Apparent Feature-Anomalies in Subjectivized Third-Person Narration

Résumé 0

The Australian Patrick White's novel, The Solid Mandala, is a useful test-case for theories of the text-constitution of character consciousness. The contrasting sections of third-person narration reflect the psychology of two dissimilar twins. Previous accounts of the novel have tended either to deduce an intrusive auctorial narrator or (a decidedly minority view) a narrating instance which mediates characterological traits (classic Free Indirect Discourse). After listing a broad, coherent and consistent range of narrational features in White's fiction that point to thoroughly subjectivized or wholly figural narration, the present study then focuses on two features that are, in narratological models, customarily situated towards the opposite pole to subjectivized, figural discourse. These two features as they occur in White — gnomic present-tense utterances or comment clauses, and non-pronominal naming gradients — have anything but "anomalous" status. The discussion inverts the notion of a narrator imitating a character (Free Indirect Discourse), positing instead a vector involving characters whose awareness or repression of the role-relationship interface between self and other leads them quite naturally to play out mentally the identity of a third-person narrator. The pragmatic psychological anchorage of the analytical procedures leading to this hypothesis is, in conclusion, linked with the developing model of frame analysis.