Speech and Thought Representation as Constitutive Elements of Narrative Perspective and Focalization: James Joyce’s Dubliners

Abstract

The paper examines the principal constitutive elements of narrative perspective (point-of-view) and focalization in fictional texts through the system of speech and thought presentation, as conceptualized by M. Short (Leech & Short 1981). The author’s clines of speech and thought presentation introduce a variety of categories such as narrative report of action (NRA), narrative report of speech/thought act (NRS/TA), indirect speech/thought (IS/T), free indirect speech/thought (FIS/T), direct speech/thought (DS/T), and free direct speech/thought (FDS/T). In spite of certain and undeniable differences between the way(s) in which a given speech or thought act(ivity) is presented in a narrative text (most notably the difference in the so-called “norm”), the two clines have been fused into one by replacing the terms speech and thought with the common term discourse. Such economization has proved particularly useful and efficient in exploring shifts in narrative perspective and focalization because neither of them can be significantly affected by whether a stretch of text is presented, for instance, in free indirect speech or free indirect thought. Consequently, the current Slovene terminology as well as the entire system of speech/thought presentation has had to be redressed and expanded, especially by the category free direct discourse. – The central part of the paper deals with the shifting of narrative perspective and focalization through the interplay of free (in)direct discourse and other forms of speech/thought presentation. The basic theoretical postulations are illustrated with excerpts from James Joyce’s collection of short stories, Dubliners. Combining the characteristic features of both traditional realist and modernist modes of writing, the Joyce text draws on a wide range of narrative techniques, which creates such a manipulation of the narrator and character that it becomes at times virtually impossible for the reader to determine the observer and/or the speaker in the narrative. In an attempt to resolve the old paradigm of the narrative mood and voice, that is the problem of who »sees« and »speaks« in a narrative text (Genette 1983), a number of pertinent concepts have been brought into play and analyzed in relation to, especially, free (in)direct discourse: represented perception (Brinton 1980), double vision (Fowler 1989a), perceptual/conceptual point of view (Chatman 1978), double imagery (Benstock 1980), character-teller and character-reflector (Stanzel 1984), etc. – The final conclusion is that the narrator inevitably has a decisive advantage over the character because he not only sees what the character sees, but he also sees the character himself. In view of this, their perspectives of the world of the narrative ought to be understood in hierarchical order, which means that they occur on separate levels. This calls for a more differentiated and precise denomination of their respective functions. Therefore, it seems appropriate to define focalization as the process in which the point of view of a character is realized on the level of story. The term narrative perspective, however, should be reserved for that position on the level of discourse from which the narrator observes, comments on and qualifies the narrative.