Figurally Colored Narration

Case Studies from English, German, and Russian Literature

Wolf Schmid

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9783110763164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Figurally colored narration (FCN) is narrator's discourse (whether in the first or third person) that adopts salient features of character's text, mainly valuation and designation, without signaling the figural part in any way. Unlike free indirect discourse, FCN does not refer to current acts of consciousness, but to typical, characteristic segments of the character's text. There are two main modes of FCN: contagion of the narrator's discourse with a character's text, and the more or less ironical reproduction of a character's text in narrative discourse. In the latter case, the narrator's criticism may refer to either the content of the character's text or to its form of expression.

This study begins with a definition and an example of FCN as a narrative device, followed by an analysis of terms used for FCN in German, Anglophone and Russian literary criticism. Building on the perception of FCN as a phenomenon of interference between narrator's and character's text (text interference), this book analyses the function and applications of FCN in narratives written in German, English and Russian.

1 Introduction: Narrator and Figure

1.1 Figurally Colored Narration: Initial Definition

The present book deals with figurally colored narration (FCN),¹ a narrative phenomenon that is widespread in modern literature but has received little attention in narratological research.² It is about a device that, in terms of narrative perspective, is situated between the authentic text of the narrator and that pattern of mind representation that in an international context is referred to as free indirect discourse (FID; erlebte Rede, style indirect libre, nesobstvenno-prjamaja reč’ [the latter meaning, in verbatim translation, “improperly direct speech”]).³

The procedure under consideration is to be found in segments of the narration that meet the following conditions:

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  The narrative text is figuralized to varying degrees of density and clarity, i.e., it takes up particular features and fragments of a character’s text (mainly evaluations and designations).
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  The figural element is not explicitly marked, i.e., there are no quotation marks, verba dicendi, putandi, or their equivalents.
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  In contrast to FID, figurally colored narration does not give the impression of an immediate representation of the character’s current acts of consciousness.

In view of the latter stipulation, one cannot simply call FCN a device of mind representation. The consciousness of the character is represented only insofar as it is contained in the figural features and fragments brought into the narrative discourse. And these features and fragments do not refer to the current consciousness activity of the character, but rather to his or her general mindset, to constant, typical attitudes.

1.2 An Example: Anton Čexov, “Rothschild’s Violin”

Let us begin by looking at an example of the device. It is taken from Anton Čexov’s tale “Rothschild’s Violin” (Skripka Rotšil’da, 1894) and forms its opening. The use of figurally colored narration is a technique typical of this author’s late novellas. The narrative text of the tale begins with the following words:

Городок был маленький, хуже деревни, и жили в нём почти одни только старики, которые умирали так редко, что даже досадно. В больницу же и в тюремный замок гро-бов требовалось очень мало. Одним словом, дела были скверные. (Čexov, PSS, VIII, 297; italics mine – W. Sch.)

The town was small, more wretched still than a village, and it was filled almost entirely with old folk, who died so seldom that it was a crying shame. And in the hospital and the prison the demand for coffins was low. In a word, business was bad. (Čexov, S, 281; italics mine – W. Sch.)

The narrative opening presents the external and internal situation of a figure who is not yet named. The selection of the elements (a small town, “old folk,” “hospital,” “prison,” “coffins”) and their evaluation (the town is “small, more wretched still than a village”; the old folk die so rarely that it is “a crying shame”; “the demand for coffins” is “low”; “business” is “bad”) follows the spatial and ideological (axiological) perspective of this not-yet-named figure, who – as far as we can tell – is dissatisfied with his or her life situation. Although the aforementioned elements are chosen from the life horizon of this subject and are presented with his or her evaluations, the author of these three sentences is not a figure, but the narrator. The choice of unfavorable life circumstances follows the horizon of the still-unknown character but does not originate from a concurrent act of thinking or speaking in the diegesis. The content of the three statements is not to be understood as the reflections of a figure who, in an interior monologue, realizes his or her life situation. Instead, all the signs of an inner process are missing, such as the expressive linguistic function (in the sense of Bühler 1918/20; 1934) or syntactic traits that point to a summing-up soliloquy. In this respect, we are not dealing with free indirect discourse, even though the passage in question is often referred to as such (Levitan 1976, 42). Free indirect discourse is always a more or less narratorially reworked reproduction of the speech, thought, or evaluative acts of a narrated figure or a collective. Such an act is not present here, is not mentioned later, and cannot be assumed on the basis of what follows. We have here the narration of the narrator, who adapts his text to the horizon of a figure in individual thematic and axiological features, i.e., in selection and evaluation – a mode of presentation that we describe as figurally colored narration.

The subject from whose horizon the narrator has selected and evaluated the features of the narrative’s opening is mentioned in the continuation of the introductory paragraph:

Если бы Яков Иванов был гробовщиком в губернском городе, то, наверное, он имел бы собственный дом и звали бы его Яковом Матвеичем; здесь же в городишке звали его просто Яковом, уличное прозвище у него было почему-то — Бронза, а жил он бедно, как простой мужик, в небольшой избе, где была одна только комната, и в этой комнате помещались он, Марфа, печь, двухспальная кровать, гробы, верстак и всё хозяйство. (PSS, VIII, 297)

Had Jakov Ivanov been a coffinmaker in the provincial capital, he would no doubt have had his own house, and people would have addressed him respectfully as Jakov Matveič. Here in this little backwater, though, he was simply Jakov, and for some reason he had also been nicknamed “Bronze”. He lived humbly enough, like an ordinary peasant, in a small old hut that had only one room, which housed Jakov, Marfa, the stove, a double bed, the coffins, a workbench, and all their belongings. (Čexov, S, 281–282)

The coffinmaker Jakov Ivanov is not actually introduced, but in the conditional sentence (“Had Jakov Ivanov been a coffinmaker in the provincial capital …”) he is assumed to be known. The conditional sentence in the irrealis mood contains essential negative information: Ivanov has no house of his own, and he is not addressed by his first name and patronymic, which in Russia is a form of address for persons of respect. The second part of the long Russian sentence that describes the coffinmaker’s living conditions contrasts the provincial capital with the sober reality of the “little backwater,” which in turn contains two pieces of information: firstly, “here” Ivanov is addressed by his first name only, and his nickname is “Bronze” for some reason,⁴ and secondly, “here” the coffinmaker lives as poor as a peasant. His meagre living conditions are illuminated by the enumeration of the things that are housed in the only room of the small old hut. Among the objects mentioned is Marfa, who, we can assume, is the coffinmaker’s wife, whose illness marks the beginning of the story. The fact that Marfa is only mentioned as part of a series of objects (“stove,” “double bed,” “coffins,” “workbench”) indicates that the sober enumeration made by the narrator follows the coffinmaker’s horizon of values and way of thinking. The subordinate mention of Marfa, who is included in the list of objects, also indicates the low importance Ivanov attaches to his wife. When Jakov presents his terminally ill wife to the feldsher as his prédmet (“object”), he uses a term that in the nineteenth century referred to someone to whom one is attached with affection.⁵ Nevertheless, the unintentional, unconscious, but actual meaning “object” is present in Jakov’s use of the term.

The entire first paragraph of the narrative denotes the initial situation of the story. The selection of the objects and the negatively evaluated facts connected with them, as well as the combination of heterogeneous moments into a situation that expresses a quality of mood, thus follows the spatial and ideological standpoint of the hero, the coffinmaker Jakov Ivanov, who ekes out a living from people’s deaths. The temporal point of view from which it becomes possible to describe the situation in this manner is also that of the coffinmaker. The narrative begins on the threshold between backstory and actual story, in the phase immediately before the occurrence of those events (Marfa’s death, Jakov’s illness) that will trigger the main mental event, Jakov’s inner transformation.

A situation is always constituted only in the consciousness of a latent story-forming subject who experiences reality and reduces its complexity to a few moments. Who is this subject here? At first it seems as if it is Jakov’s consciousness that has joined the town, the old people, and the bad business situation together to form a situation. But in his consciousness there is no such situation, at least not a current one. We therefore do not have a case of classic FID that reflects current consciousness here, but rather the narration of a narrator who, in the selection and evaluation of the thematized objects, orients himself around the standpoint of the character. Although the chosen elements are factors that determine the coffinmaker’s state of mind, and their specification is linked to the hero’s horizon, it is the narrator who has chosen them from the many that make up the coffinmaker’s horizon and linked them together to form a situation. Thus, this is the form we have called figurally colored narration.

At this point it becomes clear that the reader’s identification of FCN is an attribution based on interpretation. A different view of the character could in principle lead to the identification of a different form of presentation from FCN (although this is not very likely in the case of “Rothschild’s Violin”).

1.3 Demarcation from Related Devices

In the Čexov example, the figural element was relatively easy to identify due to the evaluations that differed greatly from the doxa, that which is generally considered true and correct. The axiological coloring does not always give such clear indications of a figural point of view. A problem arises when the narrative text itself is already strongly subjectively colored. Then it can be difficult to decide whether evaluations and other parameters of subjectivity come from the narrator or the figure. We find such a case of narrative oscillating between authentic narratoriality and veiled figurality in Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912):

Der Autor der klaren und mächtigen Prosa-Epopöe vom Leben Friedrichs von Preußen; der geduldige Künstler, der in langem Fleiß den figurenreichen, so vielerlei Menschenschicksal im Schatten einer Idee versammelnden Romanteppich, „Maja“ mit Namen, wob; der Schöpfer jener starken Erzählung, die „Ein Elender“ überschrieben ist und einer ganzen dankbaren Jugend die Möglichkeit sittlicher Entschlossenheit jenseits der tiefsten Erkenntnis zeigte; der Verfasser endlich (und damit sind die Werke seiner Reifezeit kurz bezeichnet) der leidenschaftlichen Abhandlung über „Geist und Kunst“, deren ordnende Kraft und antithetische Beredsamkeit ernste Beurteiler vermochte, sie unmittelbar neben Schillers Raisonnement über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung zu stellen: Gustav Aschenbach also war zu L., einer Kreisstadt der Provinz Schlesien, als Sohn eines höheren Justizbeamten geboren. (Mann, VIII, 450)

The author of the lucid and massive prose epic about the life of Frederic of Prussia; the patient artist who with long toil had woven the great tapestry of the novel called “Maya,” so rich in characters, gathering so many human destinies together under the shadow of one idea; the creator of that powerful tale entitled “A Study in Abjection,” which earned the gratitude of a whole younger generation by pointing to the possibility of moral resolution even for those who have plumbed the depths of knowledge; the author (lastly but not least in this summary enumeration of his maturer works) of that passionate treatise “Intellect and Art” which in its ordering energy and antithetical eloquence has led serious critics to place it immediately alongside Schiller’s disquisition “On Naïve and Reflective Literature”: in a word, Gustav Aschenbach, was born in L –, an important city in the province of Silesia, as the son of a highly-placed legal official. (Mann, Death in Venice, 202)

This is how the second chapter of the novella begins. Its hero no longer needs to be introduced. He is known to us from the walk through the Munich English Garden described in the first chapter. Now he is presented to us in his self-image, as a powerful “creator” of literary narratives, as a “patient artist,” as a preceptor of youth, and as the author of “passionate treatises.” In the selection of themes and in its syntactic structure, the presentation is cl...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Narrator and Figure
• 2 Figurally Colored Narration: Terms and Definitions
• 3 Figurally Colored Narration as Text Interference
• 4 Functions and Areas of Application
• 5 Limiting and Uncertain Cases
• 6. Summary and Conclusions
• 8. Index of Authors and Works