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Source: Lodge, David. After Bakhtin. London: Routledge, c1987.
Mimesis and diegesis in modern fiction
How does one begin to map a field as vast, as various as modern fiction? It seems
a hopeless endeavour, and, in an absolute sense, it is hopeless. Even if one could
hold all the relevant data in one's head at one time -- which one cannot -- and
could formulate a typology into which they would all fit, some novelist would
soon produce a work that eluded all one's categories, because art lives and
develops by deviating unpredictably from aesthetic norms. Nevertheless the effort
to generalize, to classify, has to be made; for without some conceptual apparatus
for grouping and separating literary fictions criticism could hardly claim to be
knowledge, but would be merely the accumulation of opinions about one damn
novel after another. This is the justification for literary history, particularly that
kind of literary history which has a generic or formal bias, looking for common
conventions, strategies, techniques, beneath the infinite variety of subject matter.
Such literary history breaks up the endless stream of literary production into
manageable blocks or bundles, called 'periods' or 'schools' or 'movements' or
'trends' or 'subgenres'.
We are all familiar with a rough division of the fiction of the last 150 years into
three phases, that of classic realism, that of modernism and that of
post-modernism (though, it hardly needs saying, these phases overlap both
chronologically and formally). And we are familiar with various attempts to
break down these large, loose groupings into more delicate and discriminating
subcategories. In the case of post-modernist fiction, for instance: transfiction,
surfiction, metafiction, new journalism, nonfiction novel, faction, fabulation,
nouveau roman, nouveau nouveau roman, irrealism, magic realism, and so on.
Some of those terms are synonyms, or nearly so. Most of them invoke or imply
the idea of the new. British writing rarely figures on such maps of post modern
fiction. Our post-modernism, it is widely believed, has consisted in ignoring,
rather than trying to go beyond, the experiments of modernism, reviving and
perpetuating the mode of classic realism which Joyce, Woolf and Co. thought they
had despatched for good.
This kind of map-making usually has an ideological and, in the Popperian sense of
the word, historicist motivation. The mode of classic realism, with its concern for
coherence and causality in narrative structure, for the autonomy of the individual
self in the presentation of character, for a readable homogeneity and urbanity of
style, is equated with liberal humanism, with empiricism, common sense and the
presentation of bourgeois culture as a kind of nature. The confusions, distortions
and disruptions of the post-modernist text, in contrast, reflect a view of the world
as not merely subjectively constructed (as modernist fiction implied) but as
absurd, meaningless, radically resistant to totalizing interpretation.
There is a certain truth in this picture, but it is a half-truth, and therefore a
misleading one. The classic realist text was never as homogeneous, as consistent as
the model requires; nor do post-modern novelists divide as neatly as it implies
into complacent neorealist sheep and dynamic antirealist goats. (It hardly needs to
be said that the ideology of the post-modernist avant-garde, reversing proverbial
wisdom, prefers goats to sheep, John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy being one of its
canonical texts.) Perhaps I have a personal interest in this issue, since I write as
well as read contemporary fiction. I am dissatisfied with maps of contemporary
fiction which take into account only the most deviant and marginal kinds of
writing, leaving all the rest white space. But equally unsatisfactory is the bland,
middlebrow, market-oriented reviewing of novels in newspapers and magazines
which not only shies away from boldly experimental writing, but makes what one
might call mainstream fiction seem technically less interesting and innovative than
it often is.
Take, for example, the case of the contemporary British novelist, Fay Weldon.
She is a successful and highly respected writer, but her work rarely figures in any
discussion of post-modernism in the literary quarterlies. Fay Weldon has been
pigeonholed as a feminist novelist, and the criticism of her work is almost
exclusively thematic. Now there is no doubt that she is a feminist writer, but her
handling of narrative is technically very interesting and subtly innovative, and her
feminism gets its force precisely from her ability to defamiliarize her material in
this way. Typically, her novels follow the fortunes of a heroine, or a group of
women, over a longish time span, from childhood in the 1930s and 1940s to the
present. The narrator is usually revealed at some point to be the central character,
but the narrative discourse mostly uses a third-person reference, typical of
traditional authorial narration, often claiming the privileged insight into the
interiority of several characters that belongs to that kind of narration, and not tothe confessional autobiographical mode. The tense system is similarly unstable,
switching erratically between the narrative preterite and the historical present.
There is very artful use of condensed duration, that is, the summary narration of
events which would have occupied a considerable length of time in reality, and
which would be sufficiently important to the people involved to be worth
lingering over in a more conventional kind of fiction.
This creates a tone of comic despair about the follies and contradictions of human
relations, and especially the fate of women. Here is a specimen from Fay
Weldon's novel Female Friends (1975). Oliver is being promiscuously unfaithful
to his wife Chloe and she complains.
'For God's sake,' he says, irritated, 'go out and have a good time
yourself. I don't mind.'
He lies in his teeth, but she doesn't know this. She only wants
Oliver. It irks him (he says) and cramps his style. He who only
wants her to be happy, but whose creativity (he says) demands its
nightly dinner of fresh young female flesh.
Gradually the pain abates, or at any rate runs underground. Chloe
gets involved in Inigo's school: she helps in the library every
Tuesday and escorts learners to the swimming pool on Fridays. She
helps at the local birth control clinic and herself attends the fertility
sessions, in the hope of increasing her own.
Oh, Oliver! He brings home clap and gives it to Chloe. They are
both soon and simply cured. His money buys the most discreet and
mirthful doctors; Oliver himself is more shaken than Chloe, and
her patience is rewarded: he becomes bored with his nocturnal
wanderings and stays home and watches television instead.1
The first paragraph of this passage is a familiar kind of combination of direct
speech and narrative, deviant only in the use of the present tense for the
narrative. The second paragraph exerts the privilege of authorial omniscience
somewhat paradoxically, since we know that Chloe is herself narrating the story.
It also uses a deviant style of representing speech, apparently quoting Oliver in
part, and reporting him in part. The effect of direct quotation arises from the
congruence of tense between Oliver's speech and the narrator's speech ('it irks . .
. he says'); the effect of reported speech arises from the use of the third person
pronoun ('it irks him'). This equivocation between quoted and reported speech
allows the narrator to slide in a very loaded paraphrase of Oliver's stated need
for young women -- it is highly unlikely that he himself used that cannibalistic
image, the 'nightly dinner of fresh young female flesh'. The penultimate
paragraph uses a summary style of narration that seems quite natural because it is
describing routine, habitual actions of little narrative interest. But summary is
foregrounded in the last paragraph because applied to events which are full of
emotional and psychological pain, embarrassment and recrimination -- the sort of
thing we are used to having presented scenically in fiction.
One way of describing this mode of writing would be to say that it is a mode of
telling rather than showing, or, to use a more venerable terminology, of diegesis
rather than mimesis. It seems to me a distinctively postmodern phenomenon in
that it deviates from the norms of both classic realism and of modernism, as do,
more spectacularly, the writers of the post-modernist avant-garde in America.
Indeed, if we are looking for a formal, as distinct from an ideological, definition
of post-modernism, we could, I believe, look profitably at its foregrounding of
diegesis. The simple Platonic distinction between mimesis and diegesis, however,
is inadequate to cope with all the varieties and nuances of novelistic discourse. In
what follows I want to combine it -- or refine it -- with the more complex
discourse typology of the Russian post-formalists (who may have been one and
the same person in some writings) Valentin Volosinov and Mikhail Bakhtin.
In Book III of The Republic, Plato distinguishes between diegesis, the
representation of actions in the poet's own voice, and mimesis, the representation
of action in the imitated voices of the character or characters. Pure diegesis is
exemplified by dithyramb, a kind of hymn. (Later poeticians put lyric poetry into
this category -- a serious mistake according to Gerard Genette,2 but one which
need not concern us here.) Pure mimesis is exemplified by drama. Epic is a
mixed form, combining both diegesis and mimesis, that is, combining authorial
report, description, summary and commentary on the one hand, with the quoted
direct speech of the characters on the other. It is important not to confuse
'mimesis' in this sense with the wider application of the term by Plato (in, for
instance, Book X of The Republic) and by Aristotle (in The Poetics), to mean
imitation as opposed to reality. In that sense all art is imitation. In Book III Plato
is concerned with two types of discourse by which verbal art imitates reality. To
make the distinction clear, Plato (in the person of Socrates) cites the opening
scene of The Iliad, where the Trojan priest Chryses asks the Greek leaders
Menelaus and Agamemnon to release his daughter for a ransom.
You know then, that as far as the lines
He prayed the Achaians all,
But chiefly the two rulers of the people,
Both sons of Atreus,
the poet himself speaks, he never tries to turn our thoughts from
himself or to suggest that anyone else is speaking; but after this he
speaks as if he was himself Chryses, and tries his best to make us
think that the priest, an old man, is speaking and not Homer.3
In other words, the confrontation is introduced diegetically by the authorial
narrator, and then presented mimetically in the speeches of the characters. To
make the point even clearer, Plato rewrites the scene diegetically, transposing
direct or quoted speech into indirect or reported speech, for example:
Agamemnon fell into a rage, telling him [Chryses] to go away now
and not to come back, or his staff and the wreathings of the god
might not help him; before he would give her up, he said, she
should grow old with him in Argos; told him to be off and not to
provoke him, if he wanted to get home safe.4
The original speech in Homer is translated by Rieu as follows:
'Old man' he said, 'do not let me catch you loitering by the hollow
ships today, nor coming back again, or you may find the god's staff
and chaplet a very poor defence. Far from agreeing to set your
daughter free, I intend her to grow old in Argos, in my house, a
long way from her own country, working at the loom and sharing
my bed. Off with you now, and do not provoke me if you want to
save your skin.' 5
It is evident that, though there is a clear difference between the two passages, the
individuality of Agamemnon's speech is not wholly obliterated by the narrator's
speech in the Platonic rewriting, and could be obliterated only by some much
more drastic summary, such as Gerard Genette suggests in his discussion of this
passage: 'Agamemnon angrily refused Chryses' request.' 6 Plato conceived of the
epic as a mixed form in the sense that it simply alternated two distinct kinds of
discourse -- the poet's speech and the characters' speech -- and this is in fact true
of Homer; but his own example shows the potential within narrative for a much
more complex mixing, more like a fusing, of the two modes, in reported speech.
This potential was to be elaborately exploited by the novel, which uses reported
speech extensively -- not only to represent speech, but to represent thoughts and
feelings which are not actually uttered aloud. This is where Volosinov and
Bakhtin are useful, because they focus on the way the novelistic treatment of
reported speech tends towards an intermingling of authorial speech and
characters' speech, of diegesis and mimesis.
In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1930) Volosinov distinguishes
between what he calls (borrowing the terms from Wolfflin's art history) the
linear style of reporting, and the pictorial style. The linear style preserves a clear
boundary between the reported speech and the reporting context (that is, the
author's speech) in terms of information or reference, while suppressing the
textual individuality of the reported speech by imposing its own linguistic
register, or attributing to the characters exactly the same register as the author's.
The linear style is characteristic of prenovelistic narrative, and is associated by
Volosinov especially with what he calls authoritarian and rationalistic dogmatism
in the medieval and Enlightenment periods. I suggest that Rasselas (1759) affords
a late example of what Volosinov calls the linear style:
' … I sat feasting on intellectual luxury, regardless alike of the
examples of the earth and the instructions of the planets. Twenty
months are passed. Who shall restore them?'
These sorrowful meditations fastened upon his mind; he passed four
months in resolving to lose no more time in idle resolves, and was
awakened to more vigorous exertion by hearing a maid, who had
broken a porcelain cup, remark that what cannot be repaired is not
to be regretted.
This was obvious; and Rasselas reproached himself that he had not
discovered it -- having not known, or not considered, how many
useful hints are obtained by chance, and how often the mind,
hurried by her own ardour to distant views, neglects the truths that
lie open before her. He for a few hours regretted his regret, and
from that time bent his whole mind upon the means of escaping
from the Valley of Happiness.7
In addition to the quoted direct speech of Rasselas at the beginning of the extract,
there are two kinds of reported speech here: the reported utterance of the maid,
and the reported inner speech, or thoughts, of Rasselas. All are linguistically
assimilated to the dominant register of the authorial discourse. The author,
Rasselas, and even the maid all seem to speak the same kind of language --
balanced, abstract, polite; but the referential contours of the reported speech are
very clearly demarcated and judged by the authorial speech. This is typical of
Volosinov's linear style and Plato's diegesis: linguistic homogeneity --
informational discrimination. It is one of the reasons why we hesitate to describe
Rasselas as a novel, even though it postdates the development of the English
novel. From a novel we expect a more realistic rendering of the individuality and
variety of human speech than we get in Rasselas -- both in direct or quoted speech
and in reported speech or thought. (But note that there is a kind of tonal
resemblance between the passage from Rasselas and the passage from Fay
Weldon's Female Friends -- the cool, confident, detached ironic tone that is
generated by the summary nature of the narrative discourse -- summary being
characteristic of diegesis, or what Volosinov calls the linear style.) For
Volosinov, naturally influenced by Russian literary history, the rise of the novel
virtually coincides with the development of the pictorial style of reported speech,
in which author's speech and character's speech, diegesis and mimesis
interpenetrate. The evolution of the English novel was more gradual.
The rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century began with the discovery
of new possibilities of mimesis in prose narrative, through the use of characters
as narrators -- the pseudo-autobiographers of Defoe, the pseudo correspondents
of Richardson -- thus making the narrative discourse a mimesis of an act of
diegesis, diegesis at a second remove. These devices brought about a quantum leap
in realistic illusion and immediacy, but they tended to confirm Plato's ethical
disapproval of mimesis, his fears about the morally debilitating effects of skilful
mimesis of imperfect personages. However highminded were the intentions of
Defoe (which is doubtful) or of Richardson (which is not) there is no way in
which the reader can be prevented from delighting in and even identifying with
Moll Flanders or Lovelace in even their wickedest actions. Fielding, his mind
trained in a classical school, restored the diegetic balance in his
comic-epic-poem-in-prose: the individuality of characters is represented, and
relished, in the reproduction of their distinctive speech -- Fielding, unlike
Johnson in Rasselas, does not make all the characters speak in the same register as
himself -- but the author's speech (and values) are quite clearly distinguished
from the characters' speech and values; mimesis and diegesis are never confused.
The same is true of Scott, in whose work there is, notoriously, a stark contrast
between the polite literary English of the narrator's discourse, and the richly
textured colloquial dialect speech of the Scottish characters -- a disparity that
becomes particularly striking in the shift from direct to reported speech or
thought:
'He's a gude creature,' said she, 'and a kind -- it's a pity he has sae
willyard a powny.' And she immediately turned her thoughts to the
important journey which she had commenced, reflecting with
pleasure, that, according to her habits of life and of undergoing
fatigue, she was now amply or even superfluously provided with
the means of encountering the expenses of the road, up and down
from London, and all other expenses whatever.8
The classic nineteenth-century novel followed the example of Fielding and Scott
in maintaining a fairly even balance between mimesis and diegesis, showing and
telling, scene and summary; but it also broke down the clear distinction between
diegesis and mimesis in the representation of thought and feeling, through what
Volosinov called the 'pictorial style' of reported speech. In this, the individuality
of the reported speech or thought is retained even as the author's speech
'permeates the reported speech with its own intentions -- humour, irony, love or
hate, enthusiasm or scorn'.9 Let me illustrate this with a passage from
Middlemarch (1871-2):
She was open, ardent, and not in the least self-admiring; indeed, it
was pretty to see how her imagination adorned her sister Celia with
attractions altogether superior to her own, and if any gentleman
appeared to come to the Grange from some other motive than that
of seeing Mr Brooke, she concluded that he must be in love with
Celia: Sir James Chettam, for example, whom she constantly
considered from Celia's point of view, inwardly debating whether it
would be good for Celia to accept him. That he should be regarded
as a suitor for herself would have seemed to her a ridiculous
irrelevance. Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of
life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that
she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born
in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in
matrimony: or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any
of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been
glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who
said 'Exactly' to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty,
-- how could he affect her as a lover? The really delightful
marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and
could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it. 10
Up to, and including, the sentence 'Dorothea... retained very childlike ideas about
marriage', this passage is diegetic: the narrator describes the character of
Dorothea authoritatively, in words that Dorothea could not use about herself
without contradiction (she cannot, for instance, acknowledge that her ideas are
childlike without ceasing to hold them). Then the deixis becomes more
problematical. The tag, 'she felt' is an ambiguous signal to the reader, since it can
introduce either an objective report by the narrator or subjective reflection by the
character. Colloquial phrases in the sequel, such as 'that wretched mistake' and
'when his blindness had come on' seem to be the words in which Dorothea herself
would have articulated these ideas, though the equally colloquial 'odd habits' does
not. Why does it not? Because, in unexpected collocation with 'great men' ('great
men whose odd habits') it seems too rhetorical an irony for Dorothea -- it is a
kind of oxymoron -- and so we attribute it to the narrator. But that is not to
imply that Dorothea is incapable of irony. 'Who said "Exactly" to her remarks
even when she expressed uncertainty' -- do we not infer that Sir James's
illogicality has been noted by Dorothea herself in just that crisp, dismissive way?
Then what about the immediately succeeding phrase --'how could he affect her as
a lover?' If the immediately preceding phrase is attributed to Dorothea, as I
suggest, then it would be natural to ascribe this one to her also -- but a
contradiction then arises. For if Dorothea can formulate the question 'How can
Sir James affect me as a lover?' her alleged unconsciousness of her own
attractions to visiting gentlemen is compromised. Is the question, then, put by the
narrator, appealing directly to the reader, over the heroine's head, to
acknowledge the plausibility of her behaviour, meaning, 'You do see, gentle
reader, why it never crossed Dorothea's mind that Sir James Chertam was a
possible match for her?' There is such an implication, but the reason given -- that
Sir James said 'Exactly' when Dorothea expressed uncertainty -- seems too trivial
for the narrator to draw the conclusion, 'How could he affect her as a lover?' The
fact is that diegesis and mimesis are fused together inextricably here -- and for a
good reason: for there is a sense in which Dorothea knows what the narrator
knows -- namely, that Sir James is sexually attracted to her -- but is repressing the
thought, on account of her determination to marry an intellectual father figure.
When Celia finally compels Dorothea to face the truth of the matter, the narrator
tells us that 'she was not less angry because certain details asleep in her memory
were now awakened to confirm the unwelcome revelation'. One of these details
was surely that very habit of Sir James of saying 'Exactly' when she expressed
uncertainty -- a sign of his admiration, deference and anxiety to please rather than
of his stupidity. Here, then, the character's voice and the author's voice are so
tightly interwoven that it is impossible at times to disentangle them; and the
author's irony, consequently, is affectionate, filled by a warm regard for
Dorothea's individuality -- very different from Johnson's judicial irony in the
passage from Rasselas.
In the next stage of the novel's development, Volosinov observes, the reported
speech is not merely allowed to retain a certain measure of autonomous life
within the authorial context, but actually itself comes to dominate authorial speech
in the discourse as a whole. 'The authorial context loses the greater objectivity it
normally commands in comparison with reported speech. It begins to be
perceived and even recognizes itself as if it were subjective.' Volosinov notes that
this is often associated with the delegation of the authorial task to a narrator who
cannot 'bring to bear against [the] subjective position [of the other characters] a
more authoritative and objective world'.11 In the Russian novel, it seems,
Dostoevsky initiated this second phase in the development of the pictorial style. In
the English novel I think we would point to the work of James and Conrad at the
turn of the century: James's use of unreliable first-person narrators (The Turn of
the Screw) or sustained focalization of the narrative through the perspective of
characters whose perceptions are narrowly limited, with minimal authorial
comment and interpretation ('In the Cage', The Ambassadors); Conrad's use of
multiple framing via multiple narrators, none of whom is invested with ultimate
interpretative authority (Lord Jim, Nostromo).
At this point it is useful to switch to Bakhtin's typology of literary discourse.
There are three main categories:
1.The direct speech of the author. This corresponds to Plato's diegesis.
2.Represented speech. This includes Plato's mimesis -- i.e. the quoted direct
speech of the characters; but also reported speech in the pictorial style.
3.Doubly-oriented speech, that is, speech which not only refers to something
in the world but refers to another speech act by another addresser.
Bakhtin subdivides this third type of discourse into four categories, stylization,
parody, skaz (the Russian term for oral narration) and what he calls 'dialogue'.
Dialogue means here, not the quoted direct speech of the characters, but discourse
which alludes to an absent speech act. In stylization, parody and skaz, the other
speech act is 'reproduced with a new intention'; in 'dialogue' it 'shapes the
author's speech while remaining outside its boundaries'. An important type of
dialogic discourse in this sense is 'hidden polemic', in which a speaker not only
refers to an object in the world but simultaneously replies to, contests, or makes
concessions to some other real or anticipated or hypothetical statement about the
same object.
These categories all have their subcategories which can be combined and shifted
around in the system in a somewhat bewildering way, but the basic distinctions
are clear, and I think useful. Let me try and illustrate them with reference to
Ulysses, a text as encyclopaedic in this respect as in all others.
1. The direct speech of the author. This is the narrator who speaks in, for
instance, the first lines of the book:
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a
bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed.12
This is the purely diegetic plane of the text. The sentence describes Mulligan
emerging on to the roof of the Martello tower not as Stephen Dedalus sees him
(Stephen is below), nor as Mulligan sees himself, but as seen by an objective
narrator. Since most narration in Ulysses is focalized, and stylistically coloured,
by a character's consciousness, or permeated by doubly-oriented speech, such
examples are comparatively rare. The author's speech as a distinct medium of
communication is scarcely perceptible, in accordance with Joyce's aesthetic of
impersonality: 'The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind
or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent,
paring his fingernails.' 13
2. Represented speech. This includes all the dialogue in the usual sense of that
word -- the quoted direct speech of the characters, which Joyce preferred to mark
with an introductory dash, rather than the usual inverted commas. This category
also includes all the passages of interior monologue -- mimesis in Plato's terms,
but representing thought instead of uttered speech. Molly Bloom's reverie in the
last episode, 'Penelope', is perhaps the purest example:
Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his
breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel
when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing
his highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs
Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of… (p.608)
... and so on, for twenty thousand uninterrupted words.
The presentation of the thought of Stephen and Leopold Bloom is more varied
and complex, combining interior monologue with free indirect speech'4 and
focalized narration -- in short, a mixture of mimesis and diegesis, in which
mimesis dominates. Here, for example, is Bloom in the pork-butcher's shop in
'Calypso':
A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish: the last. He
stood by the nextdoor girl at the counter. Would she buy it too,
calling the items from a slip in her hand? Chapped: washingsoda.
And a pound and a half of Denny's sausages. His eyes rested on her
vigorous hips. Woods his name is. Wonder what he does. Wife is
oldish. New blood. No followers allowed. Strong pair of arms.
Whacking a carpet on the clothesline. She does whack it, by
George. The way her crooked skirt swings at each whack. (p.48)
The various kinds of speech in this passage may be classified as follows:
A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish: Narrative (focalized
through Bloom).
the last. Interior monologue.
He stood by the nextdoor girl at the counter. Narrative (focalized through
Bloom).
Would she buy it too, calling the items from a slip in her hand? Free indirect
speech.
Chapped: washingsoda. Interior monologue.
And a pound and a half of Denny's sausages. Free direct speech (i.e., the girl's
words are quoted but not tagged or marked off typographically from Bloom's).
His eyes rested on her rigorous hips. Narrative (focalized through Bloom).
Woods his name is, etc. (to end of paragraph). Interior monologue.
3. Doubly-oriented speech. In the later episodes of Ulysses, the authorial narrator
who, however self-effacing, was a stable, consistent and reliab!e voice in the text,
disappears; and his place is taken by various manifestations of Bakhtin's
doubly-oriented discourse. 'Stylization' is well exemplified by 'Nausicaa', in
which Joyce borrows the discourse of cheap women's magazines and makes it
serve his own expressive purpose:
Gerty was dressed simply but with the instinctive taste of a votary
of Dame Fashion for she felt there was just a might that he might be
out. A neat blouse of electric blue, self tinted by dolly dyes (because
it was expected in the Lady's Pictorial that electric blue would be
worn) with a smart vee opening down to the division and kerchief
pocket (in which she always kept a piece of cottonwool scented with
her favourite perfume because the handkerchief spoiled the sit) and
a navy three quarter skirt cut to the stride showed off her slim
graceful figure to perfection. (p. 287)
Who speaks here? Clearly it is not the author -- he would not use such debased,
cliche-ridden language. But we cannot take it, either, to be the author's report of
Gerty's thought in free indirect speech. Free indirect speech can always be
transposed into plausible direct speech (first person, present tense) and clearly
that would be impossible in this case. It is a written, not a spoken style, and a very
debased one. It is neither diegesis nor mimesis, nor a blend of the two, but a kind
of pseudodiegesis achieved by the mimesis not of a character's speech but of a
discourse, the discourse of cheap women's magazines at the turn of the century.
(In fact, the style of today's romantic fiction of the Mills & Boon type displays a
remarkable consistency and continuity with Gerty's reading. Compare, for
example: 'Her dress was white, made from fine Indian cotton. Skimpy little
shoulder-straps led to a bodice which was covered with layers of narrow, delicate
lace finishing at the waist where it fitted Gina's slender figure to perfection.'15) It
is essential to the effect of 'Nausicaa' that we should be aware of the style's double
reference -- to Gerty's experience, and to its own original discursive context. We
are not to suppose that Gerry literally thinks in sentences lifted from the Lady's
Pictorial But the style of the Lady's Pictorial subtly manipulated, heightened,
'objectified' (Bakhtin's word) vividly communicates a sensibility pathetically
limited to the concepts and values disseminated by such a medium. The author,
like a ventriloquist, is a silent presence in the text, but his very silence is the
background against which we appreciate his creative skill.
This is stylization -- not the same thing as parody. Parody, as Bakhtin points out,
borrows a style and applies it to expressive purposes that are in some sense the
reverse of the original purpose, or at least incongruous with it. For example, one
of the headlines in 'Aeolus' parodies the style of American tabloid journalism by
applying it to an episode in classical antiquity recalled in more appropriate
language by Professor MacHugh:
SOPHIST WALLOPS HAUGHTY HELEN
SQUARE ON PROBOSCIS. SPARTANS GNASH
MOLARS. ITHACANS VOW PEN IS CHAMP
- You remind me of Antisthenes, the professor said, a disciple of
Georgias, the sophist. It is said of him that none could tell if he
were bitterer against others or against himself. He was the son of a
noble and a bondwoman. And he wrote a book in which he took
away the palm of beauty from Argive Helen and handed it to poor
Penelope. (p.122)
The anonymous narrator of 'Cyclops' provides an example of Irish skaz -- the
anecdotal chat of pubs and bars:
I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D. M. P. at
the corner of Arbour Hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep
came along and he near drove his gear into my eye. I turned around
to let him have the weight of my tongue when who should I see
dodging along Stony Batter only Joe Hynes.
- Lo, Joe, says I. How are you blowing? Did you see that bloody
chimney-sweep near shove my eye out with his brush? (p.240)
We never discover who this narrator is, or to whom he is talking, or in what
context. But clearly it is oral narration - skaz. There is no perceptible difference,
either in syntax or type of vocabulary, between the discourse before and after the
dash that in Ulysses introduces direct or quoted speech.
Of all the many styles in Ulysses, perhaps the most baffling to critical analysis and
evaluation has been that of 'Eumaeus', a style which Stuart Gilbert classified as
'Narrative: old'. Rambling, elliptical, cliché--ridden, it is, we are told, meant to
reflect the nervous and physical exhaustion of the two protagonists. As with
'Nausicaa', we cannot read the discourse either as author's narration or as
representation of Bloom's consciousness, though it does seem expressive of
Bloom's character in some respects: his friendliness bordering on servility, his
fear of rejection, his reliance on proverbial wisdom. Bakhtin's definition of
'hidden polemic' seems to fit it very well: 'Any speech that is servile or
overblown, any speech that is determined beforehand not to be itself, any speech
replete with reservations, concessions, loopholes and so on. Such speech seems to
cringe in the presence, or at the presentiment of, some other person's statement,
reply, objection'.16
En route to his taciturn, and, not to put too fine a point on it, not
yet perfectly sober companion, Mr Bloom who at all events, was in
complete possession of his faculties, never more so, in fact,
disgustingly sober, spoke a word of caution re the dangers of
nighttown, women of ill fame and swell mobsmen, which, barely
permissible once in a while though not as a habitual practice, was of
the nature of a regular deathtrap for, young fellows of his age
particularly if they had acquired drinking habits under the influence
of liquor unless you knew a little jiujitsu for every contingency as
even a fellow on the broad of his back could administer a nasty kick
if you didn't look out. (p. 502)
Let me return to the simple tripartite historical scheme with which I began --
classic realism, modernism, post-modernism -- and see what it looks like in the
light of the discourse typology of Plato, Volosinov and Bakhtin. The classic
realist text, we may say, was characterized by a balanced and harmonized
combination of mimesis and diegesis, reported speech and reporting context,
authorial speech and represented speech. The modern novel evolved through an
increasing dominance of mimesis over diegesis. Narrative was focalized through
character with extensive use of 'pictorial' reported speech or delegated to
narrators with mimetically objectified styles. Diegesis, to be sure, does not
completely disappear from the modernist novel, but it does become increasingly
intractable. One can see the strain in those novelists who could least easily do
without it: in Hardy, Forster and Lawrence. Hardy hedges his bets, equivocates,
qualifies or contradicts his own authorial dicta, uses tortuous formulae to avoid
taking responsibility for authorial description and generalization. Forster tries to
accommodate diegesis by making a joke of it:
To Margaret -- I hope that it will not set the reader against her --
the station of King's Cross had always suggested Infinity [...] if you
think this is ridiculous, remember that it is not Margaret who is
telling you about it.17
At other times in Howards End, with less success, Forster tries to smuggle in his
authorial comments as if they were his heroine's.
Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow.
Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building
of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the
passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half
beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With
it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the
grey, sober against the fire.18
It is not just the rather purple diction, but the slide from narrative preterite to
'gnomic present' in the tenses that gives away the author's voice.
Lawrence uses the same technique pervasively -- for example in the famous
passage where Lady Chatterley drives through Tevershall. She passes the school
where a singing lesson is in progress:
Anything more unlike song, spontaneous song, would be impossible
to imagine; a strange bawling yell that followed the outlines of a
tune. It was not like savages: savages have subtle rhythms. It was
not like animals: animals mean something when they yell. It was
like nothing on earth and it was called singing.19
The gnomic present tense -- 'savages have', 'animals mean' -- indicates that this is
not just a transcription of Connie Chatterley's thoughts -- that the author is with
her, speaking for her, lecturing us over her shoulder.
It has been often enough observed that Lawrence did not always live up to his
own prescription that the novelist should keep his thumb out of the pan; but the
prescription itself is very much in the spirit of modernism. Impersonality,
'dramatization', 'showing' rather than 'telling', are the cardinal principles of the
modernist fictional aesthetic, as variously formulated and practised by James,
Conrad, Ford, Woolf and Joyce. This aesthetic required either the suppression or
the displacement of diegesis: suppression by the focalization of the narrative
through the characters; displacement by the use of surrogate narrators, whose
own discourse is stylized or objectified -- that is, deprived of the author's
authority, made itself an object of interpretation. In James, Conrad, Ford, these
narrators are naturalized as characters with some role to play in the story, but in
Ulysses they do not have this validation: as I have tried to show they are conjured
out of the air by the author's ventriloquism. This was the most radically
experimental aspect of Ulysses, the aspect which even sympathetic friends like
Pound and Sylvia Beach found hard to accept. They found it difficult to accept, I
suggest, because these elaborate exercises in stylization and parody and dialogic
discourse could not be justified, unlike the fragmentary, allusive passages of
interior monologue, as a mimesis of character. It is still a common complaint
among some readers of Ulysses that the introduction of a multiplicity of
discourses which have no psychologically mimetic function in such episodes as
'Sirens', 'Cyclops', 'Oxen of the Sun' and 'Ithaca', is mere pedantry and
self-indulgence, trivializing the human content of the book. But when we put the
enterprise in the perspective of Bakhtin's poetics of fiction we immediately see
that in opening up the novel to the play of multiple parodic and stylized
discourses Joyce was aiming at a more comprehensive representation of reality
than the stylistic decorum of the realist novel allowed; we see how this aim was
organically linked to the project of writing a kind of modern epic, or mock epic,
a comic inversion of and commentary upon the archetype of Homer. This is
Bakhtin in 'Epic and the Novel':
any and every straightforward genre, any and every direct
discourse --epic, tragic, lyric, philosophical -- may and indeed must
have itself become the object of representation, the object of a
parodic, travestying 'mimicry'. It is as if such mimicry rips the
word away from its object, disunifies the two, shows that a given
straightforward generic word - epic or tragic -- is one-sided,
bounded, incapable of exhausting the object; the process of
parodying forces us to experience those sides of the object that are
not otherwise included in a given genre or a given style.
Parodic-travestying literature introduces the permanent corrective
of laughter, of a critique on the one-sided seriousness of the lofty
direct word, the corrective of reality that is always richer, more
fundamental and most importantly too contradictory and heteroglot
to be fitted into a high and straightforward genre.20
Bakhtin might have been writing about Ulysses in that passage. In fact, he was
writing about the fourth play of classical Greek drama, the satyr play, which
traditionally followed the tragic trilogy and mocked its grandeur and seriousness.
And he notes in passing that 'the figure of the "comic Odysseus", a parodic
travesty of his high epic and tragic image, was one of the most popular figures of
satyr plays, of ancient Doric farce and pre-Aristophanic comedy, as well as of a
whole series of minor comic epics'.21 Bloom has an ancient genealogy.
The resistance Joyce's readers often feel when they first encounter the later
episodes of Ulysses is likely to be even greater in the case of Finnegans Wake, a
book written entirely in doubly-, or rather trebly-, quadruply-, multiply oriented
discourse. Once again, Bakhtin's theory of the novel, and especially his emphasis
on the crucial role of Rabelais in assimilating the folk tradition of carnival into
literary narrative, seems very relevant. When Bakhtin writes about Gargantua
and Pantagruel, he might be writing about Finnegans Wake:
we have the first attempt of any consequence to structure the entire
picture of the world around the human conceived as a body... But it
is not the individual human body, trapped in an irreversible life
sequence that becomes a character -- rather it is the impersonal
body, the body of the human race as a whole, being born, living,
dying the most varied deaths, being born again, an impersonal body
that is manifested in its structure, and in all the processes of its
life.22
The Rabelaisian body and surely, we must say, the body of HCE, is a body
defined by the organs of self-transgression, the bowels and the phallus, mouth and
anus, a body perpetually in the process of becoming, eating and defecating,
copulating, giving birth and dying at the same time through the displacements and
condensations of carnival and dream (for what is dream but the carnival of the
unconscious? what is carnival but a licensed communal waking dream?).
According to Bakhtin, the two crucial ingredients in the Rabelaisian project,
which made the novel possible, were laughter -- the mockery of any and every
type of discourse in the folk-carnival tradition, and what he called 'polyglossia',
the 'interanimation of languages', such as obtained between Latin and the
vernaculars at the Renaissance. Laughter and the interanimation of languages
were also the vital ingredients of Finnegans Wake.
For most of his contemporaries, Joyce's greatest achievement was his mimetic
rendering of the stream of consciousness within individual subjects, and this is
what other novelists, like Woolf and Faulkner, tended to learn from him. 'Let us
present the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us
trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each
sight or incident scores upon the consciousness, 23 exhorted Virginia Woolf in
1919, when the early episodes of Ulysses were first appearing in print. In
principle, it was through interior monologue -- the unvoiced, fragmentary,
associative inner speech of the subject -- that this programme could be most
completely fulfilled. Yet Virginia Woolf herself never used sustained interior
monologue, except in The Waves, where it is so artificial as to have very little
mimetic force. In her most characteristic work an impersonal but eloquent
authorial narrator hovers over the characters and links together their streams of
consciousness by a fluid blend of authorial report, free indirect speech and
fragments of free direct speech and interior monologue. Joyce himself, as I have
already remarked, uses undiluted interior monologue only in 'Penelope', and that
to a large extent is what Dorrit Cohn calls a memory monologue'4 -- that is,
Molly is recalling past events rather than recording the atoms of experience in the
order in which they fall upon her mind. The Sound and the Fury is also made up
of memory monologues. The characters are narrating their stories to themselves,
and we, as it were, overhear their narrations. The effect is not in essence very
different from an old-fashioned epistolary or journal novel, though of course
much more flexible and interiorized. In this way, mimesis turns back into a
second-order diegesis as it can hardly fail to do in narrative.
In pursuing mimetic methods to their limits, modernist fiction discovered that
you cannot abolish the author, you can only suppress or displace him.
Post-modernism says, in effect: so why not let him back into the text? The
reintroduction of the author's speech, the revival of diegesis, has taken many
forms. There is a conservative form -- a return to something like the balanced
combination of mimesis and diegesis of the nineteenth-century novel. The novels
of Mauriac and Greene would be examples. 'The exclusion of the author can go
too far,' said Greene in his 1945 essay on Mauriac. 'Even the author, poor devil,
has a right to exist, and M. Mauriac reaffirms that right.' 25 The note is
defensive, however, and Greene's own use of diegesis has been discreet. Very
often in this kind of neorealist post-modern fiction the narrator is a character but
with little or no stylization of his discourse in Bakhtin's sense. The distance
between the authorial norms and the character's norms is hardly perceptible. The
narrator's perspective is limited, but as far as it goes, reliable. C. P. Snow's
novels might be cited as an example.
More obviously continuous with modernism are those novels in which the
discourse of the characterized narrator is doubly-oriented in Bakhtin's sense: for
example, stylized skaz in The Catcher in the Rye, parodic skaz in Mailer's Why
Are We in Vietnam?, hidden polemic in Nabokov's Pale Fire. Some
post-modernist novels combine a whole spectrum of stylized, parodic and dialogic
narrative discourses -- e.g. John Barth's Letters, or Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan
Stew.
How, then, does the post-modernist use of narrators differ from the modernist
use of narrators? I would suggest that one difference is the emphasis on narration
as such in post-modernist fiction. The narrators of modernist novels -- e.g. the
teacher of languages in Conrad's Under Western Eyes, or Dowell in Ford's The
Good Soldier, must pretend to be amateur narrators, disclaiming any literary skill
even while they display the most dazzling command of time shift, symbolism,
scenic construction, etc. The narrators of post-modernist fiction are more likely
to be explicit about the problems and processes involved in the act of narration,
and very often the narrators are themselves writers with a close, sometimes
incestuous relationship to the author. I find particularly interesting those
post-modernist works in which diegesis is foregrounded by the explicit
appearance in the text of the author as maker of his own fiction, the fiction we
are reading. There is an instance of this towards the end of Margaret Drabble's
recent novel The Middle Ground which brings out the distinction between
modernist and post-modernist writing by reminding us of one of the great
exponents of the former, Virginia Woolf:
[ ... ] how good that it should end so well, and even as she was
thinking this, looking round her family circle, feeling as she sat
there a sense of immense calm, strength, centrality, as though she
were indeed the centre of a circle, in the most old-fashioned of
ways, a moving circle -- oh, there is no language left to describe
such things, we have called it all so much in question, but imagine a
circle even so, a circle and moving spheres, for this is her house
and there she sits, she has everything and nothing, I give her
everything and nothing [ ... ]. 26
Here Margaret Drabble evokes a Woolfian epiphany (the allusion to Mrs
Ramsay's dinner parry in To the Lighthouse, whether conscious or not, is
inescapable) but at the same time wryly admits the arbitrariness of its
construction. In this she shows herself to be not a neorealist (as she is usually
categorized, and as her early work certainly encouraged one to think) but a
post-modernist.
About three-quarters of the way through Joseph Heller's novel Good as Gold, one
of its unnumbered chapters begins:
Once again Gold found himself preparing to lunch with someone --
Spotty Weinrock -- and the thought arose that he was spending an
awful lot of time in this book eating and talking. There was not
much else to be done with him. I was putting him into bed a lot
with Andrea and keeping his wife and children conveniently in the
background. For Acapulco, I contemplated fabricating a hectic
mixup which would include a sensual Mexican television actress and
a daring attempt to escape in the nude through a stuck second-story
bedroom window, while a jealous lover crazed on American drugs
was beating down the door with his fists and Belle or packs of wild
dogs were waiting below. Certainly he would soon meet a
schoolteacher with four children with whom he would fall madly in
love, and I would shortly hold out to him the tantalising promise of
becoming the country s first Jewish Secretary of State, a promise I
did not intend to keep.27
Up to this point, Heller's novel, though its satirical comedy about Jewish family
life and Washington politics is mannered and stylized, has consistently maintained
an illusion of referring to the real world -- it has, so to speak, challenged us to
deny that the real world is as crazy as Heller represents it. But this passage
violates the realistic code in two very obvious, and for the reader disconcerting,
ways: firstly, by admitting that Gold is a character, in a book, and not a person,
in the world; and secondly by emphasizing that this character has no autonomy,
but is completely at the disposition of his creator, who is not (or rather once was
not) sure what to do with him. Two simple words have a powerful shock effect in
this passage, because they have been hitherto suppressed in the narrative discourse
in the interests of mimesis: book (referring to the novel itself) and I (referring to
the novelist himself). The same words occur with similar, but even more
startling, effect in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five.
An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but
his brains. Moments later he said, 'There they go, there they go.'
He meant his brains.
That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.21
Erving Goffman has designated such gestures 'breaking frame'. The Russian
formalists called it 'exposing the device'. A more recent critical term is
'metafiction'. It is not, of course, a new phenomenon in the history of fiction. It is
to be found in Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne, Thackeray and Trollope, among
others -- but not, significantly, in the work of the great modernist writers. At
least, I cannot think offhand of any instance in the work of James, Conrad, Woolf
and Joyce (up to and including Ulysses) where the fictitiousness of the narrative is
exposed as blatantly as in my last few examples. The reason, I believe, is that such
exposure foregrounds the existence of the author, the source of the novel's
diegesis, in a way which ran counter to the modernist pursuit of impersonality
and mimesis of consciousness. Metafictional devices are, however, all pervasive
in post-modernist fiction. I think for example of John Fowles's play with the
authorial persona in The French Lieutenant's Woman, of Malcolm Bradbury's
introduction of himself into The History Man as a figure cowed and dispirited by
his own character, of B. S. Johnson's sabotage of his own fictionalizing in Albert
Angelo. I think of the disconcerting authorial footnotes in Beckett's Watt, the
flaunting of authorial omniscience in Muriel Spark, John Barth's obsessive
recycling of his own earlier fictions in Letters, and the way the last page of
Nabokov's Ada spills over on to the book jacket to become its own blurb.
Perhaps, to conclude a list which could be much longer, I might mention my own
novel How Far Can You Go? in which the authorial narrator frequently draws
attention to the fictitiousness of the characters and their actions, while at other
times presenting them as a kind of history, and inviting the sort of moral and
emotional response from the reader that belongs to traditional realistic fiction.
For me, and I think for other British novelists, metafiction has been particularly
useful as a way of continuing to exploit the resources of realism while
acknowledging their conventionality. And need one say that the more nakedly the
author appears to reveal himself in such texts, the more inescapable it becomes,
paradoxically, that the author as a voice is only a function of his own fiction, a
rhetorical construct, not a privileged authority but an object of interpretation?
To conclude: what we see happening in post-modernist fiction is a revival of
diegesis: not smoothly dovetailed with mimesis as in the classic realist text, and
not subordinated to mimesis as in the modernist text, but foregrounded against
mimesis. The stream of consciousness has turned into a stream of narration --
which would be one way of summarizing the difference between the greatest
modernist novelist, Joyce, and the greatest post-modernist, Beckett. When the
Unnamable says to himself, 'You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on', he means,
on one level at least, that he must go on narrating.
[NOTES OMITTED]
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