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Ann Banfield
University of Berkeley
Les chifres en parenthses rouges renvoient aux notes en bas de page

A Grammatical Definition of the Genre "Novel"

In Le Degr Zro de L'criture, Roland Barthes refers to the "signes
formels de la Littrature", listing "pass simple, style indirect, rythme
crit" (1953 et 1964, p. 58). Earlier in the same text, he discusses, as
a variant of "style indirect," the "troisime personne du Roman",
there clearly attaching these formal signs to "L'criture du Roman"
(33). The "signs" Barthes identifies are in fact grammatical
phenomena. We might posit that each literary genre exploits (as
opposed to uses) a different set of such grammatical "signs" out of
the repertoire of possible forms provided by language.
Kristin Hanson and Paul Kiparsky (1997, p. 17) posit that
verse is a form of language with "Regular Recurrence of Linguistic
Equivalences." The interesting question becomes what things can
qualify as equivalent. Hanson and Kiparsky's answer is: units
language treats as such. For instance, for meter, "isochrony is often
invoked as an important principle of certain metrical systems, but
time is not a linguistic entity" (p. 22). Rather, the equivalent units
will, as in language, be somewhat abstract entities like segments
treated as clusters of features, morae, syllables defined by various
properties. I.e., "for rhyme or alliteration to become a principle of
verse structure, the interval of recurrence must be measured by some
other linguistic element; and it is meter which normally serves this
purpose." (p. 33) Poetic meter is, in particular, "a stylization of the
rhythmic structure which language has naturally", Hanson and
Kiparsky write (1997, p. 56).[1] I.e., poetry heightens features of
natural language rather than being either "contra natura" - the
hypothesis of the violation of rules - or merely conventional patterns

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arbitrarily imposed - the conventionalist or constructivist thesis. The

elegance of the "naturalness" argument for verse lies in the
demonstration that the relevant notions required for metrical theory
like "syllable" or "foot" are those already proposed by phonological
theory and thus independently justified.
Jean-Claude Milner, in a similar vein, furnishes an internal
linguistic criterion to differentiate prose and verse: the
non-coincidence of syntactic and phonological limits. "En bref,"
Milner summarizes his claim, "il y a vers ds qu'il y a possibilit
d'enjambement" (1982, p. 301) Milner contrasts the "insignes
conventionnels de la versification" with the possibility of
enjambement, which is not a "conventional" sign (1982, p. 300). "On
comprend l'importance du blanc typographique: il n'est pas une
marque conventionnelle, mais le signal de l'enjambement possible",
Milner writes (1982, p. 301). In other words, these grammatical signs
of verse are "natural", in the sense that they arise as possibilities of
natural language. There might also exist conventional signs of verse Milner seems to suggest that there do - but these in no way imply that
the category "verse" is purely conventional. For one could imagine
that a theory of conventional forms could be maintained, but that the
repertoire of possible conventions would have to be constrained so as
to permit only those which conform to the features of natural forms
defined by the language. There might in addition exist natural aspects
of poetic form determined by other features of human cognition than
language. The same patterns of regular recurrences that constitute
what Halle and Keyser call the "abstract metrical formula" or various
rhyme schemes or stanzaic forms might be abstract forms realized in
different arts by other than linguistic material - by tiles of differing
colors or shapes or lumps of wool of different configurations, e.g.
knit/purl/knit/purl, and yet still be considered to each represent one of
a limited set of possible patterns producible and recognizable by the
human mind. Language, per se, however, decides which sounds are
treatable as recurrences in the language arts.[2]
The idea of natural language imposing constraints on possible

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literary forms arises in the opening of Le Degr Zro de l'criture

when Barthes isolates his key term "criture" from two other notions,
"language" and "style". "criture" represents the arena of the writer's
freedom, a space carved out of both language and style - language,
which each writer finds already there, setting "une limite", tracing
"un horizon" (1953 et 1964, p. 13) to his or her innovations, and
style, which is personal to each writer, a kind of unconscious
signature, formed both, Barthes suggests, by inherited tendencies and
learned features of vocabulary and construction - "un lexique naissent
du corps et du pass, non d'une Histoire."[3] One might see the
history of writing which Barthes traces in this Ur-structuralist text as
providing those conventions which each generation comes up against
and attempts to change, for it is precisely conventions which the
writer is "free" to change. But Barthes is not a radical
conventionalist, for language, which is "comme une nature" (1953 et
1964, p. 13) and style, "au niveau d'une biologie ou d'un pass" (1953
et 1964, p. 14), are posited as outside the arena of freedom, that is, of
what can be, by an act of will, changed. They define the possible
forms that writers can freely develop.
Barthes' list of the signs of Literature, which he attributes
specifically to the novel, might be taken as conventional signs, but I
want to suggest that, like the notions appropriate to poetry Hanson
and Kiparksy treat, they are natural signs or, if conventional, have a
basis in natural features of language. They are syntactic, as opposed
to phonological "signs", which determine the repertoire of different
literary forms. Nor was Barthes the first to find in grammar the
contours of a literary form. As early as Plato and Aristotle drama and
epic were distinguished by the different exploitation of the very
grammatical phenomena (omitting tense) Barthes sees as exploited
by the novel - pronouns and reported speech. Plato claims that
"poetry and fiction fall into three classes. First, that which employs
representation only, tragedy and comedy, as you say. Secondly, that in
which the poet speaks in his own person; the best example is lyric
poetry. Thirdly, that which employs both methods, epic and various

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other kinds of poetry" (Republic, Book III, 394c, Desmond Lee,

trans.). The epic uses the method of drama by using direct speech,
where the first person is not the narrating I but a character. Aristotle
echoes Plato, although he makes no reference to lyric but only epic
and drama, claiming that one "difference in these arts is in the
manner in which each kind of object is represented. Given both the
same means and the same kind of object for imitation,[4] one may
either (1) speak at one moment in narrative and at another in an
assumed character, as Homer does; or (2) one may remain the same
throughout, without any such change; or (3) the imitators may
represent the whole story dramatically, as though they were actually
doing the things described" (1448a20-24, Ingram Bywater, trans.).
The first of Aristotle's distinctions might be understood to refer to the
epic; the second to pure narration and the third to the drama.[5]
We assume as a working hypothesis that these divisions of
genre correspond to real divisions among the forms of the language
arts, much as linguistics adopts the traditional "parts of speech". But
we are concerned with finding in the differing exploitation of the
syntactic phenomena of person and reported speech a basis for
distinguishing the related genres "novel" and "short story", unknown
to Plato and Aristotle, from the epic. To Plato's and Aristotle's
implicit focus on the alternation of the personal pronouns and
reported speech, Barthes, we saw, adds tense. We might ask why the
categories of person and tense are the particular "signs" that come
into play, if this is indeed the case, in this division of genres. I will
suggest a hypothesis that brings us back to Hanson and Kiparsky's
claim that verse crucially manipulates the units language treats as
such and Milner's hypothesis about verse as the possibility of
enjambement. Milner's definition of poetry also invokes linguistic
units. For enjambement, the pertinent syntactic limits call into play
the major categories, NP, VP, AP, PP and S, or, in the framework of
the Bar-Notation, the maximal projections of X. Epic, on the one
hand, and novel and short story, on the other, likewise bring into play
the question of limits and thus of grammatical units. Banfield (1982),

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analyzing the conjunction of reported speech, the personal pronouns

and tense, formulates what the relevant limits or units which serve to
distinguish the novel are: the node E and the unit there called "Text".
The category E is a non-embeddable sentence, one that permits
constructions such as exclamations which cannot occur in
subordinate clauses such as those of indirect speech and one that
dominates the sentence itself. The Text is a larger unit of related Es
that falls outside the tree-based, hierarchically-ordered syntax of the
sentence. By contrast with verse, no unit smaller than the E need be
mentioned as setting the limits crucial to the form "novel". If a
smaller category such as the pronoun [N"] seems crucially involved,
it is, we will see, only insofar as it enters into the statement of a
principle for the interpretation of E or Text.
Hence, the theory of the novel dependent on E and Text does
not exclusively center "on sentences taken individually", without
taking into account "narrative context", as has been frequently
claimed.[6] The role of Text in the theory of unspeakable sentences
has been largely ignored. (There is no reference to the term as used in
Banfield, 1982, in Fludernik, 1993). What is of significance for any
proposed theoretical construct is whether it is confirmed by the
evidence. That confirmation may take time - i.e., a notion may be
proposed at one point to explain a certain phenomenon in a fashion
that might seem ad hoc. Only later might other phenomena be
discovered which are accounted for by this same notion, thus giving
it a generality it seemed initially to lack. I hope in the course of this
paper to so provide further confirmation for the unit "Text", which
proposed some minimal formal notions of "context" in a quite precise
sense. The proposals suggested will at the same time point to
directions for further research. It is at the interface between E and
Text that, I will argue, the novel and short story distinguish
themselves from the related narrative genre that is the epic. E and
Text are both categories independently required by the grammar.
What will turn out to be decisive is that E and Text serve to
distinguish two distinct levels of pronouns and deictics. This is, to

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my knowledge, a hitherto unobserved fact. If one translates Plato's

formulation in terms of whether the poet speaks or not in propria
persona to turn on the first person, then his divisions focus on a
pronoun which we will characterize as a Text-level deictic.
The specific innovation of novelistic style is to have
suppressed the first person and, in the process, to have discovered in
the linguistic repertoire a third person pronoun which is not an
anaphor but what I have called an "E-level deictic".[7] This discovery
permits the language of the novel to overturn the monopoly of the
first person and to orchestrate within the confines of a single Text the
"shift in point of view", a traditional notion a linguistic-based theory
of the novel can give formal content to. It is the possibility of shifts
in point of view within a single Text which sets the novel and the
short story apart from other genres, although not every novel or short
story may exploit this possibility. The fact that they don't becomes
itself significant - hence the marked case of the novel of "limited
point of view".
The Domain of the Third Person Deictic Pronoun
The notion "Text" was initially introduced in Banfield (1973 and
1982) to account for direct speech: a direct quotation is not just a new
E, separate from its introductory clause, but also a new Text. This is
because direct speech may introduce a new referent for the first
person pronoun. Thus, one of the defining features of the unit called
"Text" is the obligatory coreference of every instance of the first
person pronoun within it. This is captured by the principle of
"Concordance of Person", which stipulates "1 Text/1 Speaker".
(1982, p. 59) Hence, it might appear that Text is the level at which
point of view is determined, and the Shift in Point of View an
intertextual and not an intratextual phenomenon. But this conclusion
fails to take in the evidence of the language of the novel. The
phenomenon of represented speech and thought with its possible
"third person point of view" means that a new point of view does not
require a new referent of the first person and a new Text.
"1 Text/1 Speaker", when its full implications are seized,

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captures something of the peculiar status of the first person pronoun.

But these implications were not sufficiently foregrounded to register
with the commentators, perhaps because all its consequences were
not taken cognizance of in Banfield (1982). More recently, in
Banfield (1998 and 2001), I have returned to the question of the first
person, first via a philosophical criticism of the Cartesian cogito and
then via a linguistic analysis of "I" vs. the other deictics. It emerges
that the "s/he" of represented speech and thought, while it resembles
"I" in being the reference point for the interpretation of subjective
elements, differs from "I" in a way significant for the development of
the novel form with its multiple viewpoints. Taking the term "shifter"
Jakobson borrowed from Jespersen for the deictics to emphasize their
ability to shift referent (and ignoring certain complications), we note
that the deictics shift referent with each new E (treating, as in
Banfield, 1982, each conjoined sentence as a separate E), i.e., at
"E-level", as indicated below:
1. a. Thisi is white, and thisj is white, too.
b. Nowi you see it; nowj you don't.
c. "Now, too, the rising sun came in at the window,
touching the red-edged curtain and began to bring out
circles and lines. Now in the growing light its whiteness
settled in the plate". Virginia Woolf, The Waves, p. 75
d. "Now the cab comes; now Percival goes. . . . Now
Percival is gone." The Waves, p. 147[8]
e. "Here was the boss of a chair; here the bulk of a
cupboard." The Waves, p. 110
f. "Therei is mine, therej is Susan's." The Waves, p. 141
g. Youi close the windows, while youj lock the door.
h. "Herei are pictures. Herej are cold madonnas among
their pillars. . . . Herek are gardens; and Venus among her
flowers; here are saints and blue madonnas". The Waves,
p. 156
i. "Nowi were are we, she said to herself. Where is the
train at this moment? Nowj, she murmured, shutting her
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eyes, we are passing the white house on the hill; nowk

we are going through the tunnel; nowl we are crossing
the bridge over the river". [Woolf's italics] The Years, p.
271
j. "Therei is the very powerful, bottle-green engine
without a neck, all back and thighs, breathing steam. . . .
Therej is a bristling of chimneys and towers." The Waves,
p. 31
Unique among the shifters, "I" may not shift with each "E" but
changes referent only at Text-level, e.g., in Direct Speech. Otherwise,
in a sequence of related Es understood to form a unit, i. e., a Text, as
in (2), all instances of "I" must be coreferential:
2. "Ii see a triangle now; Ii saw a square a moment ago".
(2) provides evidence for the Principle of Concordance of Person.
Evidence of this sort was treated in Banfield (1982) as largely crucial
for defining the notion "Text." What was sufficiently recognized was
the different behavior of I with regard to the other shifters. For the
fact that the other deictics also seemed to shift reference from
introductory clause to quoted clause of direct speech masked their
difference, which the examples in (1) reveal. For a new Text is
necessarily a new E. Putting the fact accounted for by 1 Text/1
Speaker in terms of the distinction between Text-level and E-level
shifters reveals certain hitherto unnoticed logical consequences of the
former generalization and gives a formal status to the distinction
between two concepts made in Milner (1978): a) Lacan's concept of
the "sujet de l'nonciation", which is "le point de subjectivit auquel
on rapporte un nonc en acte et dont on ne suppose rien - ni
permanence ni conscience ni individualit" and b) the concept, "tout
descriptif, de "locuteur"'".[9] I.e., the role of I as Self or subject is
distinct from its role as speaker. This also explains why only "I"
among the traditional deictics can cooccur with the pass simple in
what Benveniste calls "histoire". This is a revision of Benveniste's

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claim that the pass simple cooccurs with no deictic, but the
exceptional cooccurance of I with the pass simple follows from the
fact that it is the only Text-level shifter. (See Banfield, 1982, pp.
146ff.).
Further Defining Features of the Text
Not all sequences of Es constitute a Text. A collection of sentences,
e.g., of proverbs, is not so constrained, nor a sequence of linguistic
examples. If they are ordered, it is by principles external to language
- in being, for instance, all examples of grammatical constructions, as
in (3):
3. a. John wrote to me on April 20.
b. I answered him immediately.
c. We continued to write each other for the next three
days.
By contrast, (3a and b) can be understood to form a Text if the NPs it
contains are interpreted as related by coreference, as in (4) below:
4. Johni contacted mej on April 20. Ij answered him i
immediately. Wei j continued to write each other for the
next three days.
The question of the coreference of "John" and "him" or of "me" and
"I" and of the coreferentiality of "We" with "John" and the first
person singular does not arise in (3), because no relation of the sort in
(4) is implied by a list of sentences. In (4), the coreference of the
proper name and the third person pronoun is optional in principle, but
in practice it is obligatory if no other relevant antecedent for "him" is
supplied by a larger context, as it would be if the sequence in (4)
were preceded by the first sentence in (5):
5. The inspectori wrote asking mej to inform him i as
soon as I heard from Johnk. Ij answered him i
immediately. Wei j continued to write each other for the

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next three days.

A similar ambiguity of referent would become possible for the third
person plural pronoun of the sequence in (4) if it were proceeded by
the first sentence in (6):
6. The inspectori and Ij had been corresponding about
John k's case for some time. Johnk contacted mej on April
20. Ij answered him j immediately. Wei j continued to
write each other for the next three days.
("Him" could equally be interpreted as coreferential with "John," and
"we" with "John" and "me".)
All instances of the first person singular, on the other hand,
must be interpreted as coreferential if the three sentences in 3 are
treated as a linguistically related sequence. It is for this reason that
direct speech constitutes a shift to a new Text, because it permits a
shift to a new referent for "I".
Concordance of Person is one formal principle defining which
sequences of Es constitute a Text. There are other such principles
which link E to E. One is that which governs the interpretation of
sequences of tenses. This is presented in Banfield (1982) as
Concordance of Tense. The verbs in the examples in (5) and (6)
above are interpreted as referring to sequential events. In the
passages below, the verbs in the pass simple in (7a), in the narrative
present tense in (7b), and in the English simple past in (7c) are
similarly understood to refer to events which occur in sequential
order. The verbs so interpreted in (7a) occur in a single E, but (7b and
c) make clear that the principle applies as well to sequences of Es.
7. a. "Trois dames parurent, s'effarrent, traversrent en
fuyant petits pas presss." Zola, L'Oeuvre, p. 158
b. "Factories, cathedrals, glass domes, institutions and
theatres erect themselves. The early train from the north
is hurled at her like a missile. We draw a curtain as we

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pass. Blank expectant faces stare at us as we rattle and

flash through stations. Men clutch their newspapers a
little tighter, as our wind sweeps them, envisaging death.
But we roar on." The Waves, p. 111
c. "Travellers watched the hands of the round yellow
clocks as they followed porters, wheeling portmanteaus,
with dogs on leashes. In all the stations trains were ready
to bore their way through England; to the North, to the
South, to the West. Now the guard standing with his
hand raised dropped his flag and the tea-urn slid past.
Off the trains swung through the public gardens with
asphalt paths; past the factories; into open country. Men
standing on bridges fishing looked up; horse cantered;
women came to doors and shaded their eyes; the shadow
of the smoke floated over the corn, looped down and
caught a tree. And on they passed." The Years, p. 193
The linear order established is non-deictic, the order of the integers.
It would thus use something like Bertrand Russell's formulation for
events in time: it happened at time T, T1, T2, Tn. . .
Milner (1990, p. 61, n. 26) notes as another feature of such
sequences definitization, giving as an example the following direct
speech construction: "(aa) A man saw a unicorn in his garden and
said to his wife: 'a/*the unicorn is in our garden'." This seems to
indicate, Milner comments, "that a change of speaker (which, in
Banfield's terms, implies a change of E) prevents definitization." But,
he adds, "there is a distinction to be made between two cases: (i) two
Es that are structurally distinct, define, however, the same reference
for the 1st person pronoun (and for other shifters); (ii) two
structurally distinct Es define different references for the 1st person
pronoun." "Definitization would only be possible in the first case.",
he concludes. (p. 61, n. 26)
The distinction between (i) and (ii) is precisely that between a
sequence of Es constituting a single Text and the particular sequence
of Texts consisting of introductory and quoted clauses of direct
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speech.[10] Thus, the indefinite noun phrases in the sequences below

are interpretable as coreferential with the appropriate definite noun
phrases in the sentences [Es] following them.
8. a. Jacob saw a lean Italian sportsman with a gun
walking down the road in the early morning light. The
man then turned a corner and disappeared. (Cf. Jacob's
Room, p. 137)
b. A stout gentleman laboriously hauled himself in,
dusty, baggy, slung with gold chains. Jacob wondered if
the man were Italian. (Cf. Jacob's Room, p. 136)
c. A young man with a Wellington nose, who had
occupied a seven-and-sixpenny seat, made his way down
the stone stairs when the opera ended. The young man
set himself somewhat apart from his fellows. (Cf.
Jacob's Room, p. 69)
d. Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a
camp-stool with her back to the stone wall of the Union
of London and Smith's bank. The old woman clasped a
brown mongrel tight in her arms. The dog was asleep.
(Cf. Jacob's Room, p. 67)
e. "An old beggar woman is fumbling at a big garden
gate. Half blind. You know the place well. Stone deaf
and not in her right mind the woman of the house is a
crony of your mother." (Beckett, Company, p. 11)
The indefinite and definite noun phrases in (8) can be understood as
coreferential because the sequences in (8a-e) form each a single Text.
Milner states correctly that a change of speaker "in Banfield's terms,
implies a change of E". But technically it is a new Text, which, a
fortiori, means a new E, rather than a new E, that permits a new
speaker. Such examples of definitization are not possible, by contrast,
across the frontiers of two Texts, including between introductory
clause and quoted clause of direct speech:[11]

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9. a. A stout gentleman confided this to the person next

to me: "The gentleman on your right is Italian."
b. An old beggar woman, as I recall, sang a song
which began, "The old woman is my mother."
c. A young man interrupted our conversation: "I must
beg to differ with the young man."
A quite different set of phenomena the prediction of whose behavior
would require reference to the unit Text is the class of sentence or
coordinating conjunctions that includes not only and, or, but but also
words like for, thus, however, French donc as discussed in Nlke and
Olsen (2000) and mais in Jorgensen (in this issue). There are
differences in the various members of this class. But they plausibly
play a role in the linking of E to E. Furthermore, many, if not all, are
excluded, it seems to me, from the initial position in the Text. This is
a subject deserving of further research.
The Epic: the Genre of Direct Speech
We have now arrived at a point where the differences between the
units E and Text can be invoked to distinguish the genres "novel" and
"short story" from the epic. We can hypothesize that the notion of
"character" within narrative in general crucially involves the
linguistic principles for which the constructs Text (as well as E) are
required, principles that involve the behavior and interpretation of
pronouns and other referring categories, e.g., the coreference of
indefinite and definite noun phrases of the sort Russell calls
"descriptions" with the special case of definite NPs, proper nouns,
and pronouns, (along with adjective phrases and other constructions
predicated of the NPs). It can be demonstrated that they are not
simply pragmatic principles. Tense also plays a role in the
development of character, in adding the idea of persistence as well as
change over time, an idea Proust foregrounded and problematized. (A
narratively realized character contrasts with the static notion of
character in texts like those of La Bruyre.) The units E and Text are
not, of course, restricted to the genre novel. But the specificity of

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novelistic character results from their being exploited in idiosyncratic

ways. In particular, the conception of character peculiar to the novel
is dependent the properties of the +human E-level shifter, Barthes'
"third person of the novel", which does not appear in the epic. This
third person pronoun is not a simple anaphor, dependent on an NP
antecedent. For this reason, it, like the first person, may occur in
initial position in a Text, as in these opening sentences of stories by
D. H. Lawrence.
10. a. "She was his second wife, and so there was
between them that truce which is never held between a
man and his first woman." "Her Turn," p. 39[12]
b. "'After all,' she said, with a little laugh, 'I can't see it
was so wonderful of you to hurry home to me, if you are
so cross when you do come.'" Lawrence, "New Eve and
Old Adam," 71
c. "She was too good for him, everybody said. Yet still
she did not regret marrying him." Lawrence, "A Sick
Collier," p. 267
A speaker cannot, by contrast, begin a conversation by saying "She
was too good for him." Indeed, incipit is a notion that is definable
with respect to the unit Text.[13]
This specificity of the E-level pronoun shifter, what I have
called elsewhere "the name of the subject", Lacan's "sujet de
l'nonciation", might be considered a core of the first person itself;
what the first person, Lacan's "locuteur", adds is obligatory
coreference from E to E. One can see this split in the I in those cases
of represented speech and thought in the first person. The sentence
"How my heart was beating now, I realized" is an example of
represented thought; the parenthetical presents a past response to a
simultaneous, past event. The first person is speaker or narrator as
well as subject or Self. 1Text/1 Speaker prevents its core of
subjectivity from detaching itself from its role as speaker and
behaving like an E-level shifter.[14].

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Aristotle's characterization of the epic in effect singles out the

alternation between sentences of narration with a first person narrator
and sentences of direct speech, i.e., of the shift from Text to Text, as
essential to the form. This is indeed an observably striking feature of
the oral epic, one readily apparent if we examine some frequent
formulas and formulaic lines which consist of introductory clauses of
direct speech, from the Homeric formula "epea pteroenta proseuda"
("spoke winged words") repeated several times verbatim to introduce
quoted speech (Iliad 1.201, 4.69, 5.242, 12.365; Odyssey 1.122,
4.77, 10.265, 16.7), to Beowulf's formulaic "Beowulf maelode"
["Beowulf spoke"] (405, 529), "Hrothgar maelode" ["Hrothgar
spoke"] (372, 925, 1840), "Weard maelode" ["The guard spoke"]
(286), or "a se wisa spraec" ["Then the wise one spoke"] (1698),
"werodes wisa, wordhord onleac" ["The company's leader unlocked
his wordhoard"] (259), to the many formulas introducing direct
speech in La Chanson de Roland.
11. dist Marslies li reis, 563; o dist li reis Marslies
580:
o dist Marsilies 520, 603
Dint Franceis 192, 243, 278, 734, 1047, 1561 [1359],
1609 [1652], 1628 [1385]
o dist Rollant 1288, 1360, 1376, 1456, 1558 [1515],
1702, 1722
o dit Rollant, 1713
o dist li reis 329 [280], 327, 508, 1789
o dit li reis 1757
o dist Turpin 1393
Dent paien, 61, 450, 467, 1590, 1666 [1615], 2115
Dent Franceis, 1508, 1536, 1544, 1579, 1604, 1627
[1585], 1652
Dist al paien, 1589, 1608 [1565], 1632, 1898
Dist Oliver 1170, 1274, 1705, 1719
Dist l'arcevesque 1280
Dist Blandandrins 370, 377, 392
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Dist li Paiens, 537, 550

Dent plusor 1434
Aprs li dist 1335
Guenes respunt 375, 518
Respont li quens 1548 [1505], 1712
Respunt li quens, 1676li quens Rollant respunt, 1026
[1025]
Respont Rollant, 1062, 1106, 1548, 1591
Respunt Rollant 292, 1053, 1088,1394, 1752Si lur ad dit
un mot curteisement 1164
Subjectivity or point of view is not "represented" in the oral epic;
instead there are shifts to the character's spoken viewpoint. These
frequent passages of direct speech mark the "public" aspect of the
epic hero or heroine, who is constituted by his or her words and
deeds. Novelistic character is, by contrast, "private".[15] (We might
also see a further connection between the epic's public performance
and the novel's private "consumption".) This difference between epic
hero and heroine and novelistic character is captured in the difference
between the first person used for the former in direct speech and the
E-level shifter used for the second.
The Shift in Point of View
The epic's manipulation of direct speech allows the shift to a new
Text and hence to a new speaker and that speaker's spoken point of
view. There is another possibility for the novel. Once it has
eliminated the first person elsewhere than its use of direct speech, it
neutralizes or renders null 1 Text/1 Speaker. Novelistic character's
subjectivity is separated from its role as speaker and subjectivity
disconnected from speech. Point of view or subjectivity can then be
located in the special third person pronoun, the E-level shifter. In the
process, the link between E and E forged by 1 Text/1 Speaker is
dissolved. Each E in theory can now, in the absence of a first person,
represent an independent point of view. I say "in theory", because in
fact if point of view shifted radically from every E to every E, it

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would frequently be impossible either to detect the shift or to decide

whose point of view was represented. Yet there seems to be no
formal principle that constrains the shift in point of view within a
single Text. Here is plausibly a case where pragmatic principles
intervene. Consider the examples of shifts in point of view in (12). At
some point in the Text we pass from an E representing one (or no)
Self's point of view to one representing another Self's point of view.
(I indicate where the shifts occur by placing in bold face the name of
the character whose point of view is represented; I further indicate
whether the point of view has the form of represented speech (R.S.)
or represented thought (R. T.) or whether a sentence of Pure
Narration intervenes between those representing point of view. In
some further cases, I indicate where the shift is marked by a
distinction between reflective or non-reflective consciousness, as
discussed in Banfield (1982, pp. 183ff.)
12.

Shifts in Point of View

a. [Mr. Ramsay] "He would
find some simple easy thing to say to her.
But what? For, wrapped up in his work as he
was, he forgot the sort of thing one said.
There was a puppy. They had a puppy.
[R.S.] Who was looking after the puppy
today? he asked. [James, D. S.] Yes,
thought James pitilessly, seeing his sister's
head against the sail, now she will give
away. I shall be left to fight the tyrant alone.
The compact would be left for him to carry
out. [R. T.] Cam would never resist tyranny
to the death, he thought grimly, watching
her face, sad, sulky, yielding. [Pure
Narration] And as sometimes happens
when a cloud falls on a green hillside and
gravity descends and there among all the

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surrounding hills is gloom and sorrow, and it

seems as if the hills themselves must ponder
the fate of the clouded, the darkened, either
in pity, or maliciously rejoicing in her
dismay: [Cam, R. T.] so Cam now felt
herself overcast, as she sat there among
calm, resolute people and wonder how to
answer her father about the puppy?. Virginia
Woolf, To the Lighthouse, pp. 250-1
b. [Lily Briscoe] "Gently the
waves would break (Lily heard them in her
sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to
come through her eyelids). [Augustus
Carmichael] And it all looked, Mr.
Carmichael thought, shutting his book,
falling asleep, much as it used to look." To
the Lighthouse, pp. 214
c. [Linda] Exquisite were her
mother's hands, and the two rings she wore
seemed to melt into her creamy skin. And
she was always so fresh, so delicious. The
old woman could bear nothing but linen
next to her body and she bathed in cold
water winter and summer.
"Isn't there anything for
me to do?" asked Linda.
"No, darling. I wish you would
go into the garden and give an eye to your
children; but that I know you will not do."
"Of course I will, but you
know Isabel is much more grown up than
any of us."
"Yes, but Kezia is not," said
Mrs. Fairfield.

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"Oh, Kezia has been tossed up

in her shawl again.
[Kezia] But no, Kezia had
seen a bull through a hole in a knot of wood
in the paling that separated the tennis lawn
from the paddock. But she had not liked the
bull frightfully, so she had walked back
through the orchard, up the grassy slope,
along the path by the lace-bark tree and so
into the spread tangled garden. Katherine
Mansfield, "Prelude," p. 73.
d. [Kezia] Whatever could it
be? She had never seen anything like it
before. She stood and stared. And then she
saw her mother coming down the path.
"Mother, what is it?" asked
Kezia.
[Linda] Linda looked up at the fat swelling plant with
its cruel leaves. High above them, as though becalmed in the air, and
yet holding so fast to the earth it grew from, it might have had claws
instead of roots. The curving leaves seemed to be hiding something .
. ." Katherine Mansfield, "Prelude" pp.74-5
e. [Lily Briscoe] "But now, with all her
senses quickened as they were, looking, straining, till the
colour of the wall and the jacmanna beyond burnt into
her eyes, she was aware of some one coming out of the
house, coming towards her; but somehow divined, from
the footfall, William Bankes, so that though her brush
quivered, she did not, as she would have done had it
been Mr. Tansley, Paul Rayley, Minna Doyle, or
practically anybody else, turn her canvas upon the grass,
but let it stand. William Bankes stood beside her.

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[Lily?, plural point of view of Lily and

Mr. Bankes?, Mr. Bankes? "They had rooms in the
village, and so, walking in, walking out, parting late on
door-mats, had said little things about the soup, about the
children, about one thing and another which made them
allies; [Mr. Bankes] so that when he stood beside her
now in his judicial way (he was old enough to be her
father too, a botanist, a widower, smelling of soap, very
scrupulous and clean) she just stood there. He just stood
there. Her shoes were excellent, he observed. They
allowed the toes their natural expansion. Lodging in the
same house with her, he had noticed too, how orderly she
was, up before breakfast and off to paint, he believed,
alone: poor, presumably, and without the complexion or
the allurement of Miss Doyle certainly, but with a good
sense which made her in his eyes superior to that young
lady. Now, for instance, when Ramsay bore down on
them, shouting, gesticulating, Miss Briscoe, he felt
certain, understood.
"Some one had blundered."
[Lily and Mr. Bankes] Mr. Ramsay glared
at them. He glared at them without seeming to see them.
That did make them both vaguely uncomfortable.
Together they had seen a thing they had not been meant
to see. They had encroached upon a privacy. [Lily] So,
Lily thought, it was probably an excuse of his for
moving, for getting out of earshot, that made Mr. Bankes
almost immediately say something about its being chilly
and suggest taking a stroll. She would come, yes. To the
Lighthouse, p. 30
f. [conversation in represented speech,
Mrs. Ramsay] Wasn't it late? she asked. They hadn't
come home yet. [Pure Narration] He flicked his watch
carelessly open. [Mr. Ramsay] But it was only just past

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seven. [Mr. R, represented thought] He held his watch

open for a moment, deciding that he would tell her what
he had felt on the terrace. To begin with, it was not
reasonable to be so nervous. Andrew could look after
himself. Then, he wanted to tell her that when he was
walking on the terrace just now - here he became
uncomfortable, as if he were breaking into that solitude,
that aloofness, that remoteness of hers . . . . [Woolf's
ellipses] But she pressed him. [Mrs. R, represented
speech] What had he wanted to tell her, she asked,
thinking it was about going to the Lighthouse; that he
was sorry he had said "Damn you." [Mrs. R,
represented thought] But no. [Mr. R] He did not like to
see her look so sad, he said. [Mrs. R] Only wool
gathering, she protested, flushing a little. They both felt
uncomfortable, as if they did not know whether to go on
or go back. [Mrs. R, represented speech] She had been
reading fairy tales to James, she said. [Mrs. R,
represented thought - or Mr. & Mrs. R] No, they could
not share that; they could not say that. To the Lighthouse,
pp. 103-4
g. [William Bankes] He seemed to be
rather cocksure, this young man; and his manners were
bad. But Mr. Bankes bade himself observe, he had
courage; he had ability; he was extremely well up in the
facts. Probably, Mr. Bankes thought, as Tansley abused
the government, there is a good deal in what he says.
"Tell me now . . . [Woolf's ellipses]" he
said. [Lily Briscoe?] So they argued about politics, and
Lily looked at the leaf on the tablecloth; [Mrs. Ramsay]
and Mrs. Ramsay, leaving the argument entirely in the
hands of the two men, wondered why she was so bored
by this talk, and wished, looking at her husband at the
other end of the table, that he would say something. One

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word, she said to herself. For if he said a thing, it would

make all the difference. He went to the heart of things.
To the Lighthouse, p. 94
h. "'Do you write many letters, Mr.
Tansley?' asked Mrs. Ramsay, [Lily Briscoe] pitying
him too, Lily supposed; for that was true of Mrs. Ramsay
- she pitied men always as if they lacked something women never, as if they had something. [Charles
Tansley, represented speech] He wrote to his mother;
otherwise he did not suppose he wrote one letter a
month, said Mr. Tansley shortly.
[Charles Tansley, represented thought]
"He was not going to be condescended to by these silly
women. He had been reading in his room, and now he
came down and it all seemed to him silly, superficial,
flimsy. Why did they dress? He had come down in his
ordinary clothes. He had not got any dress clothes. . . .
Yes, it was pretty well true, he thought. They never got
anything worth having from one year's end to another.
They did nothing but talk, talk, talk, eat, eat, eat. It was
the women's fault. Women made civilization impossible
with all their "charm," all their silliness.
"'No going to the Lighthouse tomorrow,
Mrs. Ramsay,' he said, asserting himself. He liked her;
he admired her; he still thought of the man in the
drain-pipe looking up at her; but he felt it necessary to
assert himself.
[Lily Briscoe] "He was really, Lily Briscoe
thought, in spite of his eyes, but then look at this nose,
look at his hands, the most uncharming human being she
had ever met. Then why did she mind what he said?" To
the Lighthouse, p. 86
i. [James Ramsay] "Meanwhile, he

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noticed, Cam dabbled her fingers in the water, and stared

at the shore and said nothing. No, she won't give way, he
thought; she's different, he thought. [Mr. Ramsay] Well,
if Cam would not answer him, he would not bother her
Mr. Ramsay decided, feeling in his pocket for a book.
[Cam Ramsay] But she would answer him; she wished,
passionately, to move some obstacle that lay upon her
tongue and to say, Oh, yes, Frisk." To the Lighthouse, p.
169.
j. [shift from Narration to the
representation of non-reflective consciousness] "Puis,
tous entrrent un un sous la petite coupole jour."
"Paris tait sous eux, droite, gauche,
partout." Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Manette
Salomon, p. 81
l. "La vieille femme lui prit
silencieusement la tte dans ses deux mains, la serra
contre son coeur, poussa un soupir, et laissa chapper:
--Allons! Il faut donc vivre encore!
"Ceci se passait dans une petite chambre
dont la fentre montrait un troit morceau de ciel coup
de trois noirs tuyaux de tle, des lignes de toits, et au
loin, entre deux maisons qui se touchaient presque, la
branche d'un arbre qu'on ne voyait pas." Edmond et Jules
de Goncourt, Germinie Lacerteux, p. 59
There are various ways of choreographing a shift in point of view,
some of which are illustrated above. Sometimes we pass from an E of
represented thought with one point of view or Self to another with
another Self via a sentence of narration, as in (12a), via a sentence of
direct speech, as in (12c) or via the use of parentheticals, as in many
of the examples of (12). Sometimes we pass from Narration to the
representation of non-reflective consciousness, as in (12a),

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sometimes from a point of view to pure Narration, as in (12b) and

(12c). (12c) is particularly revealing, because the last sentence
invokes "the branch of a tree which couldn't be seen." If the narration
had been in the first person, the knowledge of this branch would be
registered by at least one character, the first person narrator. In the
novel as it appears, there is no supposition that any character is aware
of this branch.
In this way, the novelistic universe contains many points of
view, some occupied by different individuals at different moments "Nows" - and some unoccupied. The total knowledge of that universe
is therefore possessed by no one character in it, none is "omniscient";
it is possessed by the novel or story as a whole. This implicit
epistemology of the novel follows from the linguistic properties of
the units E and Text, once the elimination of the first person renders
null 1 Text/1 Speaker. The whole - the linguistic artifact through
which this universe is represented, the Text - is held together by other
principles than 1 Text/1 Speaker, those determining Sequence of
Tense, the Coreference of NPs with lexical head nouns and their
pronoun anaphoras, definitization, etc. That whole nonetheless
permits the internal shifting of point of view, because point of view is
attached no longer rigidly to the Text via its I, but to an E-level
Shifter, grammar's name for the subject.
Bibliography
Aristotle (1954), The Rhetoric & The Poetics of Aristotle, Rhys
Roberts and Ingram Bywater, trans., Random House, New York.
Banfield, Ann (1998), "The Name of the Subject: the 'il'", The Place
of Maurice Blanchot, Tom Pepper (ed.), Yale French Studies, No. 93,
fall, 133-174.
Banfield, Ann (2001), "Le Nom Propre du Rel", Cahier
Jean-Claude Milner, Jean-Marie Marandin (ed.) Paris: ditions
Verdier, pp. 229-266.
Banfield, Ann (1973), "Narrative Style and the Grammar of Direct
and Indirect Speech," Foundations of Language, 10, pp. 1-39.
Banfield, Ann (1982), Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and

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Representation in the Language of Fiction. Routledge & Kegan Paul,

London.
Barthes, Roland (153 et 1964), Le Degr Zro de L'criture suivi de
lments de Smiologie. ditions Gonthier, Paris.
Duggan, Joseph (1969), Concordance to the Chanson de Roland,
Ohio State Univ. Press, Columbus, Ohio.
Emonds, Joseph. (1987). "Parts of Speech in Generative Grammar",
Linguistic Analysis 17: 3-42.
Fludernik, Monica (1993), The Fictions of Language and the
Languages of Fiction Routledge, London.\
Fludernik, Monica (1996), Towards a 'Natural' Narratology, New
York.
Hamburger, Kte (1973), The Logic of Literature, Marilyn Rose,
trans., Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Hanson, Kristin (1996), "Une thorie phonologique du mtre et ses
consquences pour le pentamtre iambique anglais", Bulletin de la
socit stylistique anglaise, pp. 57-72.
Hanson, Kristin (1997), "From Dante to Pinsky: A theoretical
perspective on the history of the modern English iambic pentameter",
Rivista di Linguistica, 9.1, pp. 53-97.
Hanson, Kristin and Kiparsky, Paul (1997), "The Nature of Verse and
its Consequences for the Mixed Form", in Reichl, Karl and Joseph
Harris (eds), Prosimetrum: cross-cultural perspectives on narrative
in verse and prose. D. S. Brewer, Cambridge, pp. 17-44.
Jahn, Manfred (1992), "Contextualizing Represented Speech and
Thought", Journal of Pragmatics 17, pp. 347-67.
Jrgensen, Katherine Ravn (in this issue), "Le connecteur mais et le
discours indirect libre"
Marnette, Sophie (1996), "Rflexions sur le discours indirect libre en
franais mdivale", Romania, Vol. 114, pp. 1-149.
Marnette, Sophie (1998), Narrateur et points de vue dans la
littrature franaise mdivale, Peter Lang, Berne.
Milner, Jean-Claude. (1978), De la syntax l'interprtation, Seuil,
Paris.

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Milner, Jean-Claude (1982), "Rflexions sur le fonctionnement du

vers franais," in Ordres et Raisons de Langue, Seuil, Paris.
Milner, Jean-Claude (1990), "Some Remarks on Principle C", in
Binding in Romance: Essays in Honour of Judith McA'Nulty, Di
Sciullo, Anne-Marie and Anne Rochette, Canadian Linguistics
Association, Ottawa, pp. 41-66.
Nlke, Henning and Olsen, Michel (2000), "Donc pour conclure.
Polyphonie et style indirect libre : analyses littraire et linguistique ",
Actes du XIVe Congrs des Romanistes scandinaves, Stockholm
10-15 aot 1999. Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Romanica
Stockholmiensia 19, d. Jane Nystedt. Cd-rom.
Nlke, Henning and Olsen, Michel (to appear), "Puisque: indice de
polyphonie?", Faits de Langue.
Plato (1974), The Republic, Desmond Lee, trans., 2nd revised
edition, Penguin, New York.
Ruppenhofer, Josef (2001), Unpublished handout, Berkeley-Stanford
Language Change Workshop I, April 28, 2001.
Violi, Patrizia (1986), "Review article: Unspeakable Sentences and
Unspeakable Texts", Semiotica 60. 3-4, pp. 361-78.
Corpus
Beckett, Samuel, Company, Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1980.
Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, Fr. Klaeber (ed.), D. C. Heath
and Company, Boston, 1922.
de Goncourt, Edmond et Jules, Manette Salomon, Prface de Michel
Crouzet, dition tablie et annote par Stphanie Champeua avec le
concours d'Adrien Goetz. Gallimard, Paris, 1996.
Lawrence, D.H., The Complete Stories of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 1,
Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1922 (1961).
La Chanson de Roland, Cesare Segre (ed.), Riccardo Ricciardi
Editore, Milano, Napoli, 1971. or Cesare Segre, La Chanson de
Roland (2 vols.; Textes Littraires Franais, 368; Geneva: Droz,
1989).
Mansfield, Katherine, Stories, edited by Elizabeth Bowen, Random
House, New York, 1956.

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Scott, Walter, The Antiquary, Penguin Books.

Woolf, Virginia, Jacob's Room, New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1922 (1950).
Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway, New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1925 (1985).
Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse, New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1927 (1955).
Woolf, Virginia, The Years, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1937.
Woolf, Virginia, The Waves, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1931.
Zola, mile, L'Oeuvre, Prface de Brunou Foucart; dition tablie et
annote par Henri Mitterand, ditions Gallimard, Paris, 1983.
Notes:
1. See also Hanson (1996, p. 57).
2. Against the naturalist hypothesis is ranged the current
conventionalist orthodoxy. One among many examples of it is that
presented in Fludernik (1993). She "foreground[s] the invented
quality of all representational processes and insist[s] on their
consequent fictionalization . . . . reported discourse constitutes a
fiction that language fabricates in accordance with discourse strategic
requirements etc." Fludernik (1996), despite the title - Towards a
'Natural' Narrotology-, continues this "by firmly reiterating my
insights about the artificial nature, inventedness and fictionality of
the mimetic", now extending it "to cover, quite generally, all mimetic
representation." (p. 10) In "propos[ing] to redefine narrativity in
terms of cognitive ('natural') parameters, moving beyond formal
narratology into the realm of pragmatics, reception theory and
constructivism" and in admitting that "the term 'natural' in the title
feeds from three separate disciplines and areas of knowledge",
Fludernik puts the language of anti-conventionalism-"cognitive
parameters", "natural", "a theory of naturalness" - contradictorily in

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the service of constructivism.

3. These are the features which can be imitated or parodied, as Proust
knew, and which certain computer studies seek to identify.
4. The formal distinctions that are being made here can be considered
independently of any theory of representation or mimesis.
5. The fact that Aristotle seems to exclude lyric poetry from
"mimesis" leads Hamburger (1973) to treat first person narration as
logically distinct from third person narration. See pp. 10ff.
6. Fludernik (1993) claims that when a formal analysis of the E
"eventually has to have recourse to contextual criteria, these are alien
to the framework [of Banfield (1982)], whereas the conventional
account of free indirect discourse can much more easily handle
interference from the 'previous sentence' or, indeed, paragraph". (p.
362) Here Fludernik does not understand the constraints under which
a theory which aims not merely to repeat the intuitions of traditional
criticism but to be minimally "formal" and empirical operates. Yes, as
Fludernik writes, "[a]s a linguistic theory about free indirect
discourse, Banfield's model therefore exposes itself to empirical
verification and falsification." (1993, p. 362) It only must be added
that any theory of the novel, whatever its points of reference, if it is
to be non-trivial, must "expose itself" to falsification. Fludernik
mentions Jahn (1992) and Violi (1986) as "regret[ing] the sentenceby-sentence approach in Banfield's model, which - as already noted is a direct consequence of her modified Chomskyan framework."
(Fludernik, 1993, p. 364) But Violi's reference to the notion of text is
quite different from either Jahn's or Fludernik's.
7. See Banfield (1998 and 2001).
8. There are cases where the temporal deictic "now" does not shift
referent. Cf. "All is solid now. Instinctively my palate now requires
and anticipates sweetness and lightness . . . . Now I can look steadily

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into the mill-race that foams beneath." The Waves, p. 138 It seems to
me strained to read the first two nows as other than simultaneous.
9. I ignore a third concept Milner distinguishes, that of the "sujet
parlant" defined as "un point de subjectivit par rapport la capacit
de parler, indpendamment de toute mise en acte; c'est donc le
concept d'une permanence qui, par-del les noncs singuliers, les
unifie." (1978, p. 229, n. 1)
10. Introductory clause and quoted clause of direct speech are not any
two random Texts; they are two related but separate Texts. In
Banfield (1973 and 1982), there is a relation of coreference between
a demonstrative in the introductory clause and the entire quoted E.
11. Certain cases of coreference can also operate between
introductory clause and quoted clause of direct speech, i.e., between
two related Texts. For example, the subject of a communication verb
in the introductory clause is interpreted as having the same referent
as the first person in the quoted clause:
The directori said to mej, "Ii will guarantee that youj will receive the
order by the eighth." But the coreference of the sort found in (4-6)
where a pronoun corefers with a proper name, for instance, is in
contrast to that holding between introductory clause and quoted
clause in direct speech, where the pronoun seems less acceptable:
"Mary asked Bill's sister, 'Is Bill (?he) your younger brother?'"
By contrast, dialogue has somewhat different constraints. An
indefinite noun phrase used by a first speaker may be coreferential
with a noun phrase containing a demonstrative but not with one
containing a noun phrase with a definite article, as in the relation of E
to E in the same Text in the examples of (8). Thus, if speaker A says
"I saw an old woman", speaker B may felicitously respond "That old
woman is my mother" but not "The old woman is my mother."
12. It seems also to be possible to begin a novel or short story with a
pronoun without antecedent if it occurs within the point of view of a
character. Thus, in (11a), either pronoun, his or she, is eligible to be

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interpreted as the E-level shifter, i.e.; as the Self of the E; the other
would refer to the object of the Self's thought. A third possibility is
that the sentence represents the plural point of view of them.
13. Phenomena like definitization also seem to show special behavior
in this position. My intuition is that Texts beginning with a definite
as opposed to an indefinite NP, even including the proper noun, mark
themselves as specifically novelistic, like those in (11). "Once upon
a time there lived a little girl. The girl..." is not a novelistic opening,
whereas "The girl left the cool of the house and walked into the hot
streets of the city" is.
14. Marcel Vuillaume has pointed out to me the following example:
"Superbe, ai-je-dit. Magnifique. Par accident, je prends
en filature deux encaisseurs d'un gros gang, je n'en sais rien. Le
mme gros gang vient de faire disparatre une nnette, et vous me
branchez directement sur la disparition de la nnette, et je ne suis
toujours au courant de rien. Vous savez ce que j'aurais fait leur
place ?- Ben - Je me serais abattu, ai-je bredouill. J'aurais abattu
Eugne Tarpon, tout de suite, trs vite? (Jean-Patrick MANCHETTE,
Que d'Os!, pp 164-165)
The sentence "Je me serais abattu!, Vuillaume maintains, is to
be understood unambiguously with the two instances of the first
person having disjoint reference, with the first occurence of "je"
referring to the gang and the second to the narrator-here, Eugne
Tarpon, who is a private detective. "J'(i) aurais abattu Eugne
Tarpon(j)", where "les hommes du gang" = (i) and "Eugne Tarpon"
= (j) In English, there are two possible translations of the sentence,
"I would have killed myself" and "I would have killed me", both
more or less equivalent in meaning, although the reading with
disjoint reference is clearer with either the non-reflexive pronoun or
when the reflexive pronoun is contrastively stressed. The example
makes clear that, despite the splitting of reference, 1 Text/1 I
nonetheless holds. For the contrast with the third person counterpart

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"He would have killed him", which only permits a reading with
disjoint reference for the two third person pronouns, by contrast with
"He would have killed himself", shows that, insofar as the first
person refers to the speaker or "locuteur", there is still coreference in
"Je me serais abattu."
15. Of course, direct speech occurs in the novel as well. It is the
absence of represented thought in the epic that is crucial. But we can
observe differences between the use of direct speech in these two
forms. The novel places a value on variety-in vocabulary, in
wording, in the order of words. An interesting case is furnished by
the difference between the formulas introducing direct speech in the
epic style and the "parentheticals" which often accompany both direct
speech and represented speech and thought in the novel, as in "Oh
how happy she was, she realized." Ruppenhofer (2001) writes that
the way in which quoted speech is presented "differs quite
significantly between the spoken and the written mode.
In
conversation, only a limited number of different speech reporting
verbs occur." He lists the verbs "ask, bawl, be like, decide, figure,
go, it be, it be like, say, tell, think, wonder" (p. 1). "The reporting
verbs used are also more varied in number and type" in
writing. Ruppenhofer's sample includes "add, admit, agree, answer,
ask, assure, bark, comment, confess, confirm, continue, counter,
croak, demand, echo, explain, hiss, lie, query, remark, remind,
reply, retort, say, shout, shriek, sob, tap out, tell, think, whisper".
The examples below of such parentheticals illustrate the novel's
tendency to vary them, even though nothing in their nature requires
that they not be the same formula each time. It is also apparent that
this tendency was well-established long before contemporary fiction,
even if, as Ruppenhofer claims, certain kinds of communication
verbs have "gained in frequency particularly . . . Manner and Noise
verbs". (p. 7) The following list from Sir Walter Scott's The
Antiquary indicates the great variety of these parentheticals even in a
short space: "answered the Naiad", "retorted the Antiquary",
"rejoined the virago", (p. 88); "blubbered the boy", (p. 116). As

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suggested in Banfield (1982, p. 86), by the time of Joyce's Ulysses,

the practice was established enough to be parodied.

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