ON THE PROBLEMATIC INDEPENDENCE OF DIRECT SPEECH

Contrary to the way it functions in literary criticism, the expression of independence of direct speech appears problematic. The notion of oratio recta (which is of interest to linguists, philosophers, theoreticians of communication, textologists and narratologists) was related to the methodology of Maria Renata Mayenowa who considers the monologue to be 'the supreme structure of any literary text'. With regard to the above, it is claimed that the direct speech always complicates the entire composition of a novel. The narration-structure-related direct speech is, as Wojciech Górny rightly observed, direct and independent, because of tradition, and not because of the hierarchy of the communicational pattern of the novel, in which it is the text that introduces the citation which is more independent. On the other hand, Lubomir Dolezel's term 'clear expression', concerning the border between reproduced fictitious dialogues and the narration, indicates that the direct speech is a more narrator-independent structure than the indirect speech or 'erlebte Rede' (E. Lorck). It is also the very expression 'speech' which causes doubts, it was already Boris Eichenbaum who noted that 'a novel is being written and not wrote down'. If we accept Gérard Genette's point of view that dialogues are reproduced in a novel, the impreciseness of this reproduction would need to be underlined, for it is always a translation of codes connected with oral communication into codes specific to written communication, in the form in which the code is specific to the genre in question. However, the right reception of a novel requires the reader to believe that the narrator really lets protagonists speak. The direct speech is thus direct and independent for the reader in the esthetic sense. It would be difficult to defend the independence of the direct speech in the ontological sense.