339). Quoted speech, too, is closed, not open to negotiation and revision;
it is fixed, it is not addressed to us, it is overheard by us.
Quotation is not a simple matter. Critic I. A. Richards found nineteen
different uses in writing for quotation marks. But our concern is with one
of them, reported speech and thought. Two features are of particular
relevance, first, how quotation loses illocutionary force to become pure
thought, and second, how the free play of ‘‘illocutionary force’’ elaborates
possibilities of subjectivity. Thus my intention is to trace out two of
the special properties of written documents by means of treating them
as quoted speech.
WHAT UTTERANCES LOSE IN BECOMING
TEXTS—REPORTED SPEECH
In her search for the literary basis for the rise of subjectivity in
modern novels, Banfield (1993) has extensively analyzed the linguistic
basis of what she calls ‘‘reported speech and thought.’’ She examined
the links between literature, psychology and linguistics: for literature
it was the form of the modern novel as exemplified by Jane Austen,
Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf; for psychology it was the work-
ings of the conscious and unconscious mind; and for linguistics, it
was what she calls ‘‘represented thought,’’ what literary theorists
have called ‘‘style indirect libre.’’ She wrote, ‘‘It is no accident that the
rise of the novel, the literary genre directed at the representation of
the inner (nonspeaking) self, and... the central role accorded to the
conscious, thinking subject in modern philosophy and an inarticulate
ego in psychology, coincide historically with the linguistic realization
of the nonspeaking, noncommunicating self of represented thought’’
(p. 360).
Banfield (1993) reminds us that speech is dominated by the social or
communicative function that assumes anIand ayou,ahereand anow.
Written literature, on the other hand, is dominated by the expressive
function of language that allows the formation of compositions in which
noyouexists, theImay not be the speaker/writer, and thenowmay be
cotemporal with the past (if the introductory clause is past). ‘‘When these
conditions exist... represented thought is born’’ (p. 353), a style much
exploited, she suggests, by such novelists as Austen, Woolf, and Joyce.
Written composition, she writes, ‘‘frees language from the speech act’’
(p. 357) allowing a new use of pronouns and deixis. These are the
properties that are borrowed into writing from quotation.
Represented thought is the thought expressed separate from the belief
of any particular speaker, a sort of Fregean pure thought. Banfield pro-
duces eight linguistic features that distinguish this kind of writing from
what is permissible in actual speech. Here is one example from the
writings of Virginia Woolf:
Why Literacy Matters, Then and Now 395