banfield reflectivenonreflectiveconsciousness ptoday81

REFLECTIVE AND NON-REFLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS IN

THE LANGUAGE OF FICTION *

ANN BANFIELD English, Berkeley

There is certainly further in me a certain passive faculty of perception, that is, of

receiving and recognizing the ideas of sensible things, but this would be useless to me and I could in no way avail myself of it, if there were not either in me or in some other

thing another active faculty capable of forming and producing these ideas. Descartes, Meditation IV: 191

One recent position on the style I call "represented speech and thought" holds that it is characterized by a merging of two voices - narrator's and character's. The major evidence for what I call the "dual voice"' theory of represented thought consists of sentences exhibiting what Pascal (1977: 107) calls "an

intertwining of objective and subjective statement, of narratorial account and free indirect speech." The assumption - never made explicit - underlying the dual voice position is that there is a clearly defined notion of linguistic material which cannot represent a character's consciousness and which must present a narrator's "objective" point of view. This is to be contrasted with "subjective" linguistic material. This latter category has been explicitly identified in Banfield

(1973). There it is used to justify a formal theory of represented speech and

thought where the highest S or "E" can contain only one point of view or "SELF." This is expressed in the following principle:

1 E/1 SELF. For every nonembeddable sentence or "Expression," there is a unique referent, called the SELF, to whom all expressive elements are attributed.

* Paper presented at Synopsis 2: "Narrative Theory and Poetics of Fiction," an international symposium held at the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University, and the Van Leer Jerusalem Foundation, 16-22 June 1979. ' The term "dual voice" comes from the title of Pascal's book on represented speech and thought (1977). He introduces the term as follows: "in his [Thibaudet's] comment on the sergeant's voice he is suggesting that SIL [represented speech and thought] bears a double intonation, that of the character and that of the narrator, that it is, in fact, a dual voice" (18). As we shall see, the two "voices" proposed by this theory always include as one the narrator's voice, i.e., represented speech and thought is never seen as combining two characters' voices.

? Poetics Today, Vol. 2:2 (1981), 61-76

linzubinTypewritten TextBanfield, Ann. (1981). Reflective and Non-Reflective Consciousness in the Language of Fiction.Poetics Today 2, 61-76.

linzubinTypewritten Text





ANN BANFIELD

But the category of "objective" linguistic material, so crucial to the dual voice

position, has never been precisely defined, although it is continuously invoked on the intuitive level. Narrative statements describing a character's actions, especially when in a vocabulary the character would not use in dialogue, presumably adopt a point of view outside the character's own; likewise, a

descriptive noun phrase or a proper noun referring to the character could not

represent the character's own consciousness of himself but must originate in an outside source. The relevant descriptive statements and phrases are, it is

apparently assumed, intuitively recognizable. There are no objections to postulating the existence of a style - i.e., of a kind

of sentence - which eliminates the linguistic features of subjectivity and also exhibits identifying linguistic traits unique to it. This is essentially Benveniste's

(1966) claim for the stylistic category histoire, whose linguistic features have been further treated in Banfield (1979). It is when a complete sentence (E) combines features of both a subjective and an objective style that a problem is raised for a

theory maintaining the empirical validity of 1 E/1 SELF. According to the

proponents of the dual voice position, the sentences of (1) are counter-examples to 1 E/1 SELF because they seem to combine a narrative statement, which is taken to imply a narrator's voice, but contain phrases or words (the embeddable italicized constructions in (1)) only attributable to a character (a-c are taken from defenders of dual voice).

(1) a. This time she managed to re-fasten her veil (Conrad, cited in Dillon and Kirchhoff, 1976: 434-5)

b. elle aimait la brebis malade, le sacr6 coeur perc6 de fl&ches aigues, ou le

pauvre Jesus qui tombe en marchant sur sa croix (Flaubert, Madame Bovary, cited in Perruchot, 1975: 260)

c. She had conceived her first passion, and the object of it was her governess. It hadn't been put to her, and she couldn't, or at any rate, didn't, put it to herself, that she liked Miss Overmore better than she liked papa; but it would have sustained her under such an imputation to feel herself able to reply that papa too liked Miss Overmore exactly as much. He had particularly told her so. Besides she could easily see it. (Henry James, What Maisie Knew, cited in

Cohn, 1978: 47) d. Ce pauvre diable d'ouvrier, perdu sur les routes, l'interressait. (Zola,

Germinal, 30) e. On devait, disait-il, trouver la de l'or a la pelle. L'id6e 6tait juste. Seulement,

le million y avait passe et cette damnee crise allaient lui donner raison. (ibid.: 80)

f. Catherine ne put que gifler son frere, la petite galopait deja avec une bouteille. Ces satanes enfants finiraient au bagne. (ibid.: 150)

g. Les camarades le regardaient, remues, ayant quelque part en eux l'echo de ce

qu'il leur disait... (ibid.: 316) h. En tout cas, monsieur 6tait prevenu, elle preferait flanquer son diner au feu,

si elle le ratait, a cause de la revolution. (ibid.: 343)

"The point of view" in (Ic), for instance, "is clearly Maisie's, but the language is elaborately Jamesian; with the single exception of the word 'papa' not a single

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phrase corresponds to a child's idiom" (Cohn, 1978: 47). Likewise for the other examples in (1); in every case a subjective word or phrase ascribable to a character - deictics like this, ce, cette and ces in (la, d, e, and f) respectively, kinship terms like papa in (Ic) and camarades in (lg) and the similar monsieurin (lh), subjective or evaluative adjectives like pauvre in (lb and d), satanees in (If), damnee in (le) and what Milner (1978) calls "noms de qualit6" like ce diable d'ouvrier in (Id) - is contained in a sentence whose vocabulary and syntax does not transcribe the character's train of thoughts in any direct way.

In Banfield (1978), I have demonstrated that the sentences of (1) cannot be said to contain a SELF distinct from the character and, hence, are narratorless, since any narrator is to be equated with the linguistic notion SELF. The choice of language is attributable to the author and not a narrator. This is the language in which thought is represented by the novelist. Therefore, the examples of (1) do not constitute counter-evidence to 1 E/1 SELF.

However, the relation between sentences like those in (1) and the classic examples of represented speech and thought, where consciousness is represented in its full expressivity, has yet to be defined. According to Pascal (1977: 107), there is no "definable line" between such sentences and the "more declared forms" of represented thought. If the two are related, their relation can only be seen as a continuum from the purely objective to the purely subjective, and the existence of sentences like those of (1) renders suspect a formal account of represented speech and thought itself. This style, it is concluded, is not "a linguistically identifiable phenomenon" (Culler, 1978:612); it "cannot be defined purely in formal terms" (Bronzwaer, paraphrased in Dillon and Kirchhoff, 1976: 433). "Nous ne parviendrons a l'approcher que si nous renongons a le faire entrer sous le boisseau de I'unite, logique ou synthetique, celle de l'etre ou celle du sujet, celle de la forme ou celle du sens" (Perruchot, 1975: 254).

It is not the classic examples of represented speech and thought which, according to the dual voice position, escape formal definition. Rather, its defenders insist that the sentences of (1) must be included in the formal account of the style but that any attempt to do so meets with failure. But might not the inability to define the sentences of (1) in formal terms only describe the impasse reached by the proponents of the dual voice position? The inability of research to discover a formal solution to an empirical problem should not too soon be taken as an inherent property of the object of inquiry. For a systematic account of represented speech and thought and sentences like those in (1) we require a conceptualization which allows for relating both on the basis of precisely identifiable shared features but one which explains their obvious differences.

1. THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL DISTINCTION BETWEEN REFLECTIVE AND NON-REFLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS The necessary generalization which permits an explanatory account of sentences representing consciousness, including those of (1), is the distinction between two levels of consciousness. Following Kuroda (1976), I will call the former

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"reflective" and the other "nonreflective" or "spontaneous" consciousness.

Actually, this distinction is not without precedent in philosophy. Indeed, we find the same distinction operative in two thinkers from entirely different traditions. Russell (1940) maintains that in addition to full intellectual knowledge "there is an important sense in which you can know anything that is in your present sensible field" (47) and that "there is some sense in which we can know them

[present sensible facts] without using words" (54). Sartre (1943) distinguishes the

prereflective cognito from the reflective cognito, "unreflective" (or "non-thetic") and "reflective" consciousness. "The cognito is only the manifestation of consciousness. In knowing I am conscious of knowing. If we refuse to consider consciousness as immediately reflective, that is to say, as a knowledge of

knowledge, which would require a regress to infinity (it is the idea of an idea of

Spinoza), we will see perhaps that it is not a knowledge turned back upon itself, but the dimension of being of the subject" ("Consciousness of Self and

Knowledge of Self," in Readings in Existential Phenomenology, 114). Let us consider briefly these two presentations of the notion of two levels of

consciousness. While difficult to make precise, we all intuit some difference in the processes or events we describe by the phrases "being conscious or aware of (noticing)" and "knowing." As Russell says, "It is necessary [...] to

distinguish between experiences that we notice and others that merely happen to us" (49). He gives the following as an example:

Suppose you are out walking on a wet day, and you see a puddle and avoid it. You are not likely to say to yourself: "there is a puddle; it will be advisable not to step into it." But if somebody said "why did you suddenly step aside?" you would answer "because I didn't wish to step into that puddle." You know, retrospectively, that you had a visual perception [...] and [...] you express this knowledge in words. But what would you have known, and in what sense, if your attention had not been called to the matter by the questioner? [...] Can one remember what one never knew? That

depends upon the meaning of the word "know" (p. 49).

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre's example is similar (p. 13):

[...] this spontaneous consciousness of my perception is constitutive of my perceptive consciousness. In other words, every positional consciousness of an object is at the same time a non-positional consciousness of itself. If I count the cigarettes which are in that case, I have the impression of disclosing an objective property of this collection of cigarettes: they are a dozen. This property appears to my consciousness as a property existing in the world. It is very possible that I have no positional consciousness of counting them. Then I do not know myself as counting. Proof of this is that children who are capable of making an addition spontaneously cannot explain subsequently how they set about it. Piaget's tests, which show this, constitute an excellent refutation of the formula of Alain - To know is to know that one. Yet at the moment when these cigarettes are revealed to me as a dozen, I have a non-thetic consciousness of my adding activity. If anyone questioned me, indeed, if anyone should ask, "What are you doing there?" I should reply at once, "I am counting." This reply aims not only at the instantaneous consciousness which I can achieve by reflection but at those fleeting consciousnesses, which have passed without being

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reflected on, those which are forever not-reflected-on in my immediate past. Thus reflection has no kind of primacy over the consciousness reflected-on. It is not reflection which reveals the consciousness reflected-on to itself. Quite the contrary, it is the non-reflective consciousness which renders the reflection possible; there is a pre-reflective cognito which is the condition of the Cartesian cogito. At the same time it is the non-thetic consciousness of counting which is the very condition of my act of adding. If it were otherwise, how would the addition be the unifying theme of my consciousness? In order that this theme should preside over a whole series of syntheses of unifications and recognitions, it must be present to itself, not as a thing but as an operative intention which can exist only as the revealing-revealed (revelante-revelee), to use an expression of Heidegger's. Thus in order to count, it is necessary to be conscious of counting.

In both the avoiding of the puddle and the act of addition, as Russell and Sartre argue, there must be a conscious awareness on the part of the subject, but this consciousness is not fully reflective. The subject is spontaneously aware of what he is doing, but he is not simultaneously thinking "I am doing such-and-such." The line between the non-reflective and the reflective level is similarly evoked for Russell's puddle and Sartre's cigarettes. In both cases, it is the subject's being asked what he is doing which forces consciousness to become reflective. The request for linguistic information is the catalyst. For to speak of something always implies reflective consciousness of it. The very fact that the subject can answer when so questioned is evidence that a consciousness of the act (and it is not just the puddle or the cigarettes that the subject is conscious of, but the act of avoiding the one or counting the other) did previously exist. As Sartre puts it, "It is not reflection which reveals the consciousness reflected-on to itself" but "the non-reflective consciousness which renders the reflection possible ..." The question demands an act of memory, and memory verifies the previous non-reflective conscious state which makes memory possible. "You know, retrospectively, you had a visual perception" and "you express this knowledge in words" (Russell, 1940: 49).

2. THE SYNTACTIC DISTINCTION BETWEEN REFLECTIVE AND NON- REFLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS Is there linguistic evidence to support this abstract distinction? In fact, it is reflected in the very syntax of narrative. When we examine the sentences of narrative, we find one general category of sentences representing consciousness. These include sentences of represented thought, but also other sentences which represent mental states such as sense perceptions. Some commentators assume these "represented perceptions" are cases of represented thought, for they share grammatical properties with this style. But, upon closer inspection, we find differences among the sentences representing consciousness, differences whose distribution follows the intuitive distinction between reflective and non- reflective consciousness. Concentrating initially on represented perceptions as the type of non-reflective consciousness, I will identify the features they share with represented thought in Zola before isolating the differences between the two types of sentences representing consciousness in 2.2.

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2.1. The Syntactic Properties of Sentences Representing Consciousness 2.1.1. Tense Represented perceptions share with represented thought the characteristic use of the past tense (the imparfait in French and the past or past progressive in

English) with present or future time deictics, as in (2).

(2) The pear tree before Mrs. Littlejohn's was like drowned silver now in the moon. (William Faulkner, The Hamlet, 459) They now saw, tied to the fence, Ratcliff's buckboard and team. (ibid.: 459) Now he was crossing the bridge over the Serpentine. (Virginia Woolf, The Years: 267) Maintenant, il entendait les moulineurs pousser les trains sur les treteaux, il

distinguait des ombres vivantes culbutant les berlines, pres de chaque feu. (Germinal, 8) Aujourd'hui, avec leurs allures gargonnieres d'artistes, elles tenaient la bourse, rognaient sur les sous, querellaient les fournisseurs, retapaient sans cesse leurs toillettes, arrivaient enfin a rendre decente la gene croissante de la maison. (ibid.: 282)

The shift from aorist to imparfait which is generally taken as a sign of a shift to represented thought in French may be in some cases a shift from a SELFless E to one representing a third person consciousness where only the SELF's perceptions are recorded. That is, sentences where PAST, which I use to

designate the past tenses, is cotemporal with NOW, the moment designated by the present and future deictics, may describe phenomena - scenes, sounds, events - which can be interpreted as the data of the SELF's senses instead of the

linguistic representation of his reflections. But they can be so read only when the choice of tense permits it. For instance, the shift in (3a) from aorist to imparfait permits a reading where Emma Bovary's and Mme Arnoux's perceptions are

represented in the imparfait; but this reading, as I argue elsewhere, is not

possible in (3b), where the tense remains the aorist. Only the imparfait, of course, permits NOW.

(3) a. Emma mit un chale sur ses epaules, ouvrit la fenetre et s'accouda. La nuit etait noire. Quelques gouttes de pluie tombaient (maintenant). (Mme Bovary, 87) Mme Aroux suffoquait un peu. Elle s'approcha de la fenetre pour respirer.

De l'autre c6te de la rue, sur le trottoir, un emballeur en manches de chemise clouait une caisse. (Maintenant) des fiacres passaient. (L'Education Sentimentale, 281)

b. Emma mit un chale sur ses epaules, ouvrit la fenetre et s'accouda. La nuit fut noire. Quelques gouttes de pluie tomberent (*maintenant). Mme Arnoux's s'approcha de la fenetre pour respirer. De l'autre c6te de la

rue, sur le trottoir, un emballeur en manches de chemise cloua une caisse.

(*Maintenant) des fiacres passerent.

The use of the imparfait may suggest that the events or scene described are

phenomena perceived by the subject; but the aorist may not. Sentences with the

imparfait may represent what is seen through the subject's eyes or heard through his ears. The same contrast exists in English between the past progressive and the

simple past, as shown in (4).

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(4) a. Emma looked out the window. b. A few drops of rain fell (?now). Iwere falling now.

a. She listened. b. A piano played (?now). was playing now.

With the simple past, the events are simply narrated, with no suggestion of a

point of view; with the imparfait or past progressive, what is narrated becomes, not just a description of events, but a representation of the character's perceiving consciousness. English, however, also allows the simple past to be cotemporal with NOW, i.e., with the act of consciousness; this is particularly the case with stative verbs which cannot appear in the progressive. So we find representations of perceptions in the simple past. The example in (5) is clearly not to be

interpreted as represented thought; the consciousness it represents remains non-reflective, where the SELF is a preverbal infant.

(5) The little boy [...] grubbed. The flower blazed between the angles of the roots. Membrane after membrane was torn. It blazed a soft yellow, a lambent light under a film of velvet; it filled the canvas behind the eyes with light. All that inner darkness became a hall, leaf smelling, earth smelling of yellow light. And the tree was beyond the flower; the grass, the flower, and the tree were entire. Down on his knees grubbing he held the flower complete. Then there was a roar and a hot breath and a stream of coarse grey hair rushed between him and the flower. Up he leapt, toppling in his fright, and saw coming towards him a terrible peaked eyeless monster moving on legs, brandishing arms. (Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, 12-13)

With a first person narrative, sentences in the imparfait imply the speaker's past experience of the events he recounts. The aorist does not, in contrast, imply that the speaker perceived what he describes, although he might have.

A related linguistic feature which represented perceptions share with

represented thought is the use of the "shifted" modals could, should, would and might where discourse would have can, shall, will and may. The passage in (6) signals the representation of perceptions through shifted modals, as well as the past progressive and the past.

(6) She sat up in bed and looked out through the slit of the blind. Through the gap she could see a slice of the sky; then roofs; then the tree in the garden; then the backs of houses opposite standing in a long row. One of the houses was brilliantly lit and from the long open windows came dance music. They were waltzing. She saw shadows twirling across the blind. (Virginia Woolf, The Years, 107)

he could see it now in the pedlar's box. (Eliot, Silas Marner, 114)

2.1.2. Embeddable Evaluative or Subjective Elements

The embeddable lexical items which are interpreted with reference to the SELF and which in represented speech and thought may be attributable to a non-first person may also be so attributed in representations of perceptions. These items include deictics, evaluative adjectives like poor and fucking and kinship terms like papa and comrade discussed in Banfield (1973) as well as the nouns Milner

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(1978) calls "les noms de qualite." The sentences of represented perception in (7) contain such items, which are italicized.

(7) Sara got up and went to the window. A crowd had gathered outside the public house. A man was being thrown out. There he came, staggering. (Woolf, The Years, 203) This time she managed to re-fasten her veil. The doctor came - a fat country practitioner, pleasant and kind. (D.H. Lawrence, "England, My England," 318) Poor Joyce, stretched out on a bed in the big closed motor-car - the mother

sitting by her head, the grandfather in his short grey beard and a bowler hat, sitting by her feet, thick, and implacable in his responsibility - they rolled away from Crockham, and from Egbert, who stood there bareheaded and a little

ignominious, left behind. (ibid.: 321) Ce pauvre diable d'ouvrier, perdu sur les routes, l'interressait. She stood in the Square of the Annunziata and saw in the living terra-cotta those divine babies whom no cheap reproduction can ever stale. (E.M. Forster, A Room with a View, 23) It might, indeed. For at that moment Father turned towards her and said, half-apologetically, stuffing the purse back, "I gave him a shilling." (Katherine Mansfield, "Six Years After," 345) Les camarades le regardaient, remues, ayant quelque part en eux l'6cho de ce

qu'il leur disait, cette ob6issance du soldat, la fraternit6 et la resignation dans le

danger.

As in the case of the cotemporality of PAST and NOW, the presence of such

lexical items or constructions mark the sentence as a representation of

consciousness.

2.2. The Syntactic Differences Between the Two Levels of Consciousness

There are, however, constructions which cannot occur in a representation of

consciousness without forcing it to be interpreted as reflective consciousness. A

sentence representing consciousness which lacks these constructions may be

ambiguous between reflective and non-reflective consciousness, but the

presence of these constructions disambiguates the sentence, and it is only

possible to understand it as reflective consciousness.

2.2.1. Exclamations and other Non-Embeddable Expressive Constructions The first such constructions are those generated leftmost under E in Banfield

(1973); only represented thought allows exclamations, for instance. (8a) can only be read as reflective consciousness, while (8b) can be either reflective or

non-reflective.

(8) a. Quelques gouttes de pluie tombaient maintenant. A few drops of rain were now falling.

b. Oui, quelques gouttes de pluie tombaient maintenant! Yes, a few drops of rain were now falling!

2.2.2. Direct Questions

Similarly, a direct question where the PAST is cotemporal with NOW is only

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interpretable as reflective consciousness. This can be verified by comparing the possible readings of (9a) and (9b).

(9) a. She was sitting there on that quiet steamer beside Father and at the same time she was hushing and holding a little slender boy. The air was now heavy with the fragrance of pittosporum. Ils empechaient ces enrages-la de s'embrocher. Cet 6cervele de Paul etait en train de la cacher.

b. How was it possible that she was sitting there on that quiet steamer beside Father and at the same time she was hushing and holding a little slender boy - so pale - who had just waked out of a dreadful dream? (K. Mansfield, "Six Years After," 347) Was the air heavy with the fragrance of pittosporum, or was it jasmine? She could not decide which. Et comment empecher ces enrages-la de s'embrocher eux-memes? (Germinal, 407) Ou diable cet 6cervele de Paul avait-il bien pu la fourrer? (ibid.: 327)

To ask oneself a question is to bring the content of the question to the level of reflection; this observation, recorded in both Russell and Sartre, is reflected in our interpretation of interrogative sentences.

2.2.3. Parentheticals

Thirdly, when a parenthetical is added to a sentence interpretable as the representation of a perception, it has the same affect as the addition of an exclamation: the sentence must be read as represented thought, i.e., as reflective consciousness. The sentences in (10) without the parentheticals are ambiguous between reflective and non-reflective consciousness; with the parentheticals, they can only be read as represented thought.

(10) A few drops of rain were falling, she realized. Des fiacres passaient, elle se souvint. The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the Enlightenment and the French novel. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 139)

The crucial role the parenthetical plays in establishing a sentence representing consciousness as represented thought, i.e., as reflective consciousness, is recognized by Pascal in the passage already cited, for he notes that sentences of what we are calling "non-reflective consciousness" "could not be prefaced by 'she said,' 'she thought,' etc." (1977: 107)

The difference the presence of the parenthetical plays is most apparent when the parenthetical verb is a perception verb. (Only see and feel can appear.) Perception verbs can only metaphorically imply reflective consciousness; when they occur in parentheticals, they must have this metaphoric meaning.

(11) A few drops of rain were falling, she saw. The wind was cold, she felt.

"It was raining, she saw," means not that she saw it raining, but that she

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discovered or realized that it was raining. Thus, in (12) saw represents her reflections.

(12) Paul could choose the lesser in place of the higher he saw (Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, 244).

2.2.4. Parenthetical Verbs of Reflective Consciousness

Fourthly, the class of those verbs of consciousness which may appear in

parentheticals seems to coincide with few exceptions with the class of verbs which imply reflective consciousness. We saw in the last section that verbs of

perception may appear in parentheticals only if they have a figurative, "reflective" meaning. Verbs representing other non-reflective mental states like

feelings or emotions and sensations are also barred from parentheticals:

(13) ?It hurt on her left side, she felt.= She felt that it hurt on her left side. # She felt the pain on her left side. *The perfume of the iris was heavy, she smelt. *They would arrive at six, he heard. (Only acceptable with the parenthetical interpreted as part of the speech represented, i.e., as an equivalent of the discourse parenthetical "I hear.") *Oh what a beautiful morning, she liked. *The flowers were perfect, he loved. The eggs would break, he was *anxious/sure The play would be a hit, the director was certain/convinced.

*eager/glad/sad/happy/aware. *irritated/uncertain/confused.

An interesting case can be seen in the following contrast:

(14) The cake was still in the oven, he remembered. l *forgot. L?had forgotten.

It is difficult to say whether forgetting is a conscious state or the absence of one; but if it is a conscious state, it is certainly non-reflective.

2.2.5. Noun Phrases Referring to the SELF

Finally, noun phrases referring to the SELF behave differently in representations of perceptions and in represented thought. In the sentence of

represented thought, any NP referring to the SELF must be a pronoun; in

representations of perceptions (and of non-reflective conscious states in

general), any appropriate NP may refer to the SELF, as long as the

appellation or description does not present information unknown to the SELF. This restriction on represented thought is pointed out in Reinhart

(1975): for what she calls "parenthetical subject oriented sentences contain-

ing parentheticals" (i.e., represented speech and thought), backwards

anaphora is obligatory (p. 138). She gives the examples in (15) and (16), which contrast with the discourse parenthetical in (17).

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(15) Hei would be late, Johni said. (16) *John, would be late, hei said. (17) John, will be late, he, said.

Whatever the status of (17), the data of (15) and (16) seem unquestiona- ble. Yet to exclude (16) would require an ad hoc modification of the general rules for anaphora, which in general allow a free anaphora to the right of an antecedent whenever both are not in the same clause (cf. Lasnik, 1976). But here such an account does not seem justified. It is not the coreferentiality relation of the NP in the parenthetical and one in the E of represented speech that is crucial. "SELFhood" is the determining factor for predicting which NP in represented speech and thought is obligatorily pronominalized. We must take "anaphora" as including not just the relation between two

linguistically realized NP's, one a pronoun and the other its "antecedent," but also that between a linguistically realized NP and the SELF of the E

containing it. Thus, the fact that the speaker and the addressee/hearer can never be realized as other than a pronoun follows from the general principle that the SELF enters into no structural (tree-based) relation with phrases in an Expression. Therefore, the speaker (as SELF) and the addressee-hearer are necessarily represented in an anaphoric relation to the SELF.

But now we note that the non-reflective SELF may appear as a proper noun; this includes the subject of the parenthetical verb. In narratives, we find sentences like those in (18).

(18) a. A conversation then ensued, not on unfamiliar lines. Miss Bartlett was, after all, a wee bit tired, and thought they had better spend the morning settling in; unless Lucy would at all like to go out? Lucy would rather like to go out, as it was her first day in Florence, but, of course, she could go alone. Miss Bartlett could not allow this. Of course she would accompany Lucy everywhere. Oh, certainly not; Lucy would stop with her cousin. Oh no! that would never do! Oh yes! (Forster,. A Room with a View, 20)

b. He would be going to Saint-Moritz again in August - could Marcel come too? (Painter, Marcel Proust, 159)

c. Although Berthe Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at nothing - at nothing, simply. (Katherine Mansfield, "Bliss," 145)

d. He stopt again, rose again, and seemed quite embarrassed - He was more in love with her than Emma had supposed. (Jane Austen, Emma, 265)

e. Gerty wished to goodness they would take their squalling baby home out of that and not get on her nerves no hour to be out and the little brats of twins. (Joyce, Ulysses, 351)

In (18a, c, d, and e), the SELF is represented by a proper noun in non-reflective consciousness, although the sentence may pass into reflective consciousness, as in (18a and c). In the latter case, however, the proper noun

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may not appear in the clause which is interpreted reflectively: "when she wanted to [...] laugh at nothing - at nothing, simply" (the repetition at the end is non-embeddable). Such is not the case for the proper noun used for the addressee/hearer, as in (18a and b): "unless Lucy would at all like to go out?"

(18a and b) are, of course, representations of speech. It might be considered surprising that speech can be represented as non-reflective consciousness, since we have already seen that speech implies reflection. Sentences like (18a and b) have the consistent structure of non-reflective consciousness in never allowing the expressive elements generated in the leftmost position directly under E or parentheticals to appear with the

proper noun for the SELF or ADDRESSEE/HEARER. If such elements are inserted, it becomes difficult to read "Miss Bartlett" as the SELF (i.e., the represented speaker):

(19) Yes, Miss Bartlett was, after all, a wee bit tired. *Miss Bartlett, was a wee bit tired, she said (cf. with 16).

(The direct question, however, may appear with a nominal ADDRESSEE/HEARER, as in 18b.)

What the appearance of sentences like (18a and b) shows is that the notion of non-reflective consciousness is, finally, a syntactic one and suggests that future research should explore its syntactic relation to sentences of pure narration, instead of seeing its significance exhausted by the semantic distinction between reflection and non-reflection.

The data presented here thus suggest a distinction between a reflective and a non-reflective SELF. A pronoun is coreferential with the reflective SELF, while a proper noun (or pronoun) may refer to the non-reflective SELF. 1E/1 SELF applies to both, and thus assigns sentences of non- reflective consciousness a point of view. Furthermore, in a passage representing consciousness, a reflective and a non-reflective SELF may be coreferential. Only the reflective SELF is restricted to a pronoun realization, and the SPEAKER is always a reflective SELF.

It is significant that the NP referring to the non-reflective SELF is limited, however, to a proper noun. Descriptive noun phrases like "the grizzled old veteran," "the old tarpaulin," "that much injured but on the whole

even-tempered person" or "the quaker librarian" cannot refer to the SELF in a sentence of non-reflective consciousness. It is even questionable whether such descriptive noun phrases may occur as the subject of parentheticals accompanying represented speech or thought. The examples given above all occur in parentheticals accompanying direct speech: "the grizzled old veteran interrogated" (Ulysses, 625), "the old tarpaulin corroborated" (625), "that much injured but on the whole even-tempered person declared" (627), and "the quaker librarian asked" (207). The proper name is the name the SELF knows himself by, as opposed to such descriptive phrases. The

principle governing this seems to be that the relation between the SELF and an NP in non-reflective consciousness is not one of anaphora, but rather that

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the S of non-reflective consciousness contains material only of the SELF's spontaneous conscious knowledge. (Note that the parenthetical accompanying reflective represented thought is itself non-reflective, and a non-reflective S does not enter into an anaphoric relation itself.) This knowledge is what the SELF "knows," in that other sense of know where one does not necessarily know that one knows or what Chomsky might call "consciously cognize."

3. SENTENCES REPRESENTING CONSCIOUSNESS IN NARRATION We are now prepared to give a full account of narrative sentences said to contain the "double presence of character and narrator" (Pascal, 1977: 21), like those in (1). We need only extend the notion of non-reflective consciousness to other mental states and acts besides perception. Not to do so would be missing a generalization, since sentences representing other non-reflective mental states like beliefs and feelings resemble represented perceptions syntactically. Relevant examples are, in fact, the sentences of (1). There is no reason why "she managed to re-fasten her veil" or "elle aimait" must be interpreted as pure narrative description from outside the consciousness of the character. In certain cases (where, for instance, tense is not indicative that the subject is the SELF) such statements are neutral. But they can be read from the subject's point of view, as representations of the awareness of these states or actions - managing to fasten, loving - on the part of the subject. Fastening and loving, the subject is aware of fastening and loving. (Indeed, how else could this non-reflective or spontaneous consciousness be represented linguistically other than as it is in (1)?) That this view is correct is further corroborated by the fact that sentences such as those in (20) can be rendered as represented thought, i.e., as reflective consciousness, merely by the addition of those elements which are directly attached to E - exclamations, parentheticals, sentences with root transfor- mations like subject-auxiliary inversion.

(20) Had she actually managed to refasten her veil? There, she managed to refasten her veil! She f managed l to refasten her veil, she saw.

' had managed J Est-ce qui'elle aimait vraimant la brebis malade?

Oui, elle aimait la brebis malade, le sacre coeur perce de fleches aiguis, ou le pauvre Jesus qui tombe en marchant sur sa croix, pensa-t-elle. }

Imurmura-t-elle. J

Indeed, the parenthetical itself may fall within the jurisdiction of non-reflective consciousness. It represents an awareness on the part of the parenthetical verb, but not necessarily a reflective awareness. For this reason, the parenthetical subject may be a proper noun as well as a pronoun. Further, the parenthetical verb in French narratives may appear in either the aorist or the imparfait, the latter making a reading as reflective

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consciousness possible. This is the phenomenon Charles Bally, who gave represented thought its French name, called the "imparfait par attraction."

Le style indirect libre a pour effet d'etendre son action en dehors de l'enonce des paroles ou des pensees, sur le verbe introducteur lui-meme; par une sorte de construction ad sensum, ce verbe est attir6 par les verbes de l'6nonce et se met au meme temps qu'eux. Le cas le plus clair de cette attraction est celui oi le verbe est en incidente. Une phrase telle que: L'claireur acheva son rapport: L'ennemi, dit-il, en terminant, sera l& dans deux heures ne donne lieu a aucune remarque avec son style direct pur; notre expose du style indirect libre explique egalement cette variante: ... L'ennemi, dit-il, serait la dans deux heures. Mais comment juger celle-ci: ... L'ennemi, disait-il, serait la dans deux heures!

L'imparfait du verbe declaratif disait-il, ne s'explique, selon moi, que par I'attraction decrite plus haut; englobe dans le texte du rapport, il en adopte la

syntaxe (1912: 599).

But, if the 1 E/1 SELF principle is correct, it is possible for narrative exposition to adopt the character's perceiving consciousness only because it has no other point of view. The tendency for narration itself to take on the color of the consciousness to which it refers can also explain the earlier noted fact that parentheticals accompanying represented speech and thought, as opposed to those accompanying direct speech, seem to require as their subject either a proper name or a pronoun and not descriptive phrases like "the quaker librarian." This is because only the former may co-refer with or refer to the non-reflective SELF.

In many narrative contexts, there is a progression from purely (objective- ly) narrated descriptions - often a sentence containing a verb of perception or consciousness, in the aorist in French - to a shift to the representation of a consciousness, first through non-reflective consciousness, often perceptions, and then through represented thought, as if the language of narrative can quite naturally present some knowledge as passively coming through experience, through sense data, and then as acted upon by the mind. In the

passage below from Flaubert's "Herodias," there is such a progression from narrative statement to represented perceptions to represented thought, although narrative statements in the aorist reappear throughout.

(21) Un matin, avant le jour, le Tetrarque Herode-Antipas vint s'y accouder, et

regarda. Les montagnes, imm6diatement sous lui, commencaient a decouvrir leurs

crates, pendant que leur masse, jusqu'au fond des abimes, etait encore dans l'ombre. Un brouillard flottait, il se d6chira, et les contours de la mer Morte

apparurent. L'aube, qui se levait derriere Machaerous, epandait une

rougeur. Elle illumina bient6t les sables de la greve, les collines, le desert, et, plus loin, tous les monts de la Judee, inclinant leurs surfaces raboteuses et grises. Engaddi, au milieu, tracait une barre noire; Hebron, dans l'enfoncement, s'arrondissait en d6me; Esquol avait des grenadiers, Sorek des vignes, Karmel des champs de sesame; et la tour Antonia, de son cube monstrueux, dominait Jerusalem. Le Tetrarque en detourna la vue pour

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contempler, a droite, les palmiers de Jericho; et il songea aux autres villes de sa Galilee: Capharnaiim, Endor, Nazareth, Tiberias ou peut-etre il ne reviendrait plus. Cependant le Jourdain coulait sur la plaine aride. Toute blanche, elle 6blouissait comme une nappe de neige. Le lac, maintenant, semblait en lapis-lazuli; et a sa pointe m6ridionale, du c6t6 de 1'Yemen, Antipas reconnut ce qu'il craignait d'apercevoir. Des tentes brunes 6taient dispers6es; des hommes avec des lances circulaient entre les chevaux, et des feux s'6teignant brillaient comme des etincelles a ras du sol.

C'etaient les troupes du roi des Arabes, dont il avait r6pudi6 la fille pour prendre H&rodias, mari6e a l'un de ses freres, qui vivait en Italie, sans pretentions au pouvoir.

Antipas attendait les secours des Romains; et Vitellius, gouverneur de la Syrie, tardant a paraitre, il se rongeait d'inqui6tudes.

Agrippa, sans doute, l'avait ruine chez l'Empereur? (133-5)

It is this combination of sentences - pure narration, the representation of non-reflective consciousness and represented speech and thought which, finally, is what constitutes narrative fiction linguistically. The balance of these various kinds of sentences in any given text is a matter of individual style. As has long been recognized, Flaubert prefers the representation of non-reflective consciousness over represented thought. This is entirely consonant with the kind of characters Flaubert portrays - what Henry James called "weak vessels." As Leo Bersani notes of Emma Bovary, "during much of the narrative" she "is nothing more than bodily surfaces and intense sensations." On the other hand, Virginia Woolf's novels show a preponderance of reflective consciousness.

The revelations our analysis of represented perceptions has led to can even allow us to clarify our conception of represented thought as well. In distinguishing between the representation of reflective and that of non- reflective consciousness, we implied that the former comes much closer to what the character would have said himself. Yet I point out elsewhere that represented thought does not present consciousness as inner speech. The proper formulation requires that we characterize represented thought as language representing what the character would have felt and thought reflectively, whereas non-reflective consciousness is rendered in a language which captures what the character perceives or knows spontaneously. In both cases, however, language must represent what is not linguistic - i.e., consciousness.

It is a mistaken and simplistic approach to the complex problem of the representation of a fictional reality in language which equates such language with either communication or the direct expression of a speaker's or narrator's point of view, as the dual voice position does. For such an approach operates with a vague analogy to what is itself, without a rich linguistic theory, a poorly understood notion - speaker meaning. What makes such an approach ultimately of so little consequence for narrative theory is that it has nothing to say about the differentia specifica of fictional language. It is only by trying to find a theoretical account for the data as it

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occurs, instead of by forcing the data into a preconceived schema, that

literary theory can return from linguistic research and analysis with new discoveries. The data uniquely provided by narrative fiction are the language for the representation of consciousness, both reflective and non-reflective.

REFERENCES

BALLY, CHARLES, 1912. "Le style indirect libre en franqais moderne I et II," Germanisch- Romanische Monatsschrift (Heidelberg).

BANFIELD, ANN, 1973. "Narrative Style and the Grammar of Direct and Indirect Speech, " Foundations of Language 10, 1-39.

1978 "The Formal Coherence of Represented Speech and Thought," PTL 3, 289-314. 1979 "The Nature of Evidence in a Falsifiable Literary Theory," in: Berel Lang, ed., The

Concept of Style (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP), 183-211. BENVENISTE, EMILE, 1966. Problemes de linguistique generale (Paris: Gallimard). COHN, DORRIT, 1978. Transparent Minds (Princeton: Princeton UP). CULLER, JONATHAN, 1978. "On Trope and Persuasion," New Literary History 9, 607-618.

DILLON, GEORGE, L. AND FREDERICK KIRCHHOFF, 1976. "On the Form and Function of Free Indirect

Style," PTL 1,431-440. KURODA, S.Y., 1976. "Reflections on the Foundations of Narrative Theory from a Linguistic

Point of View," in: Teun A. van Dijk, ed., Pragmatics of Language and Literature

(North-Holland). LASNIK, HOWARD, 1976. "Remarks on Coreference," Linguistic Analysis 2, 1-23.

MILNER, JEAN-CLAUDE, 1978. De la Syntaxe a l'Interpretation: Quantites, Insultes, Exclamations

(Paris: Seuil). PASCAL, ROY, 1977. The Dual Voice (Manchester UP). PERRUCHOT, CLAUDE, 1975. "Le style indirect libre et la question du sujet dans Madame

Bovary," La production du sens chez Flaubert (Colloque de Cerisy: Union Generale

d'Editions), 253-285. REINHART, TANYA, 1975. "Whose Main Clause?: Point of View in Sentences with Parentheti-

cals," in: S. Kuno, ed., Harvard Studies in Syntax and Semantics (Cambridge, Mass.). RUSSELL, BERTRAND, 1940. An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (London: George Allen and Unwin). SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL, 1943. L'Etre et le Neant (Paris: Gallimard).

AUSTEN, JANE, 1966. Emma (Harmondsworth: Penguin). ELIOT, GEORGE, 1968. Silas Marner(Harmondsworth: Penguin). FAULKNER, WILLIAM, 1956. The Hamlet in The Faulkner Reader (New York: Random House). FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE, 1965. "Herodias," in Trois Contes (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion).

1965 L 'Education Sentimentale (Paris: Gallimard). 1936 Madame Bovary (Paris: Gallimard).

FORSTER, E.M., 1955. A Room with a View (Harmondsworth: Penguin). JOYCE, JAMES, 1934. Ulysses(New York: Modern Library). LAWRENCE, D.H., 1961. "England, My England," in: The Complete Short Stories of D.H. Lawrence,

Vol II (New York: Viking). 1965 Sons and Lovers (London: Heinemann).

MANSFIELD, KATHERINE, 1956. Stories (New York: Vintage). PAINTER, GEORGE, 1976. Marcel Proust I (Harmondsworth: Penguin). WOOLF, VIRGINIA, 1972. Between the Acts (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

1972 The Years(London: The Hogarth Press). 1964 To the Lighthouse (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

ZOLA, EMILE, n.d. Germinal(Paris: Fasquelle).

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Article Contentsp. [61]p. 62p. 63p. 64p. 65p. 66p. 67p. 68p. 69p. 70p. 71p. 72p. 73p. 74p. 75p. 76

Issue Table of ContentsPoetics Today, Vol. 2, No. 2, Narratology III: Narration and Perspective in Fiction (Winter, 1981), pp. 1-218Front Matter [pp. 1 - 4]Teller-Characters and Reflector-Characters in Narrative Theory [pp. 5 - 15]Free Indirect Discourse, Mimetic Language Games and the Subject of Fiction [pp. 17 - 39]Notes on Narrative Embedding [pp. 41 - 59]Reflective and Non-Reflective Consciousness in the Language of Fiction [pp. 61 - 76]The Theory of Ironic Speech Acts [pp. 77 - 96]What Stories Can Tell Us about Their Teller's World [pp. 97 - 112]Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem [pp. 113 - 126]When "Je" Is "Un Autre": Fiction, Quotation, and the Performative Analysis [pp. 127 - 155]Review ArticlesThe Encirclement of Narrative: On Franz Stanzel's Theorie des Erzhlens [pp. 157 - 182]Islands in the Stream of Consciousness: Dorrit Cohn's Transparent Minds [pp. 183 - 191]

ControversyMieke Bal's Concept of Focalization: A Critical Note [pp. 193 - 201]The Laughing Mice: Or: On Focalization [pp. 202 - 210]

Reviewuntitled [pp. 211 - 214]

Back Matter [pp. 215 - 218]

banfield reflectivenonreflectiveconsciousness ptoday81

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