The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English

2. 1050–1500: Through a Glass Darkly; or, the Emergence of Mind in Medieval Narrative

2. 1050–1500 Through a Glass Darkly; or, the Emergence of Mind in Medieval Narrative monika fludernik The representation of consciousness in medieval literature is an underexplored area of narratological research. Partly, this is the result of a general failure of classical narratology to engage with narratives before the early eighteenth century (the beginning of the novel). Partly, too, the neglect of this issue stems from a general belief that the representation of consciousness does not properly start before the late eighteenth century at the earliest, and only comes into its own with the novel of consciousness in the late nineteenth century (starting with Thomas Hardy). As Alan Palmer has demonstrated so convincingly in Fictional Minds (2004), the study of speech and thought representation has been biased in favor of speech defined in terms of four categories : direct speech (“How are you?”), interior monologue (Nice bit of pudding, that), free indirect discourse (fid) (How was she?), and indirect speech (Jim said the boat was gone); psychonarration—that is, the narrator’s presentation of a character’s mind (He mulled it over)—has barely received any attention. Arguing against what he termed the “speech-category approach,” Palmer was able to document the importance of thought report (or what Cohn [1978] calls psychonarration) in the nineteenth-century realist novel, and this proportional and functional preference can also be found in the eighteenth-century Gothic novel and in Virginia Woolf’s narratives, for example. Thus, in the following passage from Radcliffe (1998 [1794]), I have highlighted the instances of psychonarration : “these united circumstances disposed her mind to tenderness, and her thoughts were with Valancout” (123). Building on Palmer’s account as well as my own previous work (Fludernik 1993, 1996), the present chapter will rethink 69 70 monika fludernik prior scholarship on the representation of consciousness in medieval English narrative, and it will also question the categories we have been using for analyzing the emergence of mind. More specifically, my chapter will begin by discussing how categories of thought representation have relied on a preconception that all thought is verbal. I will then outline six categories of thought representation used in Middle English texts from the thirteenth century onward, exploring the broader implications of those categories for the study of consciousness representation in narrative. The Verbal Bias in Studies of Speech and Thought Representation As the history of the study of speech and thought representation shows, there has always been a bias toward verbalized thought. Prototypically, one conceives of consciousness as consisting of words and sentences rather than, say, images or inchoate feelings . This appears most forcefully in the very term “speech and thought representation,” the standard narratological label for the analysis of embedded discourse, or discourse quoted or otherwise alluded to in the framing narrative. This bias reveals itself in two respects. On the one hand, consciousness is treated as internal utterance, as speech that is not articulated aloud but produced silently in the manner of a soliloquy. On the other hand, the bias causes narratologists to treat characters’ mental and verbal acts as material situated on a level below the primary diegetic level. When two characters speak with one another, they may also tell one another stories. Such stories are therefore embedded insets, stories within a story, located on a framed or hypodiegetic level. When characters have a vision or dream, these are likewise treated as hypodiegetic. In the first case, the embedded narrative is narrated; in the second case it is imagined or visualized in the mind of the protagonist. Whereas, therefore, in the story-within-the-story mode, the character tells the story, in the case of visions or dreams, this is not the case. The protagonist either has to tell what he or she perceived in the dream, thus verbalizing the dream narrative and converting it into the through a glass darkly 71 embedded story category; or the dreamer’s mental experience is narrated by the primary narrator as an extended passage of narrated perception and psychonarration. In the second case, the character’s conscious experiences do not form a story within the story but are rather (mental) events reported by the primary narrator. Hence, techniques for representing characters’ mental experiences are not completely coextensive with techniques for representing their spoken utterances. Criticism of the speech and thought parallelism was first articulated by linguists, in particular by Leech and Short in Style in Fiction (2007 [1981...