visions of the other and free indirect speech in artistic...
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Visions of the Other and free indirect speech by Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli
Visions of the Other and free indirect speech in Artistic Discourse
Bakhtin, Pasolini, Deleuze
Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli
1. Free indirect speech
Philological and linguistic studies on the forms of reported speech, in particular free
indirect speech, play a central role in the problem of the relationship between one’s own
vision and someone else’s vision, whether a question of the ordinary utterance, the
literary text, or the novel.
Pier Paolo Pasolini dedicates a whole essay in Empirismo eretico (1972, pp. 81–103) to
free indirect speech and returns to the problem on several occasions in his reflections on
“how to make films”. He takes free indirect speech as a model to create what he calls “free-
indirect subjective” (“soggettiva libera indiretta”), where different visions encounter
each other and interact. In his studies, Pasolini refers to Giulio Herczeg, author of Alcune
costruzioni assolute in italiano (1948), Saggi linguistici e stilistici (1972), Dizionario
italiano ungherese, and in particular to Herczeg’s analyses in Lo stile indiretto libero in
italiano (1963).
Herczeg’s book has recourse in particular to studies by the Austrian philologist and
critic Leo Spitzer. Under the influence of the philologist Karl Vossler and Benedetto Croce,
Spitzer had created a sort of synthesis between linguistics and literary criticism. Herczeg
also makes use of Nicola Vita’s work on erlebte Rede; Vittorio Lugli’s reflections on free
indirect speech in Flaubert and Verga; Charles Bally’s “pioneer” studies on free indirect
speech (publishing an article in 1912 in the journal Germanische-romanische
Monatsschrift, IV, and another, “Figures de pensée et formes linguistiques”, in 1914, in
issue VI of the same journal, in reply to Theodor Kalepky). Another book taken into
consideration by Herczeg is Le style indirect libre, 1926, by Marguerite Lips, Bally’s
alumna. He also referred to considerations made by the German linguist cited above,
Theodor Kalepky – who had already criticized Bally’s interpretation of free indirect
discourse in early 1913. Another reference is Eugen Lerch who, in 1914, with Gertraud
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Lerch (both followers of Vossler) also contributed to the discussion on free indirect
discourse. E. Lerch describes the latter as “speech as fact” (Rede als Tatsache) to indicate
that in free indirect discourse the author himself communicates the word of the other as
though it were a fact.
The interplay between one’s own word and someone else’s word, therefore free
indirect discourse where such interaction is most evident, is the central theme in Part III
of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, by Valentin N. Vološinov (I ed. 1929, II ed.
1930; Eng. trans. 1973; It. trans. 1976). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language is a
decidedly Bakhtinian text and – with another monograph by Vološinov, Freudianism. A
Critical Sketch (1927), as well as other essays published between 1926 and 1930 – may
be considered as an expression of the Bakhtin Circle.
In what follows we shall refer to the third part of Marxism and the Philosophy of
Language, “Toward a History of Forms of Utterance in Language Constructions”, now
available in Italian translation as an independent volume titled, Parola propria e parola
altrui nella sintassi dell’enunciazione (One’s own word and the other’s word in utterance
syntax) (Bakhtin & Vološinov 2010).
Vološinov took an interest in the Bakhtin Circle in 1919. Subsequently, he worked
towards his doctorate at the Institute of Oriental and Occidental Languages and
Literature (ILJaZV), in Leningrad, where he studied with Lev Jakubinskij and Vasilij
Desnickij. He presented his research project for the years 1927-28, supervised by
Desnickij and N. Jalole, and as the topic of his research indicated the relation between
one’s own word and the word of the other.
Anyone familiar with the section titled “Discourse in Dostoevsky” in Bakhtin’s
monograph Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (whether the first 1929, or second 1963
edition), or with Estetika slovesnogo tvorcestva, 1979 (It. trans. L’autore e l’eroe, 1988)
will immediately recognize this theme as “Bakhtinian”. The research project presented
by Vološinov is titled “Transmission of the word of the other”, and essentially
corresponds to Part III in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.
Interference between one’s own word and someone else’s word increases significantly
in free indirect speech, creating the phenomenon of dialogism internal to the word,
internal to the same utterance. Internal dialogism was a central interest among members
Visions of the Other and free indirect speech by Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli
of the Bakhtin Circle and is what Bakhtin had in mind when he spoke of “dialogue”.
“Dialogue” – notwithstanding widespread misunderstandings concerning Bakhtin’s
interpretation of the term – means something completely different, therefore, from what
is commonly understood. Indeed, in Bakhtin’s sense its meaning is inversely proportional
to the common understanding: in fact, the more dialogue is limited to external dialogue
among rejoinders, formal dialogue, like dialogue among characters in dramatic genres,
and the less is there dialogue in the Bakhtinian sense, that is, in the sense of dialogue
internal to the same utterance.
Vološinov refers to free indirect discourse, which he indicates with the expression
“nesobstvennaja prjamaja reč”, “improperly direct discourse”, which is the name
introduced by Gertraud Lerch (“uneigentliche direckte Rede”) for what today is generally
known as free indirect discourse. The expression quasi-direct discourse appears in the
1973 English translation of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Instead, the
expression discours indirecte libre appears in the 2010 French edition, which is analogous
to the expression, discorso indiretto libero, used in the 2010 Italian translation cited
above. Vološinov’s analysis begins from an essay published in 1887 (in Zeitschrift für
Romanische Philologie, XI) by the Swiss philologist, Adolf Tobler, rejecting the latter’s
interpretation of free indirect discourse as “eigentümliche Michung direkter und
indirekter Rede”, “orginal mixture of direct and indirect discourse”.
Instead, Vološinov places particular importance on the thesis maintained by Theodor
Kalepky (Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, XIII, 1899) who recognized free indirect
discourse as a third, absolutely independent, form of reported discourse, defining it as
“verschleierte Rede” (“veiled discourse”).
Vološinov then goes on to discuss the position held by Charles Bally and by the
“Vosslerians”: Eugen Lerch who, as observed above, characterizes free indirect discourse
in his discussion with Bally as “Rede als Tatsache”, “speech as [narrated] fact”; Etienne
Lorck, author of the little volume Die “Erlebte Rede” (1921), who defines free indirect
discourse as “experienced discourse” (erlebte Rede), in contradistinction to direct
discourse, defined as “repeated discourse” (gesprochene Rede), and indirect discourse
which is “communicated discourse” (berichtete Rede); finally, Gertraud Lerch who assigns
an important role to empathy (Einfülung) in her explanation of free indirect discourse,
indicated as “uneigentliche direkte Rede” (semi-direct discourse).
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2. Utterance syntax and free indirect discourse
In Part III of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, the interest in free indirect
discourse is not so much of a stylistic order, nor a question of poetics, as in Bakhtin’s
Dostoevsky. The second edition (1963) was entitled Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (It.
trans. Dostoevskij. Poetica e stilistica, 1968), rather than as the 1929 edition, Problems of
Dostoevsky’s Artwork (It. trans. Problemi dell’opera di Dostoevskij, 1997).
The problem of the relation between one’s own word and the word of the other is
mainly a problem of the linguistic order and is fundamental for a linguistics of the
utterance. Both Bakhtin’s book of 1929 as well as Vološinov’s, published that same year,
converge on this point, even using the same terminology and argumentations.
Unlike the sentence, the dead cell of language, which is generally the object of study by
linguistics, whether taxonomical or generative transformational linguistics, the word,
even when a question of the basic unit, the utterance, the live cell of speech, is always
involved with the word of others, because the word implies listening, is realized in
listening, the word responds and calls for a response.
On the level of sense, the basic unit is the utterance, because only an utterance can
elicit responsive understanding. The utterance is contextualized, belongs to someone and
is addressed to someone; it is endowed with implied meaning, is accentuated, and is
finalized to expressing something. All this is absent in the sentence whose meaning or
possible meanings can only be understood by imagining it as a possible utterance,
investing it with all the above-mentioned characteristics of the utterance, that is, by
conferring a possible sense upon it.
The question of reported discourse is mainly a question of syntax, precisely the syntax
of the utterance, given that the utterance lives in the encounter among words. Syntax of
the sentence is one thing, syntax of the utterance is completely different. The utterance
necessarily involves encounter of the word with the word of the other, even more so,
obviously, when a question of reported discourse.
To consider the relation between the reported word and the reporting word from a
linguistic point of view instead of, or not only, from the stylistic, means to consider how
particular reception and transmission modalities of the discourse of others are
Visions of the Other and free indirect speech by Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli
sedimented in language, and how this process varies from one language to another and
according to the historical era.
It could be claimed that here the problem of listening becomes the problem of listening
by language (lingua, that is, historical natural language). In other words, it is a question
of examining the attitude a given language takes toward the word of the other and,
therefore, of considering the instruments it provides on a syntactic level to receive and
transmit the word of the other.
To report someone else’s word means that the word must necessarily activate
connections and combine with the word of others: this necessarily involves problems of
syntax. In fact, encounter between one’s own word and someone else’s word, the
interaction among words, is especially obvious in syntax. And how reception and
transmission of someone else’s word is oriented, the capacity for listening, the
constitutive dialogism of the utterance all emerges most clearly in the syntax of reported
discourse – direct, indirect and free indirect.
However, as stated, it is above all in free indirect discourse that interference between
one’s own word and the word of the other becomes significant, giving rise to dialogism
internal to the word. Internal dialogism is the main focus of the Bakhtin circle and is what
Bakhtin understands by “dialogue”. Therefore, this term assumes a completely different,
even opposite, meaning from common understanding. It is worth repeating that external
dialogue among rejoinders is one thing, that is, dialogue as a literary genre, like dialogue
of dramatic dialogues, while dialogue in the Bakhtinian sense, that is, dialogue internal to
the same utterance, is another.
The Russian language, the language of Bakhtin and Vološinov, is not endowed with
consecutio temporis, so that, as they both observe, indirect discourse does not have its
own distinctive character. This favours, more than in other languages, interaction and
interpenetration between the reporting word and the reported word, as well as the
transition from indirect discourse (in reality from direct discourse and its variants, given
that there is hardly any difference with respect to indirect discourse) to free indirect
discourse.
But precisely because of this, free indirect discourse, the third autonomous form of
reported discourse, should not be confused with some of the variants of direct and
indirect discourse. An important contribution in the third part of Marxism and the
Philosophy of Language consists in characterizing the specificity of free indirect
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discourse as the third type of reported discourse. The difference is evidenced with
respect to the variants of direct and indirect discourse, with which it can be and in fact is
confused. However, as demonstrated by Vološinov through a series of concrete examples,
those very forms of indirect discourse which are easily confused with free indirect
discourse because of the lack of specific syntax, as occurs in the Russian language,
provides the ground for the birth and development of free indirect discourse.
Interference between the reporting word and the reported word – each with a
different sense but connected in the same syntactical structure –involves a certain
deformation of the normal syntactical physiognomy of indirect discourse, especially in
languages that respect the principle of consecutio temporis. In this case, the same
utterance “must serve two masters”, in other words, it belongs simultaneously to the
reported word and the reporting word.
Denominations of this type of reported discourse, such as improper direct discourse or
semi-direct discourse or free indirect discourse reflect the itinerary, therefore the origin
through which it was formed in the different languages – German, Russian, French (these
are the languages considered by Vološinov and Bachtin), Italian.
À propos free indirect discourse Vološinov speaks of “inter-referential fusion” of two
discourses whose intonation is oriented in different directions. He believes that this form
of reported discourse is particularly important in the study of utterance syntax, and even
dedicates a whole chapter to it, the third and last, discussing different interpretations, in
particular that proposed by Charles Bally and Vossler’s school – Theodor Kalepky and
Eugen Lorck and Gertraud Lerch.
But, as anticipated, in the first place, Vološinov makes a point of differentiating certain
variants of direct and indirect discourse from free indirect discourse. These variants are
easily confused with free indirect discourse causing it to lose its specificity as a third form
of discourse in itself, a third linguistic form of reported discourse. These variants include
“substituted direct discourse” which consists in speaking in someone else’s place, as in
the famous example of the “addio di Lucia al suo paese”, in the Promessi sposi by
Alessandro Manzoni. This variant comes very close to free indirect discourse, with the
difference that in substituted direct discourse one’s own word and the word of the other
do not interfere with each other. This is because the reporting word coincides with what
Visions of the Other and free indirect speech by Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli
someone else could have or should have said. Consequently, the grammatical and stylistic
signs that characterize free indirect discourse, that are generated by the interplay
between reported and reporting discourse, are also lacking.
Vološinov’s examples are taken from Puškin; he evidences that characterization of the
character’s “substituted discourse” simply occurs on a semantical level and concerns the
meaning of words. However, there is no interference between discourses that are
differently oriented, nor are there traces of resistance and retroaction from someone
else’s word in the author’s reporting discourse. But precisely through Puškin, it can be
observed how substituted discourse can give rise to the free indirect form, and how at a
certain point in the evolution of the Russian language, it contributed to the assertion of
free indirect discourse as a form in itself.
According to Vološinov, free indirect discourse is not a “simple mechanical mixture”
or “arithmetical sum” of two forms, but a “completely new, positive tendency in active
reception of someone else’s utterance, a special orientation in the dynamics of the
interrelation between the author’s word and someone else’s word” (Vološinov 1973, p.
142, modified following the Italian translation in Bachtin & Vološinov 2010, p. 142).
Nor is it merely a stylistic expedient invented by an author to report someone else’s
word. Here we find considerations quite similar to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s on the
subjective, private possibility of inventing what a language (lingua, historical natural
language), public ordinary language (linguaggio) has not foreseen. It is not possible to
explain, as instead Adolf Tobler proposes, the invention of a new linguistic form on the
basis of the speaker’s reasoning. On such a basis what can be explained is merely the use
in one or another concrete instance of an already available form, but under no
circumstances will it do to explain the composing of a new form in language. The
individual motives and intentions of a speaker can take meaningful effect only within
limits imposed by current grammatical possibilities on the one hand, and within the limits
of the conditions of socioverbal intercourse that predominate in his group on the other.
These possibilities and these conditions are given quantities – they are what circumscribe
the speaker’s linguistic purview. It is beyond the speaker’s individual power to force that
purview open (Eng. trans. Vološinov 1973, p. 143; It. trans. Bakhtin & Vološinov 2010, p.
143).
Given historical-social conditions are necessary, involving a certain way of perceiving
and, therefore, of reporting the word of the other, for the assertion of free indirect
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discourse as a form foreseen by language and traceable, therefore, in the work of a given
author. This is the case of La Fontaine and according to Werner Günter (see Giulio
Herczeg, Lo stile indiretto libero in italiano, 1963) free indirect discourse can already be
traced in Ariosto (Günter claims to have found approximately 60 examples of free indirect
discourse in Orlando furioso), and in Dante, as Pasolini (1972) shows in his analysis of
the Paolo and Francesca episode in the Divine Comedy. As Vološinov claims:
No matter what the intentions the speaker means to carry out, no matter what errors
he may commit, no matter how he analyzes forms or mixes them or combines them,
he will not create a new pattern in language and he will not create a new tendency in
socioverbal intercourse. His subjective intentions will bear creative character only to
the extent that there is something in them that coincides with tendencies in the
socioverbal intercourse of speakers that are in the process of formation, of
generation; and these tendencies are dependent upon socioeconomic factors (Eng.
trans. Vološinov 1973, p. 143; It. trans. Bachtin e Vološinov 2010, p. 144).
Particular social conditions cause certain orientations toward someone else’s word to
dominate over others. These become “grammatical” in a given language, rise to the status
of syntactical models and determine how the speakers of that language will perceive and
transmit the word of the other. In other words, whether these crystallized forms last, how
these models influence speaker behaviour also depends on historical-social factors. A
change in the historical-social conditions that formed these models, is immediately
reflected in them, transforming them: at the very least their regulatory and inhibitive
function is weakened, widening the range in variations relative to a given model. In free
indirect discourse, factors conditioning the possibility of dialogic interference between
two voices in the same word include: crisis in dominant ideology, the collapse of
unidimensional culture to the advantage of a pluralistic vision of reality, transformation
of a given social system and its contradictions which emerge ever more insistently.
A language (lingua, historical-natural language) can influence the dynamics in the
relation between the reported word and the reporting word. For example, it can facilitate
portrayal of someone else’s word by making sure it is clearly distinguished from the
Visions of the Other and free indirect speech by Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli
reporting word and is characterized stylistically; or it can account for the content of
discourse more than for its peculiar formal characteristics. The syntactical rules of a
language implemented by the reporting word can require that this word be a univocal
objectifying word, a mere instrument of representation, an external, absolute point of
view; or they can favour the possibility of making the two voices resound differently, the
voice of the other, of the reported word. and the author’s voice, the voice of the reporting
word. Relativization of the word of the other and of reporting discourse implies
availability, on the level of historical-natural language, of syntactic forms able to soften
the borders between authorial context and the reported word, or even cancel the
distinction between a represented word and a representing word that is not in turn
represented. From this point of view, the role carried out by free indirect discourse model
is truly noteworthy.
In fact, as Pasolini claims, free indirect discourse is generally “the sign of an ideology”,
“it implies a sociological consciousness in the author, whether this is clear or not”
(Pasolini 1972, 88): free indirect discorse is a sign of given socio-ideological conditions,
it is the expression of confrontation among different languages, styles, and ideologies, it
relativizes points of view, desecrates the monological word. What Pasolini observes à
propos free indirect speech in Dante and in Ariosto is particularly significant in light of
the role assigned to it by Bakhtin in the dialectics between monologism and polylogism:
Che nell’Ariosto ci sia il discorso libero indiretto è un fatto così storicamente
significativo e imponente, che non ci si può limitare a constatarlo, come una curiosità
o un titolo di merito rispetto a La Fontaine. Si vede che c’è stato un momento nella
società italiana con delle caratteristiche che poi si sono ripetute in modo più o meno
vasto e stabile un secolo e mezzo dopo in Francia, ecc. ecc. [...] La lingua dell’Ariosto è
inscindibile: le sfumature non hanno soluzione di continuità, e formano una
continuità tra la lingua feudale e la lingua borghese, tra la lingua delle armi e la lingua
del commercio e delle banche. [...] Il discorso che l’Ariosto rivive è quello di se stesso
borghese. [...] Il gioco è fra linguaggio alto e linguaggio medio: una sfumatura infinita,
dove la coscienza sociologica non è che un’ombra, potente, che ombreggia del resto e
dà rilievo a tutto il meraviglioso gioco dell’ironia ariostesca. [...] Neppure casuale è
l’uso del libero indiretto in Dante. La sua presenza nella Divina commedia è
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espressione delle particolari contraddizioni linguistico-ideologiche proprie delle
società comunale (Pasolini 1972, pp. 84–85).
Vološinov expresses himself in similar terms when he observes that in order to achieve
free indirect discourse – a completely different form of perception and transmission of
the word of the other –, some displacement would be necessary, a shift in socio-verbal
communication and with regard to mutual orientation of the utterances. Only once this
form has gradually developed and become part of the field of linguistic possibilities can
the expressive intentions of individual speakers be determined, find motivation and
fertile fulfilment within its boundaries (see Vološinov 1929, Eng. trans. 1973, p. 143; It.
trans. Bakhtin & Vološinov 2010, p. 144).
Vološinov, as mentioned above, considers free indirect discourse as a third and
absolutely independent form of reported discourse, and from this point of view is in
accord with Kalepky who made the same claim. He defines free indirect discourse as
hidden or veiled discourse (verschleierte Rede), observing that on the face of it the person
who speaks converges with the author, but from the point of view of the real sense of the
overall context, the person who speaks is, instead, the author. However, in contrast to
Kalepky Vološinov observes that the specific character of this form consists in the fact
that the hero and the author speak as much as each other and that the accents of
differently oriented voices resound within the limits of a single and identical linguistic
construction. This is what distinguishes free indirect discourse from that variant of direct
discourse indicated by Vološinov as “masked discourse of the other” where the word of
the other is hidden, precisely, in the word that reports it. And even if, in this case as well
grammatical and stylistic phenomena that are particularly original can be produced, it is
always one of the many variants of the direct form of reporting the “word of the other”.
However, free indirect discourse is a special type of discourse, with an uncovered face,
though double-faced, like Giano (see Vološinov 1973, p. 144).
A’ propos interpretation of free indirect discourse, an important position (classical, we
might say, alongside Vossler and his school) is Bally’s. The latter believes that free
indirect discourse, what he calls “style indirect libre”, is a new recent variant of indirect
discourse, which developed according to the following transformation due to the general
Visions of the Other and free indirect speech by Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli
tendency to prefer paratactic coordination among clauses to hypotactic subordination: “il
disait qu’il était malade -> il disait: il était malade -> il était malade (disait-il)”.
Furthermore, this variant of indirect discourse, according to Bally, is a form in motion
moving toward direct discourse.
Vološinov criticizes Bally for focusing his attention on relations among sentences and
clauses, thereby ignoring the phenomenon of encounter among words, among utterances
and voices. Instead, Bally’s analysis is based on the abstraction “language” (langue,
historico-natural language) and reduces the question to a relation among the forms of
discourse foreseen by historico-natural language.
Bally works on linguistic abstractions when he states that free indirect discourse is no
more than a variant of indirect discourse moving toward direct discourse as its furthest
extreme, formed simply by dropping the conjunction “that” and the verb that introduces
it. Nothing can form and flourish – and this is the position held by Vološinov and Bakhtin
– where there are only linguistic forms. “Life begins only at the point where utterance
crosses utterance, i.e., where verbal interaction begins” (Ibid., p. 145), where there is a
word on the word and a word in the word. In free indirect discourse dropping the
conjunction “that” does not unite two abstract forms, it is not a question of one abstract
form directing itself towards another abstract form. Instead, two utterances move
towards each other, mutually perceive each other, and no longer being in a relation of
mutual indifference, but rather of unindifference, reciprocal participation, they modify
each other. “The dropping of the conjunction que brings together, not two abstract forms
but two utterances in all their ideational fullness. The dike ruptures, as it were, and
authorial intonations freely stream into the reported speech” (Ibid., p. 146).
As anticipated, language with its rules certainly influences perception and
transmission of the word of the other. And, indeed, if what in Italian is called “indiretto
libero” and in French “indirect libre”, and instead in German is indicated as “improperly
direct speech” (uneigentliche direkte Rede ) and in Russian, as used by Bachtin,
“nesobstvennaja prjamaja reč’”, with the same reference to direct discourse, this is
because in conformity with the grammatical structures of each of these languages, it
begins developing in each language, elicited by given historical-social conditions, using
the model that appears the most flexible: free indirect in French and Italian; and direct
discourse in German and Russian.
As regards free indirect discourse in Italian, we will simply refer to the book already
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mentioned by Herczeg, Lo stile indiretto libero in italiano (1963), to Leo Spitzer’s essay,
“L’originalità della narrazione nei Malavoglia”, in his volume Studi italiani. Vita e pensiero,
1976, and to the above-mentioned essay by Pasolini (1972). Free indirect discourse is
often confused with variants of direct and indirect discourse in Italian as well. Vološinov’s
text makes a noteworthy contribution towards distinguishing among them with its
precise and articulated analyses of the models and variants of reported discourse
3. Distance and participation as conditions for the artwork
When a question of the text, as Bakhtin shows in his essay of 1961, “The Problem of the
Text in Linguistics, Philosophy, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical
Analysis” (in Bakhtin 1979, Eng. trans. 1986: 103–131; It. trans. 1988: 191), his studies
develop along boundaries, frontiers, at the point of encounter and intersection among
such spheres as linguistics, philology, theory of literature and literary criticism, and other
special disciplines belonging to the human sciences.
Reference to the text in its double modality and as the point of encounter between
verbal and nonverbal signs sheds more light on the question of reported discourse and
its variant free indirect discourse. This approach also affords insights of a methodological
order not limited to the field of linguistics, and the possibility of experimentations in the
artistic sphere not limited to narrative genres alone.
Pier Paolo Pasolini gave special attention to free indirect discourse. However, he did
not limit his attention to literary writing. He also considered the implications for film
writing and concretely experimented them. According to Pasolini, à propos what he calls
“poetry film” the essential characteristic of the photographic image in contemporary
cinema is that it is neither objective (a vision external to the character), corresponding to
indirect discourse, nor subjective (the character’s vision), corresponding to direct
discourse, but semi-objective and semi-subjective. Like free indirect discourse, the
photographic image in motion-pictures presents together two points of view that do not
Visions of the Other and free indirect speech by Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli
merge into each other, but that interact dialogically and are dissymmetrical. Pasolini calls
this doubling “free indirect subjective discourse” (“soggettiva libera indiretta”).
Deleuze develops the idea of free indirect discourse as an essential form of the new
novel and new cinema. He evaluates the role of “free indirect subjective discourse” in
Pasolini’s own film production and evidences the effect of contamination it produces
between trivial and noble, low and high, profane and sacred, everyday life and myth.
But why is encounter between one’s own point of view and someone else’s so
important in the artistic sphere?
In For A Philosophy of the Act (1920-24), reflecting on literature and art in general,
Bakhtin observes that
The world that is correlated with me is fundamentally and essentially incapable of
becoming part of an aesthetic architectonics. […] to contemplate aesthetically means
to refer an object to the valuative plane of the other. (Bakhtin 1920–24. Eng. trans.
pp. 74–5)
These statements by Bakhtin are developed and specified in a text that comes
immediately after, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”, which opens the 1979
collection of his writings (and is used as the title of the whole collection in the 1988 Italian
translation, L’autore e l’eroe, whereas the English translation is titled, Art and
Answerability, 1990):
My own axiological relationship to myself is completely unproductive aesthetically:
for myself, I am aesthetically unreal. [...]. The organizing power in all aesthetic forms
is the axiological category of the other, the relationship to the other, enriched by an
axiological “excess” of seeing for the purpose of achieving a transgredient
consummation. (Bakhtin “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”, 1920-24, in Bakhtin
1979, Eng., pp. 188–189)
The implication is that for aesthetic value in any artistic production it will be necessary
to depict the point of view of the other. For literature this means that reported discourse
is inevitable, and also involves autobiographic and lyrical genres.
A unitary reaction to the hero’s world in its totality is essential to the artwork. This
unitary reaction is distinct from cognitive and practical reactions, but not indifferent to
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them. The author’w unitary reaction must collect all the single cognitive and emotional-
volitional reactions and unite them in an architectonic totality. In order to acquire artistic
value, the author’s unitary action must communicate all the resistance of reality, of life,
of which the hero is an expression. This is the resistance of the objective with respect to
its depiction, objectification. The author’s unitary action must convey the otherness of the
hero, with his or her artistic values. Therefore, the starting point of the author’s reaction
must be extralocalized with respect to the hero, extralocalized in space, time, sense, even
more so if the hero is autobiographical. Without the processes of extralocalization, in the
case of autobiography confessional tones prevail and the text looses in artistic value.
Bakhtin shows how Dostoevsky’s “polyphonic novel” does not describe the character
as an I, a subject, would describe an object, but rather as “another” centre around which
that character organizes its world:
Not without reason does Dostoevsky force Makar Devushkin to read Gogol’s
“Overcoat” and to take it as a story about himself […]
Devushkin had glimpsed himself in the image of the hero of “The Overcoat,” which is
to say, as something totally quantified, measured, and defined to the last detail: all of
you is here, there is nothing more in you, and nothing more to be said about you. He
felt himself to be hopelessly predetermined and finished off, as if he were already
quite dead, yet at the same time he sensed the falseness of such an approach. […]
The serious and deeper meaning of this revolt might be expressed this way: a living
human being cannot be turned into the voiceless object of some secondhand,
finalizing cognitive process. In a human being there is always something that only he
himself can reveal; in a free act of self-consciousness and discourse; something that does
not submit to an externalizing secondhand definition. […]
The genuine life of the personality is made available only through a dialogic
penetration of that personality, during which it freely and reciprocally reveals itself.
(Bakhtin 1963, Eng. trans.: 49-59)
Visions of the Other and free indirect speech by Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli
Dialogue understood not in the formal sense, but rather in the substantial sense, which
is also the artistically essential sense, does not only subsist where different points of
views and identities come together. On the contrary, dialogue is achieved in the very
situation of resistance to synthesis, which includes the delusory synthesis of one’s own
identity. The latter, in fact, is dialogically fragmented insofar as it is inevitably involved in
otherness, just as the “grotesque body” depicted by Rabelais (Bakhtin 1965) is involved
with the body of others.
This gives rise to the ambivalent language of popular comical culture, described by
Bakhtin in his studies on Rabelais. Dialogism as described by Bakhtin, substantial
dialogue oriented by the logic of otherness produces the type of parody that is
characteristic of popular culture, it produces irony, comicality, the dynamic vision typical
of popular culture where images are never finalized, isolated, inert, but rather are
endowed with “regenerating ambivalence”.
Dario Fo (awared the Nobel Prize for literature in 1997) also works on Medieval
popular comical culture and its parodic artworks (sacred parodic performances, parodic
prayers, parodies of liturgy and the mysteries, etc.). In Mistero Buffo, giullarata popolare
in lingua padana de ‘400, in which he collects and reconstructs documents relating to
popular theatre, he too draws on the particular style of parodization and derision that
characterizes Medieval popular culture. He also refers to Medieval popular culture when
he uses the mimetic capacity of the actor as the main instrument of theatrical expression
and elects the grotesque body as a signifying body. Moreover, as a form of critique of
dominant ideology and of power, Fo resorts to popular culture in its capacity for
subversion and provocation thanks to the tendency for excess with respect to
homologation as imposed by official ideology. The plasticity, ductility, mobility,
comicality, ambiguity typical of the grotesque expressions of popular comicality
developed by Fo, evidence the possibility of a popular culture that is not necessarily the
result of the passive consumption of culture functional to reproduction of the existing
social system. This is a central point in the challenge launched by the body itself as
depicted by Fo in all his artworks against cultural homologation as imposed by those who
detain control over communication. And here let us underline that Fo’s entire artistic
production is political insofar as it is artistic, in his own words: “all of art is political” (Fo,
“Prefazione” to Il teatro politico 1975).
Dostoevsky’s dialogism as analyzed by Bakhtin does not involve voices independent
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of each other, as we have claimed on many occasions. Nor does polyphony consist in “the
novel’s tendency toward drama,” toward “objectivity” and “impersonality”, toward the
“author’s exit from the stage”. The polyphonic novel is not the novel approaching drama.
And yet Bakhtin is very clear on this point in his response to Lunacharsky and his
critical review of the1929 edition of his monograph on Dostoevsky (published in Novij
mir, 1929, 10). Bakhtin included his response to Lunacharsky in the 1963 edition of the
same monograph. Lunacharsky interpreted polyphony as objectivity and dramatization
where the author is effaced, and proposed to attribute polyphony thus described to both
Shakespeare and Balzac. In the 1963 edition of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin
rejects this proposal. According to Bakhtin, Balzac’s limit is of the subjective order and
consists in the fact that in his novels he does not succeed in detaching himself from the
objective representation of the word of his characters.
Balzac belongs to the same line of development in the European novel as Dostoevsky,
and is one of his direct and most immediate predecessors.. [...] But Balzac did not
transcend the object-ness of his characters, nor the monologic finalization of his
world. (Bakhtin 1963, Eng. trans.: 34)
As to Shakespeare, he belongs to that line of development in European literature in
which the early buds of polyphony mature, and which is brought to completion by
Dostoevsky (Ibid., p. 34). According to Bakhtin, this is a question of an objective limit, due
to the fact that “drama is by its very nature alien to genuine polyphony; drama may be
multi-leveled, but it cannot contain multiple worlds; it permits only one, and not several,
systems of measurement” (Ibid.). Therefore, not only do not objectivity and
dramatization in dialogue coincide with polyphony, but they can even obstruct its
completion.
The utterances of others on a given issue can be reported to undersign them or
comment on them or explain them or confute them. Therefore, in this case, we have in the
same verbal context interrelation among immediately intentional words as well as among
the basic units of sense, that is, among utterances: this is a question of dialogical
relationships in the ordinary sense of the term, that is, relationships of consensus or
Visions of the Other and free indirect speech by Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli
dissent, of assertion or clarification, of request or response, etc. These dialogical relations
between one’s own word and someone else’s can be the object of depiction in the
“dialogue” genre, in dramatic genres. They belong to the context of a third word, that of
the author who depicts the positions in dialogue, being a context that does not interfere
with objectified instances, with positions that are depicted, but that is not influenced by
them either. There is a dialogue, certainly, but in a monological context. In other words,
this context remains solid and is not affected by dialogue, it does not undergo any
weakening in its character as a word that limits itself to bringing to the stage and
operating encounter and collision among words in dialogue.
As in direct reported discourse, here in the discourse that reports, the intention of the
latter does not penetrate into the word made object, it does not enter its boundaries, but
rather assumes it in its wholeness without interfering with its sense or tone. “Discourse
that has become an object is, as it were, itself unaware of the fact, like the person”, says
Bakhtin, “who goes about his business unaware that he is being watched; objectified
discourse sounds as if it were direct single-voiced discourse” (Bakhtin 1963, Eng. trans.,
p. 192): both in the direct and immediately intentional word, the word oriented toward
the object, as well as in the reported, the objectified, depicted word, there is a single
intention, a single voice. They are both single-voiced, univocal words.
In the word reported in the form of indirect discourse, dialogism is not only that of
dialogue commonly understood as an exchange of rejoinders in the context of a word, the
reporting word, which does not at all interfere with the rejoinders themselves. The word
of indirect discourse must necessarily analyze the word it reports. As such, unlike the
reported word in the form of direct discourse, the word of indirect discourse is a double-
voiced word as much as it may be a monodirectional, monological word, a word,
therefore, which takes the word of the other as its object and presents it according to a
plan of its own, according to a given intention of its own. In indirect discourse the word
already presents the phenomenon of internal dialogism, but the reporting word
overpowers the reported word. With respect to the word of the other, “meek and
defenseless”, the reporting word “installs his own interpretation in it, forcing it to serve
his own new purposes” (Ibid., p. 197).
However, the word of the other may also operate actively on the word that reports it,
catching it off guard. Interference between one’s own word and the word of the other
increases significantly above all in free indirect discourse, creating the phenomenon of
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dialogism internal to the word.
Certainly the word, whether it knows it or not, is always internally dialogical and is so
to varying degrees. However, dialogism internal to the word is not a question of a
difference in degree, but of a qualitative difference. Dialogue in the Bakhtinian sense is
qualitatively different from formal dialogue and from dramatic dialogue, to the point that
it can also be traced in lyrical poetry. Bakhtin analyzes Puskin’s poem, “Razluka”
(“Parting,”1830) where three voices resound in each other, interfere with each other, and
dialogue with each other: the hero’s, the heroine’s and again the hero’s as he now knows
that the leave-taking narrated in the poem was forever (see Bakhtin 1920–24, in 1979,
Eng. trans., pp. 211–221).
Therefore, dialogism as a degree that is always present in the word is one thing, and
dialogism in the sense of rejoinders in formal dialogue understood as a discourse genre or
as a modality of dramatic genres is another, and still something else is the word’s internal
dialogism, that is, interference between one’s own word and someone else’s word, a word
that not only is a double-voiced word, but also a double-accentuated.
The dialogical character of the word that Bakhtin aimed to evidence does not concern
the second case, the obvious, predictable case of dialogue as it is commonly understood.
Instead, it concerns dialogism as a degree, always present even when the word is oriented
monologically; and, even more, it concerns dialogism understood as interference among
voices and accentuations, intonations.
Dostoevsky’s word installs a relation that places as in front of another completely
outside the subject-object scheme. This is connected with the polyphonic character of his
novel. The hero in Dostoevsky is not the object of the narrating word. The narrating word
is the word turned to the word, turned, as Bakhtin says, to someone who is present and
not as a word about someone who is absent, which therefore can delude itself into being
definitive. Precisely because of this, this someone who is present manifests himself in all
his otherness, that is, as capable of withdrawing from the word on him, of reacting,
absenting himself, with his surplus, from the word that presents him. The word of the
author considers the hero’s word as the word of a “second” person, and addresses it as a
“you”: the author considers the hero’s word as a face-to-face word. The hero in
Dostoevsky “is the subject of an address. One cannot talk about him; one can only address
Visions of the Other and free indirect speech by Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli
oneself to him” (Ibid., p. 251). Here, as Bakhtin states in the 1929 edition of his study on
Dostoevsky, the author “speaks with all the construction of his novel not on the hero, but
with the hero” (Bakhtin 1929, It. trans., p. 144, Eng. trans. by the authors).
4. Image, writing, de-representation
The text Gilles Deleuze dedicates to film, Cinéma I: L'image-mouvement (1983) and
Cinéma II: L'image-temps (1985) is a taxonomy, an attempt to classify images and signs,
as he observes in his introductory remarks to the first volume. In relation to the notions
of “moving-image” and “time-image,” in addition to Henri Bergson (with special reference
to his 1896 book, Matière et memoire), Deleuze also refers to Charles S. Peirce and his
typology of signs which he describes as a general classification of images and signs, no
doubt the most complete and the most varied, like a classification by Linnaeus in natural
history or, better, like Mendeleev’s laws in chemistry.
Through the point of view imposed by motion-pictures on the question of signs and
images, Deleuze shifts his detailed and profound reflections from the moving-image and
its variations (perception-image, action-image, affection-image, pulsion-image) in
Cinema 1 to the time-image in Cinema 2. Considerations on free indirect discourse and on
free indirect subjective discourse, our special interest in this essay, are covered by
Deleuze in a section dealing with the perception-image. This is only one stage in the
gradual shift in his text which leads “beyond the moving-image”.
What is involved is a shift from the utterance to the utterable, from language to what
Hjelmslev calls linguistically unformed “materia”. In this sense, Pierpaolo Pasolini who
was anything but “naïve”, as a few critics wrongly thought, speaks of cinema as a
“language of reality”, “descriptive science of reality”, constitutive of semiotics beyond
existing languages, verbal and non-verbal (see Pasolini 1975: 198ff.). Cinema is seen as
the privileged place of this shift towards images and pre-linguistic (pre-verbal) signs. And
this is so to the point of making the “time-image” possible beyond the “movement-image”.
The moving-image constitutes time in an empirical spatialized form. As Aristotle
claimed, to speak of time is to speak of movement. Objective time is a question of
spatialized time. Subjective time is a question of distension, “a stretching of the soul” (St.
Augustine), centred on the present of consciousness, according to which the past is an old
present and the future a present to come (on the spatialization of time, particularly
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interesting are Victoria Welby’s unpublished papers on the topic, a selection is now
available in Petrilli 2009).
Cinema that, rather than presenting itself as action cinema, cinema centred on
narrative content, presents instead situations without development, without extensions,
which count in themselves, thereby becoming purely optical and sonorous situations, this
type of cinema opens onto a direct time-image. Cinema can do what only music before it
succeeded in doing: make a direct presentation of time-image, in which the past persists
in the present, and passes by preserving itself, by doubling the image. Real and imaginary,
present and memory coexist ambiguously in a relation of “undiscernibility”.
We could claim that the question of transition from the system of language to pre-
linguistic material, from the utterance to the utterable, from the moving-image to the
time-image is the question of writing, of recovering the writing in which the different
historico-natural languages are grounded, writing before the verbal, before the letter.
This confers a special sense to the expression “film writing”. It also establishes a special
relation between film writing, musical writing and literary writing. Furthermore, the
relation between moving-image and time-image, which is connected with the role of
narration in the image (see Deleuze 1989, p. 301), makes it possible to associate the
itineraries followed above all by film to narrative genres, in particular to the novel. Here,
of particular interest is the role carried out by encounter and interaction between one’s
own word and the uttered word, that is, between the uttered word and the word listened
to, the present word and the past word, as occurs to a maximum degree in free indirect
discourse.
The modelling procedure to which all human languages belong, verbal and nonverbal,
is writing – writing understood as syntax, articulation, ars combinatoria. Musical
language, for example, which intervals, beats, scans, articulates space-time, is made
possible by primary modelling, ante litteram writing. The a-priori is not speech (Noam
Chomsky’s glottocentric fallacy with his Innate Universal Grammar). The a-priori is the
human species-specific modelling device we called “writing”. Writing thus described (by
contrast with the ethnocentric confusion of writing with transcription) precedes the birth
of what is commonly understood by writing, that is, transcription, writing as mnemonics.
Like verbal writing, musical writing as well presupposes the “capacity for writing” and,
Visions of the Other and free indirect speech by Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli
therefore, participates in the condition of scanning, articulating, relating, without which
the human world would not be possible.
Musical language (Lomuto & Ponzio 1998), literary language, film language (see
Deleuze, Ibid., pp. 37ff., on assimilation, beginning from Christan Metz, of the film image
to the utterance, thereby leading filmic language back to the sphere of the linguistic), all
resist verbal description and oblige recourse to de-representation, de-scription. This
reflects on verbal language itself and the way it is described; and not only on the
disciplines that describe it directly such as philology and linguistics, but also on the
general science of signs in which they are inscribed, that is, semiotics.
Returning to Artaud against Artaud, Carmelo Bene’s “actorial reading” also proposes
itself as de-scription, that is, de-writing (see the paper delivered by Marianne Fallon,
“Entre texte et performance: le jeu de la di-scrittura chez Carmelo Bene”), release from
transcription, from the mnemotechnic function, from re-citation, and becomes writing as
we are describing it, writing avant la lettre. It is no incident that Deleuze should address
his attention to Pasolini and his reflections on free indirect speech, as much as to Carmelo
Bene dedicating an essay to him, “Un manifesto di meno”. This was published with Bene’s
Riccardo III and with a response from Bene in a booklet titled Sovrapposizioni (1978).
5. To recapitulate
There is a theoretical place in which three authors meet, Deleuze, Bakhtin and Pasolini —
all three authors are “other” from official culture. The “theoretical place of encounter” is
reflection on “free indirect discourse”, which has benefited in particular from the
attention of philologists, linguists and literary critics. According to Bakhtin, free indirect
discourse plays a central role in the novel’s tendency toward polyphony, which begins
with Dostoevsky.
There is no judgment-word in the polyphonic novel inaugurated by Dostoevsky, a
word on the object, but rather the allocution-word, the word that enters into dialogic
contact with the other word, word on the word and turned to the word. Therefore,
dialogism presents itself as interference among discordant voices, as polyphony
involving the narrator himself. According to Bakhtin, this is where the difference lies
between the novel genre and dramatic genres. Polyphony cannot be achieved in theatre,
if not through what Bakhtin calls its “novelization”. For example, it is possible to
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“novelize” Shakespeare’s King Lear, as does Marco Baliano, by making the Fool recount
the whole sequence and allowing us to perceive interferences from the author’s voice in
the Fool’s voice. Contemporary theatre presents multiple and diversified examples of
such “novelization”. Carmelo Bene’s artwork merits consideration on its own account –
Deleuze dedicates an essay to Bene – and to his interpretation of Shakespeare.
Unlike direct and indirect discourse, in free indirect discourse the author’s word and
the hero’s word contaminate each other. One voice penetrates into the other and into his
or her point of view: the word becomes a double-voiced work, internally dialogic or
polylogic.
And this is no insignificant matter. Free indirect discourse reveals, but is also a practice
in questioning the Subject and everything it is connected with in Occidental ideo-logic
(nor is it incidental that today the polyphonic novel finds development above all in the
South of the world, in Africa, Latin America): Identity, Difference, Belonging, Monologism,
Being, Objectivity, Narration, Memory, History, Truth, Meaning, Reason, Power…
Pasolini (referred to by Deleuze in his volumes dedicated to cinema) translates free
indirect discourse into what he calls “cinema of poetry”. He experiments free indirect
discourse through that type of film take that is neither subjective, nor objective, but
rather “free indirect subjective discourse.
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