Poetics Today
Before the “Inward Turn”:
Tracing Represented Thought
in the French Novel (1800 – 1929)
Melanie Conroy
University of Memphis, Foreign Languages and Literatures
Abstract Literary historians have long made an issue of the extent to which the modernist novel broke with conventions established in the nineteenth century. One of the
most debated questions is the occurrence, or dating, of an “inward turn,” a rupture
with the external orientation of the realist and the naturalist novels, in favor of greater
psychological depth and complexity. Such a turn has been located in the early years of
modernism by critics like Robert Humphrey (1954), Malcolm Bradbury (1995 [1976]),
and Stanley Sultan (1987) and in the late nineteenth century by scholars like Morton
Levitt (2006) and Pericles Lewis (2007). One of the most common but seldom tested
presuppositions about the alleged “inward turn” is that the linguistic innovations of the
modernist period helped portray the mental states of characters in a more advanced
manner. This article reviews the debates on the differences between realist and modernist forms of thought representation and uses quantitative techniques to determine
whether, and to what extent, there was linguistic and stylistic innovation in how the
French novel represented thought before and during the “inward turn” of the 1910s
and 1920s. By tracing the use of reporting clauses and mental verbs (e.g., “she thought”
and “he said to himself ”) in a large sample of nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury French fiction, I measure the frequency of several key markers of represented
thought in a range of novels, authors, and decades between 1800 and 1929. I conclude
that these common reporting clauses and mental verbs appeared in a wide variety of
I would like to thank Dan Edelstein for suggesting a quantitative model to me and for encouraging me to use the ARTFL-FRANTEXT database for this project. Thanks also to Joshua
Landy and the anonymous referees of Poetics Today for their comments on early drafts of this
essay.
Poetics Today 35:1-2 (Spring – Summer 2014) DOI 10.1215/03335372-2648377
q 2014 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
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texts, particularly in the French novels of the 1830s, 1910s, and 1920s, alongside other,
“free” techniques, which are more often studied. There is, thus, very little evidence that
such “free” forms (notably free indirect thought) displaced their marked counterparts
(e.g., plain indirect thought). Indeed, the modernist “inward turn” in France, on which
this article concentrates, included a continued recourse to the supposedly more “primitive” (i.e., marked) forms of thought representation associated with the realist novel: the
1910s and 1920s even saw an increase in markers of represented thought that were
frequently used in the nineteenth-century French novel.
1. The “Inward Turn” and Its Precedents
The shift from realism to modernism has gone by many names; most often, it
is referred to as the “inward turn,” borrowing a phrase from Erich Kahler’s
(1973 [1970]) history of the novel. Kahler (ibid.: 5) called the ever-more
precise articulation of human consciousness traceable in fiction after Don
Quixote “the inward turn of narrative”: this inward turn participated in “an
increasing displacement of outer space by what Rilke has called inner space,
a stretching of consciousness.” Tools like stream of consciousness writing
“effected something most important: they have broken through the bottom
of our consciousness — on which the psyche has hitherto rested with confidence” (Kahler 1989 [1957]: 167).
About the same time, in one of the first book-length studies of psychology
in modernism, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (1954), Robert
Humphrey draws much the same historical distinction in much the same
terms. He argues that interest in the human psyche brought about a fundamental shift in novel writing between the heyday of naturalism and the
beginnings of modernism, that is, in the 1910s:
There is a difference, and it is a tremendous one, between Zola and Dreiser,
say, two novelists who attempted a kind of laboratory method in fiction, and the
stream-of-consciousness writers. It is indicated chiefly in the difference in subject
matter — which is, for the earlier novelists, motive and action (external man) and
for the latter ones, psychic existence and functioning (internal man). (Ibid.: 8)1
Humphrey articulates the strong version of the argument for a modernist
rupture: the epochal transition from naturalism to modernism was marked
1. Already in 1954, Humphrey (1954: vi) uses the term stream of consciousness out of respect for
convention, though it is, as Dorothy Richardson once said, a phrase characterized by its
“perfect imbecility.” Such novels differ from all other psychological fiction precisely in being
“concerned with those levels that are more inchoate than rational verbalization” and so “on the
margins of attention” (ibid.: 2 – 3). For Alan Palmer (2004: 24), “stream of consciousness”
intermingles various forms of discourse: “a dense mixture . . . of surface descriptions of the
physical storyworld together with all three modes of thought presentation: thought report,
free indirect thought, and direct thought.”
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by a dramatic shift from the representation of external action to that of inner
life.
These early views have persisted over the decades, terminology included.
For many critics of modernist literature, in the words of Astradur Eysteinsson
(1992: 26), “in view of previous literary history, modernism is felt to signal a
radical ‘inward turn’ in literature, and often a more thorough exploration of
the human psyche than is deemed to have been probable or even possible in
pre-Freudian times.”2
Inversely, the transition from realism to modernism3 is understood as a
rupture with the “external” realities of traditional fiction: social rank and
relations, descriptions of physical objects and people.4 This shift toward the
interior world, away from the exterior, occurred — to quote Virginia Woolf
(1986 [1924]: 421) — “on or about December 1910,” when “human character
changed.” Like many later critics, Woolf (ibid.: 421 – 22) soon qualifies this
2. More recently, the very notion of the “inward turn” of modernism has been criticized by
David Herman (2011: 253), who sees “not an inward turning but rather a foregrounding of the
inextricable interconnection between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ domains.”
3. Terms like realism, naturalism, decadence, and modernism can be used as time-bound literary
movements or as aesthetic (and so timeless) impulses. In this article, following literary historians
like Ian Watt (2001 [1957]) and Erich Auerbach (1968 [1946]), I use these terms in their former,
literary-historical sense. Thus, realism refers to novels written between 1830 and 1900, mainly in
France and England (Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, etc.). Naturalism refers to the work of Emile Zola and his followers, mainly in the 1880s and 1890s. Decadence
refers to novelists like Joris-Karl Huysmans and Rachilde, who wrote at about the same time.
Modernism refers to the cluster of novelists writing from the 1910s to the 1950s, mainly in
England, Germany, France, and the United States (e.g., Marcel Proust, Henry James, Virginia
Woolf, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Ford Madox Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner,
etc.). When used in the purely aesthetic sense, by contrast these terms are not mutually exclusive;
thus, novelists like Proust and Joseph Conrad can be classified as either realist or modernist,
depending on the aesthetic criteria used (e.g., themes, sentence structure, reliable versus unreliable narration). I cannot do justice here to the complexity of the broader debate about the
aesthetic characteristics of realist as against modernist novels, if only because this article is
focused on the representation of characters’ thoughts. Even from a purely literary-historical
viewpoint, however, there are valid debates over periodization. For instance, many locate the
beginning of modernism in the 1910s or 1920s — for example, Malcolm Bradbury (1995 [1976])
and Stanley Sultan (1987). But some recent analysts — notably Jesse Matz (2006) and Pericles
Lewis (2007) — find instances of modernist experimentation in the late nineteenth century or
even in the 1850s. According to Lewis (2007: 96), modernism is “a period concept. In its broadest
sense it refers to art and literature since Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert, but in a more
restricted sense it applies especially to work produced between the two world wars.” For critics
of French realism, on the other hand, the canon of realist literature often extends into the 1920s.
Lawrence Schehr (2003: 2) thus defines French realism as a corpus stretching from Stendhal to
Proust, “limits that can generally be agreed upon by most contemporary readers.”
4. Herman (2011: 250) reminds us that “in their critical writing, twentieth-century authors
like James and Woolf themselves helped establish a precedent for viewing modernism as contributing to what Erich Kahler described as the ‘inward turn’ of narrative,” a movement away
from characters’ “acting and interacting to the domain of the mental or psychological,” out of
“external, material reality.”
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assertion and with it the notion that one could locate such a fundamental
transformation at a precise point in time: “The change was not sudden and
definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be
arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.”
In this regard, 1922 is apparently the latest possible date for the advent of
modernism, due to the astonishing number of publications of high modernism that appeared during that year, notably including James Joyce’s Ulysses
and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. As Stanley Sultan (1987: 129) explains, 1922
was a banner year for modernism; it “began with the appearance of Ulysses
and ended with that of The Waste Land.” In that same year, by Sultan’s count,
there appeared books by E. M. Forster, John Middleton Murry, Aldous
Huxley, Carl Sandburg, Robert Graves, Conrad Aiken, H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, Edgar Lee Masters, Upton Sinclair, Ellen Glasgow, James Russell
Lowell, Gertrude Stein, and Joseph Conrad. The year 1922 also saw the
publication of Thomas Hardy’s Late Lyrics and Earlier, Katherine Mansfield’s
Garden Party and Other Stories, E. E. Cummings’s Enormous Room, Edith Sitwell’s
Façade, and Woolf ’s Jacob’s Room. Most strikingly, a number of modernists
published multiple books that year; in 1922 there were two books by F. Scott
Fitzgerald, three by D. H. Lawrence, four by William Butler Yeats. “The
movement occupied [the Victorian citadel] — established the modernist
period — by sheer weight of new and talented art” (ibid.).5
In this story, modernism — whether it began in 1910, or in the 1910s,
or in 1922 with Joyce’s Ulysses — finally created the tools that were necessary
to reveal the internal worlds of characters in the fiction of the great modernist novelists (e.g., Henry James, Marcel Proust, Joyce, and Woolf). The
Bloomsbury Group — especially Woolf but also Forster and Lytton Strachey — was, to a large extent, responsible for this history of the novel that
saw the modern as opposed to everything prior to it, especially to the con5. I have chosen to extend this study until 1929, though, in order to accommodate later dates for
the beginning of modernism. In his 1976 dictionary, Bradbury (1995 [1976]: 151) — among the
most influential critics on this topic — notes that modernism can equally well be seen as a
“timebound concept” extending from about “1890 to 1930” or as “a timeless one (including
Sterne, Donne, Villon, Ronsard).” But he thinks it is best understood as “a body of major
writers ( James, Conrad, Proust, Mann, Gide, Kafka, Svevo, Joyce, Musil, Faulkner in fiction;
Strindberg, Pirandello, Wedekind, Brecht in drama; Mallarmé, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Rilke,
Apollinaire, Stevens in poetry) whose works are aesthetically radical: they exhibit striking
technical innovations, emphasize spatial or ‘fugal’ as opposed to chronological form, tend
toward ironic modes, and involve a certain ‘dehumanization of art’” (ibid.). Bradbury thus
defines the movement both by canonizing particular authors and by ascribing particular aesthetic choices to them. For him, modernist art “is experimental, formally complex, elliptical,
contains elements of decreation as well as creation, and tends to associate notions of the artist’s
freedom from realism, materialism, traditional genre and form, with notions of cultural apocalypse and disaster. We can dispute about when it starts . . . and whether it has ended” (ibid.).
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ventions of Edwardian life and literature and, above all, to those of realist
fiction.6 This motif of a turn toward inner life was further developed by critics
who made consciousness central to the definition of modernism, from
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (1978) to Eysteinsson (1992) to
Stephen Kern (2011), following Kahler and Humphrey, of course.
The alleged inward turn of the modernist novel has become one of the
great truisms of academic literary criticism. The notion of a modernist rupture has been so influential that it appears — albeit in a weaker form — even in
histories of the novel that focus on realism and pre-twentieth-century literature. For instance, Erich Auerbach and Ian Watt — authors of two of the bestknown histories of European fiction — described modernist techniques as a
significant advance in the representation of human experience.7 Despite his
reservations about what he saw as a departure from the realist commitment
to social realities, Auerbach (1968 [1946]: 552) praises Woolf ’s capacity to
probe beneath the apparent clashes and the “prejudices” of conventional
understanding: “In this unprejudiced and exploratory type of representation
we cannot but see to what an extent — below the surface conflicts — the differences between men’s ways of life and forms of thought have already
lessened.” Again, Watt (2001 [1957]: 192) argues that Joyce revealed “this
minute-by-minute content of consciousness which constitutes what the individual’s personality really is, and dictates his relationship to others.” Further,
“it is only by contact with this consciousness that a reader can participate fully
in the life of a fictional character” (ibid.). In short, Woolf and Joyce provide
the first view into human consciousness that is truly unbiased, liberated from
the acquired habits and clichés that make up the tradition, both literary and
cultural. modernism is thus supposed to have made inner life, for the first
time, visible in all its detail.
6. The Bloomsbury Group was diverse in ideological outlook and in the attitude toward
previous writers. Yet the group generally shared Woolf ’s view of literary history as “bifurcated
around the same central point of 1910, between those writers who look forward with a new set
of stylistic tools and others who continue on with the old ways” ( Joyce 2004: 633). Woolf (1986
[1924]: 421) was one of the first modernists to polarize narrative practices between Edwardians
(Wells, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy) and Georgians (Forster, Lawrence, Strachey, Joyce,
T. S. Eliot). Through the example of Bennett, she accuses the Edwardians of interest in
“something outside” books and the desire to “observe every detail” instead of studying character properly.
7. In different ways, Auerbach and Watt see the modernist rendering of consciousness as the
culmination of a long march toward verisimilitude. For Watt (2001 [1957]: 206), Joyce’s Ulysses
is “the supreme culmination of the formal trend that Richardson initiated” in the arena of inner
life. Auerbach’s Mimesis (1968 [1946]: 552) in turn presents Proust’s and Woolf ’s novels as the
height of this long tradition, laying “the emphasis on the random occurrence.” In the process,
“something new and elemental appeared: nothing less than the wealth of reality and depth of
life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without prejudice.”
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In Pragmatic Modernism (2011), Lisi Schoenbach draws attention to
how metaphors of rupture and dissolution were traditionally used to
cast modernism as a radical break with the past. “ ‘Break-up,’ ‘devolution,’
‘dissolution,’ ‘catastrophe,’ ‘abrupt break,’ ‘chasm,’ ‘shock,’ ‘violation,’
‘de-creation,’ ‘crisis,’ ‘disintegration,’ ‘collapse,’ ‘disaster,’ ‘destruction,’ and
‘apocalypse of cultural community,’” writes Schoenbach (ibid.: 4), “these are
just some of the descriptive terms used by Malcolm Bradbury and James
McFarlane in their influential 1976 essay ‘The Name and the Nature of
Modernism.’” More recent critics of modernist literature, such as Jesse Matz
(2006), Pericles Lewis (2007), and Schoenbach (2011) herself, have generally
seen the realist novel as laying the ground for modernism, rather than as an
obstacle to be overcome. According to this more moderate generation of
scholars, modernist novelists and philosophers from Gustave Flaubert, perhaps, to Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Proust, and Stein were often pragmatic,
rather than blindly destructive of literary tradition. That is, being gradualists
with a deep interest in institutions and conventions, they introduced elements
of the new modernist poetics without jettisoning the “traditional” elements
of realist fiction wholesale. Among the previous forms chosen by modernist
novelists were realist techniques or models of representing characters, settings, and interactions in a novel. By contrast, “studies of Modernism have
been dominated too long by a central ideology of modernism: the ideology of
rupture, opposition, and anti-institutionality” (Schoenbach 2011: 10).
Such recent scholars, moreover, often locate the beginnings of the inward
turn in late nineteenth-century France: “The development of realism” there,
writes Lewis (2007: 42), “in fact paved the way for such modernist techniques
as the ‘stream of consciousness.’ Realism tended over the course of the century to become increasingly psychological, concerned with the accurate representation of thoughts and emotions rather than of external things.” In this
subtler version of the “inward turn” narrative, signs of the literary revolution
to come are found in the psychological, and so mind-viewing, tendencies
within realist discourse itself. This less doctrinaire approach has softened
much of the rhetoric of modernism discourse as fighting realist delusions of
objectivity; it has also opened up the question of what in realism survived into
the modernist era.
The most common answer to the question of what was modern in the
realist novel has been that the novels of Flaubert, especially Madame Bovary
(1857), broke with the realism of Honoré de Balzac and Stendhal, thus paving
the way for modernism. Flaubert is held up by critics like Morton Levitt
(2006: 29 – 32) and Lewis (2007: 41 – 43) as a precursor to modernist fiction
who set the inward turn in motion. Indeed, Flaubert is the one realist
that modernists themselves often claimed as their forefather. The renowned
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French critic Benoit Tadié (2011: 31 – 32) argues that this valorization of
Flaubert went hand in hand with a self-distancing from Balzac:
Like the symbolist poets, Flaubert was, at the turn of the twentieth century, coopted by the literary elites of the English-speaking world in a way that all but
eclipsed Balzac: in the cultural narratives of these elites, Flaubert became the
instrument and symbol of a renewed entente between French and English literatures, his adoption by the modernist generation putting an end to the supposedly
isolationist stance of the Georgian and Victorian eras. To complicate matters,
Balzac and Flaubert have, since then, often been seen as representing two mutually
exclusive traditions (a sort of Rome-or-Geneva opposition) rather than two
moments in a historical continuum, with the result that Joyce has tended to be
identified with the exclusive Flaubert tradition rather than with the inclusive
Balzac approach to fiction.
As Tadié points out, this “Flaubert tradition” was formative for “the literary
elites of the English-speaking world,” who found in Flaubert an ally, exhibiting their opposition to Balzac and his “inclusive” realism, with its broader
range of styles, fictional milieus, and character types. This tradition of modernism is marked by what it excludes, negates, and purifies, especially in
language use and style. For instance, in his essay “Past History, 1933,”
Ezra Pound (1967: 252) refers to Flaubert’s influence as “a specific,” or antidote, to the excesses of realism and his own English-language predecessors,
the Georgians and the Victorians. For Pound (ibid.: 248), the enemy of
modernism was “the prevailingly active line-up in England in the 1900 to
1910s” of “ Wells-Bennet-Chesterton.” “Joyce’s influence,” Pound (ibid.)
writes, “in so far as I consider it sanitary, is almost exclusively Flaubert’s
influence, extended. . . . Joyce got some of the real stuff, full strength, or in
words already used: Write clean English as clean and hard as Flaubert’s
French.” Some later followers, like the nouveau roman author Nathalie Sarraute, exaggerated this view of Flaubert as the one modernist realist. She
praises Flaubert for what his writing lacks, for his “books about nothing,
almost devoid of subject, rid of characters, plots and all the old accessories”
(Sarraute 1965: 11).
Other critics of realism have likewise disagreed with the casting of Flaubert
as a purifier of tradition who prefigured the modernist turn away from realist
excesses. In The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert, Christopher
Prendergast (1988: 182) thus attacks this image of Flaubert as the one modern
realist well ahead of his contemporaries:
The long process of detaching Flaubert from nineteenth-century doctrines of
“naı̈ve” Realism (unnecessarily prolonged since we were earnestly pressed to do
so by Flaubert himself ) has resulted in an avantgardiste version of Flaubert, in whose
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novels we hear the death-knell of mimetic conceptions of narrative. Flaubert, in
retrospect, is now seen as one of the first exemplars of the Modern. . . . Why fix the
frontier at Flaubert? Do not the preceding chapters of this book themselves imply
that, from certain versions of the “modern,” Balzac, Stendhal and Nerval might
also qualify? But, if this is so, then the “modern” as a term of historical location,
begins to lose all intellectual credibility.
Likewise, in her recent book on Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert,
Kathryn Oliver Mills (2012: 2) argues that viewing Flaubert as separate from
his contemporaries exaggerates his estrangement from the sociocultural context of nineteenth-century France by overemphasizing the purity of his art:
“Although both have reputations as disciples of ‘pure art,’ Baudelaire and
Flaubert were in fact sensitive to the radical changes taking place in all
spheres of French society and culture.” Nevertheless, Flaubert has been
remembered in large part — and considered “modern” — for his refinement
of techniques like free indirect discourse (FID), which is said to distinguish
him from the other novelists of his time (Fludernik 1993: 87 – 95; Lewis 2007:
43 – 44; Mills 2012: 6).
Flaubert’s reputation is just one instance — albeit exemplary — of the larger
debate about the relationship of nineteenth-century fiction to its twentiethcentury counterpart. In order to decide to what extent Flaubert’s writing
was really a turning point in the history of the novel, we need to consider the
history preceding and following his literary production. Did modernism
build upon the psychological experimentation of realism, as Lewis (2007:
42) argues, or break away from it, as Humphrey (1954: 8) would have it?
Can we locate the first stirrings of modernism at a point in the nineteenth
century? With these questions as leading concerns, I propose to examine the
prehistory of modernist experimentation empirically within my own field,
the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French novel. By exploring the
distribution of specific types or devices of thought representation, I seek to
complicate the easy association of specific forms of thought representation
with particular literary movements from 1800 to 1929.
Building upon work by Dorrit Cohn (1978) and others, especially Meir
Sternberg (1982a, 1982b, 1991) and Monika Fludernik (1993), I searched for
evidence of different categories of represented thought in the French novel in
this period. Take such unmarked forms of thought representation as FID and
free indirect thought (FIT) without a reporting clause. Are such untagged
forms more associated with modernist — or protomodernist — authors like
Flaubert than with predecessors like Stendhal and Balzac, for instance?
Inversely, by examining the occurrence of common reporting clauses (e.g.,
“she thought” or “he said to himself”) and mental verbs (e.g., “thought”) in
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different types of represented thought, I was able to arrive at a rough estimate
of their distribution among authors or periods. From this distribution, it is
possible to see (among other findings) that the most “elementary” forms of
thought representation persisted even after the rise of modernism — that is,
well into the 1910s and 1920s. Thus, to go by this finding, French modernism
did not break radically with realist and naturalist conventions of thought
representation, even if it did shift the proportions of various reporting
modes or measures.
What makes this article different from most other work on thought representation in this period is my recourse to a large and extensively read corpus
of texts, instead of the limited set of examples cited and analyzed in studies
like Cohn’s (1978). This much widened coverage is necessary in order to get a
sense of the distribution of represented thought in fiction, but it does not allow
(at least not at the present stage of research) for the careful analysis and
taxonomy of represented thought found in Cohn 1978 or Fludernik 1993.
A complete study of the question would, moreover, compare represented
thought in novels written in various languages, so as to bring together the
respective traditions and give a full picture of the scope, the patterns, and the
evolution of this inner existence. Nevertheless, I have limited this study to
French novels from 1800 to 1929, largely for pragmatic reasons: differences
in grammatical structure, tense, and other verbal features make comparing
large bodies of data problematic and prone to error. My reasons for confining
the time frame to 1800 – 1929 are, likewise, practical: studying twentiethcentury literature with the tools of the digital humanities is notoriously difficult because of the copyright limitations on twentieth-century texts,
especially those published after 1923. The sample of twentieth-century fiction
available to empirical research thus depends upon the agreement of heirs and
publishers.8 I chose 1929 as the end date for this study in order to minimize
problems with sampling arising from these copyright issues while extending
the inquiry well into the modernist period.
8. The ARTFL-FRANTEXT — the standard database of French literary texts — includes 213
twentieth-century novels. Some of them are no longer under copyright; others have been
approved for limited use by the copyright holders. According to the Cornell University Copyright Information Center, works published in France before 1923 are out of copyright in the
United States as of 2012 (Hirtle 2004 – 14). In the case of the French novel, it is only possible to
study the work published in the first two or three decades of the twentieth century without
running into copyright problems. In a recent article on how copyright laws can impede digital
humanities research, Mark L. Sample (2012: 188), doing an empirical study on Don DeLillo,
concludes that it is impossible to study contemporary or even mid-twentieth-century literature
unless “one is willing to infringe on copyright, break a publisher’s DRM, or wait approximately
four generations when these authors’ works will likely fall into the public domain.”
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At stake is the question of how the modes of representing thought are
distributed among novels, authors, genres, and decades. Is there “progress,”
or at least development, in the way that thought is represented during the
realist and naturalist periods, that is, from 1830 to 1910? (Or, for that matter,
progress or development within the modernist period?) Merely establishing
the distribution of represented thought in French fiction will not suffice to
answer such questions; it is, however, an important first step in constructing
a more accurate literary history. Before attempting to take this step, let me
briefly review the schemes used to classify thought representation and the
different meanings and roles that critics attributed to it.
2. On Direct and Indirect Thought Representation
In discourse analysis and narratology, there are manifold ways of categorizing thought representation. I follow the majority practice in using the
categories of direct discourse (DD), indirect discourse (ID), and FID to classify
forms of quoting the characters’ represented thoughts or speech and integrating it into the discourse of the narrator. I use the complementary, more
specific terms direct thought (DT), indirect thought (IT), and FIT for discursive representations of thought, as opposed to speech. Geoffrey Leech and
Mick Short (1981: 337) present a still wider set of forms. In third-person
singular narration, the analysts claim, there are five ways to represent a
character’s thoughts: DT, free direct thought (FDT), IT, FIT, and the narrative report of the thought act (NRTA).
These forms can be combined in various ways. For instance, Victor Hugo
(2004 [1831]: 60) uses both DT and FDT in one short section of The Hunchback
of Notre Dame, where the protagonist, Pierre Gringoire, silently curses his
fellow Parisians: “ ‘Damned Parisians!’ he said to himself (for Gringoire,
like all true dramatic poets, was given to monologues), ‘there they stand
blocking my way to the fire! Yet I greatly need a chimney-corner!’”9
“Damned Parisians” is an instance of directly reported thought, with the
reporting clause “he said to himself ” marking off the poet Gringoire’s
voice from the narrator’s. This sentence is followed by one without any
reporting clause: a free (unmarked, untagged) representation of Gringoire’s
thoughts: “Yet I greatly need a chimney-corner!” In both DT and FDT, the
9. Original: “Damnés parisiens! Se dit-il à lui-même, car Gringoire en vrai poète dramatique
était sujet aux monologues, les voilà qui m’obstruent le feu! Pourtant j’ai bon besoin d’un coin
de cheminée” (Hugo 1959 [1832]: 73). All French citations and counts refer to the ARTFLFRANTEXT database. Translations are mine, unless otherwise noted, since many of the works
in the database have never been translated — a significant fact with regard to my larger-thanusual corpus.
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tense and pronoun imply the character’s perspective — in this case, “I greatly
need” appears in the first-person present ( j’ai bon besoin) — and the diction is
appropriate to Gringoire’s lexicon, thus further suggesting that the phrase is
in his voice.
Likewise, the indirect representation of thought can occur with a reporting
clause — as IT or equally as marked FIT — or without such a clause, in a
“free” version (unmarked FIT). In Madame Bovary, Flaubert (2005: 226 – 27)
alternates between free and marked versions as well as reporting a character’s
thoughts in the voice of the narrator:
Sometimes, it is true, she tried to add up her accounts, but the results were always
so staggering, she couldn’t believe they were possible. Then she would begin over
again, soon get confused, leave everything where it was and forget about it.
The house was a dreary place now! Tradesmen were seen leaving it with angry
faces.10
This passage begins with what Leech and Short call an NRTA, when the
narrator generalizes for two sentences about recurrent events in Emma’s
inner life: “Sometimes, it is true, she tried to add up her accounts, but the
results. . . . So she would begin again.” Evidently, this kind of summary
regarding a character’s occasional states of mind requires and manifests
the overt intervention of the narrator’s voice. Then Flaubert switches to
FIT in “The house was a dreary place now!” We read this sentence as an
instance of FIT, because, in the original French, the verb was would appear to
be shifted into the imperfect tense (était ) and used to represent a past state of
affairs (“was . . . dreary”) as existing “now” (maintenant ). Though there is no
reporting clause like “Emma thought to herself,” therefore, we are able to
decide that the exclamatory statement emanates from Emma Bovary’s
thought. In other words, while ambiguous in principle between the narrator’s
and the character’s discourse, the given sentence and others of its kind are
generally identifiable in French as FIT, more so than in English.11
Along with the passage just quoted from Madame Bovary, many novels
combine different forms of thought representation, such as IT, DT, FIT,
10. Original: “Parfois, il est vrai, elle tâchait de faire des calculs; mais elle découvrait des choses
si exorbitantes, qu’elle n’y pouvait croire. Alors elle recommençait, s’embrouillait vite, plantait
tout là et n’y pensait plus. La maison était bien triste, maintenant! On en voyait sortir les
fournisseurs avec des figures furieuses” (Flaubert 1945 [1857]: 139).
11. The scholarship on FID and FIT is truly considerable: it abounds in contradictory accounts
of what it is and how it functions. For a comprehensive overview of approaches to FID up
until the mid-1970s, see McHale 1978. For authoritative recent accounts, see Sternberg 1982a,
1982b, 1991 and Fludernik 1993. For a technical explanation of how FID appears and functions
in French, see Vetters 1994. Other references will appear as we proceed.
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and NRTA, in quick succession. For instance, the following excerpt from
Jacques Chardonne’s (1929 [1921]: 221) L’épithalame combines IT, NRTA,
and DT:
Berthe knew that Albert usually remained a long time pensive after he had just
finished speaking. But at this moment, moved by the impressions of the evening,
she pushed out of her mind the true explanation for Albert’s silence, and she
regarded his taciturnity as an incomprehensible outrage. In the blink of an eye,
Albert noticed the signs of nervousness on Berthe’s face. “She’s always strange
when we go out!” He says to himself, very much exasperated.12
This passage is notable for its complex deployment of different forms of
represented thought. It begins with NRTA (e.g., “Albert usually remained
a long time pensive”) nested in IT (“Berthe knew that”), so that one character
(Berthe) reflects with confidence on the “usual” thoughts of another (Albert).
But after some further reference to her reflections “at this moment,” now
about his present “silence,” the text shifts to a representation of her usual
behavior in DT quoted from him (“She’s always strange when we go out!”), as
signaled by the reporting clause “he says to himself.” Chardonne’s novel
exhibits many such shifts of quoted inner discourse, in which nearly every
combination of DT, IT, FIT, and NRTA occurs. Such a variety of types and
complexes of thought representation suggests that they are, for a writer like
Chardonne, part of a larger system. At the same time, they are not interchangeable: if they were, one would expect to see less variation.
The two ways of introducing characters’ thoughts that are most associated
with premodernist fiction are, first, inner monologue or DT with reporting
clauses like “she thought” or “he wondered” and, second, IT (e.g., “Berthe
knew that” above or “it was true that she thought that he was busy” [Cohn
1978: 59 – 60]). Unlike DT or FIT, IT requires by definition a reporting
clause, or else it would not be “indirect.” Modernism, by contrast, is often associated with the “free” varieties of these forms: “DD shorn of its introductory
clause, which some call free direct discourse (FDD), is the basis of interior
monologues, and a staple of modernist novels” (McHale 2011). We can also
find instances of FIT: there, all tenses “have to be interpreted with respect to
some here-and-now in the past, linked to one of the protagonists; in other
words, they are internal pivot-oriented. In French free indirect discourse, we
12. Original: “Berthe savait que d’habitude Albert demeurait longtemps songeur quand il
venait de parler. Mais en ce moment, remuée par les impressions de la soirée, elle écartait
de sa pensée l’explication véritable du silence d’Albert, et elle considérait son mutisme comme
un outrage incompréhensible. D’un coup d’oeil, Albert aperçut des signes de nervosité sur le
visage de Berthe. ‘Elle est toujours bizarre quand nous sortons!’ Se dit-il avec une exaspération
aiguë” (Chardonne 1929 [1921]: 221). This is a particularly complex example, but the combination of two or more forms in it is not at all unusual.
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find the imparfait, the futur du passé or the pluperfect, while the passé
simple is excluded” (Landeweerd and Vet 1996: 159). In this regard, IT
and DT are even more easily identified. IT can also use the imperfect
tense, but it always begins with a reporting clause (or “transformer”);13 DT,
whether with a reporting clause or free, quite simply uses the tense of
the character’s discourse.
The classification and identification of types of represented thought are
thus highly developed in the study of French fiction. What has not been
investigated nearly as much is where and how these types of thought representation occur in a large body of fictional texts. The most notable studies of
represented thought, from early twentieth-century scholarship to Cohn 1978
and Ann Banfield’s (1982) controversial study to Fludernik 1993, have all
focused on the categorization of types of represented thought, at the expense
of their relative frequency and distribution. Indeed, the hybrid category, FIT,
has received most of the critical attention — largely because of the difficulty of
locating the origins of some statements there, the interaction of the “voices”
of the narrator and the character, and the relative complexity of grammatical
structures.14 Other forms of represented thought, such as DT — with its
reporting clauses, ostensibly simple grammar, and seemingly clear distinction
between the narrator and the character perspectives — have been less
studied.15 The French novels that I examine here use all of the available
modes of representing the thoughts of their characters.16 Nevertheless,
the proportions of these modes have yet to be studied, perhaps because
distribution across texts was so hard to establish before the advent of online
databases.17
13. Another term for reporting clauses, proposed by Sternberg and having the virtue of implying that discourse is transformed as it is embedded. The reported discourse is always “discourse
within discourse”: the “(piece of ) discourse quoted becomes an inset within the frame of the
reporting discourse, often with the help of an introductory clause or transformer” (Sternberg
1991: 63). According to Sternberg (ibid.), then, a reporting clause like “he said [to himself]” is
thus “a transformer, which signals the shift from frame to inset” or from discourse to reported
discourse.
14. As Fludernik (1993: 317) points out, this “merging or juxtaposition of voices” was “most
recognizable in ironic passages of free indirect discourse, where the narrator’s and the characters’ perspectives most harshly clashed.”
15. For example, in Gerald Prince’s (2003 [1987]: 83) Revised Dictionary of Narratology, the entry
“Represented Speech and Thought” directs readers to “Free Indirect Discourse.”
16. The definitive studies of represented thought in the modern European novel remain Cohn
1978; Fludernik 1993; and Vetters 1994. For a study of Stendhal’s range of thought- representing techniques, see Lala 2005 and Philippe 2005. For Flaubert, see Fludernik (1993: 87 – 95);
Jauss (1982); Pascal 1977: 98 – 105; Warning (1982); and Weinberg (1981). See Weinberg 1981
also for an overview of the relevant scholarship on Flaubert and FID through the 1970s and
Porter 2004: 122 for a more recent account.
17. To the best of my knowledge, there has been no significant quantitative work on represented
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Although DD with reporting clauses and ID have received less attention
than FID, there is, nevertheless, a large body of research on the differences
between the two forms. Since Sternberg 1982a, 1982b, and 1991 on “the
direct speech fallacy,” a broad consensus has emerged that both DD and ID
are ambiguously related to the original speech or thought act they supposedly
report. Hence the two share an inherent ambiguity, or “perspectival montage” of their components, not always resolvable with confidence. The traditional, fallacious view of the difference between these reporting forms is
that, in DD, the narrator or reporter is bound to reproduce verbatim the
original speaker’s word choice and grammar; indirect quotation, by contrast,
is supposed to allow the reporter to deal freely with the original speech or
thought.18 Among other counterarguments made since Sternberg’s exposure
of “the direct speech fallacy,” recent sociolinguistic work has also indicated
that DD rarely gives an “accurate portrayal of prior locutions” but most often
serves to render “the words of invented (often stereotypical) characters and to
suggest what to portray someone might say/have said on some (often hypothetical) occasion” (Holt 2007: 47). Literary uses of DD are even more complicated, because there is no known or verifiable original speech act, and so
the narrator has greater control over the reported discourse (Sternberg
1982a: 108). “In no form of quotation, therefore, not even in the direct
style, may we identify the representation of the original act of speech or
thought with that act itself; to do so would be comparable to equating
Balzac’s rendering of the Vauquer pension with the pension itself. What is
cited in the subject’s name is one thing; what that subject originally said or
thought is another. . . . however specific the representation and whatever
its linguistic form, it cannot exhaust — let alone replace — the original act of
discourse or expression, which is and remains a unique event” (ibid.).
thought in the nineteenth- or twentieth-century French novel. More research has been done on
English-language novels and syntactic structures. For example, the Stanford Literary Lab has
completed a project on the distribution of sentence types in English prose, “Style at the Scale of
the Sentence” (http://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet5.pdf), which analyzes the
texts from the Chadwyck-Healey Nineteenth-Century Fiction database (http://collections
.chadwyck.co.uk/marketing/products/about_ilc.jsp?collection¼ncf). Similarly, Louise Flavin
(1987) uses quantitative methods to assess the relationship between the narrator and various
characters in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.
18. The linguist Florian Coulmas (1986: 2) formulates this traditional distinction in terms of
perspective: “In direct speech, the reporter lends his voice to the original speaker and says (or
writes) what he said, thus adopting his point of view, as it were. Direct speech, in a manner of
speaking, is not the reporter’s speech, but remains the reported speaker’s speech, whose role is
played by the reporter.” For this reason, Anna Wierzbicka (1974) considers direct speech
“theatrical.”
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In spite of all the difference between these two forms, DT and IT are
introduced by reporting phrases, very often the same ones, which are by
definition absent in untagged FIT, or in “free” directness. It is these reporting
clauses which make DT and IT comparatively easy to identify and analyze.
DT is therefore often wrongly considered the earliest — and most elementary — way of representing a character’s perspective; this also makes it a
frequent target of critics who find realist technique lacking, especially in
the case of Stendhal. For instance, Levitt, longtime editor of the Journal of
Modern Literature, opines that Stendhal’s introduction of the character’s inner
discourse through phrases like “Julien Sorel said to himself ” or “thought to
himself ” testifies to his failure to develop as a novelist and to his ineptness at
rendering character perspectives. As Levitt (2006: 30 – 31) writes in reference
to the 1830s, these failures “applied at times to virtually every one of the
characters” and are what “Stendhal’s efforts at internal monologue [in DT]
amount to.”
Levitt (ibid.: 30) goes on to make the surprising claim (surprising precisely
because of Stendhal’s use of DD and ID) that, in Le rouge et le noir, we “never
have the sense that we are inside the characters’ minds for the simple reason
that, in 1830, there were no tools available to Stendhal for taking us there.”
His Le rouge et le noir only makes the attempt “to realize individual scenes
through the consciousness of a character and is among the very first novels
to offer a primitive kind of internal monologue” (ibid.). On the other hand,
in Levitt’s eye, Stendhal offers “most egregiously, a clear sense of his own
personality, almost as if he were a character in his novel” (ibid.).
Remarkably, but not untypically, then, Levitt equates the use of the most
common reporting clauses (which he opposes to “original phrases”) with a
lack of psychological realism, as though the illusion of getting “inside
the characters’ minds” required uncommon combinations of words. For
instance, he praises William Faulkner for avoiding such reporting formulas
in the opening chapters of Absalom, Absalom!: there, all the “settings of present
events in the introductory chapters” arise “through the memory, sense perceptions, consciousness of Quentin Compson. We do not require the label
‘Quentin thought,’ or ‘Quentin observed’ to recognize that these are his
internalized responses to the scene” (ibid.: 63). This is a particularly notable
instance of what Wayne C. Booth (1983 [1961]: 26) called “modernist rulemaking,” which sprang from the tendency of postwar critics to believe in the
“miraculous superiority of modern fiction.”19 Critics like Levitt assume that
19. In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth (1983 [1961]: 23) notoriously challenges the tendency of
postwar critics to believe in the “miraculous superiority of modern fiction,” though the writers
they most often cited, notably James and Flaubert, found the problem of narration to be
“extremely complicated.” Moreover, “the persistent enemy for James,” Booth (ibid.) writes,
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there are better and worse ways to make the thoughts of characters
transparent and that an improvement in the “techniques” of fiction writers
will — and in modernism did — improve the novelistic representation of
thought: in short, that the right techniques can make characters’ minds visible
to the reader.
Narratologists have likewise been concerned with the issue of transparency. Most notably, Cohn (1978: 11) refers to the illusion of seeing into a
character’s mind as “the paradox of fiction.” Many modernists, she claims,
were aware of this paradoxical “transparency of fictional minds,” but their
experiments did not resolve the contradiction between it and the normal
opacity of other minds. “Most writers on the novel,” instead, have taken the
fictional mind’s transparency “for granted; a few — like Proust, Forster,
Mann, and Ortega — have mentioned it in passing” (ibid.: 7). For Cohn
(ibid.: 9), stream of consciousness, the lens that Joyce used to examine
human consciousness, was “no less (and no more) magic than Stendhal’s
mirror or James’s field-glass.”20 Indeed, Cohn (ibid.: 13) places stream of
consciousness in the same category as DT (“quoted monologue”), arguing
that they share a “reference to the thinking self in the first person, and to the
narrated moment (which is also the moment of locution) in the present
tense.”21 This category defies the insistence on progress within literary
form, which we encounter not only in recent champions of modernism,
such as Levitt, but also in earlier writing: “According to the post-Joycean
canon,” writes Cohn (ibid.), “interior monologue was supposed not to have
existed before Ulysses (with the notable exception of Dujardin’s novel Les
lauriers sont coupés). But what was to be done with direct thought-quotations
in novels like Le rouge et le noir or Crime and Punishment?”
“was intellectual and artistic sloth, not any particular way of telling or showing a story.” And
much the same holds true for Flaubert: “Though he can be quoted to support this or that
dogma, he was interested at one time or another in almost every important problem faced by
novelists, and he was aware of the tension between what might be desirable in general and what
is possible in the particular case” (ibid.: 24). Levitt takes a very different approach. Though
called an “update” of Booth’s plea for critical pluralism, Levitt’s Rhetoric of Modernist Fiction
(2006) is actually an argument against Boothian rhetorical analysis, with its assumption that all
great authors struggle with issues of literary form and representation. By contrast, that argument favors the modernist canon as opposed to the realist.
20. Other critics have found precursors for Joyce’s interior monologues throughout the nineteenth-century novel; for instance, in authors like Nikolay Gogol and Leo Tolstoy (Paris 1984).
21. In Transparent Minds, Cohn (1978: 11 – 12) shows that the varieties of represented thought
can be classified into “three basic techniques”: “psycho-narration,” sometimes called “omniscient description”; “quoted monologue,” also called “interior monologue,” “stream of consciousness,” or “quoted thought”; and “narrated monologue,” more commonly known as FIT.
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I cannot review here the debates among different approaches to the study
of represented thought, especially since this article is primarily concerned
with the empirical distribution of markers of represented thought, rather
than the finesses of classification. I can only give a sense of the chasm between
the normative literary-historical approaches to the novel, especially to the
modernist novel, and taxonomic approaches like Cohn’s. My goal in the
preceding pages was more to draw a broad picture of these two opposed
influential approaches to represented thought than to make any final judgment between them. It is worth keeping these brief literary-historical and
taxonomic sketches in mind as I lay out my empirical discoveries about key
indicators of the frequency of DT and IT, that is, about the distribution of the
most common reporting forms, clauses (e.g., “he said to himself”) and mental
verbs (e.g., “thought”).
In order to determine whether there was something like an “inward turn”
in French literature between 1800 and 1929, I will examine in detail this
distribution across a large corpus of French novels from this period. By
comparing the concentration of these phrases and words in particular decades, authors, and novels, we can see, for example, whether the marked
versions of represented thought (e.g., those with reporting clauses) occur
most frequently in the same decades, authors, or novels and in what ratio
to the unmarked variants. Tracking common reporting clauses should also
give us a good idea of how frequently DT, IT, and FIT were used in their
marked forms and, again, relative to their unmarked counterparts. Tracking
mental verbs variously complements such lines of quantitative inquiry.
Among other benefits, it allows us to extend the coverage and the comparison
to forms like the narrative report of a thought act (e.g., “John doubted
whether Mary was home yet”), where the presence or absence of reporting
clauses does not strictly apply. By determining the empirical frequencies of
represented thought, we can therefore begin to answer the question of whether there was an “inward turn” and, if so, whether it took place in the novel of
the early twentieth century or maybe somewhere in the nineteenth-century
(French) novel.
Since it is not possible for one individual to catalog manually all of the
instances of represented thought in nineteenth-century French novels, I use
the biggest online database of French literature for the quantitative sections
of this paper. The ARTFL-FRANTEXT database, developed and maintained by the University of Chicago and Analyse et Traitement Informatique
de la Langue Française, contains more than thirty-five hundred literary
texts, all in French, from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries. Among
them, it includes 665 novels, of which 384 were first published during the
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relevant period of 1800 – 1929.22 These offer a mixture of canonical and
noncanonical works, with the former predominating. Since the texts have
not been chosen with my research in view, there is reason to believe that they
make a good sample for the study of represented thought.
Let me add, however, that I see quantitative analysis as complementary
not only to standard literary history but also to close reading: it can help us
step back and see what is really on the page. Most notably, such analysis can
establish patterns in a large corpus of texts. Being aware of these patterns can
help us avoid lending a false uniqueness to the texts that we are studying
closely and, conversely, attributing a false sameness to texts that we are not
reading closely. Quantitative methods thus promise to correct some of the
biases that close reading can produce in a reader, especially in one with a
particular emotional response to a text — and counterbalance the reader’s
selective attention and lapses of memory.23
A few words on the methods used in this study. By reference to the
ARTFL-FRANTEXT database of French literature, I enumerated and analyzed along various lines the most common reporting clauses and mental
verbs in the entire corpus of 384 novels for the period 1800 – 1929. I sought
patterns in these data that would establish the distribution of marked forms
of represented thought. The basic question that I asked was: do reporting
clauses and mental verbs occur more frequently in some authors, texts, or
decades than elsewhere? If the frequency of these markers is significantly
higher in them, these authors, books, or decades quite possibly engage in
more thought representation and thereby strengthen the “inward turn.”
On the other hand, note that the differences in the frequency of markers or
marked forms of represented thought (ID, above all) need not strictly correspond to differences in the total amount of represented thought. As I will
show on a quantitative basis, reporting clauses and mental verbs have a
common distribution: the frequency of both indicators of thought quotation
rises in the 1830s and then gradually falls before rising again in the 1910s
and 1920s.24 These results fit the literary-historical narrative of increasing
interiority on the way to the modernist “inward turn,” with one caveat:
22. Electronic editions of all the novels cited are available from this project. The ARTFLFRANTEXT database is available online at http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/content/artflfrantext.
23. By the same token, I do not endorse a purely quantitative approach, which would dispense
with the close reading of the texts and the study of their mind representations, history included.
Fortunately, the entire ARTFL-FRANTEXT corpus can be approached in all these ways.
24. These results concerning the two markers also suggest that represented thought followed a
similar pattern: rising in the 1830s, when authors like Balzac and Stendhal were writing, then
falling slowly through the rest of the nineteenth century, and rising again in the 1910s and 1920s
when the works of modernists like Proust were published. According to this picture, it would
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the rise in the 1910s and 1920s looks a lot like the earlier rise in the same
markers traceable in the 1830s.
Finally, I explore three novels from the 1830s to the 1850s — Stendhal’s The
Red and the Black (1830), Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail’s Le club des valets de
coeur (1858), and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) — in order to consider what
may be designated as the first “inward turn” looked like. The former two were
chosen because they appeared at the top of my lists of novels with a high
frequency of the common reporting clauses and mental verbs, while Madame
Bovary served as a comparison case, because it exhibits surprisingly few of
these markers of quoted thought, especially given Flaubert’s reputation
among the fathers of the modern psychological novel.25 Here the comparison
suggests that the divergent frequencies reflect differences in style and word
choice more than in attitudes toward human psychology.
3. The Distribution of Reporting Clauses and Mental Verbs in
the French Novel (1800 – 1929)
As already noted, there are various linguistic features that indicate the
presence of thought representation within a narrative. In third-person narration, the clearest indicators are reporting clauses like “he thought” or “she
said to herself.” Since they are relatively easy to identify, I began with these
clauses. In order to calculate their frequency in the ARTFL-FRANTEXT
1800 – 1929 corpus, I did a proximity search for the most common reporting
clauses in the French language, that is, the word strings “il se dit,” “elle se dit,”
“il pensa,” and “elle pensa” (he said to himself, she said to herself, he thought,
and she thought), and organized them by decades.26 I later added up the
numbers of the various phrases’ occurrences within each decade in order to
get the total number of instances for the set of novels per decade.
This is a simplistic methodology and, as we will soon see, yields misleading
results. But it is important to consider this way of calculating the distribution
of common reporting clauses, because it parallels the anecdotal way literary
criticism usually operates — that is, by focusing merely on the occurrence of
appear that the frequency of represented thought was at its lowest during the 1880s, when
naturalists such as Zola were dominant.
25. In first theorizing the psychological novel, Paul Bourget, the novelist and critic, cited Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir as examples of novels that, though bearing
upon social facts, were more psychological than historical: “The essence of Madame Bovary, as of
Stendhal’s Rouge et le Noir, is: the study of a spiritual illness produced by a displacement of the
environment” (quoted in McKeon 2000: 260).
26. Proximity searches return all the results where continuous arrangements of these words
appear, regardless of word order (e.g., whether “elle pensa” or “pensa-t-elle”).
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features like reporting clauses without regard to their proportional frequency
or their weight in the corpus as a whole.27 Thus, classic works of narratology
like Cohn 1978 and Fludernik 1993 just examine a few paradigmatic cases
of linguistic features, such as particular uses of mental verbs or reporting
clauses. This kind of approach may be suitable for creating taxonomies but
liable to present a biased picture of literary history.
Figure 1 shows the total frequency per decade of each of the common
reporting clauses mentioned above; this is a raw number of results, which is
not weighted according to the total number of words in the sample. This
chart shows near-zero results for some of these phrases in the 1800s, 1810s,
and 1820s; then a jump in the 1830s compared with the 1820s; then a peak
in the 1840s; an uneven drop down to the nadir of the 1890s; and a small
rise in the corpus of the 1880s.28 From the 1900s to the 1920s, there is a
second, slightly smaller increase in the use of common reporting clauses.
The period of about fifty years following the 1830s jump roughly corresponds
to the height of realism in France, 1830 to 1885, as described by most
recent critics of realism, like Colette Becker (1992) and Peter Brooks (2008
[2005]).29 The second period is coextensive with the rise of modernism
and its various avant-gardes.
27. Alan Palmer (2004: 75) diagnoses “five basic problems” with most accounts of thought
representation, and most of them involve the lack of a sense of proportion: “the privileging
of free indirect thought and direct thought over thought report; the overestimation of the verbal
component in thought; the resulting neglect of thought report of characters’ states of mind; the
privileging of some novels over others and some scenes over others; and the impression that
characters’ minds really only consist of a private, passive flow of thought.”
28. This lack of results for the first three decades of the nineteenth century is not due to a lack of
coverage in the database. ARTFL-FRANTEXT contains twenty-eight novels for the period
1800 to 1829 — that is, twelve novels for the 1800s, five for the 1810s, and eleven for the 1820s.
Nor does this lack of reporting clauses result from a lack of novels written in the third-person
singular, which run to twenty, including Madame de Genlis’s La duchesse de La Vallière (1804) and
Inès de Castro (1817), Madame de Staël’s Delphine (1802) and Corinne; ou, L’Italie (1807), and
Charles Nodier’s Jean Sbogar (1818) and Thérèse Aubert (1819), to name just a few examples. At
least two of the other novels, further, mix first- and third-person narration, notably FrançoisRené Chateaubriand’s René (1802) and Les Natchez (1826), with frame narratives introducing
long discourses in the first-person singular.
29. In French-language criticism, a strong distinction is made between realist and naturalist
literature; the literature of the 1880s, especially Zola’s, is considered an outgrowth of realism
that remains distinct from it (Becker 1992). In English-language criticism of French literature,
the naturalists are sometimes included under the rubric of realism, extending the dominance of
realism into the 1890s or even the 1910s or 1920s. For example, Harry Levin’s influential study
of the French novel, The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (1963), deals with Stendhal,
Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Proust. Nevertheless, some American critics follow the French
periodization. For example, in Realist Vision (2008 [2005]), Brooks characterizes realism as a
movement beginning in the 1830s with Balzac (ibid.: 3 – 18) and falling off with the rise of
naturalism in the 1870s (ibid.: 144 – 45).
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Figure 1 Reporting clauses in the French novel (1800 – 1929). Total frequency in
ARTFL-FRANTEXT
Aside from the jump in the 1830s, the change in the use of any particular
formula is mostly not statistically significant. “Se dit-elle” follows the general
trend of the common quartet of reporting clauses, peaking in the 1830s,
falling, and then rising again in the 1920s sample, as does “pensa-t-elle ”; “se
dit-il” peaks in the 1850s sample but otherwise follows the trend; “pensa-t-il” is
far more volatile, rising and falling more dramatically than the other
phrases, but, on average, it still follows the line representing the total number
of occurrences. Individual phrases, then, rise and fall at slightly different
rates; but the overall pattern is one of increasing and then decreasing recourse to marked DT and IT, with a mass of occurrences in the 1830s corpus
and then a second rise in the 1910s.
Thus, the raw numbers of the most common reporting clauses reflect the
usual biases of the scholarly history of thought representation, showing a rise
in this important marker with the rise of realism and another one in the 1910s
and 1920s, the decades of the supposed “inward turn.” Judging by this graph
alone, one would believe that the “inward turn” was an undisputed reality.
The picture in figure 1 is misleading, however, because it is based on the gross
number of these reporting clauses in the ARTFL-FRANTEXT database,
not on their relative frequency or their relative weight in the text as a whole.
Thus, the changes in number are partly an effect of the different sizes of the
corpora belonging to the decades concerned.30 As they are in literary history,
the decades of the 1830s and the 1920s are overrepresented in the ARTFLFRANTEXT database. Furthermore, simple math tells us that a very long
30. There are, for example, only eleven novels from the period 1820 – 29 and thirty-five from
1830 – 39. Similarly, there are thirty novels from 1910 – 19 and fifty-nine from 1920 – 29.
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work with a very infrequent use of common reporting clauses could easily
have a larger total of these clauses than a very short work that frequently uses
them; yet it is the latter work that would represent a true movement toward
the “inward turn.” The trends in figure 1 may to some degree reflect the rises
and falls in the representation of thought across a century, but they are also
skewed by the varying number and length of the texts from the series of
decades in the database. Merely counting the occurrences, then, does not
tell us enough about their frequency to establish even the distribution of the
quoting phrases in the relevant corpora and periods.
Fortunately, the ARTFL-FRANTEXT database allows for a more accurate measure of the amount of represented thought in the novels, and I mean
the occurrence of reporting clauses per ten thousand words in each decade.
This way of counting the common reporting clauses corrects for differences
noted above, especially in the number and the length of the novels that
represent the various decades. Figure 2 diagrams the occurrence of the
most common reporting clauses by this more accurate measure.31
Measuring proportional frequency is a way of correcting for the differences in the sizes of the corpora. This is why, in calculating the distribution of
common reporting clauses, I am using weighted (or proportional) measures —
that is, a number of reporting clauses per ten thousand words — and not
merely showing the presence or occurrences of represented thought.
The picture that emerges from the weighted frequency search in figure 2
is far less conclusive than the picture we encountered in figure 1. Aside
from the near absence of common reporting clauses in the 1820s, the
decade-by-decade breakdown in their frequency per ten thousand words
does not reveal the progression that we saw in figure 1. This contrast between
figure 1 and figure 2 enables us to see even more clearly how the taxonomic
approach, with its blindness to the weight of particular phrases within the
corpus analyzed, distorts literary history. Exclusive attention to the sheer
presence or occurrence of specific linguistic features overemphasizes decades
from which there are more words in the sample, because they produced
more canonical novels — or enjoy a larger representation thereby in the
database — and/or because these novels are longer.
31. Like the unweighted numbers of common reporting clauses and mental verbs per decade,
figure 3 gives us a sense of who (as well as what decade) was using the most common reporting
clauses and to what extent. But the picture is still distorted by the variable production of the
authors (and the equally variable percentage of their words that made it into the ARTFLFRANTEXT database). Writers who wrote little (e.g., Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, Henri
Murger, Elémir Bourges) or are underrepresented (e.g., Eugène Sue, Balzac) make less frequent appearances here, though they may have potentially used the reporting expressions no
less (or more) often than Hugo or Zola.
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Figure 2 Reporting clauses in the French novel (1800 – 1929). Proportional frequency
in ARTFL-FRANTEXT
I control for these two variables by also measuring the proportional
frequency of the reporting clauses within the relevant decades (fig. 2)
and, later, in particular novels (see tables 1 – 6). The more volatile and less
dramatic rises and falls of figure 2, in comparison with figure 1, show that
lesser-known and less productive decades, with a smaller total of novels,
sometimes manifest as many instances of reporting clauses per word as do
more prolific periods.
Yet some of the patterns, or the tendencies, in the distribution of reporting
clauses seen in figure 1 newly appear in the proportional chart (fig. 2), giving
us reason to believe that they reflect genuine patterns in the novelistic
literature: the pattern of a quick jump upward in the 1830s vis-à-vis the
1820s sample remains, as does the volatile rise through the 1910s and
1920s. Likewise, in both cases, the feminine forms of the reporting clauses
(with “pensa-t-elle” and “se disait-elle”) are far less frequent than the masculine
variants (“pensa-t-il” and “se disait-il”). Further, “pensa-t-il” enjoys a very
large proportion of reporting clauses per ten thousand words in the 1890s
sample, and this rise is so notable that it likely reflects a real increase in the
use of this phrase.
These differences between the sampling modes of figure 1 and figure 2
are also significant, moreover, because they reveal an imbalance within
the canon of novels: in the database, there are more novels from the 1830s,
1860s, 1910s, and 1920s than from other decades. Further, the novels from
the 1830s (especially those of Alexandre Dumas) are longer than the average;
so, too, are many works of the 1920s, including the seven volumes of Proust’s
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A la recherche du temps perdu (1913 – 27), one of the longest novels ever written.32
The distinct rise and fall of represented thought seen in figure 1 becomes far
more nuanced and complex when these factors are taken into account. Some
of figure 1’s increases in reporting clauses during the 1830s and the 1910s
disappear in the weighted version (fig. 2). Furthermore, this version shows
increases in the 1860s and 1890s as well as a drop in the 1870s. Like figure 1,
however, figure 2 does not allow us to see differences between individual
novels or individual authors; it is purely a calculation of the frequency per ten
thousand words of these phrases in large decade-by-decade corpora found in
the database.
A second measure of represented thought — related to the presence of
reporting clauses — is the frequency of mental verbs like “thought” (“pensait”)
and “said to himself ” (“se disait ”), which can appear as part of a reporting
clause: the main verb in the third-person transformer (e.g., “se disait-il”) or in
the first-person (e.g., “je me disais” [I said to myself ]).33 Figure 3 displays the
total numbers of these common mental verbs in French novels on a perdecade basis. As with figure 1, it is unweighted and does not reveal what I
called the proportional frequency of these verbs.
Figure 3 reveals the same overall pattern as figure 1. We see remarkably
low numbers of common mental verbs in 1800 – 1829, then a rise in the 1830s,
then moderate ups and downs, and then a second rise starting in the 1910s.
The verbs in the first-person singular (“me disais” [said to myself ] and “pensais”
[thought]) appear less frequently than the third-person singular “se disait”
(said to himself/herself) and “pensait” (thought). There are also distinct
patterns for individual verbs: “se disait” shows up more in the 1830s and
“pensait” more in the 1920s than in other decades. Unlike reporting clauses,
these patterns persist when we diagram common mental verbs per ten
thousand words (see fig. 4). This indicates that such verbs are more evenly
distributed throughout the corpus. Another important fact to keep in mind
is that these common mental verbs appear approximately ten times as
frequently as the common reporting clauses, implying that they are the
primary marked means for integrating represented thought in these novels.
What these rough measures suggest is that the two pointers of represented
thought at issue did not increase in a linear fashion in the period 1800 – 1929.
32. A la recherche du temps perdu usually runs to about thirty-two hundred pages, varying from
twenty-four hundred pages in the paperback edition of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade to
over four thousand in C. K. Scott Moncrieff ’s English translation. The AFTFL-FRANTEXT
version contains 1,312,296 words in seven volumes.
33. These imperfect verbs can, therefore, be markers for the representation of thought
in DD, ID, and FID, but they do not always help distinguish among the types of thought
representation.
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Rather, there was an unsteady series of rises and falls in common reporting
clauses and a more significant increase in the use of mental verbs over the
same period. Further, the picture that emerges from the first-person singular
uses (e.g., “me disait,” “pensait”) of these same mental verbs is even more
mixed.34 This nuanced narrative of literary developments does not directly
contradict the approach to the history of the novel as a progressive turn
inward, but it does imply a more complex distribution of represented
thought — certainly in the French novel of the 1800 – 1929 period. It also
34. The comparison of them with the third-person singular occurrences (e.g., “se disait,”
“pensait”) reveals a greater divergence in the latter’s frequencies. In short, the proportional
frequency of first-person singular mental verbs is lower and varies less. The top eight results for
these verbs delimit a different set of authors from those found in Tables 1 – 4: the sentimental
novelists Claire de Duras and Juliane de Krüdener, together with the modernist André
Gide, appear multiple times there, in connection with “me disais” and “pensais.” A range of
genres and styles also features in these lists, from romanticism (e.g., Alfred de Musset, Alphonse
de Lamartine) to high modernism (e.g., Proust). Conspicuously absent are realist authors like
Stendhal and Balzac, who wrote most of their novels in the third-person singular (“il” or “elle”).
The top eight results for “me disais” are as follows:
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
Krüdener, Juliane de, 1764 – 1824, Valérie: 3.80 occurrences per ten thousand words
(sentimentalist).
Duras, Claire de, 1777 – 1828, Edouard: 3.50 per ten thousand words (sentimentalist).
Duras, Claire de, 1777 – 1828, Ourika: 3.35 per ten thousand words (sentimentalist).
Musset, Alfred de, 1810 – 57, Histoire merle blanc: 3.01 per ten thousand words (romantic).
Lamartine, Alphonse de, 1790 – 1869, Tailleur de pierres: 2.96 per ten thousand words
(romantic).
Barrès, Maurice, 1862 – 1923, Le jardin de Bérénice: 2.89 per ten thousand words
(decadent).
Maurois, André, 1885 – 1967, Climats: 2.82 per ten thousand words (modernist).
Proust, Marcel, 1871 – 1922, La fugitive: 2.61 per ten thousand words (modernist).
The top eight results for “je pensais” are the following:
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
Duhamel, Georges, 1884 – 1966, La confession de minuit: 7.43 occurrences per ten thousand words (modernist).
Gide, André, 1869 – 1951, Le Prométhée mal enchaı̂né: 5.46 per ten thousand words (modernist).
Maurois, André, 1885 – 1967, Climats: 5.08 per ten thousand words (modernist).
Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery), 1860 – 1953, La tour d’amour: 4.90 per ten thousand
words (decadent).
Gide, André, 1869 – 1951, L’immoraliste: 4.84 per ten thousand words (modernist).
Erckmann, Emile, 1822 – 99, Le conscrit de 1813: 4.31 per ten thousand words (realist).
Gide, André, 1869 – 1951, Isabelle: 3.96 per ten thousand words (modernist).
Duras, Claire de Durfort, duchesse de, 1777 – 1828, Edouard: 3.21 per ten thousand
words (sentimentalist).
Like the formulaic reporting clauses “pensa-t-il” and “se dit-il,” then, the more or less equivalent phrases in the first person occur across generic and authorial lines. If there is a pattern
here, it is that “je me disais” appears more in the beginning of the nineteenth century and “je
pensais” appears more near the end, as figure 4 suggests; “pensais” is also slightly more frequent
in this corpus.
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Table 1
Common reporting clauses (il/elle se dit ) per 10,000 words, by author
Number of
novels in
database
Publication
dates
Occurrences
per 10,000
words
Chardonne, Jacques,
1884 – 1968
Stendhal, 1783 – 1842
1
1921
9.54
Modernist
7
5.94
Realist
Radiguet, Raymond,
1903 – 23
Arland, Marcel,
1899 – 1986.36
Ponson du Terrail,
Pierre, 1829 – 71
2
1830, 1835,
1839, 1842
1923, 1924
3.55
Modernist
1
1929
2.31
Modernist
5
1858, 1859
2.28
Gothic
adventure
Novelist
Literary
movement
reveals that there was a first “inward turn” in the 1830s, which was even more
dramatic — relative to what came before — than the rise in these indicators in
the 1910s and 1920s.
4. Common Reporting Clauses in Specific Authors and Novels (1800 – 1929)
The decade-by-decade measures are interesting from a literary-historical
perspective, but they do not relate and so do not contribute to the study
of individual texts or authors. In order to get an idea of which authors
were using represented thought most frequently and in which novels, I also
searched for the occurrence of the same reporting clauses and mental verbs
(in the third person) within the appropriate corpora, with the frequencies
weighted per ten thousand words. Using such a proportional measure is
important, because the number and length of texts in the database varies a
great deal. In terms of length, for example, Flaubert, Zola, Hugo, and JorisKarl Huysmans appear among the lower third of reporting-clause users, even
though they rank near the top according to the total number of uses.35 The
top five authors for “il/elle se dit” and “il/elle pensa” are in Tables 1 and 2.
35. Huysmans uses “se dit-il” 106 times, second only to Stendhal, but the frequency per ten
thousand words of this expression is only 1.45 occurrences, because his novels are relatively
long. Dumas’s oeuvre is an even more dramatic example of a discrepancy between overall and
proportional frequency: the ARTFL-FRANTEXT sample of Dumas’s eleven novels contains
sixty-five uses of “se dit-il,” but the proportional frequency of the terms is only 0.10.
36. Arland wrote more than thirty books, of which the majority were essay collections and short
stories. His best-known novel, L’ordre (1929), won the Prix Goncourt. In his entry “1934, 6
February: Birthrate and Death Wish” in A New History of French Literature, Denis Hollier (1994:
920) calls L’ordre a “mediocre” return to order, a book given one of France’s top prizes only to
deny the prize to avant-garde works of the same era.
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Table 2
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143
Common reporting clauses (il/elle pensa) per 10,000 words, by author
Number of
Occurrences
novels in Publication per 10,000 Literary
database
dates
words
movement
Novelist
Radiguet, Raymond, 1903 – 23
Baillon, André, 1875 – 1932
Ponson du Terrail,
Pierre, 1829 – 71
Murger, Henri, 1822 – 61
Stendhal, 1783 – 1842
2
1
5
1923, 1924
1927
1859
7.99
4.63
3.26
2
7
1858, 1859
1830, 1835,
1839, 1842
2.80
2.71
Modernist
Modernist
Gothic
adventure
Realist
Realist
These are the novelists who, proportionally, made the most use of these
common reporting clauses within this sample.37 Interestingly, Stendhal
appears on these two rankings of the top eight novels: he did frequently
use these popular reporting clauses, “se dit-il/elle” and “pensa-t-il/elle,” as
Levitt (2006) alleges. So, too, do the modernist author Raymond Radiguet
and the delightful but formulaic author of detective novels Ponson du
Terrail.38 These two write in very different styles: Radiguet, an avant-gardist
and collaborator of Jean Cocteau, died at a very early age, publishing little.39
The degree of overlap between the two lists suggests that certain authors —
like Ponson du Terrail and Radiguet — used common transformers more
heavily than others. Otherwise, there is a mix of authors, styles, and periods
among these frequent users.
This hypothesis is confirmed by proportional frequency searches for these
same phrases in individual novels. By this measure, Stendhal’s novels do, in
fact, contain a large number of reporting clauses; so large that they include six
of the top eight novels in the frequency of the phrase “se dit ” per ten thousand
words (table 3).
37. In the 1800 – 1929 ARTFL-FRANTEXT corpus, we recall, there are 384 novels by 132
novelists.
38. The latter’s adventure novels feature the celebrated detective Rocambole, who was the
hero of many sequels (not always by his creator). In novels like Les exploits de Rocambole (1859),
the “se dit-il” formula often suffices to introduce the main character’s thoughts and those of
the main female character, his lover Henriette.
39. Radiguet published two novels, Le diable au corps (1923) and Le bal du Comte d’Orgel (1924), both
found in the ARTFL-FRANTEXT database. He died in 1923, before the publication of
his second novel. Comparatively little scholarly attention has been paid to Radiguet’s meager
published oeuvre, with the exception of the 2003 celebration of the centenary of his birth.
There, Chloé Radiguet and Julien Cendres argue against Radiguet’s reputation as a young
and lazy genius and reveal how much of his prolific work went unpublished.
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Table 3
Common reporting clauses (se dit-il/elle) per 10,000 words, by novel
Publication
date
Occurrences
per 10,000
words
Literary
movement
Novelist
Novel
Stendhal, 1783 – 1842
Lucien Leuwen,
vol. 140
L’épithalame
1835
11.20
1921
9.54
Modernist
La chartreuse de
Parme
Le rouge et le noir
Lucien Leuwen,
vol. 2
Lamiel
Lucien Leuwen,
vol. 3
Les exploits de
Rocambole,
pt. 2, La mort
du sauvage
1839
9.48
Realist
1830
1835
7.93
6.76
Realist
Realist
1842
1835
6.67
6.59
Realist
Realist
1859
5.89
Gothic
adventure
Chardonne,
Jacques, 1884 – 1968
Stendhal, 1783 – 1842
Stendhal, 1783 – 1842
Stendhal, 1783 – 1842
Stendhal, 1783 – 1842
Stendhal, 1783 – 1842
Ponson du Terrail,
Pierre, 1829 – 71
Realist
The only two other novels on this list, Chardonne’s L’épithalame (1921) and
Ponson du Terrail’s Les exploits de Rocambole (1859), are extremely different
from one another in style and content. L’épithalame, Chardonne’s first novel,
exhibits a highly stylized French. As already noted, it is a psychological
study of a young woman, Berthe, and her lover, Albert, presented in an
impressionistic fashion.41 The novel abounds in examples of nested DT,
IT, and NRTA, where Albert and Berthe reflect upon each other’s feelings
(see section 2). By contrast, Les exploits de Rocambole — part of the series of gothic
adventure novels featuring the detective — is written in a style that extensively
40. The ARTFL-FRANTEXT follows standard editions of Stendhal’s works and the first
edition of Lucien Leuwen in dividing the novel into three parts. Likewise, Pierre Alexis Ponson
du Terrail’s works were originally published in multiple volumes, and the database reflects this
division.
41. This first novel of Chardonne, followed by others in the early 1930s, established his reputation as a traditional prose stylist with an interest in the characters’ psychology. In her recent
dissertation on the psychological novel in France, Yvonne Harz (2000) casts Chardonne as
exemplary of this genre, first theorized by Bourget. Since the 1940s, however, Chardonne’s
literary reputation has suffered greatly on account of his Far Right political beliefs and his
collaboration with both the Vichy regime and the German occupation during World War II,
when he was among the most fanatical Fascist journalists (Sternhell 1995: xxvi). All this has
largely overshadowed his literary work. A Critical Bibliography of French Literature lists only two
books on Chardonne’s writing as well as thirty-three short reviews and articles, mostly published in newspapers (Cabeen and Brooks 1980: 125 – 27).
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Table 4
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Common mental verbs ( pensa) per 10,000 words, by novel
Novelist
Novel
Radiguet,
Raymond, 1903 – 23
Stendhal, 1783 – 1842
Le bal du Comte
d’Orgel
Le rouge et le
noir
La chartreuse
de Parme
Le club de valets
de coeur, pt. 2,
Turquoise
la pécheresse
Délires
Stendhal, 1783 – 1842
Ponson du
Terrail, Pierre,
1829 – 71
Baillon, André,
1875 – 193243
Stendhal,
1783 – 1842
Stendhal,
1783 – 1842
Ségur, Sophie,
comtesse de,
1799 – 187444
Publication
date
Occurrences
per 10,000 Literary
words
movement
1924
7.99
Modernist
1830
6.95
Realist
1839
5.15
Realist
1858
4.96
Genre fiction
1827
4.63
Modernist
Lamiel
1842
4.34
Realist
Lucien Leuwen,
vol. 3
Les malheurs
de Sophie
1835
5.15
Realist
1864
4.11
Sentimental
uses clichés and formulas, like common reporting clauses, to speed up the
action and connect Rocambole’s thoughts to his actions.42
A similar heterogeneity — aside from the presence of Stendhal’s novels —
manifests itself in the top eight novels that use reporting clauses involving
“pensa” (table 4).
The first thing that is notable about these results is the reappearance of
Stendhal’s and Ponson du Terrail’s novels. Stendhal’s recurrence in this list
of mental verbs is not surprising: his novels are known for their careful
psychological portraits and carefree — some would say, careless — style.45
42. Linguists and psychologists have shown that formulaic phrases are processed more quickly
than unusual or unexpected ones. But there is an active debate on the reason for this difference
(Conklin and Schmitt 2012: 55).
43. Baillon was a Belgian writer whose Délires (1927) deals with the narrator’s “fear of words”
( phobie des mots) and “slide into madness” (glissement vers la folie) (Frickx and Trousson 1988: 126;
see more in de Vivier 1950).
44. She published mainly didactic prose and novels for young people, of which Les malheurs de
Sophie (1858) was the best known.
45. Hippolyte Taine (1905 [1864]: 228) was perhaps the first to describe Stendhal as a great
psychologist, indeed “the greatest . . . of our times,” if not “of all the ages.”
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Written in a month, Le rouge et le noir shows signs of this rapid pace of composition, including the repeated use of formulas like common reporting
clauses (Alter 1986: 186). Levitt (2006: 30 – 31), then, rightly comments on
Stendhal’s very frequent use of such clauses. Likewise, Ponson du Terrail’s
Rocambole series was written quickly, in highly formulaic French, packed
with clichés and reporting clauses like “pensa-t-il,” which operate to speed up
the action or bridge action and dialogue.
Compared with reporting clauses (full-length “transformers”), mental
verbs in the third-person singular might be expected to occur more
often in the corpus, because they are more grammatically flexible. Yet they
tend to cluster in novels by the same few authors — in this case, of the early
twentieth rather than of the nineteenth century. The top eight returns
for “pensait” per ten thousand words are notable for featuring multiple
books of Romain Rolland’s ten-volume novel Jean-Christophe (1904 – 12)
(table 5).46
All eight of these novels date from the period 1900 – 1929 and, except for
Jean-Christophe, from the 1920s. The distribution of “pensait” is the strongest
evidence for a modernist “inward turn” that I found in the data. But there are
few dominant themes that unite the novels that make the most frequent,
hence significant, use of this verb. While Jean-Christophe is a classic bildungsroman, for example, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Courrier sud deals with the
French air force.
On the other hand, the top eight novels for the mental verb “se disait”
(again in the imperfect as well as in the third-person singular) are led
by Stendhal, notably including his unfinished novels Lamiel (1842) and
Lucien Leuwen (1835). But, as a comparison will reveal, “se disait” is less
strongly associated with realist novels than “pensait” is with modernist
ones (table 6).
We encounter Chardonne’s L’épithalame (1921) again and one new entry:
Aimé Pache, peintre vaudois (1911), a fragmentary psychological novel by the
Swiss poet Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, highly influenced by French realism.
The presence of these two relatively experimental modernist novels alongside
Stendhal’s work is interesting but hardly decisive evidence for or against the
existence (or character) of an “inward turn.” Instead of any sharp difference
46. Jean-Christophe, for which Rolland won the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature, influenced
the young Proust, who modeled his modernist masterpiece on the earlier series of volumes
(Marantz 1989). Rolland himself was influenced by Stendhal and other realists (notably the
great Russians), which makes it possible to consider him as a late realist or an early modernist.
On this realist influence, see Bernard Duchatelet (1973: 575), who notes that Rolland even wrote
a school essay titled “The Psychology of Stendhal.”
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Table 5
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Common mental verbs ( pensait )47 per 10,000 words, by novel
Occurrences
per 10,000
words
Literary
movement
Novelist
Novel
Publication
date
Baillon, André,
1875 – 1932
Rolland, Romain,
1866 – 1944
Rolland, Romain,
1866 – 1944
Radiguet, Raymond,
1903 – 23
Saint-Exupéry,
Antoine de,
1900 – 1944
Rolland, Romain,
1866 – 1944
Rolland, Romain,
1866 – 1944
Rolland, Romain,
1866 – 1944
Délires
1927
9.26
Modernist
Jean-Christophe:
L’aube
Jean-Christophe:
L’adolescent
Le bal du
Comte d’Orgel
Courrier sud
1904
8.76
Modernist
1905
8.45
Modernist
1924
7.99
Modernist
1928
6.89
Modernist
Jean-Christophe:
Les amies
Jean-Christophe:
La révolte
Jean-Christophe:
Antoinette
1910
6.80
Modernist
1905
6.47
Modernist
1908
6.11
Modernist
between realists and modernists, we find a small set of authors, from different
literary schools and periods, favoring “se disait.”48
In order to draw some provisional conclusions, let me summarize my
findings thus far. First, the patterns diagrammed in figures 2 and 4 and
tables 1 – 6 show an initial rise in the frequency of common reporting clauses
and mental verbs in the 1830s and a further rise from 1910 to 1929, pointing
to the presence of two “inward turns.” The one arising in the 1830s is possibly
even the more dramatic,49 given the paucity of markers of represented
thought in the foregoing 1820 – 29 corpus. Indeed, it is likely that the first
decade of French realism (the 1830s) and the advent of modernism (the
1910s) each included more represented thought than any other decade of
the period 1800 – 1929.50
47. Unsurprisingly, this corpus shows more occurrences of “pensait” than of “pensa.” “Pensait,” in the imperfect tense, can appear both as a main verb and in a reporting clause, while
“pensa” is in the simple past ( passé simple) and tends to figure in the latter.
48. Although they can all be considered psychological novels, that category is too capacious and
heterogeneous to be considered a genre (Vrettos 2011: 633).
49. Although the proportional frequency of mental verbs is far higher in the 1920s than in the
1830s: 1.47 as against 0.82 per ten thousand words.
50. The largest statistical difference between the 1830s and the 1920s is the rise in the use of
“pensait” beginning from the 1880s and 1890s and a smaller rise in “se disait.” These indicate
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Table 6
Novelist
Common mental verbs (se disait ) per 10,000 words, by novel
Novel
Stendhal, 1783 – 1842 Le rouge et le noir
Stendhal, 1783 – 1842 Lucien Leuwen,
vol. 1
Stendhal, 1783 – 1842 Lamiel
Chardonne, Jacques, L’épithalame
1884 – 1968
Stendhal, 1783 – 1842 La chartreuse
de Parme
Aimé Pache,
Ramuz,
peintre vaudois
Charles-Ferdinand,
1878 – 1947
Stendhal, 1783 – 1842 Lucien Leuwen, vol. 3
Stendhal, 1783 – 1842 Lucien Leuwen, vol. 2
Publication
date
Occurrences
per 10,000 Literary
words
movement
1830
1835
7.71
6.27
Realist
Realist
1842
1921
6.00
5.74
Realist
Modernist
1839
4.92
Realist
1911
4.83
Modernist
1835
1835
4.67
4.46
Realist
Realist
Second, there is the recurrence of the same authors (e.g., Stendhal, Ponson
du Terrail, Rolland) and the same books (e.g., Jean-Christophe, Lucien Leuwen) in
many of the rankings of texts according to the high frequency of common
reporting clauses and mental verbs.
There is a third pattern. Reporting clauses were proportionally more
frequent in the corpus from the first three decades of the twentieth century
(and of modernism) than in the naturalist period of the 1880s and 1890s.
In the third decade, for instance, such clauses abound in Chardonne’s
L’épithalame (1921), Radiguet’s Le bal du Comte d’Orgel (1924), or André Baillon’s
Délires (1926). Their persistence contradicts Levitt’s (2006: 32) judgment of
this technique of embedding thought as a “primitive” instrument. Reporting
clauses did not, in fact, become less frequent either with the refinement of
FIT in novels like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) or with the stream
of consciousness experimentation of Dujardin’s novel Les lauriers sont coupés
(1888), both regarded as possible beginnings of the modernist era. This
throws into doubt the strong version of the “inward turn” narrative that
we find in Humphrey and Levitt; we can see that an increase in the “free”
modes of represented thought did not displace old ones that involved reporting formulas (“transformers”).
that one aspect of the change in represented thought was stylistic (that is, a matter of word
choice), rather than involving grammar or linguistic functions, such as a shift from IT or DT
to FIT.
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Figure 3 Common mental verbs in the French novel (1800 – 1929). Total frequency in
ARTFL-FRANTEXT
Inversely, the findings here confirm the weak version of the argument,
implied by critics like Auerbach, that there is more thought representation in
the early twentieth century than in the late nineteenth century — but with the
added caveat that a similar, realist “inward turn” already occurred as early
as the 1830s. To what extent did this early advent anticipate the second,
modernist one? In order to answer this question, we need to reexamine
the occurrence of these phrases — now in the overall context of the use of
represented thought as a whole in particular novels.
5. The Realist “Inward Turn” and the Origins of Modernism
Sections 3 and 4 of this article indicated which decades, writers, and works
most often used reporting clauses and common mental verbs in the French
novel in the years 1800 to 1929. Thus, reconsider briefly the first spike in the
data — the “inward turn” of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. As shown by figures 2
and 4, the four common reporting markers (clauses and verbs) followed a
similar pattern of a sharp rise from the 1820s to the 1830s, a slight fall in the
1840s and 1850s, and then another small rise in the 1860s.51 Moreover,
tables 1, 3, 4, and 6 demonstrate that such clauses recur more frequently in
51. Four of the most common reporting clauses (“pensa-t-elle,” “pensa-t-il,” “se dit-il,” and “se
dit-elle”) rise in proportional frequency from near zero in the 1820s to 0.09 per ten thousand
words in the 1830s, fall to 0.06 in the 1840s, rise to 0.07 in the 1850s, and then rise again to a
frequency of 0.11 in the 1860s. Figure 4 shows that mental verbs followed a similar trajectory of
rise, fall, and rise again (0.07 per ten thousand words in the 1820s, 0.82 in the 1830s, 0.29 in the
1840s, 0.49 in the 1850s, 0.7 in the 1860s).
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Figure 4 Common mental verbs in the French novel (1800 – 1929). Proportional
frequency in ARTFL-FRANTEXT
Stendhal and Ponson du Terrail than in other writers during the 1830s,
1840s, and 1860s. But why do these markedly dense temporal and/or authorial clusterings occur? For example, do these authors represent the inner lives
(“thoughts”) of their characters to a greater extent than their immediate
predecessors and their contemporaries, or do they merely resort to these
phrases with higher frequency? Is this frequency due to a lack of technical
sophistication, as Levitt would have it? Or do the authors simply prefer these
formulas to less common phrases?
To begin with, we have to return to the general framework that makes
these questions relevant. What was arguably modern, or modernist, about
this first “inward turn”? As we saw in section 1, Flaubert presents one influential answer to this question: it is an exclusive orientation toward prose
style — rather than changing modes of thought representation — that differentiates “modern” writers (i.e., his generation) from their immediate predecessors. For him, the literature of the 1850s radically differs from that of the
1830s, because it newly pays attention to the sound of language. In a letter
of June 6, 1853, to Louise Colet, Flaubert (1980: 350) thus announces his
project of reducing the dissonance of French grammar: “Before us, before the
moderns, writers had no idea of the sustained harmony of style.” As evidenced by the constant occurrence of qui and que in their writing, even great
writers “paid no attention to sonorities” (ibid.). A primary device and sign of
“modern” writing is accordingly the omission of the mandatory “que” clause
of ID. By the same criterion, FIT would be a modern mode of writing, not
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because of psychological reasons — as many critics later alleged — but because
it enables him to dispense with that undesirable reporting clause. As argued
by Laurence M. Porter (2002: 75):
Flaubert exhibits a veritable mania for avoiding the use of qui and que in his writing,
for those two words quite literally produce cacophony. . . . The first radical change
produced by avoiding the word que involved reported speech and thoughts.
Because the monotony of long passages of direct discourse led Flaubert to reduce
their number considerably (in contrast to Balzac, for example), he was led quite
naturally to the structure known as free indirect style, which arises when one suppresses the coordinating conjunction que and the introductory verb tenses.
This is a powerful origin story for modernist thought representation, whereby
narrative discourse rose to a new purity with the arrival of Flaubert. There is,
however, also good reason to think that this was a personal stylistic preference, not typical of his epoch or of later writers that he influenced. True,
he uses “qui” and “que” far less than Balzac, as Porter notes, and also than
Stendhal, but far more often than does the archclassical Voltaire. The nine
works by Flaubert in the ARTFL-FRANTEXT database use “qui” 34.9
times per ten thousand words (higher than the average of 24.27 in 1800 –
1899) and “que” 28.4 times per ten thousand words (less than the average of
33.66 for 1800 – 1899). Interestingly, Voltaire, the paragon of classical stylists,
used “qui” and “que” only 5.40 times and 7.66 times per ten thousand words,
respectively. Stendhal used “qui” 56.40 per ten thousand words and “que”
81.52 times; Balzac used “qui” 97.45 times per ten thousand words and “que”
117.79 times. This is very mixed evidence for the avoidance of these conjunctions (and clauses) in Flaubert’s prose, since they occur in it far more than in
Voltaire’s — as well as more than the 1800 – 1899 average — but far less than
in Stendhal’s and Balzac’s. Later modernists, including the exemplary
Proust,52 use both words even more frequently.
I cannot summarize here either Flaubert’s way with the “free” forms of
thought representation or the scholarship on it. For now, suffice it to say that
his professed dislike for “qui” and “que” or even his choice of FIT did not lead
to the words’ elimination from his prose or, for that matter, from the modernism of the next century. Only the frequency of the “que” indicator (and
condition) of ID, and so this reporting mode itself, was greatly reduced in
comparison with the immediately preceding Balzac and Stendhal.
Again, Flaubert may have limited the use of reporting clauses out of
the desire to create a “modern,” “light” style. To test this hypothesis, I
chose three case studies from the time of the first “inward turn.” They consist
52. In his case, 119.21 times per ten thousand words for “qui” and 195.33 for “que.”
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of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), so often claimed to be a modernist forerunner, and two instances that appeared on the lists of novels with the highest
frequency of reporting clauses per ten thousand words (tables 3, 4, and 6):
Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (Le rouge et le noir) (1830) and Ponson du Terrail’s Le club de valets de coeur (1858).53 I found that the “modernist” Flaubert is
different from Stendhal or Ponson du Terrail not so much in the tools used to
represent thought but in the proportions of marked and free forms. The
comparison between Flaubert and Stendhal has been made before, notably
by Prendergast (1988: 182). Ponson du Terrail’s fiction, though, is normally
absent in studies of represented thought; his inclusion here derives from the
quantitative methods introduced in sections 3 and 4. At stake are, above all,
the questions of where to locate the line between realist and modernist
thought representation and how the “inward turn” of the 1830s to the
1860s fits into the longer narrative of the evolution of thought representation
from 1800 to 1929.
To elucidate how reporting clauses and mental verbs function in the
texts that used them frequently in the 1800 – 1929 corpus, I will analyze the
proportions of forms of represented thought in each novel as well as how
instances of represented thought are integrated into the novel as a whole. Do
these various novels employ or integrate represented thought differently?
Does their actual practice justify their alleged status as specimens of realism
or modernism?
Before going into details, let us recall that there are various ways to define
the transition from realism to modernism in the novel. The distribution of
forms of represented thought that I am studying is only one way, which in
effect is central to otherwise diverse histories of the novel, including Auerbach
1968 [1946]; Levitt 2006; and Watt 2001 [1957]. The alternatives to it
include the decrease in the description of external objects or increased focalization through characters.54 Edward Mozejko (1992: 14 – 15) distinguishes
five main definitions of modernism, each with its own set of formal, cultural, and
aesthetic differences from movements like realism, naturalism, and romanticism: (1) “Die Moderne,” a German reaction against romanticism, which
includes “impressionism, symbolism, and decadence”; (2) a Latin American
“reaction against the monotony of naturalism”; (3) a “long-lasting period
in art and literature” which “grows out of the Anglo-American experi53. The editions in the database are Stendhal, Le rouge et le noir, edited by Henri Martineau
(Paris: Garnier, 1963); Ponson du Terrail, Le club des valets de coeur, pt. 2, Turquoise la pécheresse,
edited by C. A. Ciccione (Monaco: Rocher, 1965); Flaubert, Madame Bovary, edited by René
Dumesnil (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1945).
54. For a fuller discussion of potential differences between realism and modernism, together
with the difficulties of applying both concepts to literary texts, see Mozejko 1992: 16 – 27.
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ence . . . between the years 1910 – 1940”; (4) “a decline of bourgeois culture”;
and (5) “an ideological signifier which denotes an entire epoch from the midnineteenth century to the late modernism of the late 1950s and 1960s.”
Moreover, modernism and related terms refer to different sets of texts in different national traditions, yet there is, nevertheless, a connecting thread in such
different uses of the term, namely, that modernism represents a break with
conventions in the respective national literatures. Here I must limit myself,
though, to considering the proportions of various types of represented
thought and the reasons for their increase or decrease or other change
over the decades in question.
Let us start with Madame Bovary, which has often been identified as the
beginning of modernist literature, and for good reason, strongly linked to
thought representation. Thus, for Brooks (2008 [2005]: 198), Joyce’s impersonality is “essentially Flaubertian,” being realized in “Joyce’s use of free
indirect discourse” to present “a distanced and ironized view of the world
that is nonetheless intimate with perspectives and the language of his characters, without quotation for attribution, so to speak.” As with Flaubert,
accordingly, “the narrator does not speak in his own name, and does not
quote the characters directly, but rather speaks through them without taking
responsibility for what is said,” so that “the ‘story tells itself.’ ”
With the possible exception of Jane Austen’s works, Flaubert’s novel about
a bored provincial French housewife does contain far more varied instances
of FIT than any preceding novel.55 Not only do readings of Madame Bovary
frequently refer to FID, but accounts of FID also disproportionately take
examples from it and so color discussions of other novels, as Daniel P. Gunn
(2004) demonstrates. This novel, moreover, is known as a pioneering experiment in thought representation, whose diverse and complex recourses to
FID have drawn considerable notice and been seen by modernist critics as
a model of sophistication and a landmark in literary history.56 On the other
hand, the many studies written on FIT in Madame Bovary have shown
relatively little agreement about the “nature” of FIT, its “function” and its
“effects.” For example, is FIT a hybrid form, mixing the “voices” of the
narrator and some character? Is FIT “impersonal”? Is it tied to irony?57
55. Gunn (2004: 35 – 36) even contends that FID in Austen has wrongly been taken to create a
Flaubert-like effect of impersonality, because its occurrences in Emma are not “autonomous”
from the narrator’s voice.
56. The scholarship on represented thought in Madame Bovary, especially FID, is remarkably
voluminous. Among the important present-day accounts, I will just mention LaCapra 1982;
Ramanazi 1988; Warning 1982; and Weinberg 1981.
57. For an overview of these debates, see Bray 2010: 56 – 61. As Brian McHale (2005: 189) has
quipped, “Nothing about FID is uncontroversial.” It is, in fact, not even always easy to identify
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According to Fludernik, the problems in this debate come from an excessive
desire to establish the constant function of FIT, an objective that is perhaps
not achievable.58 What most concerns the present discussion, however, is
how FIT relates to other discursive forms of represented thought.
For our purposes, the most important thing to note is that FIT (though
often considered by literary historians the quintessential modernist technique) generally coexists alongside other forms of represented thought,
even in the same paragraph.59 For example, after Emma Bovary has overspent and is in danger of losing her home, she tries to find a way to get the
necessary money:
Suddenly she struck her brow and uttered a cry; for the thought of Rodolphe, like
a flash of lightning in a dark night, had struck into her soul. He was so good, so
tender, so generous! And besides, should he hesitate to come to her assistance, she
would know well enough how one single glance would reawaken their lost love.
(Flaubert 2005: 274).60
These three sentences combine NRTA (“the memory of Rodolphe . . . had
entered her mind”), FIT (“He was so good, so sensitive, so generous!”), and
hypothetical FIT, indicating a contingent (“if ”) future scenario that reflects
her current fantasies (“she would know quite well how to force him by
reminding him, with a single glance, of their lost love”). None of these are
marked forms, and the combined use of otherwise very different but free
forms like FIT and NRTA is a staple of thought representation in Madame
Bovary. So their alternation in paragraphs such as this one constitutes strong
evidence that Flaubert actively sought to avoid reporting clauses, apparently
for stylistic reasons. (Hence also the attack on “que.”) The novel uses such
clauses only eighteen times (“se dit-elle” [2], “se dit-il” [6], “pensa-t-elle” [3],
“pensa-t-il” [3], and “pensa” þ proper name [4]): it would appear that
NRTA performs here the function of integrating thought report — including
FIT — into the narrator’s discourse more often than do such reporting clauses
in IT or DT.61
an instance of FID, especially in the absence of reporting clauses, like “She said that . . . or Father
wanted to know when” (Fludernik 2009: 67).
58. Sternberg’s (1982a, 1982b, 1991) “Proteus Principle” indeed predicts and explains this
failure, as a companion to “the direct speech fallacy.”
59. Compare Palmer 2004: 53.
60. Original: “Tout à coup elle se frappa le front, poussa un cri, car le souvenir de Rodolphe,
comme un grand éclair dans une nuit sombre, lui avait passé dans l’âme. Il était si bon, si délicat,
si généreux! Et, d’ailleurs, s’il hésitait à lui rendre ce service, elle saurait bien l’y contraindre en
rappelant d’un seul clin d’oeil leur amour perdu” (Flaubert 1945 [1857]: 162).
61. Contrary to much of what has been said about Madame Bovary by Flaubert and others, the
novel does perceptibly manifest narratorial discourse about the characters’ thought, including
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Despite its reputation as a novel based upon FIT, Madame Bovary also
exhibits NRTA, IT, and both marked and “free” DT. In the example just
cited, the NRTA sentence (“the memory of Rodolphe . . . had entered her
mind”) typically establishes Emma’s objective situation and how she reacts to
external events. On the other hand, the FIT (“He was so good, so sensitive, so
generous!”) is subjective and ironic: the narrator knows something (that
Rodolphe is a selfish libertine) that Emma does not, and the reader is
aware of this discrepancy. The FIT discourse in Madame Bovary generally
lays bare Emma Bovary’s mistaken or cliché-ridden thoughts, often in
order to ridicule them. So, too, do counterfactual instances of FIT. They
function to make Emma Bovary look out of touch with reality, as when
Emma imagines impossible futures with one of her two lovers, Rodolphe
(e.g., “she would know quite well how to force him by reminding him, with a
single glance, of their lost love”). Even if Madame Bovary employs eighteen
reporting clauses, their proportion to the rest is lower than in many other
novels from the same period, especially considering the frequency of represented thought in Flaubert’s masterpiece.
Madame Bovary uses direct forms of thought representation, like DT, mostly
combined with FIT in the complex fashion that we have just described.
Marked DT, explicitly attributed to the character (unlike FDT), has been
mistaken for an unironic and uncomplicated form that reproduces a character’s thoughts without distortion.62 But in conjunction with forms like FIT,
DT can produce complex (e.g., ironic) effects at a higher level, partly by
resolving ambiguities of overt talk through the clarification of the reporting
clause, in the same way that NRTA can make clear what the character
thinks.63 Take the scene where the debonair Rodolphe leaves the naive
NRTA. Flaubert (1980: 773) famously asserted in a letter on March 18, 1857, that he sought to
produce the illusion of authorial absence: “It is a totally invented story; I haven’t put anything of
my feelings nor of my life into it. The illusion (if there is one) comes . . . from the impersonality of
the work. . . . The artist in his work must be like God in his creation — invisible and all-powerful:
he must be everywhere felt, but nowhere seen.” In the strongest version of this argument,
Flaubert’s novels have no narratorial presence at all. For example, Vaheed K. Ramazani (1988:
115) emphasizes “the disembodied voice of the free indirect mode” (see also Steele 1987). But
few have noted Flaubert’s recurrent use of NRTA. In the strongest case for Flaubert’s involuntary presence in Madame Bovary, Ronnie Butler (1982) finds it in the narrator’s very irony and
distance.
62. In positive terms, this would mean that DT replicates a character’s inner discourse. Here
lies what Sternberg (1982a) exposed as the “direct discourse fallacy,” which has indeed been
widely avoided since. Regardless of this fallacy, Cohn (1978) persistently criticizes the notion
that minds are rendered transparent in interior monologue and DT.
63. By analyzing questionnaires about the salient features of novelistic passages with instances
of free indirect speech (FIS) and FIT, Joe Bray (2010) has shown how grammatical features of
a discourse — such as whether IT representation is free or marked — can be less powerful than
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Emma Bovary. His letter to Emma is filled with declarations of love that
clash with the plot (e.g., his repeated affairs) and with his own inner speech
(DT). Rodolphe thus feigns distress: “The mere idea of the grief that would
come to you tortures me, Emma. Forget me! Why did I ever know you?
Why were you so beautiful? Is it my fault? God, no! only fate is to blame!”
(Flaubert 2005: 163 ).64 This exhortation is likely insincere, especially given
the speaker’s libertine past, yet the reader cannot properly determine its truth
(or untruth) without some direct information about Rodolphe’s thoughts.
Later in this scene, Flaubert accordingly reveals Rodolphe’s bad intentions
through DT (with a terminal reporting clause) that concerns the word fate
( fatalité ): “ ‘That’s a word that always helps,’ he said to himself.”65 The ambiguity about Rodolphe’s motives has been resolved beyond any doubt. Even,
or especially, amid dialogue and unmarked FIT, the omniscient narrator
adheres to the privileged disclosure of the subject’s hidden thoughts in these
marked DT sentences.
Despite Flaubert’s preference for FIT and NRTA, DT remains a useful
tool for him and his like. Marked DT is, however, a tool to which Madame
Bovary resorts sparingly. How does such use compare with other novels of this
period (1830 – 60)? The cases of Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir and Ponson du
Terrail’s Le club des valets de coeur are no less complex, and their places in literary
history are more debated.66 In both cases, it is also far harder to know what
stylistic and formal ends the authors sought than it was with Flaubert, since
neither of them wrote about their vocabulary, reporting clauses, or thought
representation.67 We thus cannot say, for certain, what they thought of the
conjunctions “qui” or “que” or of transformers like “se dit-elle.”
verbal or sociological connotations in producing an effect of irony or sympathy in the reader. So
“ ‘empathy’ may . . . not be as pervasive and as defining a feature of the [free indirect] style as
critics have tended to assume.” In fact, at least on the evidence of the responses given here,
it depends less “on the language of a particular passage than on a reader’s assessment of the
‘seriousness’ of ‘the situation’ ” (ibid.: 66). In short, FIT does not have a simple and consistent
effect on readers.
64. Original: “L’idée seule des chagrins qui vous arrivent me torture, Emma! Oubliez-moi!
Pourquoi faut-il que je vous aie connue? Pourquoi étiez-vous si belle? Est-ce ma faute? Ô mon
dieu? Non, non, n’en accusez que la fatalité!’ ” (Flaubert 1945 [1857]: 43).
65. Original: “Voilà un mot qui fait toujours de l’effet, se dit-il” (ibid.).
66. In a relatively extensive account of represented thought in nineteenth-century French
fiction, Roy Pascal (1977: 98 – 134) discusses Stendhal’s and Flaubert’s but not Ponson du
Terrail’s novels. He also prefers FID to other forms and calls Flaubert a “master” of it:
above all “when there are no, or very slight, indicators of the onset of the [free indirect]
style” and the reader “is not shaken . . . out of the narratorial perspective into the subjective,
but slips from one to the other, guided by only the most delicate hints” (ibid.: 101).
67. Stendhal did describe his style in Le rouge et le noir as masculine or “Roman,” in that his prose
contained a minimum of adjectives.
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In many ways, Ponson du Terrail’s style is typical of the integration of
represented thought into the nineteenth-century novel. Of the three novels at
issue here, his Club des valets de coeur (1858) corresponds most to the stereotyped
ideas of premodern literature as conventional and unconscious in its technique: it very liberally uses reporting clauses in IT and marked DT and
occasionally employs unmarked FIT and DT, with very little differentiation
between these quoting forms. His style in general and his plot structure
likewise tend toward the pole of cliché.68 The overall effect of Ponson
du Terrail’s style is a kind of false suspense, that which Roland Barthes
(1975 [1973]: 10 – 11) views as a “striptease”: narrative oriented to the slow
revelation of facts that are predetermined by plot conventions, rather than to
an exploration of textual possibilities.
The high frequency of reporting clauses in Ponson du Terrail’s fiction
(tables 1 – 4) might be unexpected, since his novels are reputedly plot driven,
rather than being concerned with the inner worlds (“thoughts”) of the
characters.69 Even his narrator’s observations are mostly confined to the
plot, telling what happens and quoting what the characters say, thus remaining at what Gérard Genette (1980 [1967 – 70]: 228) calls the “first [diegetic]
level.” Hence the expectation that his novels would have relatively little
represented thought. Yet the frequency of reporting clauses suggests the
opposite, and it indeed proves true.
But why should he, so unexpectedly and frequently, represent the internal
states of characters? What are the relevant facts in determining Ponson du
Terrail’s aesthetic purposes and commitments, particularly when, unlike
Flaubert, he made no explicit statements about narrative art? The question
about the frequency of reporting clauses and reported thoughts cannot be
answered in isolation, without regard to the author’s overall aesthetic choices,
such as the tendency toward formulaic action and language. Just as Flaubert’s avoidance of such clauses implies a larger stylistic project, so does
Ponson du Terrail’s abundance: only, the ends behind his practice were
certainly tied to the genre of the gothic adventure novel, with its frequent
inside views of characters, as well as to facile writing. Flaubert, on the other
hand, published only three conventional full-length novels during his lifetime — Madame Bovary (1857), Salammbô (1862), L’éducation sentimentale (1869) —
68. Even Ponson du Terrail’s admirers tend to be defensive about, or even critical of, his style.
For Michel Nathan (1992: 14 – 15), Ponson du Terrail so excessively repeats clichés and previous novels that his work emerges as a parody.
69. Accordingly, that is where most of the serious critical attention paid to him — including the
complaints voiced — has focused. As Umberto Eco (1979: 133) remarks on Ponson du Terrail’s
Le forgeron de la Cour-Dieu (1869), “There are about ten cases of fictitious recognitions, in the sense
that the reader’s expectations are built up only to be revealed to him facts that he already knew
[sic ] but which were unknown to one particular character.”
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all three of which were carefully composed at the sentence and paragraph
levels.
Despite the significant differences between them, the two novelists make
similar use of mixed modes of represented thought. Thus the combination of
marked and unmarked forms. For instance, in Le club des valets de coeur, as the
young count M. De Château-Mailly returns home and thinks about his
meeting with Mme. Rocher, various types of thought report (NRTA, FIT,
and marked DT) appear in quick succession:
The young count was somewhat moved by the scene that he had just acted with a
true dramatic talent. Eight days before, he would perhaps have blushed at similar
conduct. But, oh well! The die was cast! And then, in love, he said to himself, all the
means are good when they lead to success. The count addressed to himself this
small just consolation just at the moment he turned the corner of the street Laffite,
where he lived. (Ponson du Terrail 1965 [1858]: 247)70
Parallel to Madame Bovary, this thought representation begins with NRTA
(“The young count was somewhat moved by the scene”), then shifts to FIT
(“oh well! The die was cast!”), unmarked yet identifiable as such due to the
exclamation and the imperfect tense. There follows marked DT (“And then,
in love, he said to himself, all the means are good”), complete with its midposed reporting clause (“he said to himself ”) and its verb in the original
present tense (“are”). Finally, the passage ends with a narratorial intervention
that begins with an expanded reporting clause (“The count addressed to
himself this small just consolation”) and then situates the thinking count in
the objective time and space (“the moment he turned the corner of the street
Laffite, where he lived”). Also reminiscent of Flaubert is the integration of the
unmarked FIT and the marked DT sentences into the narrative through
NRTA.
Despite this similarity to the master himself, Ponson du Terrail is not
known for his expert thought representation or his style more generally. Of
the three novelists under comparison, he is the least sophisticated in these
regards: Le club des valets de coeur is built upon a series of plot twists, or péripéties,
and there are somewhat crude transitions between action and dialogue, of
which reporting clauses are a prime feature.71 It is possible that Ponson du
70. Original: “Le jeune comte était quelque peu ému de la scène qu’il venait de jouer avec un
véritable talent dramatique. Huit jours auparavant, il eût peut-être rougi d’une semblable
conduite. Mais, bah! Le sort en était jeté. Et puis, en amour, se dit-il tous les moyens sont bons
quand ils mènent au succès. Le comte s’adressait cette petite consolation juste au moment où il
tournait l’angle de la rue Laffite, où il demeurait” (Ponson du Terrail 1965 [1858]: 247).
71. No doubt Ponson du Terrail’s style is partly a matter of the genre in which he wrote,
the gothic adventure or the early detective novel. Although no critics have, to my knowledge,
studied his representation of thought, Eco (1979: 133) did write on the manipulation of suspense
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Terrail had few constant aesthetic commitments and no real reason for so
multiplying reporting clauses. Despite the narrative’s retrospective past tense
throughout, moreover, the narrator seems to learn with the reader, as it
were, who among the characters can be trusted, often expressing surprise
at particularly unusual turns of events or péripéties.
Although Ponson du Terrail occasionally uses indirect discourse, including
FIT, he prefers DT with reporting clauses. This repetition of the same formulas perhaps indicates how quickly he wrote his many novels, along with a
good deal of journalistic prose. Pierre Bourdieu (1996 [1992]: 53) describes
his tight schedule: every day he “managed to write a different page each for
Le Petit Journal, La Petite Presse, a literary daily, L’Opinion Nationale, a political
daily which was pro-imperial, Le Moniteur, the Empire’s official journal, and
La Patrie, a very serious political daily.”
It is not that Ponson du Terrail’s choice of reporting clauses always repeats
itself: more unusual phrases like murmura-t-il (he murmured) and repliqua-t-elle
(she replied) at times demarcate direct speech (DS) and thought (DT) from
the narration and distinguish one speaker from another. But the repetition of
formulas stands out. Moreover, in Le club des valets de coeur, techniques like
marked DT and unmarked FIT not only alternate but, it would seem, also
interchange. So we can reasonably conclude that Ponson du Terrail saw
word choice and style as instrumental to the telling of the story and that
the relationship between characters’ thoughts and the narrator’s quotation of
them as unproblematic. What makes this significant is that his techniques
correspond so well to the repetitive and stylistically limited stereotypes attributed to French realist fiction by critics like Levitt (2006). At the same time,
despite his preferences, Ponson du Terrail sometimes did opt for FIT: this
suggests that it was not a rarified form of literary expression but occurred
even in genre fiction as well as in novels widely considered modernist or
forerunners of modernism, like Madame Bovary.
Ponson du Terrail’s set of modes for representing thought (NRTA, FIT,
marked and unmarked DT) is not formally very different than Flaubert’s,
in his and other works of nineteenth-century genre fiction (known as the roman feuilleton) that rely
heavily on the effect of surprise and use DT to reveal the thoughts of characters to the reader.
Like many detective novels, Le club des valets de coeur cultivates (as Eco notes of Le forgeron de la CourDieu) the sense of an impending psychological revelation by underdescribing physical objects
and characters while disclosing information in the slow and oblique way that the maintenance
of interest demands. So the psychology of characters is murky at first and then clarified, often
through explicit self-presentation by the character (direct speech [DS]). For Charles Rzepka
(2005: 32, 43), the suspense of detective fiction comes from “two locked rooms” (or sources of
ambiguity): that of the physical universe and that of the unconscious. Psychological revelations
are thus part of a broader strategy of mystery and disclosure.
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then, while a vast difference separates the respective proportions of and
functions of these modes. But whose use of represented thought does this
difference make exceptional, or unusual, for the time? A good way to attack
this question is to look at a third novel, which combines qualities of these two.
I have chosen Le rouge et le noir (1963 [1830]) because of Stendhal’s significant
role in tables 1 – 6.
Le rouge et le noir indeed seems to be an exemplar of the psychological novel,
with abundant quotations from, or references to, the characters’ inner lives. It
ranks high on the lists of works to which I have applied quantitative measures
in this regard (tables 3, 4, and 6). Stendhal’s reporting clauses far outnumber
Ponson du Terrail’s, as do his unmarked forms like free DT. For example,
variations on “se dit-il” occur 145 times in Le rouge et le noir and a stunning 185
times in La chartreuse de Parme, as against a mere 10 times in Le club des valets
du coeur. Moreover, the narrator’s interest in the thoughts of characters,
especially of the protagonist Julien Sorel, is immediately evident. As Levitt
complains, there is hardly a page on which some mind is not revealed to us
through DT, often with a formula-like reporting clause.
Also, Stendhal in turn often deploys free and marked forms of thought
report in quick succession. For instance, in the celebrated scene in which
the young Julien Sorel musters the courage to take Mme. de Rênal’s hand,
NRTA, marked DT, and FIT are brought together:
Julien became more confident during this long speech; he looked closely at Mme
de Rênal. Such is the effect of perfect grace, when it comes naturally from character, and especially when the person it adorns would not dream of having any
grace at all, that Julien, who was very familiar with feminine beauty, could have
sworn at that moment that she was only twenty years old. All of a sudden, he had
the bold idea of kissing her hand. But very soon he was frightened by his idea; a
moment later, he said to himself: “It would be cowardice in me not to carry out an
action which might be useful to me, and lessen the scorn that this beautiful woman
probably feels for a poor worker only just plucked away from the mill.” Possibly
Julien was a little encouraged by these words of a handsome fellow, which for six
months he had heard repeated on Sundays by some of the young girls. (Stendhal
2002: 38; translation altered to reflect the French grammar)72
72. Original: “Julien se rassurait pendant ce long discours, il examinait Mme de Rênal. Tel est
l’effet de la grâce parfaite, quand elle est naturelle au caractère, et que surtout la personne
qu’elle décore ne songe pas à avoir de la grâce, Julien, qui se connaissait fort bien en beauté
féminine, eût juré dans cet instant qu’elle n’avait que vingt ans. Il eut sur-le-champ l’idée hardie
de lui baiser la main. Bientôt il eut peur de son idée; un instant après il se dit: il y aurait de la
lâcheté à moi de ne pas exécuter une action qui peut m’être utile, et diminuer le mépris que cette
belle dame a probablement pour un pauvre ouvrier à peine arraché à la scie. Peut-être Julien
fut-il un peu encouragé par ce mot de joli garçon, que depuis six mois il entendait répéter le
dimanche par quelques jeunes filles” (Stendhal 1963 [1830]: 29).
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Here, as in Madame Bovary and Le club des valets du coeur, NRTA (e.g., “Julien
became more confident”) often introduces sequences of represented thought
and reappears before and after DT or FIT. The long sentence of marked
DT (“he said to himself: ‘It would be cowardice in me’”) is both preceded
by NRTA (“he had the bold idea. . . . he was frightened”) and followed by
another NRTA in the conditional (“Possibly Julien was a little encouraged
by”). The paragraph closes with Julien’s melodramatic “Never, madame,
will I strike your children. I swear it before God” (ibid.: 39), as he takes Mme.
de Rênal’s hand and brings it to his lips.
Amid this similarity among the novels, the proportion of NRTA and
narratorial comments to DT is higher than in Madame Bovary or Le club des
valets du coeur, and the effect of the mixed thought sequence is more unsettling.
In this case, the NRTAs distributed in the passage mock Julien’s youth and
inexperience; the DT sentence discloses Julien’s self-reproach for being too
frightened to act and his heroic self-perception as a man bound to succeed (“It
would be cowardice in me not to carry out an action”). There follows a
comment by the narrator that ironizes Julien’s heroic self-image by reminding us that Julien is “a little encouraged” by his appeal as a “handsome
fellow” to “some of the young girls.” So there arises a strong opposition
between Julien’s naively self-important viewpoint and the experienced narrator’s deflating presentation of him.
Marked DT is among the primary techniques used by Stendhal to reveal
Julien’s thoughts, along with unmarked DT and FIT. As with Flaubert, what
is revealed in the DT often clashes with what is expressed in the DD of the
dialogue. Thus Julien, his self-centered romantic designs hidden from view,
suddenly exclaims to the pious Mme. de Rênal: “Never, madame, will I strike
your children. I swear it before God.” This reinforces the sense and the
impact of Stendhal’s flexible discourse report.
How does Stendhal’s fluid technique — as variable as any later novelist’s —
relate to Flaubert’s and Ponson du Terrail’s?73 Stendhal and Ponson du
Terrail pursue very different interests in the depiction of their characters’
thoughts. Whereas Ponson du Terrail focuses on the flow of information
between characters, Stendhal is very concerned with the gap between the
73. Jean-Luc Seylaz (1980: 31 – 34) even goes so far as to maintain that Stendhal’s fluid rendering of thought serves to explain his continued appeal as a novelist. This, he claims, is because
the deployment of multiple techniques and voices or viewpoints (FIT, “dialogism,” and
“perspectivism”) enacts a conflict of values for the reader to be resolved by the reader. For John
T. Booker (1985: 137 – 41), this versatility likewise explains the “fascination that Stendhal has
held for his readers down through the years” (ibid.: 137). Booker (ibid.: 141), moreover, distinguishes between the varieties of direct style and interior monologue: the former is the
“relatively brief representation of a character’s thoughts, which, if carried to any length, would
be called free interior monologue.” This even widens Stendhal’s quoting repertoire.
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characters’ internal and the narrator’s external perspectives: many of the
thoughts revealed in Julien’s interior monologue, for instance, are never
communicated to the other characters, and they are frequently juxtaposed
with the actions of Julien and others, so that Julien thinks one thing and does
another.74
As Cohn (1978: 82 – 88) points out, however, Stendhal does not distinguish
rigorously between spoken (DS) and silent (DT) monologues. Though highly
interested in his characters’ minds, like Flaubert and Ponson du Terrail, he
does not always keep speech and thought apart. Not only do specific and
summary, marked and unmarked forms of thought representation appear
in immediate continuity but also spoken and silent ones, only with less
precision.75 Moreover, Ponson du Terrail is largely unsuspicious of his characters’ thoughts — that is, information from the narration, dialogue, and
interior life tends to match — while thought representations in Stendhal, as
in Flaubert, tend to clash with other types of discourse.76
Since both Ponson du Terrail and Stendhal use a similar range of forms of
thought representation yet have such different approaches to their characters’ represented minds, we may conclude that the former do not entail any
particular attitude toward the latter. Instead, as emerges from our comparisons, each novelist (or storyteller generally) may (and here does) use a common set of techniques in different proportions and to quite different narrative
effect. My earlier narrow focus on reporting clauses and mental verbs in
represented thought captures by itself only part of the intricate relations
among these three novels.
Even in terms of the statistical frequencies above, we should avoid overgeneralizing from Stendhal and Ponson du Terrail’s abundant reporting
formulas. For the use of such clauses, formulaic or otherwise, was not, by
74. The scene in which Julien endeavors to take Mme. de Rênal’s hand by 10 o’clock is paradigmatic of Stendhal’s interest: in Julien’s thoughts, in the reactions of others, and in the actions
of characters. Because of the numerous interactions among these three levels, differing readings
can generally arise, even of focal events and attitudes. Stirling Haig (1989: 62) thus reads this
scene as leaving “little doubt as to the narrator’s [unfavorable] opinion of Julien’s campaign
and, as it were, ‘victory’ — his trembling journey through the château corridors at two in the
morning, his falling at Mme de Rênal’s feet, his bursting into tears.” Victor Brombert (1968: 72),
for his part, sees Julien’s hesitation more sympathetically and imagines the narrator to share his
view: “Julien is so taken with his tactical problems that he fails to notice his victory.”
75. Compared with Le rouge et le noir, there are few instances of DT in the Rocambole series that
might actually be spoken aloud.
76. This question of point of view in represented thought is highly complex. Sternberg (1982a:
69 – 70, 113 – 15) argues that all reported discourse combines more than “two speech-events”:
its “structure of point of view . . . normally involves . . . four perspectives: the reporter’s, the
reportee’s, and their respective addressees.” More specific generalizing about reported speech
is difficult, because the relationship among these perspectives can widely vary.
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any means, an unusual way of integrating character perspectives into thirdperson narration. Indeed, these clauses are open to multiple interpretations.
First, the fact that these phrases occur very frequently in a few novels, like
Lucien Leuwen (tables 3 and 6) and Les exploits de Rocambole (table 3), suggests that
some texts represent the interior states of characters more often than others.
For represented thought with reporting clauses is more common than the
“free” varieties, like FIT — especially in Ponson du Terrail’s work, in which
transitions between modes of discourse and between speakers generally
involve such “transforming” clauses.77
From still another comparative viewpoint, Stendhal uses various forms of
represented thought and speech, free or marked, in more equal proportions
than Ponson du Terrail, who strongly prefers marked DT. Their common
use of FIT, as well as of DT and other reporting modes, though, suggests that
they did not consider it to be a radically different technique. Flaubert used
marked DT with greater care in Madame Bovary, generally together with
unmarked forms, implying that he was more aware of the effect of different
modes of represented thought.
These choices as to represented thought, including the differences in goal,
precision, or attentiveness to style, are part of a larger set of narrative
decisions. Some of these are common to the three novels. First and foremost,
with the exception of the opening chapter of Madame Bovary, all three novels
are narrated by “omniscient” figures who are not characters in the story.78
Whether or not narrators are called “omniscient,” they have privileged
knowledge of the inner states of characters, which they mostly communicate
by way of quotation, that is, represented thought. In both Stendhal and
Ponson du Terrail’s novels, reporting clauses are a primary means of incorporating these thoughts in the third-person narratorial voice. This common
practice implies a shared understanding of what an “omniscient” narrator is
and how thoughts are integrated within narration. Yet it is not clear that such
77. Charles Bally, among the earliest writers on FID, saw it as an ingenious way of avoiding the
repetition of transformers (Pascal 1977: 10); so, in effect, did Flaubert in attacking “que.”
78. Some have denied the usefulness of “omniscience” as a concept. Thus, Wallace Martin
(1986: 146) claims that omniscient narration is liable to become “a kind of dumping ground
filled with a wide range of distinct narrative techniques.” Partly building on Martin’s work,
Jonathan D. Culler (2007: 190) lists such techniques: (1) “the performative authoritativeness
of many narrative declarations,” (2) “the reporting of innermost thoughts and feelings,”
(3) “authorial narration,” and (4) “the synoptic impersonal narration of the realist tradition.”
Moreover, users of “the term omniscience presume that the narrator is omniscient only about the
world of the novel, but fiction of the realist tradition, where the term is most used, is full of
general claims that we assess as generalizations about the larger world that extends into our
own” (ibid.: 192). But supporters of the concept of omniscience, most notably Sternberg (1978,
2007), have opposed these claims. Sternberg argues in favor of a flexible, contextual approach
to omniscience.
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marked forms have either a favorable or an unfavorable effect on the representation of thought. The critical tendency to link FIT with psychological
insight and DT or IT with heavy-handed storytelling is a very good case of
what Sternberg (1978: 256; 1982b) has called “package deals”: the tying
together of a formal technique with a certain use, or effect, or function of
this. For example, whatever the epistemic privilege, or certainty, or mental
insight carried by the third-person narratorial voice, it is not related in an
inseparable or exclusive fashion to the use of FIT.
The notion that FIT is a sophisticated, modern technique of thought
representation is pervasive in the scholarship on Flaubert and FIT, as is
the argument that this variability has strong ideological repercussions.79 In
the case of Madame Bovary, these claims are undermined by the presence of
reporting clauses there and also, to a greater extent, in L’éducation sentimentale.
More generally, the empirical data go against the “package deal” of modernist thought representation with the absence of over signals: reporting
clauses in all the marked forms, mental verbs, NRTA, and narrator comments. FIT often even pointedly combines with these discourse signals, in
the interest of ambiguity resolution, for example, as already seen. Inversely,
Stendhal’s unsystematic use of represented thought does not interfere with
his ability to construct a complex narratorial voice or complicated character
perspectives. Historically, indeed, even if Flaubert was treated as a modernist
forefather by twentieth-century writers like Pound, his influence in the relevant direction to language and thought was not immediately felt. The most
prolific writers of the 1880s and 1890s continued using marked DT and IT in
significant proportions. Reporting clauses did not disappear with the rise in
forms like FIT, then, but occur more often even in the 1910s and 1920s than
in the 1830s (fig. 2). The diversity and persistence of these choices should
give pause to those who see the evolution of novelistic forms as a set or scale
of ever-improving techniques.
6. Some Conclusions
I have followed two key markers of represented thought — common reporting
clauses and mental verbs — in French novels through the period 1800 to 1929.
The data in figures 2 and 4 suggest that there might have been at least two
“inward turns” during this time. There were certainly significant increases in
the most common phrases used to integrate thought representations (e.g., “he
79. More general studies have shown that FID is very far from an exclusively modern technique
and was used from the beginning of French literature in the Middle Ages. Bernard Cerguiglini
(1984) surveys and opposes the critics who regard FID as a modern phenomenon, starting with
the linguist Bally in 1912, the first to go into the form in French.
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said to himself,” “she thought”) in the 1830s, 1860s, 1890s, and 1920s. But
only two large increases appear in both reporting clauses and mental verbs at
the same time. The first, larger rise occurred in the 1830s in the proportional
frequency of both the one (fig. 2) and the other (fig. 4), as compared with
the 1820s; the second, smaller potential “inward turn” took place between
1910 and 1929, the years of the high modernist period — again signaled by a
gradual increase in the same two markers. In between, the 1860s and 1890s
likewise saw very high proportional use of reporting clauses in thought report
but only a small increase (or in the 1890s, even a decrease) in mental verbs
compared with the 1850s.
The reasons for these increases are not clear from the data. It is also worth
noting that the rise in the proportional frequency of these markers may not
even indicate an overall rise in thought representation, although it does imply
a rise in marked DT, IT, and NRTA, all of which use the common phrases
that I tracked across the 1800 – 1929 sample. As we have just seen, these
marked forms of inner life often coexist with free equivalents in Flaubert’s,
Stendhal’s, and Ponson du Terrail’s fiction, even in the same paragraph, so
proportions of marked and unmarked represented thought may significantly
correlate, within a work or an author, for example. It is also possible that the
proportional frequency of these indicators correlates with the total amount of
represented thought — another possibility that can only be tested through
further quantitative analysis.
Further, there are some consistencies in the proportional numbers of
words and reporting phrases associated with mind representation. Regarding
both, the samples of the 1830s and of the 1910s to 1920s forms of the verb
“thought” (“penser”) were more frequent than those of “say to himself/herself ” (“se dire”): see again the gap between figures 2 and 4. During the
early twentieth-century “inward turn,” the number of variations on “said
to himself ” rose far less compared with the past than did phrases involving
“thought” (fig. 4). This difference supports the hypothesis that the change in
represented thought was substantially stylistic.
The proportional frequency of mental verbs (e.g., “pensait,” “se disait”) is
still higher and more variable than that of reporting clauses, which rise
dramatically from the 1820s to the 1830s and then again, less dramatically,
from the 1900s to the 1920s. The sharp increase in the frequency of mental
verbs (and the less drastic rise in reporting clauses) provides strong evidence
for the softer version of the modernist narrative advanced by critics like Lewis
(2007), Matz (2006), and Schoenbach (2011). Accordingly, there is a gradual
rise in interest in the mental states of characters through the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Yet the strong version of the “inward turn” narrative found in Humphrey 1954 and Levitt 2006 — a monumental shift to rep-
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resented thought and a decline of “primitive” marked forms — is not substantiated: the proportional frequency of reporting clauses does not decline in
empirical fact, as Levitt’s theory would predict. Instead, it appears that the
switch from the reporting clause “se dit-il” to “pensa-t-il” was mainly driven
by stylistic concerns or fashions. The difference in the distribution between
thought representation in the late nineteenth-century and the early twentieth-century novel, then, seems to be a matter of degree and distribution,
rather than a strong move from one regime of thought representation
(marked) to another (unmarked or free).
Although quantitative techniques of literary analysis are in their infancy,
they offer a counterweight, as well as a complement, to the subjective qualitative approaches that literary criticism has sometimes exclusively practiced.
Even in this nascent form, these measures of the distribution of thought
markers — rough as they are — do endorse the more nuanced story about
the distribution of represented modes (DT, IT, and FIT) found in narratological studies of the novel like Cohn’s Transparent Minds. Cohn (1978: 11 – 12)
argues that forms of represented thought change over time but tend to coexist
in works of fiction, rather than being displaced by the next formal discovery; it
is for this reason, for example, that she draws attention to the family resemblance between DT and stream of consciousness.
That said, I cannot draw firm conclusions about these rival “inward turns,”
because the data are incomplete: my sample is of limited size and my
measurements admittedly rough. Indeed, whether this second, later “inward
turn” in our data corresponds to a change in “human character” “on or about
December 1910” (Woolf 1986 [1924]: 421) cannot be certainly answered
without a full account of represented thought in this period and the one
immediately before it. I found that reporting clauses and mental verbs
were distributed across genres, authors, novels, and decades — with a stronger concentration in the work of particular authors (e.g., Stendhal, André
Baillon, Ponson du Terrail, Raymond Radiguet) than in particular books or
kinds (tables 1 – 6). There is no clear literary-historical pattern evident in the
rankings of authors who use these phrases with high frequency, such as
whether they wrote well before 1910 or well after. If there was a change in
human character in France as well as England, and if this transformation was
reflected in literature, it did not bring about a revolution in the language used
to represent thought that swept away the realist devices of thought representation. At the very least, we know that the narrative of modernism long
developed in relation to the English-language novel does not easily fit the
case of the French novel in the same period.
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