Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

22.2 Types of speech presentation in prose fiction
Unit 22 Speech and narration
Section 5 Narrative

In addition writers have evolved various ways of presenting the speech of characters, which vary from giving as much autonomy to words of a character as possible (rendering them, as it were, directly) to filtering a character’s speech through the report of the narrator - or another character - thus rendering them indirectly.

22.2.1 Free direct speech

In free direct speech there is hardly any ostensible intrusion or filtering by the narrator. We know, however, that we have switched from the words of the narrator to the words of a character through various clues such as indentation on the page and the use of quotation marks, but there is little description of whose words they are or how they are spoken. They are allowed to speak for themselves. Here is an extract of free direct speech from Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962). Note the absence of any reporting clauses such as ’he said’, ’she replied’:

They talked about his work. He specialised in leucotomies:

’Boy, I’ve cut literally hundreds of brains in half!’

’It doesn’t bother you, what you’re doing?’

’Why should it?’

’But you know when you’ve finished that operation, it’s final, the people are never the same again?’

’But that’s the idea, most of them don’t want to be the same again.’

22.2.2 Direct speech

Direct speech is enclosed within quotation marks, like many examples of free direct speech, but it is introduced by, or presented in the context of, a reporting clause (such as she said/declared/commanded/asserted, etc.):

She said: ’Well there’s nothing I can say to that, is there?’

He leaned forward and said: ’I’m going to give you another chance, Anna’.

(Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, 1962)

This strategy makes a clear distinction between the words of the narrator (’He leaned forward and said’) and the words of a character (’I’m going to give you another chance, Anna.’); and it opens up possibilities for comment or evaluation (implicitly or explicitly) by the narrator on the character. Thus, in the exchange above, the details of manner supplied by the narrator - as well as the words themselves - suggest a vaguely intimidating move in the dialogue. We have the words of the characters; but we also have - through the words of the reporting clause - the narrator’s perspective.

22.2.3 Indirect speech

Indirect speech shifts the perspective yet further from the speaker to the narrator. It differs from direct speech in various ways:

1 quotation marks are dropped;

2 some kind of subordinating conjunction such as that may be used;

3 there is a switch from first and second person pronouns (for example I or you) to third person (she, he, they);

4 there is a shift in the tense of the verb ’backwards’ in time (e.g. from is to was);

5 temporal expressions shift backwards in time (e.g. now becomes then);

6 demonstratives shift from close to distant ones (e.g. here becomes there).

Following these guidelines, the piece of dialogue in direct speech from The Golden Notebook, given above, can be transformed into indirect speech simply as follows:

She said that there was nothing she could say to that. He leaned forward and said that he was going to give her another chance.

Notice that the narrative voice is now more dominant than before with a consequent attenuation of the immediacy of the original dialogue. In the following passage from George Mackay Brown’s novel Beside the Ocean of Time (1994) the author alternates between direct and indirect speech:

It was to an island satiated with festival that the three mysterious strangers came. In those days, the country people went out of their way to be pleasant and welcoming to visitors, but those men, from first setting foot on Norday, didn’t seem to care what the islanders thought of them. They climbed through fences and trespassed on the Glebe and the Bu. Simon Taing of the Bu came out and remarked that the gentlemen were in his barleyfield. They looked at the farmer coldly, and made some measurements and set up a tripod, right there in the middle of the barley, and looked in all directions through some kind of an instrument, and one of them spoke some numbers, and another made notes in a large notebook. Lucky, the Bu collie, didn’t like the look of them, it seemed, for he went circling behind the man with the theodolite and suddenly made a grab at the man’s trouser-leg. ’Keep that brute under control,’ the man taking notes said . . . Simon Taing called in the dog, and said that Lucky had never been known to seize anyone before - all the same, it was his land they were trespassing on, his barley, the winter bread of the people, and he would be glad to know what they were there for, anyway . . . The three men paid no attention to the farmer.

The utterance of the man taking notes, ’Keep that brute under control’, carries more force than the utterances of the farmer, Simon Taing, which on each occasion here are presented in indirect speech.

22.2.4 Free indirect speech

This is a mixed form, consisting partly of direct speech and partly of indirect speech, where - because of the suppression of some of the distinguishing signals - it is difficult to separate the voice of the narrator from the voice of the character. In the following short extract from Chapter 16 of Dickens’s novel, Dombey and Son (1846-8), we find ’backshifting’ of tense (’the motion of the boat . . . was lulling him to rest’), as well as some pronoun shift (’me’ becomes ’him’); these characteristic features of indirect speech emphasize the presence of a narrator who filters the speech of characters. At the same time some sections sound close to the direct speech of the character (e.g. ’how bright the flowers growing on them, how tall the rushes!’):

Presently he told her the motion of the boat upon the stream was lulling him to rest. How green the banks were now, how bright the flowers growing

on them, and how tall the rushes! Now the boat was out at sea but gliding

smoothly on. And now there was a shore before him. Who stood on the bank!

It is a fairly simple matter, involving few changes, to switch the free indirect speech of this passage into direct speech, thereby moving it closer to the perspective of the character:

Presently he told her: ’The motion of the boat upon the stream is lulling me to rest. How green the banks are now, how bright the flowers growing

on them, and how tall the rushes! Now the boat is out at sea but gliding smoothly on. And now there is a shore before me. Who stands on the bank!’

Free indirect speech is thus an ambiguous mode in that it blurs the distinction between a character’s speech and the narrative voice; this ambiguity has made it attractive to novelists from Jane Austen onwards. Some writers - such as Joyce in Dubliners (1914), or Austen in Emma (1816) - are especially known as exponents of free indirect speech. As a technical device it offers writers a way of presenting words that seem to come from inside and outside a character simultaneously. Such words can be given the emotional weight of the character’s perspective, while at the same time preserving a degree of narrative distance or ironic detachment from the character.

22.2.5 Speech and thought

Many of the distinctions discussed above apply also to the representation of characters’ thoughts in narrative, so much so that in many respects thought may be considered as a kind of ’inner speech’. Thus the different modes of presenting both speech and thought can be represented in a table that shows the different degrees to which a character’s speech or thought can be filtered through the narrator:

Because of the connection between modes of presentation and relative closeness to or distance from the viewpoint of the character or of the narrator, modes of presenting speech in prose fiction are more than merely technical accomplishments that allow for variety in the handling of characters’ voices. Each possibility has a different effect, and seems to carry a different value ranging from allowing the character to speak as if in his or her ’own words’ to filtering them through the perspective of the narrator. If, for instance, free indirect speech lends itself to the creation of ironic distance between the words of the character and those of the narrator, free indirect thought on the other hand can create a sense of empathy with the character. These different kinds of interplay between the voice of the narrator and the speech of a character make the issue of speech presentation important not just for its own sake but also for the way in which it connects with other topics such as ’point of view’ in fiction (see Unit 21).

22.2.6 Genre and the presentation of speech

Subtle differences in the presentation of speech can also serve as indicators of different ’genres’ of prose fiction (see Unit 4). Consider, for example, the following reporting clauses that frame direct speech (they are all drawn from within a few pages of each other in a single novel; the speech itself has been omitted):

’. . .,’ she replied sharply

’. . .,’ she stuttered

’. . .,’ she wailed gaspingly

’. . .,’ he murmured huskily

’. . .,’ she asked as calmly as she could

’. . .,’ he said with chilly emphasis

’. . .,’ he countered silkily

Readers familiar with the genre will no doubt instantly recognize these as coming from popular romance (they are quoted from Susan Napier’s The Counterfeit Secretary: A Vivid Story of Passionate Attraction, published by Mills and Boon (1986)). The way in which the manner of the speech has been foregrounded in the reported clauses through adverbial phrases such as ’gaspingly’, ’huskily’, ’with chilly emphasis’ and so on, is genre-specific to such popular romance. This can be seen by comparing these reporting clauses with the way speech is presented in the following short scene from Nancy Mitford’s ’literary’ novel The Pursuit of Love(1945):

’Allo - allo.’

’Hullo.’

’Were you asleep?’

’Yes, of course. What’s the time?’

’About two. Shall I come round to see you?’

’Do you mean now?’

’Yes.’

’I must say it would be very nice, But the only thing is, what would the night porter think?’

’Ma chere, how English you are. Eh bien, je vais vous le dire - il ne se fera aucune illusion.’

’No, I suppose not.’

’But I don’t imagine he’s under any illusion as it is. After all, I come here for you three times every day - you’ve seen nobody else, and French people are quite quick at noticing these things, you know.’

’Yes - I see -’

’Alors, c’est entendu - a tout a I’heure’.

Both The Counterfeit Secretary and The Pursuit of Love are concerned with romantic relationships, and dialogue in both works as an important vehicle for registering fluctuations in degrees of emotional attachment. This makes the differences in the ways dialogue is handled all the more striking. The Counterfeit Secretary uses some free direct speech; but a great deal of the dialogue is direct speech, where information about the manner of the speaker is foregrounded in explicit narrative comment. The Pursuit of Love makes much more use of free direct speech, in which the words of characters have to achieve their own significance without being mediated by a direct comment from the narrator. Comparison between the two techniques suggests that, for popular romance, the shifting grounds of emotional attachment may be carried in the manner of the speech as much as by the speech itself. For readers of The Pursuit of Love, on the other hand, the ebb and flow of emotional confrontation is to be deciphered in the nuances of the very wording of the dialogue itself. Such differences function as formal markers of generic distinctness; they may also signal differences in attitudes towards language and meaning in the ’implied readerships’ of the two works (See Unit 15, Positioning the reader or spectator). The implied readership of The Pursuit of Love is, for instance, more class-based than that of The Counterfeit Secretary. The extract from the former presupposes not only some knowledge of the French language (very much a minority skill in Britain in 1945, restricted mostly to the middle and upper classes) but also - for its humour to be intelligible - some acquaintance with the distance between French and English sexual mores of the time. Free direct speech, furthermore, may be seen as making greater demands of the reader, since the significance of the dialogue has to be extracted from the wording of the speech itself without interpretive signposts regarding tone and manner being supplied by the narrator. Thus, the differences in the narrative presentation of speech in prose fiction may correlate with broader distinctions between popular and minority genres.

In this unit we have explored how writing and speech - because of the very different circumstances in which they are produced - constitute very different modes of communication. We then considered how particular conventions have arisen in written storytelling, or prose narration, for the rendering of speech. Different techniques for presenting speech (as well as thought, as a kind of ’inner speech’) were examined; and some suggestions were made as to the different effects associated with the different techniques. Finally, it was proposed that there may also be generic differences associated with the adoption of one mode of speech presentation rather than another.