Free Indirect Style: a theory

1. Mysticism

Free Indirect Style is a technique for communicating a character’s thoughts, feelings, or perspective on the world. James Woods, in How Fiction Works, gives a standard introduction (I am looking at the 2018 revised edition). First he shows us a passage that does not use free indirect style:

He looked over at his wife. “She looks so unhappy,” he thought, “almost sick.” He wondered what to say.

Here a man’s thoughts are conveyed, first, directly, by quoting the words he thinks to himself (“She looks so unhappy”); and then indirectly, without quotation, but marked explicitly as his: “He wondered what to say.” If the man articulated this wondering in inner speech at all, the report leaves open what words he used to do it. Indirect free style is a kind of fusion of these two techniques: using it, a character’s thoughts are reported indirectly (no quotation or first-person pronouns), but in their own words. To illustrate, Woods re-writes the passage:

He looked at his wife. Yes, she was tiresomely unhappy again, almost sick. What the hell should he say?

And then Woods summarizes:

This is free indirect speech or style: the husband’s internal speech of thought has been freed of its authorial flagging; no “he said to himself “or “he wondered” or “he thought.”

So far so good, then, right? Whatever there is to be said about the ways free indirect style may be used or abused, or about its benefits or dangers, what it is is clear enough. (Woods’ definition is standard; it is basically the same, for example, as the one in Transparent Minds, Dorrit Cohn’s much-cited 1978 book on narrative techniques.)

But as he goes on, Woods starts rhapsodizing about free indirect style, making deep-sounding pronouncements like this one:

Thanks to free indirect style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the author’s eyes and language. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once. A gap opens between author and character, and the bridge—which is free indirect style itself—between them simultaneously closes that gap and draws attention to its distance.

Woods makes free indirect style sound like it should be a schedule I narcotic. Why drop acid when, just by reading Jane Austen (!!), you could inhabit omniscience and partiality at once? Or maybe free indirect style is a kind of magical duct tape, closing a gap between two things that somehow still remain distant.

So okay I don’t get it. When I read the earlier example passage,

He looked at his wife. Yes, she was tiresomely unhappy again, almost sick. What the hell should he say?

I agree that I “inhabit partiality”: I learn how things are, from the man’s perspective. He thinks his wife is unhappy. But how do I also (“at once”) “inhabit omniscience”? Surely “inhabiting omniscience” means knowing how things really are? But I do not know whether the man’s wife really is unhappy. Nor do I see how free indirect style “draws attention to” the distance between the author and character. When I read “What the hell should he say?”, my attention is not drawn to the author at all. In fact, if there is something interesting here, it is that the author’s (or narrator’s) presence is not felt more strongly: the sentence may puts the man’s thought in his own words, but it refers to the man in the third-person (“he” rather than “I”), implying that someone other than the man is using the sentence.

As another example, Woods discusses this bit from Make Way For Ducklings:

Just as they were getting ready to start on their way, a strange enormous bird came by. It was pushing a boat full of people, and there was a man sitting on its back. “Good morning,” quacked Mr. Mallard, being polite. The big bird was too proud to answer.

The free indirect style is in “strange enormous bird,” and “The big bird was too proud to answer”: in fact this is a swan-shaped boat that is thought by Mr Mallard to be a bird. Woods writes:

Instead of telling us that Mr. Mallard could make no sense of the swan boat, [Robert] McCloskey places us in Mr. Mallard’s confusion; yet the confusion is obvious enough that a broad ironic gap opens between Mr. Mallard and the reader (or author). We are not confused in the same way as Mr. Mallard; but we are also being made to inhabit Mr. Mallard’s confusion.

Inhabiting someone’s confusion without being confused—isn’t that impossible?

I am not writing this out of a deep antagonism toward James Woods. (Cohen: “Even dry scholars wax poetical when they describe [free indirect style’s] effects”). In fact I think that Woods is on to something. A grammatico-syntactic definition of free indirect style leaves something out. A more ambitious definition is needed. There is more to a sentence’s (or phrase’s) being in free indirect style than just “inner state conveyed without using the first-person or ‘he thought/wondered’.” And I get why one might risk incoherence to inflate this into something better. The simplest way to say, without paradox, what is going on in the Make Way for Ducklings quote, is to say that Mr Mallard mistakes a swan boat for a large swan. But this does not capture the effect, or point, of using free indirect style here.

To explain free indirect style without resorting to mysticism, what is needed are sharper, more precise tools. The philosophy of art has made some available. Using them, I have a suggestion to make.