Adam Lively: Writer – Literary Mentoring and Coaching

Fiction’s distinctive magic lies in its ability to transport the reader seamlessly from the external action of the story into the most private and intimate thoughts and feelings of a character, sidestepping the clunkiness of filmic voiceover or dramatic Shakespearean soliloquy. Take the following passage from Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) – it comes at a crucial moment in the novel when the protagonist, Anne Eliot, is meeting Frank Wentorth for the first time since she broke off their engagement eight years previously (a decision she has since come profoundly to regret):

Mary, very much gratified by this attention, was delighted to receive him; while a thousand feelings rushed in on Anne, of which this was the most consoling, that it would soon be over. And it was soon over. In two minutes after Charles’s preparation, the others appeared; they were in the drawing-room. Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s; a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice – he talked to Mary, said all that was right; said something to the Miss Musgroves, enough to mark an easy footing: the room seemed full – full of persons and voices – but a few minutes ended it. Charles shewed himself at the window, all was ready, their visitor had bowed and was gone; the Miss Musgroves were gone too, suddenly resolving to walk to the end of the village with the sportsmen the room was cleared, and Anne might finish her breakfast as she could.

“It is over! it is over!” she repeated to herself again and again, in nervous gratitude. “The worst is over!”

Mary talked, but she could not attend. She had seen him. They had met. They had been once more in the same room!

If we stand back and look at this passage from the point-of-view of linguistic technique, what’s striking is the way that it brings together an objective account of what transpired in the room during Captain Wentworth’s brief visit with a strong simultaneous sense of Anne’s subjective feelings about it. To put it in slightly more technical terms, although it’s written in the “third-person” (it’s not Anne herself narrating it), it contains expressive elements (the fractured quality of the sentences as the impressions flood in on Anne, the use of exclamation marks) and evaluations (“said all that was right. . . enough to mark an easy footing”) that one normally  associates with a “first-person” narration, with Anne herself voicing it.

This “dual voice” – combining within a single discourse the perspectives of objective authorial narrator and subjective character – is usually given the cumbersome technical title Free Indirect Discourse. FID has long fascinated linguists because it’s a comparatively new form of language, and one that belongs almost exclusively to written language, especially fiction. (One can unearth examples of its use in oral language (regular conversation) and pre-1800 literature, but they’re few and far between.) In terms of English literature, Jane Austen was one of the great pioneers of its use – it’s precisely her ability to transport us directly into the minds of her characters that continues to make her novels absorbing and compelling, even now when we’ve left that world of teacups and crinolines far behind us.

In modern fiction, the kind of technique that Austen pioneered has become almost ubiquitous. Virtuosic stylists like John Updike revel in its subtle, shimmering alternation it affords between objective and subjective perspectives, as in the ending of Rabbit, Run (1960):

Although this block of brick three-stories is just like the one he left, something in it makes him happy; the steps and windowsills seem to twitch and shift in the corner of his eye, alive. This illusion trips him. His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.

Above all, Free Indirect Discourse is dynamic and flexible: it enables the writer to “zoom in” to the character’s most intimate perspective and then, because it remains a “third-person” narrative, to zoom out again. The passage I’ve quoted above from Persuasion is not typical of the novel as a whole, much of which is written in a more distanced manner. Austen deliberately uses the technique here because it is a moment of emotional jeopardy and crisis for her protagonist – in much the same way that a film director would cut to a close-up of the actor’s face, registering the emotion. In thrillers, one will often find touches of FID used when a character is in physical jeopardy, to strengthen the reader’s identification with the character and thus build suspense.

It’s this dynamic flexibility of FID that makes it such a powerful tool for modern novelists – though there may be more distanced or epic types of storytelling for which it may be less appropriate. In a future blog I’ll delve further into its history and technicalities, which for language-nerds (i.e. writers) are fascinating in themselves. . .