Monitored Speech: The "Equivalence" Relation between Direct and Indirect Speech in Jane Austen and James Joyce

Introduction

In Aspects of the Novel, E.M Forster makes a distinction between round and flat characters that has achieved a certain celebrity. One reason for its celebrity is that it offers a plausible explanation for what might otherwise be inexplicable: the reader's tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to an otherwise very doubtful character, the indolent Lady Bertram in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. The passage in which Forster suggests Lady Bertram is transformed from a flat into a round character is explicable, however, in terms other than those the English novelist proposes. Indeed, this alternative explanation is preferable because it throws valuable light on an aspect of novelistic discourse that has remained remarkably undeveloped: the "'equivalence' relation" that exists between direct and indirect speech (Leech and Short 320). In this essay, my intention is to demonstrate that the passage cited by Forster as part of his argument for the existence of flat and round characters demonstrates one half of a significant rhetorical strategy: the narrator's deliberate upgrading or rhetorical amelioration of the impact of a character's words. I intend to show that this upgrading effect is matched, not least in Jane Austen herself, by the very opposite rhetorical effect, that of a deliberate downgrading or parodying of a particular character's reported speech—something that Forster explicitly denies is part of Austen's repertoire. As a result of the analysis, I draw the conclusion that Forster's focus on rotundity is in fact a misreading of the real significance of the passage about Lady Bertram. In interpreting the scene as he does, the English novelist has obscured something of even greater interest to students of the novel, something which the remainder of this essay will attempt to elucidate.

The Round/Flat Character Distinction

In the series of talks that E. M. Forster delivered at Cambridge in the spring of 1927 in fulfillment of the obligations of the annual Clark Lectures, the English novelist suggests that characters in the novel may be divided into flat and round. For Forster, in their purest form, flat characters "are constructed round a single idea or quality," with the really flat characters being expressed in a single sentence. The example he offers is that of Charles Dickens's Mrs. Macawber, with her refrain "I never will desert Mr Macawber" (Forster 73). The seventeenth century, in Forster's opinion, knew flat characters as 'humours'; nowadays, they are more likely known as 'types' or 'caricatures' (73). In contrast, round characters are characters "capable of surprising in a convincing way" (80). By implication, round characters are more complex; they are the characters that are more representative of what Norman Douglas would call "the profundities and complexities of the ordinary human mind" (75–80). In spite of their lack of profundity and complexity, however, flat characters should not be dismissed. Indeed, in Forster's view, flat characters have certain advantages. They are "easily recognized" and "easily remembered"; and in a novel "that is at all complex" flat characters as well as round characters are required (74–5). That said, flat characters are not "as big achievements as round ones" and "are best when they are comic" (77). By way of transitioning his discussion from flat to round, Forster chooses to focus on the somewhat unlikely case of Jane Austen's Lady Bertram. In effect, Forster's comments about Lady Bertram are an attempt to answer satisfactorily the following questions: "Why do the characters in Jane Austen give us a slightly new pleasure each time they come in, as opposed to the merely repetitive pleasure that is caused by a character in Dickens? Why do they combine so well in a conversation, and draw one another out without seeming to do so, and never perform? The answer to this question can be put in several ways: that, unlike Dickens, she was a real artist, that she never stooped to caricature, etc. But the best reply is that her characters, though smaller than his, are more highly organized" (79; my emphasis...