrative voice and the character’s voice; we have to forfeit any definitive response to the question “who is speaking?”
Is it correct to speak of a ‘narrative voice’ at all, in cases like this? We have already retreated from the more categorical concept of a ‘narrator’ to the caution of narrative voice; do we need to withdraw further? Perhaps. The question, at any rate, is important to pose. The notion of a ‘narrative voice’ assumes that there is one source of discourse among others, discernible and localisable, that should be attributed to this peculiar beast we call the “narrator”: a peculiar persona that is located inside the story but outside it, part of the story, but only in the way that a window through which we look is part of the landscape beyond it. The “narrator” is, notionally, that without which there would be no narrative, but not itself part of the narrative. The OED gives three definitions for ‘narrator’:
1. A person who narrates or gives an account of something.
2. spec. a. The voice or persona (whether explicitly identified or merely implicit) by which are related the events in a plot, esp. that of a novel or narrative poem.
By some writers this is reserved as a term in Literary Criticism for an explicitly personified or characterized narrative voice.
b. A character in a play or film who relates part of the plot to the audience. Also: a person who speaks a commentary in a film, television broadcast, etc.
The notion of narrator is closely tied to the concept of the person or persona (Latin for ‘mask’, ‘character’ or ‘role’). In the light of this, perhaps it would be illuminating (certainly it would be interesting) to think of the ‘narrator’ not as a vehicle of revelation but as a veiling, a masking of identity and a confounder of truth. That is certainly a thought which would draw Mr. Ramsay’s ire.
