Despite being considered one of the signature innovations of novelistic fiction, and crucial to any understanding of narrative voice, free indirect discourse (FID) remains elusive and surprisingly controversial. After an initial surge of theoretical work on the topic in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and then in the 1990s and 2000s, theorizations tend now to be embedded in practical criticism or extemporized in the classroom. The reputation of FID is well established, but more work remains to be done. This panel showcases new work on free indirect discourse, featuring scholars working on various aspects of the technique, across tradition, period, and medium.
Elisha Cohn's paper argues that the literary representation of animal sentience should matter to any reader invested in the novel as a form, highlighting the multispecies affordances of free indirect style. In contemporary fiction, she argues that “realistic” renderings of animal sentience provoke free indirect discourse, while presenting narrative as a theoretically significant answer to a question that is core to intersections of ecocriticism, animal studies, feminist studies, critical race studies, and beyond: in María Puig de la Bellacasa’s words, “What does caring mean when we go about thinking and living interdependently with beings other than human”? She takes as examples two contemporary novels, Linda Hogan’s Power (1995) and Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019), narrated in the first person only to be interrupted by free indirect discourse focalized through the perspective of a big cat.
Christina Gilligan argues that recent demotions of the narrator have a particularly distorting effect on our understanding of how free indirect discourse operates (and to what ends) in the nineteenth-century novels of Britain. Specifically, in obscuring the narrator’s role in free indirect discourse, we also obscure one of the most common and potent functions of free indirect discourse in the nineteenth-century novel: its courting of readerly identifications with the narrator — affective attachments which then can be deployed to various ethico-political ends. While critics, including D.A. Miller, Kornbluh, and Ferguson, have examined free indirect discourse’s capacity to court both readerly intimacy with and distance from the narrated character, I instead focus on the way in which free indirect discourse formally lends itself to promoting identification not with narrated characters but with their narrator. It is, after all, a much more attractive proposition to align one’s self with the narrator as reader/knower than with the character who is read/(over)known. To examine this identificatory function of free indirect discourse more closely, she attends to D.A. Miller’s own implicit identificatory attachment to Austen’s narrator in Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style.
In her presentation on the work of contemporary artist Bouchra Khalili, Victoria Baena asks: what is it about free indirect discourse that has proved so productive—and timely—for her work? The artist has long been preoccupied by the intersection of power and speech. Her Mapping Journey Project (2008-11), for instance, incorporates eight films that show people tracing their migratory journeys in marker while relating the stories of their movements aloud. The documentary mode enables a kind of counter-mapping, but is also an attempt to experiment with different forms of collectivity. In considering Khalili’s engagement with the free indirect, Baena draws on Timothy Bewes’ recent book, especially his own reading of Pasolini. But she also returns to a landmark moment in the histories of the modern novel and of free-indirect discourse alike: the first-person plural narrator with which Flaubert’s Madame Bovary begins and that quickly, almost shamefacedly, drops out in favor of the free indirect.
Eleni Coundouriotis argues that free indirect discourse, the tool par excellence of the realist novelist, is central to a decolonial reading of South African fiction. Decolonial analysis is aimed at deconstructing the institutions of knowledge perpetuated by colonialism. Point of view is critical to establishing the real in conditions of colonial oppression. Free indirect discourse may capture the thoughts of a character and hence their point of view but leaves unanswered the question of where this insight comes from. This problem around the authority of point of view finds a broader correspondence in the politics of truth under settler colonialism. For this paper, she develops two close readings to illustrate the complexity of free indirect discourse in South African fiction. She looks at two novels that explore political commitment and the personal costs entailed by a life devoted to the struggle: Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather (1968) and Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story (1990).
