Who Tells the Tale?: `Ukifune': A Study in Narrative Voice Author(s): Amanda Mayer Stinchecum Source: Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Winter, 1980), pp. 375-403 Published by: Sophia University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2384415 . Accessed: 11/08/2013 10:59 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Sophia University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Monumenta Nipponica. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 142.157.75.3 on Sun, 11 Aug 2013 10:59:40 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Who Tells the Tale? 'Ukifune':A Studyin NarrativeVoice by AMANDAMAYER STINCHECUM 'The one whospeaks (in the narrative)is not the one who writes(in real life) and the one who writesis not the one who is.' ROLANDBARTHES.' Narrative,Narrator, Speaker of theText WExrHO tellsthe tale? Who narratesthe narrative?Does narrativeby definitionrequire a narrator2or are thesecognates accidental? Does everytext have a narrator,either explicit or implied,or is therea mode of discoursewhich 'speaks itself'?These questionsarise as a matterof coursein readingthe fictionof JamesJoyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and other twentieth-centurynovelists, as well as earlierwriters such as Jane Austen and Gustave Flaubert. Here the narrator'spresence often seems to be replaced, overshadowedby that of the charactersthemselves. But what about the Genji Monogatari?The word monogatariliterally means 'a tellingor recountingof something';it stronglyimplies the cognateverb monogataru ('to recountsome- thing,to tell a tale'), in whichthe teller,or narrator(katari-te) exists a priori. Perhapswe can say that 'narrator'is moreclearly contained within the concept of monogatarithan in theEnglish word 'narrative'. In earlyHeian-period narrative tales (monogatari)such as the OchikuboMono- gatari,the narratorplaces himself(or herself)between the narrativeand us, the readers,guiding our understandingby means of commentsabout the characters and the story,and by descriptivenarration. In the firsttwo-thirds of the Genji, the readerhas a strongsense of the narrator'spresence, to the extentthat the leadingscholar in thefield, Tamagami Takuya, has interpretedthis narrator quite concretelyas a lady-in-waitingwho recordsthe storyas if she were givingan interpretativerecital of a textwhich is itselfa recordof the tellingof the tale by other,earlier ladies-in-waiting who eitherwitnessed the eventsdirectly or heard 1 Roland Barthes,'An Introductionto the this assumption the startingpoint for their Structural Analysis of Narrative', in New discussionof point of view in The Nature of LiteraryHistory, vi: 2 (Winter1975), p. 261. Narrative,Galaxy Books, OxfordU.P., 1968, 2 RobertScholes and RobertKellogg make p. 240. This content downloaded from 142.157.75.3 on Sun, 11 Aug 2013 10:59:40 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 376 MonumentaNipponica, xxxv, 4 about themfrom yet otherladies-in-waiting who witnessedthem directly.3 But even withinthe part of the workdealing with the lifeof Hikaru Genji,there are manypassages in whichwe seemto see directlyinto thehearts of thecharacters, withoutthe intervention of a narrator.These include lines conveying the innermost thoughtsof a characterwhich we cannotinterpret as thereport of a lady-in-waiting who witnessedthe situation.4 But it is in thelast thirdof the work,in whichthe eventstake place mainlyin Uji, that we feel the characters'inner world open to us. Particularlyin those chaptersin whichUkifune's plight reaches a crisiswe findthe flow of herthoughts (and thoseof othersabout her) renderedapparently without any mediationby a narrator.Often the form of thisnarration is thatof directquotation, concluding withthe quotativeparticles to, tote,or nado,and sometimesa verbsuch as omou ('she thinks').It also frequentlycontains exclamatory particles such as namu,zo, and ka shi,which one would expectto findin a directquotation, expressing the emotionof the speaker.For example,sonata ni nabiku-bekini wa arazu ka shi to omou.... (vi, 135-136,'I certainlymust not yield to him,she thinks... .'). Thus directinterior monologue is a kind of directdiscourse in Japaneseand contains a quotativeparticle. In otherpassages the characters'thoughts or feelingsdo not appear as direct quotationbut in a formcorresponding to indirectspeech. They are markednot by a phraseof direct quotation such as toomou but by expressions such as o omoi-yaru ('she wondersabout'), as in the sentence,mata konohito ni mie-tatematsuramuo omoi-yarunamu, imijui kokoro-uki (vi, 134. 4-5, 'and even wonderinghow could she meetthis one is terriblewretchedness'). A variationof o omouis ni omou;for example,ito me-yasuku ureshikaru-beki koto ni omoite(vi, 148. 10-1 , 'she feelsit to be a highlyproper and pleasingthing'). Long adjectivalmodifiers form another type of indirectquotation: kono hito ni ushi to omowarete,wasure-tamainamu kokoro-bososawa, ito fuko shiminikereba (vi, 135.4-5, 'themisery of beingthought odious and beingrejected by thisperson sinks into hervery deeply'). Here, Uki- fune's misery(kokoro-bososa) is amplifiedby the long modifyingclause that 3 Tamagami Takuya E hEW , 'GenjiMono- York, 1976, 2 vols. gatari no Dokusha: Monogatari Ondoku-ron' Nakano Koichi rPW4- citesii, 'Usugumo' Mk)t 1 M t: tP-a:, in Genji Mono- ('A Rack of Cloud'), 438. 8-14, as evidence gatari Hy6shaku MUtPO , Kadokawa against the viability of Tamagami's theory Shoten, 1964-6, Bekkan I, Genji Monogatari ('Genji Monogatarino Soshiji to Monogatari Kenkyd,1966, pp. 247-65. Ondoku-ron' FJ -Q) at R S in 4 All quotations from the text are from Genji Monogatari,i (Nihon Bungaku Kenkyd Abe Akio V 4%kT_et al., ed., Genji Mono- ShiryoSosho), Yuiseido,1969, pp. 206-7). gatari (Nihon Koten Bungaku Zensha * In this case the narratorcannot in any way ta:@h0, Shogakukan, 1970-76. Unless be interpretedas a lady-in-waitingwho either noted otherwise,all referencesare to the witnessedthe eventor heard it fromanother 'Ukifune' chapter. For the general reader, lady who was a directwitness, but, according correspondingchapter titlesin English have to Nakano, must be more transcendentaland been included,from Edward G. Seidensticker, omniscientthan any of the three narrators tr., The Tale of Genji, Alfred Knopf, New Tamagami proposes. This content downloaded from 142.157.75.3 on Sun, 11 Aug 2013 10:59:40 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions STINCHECUM: Who Tells the Tale? 377 precedesit. Thereare elementsthat identify the voice as Ukifune's(kono, 'this', indicatesUkifune's point of view),while other aspects, for example,the causal constructionshiminikereba ('because it sankinto her'), can onlybe theresult of the narrator'sreasoning. I shall hereafterrefer to thistype of narrationas 'indirect interiormonologue'. In general,one can say thatthe conclusiveform + 'thinks' (shuishikei+ to omou),or some equivalentthereof, corresponds to directinterior monologue,while the continuativeform + 'thinks'(ren'yokei + omou),or some equivalent,corresponds to indirectinterior monologue.5 In Japanese,however, the distinctionbetween direct and indirectdiscourse is not so clear as it is in English.The narrator'svoice frequentlyintrudes into a character'sdiscourse (usually interior monologue), shading the character's thoughts withthe narrator's intonations. Thus theentire narration tends to becomereported speech.6This is similarto a thirdtype of discoursein English,which Dorrit Cohn has termed'narrated monologue'.7 She describesthis kind of narration,which is similarto the German erlebteRede and the Frenchstyle indirect libre, as 'the renderingof a character'sthoughts in his own idiom,while maintaining the third- personform of narration'.8Cohn illustratesthese threemodes of discourseas follows: DIRECT STATEMENT:He said: 'I did not come here yesterday.' INDIRECTSTATEMENT: He said that he had not gone there the day before. NARRATEDMONOLOGUE: He had not come here yesterday.9 Note the changesin spatialand temporalloci: fromcome to gone,from here to there,from yesterday to theday before.Cohn pointsout thatnarrated monologue is a grammaticallydistinct mode peculiarto writtennarration; this is further demonstratedby Ann Banfieldin her analysisof the 'freeindirect style' (style indirectlibre).'0 Both Banfieldand Cohn remarkthat narratedmonologue, or free indirectstyle, contains demonstrativesand adverbs associated with the presenttense and the character'sown spatiallocus, thusclearly distinguishing it fromindirect discourse. " The modal complexityof Japaneseis reflectedby the lack of such clear categoriesof discourse.The grammarof reportedspeech does 5 Although Saeki Umetomo only draws Matejka & KrystynaPomorska, ed., Readings this conclusion in relation to adjectives,we in RussianPoetics: Formalistand Structuralist can expand it to referto reporteddiscourse in Views,MIT Press, 1971, pp. 167 ff. generaland particularlyto interiormonologue. 7 Dorrit Cohn, 'Narrated Monologue: See Saeki Umetomo 1*{MO:, 'Chokusetsu Definitionof a FictionalStyle', in Comparative Waho to Kansetsu Waho' EMM;m L SMI , Literature,xviii: 2