c) The question of the free, indirect discourse

The free, indirect discourse is the most flexible tool available to a writer wanting to relate a character to the external world of literary fiction. The are two variants: either the outside world seems a projection of the character’s imagination, or the character’s interior world seems modelled on the conventions of the outside landscape. We could define the first variant as "discursive idyll", and the second, "elegiac discursiveness". The idyll can in turn be lyric or ‘autistic’, depending on whether the character lives a state of symbiosis or estrangement with a reality that gradually welcomes or excludes him. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye presents an interesting case of suspension between these two potentialities, whereas Grimmelhausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus is an archetype of the symbiosis. Likewise, the level of the elegy can be distinguished as a disdainful refusal, with consequent inaction, as in Goncharov’s Oblomov and Chekhov’s Platonov, or as a dialectic conflict, like Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or even a sarcastic caricature of jargon within which the outside world is smothered: as in Jaroslav Hasek’s The Brave Soldier or Portnoy, the character-double of Philip Roth. In general, all the characters representing a writer’s Double come within this typology. The translator must therefore differentiate between the different linguistic registers coming to his attention. The danger, in confusing ‘idyll’ with ‘elegy’, is that of not gathering the ironic counter-texts hidden inside an apparent identification between the narrating first person and the dramatic situation. An extreme case in which such as question of differentiation is resolved by the very nature of the story is Robinson Crusoe, where the theological position not only concerns the writer but also the narrating first person, who se story of a castaway is expressed through the giving of names to the plant and animals of his personal world. An opposite case is that of Alfred Jarry’s Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, where the language permeates the characters’ discourse, submerging it in a maze of neologisms, onomatopes and free radicals, to the point where the only centripetal point of view, linguistically, is that of a monkey. Even Queneau’s The Blue Flowers poses many problems for the translator, due to the coincidence of centripetal and centrifugal staging, where the various jargons used by the characters coincide with their dramatic functionality and also their psychological definition. On the other hand, literary works in which the language conveys every parameter always remain the greatest challenge for a translator.