The Representation of Experience in Modernist Fiction

This chapter explores the holistic nature of subjective character experience in Modernist fiction and how this is represented stylistically, including all aspects of sensory experience and all levels of consciousness. I argue that the report of action, typically assigned to the narrator as external observer and reporter (Toolan, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, London, Routledge, 2001), acquires a subjective dimension that can position it as part of Free Indirect Style, the style reserved for the representation of consciousness. Physical experience is inextricably interwoven with thought, feeling and sensory perception in Modernist texts, thus ceasing to be reported as if from an outside narrator and instead appearing as if it is a mimetic representation of an aspect of the character’s consciousness, a kinetic sense. While the majority of scholars treat Free Indirect Style as discourse (Fludernik, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction, London, Routledge, 1993; Leech and Short, Style in Fiction, London, Routledge, 2007), the Modernist examples challenge the dichotomy between objective external report and subjective inner speech by weaving together all aspects of experience into a subjective representation. Such an analysis might lead to a new category of consciousness representation—the experience of action—and is in line with concurrent developments in phenomenology. In the chapter, I offer an overview of theories of Free Indirect Style and speech and thought representation and argue that the representation of consciousness cannot be reduced to the representation of verbal thought, the analysis of which has been based on the categories used for speech representation. I analyse examples from a range of Modernist texts, paying particular attention to the syntactic fusing of different modes of consciousness representation, which through their syntactic intersection with the representation of action portray it as part of the character’s subjective experience.