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EXPLORING THE IMPENETRABILITY OF NARRATIVE: A STUDY OF LINGUISTICMODALITY IN ALICE MUNRO'S EARLY FICTION

Pilar Somacarrera

As New observes, with some writers like Alice Munro literaryrealism is a surface illusion (48). The fluid uncertainties ofperception and understanding, which underlie the ostenstiblecertainties of empirical document, consequently become a covertimplied text. Such structures reiterate the idea that narrativeexists at some remove from the self. The undercurrentofinextricability which permeates Alice Munro's last short storycollection Open Secrets can already be traced in her first fictions.The "perceptual realism" which accounts for the notoriouslydifficult tone of her prose invites, as John Moss points out,analysis of content rather than of form or style (8). Her majorthemes attract critical inquiry far more than does her subtlegenius with language and narrative technique. However, this studywill concentrate on the somewhat untrodden area of the stylisticanalysis of Munro's fiction. I will focus on the linguisticsources of the impenetrability of her narratives, which, in myopinion, reside in the modalized statements conveying the

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narrator's attitude towards the truth of the narrated events. Modality has been recognised as one of the most fruitful

areas of intersection between linguistic and literary studies. Inthis article 1 I would accordingly like to argue for a stylisticapproach to linguistic modality in three early stories by AliceMunro: "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You", "Royal Beatings"and "Half a Grapefruit". Linguistic modality seems a relevantissue in a writer like Munro because, as Katherine Mayberry pointsout, most of her narrators come to recognize the imperfection andinadequacy of their medium (531). Coral Ann Howells corroboratesthis view in her analysis of three stories from The Progress of Love,observing that in the shift from event to language, incalculabledifferences are introduced, because words do not coincide withevents (142). In most cases, this inadequacy is a function of theessential incongruence between experience itself and the narrativethat would render it, an incongruence complicated by the necessarymediation of memory. This uneasy relationship between language andexperience is a recurring concern of Munro's work, one thatentices us to investigate the writer's linguistic encoding of thisinadequacy.

Recent criticism Munro has correctly noted her increasinginvolvement with a poetics of uncertainty and a rhetoric ofmistrust (Heble 96), offering insight on her use of language inrelation to the issue of knowledge. Heble notices the "rhetoric

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of supposition" (98) deployed by Munro's narrators and sets out to"shift the focus away from the prevailing tendency to emphasizeher realistic presentation of lives and events, and to attend,instead, to those shadings and absences which illustrate theimpossibility of taking anything in life, or in fiction, forgranted" (x). The shortcomings of Heble's study are, however, thathe neither uses the appropriate stylistic terminology to definehis impressions about the narratives, nor does he analyze themsystematically. The methodological framework of literarystylistics, on the other hand, seems to offer the necessarysystematic approach to the linguistic expressions of uncertaintyin the stories. According to Carter, stylistics aims at providinga basis for fuller interpretation of literary texts by seeking todemonstrate how literary effects are achieved by linguistic means(93).

As Katie Wales points out, modality has come to be discussedin stylistics as a result of an increasing interest in discourseand interpersonal relations between narrator and reader (303).Fictional narrators usually encode their point of view towardsthe story they are telling, or else deliberately avoid giving anassessment, an option which is also significant. The morequalified or evaluated the statements, the more a sense of thenarrator's personality is conveyed and the greater the awarenessrevealed of an implied addressee. The presence of the narrator is

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particularly conspicuous in "Something I've Been Meaning to TellYou", a narrative, described by Carrington as "a story of sadisticwatching" (113), that concerns the love affairs (realized andunrealized) of two sisters, Et and Char. Narrative strategies areas crucial in the other stories we are analyzing: "Royal Beatings"and "Half a Grapefruit" present an account of a female character's(Rose) childhood experiences, characterized by a triple splitbetween the two voices of the protagonist (young and mature), andthat of the narrator. The story, despite its third-personnarrator, does not offer an omniscient account of events but isprimarily filtered through Rose's perspective, as the study ofmodality will reveal. These stories already present whatCoral Ann Howells has seen as a characteristic of Munro's laterwork: her approximation to Virginia Woolf's abnegation ofauthorial omniscience in such novels as Jacob's Room (151).

From the linguistic point of view, modality has beenrecognised as a major exponent of the interpersonal function oflanguage. This term, borrowed from systemic-functionallinguistics, is concerned, according to Halliday, with

the establishment of social relations and with the participationof the individual in all kinds of personal interaction.Language, in this function, mediates in all the various rolerelationships contracted by the individual, and this plays an

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important part in the development of his personality. (335)

Modal meaning is conveyed by a variety of grammaticaldevices, amongst which are included modal auxiliaries, modaladverbs, evaluative adjectives and adverbs, generic sentences andverbs of knowledge, prediction and evaluation. In this study, wewill be describing two modal systems of English in the narratives:the epistemic system and the deontic system. Epistemic modalityhas to do with the speaker's assumptions or assessment ofpossibilities, and, in most cases, indicates the speaker'sconfidence or lack of confidence in the truth of the propositionexpressed (Coates 112). In addition, I will occasionally refer todeontic modality, which Simpson defines as the modal system of"obligation", as it is concerned with a speaker's attitude towardthe desirability of (or nondesirability) of certain actions andevents ("Modality in Literary Critical-Discourse" 67). Linguistshave commented on the fuzziness of this apparently clearcutdistinction between epistemic and deontic modality (Coates 16),which will be illustrated by some expressions from the stories.

We have already mentioned how certain verbs of knowledgeencode modal meaning. These verbs are known in linguistics asfactive predicators and have the effect of turning propositions intopresuppositions. Lyons considers know the paradigm of the factivepredicators, noting that if a speaker employs know rather thanbelieve, he is making a stronger commitment (794). This verb recurs

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in the analyzed stories, signalling that the truth of embeddedpropositions is assumed:

Et differed from Arthur in knowing that something went on,even if she could not understand why;she differed from him inknowing there were those you could not trust.(SBT 13) 2

In the above example know encodes a very firm accusation ofadultery which is at odds with the indeterminacy of the indefinitepronouns something and those. Presuppositions become even moreingrained with the successive embedding of the factive predicatorknow:

'Ignoramuses,'. At which Rose knew, and knew her father knew, thatRose had never heard of the planet Venus either. (RB 27)

From the point of view of their content, most of the propositionsintroduced by the factive predicator know are related to Rose'scertainty about her father's thoughts: "She knew perfectly well,too, that he had another set of feelings about her. She knew hefelt pride in her as well" (HG 62).

According to their degree of commitment, epistemic modalexpressions can be classified into the following categories:expressions of epistemic certainty (strong commitment), epistemic

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probability (medium commitment) and epistemic possibility (weakcommitment). At the most "certain" end of the continuum arecategorical assertions, which express the strongest possibledegree of speaker commitment (Lyons 763), and in that sense theyare "epistemically non-modal". Epistemic expressions of certaintyindicate a high level of speaker confidence, yet the truth of theproposition encoded in the utterance is qualified. Not manyexpressions suggesting epistemic certainty are to be found in theanalyzed stories. Significantly, the one adverbial of epistemiccertainty ("no doubt") that we could trace in "Something I've BeenMeaning to Tell You" qualifies a proposition about Char's affairwith her lover Blaikie: "That was a look she would like to havedescribed to Char. No doubt Char had seen it" (SBT 3). In relationto the stories of Who Do You Think You Are?, expressions of epistemiccertainty are also rare, and when they are used, they assessRose's inferences about her father's character, which are based onexternal appearances: "Her father must have got rid of them" (RB

2); "But he must have had a home-loving nature; he grew geraniumsin old tobacco cans, on the thick cement windowsills" (HF 63). Thepast version of the modal indicates that the inferences are to beassigned to the adult protagonist rather than the child.Significant statements about Rose's actions are also qualified asalmost certain: "It was for him she brought the books, no doubtabout it" (HG 60).

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A close study of the texts reveals that most instances ofmodality in the stories encode weak epistemic commitment(possibility):

Perhaps what was in the bottle was not what it said. She was noteven sure that it had been there last evening... Perhaps ithad been thrown out earlier and Char had taken somethingelse, pills maybe. Perhaps it really was her heart. All thatpurging would have weakened anybody's heart. (SBT 23)

In this highly modalized passage we find the modal adverbs"perhaps" (three times) and "maybe", the adjective "sure" in abe...that construction, and the modal auxiliary verb "would". Theadverb "really" stands in what Simpson calls a non-harmonic

combination with "Perhaps", meaning that modal operatorsexhibiting conflicting degrees of commitment are combined(Language, Ideology and Point of View 153). Obviously, the narrator, orperhaps Et, for the narrative voice is looking over Et's shoulder,does not want to commit herself to the truth of the propositionsfor several possible reasons. It could be that Et really hasdoubts about the cause of her sister's death, or maybe that she isinvolved in that death and wants to protect herself. As Blodgettobserves, we are to be left with an unsolved mystery (82). Infact, the epistemic modal adverbs conceal the real course of

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events since, as Perkins notes, perhaps and maybe appear to beneutral with regard to the subjective/objective distinction (90).Therefore, it is uncertain whether the utterances are based onreal facts, or are just Et's impressions. Other expressions in thetext also indicate this pervading uncertainty: "She could not tellif Char went paler" (SBT 1); "Et had no way of knowing how much ofit was true" (SBT 2). These instances become even more abundantafter Char's death: "She did not know what she wanted" (SBT 22);"Nor could Et ever know" (SBT 23); "Et in her natural confusioncould not remember what it was" (SBT 23).

Non-harmonic modality is also used when the narrator tries tojustify Et's evil intentions in "Something I've Been Meaning toTell You": "She supposed she might have wanted to make troublebetween him and Char-make Char pick a fight with him" (SBT 22).The nonharmonic combination of the modal lexical verb "suppose"implying possibility with the modal auxiliary "might", reducingthe degree of commitment, provides another example of thepervasive narratorial ambiguity of the story. Perhaps the mostsignificant example of contradictory modality is the followinginstance of Et's thoughts: "But there was none gone, the bottleseemed full. What awful nonsense. Like something you read about,Agatha Christie" (SBT 13). The categorical assertion about the ratpoison ("there was none gone") stands in stark contrast with theperception operator seem in "the bottle seemed full". The

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possibility emerges in Et's mind, that some of it might have beenused by Char to poison Arthur or to try to kill herself again.

In "Royal Beatings", in answer to the question about howRose started to get beaten by her father, we are offered anaccount where epistemic modal adverbs are also prominent:

Saturday, then. For some reason Flo is not going uptown, she hasdecided to stay at home and scrub the kitchen floor. Perhapsthis has put her in a bad mood. Perhaps she was in a bad moodanyway, due to people not paying their bills, or thestirring-up of feelings in the spring. (RB 15)

In the above example the epistemic modal adverbs highlight Rose'salienation from her stepmother. Similarly, the narrator distancesherself from Rose's behaviour signalling her lack of omnisciencethrough modality: "At the first, or maybe the second, crack ofpain, she draws back" (RB 22); "Rose could have been the girl thatlost the Kotex. That was probably a country girl" (HG 53).

Epistemic possibility is also encoded in modal lexical verbs:"And it seemed as if Becky and Robert had no interest in seeingjustice done" (RB 12). The state of affairs in the subordinateclause is a direct perception of the speaker, supplemented by thecomparator "as if". The perception modality evoked by modallexical verbs such as seem and appear generates a quality of

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alienation, especially when reporting the actions of certainsecondary characters: "Old man Tyde appeared to have recovered hisstrength" (RB 11). Seem designates Et as the interpreting sourceof the events in the following crucial passage of "Something I'veBeen Meaning to Tell You":

Char and Blaikie seemed to her the same kind of animal-tall,light, powerful, with a dangerous luxuriance. They sat apartbut shone out together. Lovers. (SBT 14)

The assumption that they are lovers is under the control of theverb "seem" and can, therefore, be considered Et's perception ofthe scene. The highly elliptical expression "Lovers" allows forseveral interpretations. It could stand for "They were lovers",but "They looked like lovers" is an equally possible way toconstrue the contextually reduced utterance. The perception verbseem is sometimes combined with other verbs to hint at thedifficulty that the penetrating consciousness (Et's? thenarrator's?) experiences when trying to make sense of Blaikie'sbehaviour: "He had a gentle and laughing but ultimately serious,narrowing look...that made him seem to want to be a deep-sea diverdiving down" (SBT 2-3).

Modal operators of epistemic possibility can sometimes bepostponed, having important effects in the processing of meaning,

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as Simpson records:

Given the 'on-line' nature of the reading process, there isthe natural tendency to interpret what precedes theseepistemic markers as categorical assertions; in other words,as statements to which no doubt or uncertainty is attached.No sooner has this information been accessed, however, thanit is immediately jeopardized by the postponing of epistemicweakeners. (Language, Ideology and Point of View 60)

Instances of postponed modal operators abound in the beating scenein "Royal Beatings" enhancing the sensation that what is happeningis a farce:

At the first, or maybe the second crack of pain, she drawsback...Not an ounce of courage of stoicism in her, it wouldseem...He throws Rose down. Or perhaps she throws herselfdown. (RB 22-23)

In fact, modality in the first stories of Who Do You Think You Are? isrelated to the pervasive theme of theatricality. The modalizednarrative utterances emphasize the fuzzy distinction betweenreality and acting:

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for it seems that Rose must play her part in this with the samegrossness, the same exaggeration, that her father displayedin his. She plays his victim with a self-indulgence thatarouses, and maybe hopes to arouse, his final, sickenedcontempt. (RB 23)

The reader has to be constantly making decisions about whetherRose is pretending or not, and this sense of uncertainty isheightened by the device of postponing the modal lexical verb ofperception, which is itself modalized by the auxiliary "would":"Not an ounce of stoicism in her, it would seem" (RB 22-23). Thefact that Rose's father also feels an obligation to play his roleis foregrounded by the combination of deontic and epistemicmodality in the following quotation from "Half a Grapefruit": "Andhe had to seem to be in sufficient agreement with Flo" (HG 62).Munro is intrigued, as she has indicated to Doug Freake, by howpeople set up and play roles, invent their parts, make drama oftheir lives (6).

Munro also uses modality to enact the town's gossip. When thetown's opinion about the narrated events is reported, narrativeutterances are also qualified by modal operators of probability,designating the speaker's doubts about the truth of theproposition: "The reason that Becky was kept out of sight was nowsupposed to be her pregnancy and the father of the child was

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supposed to be her own father (RB 9). In "Something I've BeenMeaning to Tell You", instances of narratorial report whose sourceis the town's gossip are also qualified:

He (Blaikie) had married the lady ventriloquist.The only thingpeople recalled for sure about her was that she could nothave been under forty. A nineteen-year-old boy. It wasbecause he had not been brought up like other boys, had beenallowed the run of the hotel, taken to California, let mixwith all sorts of people. The result was depravity, and couldhave been predicted. (SBT 11)

The combination of different types of modality heighten theoppressive atmosphere of a small town where everyone must abide bya strict social code. The modal operators of epistemic certainty("for sure") and probability ("could not have been") indicate thatpeople in Mock Hill seem to be sure about the lady ventriloquist'sage. About the reasons for Blaikie's erratic behaviour, thenarrative voice elicits a categorical assertion ("It was becausehe had not been brought up like other boys.."). This voice alsoquestions Char's actions through deontic modality: It was because she was a teacher's wife that she should have

refrained from doing either of those things, but Arthur ofcourse let her do anything she liked, even buying a cigarette

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holder so she could look like a lady in a magazine. (SBT 19)

The deontic modal operator ("should") indicates that her behaviourdoes not correspond to what is expected of her. On the other hand,the expression "of course" seems to come from Et's consciousness,as a negative comment about Arthur's permissiveness.

At the beginning of this article we referred to the basicindeterminacy of much modal meaning, especially concerning theepistemic-deontic distinction. The stories present severalutterances where the boundary between epistemic and deonticmeaning is unclear, a linguistic device which also contributes tomaking the pervading ambiguity of these narratives even moresalient. The following passage from "Royal Beatings" contains aninstance of ambiguous ought to, implying either weak obligationor/and weak inference:

Rose detects in her father some objections to Flo's rhetoric, someembarrassment and reluctance. She is wrong, and ought to knowshe is wrong, in thinking that she can count on this. Thefact that she knows about it, and he knows she knows, willnot make things any better. (RB 21)

The factive predicator "know" points to the fact that the narratoris committed to the truth of the proposition "she is wrong", as it

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had been previously expressed in the categorical assertion. Themodal auxiliary verb "ought to", whether epistemic or deontic,weakens the presupposition triggered by the factive verb "know".The selection of ought to rather than must is significant because,as Palmer points out, the first entails that the speaker admitsthe possibility that the event might not take place (100).Therefore, in this example the factuality about Rose's knowledgeremains undecided.

After the stylistic examination of modality in the texts,knowledge crops up as the main theme of the stories, a fact whichis not surprising if we recall that narrative has often beenregarded as a kind of epistemology. On the lexical level thepervasive presence of the factive predicator know is particularlyexpressive of the significance of this issue. It can also tracedin the plots: "Royal Beatings" and "Half a Grapefruit" are aboutthe precocious knowledge of a girl who is trying to establish herposition in the world in relation to her father and stepmother. In"Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You", Et knows too much, infact, "Nobody but Et knew it all" (SBT 19), but the reader is leftwondering about the reliability of the information transmitted bythe narrator, who is complicitous with this character. As CoralAnn Howells puts it, for Munro there is always the irony of beliefwhich coincides with the inability to know, though the absence of

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knowledge does not prevent belief (144). The inability to know ispresent at all levels: Rose the protagonist feels theimpossibility of understanding her father's actions, in the sameway that the narrator cannot figure out Rose's. Reality, asRosalie Osmond observes, or even the simple truth about events inthe past, is rather difficult to recover (82). This brings us backto our initial query about Munro's ascription to postmodernism, inanswer to which we can now suggest that she is connected to itthrough the unfathomable quality of her narratorial statements. Wehope to have demonstrated that the linguistic study of modalexpressions does shed some light on the complex narrativestrategies of these stories. As a component of the interpersonalfunction of language, modality is responsible for the peculiarkind of interaction established between narrator and reader inthese stories. The former expects the latter to take an activepart in the disentangling of a narrative which, as Miller puts it,questions its own truths and mocks its own telling (106). Severalcritics on Munro agree on the role that the narrator plays ingenerating this semantic indeterminacy. Coral Ann Howells remindsus that as soon as there is a teller, that teller creates meaningsthat cannot be controlled or determined (142). As Ajay Heblerightly points out, in "Royal Beatings", the narrator's attempt totell a story is continually disrupted by a hermeneutics ofsuspicion, which requires us to question whether or not certain

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events are actually taking place (18). The linguisticconstructions in which this uncertainty is couched are the modalexpressions deployed by the split narrator. These voices alwaysadopt an alienated and bewildered position towards the characters,alleging no privileged knowledge about their behaviour. In"Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You", since almost all thereflections can be readily attributed to Et (Carscallen 20), shecan be considered the source of the modality in the text. In thisstory, modality is also responsible for the thriller-like qualitywhich pervades the text. The modal system predominating in thestories is that of epistemic possibility, not without certaincomplexities which mirror the intrinsic ambiguities of thestories. The non-harmonic combination and postposition of modaloperators ties in with the inscrutability we perceive at thecontent level, and the confusion between epistemic and deonticmeaning is consistent with the omnipresent indeterminacy of thetexts.

Furthermore, modality is an excellent grammatical index toencode the themes of theatricality, which being endemic in thestories from Who Do You Think You Are?, is introduced extensively in"Royal Beatings". Acting, as Heble suggests, serves to underminethe distinction between which is genuine and that which is merelyan imitation (98). Finally, the gossip motive, which is crucial tounderstand Munro's work in general, is also through modality. We

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again share Heble's view when he remarks that the recurrence ofsuppositional phrases (in our terms, modal operators) alerts us tothe fact that Flo's stories are about the transforming, myth-making powers of memory, and that her tales evolve out of a localcommunity of gossip (102). Ultimately, the stories have the sameunsteady texture of gossip, in which no statement is completelyreliable. After investigating the multi-layered structure of thesenarratives, many issues still remain unclear: to what extent wasRose acting? Was Et involved in her sister's death? There isprobably no way to know for sure, but we hope to at least haveprovided the methodological tools for a linguistically-basedexploration of these impenetrable tales.

NOTES

1 This research was supported by a Government of Canada Award forthe academic year 1994-95.2 All references to the stories are from the Penguin editions ofthe collections and are incorporated into the text of the articleusing the following abbreviations: SBT ("Something I've BeenMeaning to Tell You"), RB ("Royal Beatings"), HT ("Half a

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Grapefruit").

WORKS CITED

Carrington, Ildikó de Papp. Controlling the Uncontrollable. The Fiction of Alice

Munro. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989.Carscallen, James. The Other Country: Patterns in the Writing of Alice Munro.Toronto: ECW Press, 1993. Carter, Ronald. "Stylistics." Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 5(1984): 92-100.Coates, Jenninfer. The Semantics of Modal Auxiliaries. Beckenham, England:Croom Helm, 1983.Freake, Doug. "Alice Munro: an Interview." What 6 (1986): 8.Halliday, Michael A.K. "Language Structure and Language Use." Ed.John Lyons. New Horizons in Linguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970:140-65.Heble, Ajay. The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro's Discourse of Absence. Toronto:U of Toronto P, 1994.Howells, Coral Ann. "Alice Munro's Art of Indeterminacy: The

Progress of Love." Modes of Narrative. Approaches to American, Canadian and

British Fiction. Eds. Reingard M. Nischik and Barbara Korte.Würzburg: Könighousen & Neumann, 1990: 141-152.Hoy, Helen. "Unforgettable, Indigestible Messages." Journal of

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Canadian Studies. 26.1 (1991): 5-21.Lyons, John Semantics (vol.2). Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977.Mayberry, Katherine J. "Every Last Thing...Everlasting: AliceMunro and the Limits of Narrative." Studies in Short Fiction (Fall1992): 531-41.Miller, Judith. The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable. Waterloo: U ofWaterloo P, 1984.Moss, J. The Canadian Novel Here and NowMunro, Alice. Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You. 1974. Toronto:Penguin, 1991._______. Who Do You Think You Are?. 1978. Toronto: Penguin, 1991. W.H. New Tense/Present/Narrative...Osmond, Rosalie. "Arrangements, Disarrangements and EarnestDeceptions." Narrative Strategies in Canadian Literature: Feminism and

Postcolonialism. Ed. Coral Ann Howells and Lynette Hunter. MiltonKeynes: Open University, 1991:82-92.Palmer, Frank Robert. Mood and Modality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1986.Perkins, Michael R. Modal Expressions in English. London: Frances Pinter,1983.Simpson, Paul. "Modality in Literary-Critical Discourse." The

Writing Scholar. Ed. Walter Nash. Newbury Park: Sage, 1990: 63-94._____ ___. Language, Ideology and Point of View. London: Routledge, 1993.Smythe, Katherine. Figuring Grief. Gallant, Munro and the Poetics of Elegy.

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Montreal: McGill's- Queen's UP, 1992.Wales, Katie. A Dictionary of Stylistics, London: Longman, 1989.

Patricia Meyer Spacks Gossip *7: Gossip proves relevant to considerations both of content andform in English and American realistic fiction, particularly onnarrator-reader relationshipsThe plot shapes itself around intensifying gossip. 10 Many writers employ gossip as characterizing speech. Thus,gossip fully imagined in tone and substance conveys fictionalpersonality. It can also suggest the dimensions of closerelationship, particularly between or among women. * 212: It is a paradox essential to gossip that those who engagein it must in the process combine the roles of insider andoutsider. Indeed, that combination generates one of gossip's morepowerful appeals. The person who talks about others must belong totheir world enough to know what is going on, but the gossipspeaks, often, as one judging from the position of the outsideobserver. Gossip, as I have said before, creates its own "inside",making a unity of talkers; it creates this unity by thrusting itssubject firmly out, into the position of exemplum. Gossipinterprets on the basis of unlocated but insistent authority. Itoften disguises (213) its malice as moralizing; it generates the

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superiority of its speakers from their capacity to condemn whatthey see.

"Tittle-Tattle of Highbury": Gossip and Free Indirect Style inEmma

1 the theatricalty of gossip3 gossip is dismissed as feminine "tittle-tattle" and put to use aa serious and privileged form of knowledgethe novel's deployment of free indirect style has the effect ofnaturalizing narrative authority by disseminating it among thecharactersa style which as Flaubert (The letters of Gustave Flaubert, ed andtrans Francis Stegmuller, Cambridge Mass 1980 1:230) said theauthor is everywhere felt, but never seen. The very force of freeindirect style is the form of gossip. Both function as forms parexcellence of surveillance, and both serve ultimately to locatethe subject-characterological or political-within a seeminglybeningn but ultimately coercive narrative or social matrix. 9: gossip, operating as a mode of a gauge of community authority,thus comes to represent the community itself14: the free indirect style is variously deployed throughout thenovel: sometimes it eavesdrops, as it were, on the internalruminations of individual citzens in order either to satirize a

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whole (or at least a the voice of its respectable citzens