Transparent Minds

Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction

Dorrit Claire Cohn

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691213125
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book investigates the entire spectrum of techniques for portraying the mental lives of fictional characters in both the stream-of-consciousness novel and other fiction. Each chapter deals with one main technique, illustrated from a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction by writers including Stendhal, Dostoevsky, James, Mann, Kafka, Joyce, Proust, Woolf, and Sarraute.

Part I

Consciousness in Third-Person Context

1 Psycho-Narration

Early Avoidance

When Becky Sharp believes that she has successfully ensnared Joseph Sedley, and expects him to ask for her hand the following day, her narrator escorts her to bed and informs us: “How Miss Sharp lay awake, thinking, will he come or not to-morrow? need not be told here.” The next sentence, without so much as a paragraph break, reads: “Tomorrow came, and, as sure as fate, Mr. Joseph Sedley made his appearance before luncheon.”¹ The narrator of Vanity Fair is not much interested in his heroine’s night thoughts, eager as he is to pass on to some action—or at least to some talk. Becky’s meditation can be summarily dismissed because it would add little to the understanding of a fictional character or a fictional world that has already been amply explored in preceding episodes of social interaction.

This avoidance of psycho-narration is characteristic for a novel in which a hyperactive narrator deals with a multitude of characters and situations by rapid shifts in time and space. This pattern dominates the third-person novel well into the nineteenth century. While prolonged inside views were largely restricted to first-person forms, third-person novels dwelt on manifest behavior, with the characters’ inner selves revealed only indirectly through spoken language and telling gesture. The profusion of directly quoted conversations in the typical nineteenth-century novel, and the rare opportunity for self-communion, indicate this tendency toward dramatic form. In most works by Dickens, Turgenev, Fontane, and other masters of the novel of manners, character portrayal is far more “contextual” than “intrinsic,” and thereby moves in directions lying outside the central compass of this study.²

As Ian Watt has shown in detail, a similar narrative rhythm is coupled with similar avoidance of inside views in Tom Jones,³ where the narrator is even more explicit about his refusal to look inside:

A gentle sigh stole from Sophia at these words, which perhaps contributed to form a dream of no very pleasant kind; but as she never revealed this dream to any one, so the reader cannot expect to see it related here.

As to the present situation of her [Sophia’s] mind, I shall adhere to a rule of Horace, by not attempting to describe it, from despair of success.⁴

Although the Fielding narrator is regularly evasive about the emotions of the passive female of the species, he is somewhat less reluctant to present the mind of the more worldly and active male, who retains a sober—and more easily narrated— mind even in the worst of circumstances. After banishment from Sophia, Tom relieves his emotions in “a flood of tears,” which “possibly prevented his misfortunes from either turning his head or bursting his heart,” and thus greatly simplify the narrator’s task. His faculties unimpaired, Tom then easily turns to the practical problems of where to go and how to earn a living, and thus returns the text to a social context; this is the realm of the narrator’s greatest competence, and it gives him occasion for a pithy gnomic pronouncement: “every man who is greatly destitute of money, is on that account entirely excluded from all means of acquiring it.”⁵

The last quotation points up another tendency that Fielding and Thackeray share and that deflects their novels from inside views: the presence of a vocal authorial narrator, unable to refrain from embedding his character’s private thoughts in his own generalizations about human nature. Not only is he far more interested in his own commentary on events than in the meditations these events may release within his characters, he is also committed by his narrative stance to explicit, often didactic, evaluation. A typical passage of psycho-narration in a narrator-oriented novel starts with a brief sentence or two in the past, followed by several longer and more elaborate sentences in the present. The extent to which such authorial rhetoric can stunt the inner life is illustrated in another passage from Vanity Fair. Here the narrator accompanies Becky (“this dauntless worldling”) into the room where Amelia is sorrowing after her husband has gone to war:

Until this dauntless worldling came in and broke the spell, and lifted the latch, we too have foreborne to enter into that sad chamber. How long had that poor girl been on her knees! what hours of speechless prayer and bitter prostration had she passed there! the war-chroniclers who write brilliant stories of fight and triumph scarcely tell us of these. These are too mean parts of the pageant: and you don’t hear widows’ cries and mothers’ sobs in the midst of the shouts and jubilation in the great Chorus of Victory. And yet when was the time, that such have not cried out: heart-broken, humble protestants, unheard in the uproar of the triumph.⁶

The evasion of an inside view could not be more complete. The narrator, obviously more interested in his dauntless worldling than in Amelia’s silent sorrow, enters this realm almost inadvertently—and escapes as swiftly as he can. By generalizing the individual sorrow of “that poor girl” into “widows’ cries and mothers’ sobs,” he makes Amelia just as inaudible among the other “heart-broken, humble protestants”as the latter are among “the great Chorus of Victory.”

In pronouncedly authorial narration, then, the inner life of an individual character becomes a sounding-board for general truths about human nature. This typifying tendency determines analogous approaches to the inner life by novelists who are in other respects as different as Fielding, Thackeray, and Balzac. Balzac’s design, as announced in the preface to the Comédie humaine, was explicitly paradigmatic: “the description of social species,” by the creation of an array of types representative of the society of his time. No matter how greatly he may have departed from this design in other respects, his inside views are true to type: it is hard to find in the Comédie humaine an instance of psycho-narration that is not followed and dwarfed by authorial glosses, as in the following from Le Père Goriot:

The next day Rastignac dressed himself very elegantly, and at about three o’clock in the afternoon went to call on Mme de Restaud, indulging on the way in those dizzily foolish dreams which fill the lives of young men with so much excitement: they then take no account of obstacles nor of dangers, they see success in everything, poeticize their existence simply by the play of their imagination, and render themselves unhappy or sad by the collapse of projects that had as yet no existence save in their heated fancy; if they were not ignorant and timid, the social world would not be possible. Eugène walked with extreme caution in order not to get muddy. . . .⁷

No sooner does the narrator mention an inner happening (“indulging . . . in . . . dreams”) than he imposes a value judgment (“dizzily foolish”), which is immediately followed by a change of tense from narrative past to gnomic present, and a change of subject from the specific Rastignac to the species “young men.” The text then proceeds with a detailed and extended psychological analysis, only to end in an even broader generalization: “if they were not ignorant or timid, the social world would not be possible.” When the text at length returns to Rastignac, we have learned much about his peer group, but little about his own thoughts.

In these texts, even as the narrator draws the reader’s attention away from the individual fictional character, he fixes it on his own articulate self: a discursive intelligence who communicates with the reader about his character—behind his character’s back. This communication can even become a dialogue, with a narrator engaging an implied reader in a discussion regarding his fictional hero. Wieland’s Bildungsroman Agathon (1766), contains a chapter entitled “Moral State of our Hero,” in which the narrator quotes “a few moving voices” belonging to his female readers. They protest against the hero’s unheroic thoughts when he reaches a momentary nadir in the building of his personality. The spirited exchange that ensues, though it ostensibly deals with the mental behavior of Agathon, tells us less about the “state of our hero” than it tells about the moral criteria of his narrator and of the typical reader for whom he wrote.

Our discussion up to this point suggests a relation of inverse proportion between authorial and figural minds: the more conspicuous and idiosyncratic the narrator, the less apt he is to reveal the depth of his characters’ psyches or, for that matter, to create psyches that have depth to reveal.⁸ It almost seems as though the authorial narrator jealously guards his prerogative as the sole thinking agent within his novel, sensing that his equipoise would be endangered by approaching another mind too closely and staying with it too long; for this other mind, contrary to his own disincarnated mental existence, belongs to an incarnated and therefore distinctly limited being.

The historical development of the novel clearly bears out the old-fashioned narrator’s self-preservative instinct: with the growing interest in the problems of individual psychology, the audible narrator disappears from the fictional world. Not because, as Wayne Booth misleadingly asserts, “any sustained inside view . . . temporarily turns the character whose mind is shown into a narrator,”⁹ but because a fully developed figural consciousness siphons away the emotional and intellectual energy formerly lodged in the expansive narrator. Even when he passes from center stage, the narrator continues to narrate, becoming the neutral but indispensable accessory to figure-oriented narration. It is therefore no coincidence that those writers who first insisted on the removal of vociferous narrators from fiction—notably Flaubert and Henry James—were also the creators of fictional minds with previously unparalleled depth and complexity.

Dissonance and Consonance

Although the image of the seesawing relationship between authorial and figural minds has a certain historical validity, it becomes invalid once the more extreme forms of authorial narration have been abandoned. In psychological novels, where a fictional consciousness holds center stage, there is considerable variation in the manner of narrating this consciousness. These variations range between two principal types: one is dominated by a prominent narrator who, even as he focuses intently on an individual psyche, remains emphatically distanced from the consciousness he narrates; the other is mediated by a narrator who remains effaced and who readily fuses with the consciousness he narrates.¹⁰ Two well-known modern narrative texts will exemplify these two types of psycho-narration: Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist.

Thomas Mann is one of the several twentieth-century novelists—Lawrence, Musil, Gide, and Broch are others— who reintroduce an audible narrator into third-person fiction, and put him at the service of individual psychology. Death in Venice concentrates fully on the inner adventures of its writer-protagonist, with Aschenbach’s mind rendered largely by means of psycho-narration, and only occasional moments of quoted or narrated monologue. The narrator of the story holds the unwavering stance of a wise and rational psychologist, whose special field is the psychology of creative artists. The consistency of his views can be verified in a dozen authorial glosses scattered throughout the text. As Aschenbach’s psychological state changes, as he gravitates from reason to eros and from life to death, the distance between narrator and protagonist increases: in the early sections, when Aschenbach is still in full control of his rational faculties, his self-image very nearly coincides with his narrator’s image of him, whereas in the later sections there is a marked ironic gap. The quoted passage occurs somewhat past the midpoint of the story, when Aschenbach is already quite “far gone.” Having followed the boy Tadzio with the intention of striking up a casual conversation, Aschenbach finds himself too strongly moved to speak.

Too late, he thought at this moment. Too late! But was it too late? This step he had failed to take, it might quite possibly have led to goodness, levity, gaiety, to salutary sobriety. But the fact doubtless was, that the aging man did not want the sobering, that the intoxication was too dear to him. Who can decipher the nature and pattern of artistic creativity? Who can comprehend the fusion of disciplined and dissolute instincts wherein it is so deeply rooted? For not to be capable of wanting salutary sobering is dissoluteness. Aschenbach was no longer disposed to self-criticism; the tastes, the spiritual dispositions of his later years, self-esteem, maturity, and tardy single-mindedness disinclined him from analyzing his motives, and from deciding whether it was his conscience, or immorality and weakness that had prevented him from carrying out his intention.¹¹

The narrator distances himself from Aschenbach immediately, by questioning the directly quoted exclamation “too late,” and by then interpreting the failed action as a symptom of abnormal behavior—a form of behavior contrary to the norms held by the narrator. These norms are summed up in the notion of sobriety, which is called salutary when it follows “goodness, levity, gaiety.” But his subject has by now rejected these congeries: Aschenbach’s supreme value is intoxication. This places him in an eccentric position, makes him into an enigma, the subject of the narrator’s dismay: “Who can decipher? . . . Who can comprehend?”; but it is a cool dismay that falls into pointed sententiousness. Couched in the gnomic present—the tense used for timeless generalizations—the authorial rhetoric addresses itself to the mysteries and verities of the human condition, and this authorial wisdom is explicitly denied to A...