Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

“polyvocality” and ambiguity of the text “by bringing into play a plurality of
speakers and attitudes” but also “dramatizes the problematic relationship between
any utterance and its origin.” 162 The effect of this technique is another ambiguity:
“on the one hand the presence of a narrator may create an ironic distancing. On
the other, the tinting of the narrator’s speech with character’s language may
promote empathetic identification on the part of reader” (Rimmon-Kenan 115).
Thus, the reader may be left unable to choose between irony and empathy towards
the character, an effect which Feuchtwanger’s narrator often exploits by allowing
the reader access to Goya’s innermost thoughts while at the same time evoking
ironic distance toward him. Moreover, when used for ekphrasis, free indirect
discourse produces yet another ambiguity between the voices. Ekphrasis in free in
direct discourse may be constituted by the character’s pre-verbal thought and
feelings, thus resulting in a verbalized (by the narrator) yet pre- or non-verbal
ekphrasis (of the character).
For example, when Goya muses about Velazquez’ Las meninas and plans
his own portrait of the king’s family (La familia de Carlos IV), his thoughts are
narrated through the third person voice of the narrator, but clearly in Goya’s
perspective:
Nein, er wird keine vertrackte Anekdote malen wie van Loo, und niemand
wird sagen dürfen, was dem Velazquez erlaubt sei, sei dem Goya nicht
erlaubt. [...] Und in der Dunkelheit, mit innerm Jubel, sah er deutlich, was
er malen wollte, die wiederstrebenden Farben, die er zwingen wird, eins
zu sein, den ganzen schillernden, glitzernden Einklang, und inmitten des
162 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London and New York:
Routledge, 1983) 111-113. On the production of ambiguity through the confusion between the
voices of the narrator and characters in free indirect discourse see also Gerard Genette, Narrative
Discourse Revisited (Ithaka, NY: Cornell UP, 1988) 52-55.
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