A summary of Dorrit Cohn's Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1978). 1. Consciousness in Third-Person Context.
1.1. Psycho-Narration: Psycho-Narration: The narration of the character's thoughts by a knowledgeable
narrator, in the narrator's own language and concepts. It tends towards summary and abstraction. It draws no border between feelings and perceptions. It is the classical way of presenting consciousness (e.g. in Trollope, Meredith or Proust) and it is the most apt for the analysis of the least conscious levels of psychic life. It is the equivalent of indirect discourse. Often found in authorial narrative. 1.2. Quoted Monologue. The thoughts of the character are quoted by the narrator in a literal
way. Usually with quotation marks (but witho ut them in Ulysses ch. I). Monologue, whether autonomous or not, does not portray the Freudian unconscious or the Jamesian stream of consciousness, but endophasy, a phenomenon of consciousness. The unconscious can be reflected only symptomatically by the thoughts of a character. Primitive uses are modelled on speech and rhetorical patterns. In the most mimetic instances, pronominal reference of 1st and 2nd person collapses, the coherence and unity of speech gives way to several conflicting voices or lines of thought, and there is syntactic fragmentation and lexical opaqueness. It is the silent equivalent of direct discourse and is often identified with it up to the early 19th century. 1.3. Narrated Monologue. A version of the character's thoughts with his own words and
attitudes, but set in the syntax of a third-person narration (3rd person reference to the character and past narrative tenses). Very often there is an ambiguity as to whether it is actual speech or merely thought which is being depicted: therefore, this mode merges into free indirect discourse, discourse, of which it is the equivalent. Due to its form, it al so provides a seamless transition into psycho-narration: the difference is that no verbs of mental activity are used in narrated monologue, which therefore has grammatical independence. Narrated monologue refers to thoughts : it is different from narrated perception , although they may combine. It amplifies emotional notes, in the directions of both sympathy and irony. Often found in figural narrative. Galsworthy's The Man of Property is is a good example.
2. Consciousness in First-Person Texts.
2.1. Retrospective techniques. They are the first-person equivalents of these techniques, but
with an essential difference: an element of remembrance is introduced. 2.1.1. Self-narration. Equivalent of psycho-narration. Like psycho-narration, it may be dissonant, if there is a great distance (temporal, ideological) between the narrating self and the experiencing self, or consonant , if the two are close. Consonant self-narration has been favoured by modern literature. Dissonant : Great Expectations. Consonant: L'Etranger.
2.1.2. Self-quoted monologue. Equivalent of quoted monologue. From set speeches to flickering thoughts. It is somewhat cumbersome and psychologically implausible. Usually avoided now; frequent in early memoir-novels. 2.1.3. Self-narrated monologue. Equivalent of narrated monologue. In it, "the narrator momentarily identifies with his past self, giving up his temporally distanced vantage po int and cognitive privilege for his past-time-bound bewilderments and vacillations" (167). Hamsun's Hunger. 2.2. From narration to monologue. A range of intermediary, problematic forms. In these
there is no realistic motivation for the narrative; there is ambiguity about the status of the narrative and the audience addressed. E.g. Beckett's novels, or Faulkner's memory monologues which exclude all but past experience. Other intermediary cases may be in the direction of digressive autobiography, or the diary, when the motivation of the text is abandoned or laid bare. There is a general tendency in contemporary literature to break the rules of formal mimeticism. 2.3. The autonomous monologue. It is similar to quoted monologue, only it is not quoted by
a narrator – our first and only contact is with the mind of the character. 2.3.1. Joyce's "Penelope" monologue in Ulysses as paradigm. Predominance of exclamatory syntax; avoidance of standard narrative and reportive tenses; vague referentiality. 2.3.2. Variations of the form. The portrayal of time is not necessarily even. Sections of the same length without breaks may stand for very different stretches of story time. Or else, time gaps may be introduced in a variety of ways. Various degrees of formality or readability, sometimes motivated by the kind of mind whic h is portrayed. 2.3.3. The memory monologue. See 2.2. The present moment of locution of the narrator is emptied of experience: "the monologist exists as a disembodied medium, a pure memory without clear location in time and space" (247). Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Claude Simon's novels. 2.3.4. Epilogue: The relation to drama and lyric. The autonomous monologue is no longer a narrative technique among others used in a narrative genre. It is a narrative genre of its own, which has gradually suppressed all the originally narrative characteristics and moved i n the direction of lyric and drama.
The book is very readable. She gro unds her analysis in texts and avoids theorizing without examples. I wish I had known about this book as an undergraduate. I wrote a paper trying to discuss how the use of the first person narrator in a book I read of a class, made the protagonist ambiguous; in the end of the novel, the reader was unsure if the narrator was
the man described or not. She is interested in how authors give readers the impression of the processes of thought, of consciousness of the characters and what devices they use to do this. She divides the book into two halves. The first deals with the third person narrator, the second with the first person narrator. She proceeds somewhat diachronically, but she see a synchronic pattern in the history of the methods. She focuses on grammatical markers, such as tenses, clauses, and punctuation in her discussion of the dif ferent devices for representing a character’s mind by the author. She points out that in realistic fiction, the protagonist conveys psychological processes and thoughts that no one would ever have communicated to them in real life; "… the paradox
that narrative fiction attains its greatest 'air of reality' in the representation of a lone figure thinking thoughts she will never c ommunicate to anyone" (7). Her argument joins wi th theories about the constructed and imaginary nature of narrative, even realist narrative. The third person narrator can explore
another person's mind in a way that is impossible for anyone in the real world, even perhaps the person narrating her own life. In realist fiction, and in other narrative forms, the human mind is "transparent" to the narrator, who can describe the character's thoughts. No one in real life is capable of doing such a thing. In other words, this transparency of the mind, of a character's thoughts is in itself a fiction. But is a compelling fiction that has some basis in reality; human beings think to themselves it seems, and we translate this experience to t he fictional representation of the reality of a character's mind. In the third person context, the author depicts consciousness in three ways: psychonarration, quoted monologue and narrated monologue. An i mportant component of her argument is the difference between the authorial and the figural mind. The authorial mind is the writer's authority to act as a thinking agent in the narrative. The figural mind i s the mind of the character in the narrative. The psycho-narration method delves into the mind of the character, but with the narrator's ability to discern the thoughts she has, but he uses his own language to do so. She makes some examples to show it: "he knew he was late," "he knew he had been late," and "he knew he would be late" (105). Note that each of these examples subordinated the character's thoughts to the narrator's main authority; the second part of these examples is a subordinating clause. The point of view is the character's but the author/narrator expresses the thoughts. Quoted monologues occurs when a character is quoted, as verbatim, by the narrator. The examples she uses to compare it with the other methods are: "(He thought:) I am late," "(he thought:) I was late," and "(He thought:) I will be late" (104-5). The thoughts are seen a occurring in the character's mind, unsaid. The thoughts are marked by verbs that express speech or thinking, change in tense, quotation marks or some other way; the reader can discern that the thought belongs or comes from the figural mind, not the authorial. This can be used in interesting ways to contrast between what the character thinks and what the narrator perceives (often the reality of the situation). The narrator remains the authority.
Cohn defines narrated monologue as "the technique for rendering a character's thought in his own idiom while maintaining the third-person reference and the basic sense of narration" (100). Her examples for comparison are: "he was late," "he had been late," and "he would be late" (105). This method is somewhere between quoted monologue and psycho-narration. The method "reduces the content of the figural mind more implicitly than" quoted monologue and "more directly than" psycho-narration (105). The authorial and the figural are twisted together in this method; the narrator's identification but not his identity with the figural mind is placed forward by this method (112). The narrator has to take an attitude towards his characters; her thoughts are objectified and falsity and sincerity are formed. The first person context, Cohn discusses retrospective techniques, from narration to monologue and finally the autonomous monologue. The first person context is odd; in many cases, the narrator is separated in time from what he narrates. The first person narrator is not really the same person; she is looking back at her past self. This can be exploited: an author can run the narrator’s thoughts now and memories together to create t he idea that the character’s thoughts have not changed. There are some case where the narrated
monologue of third person context approaches the first person version: the narrative appears to tell itself (169)
