Da tipologia à imagologia: personagem e ponto de vista em E. M. Forster

Abstract

In Aspects of the Novel (1927) E. M. Forster dwells upon what he considers to be the essential parts of a novel. In the chapter about characters he tackles an already highly discussed topic at the time: that of narrative point of view. As a novelist and critic however, Forster does not deem it a key topic in narrative studies, dedicating most of the chapter to distinct flat from round characters. According to him, debates about narrative point of view would be a caprice, more important to the critics than to readers or to the novelist, whose main concern would be to “bounce” the reader. Throughout the years, Forster’s critical work stood out especially due to his distinction between the two character types, but, since then, while critics such as Antonio Candido, for instance, leant on his typology, others opposed his distaste for narrative point of view. Concerning one of his most acclaimed works, the novel A Passage to India (1924), would it be possible to argue that it owes its success exclusively to a good mix of (flat and round) characters and a plot that “bounces” the reader? Behind the construction of the main characters wouldn’t there be an enunciative perspective guiding the reader and interfering in both the protagonists’ and the secondary characters’ characterisation? Wouldn’t a voice, a narrator, with its enunciative perspective, describe characters, the plot and organise it as a whole according to its own tastes, opinions and worldview, all perceivable in language itself? This research sought to answer exactly these and other questions, putting side to side parts of Forster’s fictional work and his critical stances, with the purpose of identifying linguistic marks that highlight a voice and its point of view in the aforementioned novel. For such, were used as theoretic and methodological support Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism and the notion of heteroglossia, Daniel-Henri Pageaux’s studies on imagology and imaginary, Alain Rabatel’s enunciative approach of point of view (PDV, in Portuguese), and also Dominique Maingueneau’s view on discursive stance and the formation of narrative ethos. These works helped in the mapping of Forster’s novel, emphasizing linguistic evidence of a point of view that would lead the building of its characters and the plot and without which the novel wouldn’t be recognised as it is today