The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics [1 ed.] 9781441160058, 9781441143204, 9781441143259, 9781350079441

Citation preview

i

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Bloomsbury Companions Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics, edited by Jeannette Littlemore and John R. Taylor Bloomsbury Companion to Lexicography, edited by Howard Jackson Bloomsbury Companion to, M.A.K. Halliday, edited by Jonathan J. Webster Bloomsbury Companion to Phonetics, edited by Mark J. Jones and Rachael-Anne Knight Bloomsbury Companion to Syntax, edited by Silvia Luraghi and Claudia Parodi Continuum Companion to Discourse Analysis, edited by Ken Hyland and Brian Paltridge Available in Paperback as Bloomsbury Companion to Discourse Studies Continuum Companion to Historical Linguistics, edited by Silvia Luraghi and Vit Bubenik Available in Paperback as Bloomsbury Companion to Historical Linguistics Continuum Companion to Phonology, edited by Nancy C. Kula, Bert Botma and Kuniya Nasukawa Available in Paperback as Bloomsbury Companion to Phonology Continuum Companion to the Philosophy of Language, edited by Manuel García-Carpintero and Max Köbel Available in Paperback as Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Language Continuum Companion to Second Language Acquisition, edited by Ernesto Macaro Available in Paperback as Bloomsbury Companion to Second Language Acquisition

The Bloomsbury ­Companion to Stylistics Edited by

Violeta Sotirova

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Violeta Sotirova and Contributors, 2016 Chapter 17, Defamiliarization and Foregrounding © Catherine Emmott and Marc Alexander, 2015 Violeta Sotirova has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-6005-8 ePDF: 978-1-4411-4320-4 ePub: 978-1-4411-4325-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics / edited by Violeta Sotirova. pages cm. – (Bloomsbury companions) ISBN 978-1-4411-4325-9 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4411-6005-8 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4411-4320-4 (epdf) 1. English language–Style. 2. English language–Versification. 3. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) 4. Style, Literary. I. Sotirova, Violeta, editor. PE1421.B56 2015 808’.042–dc23 2015010278

Series: Bloomsbury Companions Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents Part I The Discipline of Stylistics 1

Introduction Violeta Sotirova

3

Part II Theoretical Approaches and Research Methods 2

Structuralism and Stylistics Linda Pillière

21

3

Generative Grammar and Stylistics Andrew Caink

37

4

Functional Stylistics Benedict Lin

57

5

Pragmatics and Stylistics Siobhan Chapman

78

6

Discourse Stylistics Marina Lambrou

92

7

Cognitive Stylistics David West

109

8

Feminist Stylistics Clare Walsh

122

9

Corpus Stylistics Michaela Mahlberg

139

10

Critical Stylistics Lesley Jeffries

157

11

New Historical Stylistics Beatrix Busse

177

12

Empirical Stylistics Frank Hakemulder and Willie van Peer

189

13

Pedagogical Stylistics: Charting Outcomes Sonia Zyngier and Olivia Fialho

208

Contents

14

Stylistics and Translation Jean Boase-Beier

231

15

Stylistics and Literary Theory Geoff Hall

244

16

Sociolinguistics and Stylistics Sylvia Adamson

263

Part III Current Areas of Research 17 Defamiliarization and Foregrounding Catherine Emmott and Marc Alexander

289

18

Metaphor Gerard Steen

308

19

Mind-Style David L. Hoover

325

20

Narrative Point of View Joe Bray

341

21

Speech and Thought Presentation Reiko Ikeo

356

22

Consciousness Eric Rundquist

380

23

Deixis in Literature Keith Green

400

24

Dialect in Literature Jane Hodson

416

25

Dialogue Dan McIntyre

430

26

Text-Worlds Joanna Gavins

444

27

Texture Peter Stockwell

458

28

Iconicity Christina Ljungberg

474

29

Narrativity Yanna Popova

488

vi

Contents

30

Emotion Sara Whiteley

507

31

Verse Nigel Fabb

523

32

Odd Pronominal Narratives Manuel Jobert

537

33

Irony Massimiliano Morini

553

Part IV Genres and Periods 34

Old English Style Sara M. Pons-Sanz

569

35

Middle English Style Louise Sylvester

583

36

Early Modern Style Sylvia Adamson

607

37

The Poetics of Everyday Discourse Jessica Mason and Ronald Carter

631

38

Dramatic Discourse Sarah Grandage

646

39

Style in Popular Literature Rocío Montoro

671

40

Style in World Englishes Literature E. Dawson Varughese

688

Author Index Subject Index Literary Writers and Texts

703 715 726

vii

viii

Part I The Discipline of Stylistics

1

Introduction The Discipline of Stylistics Violeta Sotirova, University of Nottingham

Stylistics as a movement within linguistics was the product of a number of ­intellectual pursuits which converged in Middle- and Eastern-European philological circles in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Jena School of Romance Philology, led by Meyer-Lübke, trained two of the finest philologists involved in inaugurating the discipline of stylistics in Germany: Leo Spitzer (1948) and Karl Vossler (1932). The French linguist and student of Saussure, Charles Bally, extended Saussurean Structuralism to include in it a theory of style (1909). But by far the most significant influence on modern ­stylistics is the work of the Russian Formalists. The theoretical foundations of modern stylistics were laid by the Russian Formalists and Czech Structuralists, working at a time, at the beginning of the twentieth century, marked by incredible intellectual activity. Although Erlich deems ‘the beginnings of Russian Formalism’ to have been ‘anything but spectacular’ (1980: 63), the ideas of these young scholars about the nature of literature were subsequently exported to America and Western Europe by Roman Jakobson, and they formed the basis of such influential movements as French Structuralism. Moreover, these ideas still underlie much of the theoretical discourse of those disciplines concerned with the study of literature. The non-spectacular character of the two circles in which Russian Formalism originates – the Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded in 1915 with Jakobson as its most prominent junior member, and the Petersburg Opojaz (Obščestvo izučenija poetičeskogo jazyka [Society for the study of poetic language]), founded in 1914 with Šklovsky, Èjxenbaum and Tynjanov as most prominent members – was due to the fact that they ‘were at first simply small discussion groups, where young philologists exchanged ideas on fundamental problems of literary ­theory’ (Erlich 1980: 63–4). The question that prompted the stirring up of activity, the theoretical articles and debates that occupied these scholars, was the question of what literature was, or rather, as redefined by Jakobson, the question of what ‘literariness’ was: ‘The object of study in literary science is not literature but “literariness,” that is what makes a given work a literary work’ (Jakobson 1921; cited in Èjxenbaum 3

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

2002[1927]: 36). The characteristic aim from the very start was ‘to create an autonomous discipline of literary studies based on the specific properties of literary material’ (Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 4). And the answer to the question of ‘literariness’ that led to the foundation of the discipline of stylistics (or, as the Formalists called it, poetics) was that literature could not be defined in any other way but by its linguistic make-up. Literature, for the Russian Formalists, was made of language, and this claim remained influential for decades to come: ‘[t]he novelist’s medium is language: whatever he does, qua novelist, he does in and through language’ (Lodge 1984: ix). Its definition, therefore, had to focus, first of all, on what literary language was. This, of course, could only be done in relation to other kinds of language, or in Èjxenbaum’s words, as a sort of ‘methodological procedure’ during which ‘the opposition between “poetic” language and “practical” language’ had to be established (Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 8). Thus, the distinctiveness of literary language became the essence of a theory of literature. To this day, stylistics is concerned with the study of literary language, and for some stylisticians this, as opposed to literary criticism, is the study proper of literature: Literary criticism has settled recently into a paradigm which is improper and marginalising. … literary scholarship has become an arid landscape of cultural history. Contexts and biographies, influences and allusions, multiple edited textual variants of literary works and their place in social history have become the focus of concern. … engagement with text, textuality and texture has largely disappeared from the profession. … Rational thought, discipline, systematicity, clarity of expression, transparency of argument, evidentiality and analytical knowledge have become the preserve of the few. (Stockwell 2009: 1) In fact, when making this provocative declaration, Stockwell seems to be echoing the sentiments expressed almost a century earlier by Jakobson: The historians of literature have helped themselves to everything – environment, psychology, politics, philosophy. Instead of a science of literature, they have worked up a concoction of home-made disciplines. They seem to have forgotten that those subjects pertain to their own fields of study – to the history of philosophy, the history of culture, psychology, and so on. … (Jakobson 1921; cited in Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 8) What Jakobson also advocated at this early stage in the formation of the discipline was that ‘[b]ecause the main subject of poetics is the differentia specifica of verbal art in relation to other arts and in relation to other kinds of 4

Introduction

verbal behaviour, poetics is entitled to the leading place in literary studies’ (1996[1960]: 10). But modern stylisticians have felt somewhat uneasy in acknowledging the influence of Russian Formalism and have felt the need to disassociate themselves from anything too ‘formalist’: ‘Of course’, write Carter and Stockwell, ‘the notion of literariness makes no sense within a Formalist or Structuralist paradigm, since a large part of what is literary depends on the social, institutional and ideological conditions of production and interpretation’ (2008: 293). Jeffries and McIntyre also point out that the Formalist attempt to establish a division between literary language and ‘practical’ language was ‘misconstrued’ and argue a similar point that ‘[l]iterariness … is not a quality of a text, rather it is a concept belonging to a specific genre’ and that it involves ‘contextual (social and cultural) aspects’ (2010: 2). Some of this uneasiness, I believe, stems from the pressure that more critically-minded literary scholars have exerted on stylistics when claiming that Jakobson, and by extension the whole Formalist and Structuralist movement, excludes a major component of the interpretative and analytical process of reading literature – the reader – and that this is ‘part of a wider elision of the cultural determination of literature itself’ (Attridge 1996: 40–1; see also Fish 1980). It is not clear, however, how an analysis of literary language can be ‘un-Formalist’, no matter how rich the cultural, historical, readerly contexts that are evoked might be, given that one of the primary disciplines informing this analysis is the scientific discipline of linguistics. And it is also the case that some of the best examples of stylistic scholarship remain the ones that are linguistically most rigorous. So, the renunciation of the formal method might appear at times to be an expression of an anxiety of influence and an attempt to address literary critical attacks rather than a true dissociation of theory and method. While Formalist poetics has produced some very descriptive linguistic analyses of literary works, its theoretical legacy is wider than the strict linguistic focus of some of its practical applications. The wider and richer scope of modern stylistics, therefore, has exceeded the practical applications of Formalism, but its theoretical foundations are nevertheless rooted in the ideas of Russian Formalism, which was anything but ahistorical or lacking in cultural awareness. In the remainder of this introduction, I will chart some of these theoretical ideas and concepts that remain fundamental to the discipline of stylistics, in both its past and present developments. The name Formalism signifies for the Formalists not a preoccupation with the text as an artefact. Its significance is historically and culturally contingent; as Èjxenbaum points out, it arises out of a need to make it clear that the Formalists no longer believe in a separation of form from content, but rather want ‘to foster the analysis of form itself – form understood as content’ (2002[1927]: 13). This belief that form is central to the understanding of content – or in its extreme 5

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

version that form is content – is what still underlies the endeavours of presentday stylistics. Literature is precisely that use of language that makes form palpable, that forces us to focus on the verbal texture and structure of the literary work as much as on the meanings expressed through its language, that prolongs the act of perception and interpretation through its difficult forms. In Šklovsky’s famous dictum: Habitualisation devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. … And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important. (Šklovsky 1965[1917]: 12) As a theory of literature, Formalism promotes the belief that literature is unlike any other form of language precisely because it defamiliarizes the familiar – it ‘make[s] the stone stony’. Although the criticism levelled at the Formalists’ belief of a separation between literary language and ‘practical’ language is valid and well founded (Simpson 1993) and the evidence pointing to the creative and poetic resources of spoken language is incontestable (Carter 2004), the power of literary language cannot be explained away too easily with its institutional sanctioning alone, nor can it be captured fully by alluding to models of the common cognitive processing of language, such as schema theory. Šklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization, therefore, remains at the core of any stylistic endeavour, because stylistics is concerned with the palpability and unfamiliarity of the language of the literary text which makes the reality portrayed in it palpable and unfamiliar. By this I do not mean that outlandish experiences are described in the text, or that the plot contains unexpected twists, or even that the text abounds in unusual images. Reality and our experience of it is made palpable and unfamiliar through particular verbal patterning, which may sometimes manifest itself as the opposite of metaphorical and rhetorical flourishes. Or, as Šklovsky asserts: Many still believe, then, that thinking in images – thinking in specific scenes of ‘roads and landscape’ and ‘furrows and boundaries’ – is the chief characteristic of poetry. … Images are given to poets; the ability to remember them is far more important than the ability to create them. (Šklovsky 1965[1917]: 7) 6

Introduction

Thus, even a sophisticated use of metaphor is not a prerequisite for the power of literature. Rather, it resides, as Šklovsky and the Formalists tried to show, in the artful use of language in any of its forms and on any of its levels. Such artful use of language may involve simple repetition or the challenging of an established norm in the form of plain language resembling ‘ordinary’ speech. The study of a particular device was not conducted in isolation by describing the device alone. It was done against the background of generic and historic norms in order to gauge its full significance. The awareness of literary history that the Formalists demonstrate in their writings is something that is not just typically overlooked by modern commentators, but is also completely glossed over to the extent that the Formalists are frequently accused of being ahistorical. However, the fact remains that the Formalists engage with issues of historicism just as prominently as they engage with issues of form. This engagement is not done as a purposeless widening of the scope of literary scholarship, but out of necessity. As Èjxenbaum explains: ‘The transition to the history of literature had come about, not by way of simply expanding the range of topics for investigation, but as the result of an evolution in the concept of form,’ an evolution that had made it clear that ‘a literary work is not perceived in isolation’ and that ‘its form produces an impression against the background of other works, and not on its own’ (2002[1927]: 18). Put succinctly, ‘Theory itself required our branching out into history’ (Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 30). Indeed, modern stylistics can usefully learn to practise a better awareness of history. By historicism, the Formalists do not mean the study of biographical detail or simply situating the work in terms of major historical events of the time when it was written. This is the kind of historicism that Jakobson and later Stockwell condemn (see earlier quotes). But for modern stylistics, the history of form, as the type of historicism advocated by Formalism, often gets lost from view once a break with historical criticism is established. This is the kind of historicism that is important in gauging the significance of stylistic forms and techniques: ‘History gives us what the contemporary situation cannot – a full measure of material’ (Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 33). The branching into a history of literary style, as early as 1925, when Šklovsky wrote his essay on Rozanov in О теории прозы [Theory of Prose], also presents us with a profoundly radical understanding of the historical development of literature, based on stylistic development. Literary history is not viewed as ‘a steady advancement toward perfection, like human progress’ (Šklovsky 1925; cited in Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 30), which is what the Formalists deem ‘primitive historicism’ (Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 30). It is instead characterized as ‘a struggle involving a destruction of the old unity and new construction out of the old elements’ (Šklovsky 1925; cited in Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 31). For Šklovsky, ‘literature moves ahead in a broken line’ (Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 7

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

32). Thus, the study of literary history is now announced as the study of ‘the very process of evolution, the very dynamics of literary forms’, the study of ‘literature as a social phenomenon sui generis’ and not as ‘dependent on other orders of culture’ (Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 33). To fully understand the significance of a stylistic form, one must have an understanding of the historical process of the appropriation and rejection of older forms. In Šklovsky’s famous words: Each new school of literature is a revolution – something like the emergence of a new class. … The defeated line is not annihilated, it does not cease to exist. It only topples from the crest, drops below for a time of lying fallow, and may again rise as an ever present pretender to the throne … the new hegemony is usually not a pure instance of a restoration of earlier form, but one involving the presence of features from other junior schools, even features (but now in a subordinate role) inherited from its predecessor on the throne. (Šklovsky 1925; cited in Èjxenbaum 2002[1927]: 32) An understanding of the history of literary style is important, as Adamson has shown (1999a, b), in order to illuminate the fact that Modernist practices of linguistic innovation, for instance, do not occur ex nihilo, but are inherited, albeit pushed to an extreme, from Romantic attempts to transform literary language into something that resembles common speech. Or in other words: ‘Modernist writing typically works by radicalising the techniques of Romantic orality’ (Adamson 1999b: 599). Situating a literary work in a particular historical period is not enough; the work has to be simultaneously analysed vis-à-vis similar forms from other periods and also simultaneously assessed in terms of its cultural significance and interaction with wider cultural trends of the period. All these are difficult to do at once, but stylisticians typically do engage with at least one of these aspects of analysis. Most often this is the situating of the work within a particular period. Truly historical approaches that take into account cultural situatedness and ways of breaking with a tradition are rare (Sotirova 2013; Hodson 2007; Bray 2001), thus pointing to the need of reviving the historicist legacy of Formalism. As a movement, Formalism is so versatile that apart from its theoretical definitions of literariness and its programmatic statements on literary history, it has also charted the territory of some of the most important analytical concepts of modern stylistics: foregrounding, which is especially important in the study of poetry; and fabula and sjužet, which shape the study of narrative. Foregrounding is strictly a concept that originates in the Prague School of Structuralism. Prague Structuralism, however, has a direct link with Russian Formalism, since one of its central members, Roman Jakobson, had been a member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle. The term foregrounding is a 8

Introduction

translation of the Czech aktualisace, defined by Jan Mukařovský as ‘the opposite of automatization’: Foregrounding is the opposite of automatization, that is the deautomatisation of an act; the more an act is automatized, the less it is consciously executed; the more it is foregrounded, the more completely conscious does it become. Objectively speaking: automatization schematizes an event; foregrounding means the violation of the scheme. (Mukařovský 2001[1932]: 226) The comparison that Mukařovský establishes between automatization and foregrounding is reminiscent of Šklovsky’s opposition between defamiliarization and habitualization. In a similar vein, Mukařovský’s statement contrasts the automatic processing of what he calls ‘standard language’ with the prolonged and more consciously palpable act of perception triggered by poetic language. But Mukařovský can also be credited with acknowledging the difficulty of a straightforward division between poetic language and ‘everyday’ language, something that stylisticians have later come to question in Formalist theories. The difference between the two, he argues, is not quantitative, but one that consists in ‘the consistency and systematic character of foregrounding’ (Mukařovský 2001[1932]: 227). Thus, standard language for him also makes use of foregrounding; it also uses forms of repetition and parallelism and violates norms, but it quickly assimilates those forms and automatizes them, in order to retain focus on the content of the message. In contrast, poetic language deliberately ‘push[es] communication into the background as the objective of expression’ and ‘place[s] in the foreground the act of expression’ (Mukařovský 2001[1932]: 227). This analysis of poetic language as one that foregrounds the palpability of its linguistic make-up is also echoed by Jakobson when he defines the poetic function of language as the ‘focus on the message for its own sake’ (Jakobson 1996[1960]: 15), as opposed to the other functions of language – the emotive, the referential, the conative, the phatic and the metalingual – each of which corresponds to one of the other ‘constitutive factors’ (Jakobson 1996[1960]: 12) in a speech event: the addresser, the context, the addressee, the contact and the code. Although Jakobson’s model of communication and his definition of the poetic function have received heavy criticism (Attridge 1996; Toolan 2010), Mukařovský’s concept of foregrounding has remained at the centre of stylistic investigation (Leech 1969, 2008; Leech and Short 2004; van Peer 2007; Miall 2007). It has produced some very interesting empirical findings which prove its validity, that is, its measurable effect on readers (van Peer 1986; Miall and Kuiken 1994). The fundamental significance of the theory of foregrounding for stylistics is not just witnessed in the proliferation of studies relating to foregrounding; it forms the very essence of stylistic study per se, because in a 9

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

sense, all stylistic investigation is concerned with showing what is prominent or remarkable in the language of a literary work – that is, with foregrounding. This is also the primary focus of the cognitive concern with texture, albeit from an angle that considers it as a readerly response rather than a textual pattern (Stockwell 2009). Two of the most fundamental concepts in the study of narrative – story and discourse – also originate in the thought of the Russian Formalists. In a series of studies, Šklovsky works out a theory of prose that allows him to scrutinise narrative texts in terms of their construction. The theoretical angle that he takes is closely linked to generic and historic norms and discards the notion of content as unimportant in the study of narrative texts: A work of art is perceived against a background of and by association with other works of art. The form of a work of art is determined by its relationship with other pre-existing forms. The content of a work of art is invariably manipulated, it is isolated, ‘silenced’. All works of art, and not only parodies, are created either as a parallel or an antithesis to some model. The new form makes its appearance not in order to express a new content, but rather, to replace an old form that has already outlived its artistic usefulness. (2009[1925]: 20) It is much more tempting to put content at the forefront of discussion in the case of narrative than it is in that of poetry. Poetry is more densely patterned to the extent that its language cannot be lost from view. But for prose, the development of a storyline is something that can easily obscure the construction of the text, especially since this construction is more difficult to keep in focus over long stretches of text. The theoretical awareness of form that Šklovsky brings to the study of narrative has been fundamental to the establishment and development of narratology as a sub-discipline of stylistics. In the words of Scholes: ‘Formalism and Structuralism have indeed made significant contributions to the poetics of fiction’ (1973: 134). The distinction between content and construction in narrative texts is defined by Šklovsky as a distinction between storyline and plot, in the famous concepts of fabula and sjužet: The concept of plot (sjužet) is too often confused with a description of the events in the novel, with what I’d tentatively call the story line (fabula). As a matter of fact, though, the story line is nothing more than material for plot formation. In this way, the plot of Eugene Onegin is not the love between Eugene and Tatiana but the appropriation of that story line in the form of digressions that interrupt the text. … The forms of art are explained by the artistic laws that govern them and not by comparisons with actual life. In order to impede the action of the 10

Introduction

novel, the artist resorts not to witches and magic potions but to a simple transposition of its parts. He thereby reveals to us the aesthetic laws that underlie both of these compositional devices. (Šklovsky 2009[1925]: 170) Here, again, we see Šklovsky’s characteristic distrust of convoluted or striking content and of attempts to seek the connections between reality and the text. Just as he dismisses the poetic image as the defining feature of verbal art, he rejects the thesis that the power of a narrative text may lie in its twists of content and in its choice of shocking events. Again, the artistic technique is what defines the narrative text, and this technique is located in the ‘transposition’ of basic story events, so much so that he declares a novel like Tristram Shandy to be ‘the most typical novel in world literature’ (Šklovsky 2009[1925]: 170). The whole of Structuralist narratology is built around this idea: that narrative is transformed experience (Genette 1983; Rimmon-Kenan 1983; Toolan 2001). Although the more recently developed discipline of cognitive narratology has shifted the focus to ‘the study of mind-relevant aspects of storytelling practices’ (Herman, [2]), that is, to how stories are processed and tracked, to how story worlds are mentally represented, etc., its reader processing orientation is still dependent on the basic classifications of text construction put forward by classical narratology and originating largely in the thought of Russian Formalism. Some of these new developments, as Herman points out, ‘were unavailable to story analysts such as Barthes, Genette, Greimas, and Todorov during the heyday of the structuralist revolution’ (Herman, [4]), but some of the concerns of cognitive narratology fall outside of the remit of a Formalist Poetics or clash outright with the theoretical assumptions of the Formalist and Structuralist schools of thought. Thus, any attempt to relate story worlds to the real world is not a concern of classical narratology, which focuses on the poetics of the text itself rather than on the understanding of questions such as ‘when in history did these events occur, and where geographically?; an inventory of the characters involved; and a working model of what it was like for these characters to experience the more or less disruptive or non-canonical events that constitute a core feature of narrative representations’ (Herman, [6]). Rather than deem Structuralist narratology inadequate in addressing these issues, it seems to me that there is a fundamental difference in the aesthetic theories that underpin these two approaches and make them more or less incompatible. For one of them, the primary concern of an aesthetic theory of narrative is the cognitive processes that make understanding possible. For the other, an aesthetic theory proper should account for the palpability of the textual construction. In other words, what is of value is not the extraordinariness of the image itself or the events of the story and how they may be naturalized by the reader, but the way they are made palpable to the reader through language. 11

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

There is also a fundamental philosophical difference between these different schools of thought in the understanding of how meaning is interpreted in language. For Russian Formalism, as for Structuralism, meaning is not gauged by a mapping of word to world but is based on difference: on how a particular linguistic sign differs from other signs in the system. As Pomorska states: ‘the Opojaz scholars were often attacked for having (allegedly) neglected or rejected [the problem of meaning in verbal art’ (2002: 278). This attack seems to have continued throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But as Pomorska further explains, the Formalists approached this problem not ‘in a traditional way’, whereby ‘every separate signans was supposed to fit some signatum, and in which such unity was regarded as steady and universal’; rather, they approached the problem of meaning ‘in a new and different way’, whereby ‘the sign acquired meaning only within the system in which it played a part’ (2002: 278). This understanding of meaning as being based on difference and opposition with other elements of the text has informed stylistic analysis throughout the decades, not least in the understanding that the text posits its own text-internal norms. The concern with readerly processing or with mappings between text and reality thus falls outside of the scope of Formalist Poetics. Modern stylistics, even when embracing the more interesting aspects of cognitive theory, such as viewing narrative as ‘a sense-making instrument in its own right, a way of structuring and understanding situations and events’ and as a ‘tool[.] for thinking’ (Herman, [6]), retains a theoretical and practical focus on the structural and linguistic artfulness of the text. Another important narratological concept inherited from Formalist Poetics is the concept of skaz, first addressed by Èjxenbaum (1978[1918]) and later included by Mikhail Bakhtin in his typology of prose genres (1984[1929]). Skaz is defined by Èjxenbaum ‘as the constructional principle of the plotless story’ (2002[1927]: 21). Wolf Schmid relates its definition in The Living Handbook of Narratology to its etymology. Derived from ‘Russian skazat’ ‘to say, to tell’, skaz ‘is a special type of narration … characterized by a personal narrator, a simple man of the people with restricted intellectual horizons and linguistic competence, addressing listeners from his own social milieu in a markedly oral speech’ (Schmid, [2]). This kind of personalized narrator makes the narrative akin to oral narrative and the narration becomes a form of stylization whereby elements of orality mimic the spontaneous and naturally-occurring situation of story-telling. The classic examples of skaz in Western literature, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, adopt the non-standard and very colloquial variety of a first-person narrator whose voice is made clearly distinct from the voice of the author. In this way, they dispose of the normally present educated and standard variety of the authorial narrator, which, in a hierarchy of narrative voices, occupies the supreme position (Adamson 1999b). The identification 12

Introduction

and definition of the concept is thus important for distinguishing between the different types of narrators and narrative positions that narratology has subsequently gone into investigating. The crucial significance of the Formalist legacy for modern stylistics can still be felt, in spite of the limited account of its concepts and theoretical positions offered here. Modern stylistics is indebted to Formalism both for its theoretical outlook on literature and for its most central concepts shaping the study of poetic language and narrative structure. Two other Russian thinkers, Bakhtin (1981[1934–5]; 1984[1963]) and Vološinov (1973[1929]), with their work on novelistic discourse, have also exerted a fundamental influence on the theory of the novel as a polyphonic genre. That these new ideas of how to study literature arose at that particular time is no coincidence, according to some historians of Formalism. As Erlich points out, the Futurist movement in Russia, with its poetry characterized by extreme verbal dexterity, ‘was to become one of the main factors behind the emergence of Russian Formalism’ with its insistence on ‘the need for an adequate system of scientific poetics’ (Erlich 1980: 49). Erlich also reports a striking parallel between Šklovsky’s theory of defamiliarization as the distinctive feature of art and a statement that Jean Cocteau, a central representative of the Surrealist movement in France, makes when ‘describ[ing] the mission of poetry’ (Erlich 1980: 179): ‘Suddenly’, wrote Cocteau, ‘as if in a flash, we see the dog, the coach, the house for the first time. Shortly afterwards habit erases again this potent image. We pet the dog, we call the coach, we live in a house; we do not see them anymore’. (Cocteau 1926; cited in Erlich 1980: 179–80) Erlich goes on to clarify that ‘the striking similarity between the two pronouncements is not to be ascribed to Šklovsky’s influence’ (Erlich 1980: 180), because there is no evidence that Cocteau would have been familiar with the work of Šklovsky or any member of Opojaz. But what has to be acknowledged is the fact that ‘this virtual identity of formulation’ cannot be ‘merely a matter of convergence of views between two essayists who wrote about poetry lovingly and imaginatively’ (Erlich 1980: 180). And Erlich concludes that: It is certainly no accident that a statement which sounds at times like a French rendition of the Opojaz manifesto was made by one who, like Šklovsky, carried the torch for the literary avant-garde. (Erlich 1980: 180) The idea that it is not coincidental that Formalism emerges as a literary theory in what is broadly known as the Modernist period is plausible, because as a theory of literature that focuses exclusively on language, it coincides with a 13

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

time of most radical experimentation in literary language and all the arts. The cultural confluence of the two movements thus has to be acknowledged, but not to the extent that Formalism should be criticized for serving the interests of a particular literary movement, or, as Erlich puts it, for having an ‘improvised philosophy of art’ that was ‘as much of a paean for the Russian Futurist movement as it was a contribution to the theory of literature’ (1980: 180). That the extreme linguistic experimentation laid bare the need for a disassociation of literary scholarship from biographical and historical criticism, that it exposed the centrality of language in the construction of a literary work more patently, is not necessarily a reason for declaring the cultural contingency of Formalist literary theory. All that this historical coincidence points to is the dependence of abstract theoretical scholarship on actual artistic manifestation, but it does not invalidate the relevance of the linguistic turn in literary scholarship to earlier or later periods. My final note of homage to Formalism is the mention of Jakobson’s theory of metaphor and metonymy. Based on Saussure’s theory of the two axes of language, Jakobson distinguishes between the axis of selection, which he also calls the metaphoric axis, and the axis of combination, which can be called the metonymic axis (Jakobson 1987[1956]). This fundamental distinction is unique to language as a semiotic system and plays an important role as a structuring principle of the human linguistic ability. Because any linguistic utterance is the result of the intersection of the two axes, or of both the selection from an appropriate set and its combination into an appropriate sequence, Jakobson claims that any speech disturbance, as for instance any aphasiac disorder, should affect one of these two structuring principles. He goes on to show persuasively that this is indeed the case and that patients with aphasia exhibit either a selectional disturbance or a combinational disturbance. The similarity disorder would thus manifest itself in a patient’s inability to select the correct item from a paradigmatic set and may produce sequences that contain only function words signalling syntactic relations, or substitute ‘fork’ for ‘knife’, ‘smoke’ for ‘pipe’, etc., based on their contiguous or metonymic relation. A contiguity disorder, on the other hand, can manifest itself in the dismissal of correct inflections which signal syntactic relationships: for instance, in the use of infinitives instead of the finite forms of verbs. This venture into speech disorders is important for Jakobson as it demonstrates that the principle of selection and the principle of combination are both structuring principles of the brain and of the organisation of discourse. Thus, he goes on to argue: The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term 14

Introduction

for the first case and the metonymic way for the second, since they find their most condensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively. (Jakobson 1987[1956]: 110) But beyond the individual characteristic of a person’s style, the interaction of the two structuring principles of discourse can characterize a literary work either as predominantly metaphoric or predominantly metonymic. This does not imply the surface presence of concrete metaphors or metonymies, although they may be an effect of the principle that dominates the discourse; it implies that the structure of the discourse is based on the metaphoric or metonymic principle. The repetition of a structure, for example, operates along the metaphoric axis, as the equivalence between parallel lines in verse invites an associative link of some kind – either of semantic equivalence or of semantic contrast. The drawing of attention to ‘the heroine’s handbag’ ‘in the scene of Anna Karenina’s suicide’ is a metonymic mode of arrangement, according to Jakobson (1987[1956]: 111). The significance of the metaphoric or metonymic structuring of a literary work is then extended from the individual work to the historical periodization of literature and to the distinctions between different genres. For Jakobson, the metaphoric process is predominant in poetry and the metonymic in prose. Film as a genre is predominantly structured according to the metonymic principle. But these broad-brush generalizations have to be historically nuanced. Thus, Romanticism and Symbolism as distinct literary movements can be characterized by ‘the primacy of the metaphoric process’, and what Jakobson claims is ‘insufficiently realised’ is also the fact that Realism, ‘which belongs to an intermediary stage between the decline of Romanticism and the rise of Symbolism and is opposed to both’, is marked by the predominance of the metonymic principle (Jakobson 1987[1956]: 111). In painting, Cubism is a predominantly metonymic form and Surrealism is metaphoric. In film, the work of Charlie Chaplin or the metaphoric montage of Eisenstein are structured according to the metaphoric principle, albeit the genre in which they work is predominantly metonymic. The storm scene in King Lear, in spite of belonging to a predominantly metonymic genre, is classed as structured according to the metaphoric principle by Lodge (1977: 82). Indeed, Lodge (1977) takes up Jakobson’s historical and generic mappings of the metaphoric and metonymic principles to show how Modernist writers are predominantly metaphoric and how the novel of consciousness, with its associative links, operates along the metaphoric pole of representation. What is important in this historical analysis of literary movements is the conclusion that the metaphoric versus metonymic distinction allows us to reach: namely, that there is an ‘alternative predominance of one or the other of these two processes’, ‘an oscillation’ (Jakobson 1987[1956]: 111) that manifests in different literary periods as a pendulum effect, as Lodge describes it (1977: 212), 15

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

with each subsequent generation of writers rejecting the stylistic norms of the previous one and reversing the mode of discourse organization as one measure of the shift in taste. This oscillation between two alternatives is, of course, an oversimplification that does not take into account other distinguishing features of the style of a period, but it does chime in with Šklovsky’s analysis of literary history as moving ahead ‘in a broken line’ and as bringing about a revolution with each new period or movement. Jakobson should be credited with being the first to extend metaphor and metonymy from surface tropes to structuring principles, something that becomes especially important in the treatment of conceptual metaphors proposed by cognitive poetics (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). As ChrzanowskaKluczewska states: It is to Jakobson (1956) that we owe the idea that figuration can extend far beyond a phrase, a sentence, a sequence of sentences, or even a short text, though such a proposal has distant roots in the tropi sermonis of ancient rhetoric. A ‘large figure’ of traditional and structural stylistics and criticism, in Jakobson’s understanding of this term, becomes a device for the construal of entire discourses and especially of narrative (contrary to micro- and macrofiguration typically associated with poetry). … Thus metafigures are not only covert but also largely dissociated from overt figuration. (2011: 47) The legacy of Formalism thus manifests itself in almost every field of presentday stylistic enquiry. The developments, refinements and revisions to Formalist theories and concepts have been inevitable and will be felt in the course of this book in almost all its chapters, but so will also their powerful presence. In spite of the incompatibility between aesthetic principles and beliefs that some stylisticians might feel with Formalism, narratologists and stylisticians of either a cognitive or a formalist bent often practise a truly interdisciplinary and eclectic approach. Or, as Jeffries and McIntyre assert, ‘Stylistics … is eclectic in its use of theory, though it originated in literary theories of Formalism and took on the theory of Structuralism as developed by Saussure’ (2010: 10) and ‘in addition to drawing upon a wide range of theories about the nature of language and particularly the nature of reading, stylistics is eclectic in its use of methodologies’ (2010: 11). Amidst this eclecticism, however, the dominant question that continues to shape any stylistic enquiry, as formulated by two of the founding fathers of stylistics in the United Kingdom, is ‘not so much what, as why and how’ (Leech and Short 1981: 13). This sounds strikingly similar to Pomorska’s formulation of ‘the question posed’ by the Formalists in relation to literature: ‘not “What is it about?” or “Why and how did it appear?” but “How is it made?”’ (Pomorska 2002: 274).

16

Introduction

References Adamson, S. M. (1999a), ‘Literary language’, in R. Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 3: 1476-1776, 539–653, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Adamson, S. M. (1999b), ‘Literary language’, in S. Romaine (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 4: 1776-1997, 591–690, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Attridge, D. (1996), ‘Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics in retrospect’, in J. J. Weber (ed.), The Stylistics Reader, 36–53, London: Arnold. Bakhtin, M. (1981[1934–5]), ‘Discourse in the novel’, in M. Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, 258–422, Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1984[1929]), Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. C. Emerson, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bally, C. (1909), Traité de stylistique française, Paris: Librarie C Klincksieck. Bray, J. (2001), ‘The source of “dramatized consciousness”: Richardson, Austen and stylistic influence’, Style, 35 (1): 18–33. Carter, R. (2004), Language and Creativity: The Art of Common Talk, London: Routledge. Carter, R. and Stockwell, P. (2008), ‘Retrospect and prospect’, in R. Carter and P. Stockwell (eds), The Language and Literature Reader, 291–302, London: Routledge. Chrzanowska-Kluczewska, E. (2011), ‘Catachresis – a metaphor or a figure in its own right?’, in M. Fludernik (ed.), Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory – Perspectives on Literary Metaphor, 36–57, Abingdon: Routledge. Cocteau, J. (1926), ‘Le Secret Professionel’, Le Rappel à l’Ordre, Paris: Delamain et Boutelleau. Èjxenbaum, B. (1978[1918]), ‘The illusion of Skaz’, Russian Literature Triquarterly, 12: 233–6. Èjxenbaum, B. (2002[1927]), ‘The theory of the formal method’, in L. Matejka and K. Pomorska (eds), Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, 3–37, Chicago, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Erlich, V. (1980), Russian Formalism: History – Doctrine, The Hague: Mouton. Fish, S. (1980), Is There a Text in This Class, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Genette, G. (1983), Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Herman, D. ‘Cognitive narratology’, The Living Handbook of Narratology, Hamburg University Press. http://wikis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.php/Cognitive_Narratology. Hodson, J. (2007), ‘Women write the rights of women: The sexual politics of the personal pronoun in the 1790s’, Language and Literature, 16 (3): 281–304. Jakobson, R. (1921), Novejšaja russkaja poèzija, Nabrosok pervyj [Recent Russian Poetry, Sketch 1]. Prague. Jakobson, R. (1987[1956]), ‘Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances’, in K. Pomorska and S. Rudy (eds), Language in Literature, 95–114, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Jakobson, R. (1987[1960]), ‘Linguistics and poetics’, in R. Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. K. Pomorska and S. Rudy, 62–94, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Jakobson, R. (1996[1960]), ‘Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics’, in J. J. Weber (ed.), The Stylistics Reader, 10–35, London: Arnold. Jeffries, L. and McIntyre, D. (2010), Stylistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980), Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

17

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Leech, G. (1969), A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, London: Longman. Leech, G. (2008), Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding, Harlow: Longman. Leech, G. and Short, M. (2004[1981]), Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, London: Longman. Lodge, D. (1977), The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature, London: Arnold. Lodge, D. (1984), The Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel, London: Routledge. Miall, D. S. (2007), ‘Foregrounding and the sublime: Shelley in Chamonix’, Language and Literature, 16 (2): 155–68. Miall, D. S. and Kuiken, D. (1994), ‘Foregrounding, defamiliarisation and affect: Response to literary stories’, Poetics, 22: 389–407. Mukařovský, J. (2001[1932]), ‘Standard language and poetic language’, in L. Burke, T. Crowley and A. Girvin (eds), The Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader, 225– 30, London: Routledge. Pomorska, K. (2002), ‘Russian formalism in retrospect’, in L. Matejka and K. Pomorska (eds), Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, 273–80, Chicago, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Rimmon-Kenan, S. (1983), Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, New York: Methuen. Schmid, W. ‘Skaz’, The Living Handbook of Narratology, Hamburg University Press. http:// wikis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.php/Skaz. Scholes, R. (1973), ‘The contributions of formalism and structuralism to the theory of ­fiction’, Novel, 6 (2): 134–51. Simpson, P. (1993), Language, Ideology and Point of View, London: Taylor & Francis. Šklovsky, V. (1925), О теории прозы [Theory of Prose], Leningrad: ‘Krug’. Šklovsky, V. (1965[1917]), ‘Art as technique’, in L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis (eds), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis, 3–24, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Šklovsky, V. (2009[1925]), Theory of Prose, trans. B. Sher, London: Dalkey Archive Press. Sotirova, V. (2013), Consciousness in Modernist Fiction: A Stylistic Study, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Spitzer, L. (1948), Linguistics and Literary History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stockwell, P. (2009), Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Toolan, M. (2001), Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, London: Routledge. Toolan, M. (2010), ‘What do poets show and tell linguists?’, Acta Linguistica Hafniensia, 42 (1): 189–204. van Peer, W. (1986), Stylistics and Psychology: Investigations of Foregrounding, London: Croom Helm. van Peer, W., ed. (2007), Foregrounding, Special Issue of Language and Literature, 16 (2). Vološinov, V. (1973[1929]), Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik, New York: Seminar Press. Vossler, K. (1932), The Spirit of Language in Civilization, trans. O. Oeser, London: Kegan Paul.

18

Part II Theoretical Approaches and Research Methods

2

Structuralism and Stylistics Linda Pillière, Aix Marseille Université

Chapter Overview The Key Ideas Saussure’s Legacy Woolf and Linearity Visible Breaks in the Linearity Subverting the Word Order Subverting Temporal Linearity Subverting the Paradigmatic Axis Repetition and Parallel Structures

22 23 25 25 26 27 28 31

The concept of Structuralism is firmly associated with the name of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. Yet strangely enough, Saussure himself never uses the term and hardly ever uses the word structure. In fact, Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale was not written by the linguist himself. The text that we have today is an edited text based on students’ notes, supplemented by a manuscript discovered in 1996. So while we may consider Saussure to be the founder of Structuralism, he was, in the words of Georges Mounin (1968), a structuralist without knowing it. Trying to elaborate a theory from students’ notes, even aided by the recent discovery of the manuscript, inevitably raises questions of interpretation (Culler 1975; Harris 2001) – would Saussure have wished for a particular chapter to follow on from another? Did he really intend that particular meaning? Would he have rephrased a particular concept or idea had he known his theories would be published? Interesting as such debates may be, they are beyond the scope of the present chapter. What concerns us here is how Saussure’s ideas have given rise to the concept of Structuralism, how they have been interpreted, rightly or wrongly, and how that has influenced stylistics. 21

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

1  The Key Ideas There are several key ideas in Saussure’s theory that have played an important role in subsequent text analysis and in the development of stylistics (Culler 1990). The first concerns the distinction between langue and parole. For Saussure, it was essential that linguistics should determine its object of study if it was to develop an appropriate method of analysis. In order to clarify this object of study he differentiates langue from parole. The term langue refers to an abstract coherent system, the resources available to the individual, while parole refers to the individual’s actual use of this system. Thus, langue is a social institution, a stable entity, a ‘grammatical system existing potentially in every brain’ (Course,  131; Cours, 302), whereas parole is individual; and although parole is more immediately accessible to the linguist, it is langue that Saussure believes should be the linguist’s field of research. As a system or structure, langue is seen as a coherent object for analysis consisting of linguistic signs. Each linguistic sign is composed of a signifié (signified) and a signifiant (signifying or signifier). These two terms are frequently translated as ‘concept’ and ‘acoustic image’. Thus, the word-form ‘calf’ is composed of the mental image that the word-form evokes and the phonemes that are used to pronounce the word: /kɑːf/. These two components of the linguistic sign are as closely associated as the recto and verso of a sheet of paper (Course, 111; Cours, 157). Saussure presents langue as being a differential system. Each linguistic sign has its place within the structure of langue and its value is defined in relation to the other elements belonging to the structure, both in terms of signifié and in terms of signifiant. We identify ‘calf’ because it has a different acoustic image – or a different pattern of sounds – to ‘laugh’, ‘half’, ‘car’, etc. At the same time, the concept of ‘calf’ is different to that of ‘dog’ or ‘cow’. It therefore takes its value in relation to the other linguistic signs in the system. Its material form may change, the way that we spell or pronounce it, but ‘calf’ maintains its place within the system as long as it is different in value to the other signs. Saussure uses the example of the 8.45 Geneva–Paris train to illustrate this point. The train is identified not by its number of carriages, by the driver or by the staff on board, but by its place within the structure of the rail system, the route that it takes, the time of departure: all the elements that distinguish it from other trains in the system. The 8.45 might leave ten minutes late or have a different driver or passengers, but it will still be recognized as the 8.45 Geneva–Paris train, distinct from an earlier or later train within the timetable. The idea that the value of a sign depends on the relationship it maintains with other signs can be illustrated by taking the form І3. Within the series І2 І3 І4, we would identify it as the number 13. In another series, A І3 C, it would take its value from what precedes and follows and be read as the letter B.3 22

Structuralism and Stylistics

The identity of a linguistic sign does not therefore depend on its relationship with an object but on its relationship with other signs. Saussure counters the nominalist approach that believes an intrinsic or natural link exists between the word ‘calf’ and the animal. For Saussure, such a link is arbitrary. There is no reason to call a calf a ‘calf’ rather than a ‘dog’. Within the system of the English language, ‘calf’ does not occupy the same place as veau does within the French system. Both designate the young animal, but in English, ‘calf’ is also opposed to ‘veal’, the meat obtained from the animal. Saussure also argues that language is linear since within the linguistic sign, one sound inevitably precedes another, and when we write, we can only write one word at a time. Language operates in a linear fashion or sequence, and words connect to one another to form a chain of meaning. This horizontal chain of meaning came to be called the syntagmatic axis. It is the association of ‘this and this and this’. Words are therefore also differentiated from what precedes and follows. At the same time, each word form can be differentiated from what might have been selected in their place. The axis of choice or selection is known as the paradigmatic axis. Identity thus depends on both paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations. Finally, Saussure distinguished between the diachronic axis and the synchronic axis. Each has its methods and field of inquiry, but history has interpreted Saussure as being firmly on the side of a synchronic analysis of language, focusing on the current state of the language rather than analysing it from a historical perspective.

2  Saussure’s Legacy The influence of Saussure’s ideas in stylistics owes much to the scholars who adopted them and diffused them, sometimes modifying them in the process. The notion of an underlying abstract system has played an important role in Structuralism, with the basic opposition between langue and parole being most influential in the field of phonology. A distinction was established between phonetics, which concentrates on the actual sounds produced in speech acts, and phonology, which analyses the distinctions between the abstract units of the signifiant. In other fields, the importance of an underlying system led to a move away from studying authors to studying texts. For the adherents of Russian Formalism and Prague Structuralism, movements that developed in the early twentieth century, the literary text as a system provided a background against which various elements are foregrounded, and this led to the analysis of literariness as a deviation from a norm. Roman Jakobson was probably the most influential adherent to this approach, and his writings, with their emphasis on a careful analysis of a text’s linguistic features, undoubtedly influenced stylistics. 23

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

In his essay ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance’, Jakobson advocates an ‘unbiased, attentive, exhaustive, total description of the selection, distribution and interrelation of diverse morphological classes and syntactic constructions’ (1987: 127). If such an analysis is followed it will, he argues, reveal patterns and ‘salient contrasts’. This essay underlines the important role played by selection and combination in constructing discourse. Building on ideas attributed to Saussure, he argues that metaphor relates to the paradigmatic dimension of language whereas metonymy uses the syntagmatic dimension. In a later paper, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, Jakobson presents a communication model with its six communicative functions, highlighting the importance of the poetic function that is concerned with the message itself. The poetic function ‘projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination’ (1987: 71). Instead of choosing a different element, the writer selects similar elements resulting in repetition and parallelism. If deviation is an unexpected choice, pushing the rules of language to the limit, repetition and parallelism emphasize lack of choice. Although the poetic function is not limited to poetry, Jakobson’s subsequent analyses often concentrate on poems, drawing attention to the use of specific elements that defamiliarize the reader. As a result, deviance, choice and foregrounding played a dominant role in early work in stylistics and have continued to do so (see van Peer 1986; Levin 1962; Leech 2008). Later stylisticians, such as Riffaterre (1960), consider deviation in relation to the norm present in the text, and deviation continues to play a role in corpus linguistics. Structuralism has also played an important role in narratology, ‘the set of general statements on narrative genres, on the systematics of narrating (telling a story) and on the structure of plot’ (Ryan and van Alphen 1993: 110). Writers such as Propp (1928), Todorov (1969), Greimas (1966), Barthes (1966), Brémond (1973) and Lévi-Strauss (1955), to name but a few, all sought to discover an underlying structure to narrative that was the equivalent of langue. More recently, Elizabeth Black draws attention to the many devices that form part of the ‘deep structure’ of narratives that are ‘prior to the surface structures such as syntax and lexis’ (2006: 36). The analysis that follows will seek to demonstrate that some of the key concepts of Structuralism can still help reveal important underlying textual patterns. To do so, I will be focusing on the notion of linearity and the relations created by the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes. As we saw above, Saussure presented language as being linear. The importance of word order for meaning will vary according to the language under study, but in English it undeniably plays an important role. At the most obvious level, the meaning of a sentence may vary when the word order of its constituents is changed. Thus, ‘John murdered Mary’ does not mean the same thing as ‘Mary murdered John’. Yet the linearity that we observe at one level is, at another, illusory. It is not possible to interpret a sentence such as ‘John is easy 24

Structuralism and Stylistics

to please’ in the same way that we might interpret ‘John is eager to please’. Similarly, in a sentence such as ‘John happened to meet Mary’, the linear structure presents the event ‘happened’ as taking place before the event ‘to meet’, whereas in fact the event ‘John met Mary’ must take place before the speaker can present it as being accidental (see Girard-Gillet 2012). Thus, the interrelation between syntax and semantics is far from simple. The analysis of Virginia Woolf’s style that follows seeks to focus on how the writer challenges the idea of temporal linearity and chronological sequence and the impact that this has on meaning, for while literary critics have frequently drawn attention to her non-linear style, they have rarely analysed the surface structure of her syntax and how it affects the paradigmatic axis.

3  Woolf and Linearity The questioning of the unidimensional, linear character of syntax is a recurring theme in Woolf’s novels, essays and diaries. For Woolf, linearity is a typical trait of authors such as Bennett and Galsworthy who ‘adhere to a formal railway line of sentence’ (1977a[1923–28]: 135–6), authors who find little favour in her eyes. A similar criticism is voiced by Bernard in The Waves when he says ‘The sequence returns; one thing leads to another – the usual order. Yes but I resent the usual order. I will not let myself be made yet to accept the sequence of things’ (1986[1931]: 104–5) and he insists that ‘it is a mistake, this extreme precision, this orderly and military progress; a convenience, a lie’ (ibid.: 170–3). The syntax that Woolf advocates in her writing is in fact of a different order. In her essay on Turgenev’s novels, she admires the Russian author because he ‘did not see his books as a succession of events; he saw them as a succession of emotions radiating from some character at the centre’ (The Captain’s Death Bed, 1950: 57–8). In ‘More Dostoevsky’ (1917), she describes a movement of thought that is far from linear: ‘the associations of a word perhaps make another loop in the line, from which we spring back again to a different section of our main thought’ (1987[1912–18] : 85). For Woolf, a ‘book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes’ (1977b[1929]: 73). Yet given the inescapable linear structure of language outlined in Structuralism, how can a writer create a different kind of movement within a text and what will be the repercussions for the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations?

4  Visible Breaks in the Linearity The most obvious way to disrupt syntactic linearity is to break the flow of words or sentences, to introduce gaps into the text, between paragraphs, or to 25

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

leave sentences unfinished, so that the syntax falters and stops, as in the following example from Between the Acts: ‘So each of us who has enjoyed this pageant still has an opp. …’ The word was cut in two. A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead. That was the music. … Then zoom became drone. The planes had passed. ‘… portunity,’ Mr. Streatfield continued, ‘to make a contribution’. (1985[1941]: 140) Because the sentence is broken in this manner, attention is drawn to the very nature and sounds of the language, its physical aspect or material form and, instead of a word being assigned a fixed meaning, a break such as that in ‘opp … portunity’ isolates the first syllable from the rest of the syllables and from its meaning. This simple break also disrupts the paradigmatic axis as new possible meanings are temporarily created. Mr Streatfield could indeed have continued his sentence with the adjective ‘opposite’ or ‘opportune’. From a phonological perspective, the break in ‘opp … portunity’ is not very plausible, but the literary representation of language has often deviated from the exact reproduction of spoken language.

5  Subverting the Word Order If one canonical word order available in English is subject, predicator and object (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 46), then another obvious way to disrupt the syntagmatic axis is to change the place of the constituents in the sentence. Leech and Short (2007: 81) draw attention to the use of anticipatory structures in James Joyce’s syntax, and Woolf’s sentences are frequently disrupted in a similar manner. Thus, the subject may be separated from the verb, with the introduction of a parenthetical structure: ‘The girl, silk-stockinged, feathered, evanescent, but not to him, particularly attractive, (for he had had his fling), alighted’ (Mrs Dalloway, 50).4 Or, the main verb is separated from the direct object: ‘she had borne about her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish’ (ibid.: 9). In the following examples, the insertion of a parenthesis delays the main clause, either by introducing a number of subordinate clauses at the beginning of the sentence (as in the first example) or by preposing several adverbials (as in the second): And then, as they stood in the hall taking yellow gloves from the bowl on the malachite table and Hugh was offering Miss Brush with quite unnecessary 26

Structuralism and Stylistics

courtesy some discarded ticket or other compliment, which she loathed from the depths of her heart and blushed brick red, Richard turned to Lady Bruton, with his hat in his hand, and said… . (ibid.: 99) And in respectable quarters with stucco pillars through small front gardens, lightly swathed, with combs in their hair (having run up to see the children), women came. (ibid.: 145) At other moments, it is the complements that are preposed with the result that prepositions are stranded: ‘Admirable butlers, tawny chow dogs, halls laid in black and white lozenges with white blinds blowing, Peter saw through the opened door and approved of’ (ibid.: 50). Besides foregrounding certain elements, this displacement and separation of usually contiguous constituents, in whatever form it appears, results in full meaning only being obtained at the end of the sentence. It also creates a momentum within the sentence that is increased in the previous example by the expansion of the noun phrases. Thus, the first noun phrase is expanded from an adjective and a noun – ‘admirable butlers’ – to an adjective and a compound noun – ‘tawny chow dogs’ – before culminating in a noun and participial clause: ‘halls laid in black and white lozenges with white blinds blowing’. Such a sequence could be continued indefinitely unlike many canonical sentences where closure is more clearly marked. A similar effect is achieved by inverting the subject and omitting the predicator: ‘A splendid achievement in its own way, after all, London; the season; civilization’ (ibid.: 50). Once again, the sentence could theoretically be continued ad infinitum. Each time a noun phrase is introduced and seemingly marks closure, another is added. Occurring at the end of the sentence, each noun phrase is given end-focus. However, even here, the usual linear hierarchy is being undermined as not one but three noun phrases appear in end focus position, calling into question which, if any, is to be the main focus.

6  Subverting Temporal Linearity Linearity in a narrative is not simply created through word order but also through temporal succession, with one event following another. Just like Mary Carmichael, Woolf often seems to be ‘tampering with the expected sequence. First she broke the sentence; now she has broken the sequence’ (1977b[1929]: 78). The temporal sequence is disrupted in a number of ways. In the following passage from Between the Acts, the event ‘the fish had been delivered’ is followed by a description of the actions that took place before the fish was delivered: ‘The fish had been delivered. Mitchell’s boy, holding them in a crook of his arm, jumped off his motor bike. … He dabbed them down on the kitchen table, 27

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

the filleted soles, the semi-transparent boneless fish’ (1985[1941]: 27). Thus, the final event in the sequence is presented first, with the events leading up to it appearing later, not as part of a flashback with the use of the past perfect, but as a sequence of events in the simple past, the tense of the main narrative. Thus events prior to the narrative and the narrative proper merge. Note too how the canonical word order is inverted, with the pronoun ‘them’ appearing before its referent ‘soles’.

7  Subverting the Paradigmatic Axis The fact that syntax is linear implies not only that we pronounce or write one word after another and not two or more simultaneously, but also that each word form is selected and no word means two things at the same time. From a structuralist point of view, two separate meanings cannot co-exist. Identity, as we saw above, is determined through difference. However, when the syntagmatic axis is subverted, it becomes possible to hold two meanings in equilibrium. In order to illustrate this point, I wish to examine the following example from Jacob’s Room: ‘Sweet and holy are the angelic choristers’ (1989[1922]: 86). To all intents and purposes, this is a simple sentence with three adjectives. However, while ‘angelic’ occupies a typical adjectival position, premodifying the noun, the two adjectives ‘sweet’ and ‘holy’ are preposed. If we re-establish canonical word order, placing the adjectives in predicative position, then the sentence becomes problematic: ‘The angelic choristers are sweet and holy.’ Angelic choristers may be sweet or they may be holy. Normally we would select one or other of the meanings of ‘angelic’. What is striking about this example is that by disrupting the syntagmatic axis, two or more meanings are held in limbo and cannot be resolved into one single literal meaning. In other words, the paradigmatic axis is also subverted. This holding of two values in limbo is also to be found in the use of grammatical tenses. A narrative is usually recounted using the preterite or the historic present, but at times, Woolf juxtaposes the two, as in the following passage: ‘The stag-beetle dies slowly (it was John who collected the beetles). Even on the second day its legs were supple. But the butterflies were dead’ (1989[1922]: 25). From a generic present, a reference to the class of stag-beetles and a process composed of several instants (‘slowly’) the text passes to a specific beetle, a moment in a sequence of events (‘second day’), a stable state and the moment of narration, with the pronoun ‘it’ referring simultaneously to a representative of the class and a specific beetle. At other moments, the text oscillates between two interpretations of the past tense. The preterite can refer to a unique event: ‘the war broke out in 1914’; or to an iterative one: ‘Every week she wrote to Jacob.’ These two values are mutually 28

Structuralism and Stylistics

exclusive. What we find in Woolf, however, is a movement from one value to another, so that it becomes impossible to impose one single interpretation on the passage, as in the following extract: ‘You won’t go far this afternoon, Jacob,’ said his mother … ‘for the Captain’s coming to say good-bye’. It was the last day of the Easter holidays Wednesday was Captain Barfoot’s day. He dressed himself very neatly in blue serge, took his rubber-shod stick – for he was lame and wanted two fingers on the left hand, having served his country – and set out from the house with his flagstaff precisely at four o’clock in the afternoon. At three Mr Dickens, the bath-chair man, had called for Mrs Barfoot. ‘Move me,’ she would say to Mr Dickens, after sitting on the esplanade for fifteen minutes. And again, ‘That’ll do, thank you, Mr Dickens.’ At the first command he would seek the sun; at the second he would stay the chair there in the bright strip. … An old inhabitant himself, Mr Dickens would stand a little behind her, smoking his pipe. She would ask him questions – who people were – who now kept Mr Jones’s shop – then about the season – and had Mrs Dickens tried, whatever it might be – the words issuing from her lips like the crumbs of dry biscuit. She closed her eyes. Mr Dickens took a turn. … As Mr Dickens sucked in the smoke and puffed it out again, the feelings of a man were perceptible in his eyes. He was thinking how Captain Barfoot was now on his way to Mount Pleasant. (1989[1922] : 28–9) The first paragraph, which precedes the description of Captain Barfoot, refers to a specific Wednesday: ‘this afternoon’ designates a precise afternoon as does ‘the last day of the Easter holidays’. However, the sentence ‘Wednesday was Captain Barfoot’s day’ places us within an iterative framework. The three events, ‘dressed’, ‘took’ and ‘set out’, can be interpreted as iterative actions that take place every Wednesday or, given the fact that they refer to three normally successive events, they could just as easily refer to a specific moment in time and form a chronological sequence. The simple addition of an adverb such as ‘always’ would mean that the value of the simple past in ‘he dressed’ becomes iterative: He always dressed himself very neatly in blue serge, took his rubber-shod stick – for he was lame and wanted two fingers on the left hand, having served his country – and set out from the house with his flagstaff precisely at four o’clock in the afternoon. 29

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Similarly, the choice of a different determiner would give the simple past unique time reference: He dressed himself very neatly in blue serge, took his rubber-shod stick – for he was lame and wanted two fingers on the left hand, having served his country – and set out from the house with his flagstaff precisely at four o’clock that afternoon. As it is, the passage oscillates from one value to another. The use of a frequentative ‘would’– ‘Mr Dickens would stand a little behind her, smoking his pipe. She would ask him questions’ – creates an iterative framework, thus encouraging the reader to interpret the verbs in the preterite tense as also referring to repeated actions. On the other hand, the use of the past progressive in ‘He was thinking how Captain Barfoot was now on his way’ situates the action as being ongoing at a specific moment in the past and the action is no longer perceived as being complete. It is a particular moment in time as it is experienced by one character, Mr Dickens, that is highlighted. The uses of the preterite tense in the same paragraph – ‘she closed her eyes’, ‘Mr Dickens took a turn’ – now also read retrospectively as referring to that same precise moment instead of being iterative actions, and can therefore be interpreted as forming a sequence of events within the main narrative. The preterite can also refer to a real or imagined event. In the extract from Mrs Dalloway to be found at the end of this chapter, Peter Walsh arrives back at his hotel and prepares to go to Clarissa’s party. Several moments in time are referred to: past conversations with Mrs Burgess, the possible future life of Peter poking about in the Bodleian, August 1922. In each case, it is the preterite that is used. As a result, these moments merge and blur. One particular scene, in which the ‘dark adorably pretty girl’ runs after Peter, is narrated three times (ll. 24–7; ll.41–2; ll. 48–52). On the one hand, it follows a chronological sequence; from a photo of Daisy, we move to the scene on the verandah, with Daisy becoming increasingly desperate and finally being separated from Peter. On the other hand, the final scene combines both a reference to the past, 1922, and a hypothetical ‘would’, so that the reader no longer knows whether these events belong to the narrative and took place at an earlier moment, or whether they belong to Peter’s imagination. Temporal reference becomes indeterminate, oscillating between two interpretations, which in turn makes the syntagmatic axis break and falter. Beginnings and ends no longer have the same importance or certainty. By reducing the importance of the beginning and the end of a sequence, the emphasis is placed upon the ‘middle’, the events ‘between the acts’, which calls into question the very existence of a sequence. Yet paradoxically, as one set of associations and relations is undermined, another is created, and it is these associations and relations that will now be examined. 30

Structuralism and Stylistics

8  Repetition and Parallel Structures For Jakobson, the poetic function is created through the superimposition of similarity on contiguity. Thus, foregrounding is produced not through deviance but through a highly patterned use of language and especially through repetitions. Literary critics of Woolf have tended to focus on the repetition of specific images, seeking to decode a fixed meaning (Brower 1951; Sprague 1971; McLaurin 1973; Novak 1975; Hillis Miller 1982). However, I would suggest that repetition can also be analysed as a structuring device and that its omnipresence in Woolf’s novels contributes to the undermining of linearity. As Evans (1989) has pointed out, Woolf’s novels contain a wide variety of rhetorical structures such as anaphora, epizeuxis, epistrophe and anadiplosis. These repetitive devices create the text’s cohesion, ‘tying together multiple sentences, sometimes even paragraphs, to provide solidity of events, images, and actions, to permit uninterrupted flow, and to achieve bridging between sections and chapters’ (Evans 1989: 75–6). In fact, it is often the repetition of a single word that creates a network of associations and echoes. It may be a case of identical repetition, or repetition with variation with the original term being slightly changed, slightly modified. The extract from Mrs Dalloway at the end of this essay contains many identical words and sentences that are repeated by the various characters at various moments of the day. The arguments between Septimus and Rezia and between Clarissa and Peter, and the imagined argument between Daisy and Peter, are all referred to in the same words: ‘a scene’. The expression ‘didn’t care a straw’ (l.42) is also used to describe Elizabeth Dalloway (‘Elizabeth cared not a straw for either of them. Not a straw’ [12]), Peter Walsh (‘he cared not a straw – not a straw’ [46]) and even Richard Dalloway (‘Richard didn’t care a straw what became of Elizabeth’ [101]). To this expression one could easily add reformulations such as ‘they don’t care a hang’ or ‘not caring a rap what people say’, which are also to be found in the novel. Similarly, the adjective ‘odd’ (l.4; l.6), which is also to be found in this passage, recurs in different contexts and is used by different characters: ‘but odd it was, and quite true’ (50); ‘odd, he thought’ (51); ‘all of which seemed to Richard Dalloway awfully odd’ (101–2); ‘odd it was’ (112); ‘it was odd’ (151, 156); ‘odd, incredible’ (164) and ‘how odd it was to know him’ (158). The expressions ‘all plain sailing’ and ‘pooh-poohed’ are also used in relation to other characters in the novel. The reader’s attention is drawn to this repetition through the use of foregrounding. The adjective ‘odd’, for example, is often preposed (‘odd, it was’) or repeated within the space of a few lines, as in the extract. As a result, although the action advances within the short space of the day, these repetitions undermine any notion of differentiation, so that the various moments and experiences merge. In similar fashion, the chapter 1891 in The Years starts with a description of falling leaves, bonfires and the autumn wind. As the narrative unfolds, the 31

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

leaves are no longer falling but ‘withering red and yellow leaves’ and finally ‘dead leaves’, indicating passing time, while the initial ‘drift of smoke’ is later ‘a gust of smoke’ and finally becomes ‘a great gust’. This progression is, however, undermined by the fact that the chapter closes with a reference once more to a ‘puff of smoke’ and a repetition of ‘leaves were falling’. By disrupting the linearity of the syntagmatic axis, other movements are created, and it is those movements that I wish now to examine. In the extract from Mrs Dalloway, the repeated references to books and reading introduce a movement that is at odds with the forward thrust of the narrative. In the narrative, we move from a characteristic of Peter Walsh, that of being ‘bookish’ (l.9), to a habitual action, ‘he never came to see you without picking up a book’ (l.9), to a specific event situated in the here and now of the narrative, ‘he was now reading’ (ll.9–10), and finally to an event sometime in the future, ‘And if he did retire, that’s what he’d do – write books. He would go to Oxford and poke about in the Bodleian.’ On another level, the characteristic ‘bookish’ can only be ascertained if first we observe a habit, and in order to observe a habit we need to identify a specific event that has been subsequently repeated. In other words, the text moves forward on one level but backwards on another as it reaches back to the cause of judgement. The text thus loops back upon itself. On another level still, each reformulation is the exploration of a single characteristic of the term bookish: someone who likes reading, someone who is studious, someone who acquires knowledge from books. The repetition works its way through the various temporal layers of the narrative, radiating outwards from the term ‘bookish’ in a manner that recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s description of a rhizome where ‘any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be’ (1987: 7). Such a structure is mobile, capable of continually deviating and bringing new relations into play, and challenges once again the hierarchical order of the syntagmatic axis, for the full stop is provisional since each repetition or reformulation develops the preceding sentence, underlining the fact that it is not complete but can be reiterated ad infinitum. This repetition with variation also affects the reading experience, as the sentences no longer follow on in a predictable sequence but interact with each other, making the reader re-read and reinterpret what preceded. Finally, we find two movements in the novels that I shall call centripetal and centrifugal. The first concerns the systematic reduction of syntax into silence. In the following example from The Years, Matty Stiles is observing Martin Pargiter and reflects ‘Couldn’t he see the notice on the board? Couldn’t he read it? Hadn’t he eyes?’ (1974[1937]: 108). First, the prepositional phrase is removed, then the complement, and we move from the act of seeing to reading to simply possessing eyes. The syntagmatic axis is reduced to the point where no further reduction is possible. The other movement is a constant reformulation, where each sentence is longer than the preceding, so that there is a continual movement 32

Structuralism and Stylistics

forward. An example of this occurs in the passage from Mrs Dalloway to be found at the end of the chapter: ‘No fuss. No bother. No finicking and fidgeting. All plain sailing’ (l.24). In this instance, each new noun contains a higher number of syllables, and the reversal of the negation into an affirmation suggests that the list is open-ended, capable of continuing ad infinitum. Both these structures challenge textual linearity either by introducing a break into the sequence or by opening up myriad possibilities so that there can be no final full stop. In recent years, Structuralism has come under heavy criticism; yet, as I have attempted to show in this short essay on Woolf’s style, its basic precepts still have much to offer the stylistician. By starting from the structuralists’ viewpoint that language is a system and that the interaction between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes creates meaning, and by then analysing how Woolf disrupts these two axes, it becomes possible to offer an explanation of certain effects of her style. By analysing how the words on the page relate and contrast with each other, rather than seeking hidden meanings, and by focusing on specific grammatical structures, some of the means used by Woolf to construct her text can be brought to light. While a structuralist approach does not hold all the keys, it can still certainly open a few doors. Peter Walsh had now unlaced his boots. But it would not have been a success, their marriage. The other thing, after all, came so much more naturally. It was odd; it was true; lots of people felt it. Peter Walsh, who had done just respectably, filled the usual posts adequately, was liked, but thought a little cranky, gave himself airs – it was odd that he should have had, especially now that his hair was grey, a contented look; a look of having reserves. It was this that made him attractive to women who liked the sense that he was not altogether manly. There was something unusual about him, or something behind him. It might be that he was bookish – never came to see you without taking up the book on the table (he was now reading, with his bootlaces trailing on the floor); or that he was a gentleman, which showed itself in the way he knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and in his manners of course to women. For it was very charming and quite ridiculous how easily some girl without a grain of sense could twist him round her finger. But at her own risk. That is to say, though he might be ever so easy, and indeed with his gaiety and good-breeding fascinating to be with, it was only up to a point. She said something – no, no; he saw through that. He wouldn’t stand that – no, no. Then he could shout and rock and hold his sides together over some joke with men. He was the best judge of cooking in India. He was a man. But not the sort of man one had to respect – which was a mercy; not like Major Simmons, for instance; not in the least like that, Daisy thought, when, in spite of her two small children, she used to compare them. 33

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

He pulled off his boots. He emptied his pockets. Out came with his pocket-knife a snapshot of Daisy on the verandah; Daisy all in white, with a fox-terrier on her knee; very charming, very dark; the best he had ever seen of her. It did come, after all so naturally; so much more naturally than Clarissa. No fuss. No bother. No finicking and fidgeting. All plain sailing. And the dark, adorably pretty girl on the verandah exclaimed (he could hear her). Of course, of course she would give him everything! she cried (she had no sense of discretion) everything he wanted! she cried, running to meet him, whoever might be looking. And she was only twenty-four. And she had two children. Well, well! Well indeed he had got himself into a mess at his age. And it came over him when he woke in the night pretty forcibly. Suppose they did marry? For him it would be all very well, but what about her? Mrs. Burgess, a good sort and no chatterbox, in whom he had confided, thought this absence of his in England, ostensibly to see lawyers might serve to make Daisy reconsider, think what it meant. It was a question of her position, Mrs. Burgess said; the social barrier; giving up her children. She’d be a widow with a past one of these days, draggling about in the suburbs, or more likely, indiscriminate (you know, she said, what such women get like, with too much paint). But Peter Walsh poohpoohed all that. He didn’t mean to die yet. Anyhow she must settle for herself; judge for herself, he thought, padding about the room in his socks, smoothing out his dress-shirt, for he might go to Clarissa’s party, or he might go to one of the Halls, or he might settle in and read an absorbing book written by a man he used to know at Oxford. And if he did retire, that’s what he’d do – write books. He would go to Oxford and poke about in the Bodleian. Vainly the dark, adorably pretty girl ran to the end of the terrace; vainly waved her hand; vainly cried she didn’t care a straw what people said. There he was, the man she thought the world of, the perfect gentleman, the fascinating, the distinguished (and his age made not the least difference to her), padding about a room in an hotel in Bloomsbury, shaving, washing, continuing, as he took up cans, put down razors, to poke about in the Bodleian, and get at the truth about one or two little matters that interested him. And he would have a chat with whoever it might be, and so come to disregard more and more precise hours for lunch, and miss engagements, and when Daisy asked him, as she would, for a kiss, a scene, fail to come up to the scratch (though he was genuinely devoted to her) – in short it might be happier, as Mrs. Burgess said, that she should forget him, or merely remember him as he was in August 1922, like a figure standing at the cross roads at dusk, which grows more and more remote as the dog-cart spins away, carrying her securely fastened to the back seat, though her arms are outstretched, and as she sees the figure dwindle and disappear still she cries out how she would do anything in the world, anything, anything, anything. ... (Mrs Dalloway, 138–40) 34

Structuralism and Stylistics

Notes 1. Ferdinand de Saussure (1983), Course in General Linguistics, ed. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, trans. R. Harris. La Salle, IL: Open Court. 2. Ferdinand de Saussure (1995[1916]), Cours de linguistique générale, 4th edn, Paris: Editions Payot. 3. I would like to thank a former colleague for drawing my attention to this example. 4. Virginia Woolf (1985[1925]), Mrs Dalloway, Glasgow: Collins.

References Barthes, R. (1975[1966]), ‘An introduction to the analysis of narrative’, New Literary History, 6: 237–72. Black, E. (2006), Pragmatic Stylistics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bremond, C. (1973), Logique du récit, Paris: Seuil. Culler, J. (1975), Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Culler, J. (1990[1976]), Saussure, London: Fontana. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Evans, W. A. (1989), Virginia Woolf, Strategist of Language, Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Girard-Gillet, G. (2012), ‘Linear order and the construction of meaning: Is syntax deceptive?’, E-rea 9.2 | 2012, http://erea.revues.org/2384 (accessed 12 January 2012). Greimas, A. J. (1983[1966]), Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, Lincoln: Nebraska University Press. Harris, R. (2001), Saussure and his Interpreters, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Huddleston, R. and Pullum, G. K. (2002), The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jakobson, R. (1987), Language in Literature, ed. K. Pomorska and S. Rudy, Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press. Leech, G. (2008), Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding, Harlow: Pearson Longman. Leech, G. and Short, M. (2007[1981]), Style in Fiction, London and New York: Longman. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1955), ‘The structural study of myth’, Journal of American Folklore, 68: 428–44. Levin, S. (1962), Linguistic Structures in Poetry, The Hague: Mouton. McLaurin, A. (1973), Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, J. H. (1982), Fiction and Repetition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mounin, G. (1968), Ferdinand de Saussure ou le structuraliste sans le savoir, Paris: Seghers. Novak, J. (1975), The Razor Edge of Balance, Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press. Propp, V. (1958[1928]), Morphology of the Folktale, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Riffaterre, M. (1960), ‘Stylistic content’, Word, 15: 154–74. Ryan, M.-L. and Van Alphen, E. (1993), ‘Narratology’, in I. R. Makaryk (ed.), Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory. Approaches, Scholars, Terms, 110–16, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Saussure, F. de (1983), Course in General Linguistics, ed. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, trans. R. Harris, La Salle, IL: Open Court.

35

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Saussure, F. de (1995[1916]), Cours de linguistique générale, 4th edn, Paris: Editions Payot. Sprague C., ed. (1971), Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Todorov, T. (1969), Grammaire du Décaméron, The Hague: Mouton. van Peer, W. (1986), Stylistics and Psychology: Investigations of Foregrounding, London: Croom Helm. Woolf, V. (1950), The Captain’s Death Bed and other Essays, London: Hogarth. Woolf, V. (1974[1937]), The Years, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Woolf, V. (1977a[1923–8]), The Letters of Virginia Woolf Vol. 3, ed. N. Nicolson and J. Trautmann, London: Hogarth. Woolf, V. (1977b[1929]), A Room of One’s Own, London: Triad/Grafton Collins. Woolf, V. (1985[1925]), Mrs Dalloway, Glasgow: Collins. Woolf, V. (1985[1941]), Between the Acts, London: Panther/Granada Collins. Woolf, V. (1986[1931]), The Waves, Glasgow: Collins. Woolf, V. (1987[1912–18]), The Essays of Virginia Woolf Vol. 2, ed. A. McNeillie, London: Hogarth. Woolf, V. (1989[1922]), Jacob’s Room, Glasgow: Collins.

36

3

Generative Grammar and Stylistics Andrew Caink, University of Westminster

Chapter Overview Introduction 37 The Scientific Study of Language 37 Knowledge about Language 40 Theory and Stylistic Research 44 A Formal Contribution to Literary Interpretation and Evaluation 48 Conclusion 53

1 Introduction This chapter first examines some occasionally misunderstood aspects of the scientific study of language before reviewing the kind of linguistic knowledge that has arisen out of generative research and that is relevant to stylistics. Section 4 briefly reviews and evaluates some generative and generative-inspired stylistic theories. Section 5 focuses on a poem by Emily Dickinson in the light of some of the themes discussed. Section 6 provides a brief summary with suggestions for further reading.

2  The Scientific Study of Language Generative grammar is the term for a scientific research programme into human language, pursued initially in North America and Europe in the late 1950s and 1960s and subsequently worldwide. It seeks to address the question 37

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

of what human language is, how it is constituted and how an adult human comes to possess the knowledge that they have about the language(s) they acquired in childhood. The complexity of a human language set against the speed and ease with which a child acquires it amidst such varied levels of language use supports the hypothesis that the human brain is predisposed to acquire language. This is a process that, like many aspects of the child’s development, takes place during a particular window of opportunity (the ‘critical period’) and results, like the binocular visual system, from a combination of genetic predisposition and stimulus. Generative research is therefore a study of psycho-biological structures in the brain and is thus a branch of psychology and cognitive science. The language faculty has cognitive mechanisms that are distinct from other parts of the cognitive system, even though the products of the language faculty are then subjected to other cognitive processes of inferencing. Generative theory is not deterministic; as Kiparsky puts it, ‘there is absolutely no reason why we could not have precise theories of non-deterministic regularities’ (1987: 190). The research programme as a whole has undergone enormous advances. Initially, the focus was on distinct language-specific constructions and rules to generate them (‘relative clause’, ‘passive’, etc.), and this remains the theory with which many non-generative stylisticians are most familiar. In the 1970s, such individual constructions became taxonomic artefacts derived from the interaction of more general principles. This theory and its offshoots enabled a greater explanatory adequacy, partly through the increasingly cross-linguistic nature of the research (Chomsky 1981, 1986). In the minimalist program of the last two decades, those principles themselves have been reduced to more general and abstract properties of the computational system (e.g. Chomsky 1995). The knowledge of language that a native speaker possesses and which underlies their language use is the object of study (‘competence’ in Chomsky 1965, or ‘I-language’ in Chomsky 1986). The intuitive judgements concerning acceptability and grammaticality of structures provide the data. Researchers interested in the way in which language is used often regard such data as irrelevant because the sentences are without context. However, idealization is standard in scientific procedure, just as frictionless planes and perfect vacuums do not occur in nature but feature in theories of mechanics (Kiparsky 1987: 190). Idealization is necessary to filter out what is irrelevant as the researcher hones in on the constitutive features of sentence generation. Seemingly stranger still, much data that is discussed consists of examples that the language faculty cannot produce (data that is ‘ungrammatical’ or ‘marginal’), but ungrammatical data is essential for establishing the limits of the generative system under examination. To restrict research to those sentences that we find useful or ‘likely’ or attested in the noise of language use would be as peculiar a methodology as for a physicist to restrict her theorizing to that which we can see with the 38

Generative Grammar and Stylistics

naked eye. Clearly, wider levels of meaning above that of propositional form require context, but such research is outside the scope of generative linguistics and requires the different tools of linguistic pragmatics. The nature of the processes at work in the various components of the language faculty cannot be determined beforehand. There is much evidence to suggest that the relation between the syntactic and the semantic aspects of language is in some areas arbitrary, and hence the ‘autonomy of syntax’ is widely supported. This is not an ‘article of faith’, however, and a variety of positions exist within generative research, as indeed among functional grammarians (Newmeyer 2000: ch. 2 provides a revealing account). Semantic roles became prominent within the earliest principles and parameters theory (‘theta roles’, Chomsky 1981) in ways that were surprising to the most stringent exponents of syntactic autonomy. Discourse orientated factors such as ‘topic’ and ‘focus’ have played central roles. Optional stylistic wordings have been central to mainstream theorizing (e.g., in Banfield 1973; Emonds 1976. On the role of focus, see e.g. Rochemont 1986; Rochemont and Culicover 1990). Science progresses through the development of successive hypotheses that are in turn tested against new data. No hypothesis is expected to be ‘perfect’; all are approximations, and progress is made by examining where they fail. A scientific hypothesis is not itself undermined by data, for there is always ‘recalcitrant’ data. Rather, a theory is defeated by a more successful theory, one that is able to account for more data or more types of data, or is more parsimonious in its machinery and primitives. Hence, a single transformation (‘move-alpha’ in Chomsky 1981) in combination with independently motivated principles and parameters can be seen as both more parsimonious and providing greater explanatory adequacy than earlier theories with numerous language-specific rules. From a stylistics point of view, it is worth noting that it was the earlier model, with its many ad hoc rules, that provided much material for some of the best known generative-inspired theories of stylistics. There is therefore a sense in which scientific theories are part of an ongoing process, moments of fixity within a larger research programme. The onus is on the researcher not simply to establish the shortcomings of a theory, but also to propose a more effective theory. On occasions, of course, scientific enquiry can result in counter-intuitive theories. All of this is true of linguistic generative research. Sometimes the mnemonic used to refer to a proposed primitive can cause confusion outside the field. For example, the formal characterization of ‘focus’ within a theory about the grammar should not be confused with a general lay use of the term; one can attract focus to aspects of one’s speech in a host of ways, including via gesticulation. A generative theory of ‘focus’ restricts itself to aspects of focus that have a demonstrable role in the generative process. The associative relation between the formal definition and the general term should 39

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

not be taken to indicate that they are synonymous. This confusion lies behind some non-generative responses to, say, Banfield’s sentences of represented speech and thought (1982 and below); while there is clearly a close relation between Banfield’s formally defined constructions and non-formal characterizations of free indirect style, the aims, methodology and definitions remain distinct.1 Verbal art is evidently an example of language use and hence comes under ‘performance’ in the sense of Chomsky (1965; ‘E-language’ in Chomsky 1986). In general terms, therefore, verbal art falls outside the remit of generative research. However, the generative model provides a formal, precise characterization of the language system that underpins (most) verbal art, and it made considerable contributions to the burgeoning field of stylistics in the 1960s and 1970s. Verbal art may also supply useful data for generative research into the language faculty, particularly with respect to degrees of marginality or deviation. What generativism does not do is provide an all-encompassing theoretical approach to the characterization, let alone interpretation or evaluation, of individual works of verbal art. In the next section, we consider some knowledge about language that has come to light through generative research, and that can contribute to stylistic research.

3  Knowledge about Language Besides a rapid growth in the understanding of the underlying language system being employed, generativism brought to the ‘close reading’ of texts in the 1960s and 1970s (i) an awareness of underlying structure, (ii) a dazzling taxonomy of construction-specific generative rules and (iii) a clearly defined notion of a language ‘norm’ from which verbal art may deviate. To cite a handful of examples of ‘close reading’ of poetry in English, Keyser’s tree diagrams of clausal embedding in Wallace Stevens’ Snow Hill served to illustrate an underlying form that he claimed contributes to the poem’s wider meanings (Keyser 1976); Chatman focused on the present and past-participial constructions as a key aspect of Milton’s argumentative style in Paradise Lost (Chatman 1968); Freeman’s examination of preposing and subject-auxiliary inversion in Dylan Thomas’s work was argued to contribute to the reading experience of ‘tension and release’ (Freeman 1975); generative rules of the 1970s enabled Austin to formulate generalizations about the ways in which Shelley’s style in Adonais deviates from normal language use (as in the line ‘And happier they their happiness who knew’, which contrasts with the more intuitively normal inversion of ‘And happier were they who knew their happiness’; Austin 1979) or the marked ellipses of Pope (as in ‘Now leaves the trees, and Flow’rs adorn the Ground’ rather than ‘Now leaves adorn the trees, and Flow’rs adorn 40

Generative Grammar and Stylistics

the Ground’; Austin 1984: ch. 2). The leap made from technical analysis to interpretative – and in some cases evaluative – fiat is not unique to generativism, but of course remains vulnerable to debates over the role of interpretive communities (Fish 1980), even if the establishment of demonstrable linguistic fact does not.2 In generative research, a distinction is made between the open-class lexicon on the one hand (what is often seen as the entirety of ‘language’ in literary discussion; that is, most nouns, verbs and adjectives/adverbs) and the closed classes of both grammatical and semi-lexical items (termed the ‘syntacticon’ in Emonds 2000). This distinction provides the linguistic core of Banfield’s discussion of Joyce and Beckett (Banfield 2003), where Joyce’s ‘deviance’ is shown to lie in his neologisms within the open-class lexicon, while Beckett’s move from a childlike ‘midget syntax’ to the later style of ‘tattered grammar’ is a move from creativity within the closed classes to the virtual eradication of the open classes. Beckett’s lexicon becomes one of closed-class semi-lexical words and emphasis on grammatical formatives, which, Banfield argues, contributes to the sense that ‘nothing happens’ at the heart of Beckett’s world. Particularly fruitful has been the wider discussion of verbal art cross-linguistically in the light of generative research. Kiparsky demonstrates how many conventions in poetry around the world are ‘anchored’ in the underlying structures of language revealed by generative analysis (Kiparsky 1973). Fresh purchase is given to Jakobson’s characterization of equivalence and contiguity (Jakobson 1960: 358) through reference to underlying levels of structure at both the syntactic and phonological levels. Thus, Kiparsky can formally characterize a significant distinction between the styles of Dylan Thomas and Walt Whitman via their use of syntactic parallelism: Thomas’s stricter parallelism occurs close to the surface structure, while the apparently ‘loose’ parallelism of Whitman appears higher in the tree (1981[1973]: 15).3 He establishes the interesting and testable generalization that the stricter the constraints on abstract, non-linguistic patterns (e.g. symmetry or anti-symmetry), the stronger the tendency for the poet to employ parallelism closer to the surface structure of the sentence. The ways in which artistic form exploits linguistic form is a theme that is continued in Fabb (1997). The language of verbal art may itself provide data in the wider generative research programme by allowing a focus on the distinction between mildly and wholly deviant language. Banfield (1973) formulated the optional stylistic rules that can generate the various marked word orders of the high Miltonic style (as in the line ‘his gestures fierce/He marked and mad demeanor’ rather than the intuitively ‘normal’ coordination of ‘He marked his fierce gestures and mad demeanour’; Banfield 1973: 163). For stylistics, such research provides a detailed, empirical investigation of the style of Milton, and suggests theoretically a way of characterizing an account of a particular author’s style. 41

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

If the syntactic component is to some degree autonomous, generating structures via mechanisms that are not driven by purely functional needs, then it remains a logical possibility that human language is only incidentally related to its use in the spoken, communicative, discourse context involving a speaker and interlocutor. Banfield (1982) demonstrates how the rise of written fiction in the novel reveals the existence of linguistic structures that might otherwise have remained hidden. In order to tease apart the primitives at play, Banfield establishes formally the constructs present in linguistic structures, including SELF (the object of consciousness to which expressive elements refer), NOW (the locus of time deictics), SPEAKER and an ‘interlocutor’ or ADDRESSEE/HEARER. A communicative example of language use exhibits a SPEAKER and a SELF who are co-referential (in ‘You know, just between you and me, I saw that idiot of a milkman yesterday’, I am both the speaker and the one who regards the milkman negatively); NOW is coreferential with PRESENT (the past tense of ‘saw’ above is determined in relation to the ‘present’ of the utterance time); the presence of an ADDRESSEE/HEARER is reflected by imperatives, vocatives, second-person pronouns and addressee-oriented adverbials (such as ‘between you and me’ above).4 Such alignments may be reconfigured: in an Echo question, SPEAKER and SELF are no longer co-referential (in ‘You’re bloody furious with who?’ the expressive ‘bloody’ may no longer reflect the speaker’s sentiments but those of the addressee who is being echoed). Through examination of a host of examples from literary fiction, alongside her own constructed examples demonstrating the limits of the language system, Banfield shows that the hallmarks of the spoken communicative use of language do not appear in sentences of ‘pure narration’.5 These are constructions that recount the narrative without any anchoring to a NOW, the linguistic hallmarks of the ADDRESSEE/HEARER are absent, and in third-person narratives, there is no narrator (1982: ch. 4). One minor example is that of ‘narrative parentheticals’ following direct speech (‘But you can’t reduce literature down to a mere formalism!’ said the professor). The sentences of ‘Represented Speech and Thought’ have attracted most attention. They exhibit the features of a SELF that is co-referenced with a character in the narrative, along with the familiar shift in deictics to depict a NOW-in-the-past, but they cannot host the features related to an ADDRESSEE/ HEARER. Claims that Represented Speech and Thought betray the presence of a narrator as well as a character’s SELF are not supported by the linguistic evidence, and neither can the presence of an additional independent SELF be supported (Banfield 1982: chs 2 and 3). This does not rule out a shift in SELF within a sentence per se, merely within the proposed structure of a clause (1982: 293/4, n. 12).6 42

Generative Grammar and Stylistics

A third type of sentence is the sentence of ‘non-reflective consciousness’ that reflects the presence of a consciousness in the past, witnessing, but proving unable to exhibit grammatical features of a reflective consciousness in the present (expressing an attitude towards events, for example) (1982: ch. 5). What Banfield demonstrates is that the language of certain types of narrative fiction is distinct from the language of the spoken communication context. The sentences in question are unable to exhibit simultaneously the full set of core elements of a speaking context: the grammatical reflexes of a reflective SELF, an ADDRESSEE/HEARER and a NOW linked to an utterance time. Non-generative critiques have largely centred on providing examples of ‘free  indirect discourse’ that appear earlier than Banfield’s historical hypothesis for represented speech and thought suggests (1982: ch. 6), or that suggest the presence of more than one SELF in a construction, or the existence of ADDRESSEE-orientated features in so-called ‘unspeakable’ structures. Such critiques tend to reject the methodology generally and do not therefore find it incumbent to propose alternative formal theories of the data.7 One brief example may suffice here of the kind of substantive empirical evidence that requires an alternative account from any critique. The factive verb to know in (1a) establishes the speaker’s assertion of the independent truth of the complement. In (1b) however, the verb cannot assert the independent truth of the equivalent clause: (1) a. She knew that her days were numbered. b. Her days were numbered, she knew. The character’s thought is represented in (1b) but there is no independent assertion of the truth. This remains a fact no matter how few or how many examples are attested in a corpus, or whatever the context. For Banfield, it supports the argument that there is an absence of SPEAKER in the narrative parenthetical in (1b): only the thoughts of the character are represented, there is no independent narratorial presence that can assert the (fictional) truth as in (1a). A good scientific theory gives rise to new, previously obscured data, data that arises out of the very testing of hypotheses, thus allowing the formulation of new questions and the challenge of new problems. Banfield (1982) is a prime example, for the very existence of the sentence of non-reflective consciousness came to light only within the vigorous debate and research around Banfield’s work during the 1970s.8 In this section, we looked briefly at instances of generative-informed work on specific texts and authors, considered some of the wider implications for verbal art that generative knowledge about language enables and, finally, examined 43

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

one particularly startling example of how scientific enquiry informs our knowledge about human language, and its role in verbal art.

4  Theory and Stylistic Research Generative theory had a major influence on theoretical approaches to literary criticism, though not always of a generative kind. Often terminology is co-opted for metaphorical usage. In Narratology, Todorov argued for a transformational relation between the underlying narrative and its telling, suggesting that transformations were central to narrativity (1971: ch. 14), and the generative focus on sentence grammar doubtless provided impetus for Todorov’s theory of a narrative as a sentence. Fowler adopted this analogy in his introductory account of linguistic approaches to the novel, but appears to deny the autonomy of the syntax when he claims that the construction principles of narrative are the same as those of the sentence (Fowler 1977: 24). Demonstrating that one can summarize a novel in a single sentence, however, shows nothing about the relation between an extended narrative and a sentence, any more than a sentence about a painting implies anything about the formal structures within the visual work of art. The characterization of narrative is largely a semantic analogy with room for displacement (via transformations), but it makes use of none of the formal hallmarks of a sentence (dummy verbs, agreement, etc.) or the constraints on transformations that were central to that generative model. The notion of an underlying ‘competence’ also proved useful for structuralists in formulating a notion of a reader’s ‘literary competence’ (Culler 1975: ch. 3; Genette 1980: 77), but again, there is no connection between a learned competence of common parlance (such as my patchy competence in driving a car or small-talking at parties) and the acquired linguistic competence that is the object of generative enquiry. One early generative approach to stylistics is that of Ohmann (1964), who proposed that an author’s style could be substantially characterized by examining the transformational rules employed in the generation of the author’s sentences. Thus, in a passage from Faulkner, rules of compounding, conjunction and subject deletion are most common, whereas a passage written by Henry James can be characterized by rules that generate relative clauses and various other forms of embedding. Beyond obligatory morphological rules, Hemingway’s sentences generally involve only the introduction of pronouns and the apparent transformation of direct speech and thought into free indirect style. The descriptive strength of Ohmann’s theory is illustrated by reversing the transformations for a section of text. This process creates a ‘kernel text’ that consists solely of simple sentences on which only morphological rules have been applied. 44

Generative Grammar and Stylistics

To characterize a writer’s style in terms of their preferred generative rules is an entertaining and at times revealing exercise, but the model is wholly dependent on a generative theory of very extensive rules mediating between the kernel string and the surface form. The model collapses as generative theory progresses and knowledge about language advances, partly because the model employed becomes obsolete and partly because some assumptions are later falsified. For example, Banfield demonstrates that the sentences of represented speech and thought and those of (in)direct speech and thought are not transformationally related (1982: ch. 2). While Ohmann makes the point that his theory is concerned only with the first step of stylistic discussion, that of formal description, he maintains that in a kernel text, the style of the individual author has gone with the ‘transformational wind’ (Ohmann 1964: 436). The notion of a text having some sort of ‘zero style’ (my inverted commas) is difficult to sustain, however. The reliance on a ‘kernel text’ requires a reader to respond to a text which, inevitably, has its own style. The model is founded on the intuition that we have something to say but a variety of choices of language with which to say it, an intuition that may be captured formally in terms of propositional semantics and the translation from a ‘mentalese’ to natural language at the level of the sentence, but becomes unworkable at the level of a text and the inferences it gives rise to. Adopting Ohmann’s approach, Fowler is aware of the dangers of loosely co-opting formal terminology (1977: 18) but appears to fall into the trap himself on claiming that ‘a writer may transform his deep structures into surface structures which radically modify our apprehension of the propositional meaning of the text’ (1977: 17). The confusion lies in the notion of a process of modification in the reader’s apprehension. There is no reading ‘to be modified’, for the reader’s computation arises from the surface structure that she reads. One refreshing aspect of Fowler’s introduction, however, is the adoption of both generative grammar and Hallidayan functional grammar as complementary tools for addressing competence and performance. Such complementarity between the principled study of discourse properties and formal properties of language is argued for explicitly by Kuno (1980: 117–18) and assumed in relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995). Generative debate in the 1960s and 1970s was particularly vibrant on the subject of grammatical ‘deviance’. Saporta (1960: 91) argued that the deviant sentences in texts should be the subject matter of stylistics, but the notion of deviation from a norm is difficult to maintain in the absence of a clear definition of a norm. Generative tools provide such a definition, in characterizing a native speaker’s competence (what is grammatically possible) and distinguishing between it and that which is outside the competence (the infinite array of structures that cannot be generated by the language system). Degrees of grammaticality and acceptability have been central to generative research ever since 45

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Chomsky observed the distinction between, say, Dylan Thomas’s ‘a grief ago’ and the more deviant ‘a the go’ (1964: 386). Levin suggested that stylisticians should begin with the current grammar of the standard language and tweak and adapt the rules to encompass the language of the specific text (Levin 1967). Thorne argued instead that the stylistician should draw up a new inventory of rules that establishes the grammar of the language of the poem as if it were a language other than English. For him, the construction of a distinct grammar that can generate all the sentences of the poem reveals tendencies in the language that may clarify a poem’s interpretation and enable a characterization of the poet’s style (Thorne 1965, 1969, 1970). However, Austin (1984) points out that for any engagement with verbal art, generativism provides a distinct definition of a reader, the native speaker. It is this reader that processes the language of verbal art and has the linguistic competence that underlies her knowledge of grammatical and mildly deviant structures. When verbal art employs language that is very far from a speaker’s competence, then other cognitive processing abilities may be employed, but still, there may be an association being made with grammatical structures (see Fabb 2010 discussed below). Both Austin and Banfield (1973) make the point against Levin and Thorne that constructing new grammars for the language of specific poems results in the distinction between the deviant language and the ‘norm’ of the reader’s competence being lost. The shift towards a greater focus on the role of the reader in stylistics brings this drawback into sharp focus: Part of the effect of a deviant sentence is precisely the fact that it is deviant in terms of the reader’s competence. Rather than formulate new grammars, Austin (1979, 1984) retains the grammar of the reader’s competence and establishes descriptive generalizations about an author’s style by observing where the deviation from the norm tends to occur. Returning briefly to Thorne’s work, he makes some extravagant evaluative claims, arguing for example that good poems deviate from the standard language at the level of deep structure rather than surface structure; that is, variation occurs in what became characterized as subcategorization and selectional rules (e.g. the requirement of an animate predicate is violated in lines from Donne’s Nocturnal upon St. Lucie’s day). Mere deviations in word order at the surface structure are the hallmark of the ‘bad’ poem (Thorne 1969: 148). Sometimes the bold claim in science may help to clarify the nature of the analysis, but Thorne merely betrays here a prejudice against certain literary styles and periods. There is also something of an unease with the role of ambiguity, perhaps stemming originally from Jakobsonian Structuralism, for he asserts that choices about the grammar may determine between specific readings of a poem (1981[1970]: 50). In contrast, with the rise of literary pragmatics, it has become clear that ambiguity and indeterminacy are not only central aspects of 46

Generative Grammar and Stylistics

language use but may be central to an aesthetic effect (e.g. ‘Poetic Effects’ in Sperber and Wilson 1995: ch. 4). Interestingly, Thorne observes that even in poems where there is a relative lack of ‘deviation’, it is the lines where deviation occurs that may hold most significance (1969: 148). Reformulating this theory in terms of a more reader-orientated approach, it may be the moment of processing ‘difficulty’ that provides a key to possible meanings in a poem. The processing difficulty, of course, may arise from the fact that the language being used is outside the reader’s linguistic competence and so requires distinct cognitive abilities. Fabb (2010) re-examines the hypothesis that literary language is a development of ordinary language. The article marshals the kind of arguments that can exist for and against the hypothesis in both its strong form (a literary language is developed out of the source language) and its weak form (a literary language is seen as ‘a development of the universal possibilities underlying all languages’, 2010: 1220). It is a continuation of the discussion set out in Kiparsky (1973), mapping the parameters for future research into literary language, though it finds no place in its discussion for Banfield’s ‘unspeakable’ sentences. Fabb includes the interesting hypothesis that in some examples of avantgarde poetry the language may not be a ‘natural’ language at all, in that it may include wordings that are far removed from those structures that can be generated by the human language faculty. They result instead from the ‘linear concatenation of elements’ without syntax (Fabb 2010: 1221–2). Such examples of quasi ‘language’ may be processed by the reader via analogy to structures that are part of a speaker’s competence. In a sense, the poem may have some form of abstract prose paraphrase alongside it, which provides the propositional form that then contributes to the inferencing of the reading process. This distinction between formal structure within a reader’s competence and formal structures outside that competence (hence processed by other modules in the brain) is a generative one and represents a theme in much of Fabb’s work (e.g. Fabb 1997, 2002, 2010, 2012). The notion of a ‘literary language’ is often given short shrift in contemporary stylistics and literature primers, as though the medium of that social construct, ‘literature’, is necessarily a chimera. Certainly there were periods in which few writers or readers would disagree that there was such a thing as a literary language, as Leech notes (1969: ch. 1), and the briefest glance at the word orders of Milton, Pope and Shelley mentioned above demonstrate a sustained and constrained deviance from standard English competence. The generative studies cited have documented this assiduously. Even restricting ourselves to the domain of prose, it is evident from Banfield’s work that there are sentences that are unique to certain kinds of written narrative. For all the (standard) quibbles over specific data, or even over scientific methodology, the regularities in the patterns of data revealed by such research are facts that require an explanation. 47

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Generativism is good at moving the debate on. For example, Banfield closes (1982) by asserting that the research enables us to go beyond merely the discussion of a writer’s lexical and structural choices to address wider concerns about the nature of written fiction in relation to fictional subjectivity and, historically, the rise of particular types of narrative fiction (Banfield 1982: ch. 6). Kiparsky (1973) placed verbal art in various languages at the centre of generative research, as does Fabb (1997, 2010). The question of what we can learn from generativism about the medium of verbal art is as vibrant a question now as it was in the earlier stages of generative research. The cross-linguistic focus is surely essential in our appreciation of what the nature of verbal art is and helps to reduce the dangers of linguistic parochialism.

5  A Formal Contribution to Literary Interpretation and Evaluation We have seen, then, generative contributions to a number of areas that might loosely come under the umbrella of ‘stylistics’, from characterizations of authorial style to interpretations founded on formal observations, from generativeinspired stylistic theories to considerations of the nature and limitations of verbal art generally. In this section, I provide a very brief account of some formal aspects of Poem 1279 by Emily Dickinson (in (2) below) in the light of some parts of this discussion. It should be apparent from the preceding sections that there is no such thing as a ‘generative’ reading of a poem, due to the simple fact that generative theory is not a theory of language use but a theory of the underlying language system that performance indirectly reveals. I will assume Austin’s theory of poetic syntax in which the formal generative contribution appears in the first stage prior to the levels of aesthetic and interpretative analysis, which draw on different tools (Austin 1984). Given the generative focus of this chapter, I shall leave off precisely where the interpretative and evaluative analysis begins. The aim is to illustrate some of the themes introduced in previous sections and to prepare some of the formal ground for further interpretive analysis by the literary pragmatist. First, the poem: (2) Poem 1279 by Emily Dickinson (in Vendler 2010: 441) The things we thought that we should do We other things have done But those peculiar industries Have never been begun. The Lands we thought that we should seek When large enough to run 48

5

Generative Grammar and Stylistics

By Speculation ceded To Speculation’s Son – The Heaven, in which we hoped to pause When Discipline was done Untenable to Logic But possibly the one –

10

As mentioned in Section 3, relatively loose syntactic parallelism can be precisely captured in a formal way if we have access to the underlying hierarchical linguistic structure that generativism has revealed. This poem presents an example of this in the opening lines of each verse, each one of which is a noun phrase (NP). The first line of the second verse parallels the poem’s opening line very closely, with only two switches: in the head nouns (things ~ Lands) and the main verbs of a clause embedded within the relative clause (do ~ seek). The first line of the third verse does not continue such strict parallelism with the first two, but the parallel is apparent if we make reference to the hierarchical clause structure within each NP, as in (3): (3)

Line 1 NP[ The things CP[ which we thought CP[ that we should do ]]] Line 5 NP[ The Lands CP[ which we thought CP[ that we should seek ]]] Line 9 NP[ The Heaven CP[ in which we hoped CP[ to pause ]]]

The absent relative pronouns have been included in (3) to emphasize the structural parallels. If we imagine a tree diagram rather than brackets, lines 1 and 5 are equivalent at the lowest level of individual lexical items, differing only in the specific words inserted under two nodes. In contrast, line 9 is not parallel to lines 1 and 5 at the lexical level but becomes equivalent at a higher point in the tree, at the level of the nodes representing the relative clauses and embedded complement clauses (CP). The structures in (3) are actually incomplete, because the NPs of lines 5 and 9 also include adverbial when clauses that appear in the following lines (line 6, ‘When large enough to run’; and line 10, ‘When Discipline was done’). These two lines also exhibit a loose parallelism which is again captured formally at the level of the embedded clausal node: (4)

Line 6 [When [ large enough to Line 10 [When [ Discipline

[ run ]] [ was done ]] VP VP

At the lexical and grammatical level, these phrases are quite distinct: line 6 has the adjective ‘large enough’ followed by a clause with ‘run’ as the head of the 49

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

verb phrase, line 10 has ‘Discipline’ as subject and the copula ‘was’ as head of the verb phrase (the American English ‘done’ is here an adjective). However, the brackets in (4) indicate the equivalence at the more abstract level. There is, then, parallelism between the opening lines of each verse, but it is a parallelism that becomes progressively looser as we move through the poem (3). There is another example of loose parallelism between the second and third verses in the second lines (4). The non-linguistic formal structure of the poem includes the fact that it is divided into three verses. Vendler suggests that this structure is ‘well-suited’ to a beginning-middle-end development, but she argues that any sense of development in this poem is denied by the repetition of the ‘un’ sound: ‘The story comes to the same thing, over and over. Industry, Speculation and Discipline have all come to naught’ (Vendler 2010: 442). What we have established formally is that syntactic parallels exist between the verses, but that there is a difference between the underlying levels of parallelism between verses 1 and 2 on the one hand and between verses 2 and 3 on the other. This might be taken as evidence for a different inference on the part of the reader – that there is more of a development between the verses than Vendler suggests, and while ‘Industry, Speculation and Discipline’ all fail, it is not simply a question of the same thing recurring ‘over and over’. I demonstrate next that further development can be mapped in terms of degrees of deviation. The syntactic parallels between the verses do not continue beyond the opening lines of each verse, for each verse-initial NP plays a different structural role. The NP in line 1 plays no role in either of the conjoined clauses that make up the rest of the verse: [We other things have done] / But [those peculiar industries / Have never been begun]. In contrast, in verse 2, the initial NP may be the subject of a clause that takes up the whole verse. In verse 3, the initial NP has no structural role, for the verse does not exhibit a clause. We see then a very different structure to each verse, which we will now examine in more detail with respect to the deviation from language that may be generated by the native speaker’s linguistic competence. Let us consider the first verse. The displacement of the complement NP in line 2 (We [other things] have done) is only marginally deviant and presents little processing difficulty to the native-speaker reader. It is the kind of late stylistic transformation that Banfield examines in Milton (Banfield 1973: ch. 1) and may be seen as relatively unmarked within the context of the ballad form adopted. More challenging for the native-speaker reader is the apparent absence of the auxiliary in the passive construction in verse 2 and the appearance of the by-phrase before the verb ‘ceded’. If we remove the relative clause and the adverbial when phrase for structural clarity, the normal wording would be: ‘The Lands were ceded by Speculation to Speculation’s Son’, 50

Generative Grammar and Stylistics

rather than what Dickinson writes: ‘The Lands by speculation were ceded to Speculation’s Son’. In fact, the wording that Dickinson uses in the poem may have the curious effect of simultaneously evoking the word order of the equivalent active sentence (Speculation ceded Lands to Speculation’s Son). That is, if the preposition by is ignored, and we understand the object NP ‘The Lands …’ to have been topicalized out of its direct object position into a sentence-initial position, the reader finds: ‘Speculation ceded / To Speculation’s Son’). My point is not that Dickinson’s wording is ambiguous on this point – the preposition by rules that out – but that the reader may, in attempting to process the structure, be dimly aware of the active reading. Finally, in this second verse there is another structural analysis available. In this reading, the entire second verse may be seen as a single NP with a reduced relative clause starting in line 7. Removing again the first relative clause and when-clause for clarity, the second verse may underlyingly be of this construction: NP[The lands CP[which were ceded to speculation’s son]]. In this case, verse two is not a clause at all, just a complex NP. Of course, a native-speaker reader is unlikely to consider these options consciously. What I seek to do here is to formally document the reasons for processing tensions that may arise for a native-speaker reader in the process of reading this poem. The third verse presents a challenge for the reader because there is no verb in a main clause at all. It is repeated here with the principal constituents bracketed: (5)

[The Heaven, in which we hoped to pause  When Discipline was done]

NP

[Untenable to Logic]  But possibly NP[the one] –

AP

In the absence of a verb, the native-speaker reader is confronted with a collection of internally grammatical syntactic constituents but no sentence and hence no proposition. This may be a case where a prose paraphrase must be constructed by the native-speaker reader in order to construct a proposition that might then contribute to pragmatic inferencing.9 The simplest option may be for the reader to assume that a copula is missing. If the reader mentally provides the copula, we get this sentence (again, ignoring the relative clause for structural clarity): The heaven is untenable to logic but possibly the one. As a conclusion to this presentation of syntactic deviation in the poem, we have noted how the first verse presents little difficulty, while the second verse presents structural ambiguity between a missing auxiliary in a passive structure 51

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

and a single isolated NP. The third verse requires the reader to provide a copula in order to create a sentence structure that will allow a syntactic role for the various constituents. This challenge in terms of deviation from normal language provides another distinction between the verses that might support the inference suggested above: there is a development of sorts, this time one of increasing complexity owing to syntactic deviation. The complexity of the final verse may be taken as a good example of Thorne’s point discussed in Section 4 that the moment of most deviance in a poem otherwise characterized by little deviation may be a moment of significance. The point of greatest processing challenge comes in the final verse. The distinctive nature of the final verse is strengthened by another formal fact that requires us to briefly step outside the syntactic focus of this chapter and consider the poem’s metrical system. The poem exhibits regular alternating 8 and 6 iambic foot lines throughout the poem except for line 11. This line contains the constituent that first signals a processing problem to the reader in the third verse, the AP ‘Untenable to Logic’. Both the lexical stresses appear in even positions in the line as required by the metre, but there is no syllable to fill the final slot, making it formally unmetrical (this account assumes Hanson and Kiparsky 1996). Interestingly, the line could be made metrical by introducing the missing copula. The copular would need to appear at the end of the line to fill the empty metrical position and to retain the placement of the preceding lexical stresses. The result would be: ‘The Heaven, in which we hope to pause / When Discipline was done / Untenable to Logic is.’ In this way, line 11 becomes metrical, albeit at the expense of another mildly deviant ‘poetic’ word order (the complement of the copula precedes rather than follows). Given that this makes the final verse both metrical and grammatical, it may be seen as noteworthy that Dickinson does not do this. Interestingly, Vendler hones in on the same line as central to her reading of the poem, though she does so for independent reasons to do with sound patterns and Dickinson’s revealing revisions in earlier versions of the poem (Vendler 2010: 443). Vendler’s reading is that this poem is ‘a parody of the Christian pilgrimage to heaven’ (2010: 442). As noted above, she regards the semantic structure as one of the same failure reoccurring without development in each verse. The structural observations we have established here suggest rather that there is a degree of development in the poem, from tighter to progressively looser parallelism, from relatively unmarked poetic language to increasingly marked deviation from the reader’s linguistic competence, and from metrical regularity to an instance of irregularity that draws attention to line 11 in the final verse. The nature of the inferences that may arise as a result of these demonstrable facts is outside the scope of the generative analysis. However, a reader might regard such facts as evidence for the inference that the poem itself enacts a shift 52

Generative Grammar and Stylistics

away from the relative ‘comfort’ of the Christian world view (the opening lines allude to Rom. 7:19), evoked in regular ballad metre and standard syntax in verse 1, towards the absence of any such religious comfort, embodied in syntactic deviation and looser parallelism. The single unmetrical line asserts that the heaven is logically untenable, even as a need for it is acknowledged (it is ‘the one’). Such an inference supports Vendler’s reading of the poem. Finally, the poem’s diction is weighted towards the closed classes of grammatical and semi-lexical items (Emonds 2000), including a key role for semantically reduced nouns (thing, one) and the semantically minimal action verb do and its derived adjective done. The semantics of the poem is substantially reduced to the closed class semantics of simple action (though not enacted), causation and negation. This fact might be related to the prominence given in line 11 to logic. In this section, I have briefly discussed Dickinson’s poem with a view to illustrating some themes that featured in earlier sections. Such a generativeinformed account of some aspects of the poem’s form can only be a first step in any discussion of the poem, but I have indicated some ways in which these facts might contribute to the reader’s inferences about the poem’s wider meanings.

6 Conclusion Generative grammar has made substantive contributions to formal descriptions of the style of specific authors and genres, but in providing a theory of the underlying structure of language, it enables a greater purchase on the nature of many traditional patterning features of verbal art. As a theory of human language, its cross-linguistic purview and cognitive orientation affords an opportunity to go beyond close reading in individual languages to formulate fundamental questions about verbal art as a human activity, its nature, its linguistic tendencies and its limitations. It presents a definition of a reader that possesses an intuitive sense of language ‘norm’ and provides the tools to examine the ways and degrees to which verbal art may and may not depart from that norm. Yet outside metrics, the generative presence in contemporary stylistics is now minimal. There are various reasons for this. Fludernik observes that ‘the Chomskyan paradigm … is still unpalatable to many literary scholars’ (1994: 356), and there is little doubt that C. P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ remains a factor. But with the welcome shift in focus towards the reader, the rise of linguistic pragmatics, with its distinct tools for analysing language use, has certainly contributed to a diminished presence of generative stylistic work, even though the need for a formal description that contributes to readerly inferencing remains. Finally, the very success of the generative research programme has perhaps 53

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

made its adoption less readily available to researchers from outside the field as it progressed from individual rule-based, language-specific grammars (that bore some resemblance to the partial typologies of constructions in traditional grammar books) to theories of greater cross-linguistic generality and abstraction. More than twenty years ago, Kiparsky characterized generative grammar as being the dominant theory in linguistics ‘in the sense that it is the one which most linguists try to develop, to apply, or to overthrow’ (1987: 189–90), and if its spirited denunciations in the opening pages of contemporary stylistics primers are anything to go by, this remains true. Generative research is vibrant and remains available to stylistic researchers interested in the workings of their medium. Carter and Stockwell’s stylistic manifesto rightly asserts that being eclectic theoretically and being prepared to engage with the difficult should be central to stylistic research (2008: 300). With respect to further reading, stylisticians of either a formal or a functional bent will learn much about the opposing – and potentially complementary – linguistic research programmes in Newmeyer (2000). The rise of popular science books is now reflected in linguistics too: Pinker (1995) is widely celebrated, and Baker (2001) and Smith (1989) are equally authoritative and engaging.

Notes 1. A particularly fine example of the non-formal discussion of free indirect style from the same period is that of Leech and Short (1981: ch. 10). 2. Kiparsky (1987) outlines Fish’s misunderstandings of scientific method and generative linguistics. Austin (1984: ch. 1) provides a useful rejoinder to Fish’s more extreme claims about the circularity of formal stylistics, while welcoming the nudge that Fish gave stylistics towards the reader and interpretive communities. 3. See also Fabb (2012) for analysis of the interplay between ‘inherent’ linguistic form and non-linguistic form in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. 4. The use of capitals signals a formally defined object within the theory rather than the non-formal usage, as mentioned in Section 2. 5. Banfield builds on Benveniste’s work on the French aorist tense and Hamburger’s work on German Erzahlen (see Banfield 1982 for references). 6. Banfield proposes an E node above the S’ of Chomsky’s Extended Standard Theory (1972), which exhibits uniformity in the alignments of SPEAKER and SELF, NOW, etc. 7. McHale (1983), Toolan (1988) and Fludernik (1994) are the best of the anti-generative critiques and the source for most discussion of Banfield (1982). 8. Ehrlich (1990) assumes Banfield’s model as part of a pragmatic account above the level of the sentence. Guéron (2008) provides a revised account of the sentences of Represented Speech and Thought in current generative terms. 9. See discussion of Fabb (2010) in Section 4. This construction of a possible prose paraphrase itself requires pragmatic inferencing. It is perhaps worth noting that the development of pragmatic theory since the 1980s means that today we might draw the distinction between the formal and the pragmatic analysis in a different way to that of Austin’s (1984). See Clark (2013) and references there for discussion with respect to relevance theory.

54

Generative Grammar and Stylistics

References Austin, T. R. (1979), ‘Constraints on syntactic rules and the style of Shelley’s “Adonais”: An exercise in stylistic criticism’, Poetics and Theory of Literature, 4: 315–43 (reprinted in Freeman, 1981, 138–65). Austin, T. R. (1984), Language Crafted: A Linguistic Theory of Poetic Syntax, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Baker, M. (2001), The Atoms of Language: The Mind’s Hidden Rules of Grammar, New York, NY: Basic Books. Banfield, A. (1973), ‘Stylistic transformations: A study based on the syntax of Paradise Lost’, PhD diss.: University of Wisconsin, Madison. Banfield, A. (1982), Unspeakable Sentences: Narrative and Representation in the Language of Fiction, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Banfield, A. (2003), ‘Beckett’s tattered syntax’, Representations, 84: 6–29. Carter, R. and Stockwell, P. (2008), The Language and Literature Reader, Abingdon: Routledge. Chatman, S. (1968), ‘Milton’s participial style’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 83: 1386–99. Chomsky, N. (1964), Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, The Hague: Mouton. Chomsky, N. (1965), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, N. (1972), Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar, The Hague: Mouton. Chomsky, N. (1981), Lectures on Government and Binding, Dordrecht: Foris. Chomsky, N. (1986), Knowledge of Language, New York: Praeger. Chomsky, N. (1995), The Minimalist Program, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clark, B. (2013), Relevance Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Culler, J. (1975), Structuralist Poetics, London: Penguin. Ehrlich, S. (1990), Point of View: A Linguistic Analysis of Literary Style, London: Routledge. Emonds, J. E. (1976), A Transformational Approach to English Syntax: Root, Structurepreserving, and Local Transformations, New York, NY: Academic Press. Emonds, J. E. (2000), Lexicon and Grammar: The English Syntacticon, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Fabb, N. (1997), Linguistics and Literature, Oxford: Blackwell. Fabb, N. (2002), Language and Literary Structure, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fabb, N. (2010), ‘Is literary language a development of ordinary language?’, Lingua, 120: 1219–32. Fabb, N. (2012), ‘Poetic form as meaning in Walt Whitman’s leaves of Grass’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 41: 105–19. Fish, S. (1980), Is there a Text in this Class? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fludernik, M. (1994), The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction, London: Routledge. Fowler, R. (1977), Linguistics and the Novel, London: Methuen. Freeman, D. C. (1975), ‘The strategy of fusion: Dylan Thomas’s syntax’, in R. Fowler (ed.), Style and Structure in Literature: Essays in the New Stylistics, 19–39, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Freeman, D. C., ed. (1981), Essays in Modern Stylistics, London: Methuen. Genette, G. (1980), Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Guéron, J. (2008), ‘Remarks on the grammar of unspeakable sentences’, in R. S. Kawashima, G. Philippe and T. Sowley (eds), Phantom Sentences: Essays in Linguistics and Literature Presented to Ann Banfield, 165–92, Berlin: Peter Lang. Hanson, K. and Kiparsky, P. (1996), ‘A parametric theory of poetic metre’, Language, 72 (2): 287–335. Jakobson, R. (1960), ‘Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics’, in T. A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, 350–77, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

55

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Jakobson, R. (1987[1960]), ‘Linguistics and poetics’, in R. Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. K. Pomorska and S. Rudy, 62–94, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Keyser, S. J. (1976), ‘Wallace Stevens: Form and meaning in four poems’, College English, 37 (reprinted in Freeman, 1981, 100–22). Kiparsky, P. (1973), ‘The role of linguistics in a theory of poetry’, Daedalus, 102: 231–44 (reprinted in Freeman, 1981, 9–23). Kiparsky, P. (1987), ‘On theory and interpretation’, in N. Fabb, D. Attridge, A. Durant and C. MacCabe (eds), The Linguistics of Writing, 185–98, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kuno, S. (1980), ‘Functional syntax’, in E. Moravcsik and J. Wirth (eds), Current Approaches to Syntax, 117–36, New York: Academic Press. Leech, G. (1969), A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, Harlow: Longman. Leech, G. and Short, M. (1981), Style in Fiction, Harlow: Longman. Levin, S. R. (1967), ‘Poetry and grammaticalness’, in S. Chatman and S. Levin (eds), Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguistics, 224–30, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. McHale, B. (1983) ‘Unspeakable sentences, unnatural acts: Linguistics and poetics revisited’, Poetics Today, 4: 17–45. Newmeyer, F. (2000), Language Form and Language Function, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ohmann, R. (1964), ‘Generative grammar and the concept of literary style’, Word, 20: 423–39. Pinker, S. (1995), The Language Instinct, rev. edn, London: Penguin. Rochemont, M. S. (1986), Focus in Generative Grammar: Studies in Generative Linguistics 4, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rochemont, M. S. and Culicover, P. W. (1990), English Focus Constructions and the Theory of Grammar, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saporta, S. (1960), ‘The application of linguistics to the study of poetic language’, in T. A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, 82–93, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smith, N. (1989), The Twitter Machine, Oxford: Blackwell. Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1995), Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell. Thorne, J. P. (1965), ‘Stylistics and generative grammars’, Journal of Linguistics, 1 (1): 49–59. Thorne, J. P. (1969), ‘Poetry, stylistics and imaginary grammars’, Journal of Linguistics, 5 (1): 147–50. Thorne, J. P. (1970), ‘Generative Grammar and stylistic analysis’, in J. Lyons (ed.), New Horizons in Linguistics (Reprinted in Freeman, 1981, 42–52). Todorov, T. (1971), La Poétique de la Prose, Paris: Edition du Seuil [translated as (1977), The Poetics of Prose, Cornell: Cornell University Press.] Toolan, M. (1988), Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, 1st edn, London: Routledge. Vendler, H. (2010), Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

56

4

Functional Stylistics Benedict Lin, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Chapter Overview Introduction 57 SFL – A Brief Introduction 57 Overview of Work in Functional Stylistics 61 A Brief Example of Functional Stylistics in Action 68 Evaluation 72 Conclusion 73

1 Introduction ‘Functional stylistics’ (or ‘functionalist stylistics’) can refer to stylistics that draws on any branch of functional linguistics. For instance, papers in Chloupek and Nekvapil’s (1993) edited volume, Studies in Functional Stylistics, draw on Prague School linguistics. Overwhelmingly, however, the term ‘functional stylistics’ has been used to refer to stylistics based on M. A. K. Halliday’s model of linguistics: systemic functional linguistics (SFL). In this chapter, therefore, the term will be used in this sense.

2  SFL – A Brief Introduction SFL sees language as a social semiotic (Halliday 1978), with a system of resources for making meaning in context. Its interest is in language in use, and every linguistic choice is seen as functioning to encode meaning potential, with actual meaning being realized through the interaction of text with context. The 57

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

labels used in lexico-grammatical analysis, therefore, reflect semantic functions rather than form. SFL adopts a tri-stratal, tri-nocular perspective of language, as illustrated in Figure 4.1. At the level of context, each context of situation embedded in a particular context of culture is seen as a configuration of field (topic or activity area), tenor (relations between its interlocutors) and mode (the semiotic means). A description of this configuration is a description of the register of the discourse.

Context of Situation

Three motivating features

Field of discourse Realised in Semantics

Tenor of discourse

Mode of discourse

Three metafunctions = three kinds of meaning

Ideational = Experiential (+ Logical)

Realised in Lexicogrammar

Interpersonal

Textual

Three distinct primary structures each with its own descriptive vocabulary

Transitivity

Mood Mood: Subject

Thematic

Process types

Finite

Theme

Participant roles

Mood

Rheme

Circumstance

Adjuncts Comment Adjuncts Residue:

Predicator Complement Adjunct

Figure 4.1  From Context to Meaning to Lexico-grammar (adapted from Butt et al. 1995)

58

Functional Stylistics

At the level of semantics, the three register variables of any text are realized through three corresponding aspects of meaning – ideational (to do with how we represent the world), interpersonal (to do with the interactional exchange taking place, and the speaker’s/writer’s judgements) and textual (to do with the organization of the other two types of meaning into coherent text). Conversely, each ensemble of such meanings of a text is seen to construe the register and context of situation of the discourse. Finally, at the level of the lexico-grammar, co-occurring systems realize these three aspects of meaning. At the constituent level of the clause, these systems are transitivity, mood and theme respectively. Again, conversely, linguistic choices from these systems are seen to construe the meaning potential of a text. Transitivity concerns how the clause represents experience in terms of who/ what does what, to whom/what and in what circumstances. From this perspective, each clause is seen as a configuration of Participants (realized by noun groups/ phrases) involved in a Process (realized by the verb groups), under a set of Circumstances (realized by adverbial groups). At the heart of the clause is the Process, which Halliday (1994, 2004) identifies as being of six types, each associated with a particular set of Participants: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Material Process with Actor, Goal, Range and Beneficiary Mental Process with Sensor and Phenomenon Relational Process with Carrier and Attribute, or Identifier and Identified Verbal Process with Sayer, Verbiage, Receiver and Target Behavioural Process with Behaver Existential Process with Existent

Circumstances are associated with all Process types and encode the circumstantial conditions of the happening in each clause. Each Circumstance may be further specified in terms of type of condition (e.g. Time, Place, Manner and Cause). Under the mood system, mood structure encodes the clause as the ‘exchange’ of information or ‘goods’ and ‘services’: The declarative mood (e.g. ‘The men were in the restaurant’) typically encodes statements offering information; the interrogative mood (e.g. ‘Who were in the restaurant?’ or ‘Were the men in the restaurant?’) typically encodes questions that ‘demand’ or ask for information; and the imperative mood (e.g. ‘(You) Come here!’) typically encodes commands and instructions, or ‘demand’ for ‘goods’ or ‘services’. These are unmarked or congruent uses of mood structure. However, each mood structure may also be used less typically or congruently. For instance, interrogatives may be used for commands (e.g. superior to subordinate: ‘Would you open the window, please?’). Such an indirect use can be said to lessen the force of the command.

59

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Other marked or non-congruent uses may have similar interpersonal motivations, or may serve, for instance, to add force or draw attention. In the mood system, each clause comprises two main components, Mood and Residue. The Mood consists of Subject, which corresponds to the Subject in more traditional grammars, and Finite, the element of the verb group, which may either be explicitly realized through a primary or modal auxiliary verb or implicitly ‘fused’ with the Predicator (which comprises the rest of the verb group) to encode tense (the speaker’s position in time in relation to the proposition), polarity (whether something is or is not) and modality (the speaker’s judgement, for instance, of the certainty of a proposition). To these may be added Mood Adjuncts such as ‘perhaps’, ‘possibly’, ‘only’, ‘of course’, ‘scarcely’ and ‘luckily’. The Residue comprises the remaining elements of the clause, including the Predicator. Interpersonally, it is choices in the elements of the Mood that are of most interest, since they encode a speaker’s judgements, attitudes and positions. Finally, the clause can also be seen as comprising a Theme and a Rheme, which form the structure of the clause as a message, as a ‘quantum of information’ (Halliday 2004: 58). The Theme is ‘the point of departure for the message’ (ibid.: 58) and ‘that which locates and orients the clause within its context’ (ibid.: 64). The rest of the clause constitutes the Rheme, which develops the message. In English, the Theme is indicated by being put in the initial position in a clause. Minimally, the Theme in English comprises the first element in the transitivity structure, whether it is Participant, Process or Circumstance: this is the topical Theme, the experiential starting point of the message. Preceding the topical Theme may be non-experiential elements. Textual Themes signal moves in the discourse or relate the clause structurally to the previous clause or stretch of text. They include ‘continuatives’ such as yes, no, well, oh and now; conjunctions (and, but, when, while, etc.); and conjunctive phrases such as in other words, in fact, on the other hand and as a result. Interpersonal Themes serve interpersonal functions. They include vocatives, which are ‘any item, typically … a personal name, being used to address’ (Halliday 2004: 81); words or phrases that index the speaker’s or writer’s subjectivity towards the message (e.g. probably, in my opinion, surely, usually, unfortunately, to my surprise); and finite auxiliary verbs indicating tense or modality (usually in yes/no interrogatives to indicate mood, e.g. can in ‘Can you tell me the time?’). Beyond the clause, an important textual resource system is that of cohesion, which refers to how a text is ‘glued together’ to create texture. Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) highly influential Cohesion in English identifies four types of resources: conjunctions for linking clauses and clause complexes; reference, realized through linguistic items such as pronouns, demonstratives and comparatives that ‘are not interpreted semantically in their own right … [but] … make reference to something else for their interpretation’ (Halliday and Hasan 60

Functional Stylistics

1976: 31); ellipsis, which connects one part of a text (typically later) with another (typically earlier) through omitting information recoverable from the latter; and lexical cohesion, that is, through lexical items with semantic links, whether through repetition or synonymy. Halliday (1994, 2004) provides definitive accounts of SFL grammar that may be consulted for analysis. Other useful reference accounts include Bloor and Bloor (2004), Eggins (2004) and Thompson (2004). For applications of SFL to stylistic analysis, Kennedy (1982) is often referred to by other scholars (e.g. Simpson 1993: 95; Toolan 1998: 95; Nørgaard 2003), while Toolan (1998) is a functionally-oriented introductory stylistics textbook which devotes three chapters to introducing selected SFL notions and their application. More recently, Nørgaard (2003) not only provides an introduction to a more comprehensive range of the SFL framework, but also demonstrates strategies for its application from different meta-functional perspectives.

3  Overview of Work in Functional Stylistics SFL-based functional stylistics is concerned with how and what types of meanings are constructed through lexico-grammatical choices in a text in relation to context. It is in this that its strength and usefulness lies, and through which it has played an important role in the development of modern stylistics. Before the advent of functionalism, stylistics was widely seen as limited in its usefulness and applications to literary study. Reliant on the paradigms of Russian Formalism and structural as well as Chomskyan transformationalgenerative linguistics, and focused largely on poetry, interest was devoted to investigating formal linguistic features that produced ‘literary’ effects. While such work brought a focus on language (back) into literary study and also introduced system and rigour into textual analysis, it failed to link descriptive analysis to interpretation and tended to ignore the significance of pragmatic, social and historical contexts. The emergence in the 1970s of Halliday’s SFL, with its emphasis on linking form and function, text and context, provided a theoretical framework and approach to bridge these gaps, and work in stylistics that drew on Halliday’s ideas developed to extend its scope and relevance to questions of interpretation and context. Halliday’s own study of transitivity in William Golding’s novel The Inheritors (Halliday 1971) is widely regarded as seminal in this respect, and in many ways, it provided ‘the blueprint of a modern stylistics which seeks to uncover patterns of meaning through the systematic analysis of linguistic structure’ (Simpson 1993: 101). Highly influential publications in stylistics of the period, such as Leech and Short’s Style in Fiction (1981), draw heavily on Halliday’s ideas, even when not overtly applying SFL. 61

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Functional stylistics has remained popular (Wales 2012: 9), but beyond that, Nørgaard (2010: 26) notes how it ‘has had an impact in many corners of stylistics’ with contextual and/or ideological concerns, such as feminist, critical and pragmatic stylistics. Furthermore, because SFL is interested in how clauselevel meanings are put together coherently and cohesively into longer stretches of text, the functional turn in stylistics has encouraged and enabled attention to longer texts such as narrative fiction and plays (Nørgaard 2010: 26). In this sense also, it has widened the scope of stylistics. Within mainstream stylistics, as reflected for example by articles in Language and Literature, the journal of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), and book chapters by scholars associated with PALA, transitivity and its encoding of experiential meanings has been a popular focus, inspired by and developing on Halliday’s study. Transitivity is also the aspect of SFL that is most highlighted in introductory stylistics textbooks (apart from Toolan 1998; see e.g. Simpson 2004) and readers (e.g. Carter 1982; Carter and Stockwell 2008). Most transitivity analyses have concerned narrative fiction and relate to characterization. Halliday’s study, for instance, demonstrates how it is through his transitivity choices that Golding depicts the world and worldviews of two groups of people in the novel: one group’s ‘mind style’ is represented as primitive and ineffectual through choices that overwhelmingly involve Processes not directed at object Participants (e.g. Material Processes without Goal), while this group’s antagonists, the ‘inheritors’, are construed as effectually being geared towards progress and modernity through clauses with goal-directed Processes (e.g. Material Processes with Goal). Hence, Halliday is able not only to argue in support of intuitions about the characters in the story, but also to make clear the basis for his interpretation, as well as to suggest where Golding’s craftsmanship lies. Kennedy (1982) shows how a passage from Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent suggests that the female character Mrs Verloc is not fully responsible for her actions in murdering her husband: parts of her body, as well as the murder weapon (a knife), constitute the main Actors in Material Processes associated with the act, and she herself is hardly ever construed linguistically as Actor in the murder scene. Kennedy’s paper also demonstrates how transitivity analysis of Joyce’s short story ‘Two Gallants’ may help account for the reader’s impression that one protagonist in the story, Lenehan, does not seem active and is more a mere observer of events initiated by his friend Corley, who seems more active. In another example, Ji and Shen (2004), noting how most earlier transitivity studies aim at showing power relationships or ‘mind-styles’ of characters, analyse three selected chapters of a novel to show how transitivity patterns encode the mental transformation of the protagonist. Other examples of transitivityfocused studies include Burton (1982), Shen (2007) and Goatly (2008: 10–40). 62

Functional Stylistics

Aspects of interpersonal grammar have also received much stylistic scrutiny, often in conjunction with other meta-functional perspectives, especially the experiential. Kennedy (1982), for instance, complements his transitivity analysis of Joyce’s ‘Two Gallants’ with mood-choice analysis of dialogues between the two main characters, to show how the patterns indicate power relations between them and further reinforce the impressions created by transitivity choices. Vocatives and naming are also examined and are shown to further support the findings of the mood analysis. Nørgaard (2003: 103–4) demonstrates how naming choices in the same story function additionally to indicate the attitudes of the two protagonists towards women (as reflected in the terms they use to refer to the women) as well as to convey implicit evaluation of the two protagonists by the narratorial voice. Toolan (1998: 46–74) and Simpson (2004: 123–7) highlight modality to the near exclusion of other interpersonal resources in their introductory textbooks, with Toolan suggesting that speaker attitudes, states of mind and relative power status may be fruitfully explored through examining modal choices, and Simpson relating modality to the study of point of view. In an influential earlier work (Simpson 1993), the latter devotes one chapter (ch. 3, pp. 42–79) to a detailed description of modal grammar ‘to facilitate the systematic analysis of point of view in fiction’ (77). Unsurprisingly, there have been a good number of studies of modality use, one example being Wheatly (1995). Polarity, although explored much less frequently than modality, has also been demonstrated to be worthy of attention by Nørgaard (2003: 105–10, 2007). Her studies of Joyce’s ‘Two Gallants’ demonstrate how negative polarity as a motivated choice often works to heighten awareness of what has been negated and hence focus our attention on, for instance, expectations that are not met, with subtle consequences for how a character or situation may be seen. Appearing to have received the least stylistic attention is the use of the resources of the textual meta-function. Kennedy (1982) hardly mentions it at all. Nørgaard (2003: 139) notes that to the best of her knowledge, Theme-Rheme patterns in particular ‘are a seldom explored area in literary analysis’. However, she demonstrates in her own examination of ‘Two Gallants’ that such analysis can be illuminating. For instance, as she summarizes it (132), not only do prevalent patterns of repeated Themes referring to three characters (the two protagonists and a girl) focalize the story on each of them at different points, with an overall focus on the main character Lenehan, but also an ‘overall tendency to have Lenehan occupy the Theme slots’ might also account for an impression that the story ‘is a narrative which is moving nowhere’. This consequently encodes the ‘general stasis of Lenehan’s life’ in interaction with patterns of transitivity involving Lenehan. Her study of marked Themes in the same story is also revealing, as is Goatly’s (2008: 59–96) examination of marked Themes and 63

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

their role in constructing a voice that, he argues, is a mixture of the poetic and the colloquial. Cohesion has had much more attention. Toolan (1998) devotes a chapter to introducing the key analytical categories and suggests that in literary texts, it is often ambiguous cohesive ties that prove interesting as instances of deliberate crafting. Halliday and Hasan (1976: 298) note that ‘false or unresolved cohesion’ is a feature of literary work that serves three functions: at the beginning of short stories, to create the illusion that what is being read is just a part of a larger text, a ‘slice of life’; to engage the reader through creating curiosity about what is being referred to; and to create ‘an effect of solidarity with the hearer or reader [which] puts him on the inside as one who is assumed to have a shared common experience with the speaker or writer’. Beyond these functions, Carter (1982) examines, amongst other features, how unmodified lexical repetition, used as the main cohesive device in the opening description of setting in Hemingway’s ‘Cat in the Rain’, produces ‘complex literary effects’ that suggest the humdrum unfulfilled life led by the female protagonist in the story. Nørgaard’s (2003: 140–8) examination of cohesion in Joyce’s story demonstrates how the absence of precisely specified referents for pronouns such as ‘it’ and ‘that’ in the dialogue of the characters may serve to mislead readers into speculative but erroneous interpretations and consequently to surprise them with a final revelation that may cause them ‘to re-evaluate the entire story and its overall theme and moral’ (147). Outside mainstream stylistics, there exists a significant body of theorizing and analysis in SFL circles, apart from Halliday’s seminal study, that merits wider attention and interest. Butt and Lukin (2009) provide an overview of such work, while Lukin and Webster (2005) outline the main theoretical influences, notions and approaches. Birch and O’ Toole (1988) and Miller and Turci (2007) are among the key anthologies displaying examples of such work and the wide range of literary genres covered. Much of the analytical work extends beyond selected lexico-grammatical features in the studied texts and is concerned with how each work’s ‘transcendent semantic enterprise’ is achieved through bestowing ‘new value’ on the ‘ensemble of relations across the text’ between its various linguistic elements. This, it is posited, is done via a higher form of organization that ‘exists over and above the organization which we can discern at a number of levels in anything made in language’ (Butt and Lukin 2009: 190). Theorizing centres on elucidating the nature of this higher order organization, how it distinguishes ‘verbal art’ from other (ordinary) discourses and how, therefore, the basic SFL model may be extended to the specific analysis of verbal art. In this, Halliday (e.g. 1964, 1971, 1982, 1988), Hasan (e.g. 1975, 1985, 1988, 1996, 2007) and Butt (e.g. 1988a, b, 2007) have played major roles. 64

Functional Stylistics

As with others in mainstream stylistics, they draw on the ideas of the Russian Formalists and also the Prague School linguists, considering Mukařovský to have produced ‘the most coherent view of the nature of verbal art and its relation to language’ (Hasan 1985: 122). Central amongst these ideas is that ‘poetic’ or aesthetic language distinguishes itself by a mode of language use that draws attention to the language itself, through the process of ‘de-automatization’ or ‘making strange’. De-automatization is in turn achieved through foregrounding, a familiar central notion in stylistics. What distinguishes work on foregrounding in SFL circles from traditional stylistic analyses lies in its conception of foregrounding and how it is achieved. Foregrounding in a text is often treated as being achieved through external deviation, where units of language stand out and are therefore made salient by being different from the norms of the language (e.g. an unusual grammatical structure) – especially as exhibited through traditional categories of literary tropes. SFL scholars do not see external deviation as being of interest; they see foregrounding mainly in terms of internal deviation, where language units stand out by varying from the norms of the text, or in some other way being prominent within the text. In addition, they emphasize the notion of ‘maximum of foregrounding’, achieved through ‘devices … (that) consist in the consistency and systematic character of foregrounding’ (Mukařovský 1964: 20, cited in Lukin and Webster 2005: 416). For Halliday (1971), this ‘maximum of foregrounding’ is realized through ‘prominence’, by which he means ‘the phenomenon of linguistic highlighting, whereby some feature of the language of a text stands out in some way’ (99). Such prominence must be of a type that leads to a de-automatization involving ‘the partial freeing of the lower-level systems from the control of the semantics’ (Halliday 1982: 131) so as to invite interpretations of ‘the grammar in terms that go beyond its direct realisational meaning’ (ibid.: 139). This is the type of prominence illustrated in his analysis of The Inheritors, where the prominence of selected transitivity patterns invite and make possible a particular reading of the thematic concerns of the novel. Similarly, in Halliday (1982), he demonstrates how in Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, it is through the prominence of certain patterns of choices from the mood system that ‘the complex interrelationship of themes related to obligation, personality and time are built from semantic systems of time, mood and polarity’ (Lukin and Webster 2005: 418). It is Halliday’s approach that has been influential in the developments in mainstream functional stylistics previously described. Hasan’s work develops further Mukařovský’s notion of ‘consistency of foregrounding’ in terms of how it is achieved linguistically and its role in constructing the potential themes of a literary text. Her work proposes an explicit extension of the SFL theoretical and methodological apparatus for the specific analysis of verbal art. In Hasan (1985), she provides the most concentrated explication of this extended framework, on which she has produced numerous 65

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

CONTEXT OF CREATION / INTERPRETATION

THEME SYMBOLIC ARTICULATION VERBALISATION

CONTEXT OF SITUATION IN WORK

the semiotic system of verbal art SEMANTICS LEXICO-GRAMMAR PHONOLOGY

the semiotic system of language

Figure 4.2  Hasan’s (1985) model elaborated to show context of situation statements and examples of its use over a period of forty years (e.g. 1975, 1985, 1988, 1996, 2007). For Hasan, successful verbal art in literary work achieves two levels of semiosis (see Figure 4.2): zz At the first level, verbal art works like everyday discourse, with poten-

tial meanings construed by the lexico-grammar in turn encoding possible ‘everyday’ contexts of situation. This first-level discourse is the discourse represented as being carried out in the text, for example, between characters and interactants in the text. zz At the second level, verbal art then construes a discourse between the work and the reader. This second-level discourse is achieved through what Hasan calls the ‘verbalisation’ of first-level meanings construing a ‘symbolic articulation’ that yields potential ‘thematic sayings’ from the text to the reader – for instance, a ‘moral’ that may be read into a story or an implied statement about the human condition or about society. Consistency of foregrounding plays a crucial role in this ‘double articulation’, as she calls it in Hasan (1996). For Hasan, foregrounding occurs when a part of the text deviates from the norms of the text, from any lexico-grammatical perspective. However, the foregrounding becomes strong and therefore significant only when the part of the text is foregrounded from more than one perspective. Successful ‘symbolic articulation’, in other words, is achieved through skilful inter-patterning of lexico-grammatical patterns across SFL’s three meta-functional domains in such a way as to consistently foreground and draw attention to some part of a text. This would suggest its symbolic significance and hence invite interpretation of its potential ‘deeper’ meaning(s) or

66

Functional Stylistics

‘thematic saying(s)’. Varying interpretations of such sayings may arise, resulting from the influence of differing contexts of interpretation, which characteristically are distant in time and space from the context of creation of the work, but these are constrained by what is foregrounded in the text through the patterning of patterns. Hasan (1985) provides detailed demonstrations of a methodological approach for the use of SFL through the analysis and appraisal of a poem and a short story. Her examination of the consistency of foregrounding in each of these works shows how explicit grounds can be provided for specific claims about the work’s verbal artistry and ‘deepest level of meaning’ and, consequently, for rejecting difficult-to-justify criticisms; for instance, of the Australian poet Les Murray’s Widower in the Country (the poem analysed) as being just a ‘rather sickly and sentimental’ expression of the widower’s grief. Further examples of studies illustrating the application of this sophisticated framework, which appears to have received scant attention in mainstream stylistics circles, can be found in Hasan (1988), O’ Toole (1988), Lukin and Webster (2005) and Lin (2007, 2013). Butt, as Lukin and Webster (2005: 425) note, tests and extends the theoretical and methodological developments of Halliday and Hasan. In studies of Wallace Stevens’ work (e.g. Butt 1988a, b, 2007) and others (e.g. Butt 2009), he provides ‘elaborated exempla’ of how to integrate interpretations of ‘features across systems and functions, within ranks and between structural and non-structural properties of text’ (Lukin and Webster 2005: 426). In each study, he shows how their semantic consequences overlay to create through ‘latent patterning’ (Butt 1988b) what he calls the ‘existential fabric’ of the work, through which ‘the overall character of the phenomenal world of the poem is brought out’ (Butt 1988a). The notions here clearly relate to Hasan’s notions of the patterning of patterns to create consistent foregrounding and symbolic articulation. Lukin and Webster (2005: 424) note that Butt further takes the idea of ‘theme’ to the ‘scale of the oeuvre of the poet’, through finding in the work of Stevens persistent themes which seem to preoccupy the poet, and which he relates to crucial intellectual developments of Stevens’ time in other disciplines such as physics. Thus, Butt (2007) argues that the value of Stevens’ work lies in its cultural significance as ‘thought experiments’ through the language of verbal art. He, thus, suggests how the SFL framework can be applied beyond the aesthetic appraisal of individual works to the evaluation of an artist’s work in terms of its broader cultural significance. Beyond this, his work also demonstrates the value of stylistics not only in providing a basis for literary appraisal, but also in showing the nature and value of verbal art in the broader construction of and advancement of intellectual thought.

67

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

4  A Brief Example of Functional Stylistics in Action To illustrate stylistic analysis using SFL in general, and the ideas of Hasan in particular, here is a poem: Piano and Drums When at break of day at a riverside I hear the jungle drums telegraphing the mystic rhythm, urgent, raw like bleeding flesh, speaking of primal youth, and the beginning, I see the panther ready to pounce, the leopard snarling about to leap and the hunters crouch with spears poised; And my blood ripples, turns torrent, topples the years and at once I’m in my mother’s lap a suckling; at once I’m walking simple paths with no innovations, rugged, fashioned with the naked warmth of hurrying feet and groping hearts in green leaves and wild flowers pulsing. Then I hear a wailing piano solo speaking of complex ways in tear-furrowed concerto; of far-away lands and new horizons with coaxing diminuendo, counterpoint, crescendo. But lost in the labyrinth of its complexities, it ends in the middle of a phrase at a daggerpoint.

5

10

15

20

25

And I lost in the morning mist of an age at a riverside keep wandering in the mystic rhythm of jungle drums and the concerto. Gabriel Okara The poem’s context of creation is quite clearly that of Western civilization’s impingement on African society, and the titular piano and drums would appear 68

Functional Stylistics

to symbolize the opposing calls of the modern (Western) world and the speaker’s native culture. Prima facie, the poem expresses a simple conflict between the ‘simple paths with no innovations’ of the speaker’s ‘primal youth and the beginning’, and the ‘complex ways’ of the ‘far-away lands and new horizons’. For the more thoughtful reader, however, there remains a sense that there is something more to the conflict. Is there verbal artistry at work that construes much more complex meaning potential at the level of theme, and if so, wherein lies this complexity? An immediate observation is that the first two stanzas, which focus on the jungle drums and their effect on the speaker (and thus forming one movement in the poem), consist of one single rather long and complex orthographic sentence, while the other two, focusing on the piano solo and its effect (and thus forming a second movement), comprise three relatively short and simple orthographic sentences. Already, this suggests that what is said about the jungle drums is potentially more complex than what is said about the piano solo: the ostensible ‘simple’ versus ‘complex’ opposition between the two represented cultures perhaps is not so straightforward after all. Dividing the poem into clauses, the topical Themes of finite clauses can be found to all concern the speaker (‘I’, ‘my blood’ and Processes in which they are Participants), except in the last clause of the third stanza (‘But lost in the labyrinth/ of its complexities, it ends in the middle/ of a phrase at a daggerpoint’). Those in the non-finite clauses are all associated with the worlds of the jungle drums or the piano solo. This construes the overall ‘message’ as being mainly about the speaker himself, with the worlds of the jungle drums and of the piano solo forming an inner frame of concerns. The last clause of the third stanza appears to be strongly foregrounded (lines 23b–25): first, its topical Theme (‘lost in labyrinth/ of its complexities’) is the only one among finite clauses that is not about the speaker, and second, as Circumstance in the transitivity structure, is also one of only three marked Themes, and the only marked Theme that is circumstance of cause and reason. Moreover, its textual Theme (‘But’) is the only one encoding an adversative relationship with the preceding clauses – the rest (‘when’, ‘and’, ‘then’) encode additioning temporal references. Such foregrounding suggests that this clause is potentially significant in the poem. From the interpersonal perspective, of most interest is the fact that although the Finites encode the present tense throughout, its time reference varies. Clear habitual reference up to the first three clauses of the second stanza (lines 9–10a) gives way in the rest of the second stanza (lines 10b–16) to reference to a time in the speaker’s past, implied by the preceding ‘topples the years’ (line 10a). The past thus is construed as if occurring now, creating a sense of immediacy, with the possible added implication that the speaker’s past is part of his present as well. In the consciousness of the speaker, then, the native culture appears to be 69

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

a world where time distinctions are blurred and hence somewhat timeless, and in this sense, complex. Time in the world of the piano solo, however, seems more straightforward; the present tense in the third stanza again refers to present occurrence of a habitual nature. The reference may in fact be momentarily mistaken to be to a single here-and-now occurrence, since the immediately preceding reference to past events may suggest that the speaker is now merely returning to a presently occurring event. Thus, the piano solo can also seem a fleeting, illusory happening, and the influence of its culture therefore light. Once again, the apparent ‘simple’ versus ‘complex’ distinction between the two cultures seems to be challenged. Analysis of mood-system elements again reveals the last clause of the third stanza (lines 23b–25) to be strongly foregrounded by virtue of it being the only finite main clause to contain three Adjuncts, and in which the Subject is not the speaker (‘I’) or his being (represented by ‘my blood’), but ‘it’, the piano solo. Taking into account the Thematic foregrounding previously noted, the consistency of this clause’s foregrounding becomes more apparent. In terms of the experiential grammar, each movement begins with the speaker as Sensor in a Mental Process (‘I hear’ in lines 2 and 17), in which the Phenomenon comprises the symbolic drums and piano acting as Sayers in Verbal Processes (‘the jungle drums telegraphing … speaking…’, ‘a wailing piano/ solo speaking …’). However, while hearing the jungle drums engenders a near-simultaneous further Mental Process of the speaker ‘seeing’ other things in the first movement (lines 6–8), his hearing the piano solo in the second movement only leads to the subsequent Material Process of the piano solo coming to an end (lines 24b–25). Further, all that this subsequent act results in is the speaker ‘behaving’ in a certain way (‘keep/ wandering’ – line 27–8); it fails to have any impact on the speaker’s consciousness, unlike in the case of the jungle drums. Neither does it lead to the speaker’s imagined as-if-now (see earlier discussion of tense and time reference) consequent Behavioural and Material Process seen in the first movement (lines 10b–16). Further analysis of other transitivity aspects, such as the Participant roles as well as Processes associated with the drums and piano respectively, and the types of Circumstances in the two movements, suggest further implicit contradictions of the ‘simple paths’ versus ‘complex ways’ binary: the transitivity choices can be shown to construe the world of the jungle drums as more dynamic and rooted, with much more capability of having a direct, quickening effect on the speaker. Unsurprisingly, experientially, the last clause of the third stanza is also the most strongly foregrounded. It is the only finite clause in which the Participant in what Hasan (1985) calls an ‘-er’ role is one of the two cultural symbols in the poem, and the only instance where one of them is Actor in a Material Process. 70

Functional Stylistics

The insistent foregrounding of this clause is thus very evident, and its significance thus needs to be considered. To begin with, the foregrounding emphasizes the event represented by the clause, suggesting its centrality in the speaker’s consciousness; it is the concerto’s ending ‘in the middle of a phrase at a daggerpoint’ that marks the speaker’s crisis point. Why this crisis arises is construed by the manner and specifics of the foregrounding. Thematically, the event is foregrounded as stand-alone and independent of all other happenings through the adversative textual Theme ‘But’, where all other textual Themes in the poem express additioning. The isolation of the event is further reinforced by the clause being one of only two constituting what are traditionally termed ‘simple’ sentences. The event, it can be interpreted, is perceived by the speaker as other to and outside of his other more deeply integrated experiences. Interpersonally, the foregrounding of the piano solo (‘it’) as the only other Subject apart from the speaker makes it an important focal point of the ‘messages’ of the poem. The Subject, for Halliday (2004: 117) is that ‘by reference to which the proposition can be affirmed or denied’. Foregrounding the piano solo as Subject thus makes it become something to be figured out, so to speak. This is reinforced by the foregrounding of the clause’s topical Theme as the only marked Theme that is Circumstance of Cause (Reason); its lexical realization (‘lost in the labyrinth’) highlights the speaker’s need to make sense of the piano solo and hence his bewilderment. Foregrounding the Adjuncts perhaps metaphorically suggests that the central crisis in the speaker’s encounter with the piano solo’s call is that of not only a lack of comprehension, but also a feeling of incompleteness (‘in the middle/ of a phrase’), and a sense of threat (‘at a daggerpoint’). Experientially most significant is the foregrounding of the piano solo (‘it’) as an Actor in a Material Process – without Goal; this is the only occasion in which either cultural symbol plays this role. At other times both are Sayers in Verbal Processes – Processes involving interaction, with the speaker an implied Participant. Here, the Material Process does not involve the speaker as a Participant of any sort, and thus the piano solo is made to seem of little relation to the speaker. In summary, consistent foregrounding suggests the possible reading of the poem’s central theme as possibly being about how the arrival of a new foreign culture may precipitate a cultural crisis for those in the world of the old, leaving them feeling ‘lost’, unfulfilled and threatened. The rest of the poem suggests why: the new may have claims of the attraction and promise of sophistication in speaking of ‘complex ways … faraway lands … new horizons …’, but in the deepest recesses of their subconscious, the new may be ineffectual in the significant way that one’s own inherited is not – the new remains outside and other, 71

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

and perceived as lacking the implicit richness, complexity and dynamism of the inherited. Historical knowledge would help the reader relate this to its context of creation. The poem makes no direct reference to this historical context or to the source of the speaker’s conflict, yet the lexico-grammatical foregrounding of this clause, achieved through intricate inter-patterning, appears to make the latter clear. Even if the specifics of history remain beyond any reader, it can be claimed through the analysis that there exists in the poem a verbal artistry that foregrounds the potential for thematic sayings that can find resonances in any context of interpretation where cultural change occurs. Thus, a claim can be made that the poem has an aesthetic worth for exploring universal themes across time and space.

5 Evaluation Functional stylistics has not been without criticism. Most famously, as part of a more general repudiation of text-based stylistics, Halliday’s (1971) pioneering study has been attacked by Stanley Fish (1973) as being circular in methodology and argument and arbitrary in its interpretative ascription of meaning to prominent linguistic patterns. Fish’s criticism, which has attracted continued rebuttals from stylisticians, aims at a larger argument that meaning does not reside in the text but is primarily constructed by the reader, and leads to a call for an ‘affective stylistics’, in which ‘the focus of attention is shifted from the spatial context of a page and its observable regularities to the temporal context of a mind and its experiences’ (Fish 1973: 144). However, SFL does not insist on a one-to-one correspondence between linguistic choice and actualized meaning; the notion of meaning potential that allows for a constrained range of realizations needs to be stressed. With regard to literary texts, Hasan’s (1985) model draws attention to the importance of the context of interpretation – the reader’s temporal context of mind and experience – in determining actualized interpretation. A truly functional stylistics must take this into account, and in doing so, addresses Fish’s objections. Much of the work in functional stylistics already described has also developed methodological and procedural refinements in applying Halliday’s SFL framework that seek to address Fish’s concerns and other potential flaws. Nørgaard’s (2003) study, for instance, identifies weaknesses in Kennedy’s (1982) earlier work on the same text and develops new strategies for the application of SFL in exploring literary texts as functional acts of communication between author and reader. O’Halloran (2007) explicitly sets out to demonstrate how an investigative method combining corpus-informed analysis and SFL transitivity analysis can reduce the problems of arbitrariness and circularity that Fish 72

Functional Stylistics

is concerned about, and is an instance of one recent important direction that functional stylistics has taken: complementing quantitative work in corpus linguistics with the qualitative insights of SFL and vice-versa. Other examples of a growing body of work in this vein include Turci (2007) and Goatly (2008: 41–58). A more novel attempt at methodological innovation to support SFL-based stylistic analysis has been Melrose’s (2006) attempt to integrate insights from philosophy, neuroscience and particle physics with SFL in order to understand how the meaning potential created in Browning’s My Last Duchess can yield diametrically opposing interpretations of the persona’s motivations. In doing so, he follows both Halliday (1988) and Butt (in his various writings) in exploring links between linguistics, other disciplines (especially those of the sciences), the workings and value of verbal art and the construction of thought. Collectively, they show that beyond the traditional aims of literary understanding and appraisal, functional stylistics can contribute to broader intellectual explorations in an interdisciplinary way. More practically, functional stylistics has been applied to exploring the value of literature study in schools (Lin 2007) as well as to pedagogy for literature (e.g. Lin 2006). There has, however, been little work in pedagogical stylistics that has been explicitly based on functional stylistics, and herein lies an area for development. Lin (2013) and Lukin and Pagano (2012) aim to demonstrate the value of Hasan’s double articulation framework in addressing issues and providing insights into literary translation, while Munday (2008) uses SFL to explore ideology in the translation of fiction. However, as with stylistics in general (see Boase-Beier 2011; Lin 2013), the role of functional stylistics in literary translation again remains underexplored. Functional stylistics has also played an important role in the fast developing field of multimodal stylistics. Nørgaard (e.g. 2010, 2011), for instance, demonstrates how extensions of the SFL framework by scholars such as Kress and Van Leeuwen (e.g. 2006) into frameworks for non-linguistic modes can provide useful ‘toolkits’ to explore how visual elements (including images on book covers, illustrations, typography and layout) interact with the linguistic text in the creation of effects and meanings. Nevertheless, again there continues to be much room for drawing further on already much developed work in SFL-influenced social semiotics in the exploration of the multi-modal aspects of verbal art.

6 Conclusion As a key approach to stylistics, functional stylistics has produced a rich tradition of evolving work and continues to be important in the overall development 73

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

of the field. This chapter has provided an overview of some of the work that has been done, with which readers may wish to engage. For the future, much more engagement is possible with the rich work in stylistics by SFL scholars such as Hasan and Butt, who do not work exclusively in the field, and with the development of applications in areas such as literary pedagogy, literary translation and multi-modality. Further, as theoretical developments in SFL itself take place, there is potential for functional stylisticians who keep abreast of these to develop fruitful further sub-approaches. Peng (2008), for instance, has made initial proposals for an ‘appraisal stylistics’, based on the relatively recent development of appraisal theory in SFL. How these and older functional approaches can be used fruitfully in tandem with other approaches and theoretical models can also be further explored. Although the field of stylistics today has taken on a much more cognitive emphasis, fundamental engagement with texts and their role in meaning-making needs to remain, and for this, functional stylistics in all its evolving forms remains important.

References Birch, D. and O’ Toole, L. M., eds (1988), Functions of Style, London: Pinter. Bloor, T. and Bloor, M. (2004), The Functional Analysis of English: A Hallidayan Approach, London: Arnold. Boase-Beier, J. (2011), ‘Stylistics and translation’, in K. Malmkjær and J. Windle (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies, 71–82, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Burton, D. G. (1982), ‘Through glass darkly: Through dark glasses’, in R. Carter and D. Burton (eds), Literary Text and Language Study, 195–214, London: Edward Arnold. Butt, D. G. (1988a), ‘Ideational meaning and the existential fabric of a poem’, in R. Fawcett and D. Young (eds), New Developments in Systemic Functional Linguistics Vol. 2. Theory and Application, 174–218, London, New York: Pinter. Butt, D. G. (1988b), ‘Randomness, order and the latent patterning of text’, in D. Birch and L. M. O’ Toole (eds), Functions of Style, 74–97, London: Pinter. Butt, D. G. (2007), ‘Thought experiments in verbal art: Examples from Modernism’, in D. R. Miller and M. Turci (eds), Language and Verbal Art Revisited: Linguistic Approaches to the Study of Literature, 68–96, London: Equinox. Butt, D. G. (2009), ‘Technique and empire in the poetry of Ee Tiang Hong’, World Englishes, 28 (3): 365–93. Butt, D. G. and Lukin, A. (2009), ‘Stylistic analysis: Construing aesthetic organisation’, in M. A. K. Halliday and J. J. Webster (eds), Continuum Companion to Systemic Functional Linguistics, 199–224, London: Continuum International Publishing. Butt, D., Fahey, R., Feez, S., Spinks, S. and Yallop, C. (1995), Using Functional Grammar: An Explorer’s Guide, 1st edn, Sydney: National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research. Carter, R., ed. (1982), Language and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Stylistics, London: Allen and Unwin.

74

Functional Stylistics Carter, R. (1982), ‘Style and interpretation in Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain”’, in R.  Carter  (ed.), Language and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Stylistics, 65–80, London: Allen and Unwin. Carter, R. and Stockwell, P., eds (2008), The Language and Literature Reader, London and New York: Routledge. Chloupek, J. and Nekvapil, J., eds (1993), Studies in Functional Stylistics, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Eggins, S. (2004), An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics, 2nd edn, New York: Continuum. Fish, S. (1973), ‘What is stylistics and why are they saying such terrible things about it?’, in S. Chatman (ed.), Approaches to Poetics, 109–52, London and New York: Columbia University Press. [Also reproduced in D. Freeman (1981), Essays in Stylistics, 53–78, London: Methuen.] Goatly, A. (2008), Explorations in Stylistics, London and Oakville: Equinox. Halliday, M. A. K. (1964), ‘The linguistic study of literary texts’, reprinted in M. A. K. Halliday (2002), Collected Works, vol. 2 (‘Linguistic Studies of Text and Discourse’), 5–22, London and New York: Continuum. Halliday, M. A. K. (1971), ‘Linguistic function and literary style: An inquiry into the language of William Golding’s The Inheritors’, in S. Chatman (ed.), Literary Style: A Symposium, 330–68, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Halliday, M. A. K. (1978), Language as a Social Semiotic, London: Edward Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K. (1982), ‘The de-automatization of grammar: From Priestley’s An Inspector Calls’, in J. M. Anderson (ed.), Language Form and Linguistic Variation: Papers Dedicated to Angus McIntosh, 129–59, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Halliday, M. A. K. (1988), ‘Poetry as scientific discourse: The nuclear sections of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”’, in D. Birch and L. M. O’ Toole (eds). Reprinted in M.  A.  K.  Halliday (2002), Collected Works, vol. 2 (‘Linguistic Studies of Text and Discourse’), 149–67, London and New York: Continuum. Halliday, M. A. K. (1994), An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd edn, London: Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K. (2004), An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 3rd edn, rev. C. Matthiessen, London: Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K. and Hasan, R. (1976), Cohesion in English, London and New York: Longman. Hasan, R. (1975), ‘The place of stylistics in verbal art’, in H. Ringbom (ed.), Style and Text: Studies Presented to Nils Erik Enkvist, 49–62, Stockholm: Skriptor. Hasan, R. (1985), Linguistics, Language and Verbal Art, Victoria: Deakin University Press. Hasan, R. (1988), ‘The analysis of one poem: Theoretical issues in practice’, in D. Birch and L. M. O’ Toole (eds), Functions of Style, 52–64, London: Pinter. Hasan, R. (1996), ‘On teaching literature across cultural distances’, in J. E. James (ed.), The Language-Culture Connection, Anthology Series 37, 34–63, Singapore: SEAMEO Regional Language Centre. Hasan, R. (2007), ‘Private pleasure, public discourse: Reflections on engaging with literature’, in D. R. Miller and M. Turci (eds), Language and Verbal Art Revisited: Linguistic Approaches to the Study of Literature, 13–40, London: Equinox. Ji, Y. and Shen, D. (2004), ‘Transitivity and mental transformation: Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook’, Language and Literature, 13 (4): 335–48. Kennedy, C. (1982), ‘Systemic grammar and its use in literary analysis’, in R. Carter (ed.), Language and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Stylistics, 83–99, London: Allen and Unwin. Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. (2006), The Grammar of Visual Design, 2nd edn, London: Routledge.

75

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Leech, G. N. and Short, M. H. (1981), Style in Fiction, London and New York: Longman. Lin, B. (2006), ‘Exploring the literary text through grammar and the (re-)integration of literature and language teaching’, in A. Paran (ed.), Literature in Language Teaching, 101–16, Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. Lin, B. (2007), ‘Old houses, linguistics and literature in schools: What stylistics can offer’, Linguistics and the Human Sciences, 3 (2): 191–219. Lin, B. (2013), ‘Stylistics in translation’, in P. Stockwell and S. Whitely (eds), Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, 575–91, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lukin, A. and Pagano, A. (2012), ‘Context and double articulation in the translation of verbal art’, in J. Knox (ed.), To Boldly Proceed, 39th International Systemic Functional Linguistics Congress, 123–8, Sydney: University of Technology. Lukin, A. and Webster, J. (2005), ‘SFL and the study of literature’, in J. Webster, R. Hasan and C. Matthiessen (eds), Continuing Discourse on Language: A Functional Perspective, vol. 1, 413–56, London: Equinox. Melrose, R. (2006), ‘Sites and parasites of meaning: Browning’s “My Last Duchess”’, Language and Literature, 15 (2): 123–40. Miller, D. R. and Turci, M., eds (2007), Language and Verbal Art Revisited: Linguistic Approaches to the Study of Literature, London: Equinox. Mukařovský, J. (1964), ‘Standard language and poetic language’, in P. L. Garvin (ed.), A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style, 17–30, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Munday, J. (2008), Style and Ideology in Translation, London: Routledge. Nørgaard, N. (2003), Systemic Functional Linguistics and Literary Analysis: A Hallidayan Approach to Joyce – A Joycean Approach to Halliday, Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark. Nørgaard, N. (2007), ‘Disordered collarettes and uncovered tables: Negative polarity as a stylistic device in Joyce’s “Two Gallants”’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 36: 35–52. Nørgaard, N. (2010), ‘Multimodality: Extending the stylistic tool kit’, in D. McIntyre and B. Busse (eds), Language and Style, 433–48, Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nørgaard, N. (2011), ‘Teaching multimodal stylistics’, in L. Jeffries and D. McIntyre (eds), Teaching Stylistics, 221–38, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nørgaard, N., Busse, B. and Montoro, R. (2010), Key Terms in Stylistics, London: Continuum. O’Halloran, K. (2007), ‘The subconscious in James Joyce’s “Eveline”: A corpus-stylistic analysis that chews on the “Fish hook”’, Language and Literature, 16 (3): 227–44. O’ Toole, L. M. (1988), ‘Henry Reed and what follows the “Naming of Parts”’, in D. Birch and L. M. O’ Toole (eds), Functions of Style, 12–30, London: Pinter. Peng, X. (2008), ‘Evaluative meanings in literary steps: The first step towards Appraisal Stylistics’, in N. Nørgaard (ed.), Systemic Functional Linguistics in Use: Odense Working Papers in Language and Communication, vol. 29, 665–84, Odense: University of Southern Denmark. Shen, D. (2007), ‘Internal contrast and double decoding: Transitivity in Hughes’s “On the Road”’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 36 (1): 53–70. Simpson, P. (1993), Language, Ideology and Point of View, London: Routledge. Simpson, P. (2004), Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students, London: Routledge. Thompson, G. (2004), Introducing Functional Grammar, 2nd edn, London: Arnold. Toolan, M. (1998), Language in Literature, London: Arnold. Turci, M. (2007), ‘The meaning of “dark” in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, in D. R. Miller and M. Turci (eds), Language and Verbal Art Revisited: Linguistic Approaches to the Study of Literature, 97–114, London: Equinox.

76

Functional Stylistics Wales, K. (2012), ‘A celebration of style: Retrospect and prospect’, Language and Literature, 21 (1): 9–11. Wheatly, J. (1995), ‘An examination of modality in the opening chapter of Silas Marner’, in J. Payne (ed.), Linguistic Approaches to Literature: Papers in Literary Stylistics, England: The University Printers, University of Birmingham.

77

5

Pragmatics and Stylistics Siobhan Chapman, University of Liverpool

Chapter Overview Introduction 78 Pragmatic Approaches to Stylistics 79 Neo-Gricean Pragmatics 81 Reading a Passage from Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September 84 Conclusions 89

1 Introduction This chapter will consider the potential of pragmatic theory as a tool for the stylistic analysis of literary texts. Present-day pragmatics is a wide field, encompassing many different theories of meaning in context, and in order to offer an illustrative example of how pragmatics might function in stylistic analysis, this chapter will focus on the application of one type of pragmatic theory to the analysis of one short extract from a literary text: the application of some recent developments in what has become known as ‘neo-Gricean pragmatics’ to one paragraph from Elizabeth Bowen’s 1929 novel The Last September. The chapter begins with a brief overview of recent and current pragmatic theories and of how these have been used in stylistics. It then focuses on neoGricean pragmatics, and in particular on the two-principled system developed by Laurence Horn and others that explains implicated meaning in relation to Q- and R-implicatures. Section 4 is concerned with The Last September, considering first some of the claims made by the novel’s literary critics about its main themes and stylistic features, and secondly how neo-Gricean pragmatics might

78

Pragmatics and Stylistics

be used to endorse and explain these claims. This section will focus on examples drawn from a single paragraph, but where necessary the analysis will be supported with examples from other parts of the novel. Indeed, one of the claims of recent neo-Gricean pragmatics is that successful pragmatic analysis must take account of the wider context in which a particular example occurs. This claim has implications for how pragmatic analysis might be applied to literary texts, such texts potentially establishing a specific context for their own interpretation. The chapter concludes with a consideration of some of the implications of the analysis, firstly for a reading of Bowen’s novel, and then more generally for the potential relationship between pragmatic theory and stylistic analysis.

2  Pragmatic Approaches to Stylistics Pragmatics is concerned with the various relationships between language and the contexts in which it is used, and it ranges from detailed theoretical treatments of the differences between literal and intended meaning to broader empirical studies of language use in various social situations. The origins of theoretical pragmatics can be traced to two influential approaches to meaning developed in analytic philosophy during the mid-twentieth century: speech-act theory, initiated by J. L. Austin and developed in more detail by John Searle (Austin 1962; Searle 1969); and the theory of conversational implicature, which originated in the work of H. Paul Grice (Grice 1975). Speech-act theory highlights the distinction between the linguistic form of an utterance and the uses to which it might be put in context, and aims at a classification of the different possible types of acts in terms of their intended functions. The theory of conversational implicature focuses on the distinction between linguistic and speaker meaning or between ‘what is said’ and ‘what is implicated’ on any particular occasion, and aims to describe specific and motivated principles of language use that account for the differences between the two. Monika Fludernik has suggested that the emergence of pragmatics as a field of language study in its own right made the application of serious linguistic analysis to literary texts possible through its emphasis on contextual properties of language use: ‘The recent paradigm shift within linguistics towards a pragmatic model of language use ... has made it possible to bridge the divide between the literary and the linguistic approaches to language’ (Fludernik 1996: 585). Speech-act theory and the theory of conversational implicature have both been successfully applied to the stylistic analysis of literary texts, but the latter, which has spawned more recent, post-Gricean approaches such as relevance theory, neo-Gricean pragmatics and politeness theory, has proved the more productive. 79

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Searle applied his own framework to textual analysis in an article from the early 1970s, in which he argued that, while literature is ‘a set of attitudes we take towards a stretch of discourse’ and is therefore entirely subjective, fiction can be characterized by pretence on the part of the author, in particular, the pretence that he or she is making assertions (Searle 1979: 59 and 65). Stylistic analysis using the framework of speech-act theory continued (e.g. Miller 2001) and is still proving productive; for instance, Watson (2012) is an examination of the lyrics of early female blues singers in relation to Searle’s categories of assertives, directives and commissives. Grice himself had little if anything to say about literature, but linguists with an interest in literary texts were quick to identify the potential in his account of the series of maxims that determine cooperative communication and that bridge the gap between ‘what is said’ and ‘what is implicated’. Van Dijk, for instance, suggested that the maxims ‘partly concern the structure of the utterance itself, and might therefore be called “stylistic”’ (Van Dijk 1976: 44). Persuasive Gricean analyses were subsequently produced of, for instance, Jane Austen’s use of irony (Pratt 1977), the dialogue in Shakespeare’s plays (Gilbert 1995; Culpeper et al. 1998; Cooper 1998; Blake 2002) and the language of Finnegans Wake (Herman 1994). More recently, Massimiliano Morini has used Gricean analysis in a more extended discussion of dialogue in Jane Austen’s novels, focusing in particular on a single scene from Emma (Morini 2009). Two of the more recent developments in pragmatics that draw, at least in part, on Gricean insights have also been applied productively to literary texts, namely relevance theory and politeness theory. Sperber and Wilson identified relevance as the single motivating force driving human communication and cognition. They began the discussion of the relationship between relevance theory and literary texts when they discussed the ‘poetic effect’, particularly in relation to some metaphorical uses of language, as ‘the peculiar effect of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures’ (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 222). Relevance theory subsequently became a fruitful framework within stylistics, with applications for instance to poetry (MacMahon 1996; Pilkington 2000), to literary translation (BoaseBeier 2004), to thought representation (Blakemore 2009) and to film dialogue (Desilla 2012). Politeness theory considers not just the mechanisms of non-literal or indirect meaning, but also the social and interpersonal factors that explain its occurrence. It has proved particularly illuminating in the analysis of play and film scripts. Simpson (1989) analyses the relationship between the two central characters in Ionesco’s play The Lesson in relation to Brown and Levinson’s account of politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987). Culpeper (1998) and Blake (2002) both comment on how changes in strategies of politeness or impoliteness might reflect on character development and on dramatic tension in the Hollywood 80

Pragmatics and Stylistics

film The Scent of a Woman and in Shakespeare’s plays, respectively. Paternoster (2012) looks at impoliteness and over-politeness in the dialogue of crime novels. Politeness theory has also been used to investigate the establishment and maintenance of a relationship between narrator and reader in poetry and in novels. Sell (1985), for instance, argues that ‘if we feel that Dickens can be cheeky, or George Eliot importunate, or Pope politely impolite, it would be worth trying to pin these impressions down’, and argues that politeness theory is a valuable tool for doing so. Neo-Gricean pragmatics, which will be discussed in the next section, is an important branch of post-Gricean pragmatic theory, but one that has received comparatively little attention from those working in stylistics. There has been, however, some recent increase in interest in neo-Gricean pragmatics among stylisticians. It has been mentioned in some articles on stylistics that offer an overview of recent trends in pragmatics or subsequent developments of Grice’s insights (see, for instance, Papafragou 1996; Hidalgo Downing 2002; Nahajec 2009), and there have been a few recent attempts to use it as a tool for stylistic analysis in its own right (e.g. Israel 2011; Chapman 2012). The valuable insight that pragmatic theory offers into the interpretation of the interpersonal and non-literal aspects of literary texts is reflected in a growing body of publications. Clark (2009) offers an in-depth discussion of the importance of considering inferential processing when analysing literary texts. He uses a relevance theoretic framework but argues that questions concerning the importance of inferencing in analysing literary texts are ‘independent of any particular semantic or pragmatic framework’ (Clark 2009: 173). Chapman and Clark (2014) brings together analyses using a range of different frameworks that share a commitment to the value of pragmatics to stylistic analysis. A recent special issue of the Journal of Literary Semantics dedicated to ‘inference and implicature in literary interpretation’ includes articles taking a number of different pragmatic approaches to a variety of literary genres and texts, all of which show evidence of a growing emphasis on the importance of considering the literary text as a whole, together with its broader context, in accounting for pragmatic interpretation (Caink 2012; Chapman 2012; Clark 2012; Fabb 2012; Furlong 2012).

3  Neo-Gricean Pragmatics Grice (1975) developed a complex structure of pragmatic principles to explain how ‘what is said’ on any particular occasion can be used as a basis to establish ‘what was implicated’. The operation of his ‘cooperative principle’ was explained using nine different maxims of conversational behaviour, which were arranged into four different categories: quantity, quality, relation and 81

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

manner. Various different theories are subsumed under the label ‘neo-Gricean pragmatics’, but they share a commitment to retaining some version of the distinction between ‘what is said’ and ‘what is implicated’ and also to reducing the pragmatic mechanism required to bridge between them. For instance, Levinson (2000) proposes a system of three pragmatic principles – the I-principle, the Q-principle and the M-principle – concerned respectively with the informativeness and the quantity of the information provided by a speaker, and the manner in which it is presented. The system proposed by Horn (1989, 2004, 2006, 2007) reduces the pragmatic mechanism yet further to two principles, the R-principle and the Q-principle. Horn argues that ‘setting Quality aside as unreducible, we can collapse the remaining maxims and submaxims into two fundamental principles’ (Horn 2004: 13). That is, he claims that his R- and Q-principles together are able to cover the same ground as Grice’s rather unwieldy and perhaps ad hoc system, while being more economical and more clearly motivated. Horn’s two principles, which are concerned in turn with quantity and with relation of information, place potentially conflicting demands on a speaker and in effect ensure that a balance of the appropriate amount of information is conveyed in any utterance. The R-principle requires the speaker to ‘make your contribution necessary’ or to ‘say no more than you must’. It licenses the hearer to recover more precise or more informative meanings than what the speaker has literally said, on the understanding that she is giving the smallest possible amount of information, and therefore that everything she says is significant because it is necessary. For Horn, the operation of the R-principle explains how hearers interpret what they hear so that it is in line with what is normal or stereotypical. In the following example, (1) will generally be taken to implicate (2); the hearer assumes that the speaker of (1) has not added precise information about how John stopped the car because he used the usual method rather than, say, crashing it into a wall. 1. John stopped the car. 2. John stopped the car by applying the brakes. The R-principle also explains cases where a speaker leaves a hearer to fill in extra information, for instance, for reasons of politeness. The hearer of (3) will generally understand it as conveying the implicature in (4). 3. The television is on rather loud. 4. I would like you to turn the television down. Horn’s Q-principle requires speakers to ‘make your contribution sufficient’, or ‘say as much as you can’. Implicatures that follow from the operation of the Q-principle are essentially negative in nature; the Q-principle allows hearers 82

Pragmatics and Stylistics

to assume that if there was something more informative that the speaker might have said but has not, that is because the speaker was not in a position truthfully to make the informationally stronger claim. In other words, it introduces the implicature that the stronger statement is not applicable. So (5) generally implicates (6): 5. This beer is drinkable. 6. This beer is not delicious. The Q-principle triggers implicatures of the negation of stronger alternatives to what was said on any particular occasion. This led Horn to develop his account of scalar implicatures. He claimed that natural languages contain scales of semantic strength, or ‘Q-scales’, in which semantically related lexical items are arranged in order of descending strength, or intensity. Such scales explain our default pragmatic interpretation of many of the expressions that we encounter in our everyday interactions. They cover the full range of grammatical classes, including adjectives (for instance, the scale ), verbs (), adverbs () and quantifiers (). In the absence of indicators to the contrary, the use of ‘often’ will implicate ‘not always’, the use of ‘some’ will implicate ‘not all’ and so on. The nature, and indeed the feasibility, of scalar implicatures have been central topics of recent debate among pragmatic theorists. Those who have retained the notion of scalar implicatures have increasingly understood them as less rigidly fixed, more variable and, crucially, more context dependent than Horn originally envisaged them to be (see, for instance, Sauerland 2004; Israel 2011; Cummins, Sauerland and Solt 2012). One recent account of implicature that belongs to the broadly neo-Gricean tradition but that questions the determinate nature and central status of scalar implicatures is Guerts’s book-length treatment of quantity implicatures (Geurts 2010). Guerts argues that implicatures based on expectations of the quantity of information, or examples in which ‘speakers convey information not only by what they say, but also by what they don’t say’ (Geurts 2010: 1), are of central importance to any pragmatic account of interpretation, but that their nature and significance have been distorted by recent emphasis on scalars. In particular the focus on the implicatures attached to the use of individual words, a necessary consequence of positing scales of semantic strength, obscures the prevalence and variety of quantity implicatures. Geurts proposes the following example to illustrate his claim that pragmatic interpretation can often be based on expectations of quantity without being straightforwardly scalar: 7. X: Has A’s book come out? Y: He has corrected the proofs. 83

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

X is likely to interpret Y’s utterance as implicating the denial of the potential and more informative alternative answer ‘yes’, although there is no single word in Y’s utterance that triggers this interpretation, and no scale is involved. Geurts allows that in some cases individual words or phrases can stand in a relationship to other words and phrases, such that their use will implicate the denial of the applicability of these alternatives. But he distances himself from the notion of fixed or default scales, preferring to describe words and phrases as being arranged in unordered ‘sets’, and emphasising the potential for these sets to be dependent on and determined by context. For instance, in example (8), C’s response is likely to implicate that she does not know, or does not care, precisely what item of furniture Bonnie has gone to buy, although it would not be possible to understand ‘piece of furniture’ as being in a scalar relationship with items such as ‘chair’, ‘table’, ‘bed’ etc. 8. A: Where is Bonnie? C: She went out to buy a piece of furniture. Geurts suggests that the implicature of not knowing or not caring arises because ‘there are general expectations to the effect that, when introducing a new discourse entity, speakers should employ expressions of at least a minimum level of specificity’ (Geurts 2010: 46). When quantity implicatures can be traced to the use of individual words or phrases, then, they are based on a contrast between what a speaker has said and available alternatives that she might have said but has not. It is expectations specific to the context of the utterance, rather than any pre-existing semantic scales, that determine in each case what counts as an available alternative. These expectations will be based on factors such as what other alternative expressions are used in the general context of the utterance. The next section will consider how pragmatic analysis in a neo-Gricean framework in general, and in Geurts’s account of the nature of quantity implicatures in particular, might contribute to the reading of an extract from a literary text.

4  Reading a Passage from Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September Elizabeth Bowen’s 1929 novel The Last September presents an interesting subject for pragmatic analysis because much of what is communicated in the novel, particularly much of what is communicated in dialogue between characters, is conveyed indirectly or non-literally. The characters’ avoidance of direct language and literal expression can be explained in relation to the two main issues in the novel: the nature and the implications of the historical context in which it is set, and the relationships between its central characters. Both are marked by 84

Pragmatics and Stylistics

change, instability and finality, but these properties are habitually ignored or avoided by the characters themselves. Many of the novel’s literary critics have pinpointed this as an identifying feature of the text. Glendinning describes the central themes as being ‘implicit’ in the novel (Glendinning 1998: 1). Corcoran identifies the communication in the novel as being characterized by ‘edgy insinuation’ (Corcoran 2004: 45). Esty categorizes the language of the novel as ‘indirect’ (Esty 2007: 258) and Brown as ‘language that evades’ (Brown 2012: 6). The novel is set in rural Ireland in September 1920, during what Bowen described as ‘the Troubled Times’ (Bowen 1952: 125). This was the period of instability and increasing violence that immediately preceded the formation in 1922 of the Irish Free State. It is set in and around Danielstown, a ‘Big House’ owned by Sir Richard and Lady Myra Naylor, members of the Anglo-Irish protestant ascendancy, who are joined for an extended house visit by their old friends Hugo and Francie Montmorency. The Naylors’ privileged position is clearly threatened by the escalating violence and will eventually be ended along with British rule in Ireland. Bowen herself made this clear when she later commented that she wanted readers of her novel to understand the message that ‘all this … is done with and over’ (Bowen 1952: 124). Later critics have described it as ‘a novel of transition’ from the colonial to the postcolonial (Brown 2012: 20) or as one centrally concerned with the ‘threat to self-proclaimed civilized order’ (Lassner and Derdiger 2009: 197). However, the Naylors themselves, and their Anglo-Irish circle, avoid direct discussion of ‘The Troubled Times’ and the implications of that situation. It is not that they explicitly deny the existence of the violence going on around them, but rather that they downplay its significance by choosing not to refer to it or by using the indirect and insinuating language noted by the novel’s critics. The characters in the novel take the same communicative approach to the secondary theme of their emotional involvements and potential relationships, a theme that the novel’s critics have noted is closely connected to that of political change. McElhattan Williams argues that Bowen uses the relationships between her central characters ‘to reinforce physically what she is depicting thematically’ (McElhattan Williams 1995: 231). Wessels describes her as ‘establishing a close conjunction between the politico-historical and the personal, of rendering the wider context in terms of the crisis of the individual’ (Wessels 1995: 89). Various potential relationships are shown, in parallel to the status of the AngloIrish, to be unviable and to have no future. The passage to be analysed here is the first paragraph of Chapter 10. It concerns the immediate aftermath of the arrival for a visit of Marda, a young woman who visited Danielstown as a child but who now lives in England, and who is to have a profound effect on the emotional relationships and tensions within the Naylors’ circle. Marda tends to be accident-prone and forgetful, traits that will play a significant role later in the novel, and she has arrived without one of her 85

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

suitcases, which she has apparently left on the train. Much of this paragraph is in free indirect speech, a form of speech reporting that gives ‘some of the apparent flavour’ of the characters’ original speech (Short 1996: 308). Analysing this extract can offer a snapshot of how the characters communicate with each other and, by extension, of how the narrator communicates information about the characters to the reader. For a fuller discussion of the novel as a whole in relation to neo-Gricean pragmatics see Chapman (2014). One did not lightly telephone. There was a telephone six miles away, at Ballyhinch, but its use made excessive demands upon the sympathy and attention of the post-mistress. Marda could not understand – as Sir Richard said, one would think she had come from America. From all their angles she seemed to them very modern. They sat on the steps after breakfast, waiting for the post to come, discussing what they should do. There was something agonising to Sir Richard in the thought of the suitcase. Marda said, it would not have mattered at all but that her tennis shoes seemed to be in it. It was quite a relief when the postman settled the matter by saying there had been another raid last night in the Brittas direction and that all the wires were down again. It had been a great raid, the postman said; if the boys had not fled it would have been almost a battle. What times, said Francie, looking at Marda doubtfully, they did live in! But other times, said Marda, other disadvantages. Nobody hurt, they hoped? Well, said the postman, the Black and Tans had been fired on, but why would they not be, they themselves firing to the left and right continually? It seems two of them ones had pitched from the lorry the way you would think they’d be killed and the boys had bolted, leaving the two lying. (Bowen 1929: 78) First, we will consider two examples of how the reader may form significant assumptions about characters because of the implicatures conveyed by their reported speech, rather than by what they literally say. These examples will represent, respectively, an instance of the operation of the R-principle and one of the Q-principle. Sir Richard Naylor’s response to Marda’s incomprehension about the reluctance at Danielstown to use the Ballyhinch telephone is striking: ‘Marda could not understand – as Sir Richard said, one would think she had come from America.’ Sir Richard’s original utterance needs to be filled out by his hearers to make it an informative comment on Marda. The R-principle licences the hearer to recover more informative meanings than what was literally said, on the understanding that the speaker has said no more than is necessary to contribute to the conversation, and therefore that everything said is significant. Sir Richard’s hearers are licensed by the R-principle to understand more than he has explicitly stated: for instance, that modern ideas about communication are more closely associated with America than with Ireland or Britain, and also 86

Pragmatics and Stylistics

that they are in some way inappropriate in the present context. Sir Richard’s hearers, and by extension the readers of the novel, understand from this some important aspects of his character, such as his antipathy to change and his distrust of what he perceives to be new or modern ways of thinking. We learn more about Marda from the implicatures of her comment about her lost suitcase than we do from what she literally says: ‘Marda said, it would not have mattered at all but that her tennis shoes seemed to be in it.’ Marda’s disorganized, vague, careless attitude and her resultant tendency to accidents and misfortunes have a strong effect on those around her and will prove significant in the course of the novel. The Q-implicature associated with Marda’s reported utterance can best be understood by comparing it to a potential and more informative alternative utterance. Marda apparently said ‘My tennis shoes seem to be in it’, not ‘My tennis shoes are in it’. The inclusion of the perception verb ‘seem’ conveys a weaker level of commitment on Marda’s part to the truth of the proposition about the tennis shoes and therefore makes her statement less informative than it might have been. According to accounts of quantity implicatures such as that developed by Guerts, a speaker who selects a less over a more informative potential statement is in general taken as implicating that she does not have sufficient knowledge or confidence that the alternative applies (Geurts 2010: 31). Marda gives the impression to her hearers, and to the readers of the novel, that she is not in a position to use the more informative alternative because she does not know exactly where her own tennis shoes are. The paragraph under discussion reports on a conversation that is directly concerned with the contemporary violence and instability. However, here, as elsewhere in the novel, much of what is communicated about the characters’ attitudes to the fighting is communicated implicitly. It is possible to explain this in relation to a series of Q-implicatures, dependent on what, following Geurts, might be described as a set of alternatives established in the context of the novel itself. Francie Montmorency’s response to the postman’s news is rather vague: ‘What times, said Francie, looking at Marda doubtfully, they did live in!’ The full significance of this reported speech can be understood in relation to a contextual set of alternative terms for referring to the current state of hostility and violence. That is, Francie’s use of the term ‘times’ has implicit significance because of its relationship to a system of naming within the novel, the cumulative effect of which is to downplay the nature of the current violence and the severity of the threat it poses. Repeatedly throughout the novel, characters use vague or general vocabulary to refer to the current situation, terms that, in Geurts’s terminology, have a low level of specificity. On arrival at Danielstown, Francie asks her husband, Hugo: ‘What does Richard think of the situation?’ (18). Making conversation on the first evening of their visit, Hugo asks Myra’s nephew Laurence: ‘And what do you think of things?’ (24). The alternative and much more specific term ‘war’ is offered in the novel, but 87

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

itself becomes a topic of controversy. In the following extract, the army officer Gerald is in conversation at a tennis party with the Miss Hartigans, a group of unmarried sisters from a nearby house: “It was splendid of you to forget I was English. Well, we shall all be leaving you soon, I dare say; all we jolly old army of occupation.” “Oh, one wouldn’t like to call you that,” said Miss Hartigan, deprecatingly. “ – as soon as we’ve lost this jolly old war.” “Oh, but one wouldn’t call it a war.” “If anyone would, we could clean these beggars out in a week.” “We think it would be a great pity to have a war,” said the Hartigans firmly. “There’s been enough unpleasantness already, hasn’t there? … And it would be a shame for you all to go,” added Doreen warmly, but not too warmly because they were all men. (37–8) It is possible to posit a contextualized set in which ‘war’ occurs as an alternative to terms such as ‘the situation’, ‘things’, ‘unpleasantness’ and Francie’s ‘times’. This set is established by usage in the context of the novel itself, such that the use of a less specific item implicates that the more specific ‘war’ is in some way inapplicable or inappropriate. It is striking that in using the term ‘times’ Francie looks at the relative newcomer Marda ‘doubtfully’; she is perhaps not certain whether Marda is yet familiar with the context in which conversation is interpreted at Danielstown. A final example of implicated meaning can be found in the postman’s summary of the fighting: ‘Well, said the postman, the Black and Tans had been fired on, but why would they not be, they themselves firing to the left and right continually?’ The postman is implicating something about his attitudes to the participants in the fighting, and this can be explained in terms of the R-principle. In particular, his description of the Black and Tans as firing ‘to the left and right’ is not obviously significant or informative. By including this extra information, the postman R-implicates that it is necessary and that by including it he is saying no more than he must. That is, he implicates that there was something inappropriate about the degree of violence employed by the British troops. Characters in The Last September of course have different motivations for communicating by implicature rather than explicitly. The postman is not a member of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, but he is speaking to them, and chooses his words carefully so as not to express too explicitly sympathy for the insurgents who might be seen as hostile to his immediate audience and were, in any case, engaged in illegal activity. Those characters that do belong to the Anglo-Irish ascendancy are directly threatened by the current violence, but at the same time they have an ambivalent attitude towards it because of their loyalty to Britain on the one hand and their own Irishness on the other. Bowen herself described 88

Pragmatics and Stylistics

this situation as ‘more nearly heart-breaking than they cared to show’ (Bowen 1952: 125). As a result, they display in this paragraph and throughout the novel a reluctance to use explicit vocabulary to describe the current situation, choosing alternative forms of expression that downplay its severity.

5 Conclusions Pragmatics has a distinctive role to play in the stylistic analysis of texts because of its focus on indirect meaning, or on differences between what is literally said and what is intended. This chapter has used some recent developments in pragmatic theory in the neo-Gricean tradition, a branch of pragmatics that has not to date attracted much attention from stylisticians, to analyse a short passage from Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September. The novel’s literary critics have noticed the prevalence of implicit or indirect communication between the characters and have linked this to the general themes of change, uncertainty and transition. What pragmatics can add to these observations is the focused analysis of specific examples, to show how implicit meaning is generated in relation to principles that have been posited to explain language use. Neo-Gricean pragmatics can also be used to demonstrate the context dependency of interpretation. A novel can create a specific context for its own interpretation, for instance by establishing sets of alternatives that make the choice of one term from that set potentially significant with respect to the alternative terms that were not chosen. The systematic accounts of non-literal meaning offered by present-day pragmatic theory, including neo-Gricean pragmatics, are proving a valuable source of insight into literary analysis and interpretation.

References Austin, J. L. (1962), How to do Things with Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blake, N. (2002), A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Blakemore, D. (2009), ‘Parentheticals and point of view in free indirect style’, Language and Literature, 18: 129–53. Boase-Beier, J. (2004), ‘Knowing and not knowing: Style, intention and the translation of a Holocaust poem’, Language and Literature, 14: 397–408. Bowen, E. (1929), The Last September, London: Constable & Co. Ltd. [Vintage, 1998]. Bowen, E. (1952), ‘Preface to the second U.S. edition of The Last September’, in H. Lee (ed.) (1986), The Mulberry Tree, 122–6, London: Virago. Brown, M. (2012), ‘Strange associations: Elizabeth Bowen and the language of exclusion’, Irish Studies Review, 20: 3–24. Brown, P. and Levinson, S. (1987), Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caink, A. (2012), ‘Experiencing meanings in Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 41: 121–38.

89

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Chapman, S. (2012), ‘Towards a neo-Gricean stylistics: Implicature in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 41: 139–53. Chapman, S. (2014), ‘“Oh, do let’s talk about something else – ”: What is not said and what is implicated in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September’, in S. Chapman and B. Clark (eds), Pragmatics and Literary Stylistics, 36–54, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chapman, S. and Clark, B., eds (2014), Pragmatics and Literary Stylistics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Clark, B. (2009), ‘Salient inferences: Pragmatics and The Inheritors’, Language and Literature, 18: 173–212. Clark, B. (2012), ‘Beginning with “one more thing”: Pragmatics and editorial intervention in the work of Raymond Carver’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 41: 155–73. Cooper, M. (1998), ‘Implicature, convention and The Taming of the Shrew’, in J. Culpeper, M. Short and P.  Verdonk (eds), Exploring the Language of Drama, 54–66, London: Routledge. Corcoran, N. (2004), Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Culpeper, J. (1998), ‘(Im)politeness in dramatic dialogue’, in J. Culpeper, M. Short and P. Verdonk (eds), Exploring the Language of Drama, 83–95, London: Routledge. Culpeper, J., Short, M. and Verdonk, P., eds (1998), Exploring the Language of Drama, London: Routledge. Cummins, C., Sauerland, U. and Solt, S. (2012), ‘Granularity and scalar implicature in numerical expressions’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 35: 135–69. Desilla, L. (2012), ‘Implicatures in film: Construal and functions in Bridget Jones romantic comedies’, Journal of Pragmatics, 44: 30–53. Esty, J. (2007), ‘Virgins of empire: The Last September and the antidevelopmental plot’, Modern Fiction Studies, 53: 257–75. Fabb, N. (2012), ‘Poetic form as meaning in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 41: 105–19. Fludernik, M. (1996), ‘Linguistics and literature: Prospects and horizons in the study of prose’, Journal of Pragmatics, 26: 583–611. Furlong, A. (2012), ‘“It’s not quite what I had in mind”: Adaptation, faithfulness, and interpretation’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 41: 175–91. Gilbert, A. (1995), ‘Shakespearean self-talk, the Gricean maxims and the unconscious’, English Studies, 76: 221–37. Grice, P. (1975), ‘Logic and conversation’, in P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds), Syntax and Semantics, volume 3, New York: Academic Press. Reprinted in P. Grice (1989), Studies in the Way of Words, 22–40, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Geurts, B. (2010), Quantity Implicatures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Glendinning, V. (1998), ‘Introduction’, in E. Bowen, The Last September, 1–6, London: Vintage. Herman, D. (1994), ‘The Mutt and Jute dialogue in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: Some Gricean perspectives’, Style, 86: 505–13. Hidalgo Downing, L. (2002), ‘Creating things that are not: The role of negation in the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 31: 113–32. Horn, L. (1989), A Natural History of Negation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Horn, L. (2004), ‘Implicature’, in L. Horn and G. Ward (eds), The Handbook of Pragmatics, 3–28, Oxford: Blackwell. Horn, L. (2006), ‘The border wars: A neo-Gricean perspective’, in K. von Heusinger and K. Turner (eds), Where Semantics Meets Pragmatics, 21–48, Amsterdam: Elsevier. Horn, L. (2007), ‘Neo-Gricean pragmatics: A Manichaean manifesto’, in N. BurtonRoberts (ed.), Pragmatics, 158–83, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

90

Pragmatics and Stylistics Israel, M. (2011), The Grammar of Polarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lassner, P. and Derdiger, P. (2009) ‘Domestic gothic, the gothic primitive, and ­gender ­relations in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and The House in Paris’, in M. McGarrity and C. Culleton (eds), Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive, 195–214, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Levinson, S. (2000), Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. MacMahon, B. (1996), ‘Indirectness, rhetoric and interpretive use: Communicative strategies in Browning’s My Last Duchess’, Language and Literature, 5: 209–23. McElhattan Williams, J. (1995), ‘“Fiction with the texture of history”: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September’, Modern Fiction Studies, 41: 219–42. Miller, J. H. (2001), Speech Acts in Literature, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Morini, M. (2009), Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques, Farnham: Ashgate. Nahajec, L. (2009), ‘Negation and the creation of implicit meaning in poetry’, Language and Literature, 18: 109–27. Papafragou, A. (1996), ‘Figurative language and the semantics-pragmatics distinction’, Language and Literature, 5: 179–93. Paternoster, A. (2012), ‘Inappropriate inspectors: Impoliteness and overpoliteness in Ian Rankin’s and Andrea Camilleri’s crime series’, Language and Literature, 21: 311–24. Pilkington, A. (2000), Poetic Effects: A Relevance Theory Perspective, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J. Benjamins. Pratt, M. (1977), Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sauerland, U. (2004), ‘Scalar implicatures in complex sentences’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 27: 367–91. Searle, J. (1969), Speech Acts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J. (1979), ‘The logical status of fictional discourse’, in Expression and Meaning, 58–75, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sell, R. (1985), ‘Tellability and politeness in “The Miller’s Tale”: First steps in literary pragmatics’, English Studies, 66: 496–512. Short, M. (1996), Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose, London: Longman. Simpson, P. (1989), ‘Politeness phenomena in Ionesco’s The Lesson’, in R. Carter and P. Simpson (eds), Language, Discourse and Literature, 171–93, London: Unwin Hyman. Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1995), Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell. Van Dijk, T. (1976), ‘Pragmatics and poetics’, in T. Van Dijk (ed.), Pragmatics of Language and Literature, 23–57, Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing. Watson, G. (2012), ‘Pragmatic acts of love’, Language and Literature, 21: 150–69. Wessels, A. (1995), ‘Elizabeth Bowen’s A World of Love: A “cultural analysis” of the AngloIrish ascendancy in the twentieth century’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 21: 88–95.

91

6

Discourse Stylistics Marina Lambrou, Kingston University

Chapter Overview Introduction 92 From Text to Discourse 93 Discourse and Stylistics 94 Language as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Discourse 95 What is Rhetoric? 96 The Stylistics of Rhetoric 97 Politicians and Political Speeches 100 For President Bush, it was Time to Act 101 Logos: Analysis of Rhetorical Devices 103 Conclusion 107

1 Introduction This chapter explores discourse stylistics as an approach to the analysis of literary and non-literary texts. Specifically, discourse stylistics attempts to show the importance of contextualized language beyond a formal atomistic analysis of linguistic features or structures for an understanding of how a unified text is created. Through a discourse-orientated approach, spoken and written language can be seen to function as communicative and transactional events that are embedded in social, cultural and historical contexts. In this chapter, discourse in the form of a political speech will be examined for its range of rhetorical strategies, or the artful practice of persuasive language, to identify how meaning is created in the dynamics between speaker and hearer. The case study central to this analysis is George W. Bush’s 2005 ‘Hurricane Relief Address to the Nation’, which has been chosen because it exemplifies how language is 92

Discourse Stylistics

used strategically to create effective modes of communication for persuasive discourse while conveying both social and political ideologies. Before presenting an analysis of rhetoric in this political speech, it is useful to define key terms such as text, discourse and discourse analysis in order to understand how discourse stylistics emerges as an approach to the analysis of language.

2  From Text to Discourse If we begin by looking at what is meant by ‘text’, we can accept that a text is a stretch of language that, in terms of communicative meaning, is complete in itself. These stretches of language can range from minimal texts such as a road sign to larger units such as a letter or a conversation. According to Verdonk (2002: 18), both the semantic and pragmatic meaning of a text is dependent on its use in an appropriate context. In other words, meaning is derived through context, which is the reader’s or listener’s reconstruction of the writer’s (or speaker’s) intended message, that is, his or her communicative act or discourse. In these terms, the text is the observable product of the writer’s or speaker’s discourse, which in turn must be seen as the process that has created it. A text, then, is not a random string of words or sentences; it is the context as well as the relationship between the words that gives ‘texture’ to words or sentences. In order for text to become discourse, it needs to be ‘activated’ by relating it to a context. Leech and Short (1981: 209) also distinguish between text and discourse by stating that text is linguistic communication ‘seen simply as a message coded in its auditory or visual medium’, whereas discourse ‘is linguistic communication, seen as a transaction between speaker and hearer, as an interpersonal activity whose form is determined by its social purpose’. Stubbs (1983: 10), drawing on Van Dijk (1977), offers a simple analogy for text and discourse whereby ‘text is to discourse as sentence is to utterance’. He goes on to state that discourse analysis is the sociolinguistic analysis of natural language, so it can also describe how individuals construct social identities through their enactment of language. All these descriptions emphasize that discourse must have context for it to be communicative and must be interpersonal if it is to have meaning. For Jones (2012), who sees discourse as language in use or language in action, there are three ways of looking at discourse: as language above the clause, as language in use and as language as social practice (see pp. 36–8), adding that it is difficult to separate one from the other two. (For further discussion and definitions of discourse, see Van Dijk 2011). Discourse analysis can therefore be taken to be the study of language 93

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

above sentence level to identify how language is actually used in various contexts. Having gained an understanding of discourse and discourse analysis, we are closer to understanding discourse stylistics.

3  Discourse and Stylistics As this volume is dedicated to definitions, descriptions and explorations of various perspectives of stylistics in (mostly) literary and non-literary formats, there is no need to define what is meant by stylistics or to follow this up with an extensive discussion. At the simplest level, stylistics is the study of style in language (Verdonk 2002) and the study of the linguistic tools used to create texture in written texts. It is a method of textual interpretation (Simpson 2004) where form and function interact to create (literary) effects: While linguistic features do not of themselves constitute a text’s ‘meaning’, an account of linguistic features nonetheless serves to ground a stylistic interpretation and to help explain why, for the analyst, certain types of meaning are possible. The preferred object of study in stylistics is literature, whether that be institutionally sanctioned ‘Literature’ as high art or more popular ‘noncanonical’ forms of writing. (Simpson 2004: 2) However, as discourse analysis tends to be associated with the examination of naturally occurring language, how do stylistics and literary texts fit into discourse stylistics? According to Simpson and Hall (2002: 136): Discourse stylistics views literary texts as instances of naturally occurring language use in a social context, where discourse analysis should reveal as much about the contexts as about the text. In this way, the social, sociocultural and sociohistorical aspects of the texts can be identified and analysed. Moreover, ‘Discourse stylistics at its best will necessarily be a thoroughgoing interdisciplinary, even transdisciplinary, endeavour.’ This description echoes the view of Fowler (1981) in Literature as Social Discourse, where he focuses on the interpersonal dimensions of literature and the theories proposed by Halliday (1978) and draws attention to: the sociolinguistic varieties or registers of language and examines how they crystallize in a range of literary texts in response to the social, economic, technological and theoretical needs of the cultures concerned (cited in Carter and Simpson 1989: 11).

94

Discourse Stylistics

In short, discourse stylistics draws specifically on the techniques and methods of discourse analysis for the investigation of the language and structure of literary and non-literary texts. As stylistics is no longer only interested in literary works but also non-literary genres such as naturally occurring talk found in conversation, personal narratives and mediated forms of language (e.g. advertisements and news reports), where social identities are more likely to be represented and constructed, a discourse-stylistic analysis of a political speech can give insights into a specific style of spoken language while also inviting the interpretation of who is doing the speaking and why. George W. Bush’s ‘Hurricane Relief Address to the Nation’ was given in response to the devastation of parts of the southern states of America by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A discourse-stylistic analysis of the speech will identify how persuasion can be accomplished through the use of a style of discourse, described as rhetoric that draws on a range of carefully selected linguistic devices including lexical choice, sound patterning and figurative language. (See below for list of rhetorical devices). Moreover, the then president’s use of a broad range of rhetorical devices demonstrates a strategic and politically motivated attempt to persuade the public of his concern and, more importantly, to redress public opinion about a president who ‘doesn’t care about black people’ (Kanye West, ‘A Concert for Hurricane Relief’, 2 September 2005).

4  Language as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Discourse Rhetoric as a focus of linguistic study seems to be enjoying a resurgence in popularity, as recent publications demonstrate. In stylistics, rhetoric lends itself well to the systematic study of language form in relation to function. This is shown, for example, in Wales’ (1993) analysis of Philip Larkin’s poem Church Going (also in Carter and Stockwell 2008) and Burke’s (2007) cognitive linguistic-stylistic discussion of E. E. Cummings’ Tulips & Chimneys, where the techniques of rhetoric form the central analytic framework. As Stockwell points out in Burke’s introduction, ‘Stylistics traces its origins back through the study of rhetoric across the twentieth century and the modern era, and into the study of elocutio in the ancient past’ (see Lambrou and Stockwell 2007: 144). The most common association for the use of rhetoric and communication is in public speeches where three principles or ‘modes of proof’ converge for an effective delivery of a speech: ethos, logos and pathos. (See below for definitions.) Political speeches, especially, draw on many of the techniques that rhetorical language has to offer as a means of creating a dialogue between the orator and the audience. An analysis of the use of rhetorical devices commonly found in political

95

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

speeches can therefore expose how this type of persuasive discourse can be employed with the specific intention of creating an effective, goal-orientated mode of communication.

5  What is Rhetoric? The term ‘rhetoric’ comes from the Greek rhêtorikê and can be defined as the ‘art of discourse’, or, more precisely, the ‘art of persuasive discourse’ (Cockcroft and Cockcroft 2005: 3). Rhetoric is essentially the ability to persuade an audience mostly through linguistic strategies; while it describes devices that can be employed in both written and spoken texts, it is traditionally associated with the oratory skills necessary for political speeches wherein persuasion is primarily the intended rhetorical effect. How well an audience is aware they are being persuaded – or perhaps, as in the case of a political speech, manipulated – can be assessed on the basis of how well policies are received and whether a politician is successfully (re)elected. This association of rhetoric with manipulation is not new. As Wales (2011) points out, ‘rhetoric had been condemned as the “mother of lies” in its possible manipulation to conceal rather than reveal truth; and its association with artificiality of thought and expression, and with “bad style” has persisted ever since’ (p. 369). The art of rhetoric developed in classical times, when it formed an important part of the training for anyone involved in public speaking and who needed to be skilled in oratory techniques; that is, mainly politicians, statesmen and senior administrators. Both Aristotle and Plato saw it as a factor in all human communication, but whereas Aristotle saw it as an ‘art’ (1991) and ‘as an important part of human activity, and so worth categorising and defining in great detail’, Plato ‘believed rhetoric to be about manipulation of an audience by people who were essentially insincere in their motives’ (Beard 2000: 35). Such was the importance of rhetoric for public orators that Aristotle, Quintilian, Cicero and Longinus wrote training manuals to instruct others on the practical skills (Pope 2002). To ensure the delivery of an effective presentation, Cicero offers five ‘Roman cannons of rhetoric’ that describe the five stages of the development and delivery of a speech: i. Invention:

the arguments and their arrangement in terms of most important

ii. Disposition: the actual organization of the speech from introduction to conclusion

96

iii. Elocution:

the use of language to express ideas and arguments; includes linguistic strategies such as repetition, antithesis, metaphor and simile

iv. Memory:

the use of mnemonic devices, which ensure that the speech is memorable

v. Delivery:

the non-verbal strategies, such as pitch, tone and gesture, as well as verbal strategies for a successful presentation

Discourse Stylistics

For Aristotle, rhetoric also involved the presence of three ‘modes of proof’ – ethos, pathos and logos – which are the ways a speaker is able to persuade an audience to accept a thesis (Gill and Whedbee 1997): i. Ethos:

relates to the speaker’s personality and the audience’s belief that the speaker is trustworthy and honest

ii. Pathos:

where persuasion is evoked through emotions, brought on by engagement and empathy

iii. Logos:

the speech itself and the structure of the argument

For public figures such as politicians, the matter of ethos or trustworthiness is automatically a given because, as an elected representative and spokesperson of the people, politicians are expected to be honest. Audiences are therefore likely and willing to accept that what is said is ‘true’ – see Queen Elizabeth I’s rousing speech to troops waiting for the Spanish Armada at Tilbury in 1588, or Jawaharlal Nehru’s poignant ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech on the eve of India’s independence in 1947. This would also explain why there is so much news coverage when political figures are caught up in scandal, as dishonest or immoral activities are likely to permanently damage the integrity and trustworthiness of the person implicated. (In the United States, the political careers of President Nixon after the 1974 Watergate scandal and Senator Edward Kennedy after the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 were damaged irreparably because of their involvement. In the United Kingdom, Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq against the wishes of many party members and the public saw his standing as leader decline irrevocably.) Pathos, or the emotion that is aroused by engaging with the text, is not only related to the lexis but also to the context and purpose of the speech. To give an example, the presidential acceptance speech given by President Barack Obama, the first African American to be elected in the history of the United States, was emotional on many levels for so many people because of its historical as well as political significance. (See Durant and Lambrou 2009, for an analysis of rhetoric in Obama’s presidential acceptance speech.) While the effectiveness of rhetoric in public speaking is dependent on all three of Aristotle’s ‘proofs’ combining together, it could be argued that the most important is logos, where ‘audiences are persuaded through the argument of the speech itself’ (Gill and Whedbee 1997: 159). A discussion of the various linguistic devices that can be used to create a memorable and persuasive speech is discussed in greater detail in the following sections.

6  The Stylistics of Rhetoric As a means of persuasive discourse, traditional rhetoric relies on a repertoire of linguistic strategies, which Durant and Lambrou (2009) liken to a ‘toolkit’ 97

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

that can be drawn upon. Rhetorical language, then, can be seen as belonging to a specific ‘style’ of language that needs to accomplish a particular rhetorical function, and as such, relies on the careful selection and delivery of very specific language choices. It is not just the lexical choices that are crucial, but also how they are combined and structured within the context of the speech to convey very specific social and political ideologies. In describing the language of rhetoric, Cockcroft and Cockcroft (2005) draw on the work of Aristotle to categorize a repertoire of linguistic devices under four main headings: lexical choice, sound patterning, figurative language or trope and schematic language. Under each of these headings is a further list of rhetorical devices, which, when combined together in a speech, create an effective piece of rhetorical discourse. A list of the more common rhetorical devices are set out below: 1. Lexical choice: As the purpose and context of the speaking determines which words are to be used, the correct choice of lexis is of the utmost importance for the correct register and appropriateness of language for the given task. The use of lexis from the same semantic field also helps to create emphasis as well as cohesion. 2. Sound patterning: This refers to repetition of sounds or intonation or rhymes which enhance meaning. These can be sub-categorized further as: a. Alliteration: repetition of the initial consonant of two or more words b. Assonance: repetition of a vowel sound in a word c. Rhyme: repetition of sounds or group of sounds in words 3. Figurative language or trope: This refers to the use of language that gives meaning in a less literal way. Here, the text is animated unexpectedly so that another sense of meaning is given (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980 for metaphor; Leech and Short 1981 for figurative language). (In the speech extracts below, the italicizing of specific words and clauses is the author’s.) a. Metaphor: the mapping between two different conceptual domains; ‘The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 5). Metaphors are basic schemes by which people conceptualize their experience and their external world, for example: At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. (Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘A Tryst With Destiny’ speech, 14 August 1947) b. Simile: a kind of analogy ‘whereby two concepts are imaginatively and descriptively compared’ (Wales 2011: 383) for example: So this morning before we got on the plane to come here, at the White House, we planted a tree in honor of the children of 98

Discourse Stylistics

Oklahoma. It was a dogwood with its wonderful spring flower and its deep, enduring roots. It embodies the lesson of the Psalms – that the life of a good person is like a tree whose leaf does not wither. (President Bill Clinton, ‘A Time of Healing Prayer Service’, Oklahoma City, 23 April 1995) c. Metonymy: involves replacing the name of something with something that is connected to it (without being the whole thing), for example: Sasha and Malia, I love you both so much, and you have earned the new puppy that’s coming with us to the White House. (Barack Obama, presidential acceptance speech, 5 November 2007)

‘The White House’ is usually a metonym for the government and president, but here, it is literally their home.

4. Schematic language: a. Antithesis or contrastive pair: the placing of two contrasting ideas, similar in grammatical structure, next to each other to heighten meaning through contrast, for example : Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. (President Barack Obama, Democratic National Convention speech, 28 August 2008) b. List of three (or three-part list): creates unity by repetition, for example: Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few. (Prime Minister Winston Churchill praising Battle of Britain fighter pilots, 1940) c. Repetition: reiteration of the same words or phrases for emphasis for example: Expectations were so high. Too high. Too high in a way for either of us. (Tony Blair resignation speech, 10 May 2007) d. Parallelism: similar to repetition, it is the reiteration of words or phrases to create a memorable rhythm, for example: He fought long and hard in this campaign, and he’s fought even longer and harder for the country. (Barack Obama, presidential acceptance speech, 5 November 2007) In stylistics, many of the above linguistic features would be described as examples of foregrounding, ‘the throwing into relief of the linguistic sign against the background of the norms of ordinary language’ (Wales 2011: 166). In other words, certain linguistic features are highlighted or made prominent for 99

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

specific effects and in this way invite interpretation as well as aid memorability. Parallelism, for example, can refer to similarity or ‘equivalence’ (Jakobson 1960) on several levels – for example, the repetition of words, clauses and syntactic structures – but it can also describe antithesis (through the use of antonyms), alliteration and assonance, with sound patterning. The ‘stylistics’ in ‘discourse stylistics’ is particularly evident here, as style in language for a specific effect is at play.

7  Politicians and Political Speeches Political speeches perform a variety of rhetorical functions, such as ‘inform, persuade, manipulate, influence and control while also serving to place the speaker in the best possible light’ (Durant and Lambrou 2009: 148). Moreover, they are ‘designed to hold the attention of members of the audience and gain their approval and support for the politicians and the messages and sentiments being expressed’ (Maybin and Mercer 1996: 124). In this way, successful political speeches can enhance the reputation of the speaker. A case in point is Barack Obama, America’s first African-American president, who has been highly praised for the skilful delivery of his speeches. Obama drew great admiration for his presidential acceptance speech (on 5 November 2008), for which he was compared to other great political ­orators such as Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. One admirer, Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Kingdom and writer for the Times newspaper, points to ‘Obama’s long, perfectly balanced sentences, his ability to shift pitch and perspective without losing narrative flow’ (cited in Durant and Lambrou 2009: 151). Obama skilfully brought together the three ‘proofs’ of ethos, pathos and logos for a memorable and historically important speech.

Discourse Stylistics Case Study: Bush’s ‘Hurricane Relief Address to the Nation’ Speech One case where it was necessary for a president to redress public opinion and be seen to ‘care’ was the occasion of the rousing ‘Hurricane Relief Address to the Nation’ speech delivered by George W. Bush in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 15 September 2005. President Bush’s address was given following the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in the southern states of America, where several thousand people lost their lives and millions lost their homes. Bush was criticized in the aftermath of the hurricane for his failure to fly to

100

Discourse Stylistics

the devastated areas and to be seen to be actively concerned. These actions prompted the musician and rapper, Kanye West, to criticize the president live on television during a hurricane relief telethon (‘A Concert for Hurricane Relief’, held on behalf of the Red Cross, 2 September 2005) with the controversial statement ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people’. West broke away from the script to accuse the president in what was felt to be a reflection of not just his opinion but those of a number of US citizens. Part of West’s speech is reproduced below: I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, ‘They’re looting.’ You see a white family, it says, ‘They’re looking for food.’ And, you know, it’s been five days [waiting for federal help] because most of the people are black. And even for me to complain about it, I would be a hypocrite because I’ve tried to turn away from the TV because it’s too hard to watch. I’ve even been shopping before even giving a donation, so now I’m calling my business manager right now to see what is the biggest amount I can give, and just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people down there. So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help – with the way America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible. I mean, the Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way – and they’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us.

8  For President Bush, it was Time to Act The ‘Hurricane Relief Address to the Nation’ speech, as with most political speeches, is usually credited to the speaker as author; however, there is usually a team of speechwriters responsible for composing the first draft. In this case, several members of President Bush’s staff during his second term were responsible. These included former Wall Street Journal editorial writer William McGurn, who was the chief writer for President Bush; Mike Gerson, the previous chief speechwriter whom McGurn replaced; and John McConnell, the current director of national intelligence for the United States. (In email correspondence with the author, McGurn confirmed that Gerson and McConnell provided the policy information for the speech.) An abridged version of Bush’s ‘Hurricane Relief Address to the Nation’ is presented below and then analysed for its use of rhetorical devices. (Because of a lack of space, the original speech has been edited. A full transcript of the speech is freely available on the Internet.)

101

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

1

5

10

15

20

Good evening. I’m speaking to you from the city of New Orleans – nearly empty, still partly under water, and waiting for life and hope to return. Eastward from Lake Pontchartrain, across the Mississippi coast, to Alabama into Florida, millions of lives were changed in a day by a cruel and wasteful storm… Across the Gulf Coast, among people who have lost much, and suffered much, and given to the limit of their power, we are seeing that same spirit – a core of strength that survives all hurt, a faith in God no storm can take away, and a powerful American determination to clear the ruins and build better than before… Tonight so many victims of the hurricane and the flood are far from home and friends and familiar things. You need to know that our whole nation cares about you, and in the journey ahead you’re not alone. To all who carry a burden of loss, I extend the deepest sympathy of our country. To every person who has served and sacrificed in this emergency, I offer the gratitude of our country. And tonight I also offer this pledge of the American people: Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives. And all who question the future of the Crescent City need to know there is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again...

25

To carry out the first stages of the relief effort and begin rebuilding at once, I have asked for, and the Congress has provided, more than $60 billion. This is an unprecedented response to an unprecedented crisis, which demonstrates the compassion and resolve of our nation.

30

Our second commitment is to help the citizens of the Gulf Coast to overcome this disaster, put their lives back together, and rebuild their communities. Along this coast, for mile after mile, the wind and water swept the land clean...

35

Our third commitment is this: When communities are rebuilt, they must be even better and stronger than before the storm…As all of us saw on television, there’s also some deep, persistent poverty in this region, as well. …We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality. When the streets are rebuilt, there should be many new businesses, including minority-owned businesses, along those streets. When the houses are rebuilt, more families should own, not rent, those houses. When the regional economy revives, local people should be prepared for the jobs being created.

40

102

Discourse Stylistics

45 Americans want the Gulf Coast not just to survive, but to thrive; not just to cope, but to overcome. We want evacuees to come home, for the best of reasons – because they have a real chance at a better life in a place they love. 50

55

60

In the life of this nation, we have often been reminded that nature is an awesome force, and that all life is fragile. We’re the heirs of men and women who lived through those first terrible winters at Jamestown and Plymouth, who rebuilt Chicago after a great fire, and San Francisco after a great earthquake, who reclaimed the prairie from the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Every time, the people of this land have come back from fire, flood, and storm to build anew – and to build better than what we had before. Americans have never left our destiny to the whims of nature – and we will not start now. Thank you, and may God bless America.

9  Logos: Analysis of Rhetorical Devices Bush’s ‘Hurricane Relief Address to the Nation’ uses a great number of the persuasive techniques traditionally associated with the discourse of political speeches, such as lexical choice, sound patterning, figurative language or trope and schematic language, as outlined earlier this chapter. An analysis of these different persuasive devices under specific sub-headings is provided in Table  6.1, to enable readers to engage with the power of rhetoric in ­creating a successful speech. For ease of analysis, Table 6.1 is organized into three columns: Rhetorical devices (1) form (2) and function (3), with examples from the speech as illustration. Line numbers from the speech are given in brackets. (It should be noted that this analysis does not represent a comprehensive list and that the description under ‘function’ presents one interpretation and is open to discussion.) Bush delivers a rousing speech as he addresses the devastated community of New Orleans. However, it is not only the people of this community the speech is aimed at. Here is an opportunity for Bush to show his humane and caring side to the nation as well as to the world and to prove that he is committed to rebuilding the devastated communities. Bush is able to persuade his audience into accepting his reassurances through Aristotle’s three proofs of ethos, pathos and logos. In terms of ethos, Bush positions himself as a man of faith with lexis from the semantic field of a biblical or religious theme (fire, flood, storm, faith in God), which would appeal to his audience’s faith in God and therefore go some way to restoring their trust. Pathos is achieved by the 103

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Table 6.1 Analysis of President George W. Bush’s ‘Hurricane Relief Address to the Nation’ showing rhetorical devices 1. Rhetorical device

2. Form

3. Function

i. Lexical choice pronouns

You need to know … about you 2nd person pronoun creates a (14) power hierarchy and distance between the speaker and audience; repetition is emphatic our country (16)

Bush creates a sense of inclusion and personalization; he is ‘one of us’

we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes (19–20)

As above; also repetitive use of ‘we’ is emphatic

I have asked for (25–6) Use of ‘I’ ensures Bush takes full credit for rebuilding communities Biblical theme

faith in God (9) fire, flood and storm (55–6) God bless America (60)

Pain theme

Signals that Bush is a man of faith; appeals to listener’s faith in God; also cohesion is created through the semantic field of religious vocabulary

lost…suffered…hurt (l.7–9) victims (l.13) loss (16)

Emotive language showing a president who understands and identifies with those who have experienced these things – pathos

same spirit (8)

Provides rhythm; memorable

ii. Sound patterning Alliteration

served and sacrificed (17) persistent poverty (37) iii. Figurative language Metaphor

a cruel and wasteful storm (4–5) Personification of storm with human qualities; suggests hurricane destroyed with intent and with no regard to the human cost and this great city will rise again (22–3)

104

Suggests the city is living and able to repair itself; an allusion to the restorative, which symbolizes immortality and resurrection;

Discourse Stylistics

Table 6.1 Continued 1. Rhetorical device

2. Form

3. Function also, allusion to the phoenix, which connotes great powers of regeneration as well as invincibility

Metonymy

the wind and water swept the land clean (32–3)

Suggestive of something positive and provides a fresh foundation to build upon

In the life of this nation (50)

Again, the nation is personified as a living and breathing being

whims of nature (57)

Nature is personified; natural events are indiscriminate and beyond human control

our country (17–8)

America

we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes (19–20)

‘We’ = the government. (Bush’s ‘we’ ensures he takes full credit for the promise to rebuild communities. Also, see iii. Lexis, pronouns above)

We want evacuees… (47)

Unclear who ‘we’ are: the government or the citizens of America.

iv. Schematic language Contrastive pairs/ antithesis

not just to survive, but to thrive; not just to cope, but to overcome (46–7)

Adds emphasis, as does repetition of ‘not’/‘but’ structure

List of three

nearly empty, still partly under water, and waiting for life and hope to return (1–2)

Similar to repetition in sounding poetic and being emphatic; it is also attractive to the listener as it provides a sense of unity

a core of strength … a faith in God…and a powerful American (8–10) far from home and friends and familiar things (13–14) overcome this disaster, put their lives back together, and rebuild their communities (31) Fire, flood and storm (55–6) Repetition and parallelism

lost much, and suffered much (7–8) to all who carry. … To every person (15–17) Tonight … tonight (13–18)

Repetition of words, clauses and sentences offers lyrical patterning to what is being said, which can sound poetic and even mesmerizing; repetition is also emphatic and memorable

105

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Table 6.1 Continued 1. Rhetorical device

2. Form

3. Function

I offer the gratitude …I also offer this (17–18)

Also see lines 40–43 for list of three, with the repetition of ‘when’ and ‘should’ for emphasis and poetic effect

we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes (19–20) an unprecedented response to an unprecedented crisis (27) Our second commitment. … Our third commitment (30–35) let us restore … and let us rise above (38–9) When the streets. … When the houses. … When the economy… (40–4) To build anew – and to build better (56)

empathy invoked in the emotive linguistic choices (suffered, lost, hurt), showing a caring and committed president who identifies with the terrible suffering of his audience. Logos, however, is presented as the most important component of the three proofs, as it is here that Bush can make explicit his actions through words; it is a case of words speak louder than actions. As expected, Bush chooses his pronouns carefully to not only personalize and show himself as one of the people but also to take credit for everything positive in the steps being taken to rebuild the damage caused by the hurricane. Note, in particular, the repeated ‘we’ (ll.19), a metonymical reference to the government, while in ll. 25–6, Bush separates himself from the congress with the self-promotional ‘I’ (25) to emphasize the good he is doing as president by suggesting that he is personally responsible for overseeing reparations and costs of over $60 billion. Bush’s use of figurative language to animate Hurricane Katrina through personification provides a poetic expression that contrasts with the more literal and fact-based relief operations for the devastated communities. (This strategy is reminiscent of Nehru’s ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech, wherein India is personified as female: ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom…’ and ‘Before the birth of freedom, we have endured all the pains of labour…’ Such intertextual references are not uncommon in political speeches as shown in Obama’s presidential acceptance speech.) The use of numerous parallel structures, including antithesis and lists of three, at lexical, 106

Discourse Stylistics

clausal and sentential levels, offers a lyrical response to the criticism against Bush and, more importantly, emphasizes through repetition aspects of the speech that he wants the audience to remember. These are examples of foregrounding that are intentionally and strategically embedded into the speech to show the president in a positive light and as a president who cares.

10 Conclusion Discourse stylistics as an approach to analysing spoken and written texts for their communicative and transactional function is well suited as an approach to analysing the persuasive techniques of political speeches. As a genre of spoken discourse, political speeches offer an example of language as action and language in use (Jones 2012) where form and function combine with context to create poetic effects. Through a discourse-stylistic analysis, the linguistic features and structures of President George W. Bush’s ‘Hurricane Relief Address to the Nation’ can be examined to expose the prolific use of a range of rhetorical devices in a carefully constructed response to the criticisms levelled at him and the government. A discourse-stylistic analysis reveals rhetorical devices that include metaphors, the list of three, repetition and specific lexical choices that carry social and political ideologies. The emphasis here is a commitment to rebuild the affected communities, and this is achieved by ensuring that Aristotle’s three modes of proofs – ethos, pathos and logos – are present, thereby creating a successful and persuasive piece of discourse. After all, political speeches function to ‘persuade an audience (of peers, subjects, or superiors) to go along with the speakers view of the world and his or her proposals’ (Pernot 2000, cited in Duranti 2006: 467), and in the case of this speech by Bush, it also functions to restore his reputation as a competent and humane leader. The workings of rhetoric as functional and transactional modes of communication can be clearly understood by applying a discourse-stylistic approach to the analysis of political speeches, as demonstrated in the analysis and discussion above wherein strategic choices are at play.

References Aristotle (1991), The Art of Rhetoric, trans. H. Lawson-Tancred, London: Penguin. Beard, A. (2000), The Language of Politics, London: Routledge. Burke, M. (2007), ‘“Progress is a comfortable disease”: Cognition in a stylistic analysis of E.  E. Cummings’, in M. Lambrou and P. Stockwell (eds), Contemporary Stylistics, 144–55, London: Continuum. Carter, R. and Simpson, P., eds (1989), Language, Discourse and Literature, London: Unwin Hyman.

107

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Carter, R. and Stockwell, P. (2008), The Language and Literature Reader, London: Routledge. Cockcroft, R. and Cockcroft, S. (2005), Persuading People, Hamps: Palgrave. Duranti, A. (2006), ‘Narrating the political self in a campaign for U.S. Congress’, Language in Society, 35 (4): 467–97. Durant, A. and Lambrou, M. (2009), Language and Media, Oxford: Routledge. Fowler, R. (1981), Literature as Social Discourse, London: Batsford. Gill, A. and Whedbee, K. (1997), ‘Rhetoric’, in T. A. Van Dijk (ed.), Discourse as Structure and Process, 157–84, London: Sage. Halliday, M. A. K. (1978), Language as Social Semiotic, London: Edward Arnold. Jakobson, R. (1960), ‘Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics’, in T. A. Sebeok (ed.), Style and Language, 350–77, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jones, R. H. (2012), Discourse Analysis, London: Routledge. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980), Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lambrou, M. and Stockwell, P. (2007), Contemporary Stylistics, London: Continuum. Leech, G. N. and Short, M. (1981), Style in Fiction, Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Ltd. Maybin, J. and Mercer, N. (1996), Using English from Conversation to Canon, London: Routledge. Pernot, L. (2000), La Rhétorique dans l’antiquité, Paris: Libraire Générale Français. Pope, R. (2002), The English Studies Book, London: Routledge. Simpson, P. (2004), Stylistics, A Resource Book, London: Routledge. Simpson, P. and Hall, G. (2002), ‘Discourse analysis and stylistics’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 22: 136–49, New York: Cambridge University Press. Stubbs, M. (1983), Discourse Analysis: The Sociolinguistic Analysis of Natural Language, Chicago: The University of Chicago. Van Dijk, T. A. (1977), Text and Context, London: Longman. Van Dijk, T. A. (2011), Discourse Studies, London: Sage. Verdonk, P. (2002), Stylistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wales, K. (1993), ‘Teach yourself rhetoric: An analysis of Philip Larkin’s “Church Going”’, in P. Verdonk (ed.), Twentieth Century Poetry: From Text to Context, 87–99, London: Routledge. Wales, K. (2011), A Dictionary of Stylistics, Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Ltd. West, K. (2005), “The President doesn’t Care about Black People”. Available online: http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIUzLpO1kxI.

108

7

Cognitive Stylistics David West, University of Düsseldorf

Chapter Overview What is Cognitive Stylistics? My Object of Study The Experiment: What Sounds do Readers Associate with Clarity? Phonetic Properties of the Sonnet Conclusion and Some Implications

109 111 114 117 119

1  What is Cognitive Stylistics? Cognitive stylistics is a branch of cognitive linguistics, which itself is a branch of cognitive science. The latter, its roots lying in the evolutionary psychology of the late nineteenth century, is concerned with the mental faculties with which the human being is born – such as consciousness, memory, imagination, metaphorical reasoning and creativity – faculties that distinguish the human being from other species and that enable it to survive and thrive in the natural world. Cognitive linguistics, in its insistence that language is a phenomenon of the mind and can therefore only be properly understood in relation to the mental processes of which it is a manifestation, is a radical rejection of linguistics and its modular view of language as practised for much of the twentieth century, from Saussure to Chomsky. Cognitive stylistics emerged from these two disciplines as a self-conscious movement within literary studies in the early 1990s. Its founding text is usually considered to be Mark Turner’s Reading Minds (1991), although its roots lie much further back – as far back, at least, as the pioneering work of I. A. Richards in the 1920s (see West 2013). Cognitive stylistics, it is important to stress, is not simply another literarycritical approach, one that can sit comfortably alongside other approaches such 109

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

as new historicism or deconstruction or psychoanalytical criticism. Rather, it constitutes a radical challenge to literary studies as it is practised today and as it has been practised since the so-called turn to theory in the 1960s. It is distinct from all other approaches in its endeavour to be a proper science or theory of literature, one that has an explicit object of study, a principled methodology and a clear and significant purpose. The object of study of cognitive stylistics is readerly experience. According to those working in the field, readerly experience is a product, on the one hand, of the words on the page, of the text’s semantic, syntactic and sonic (or phonetic) features, which act as a stimulus to evoke complex thoughts and emotions in the reader; and, on the other, of the reader’s cognitive faculties, which inevitably intervene in, and shape, her or his experience of the text (and, indeed, of any object, aesthetic or otherwise, in the world). It is from within the interaction of these two forces that readerly experience emerges, and this is what Peter Stockwell refers to as texture (Stockwell 2009). It is this readerly experience that cognitive stylisticians take as their principal object of study, rather than the author’s biography, the text’s social and historical context or the text as an entity in itself. Cognitive stylistics approaches its object of study with a clear ­methodology, with cognitive stylisticians combining a microscopic analysis of the literary text’s linguistic features (this is the stylistic element) with an account of what is known, from cognitive psychology, about the ordinary workings of the human mind (this is the cognitive element). When we read a literary text, such as a poem, a short story or a novel, or when we watch a play, we have certain thoughts, or produce certain interpretations, or experience certain emotions. It is the task of cognitive stylistics to explain these thoughts, interpretations and emotions in a principled way by referring both to the literary artefact’s language and to what we know about the human mind and how it functions in its experience of the external world. To collect data on readerly experience, cognitive stylisticians can investigate what real readers say about their experiences in reading literary texts, much as Michael Burke did, for example, in his recent Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion (2011), when he gave his student subjects questionnaires asking them to introspect on their reading experiences; or as Richards did in his famous ‘practical criticism’ experiment, when he issued students with poems and collected their written responses to them (Richards 1929). Cognitive stylisticians can also conduct scientific experiments, as Willie van Peer did in Stylistics and Psychology (1986), when he gave different groups of subjects slightly altered versions of the same text and analysed their different responses. Most importantly, perhaps, cognitive stylisticians carry out scientific investigations of readerly experience with a clear and significant purpose in mind. For cognitive stylisticians, literature is a peculiar use of language, one that calls into play the central cognitive faculties of the human reader. These central 110

Cognitive Stylistics

cognitive faculties are necessarily present in all human activity, from riding a bike to playing football to changing a nappy, but it is in literature that they are involved in particularly intense and heightened ways. Through investigating our experience of literature, therefore, cognitive stylisticians seek to further our understanding of the human mind, of how we, as members of the human species, experience phenomena in the world (such as literary texts). As such, cognitive stylistics is concerned not with individual texts or writers, or with literary epochs and genres, but with much more fundamental questions, such as: What is literature? What distinguishes it from other uses of language? What accounts for the breathless fascination that we have for literature? Where does literature come from, and what function does it play in human life and in the evolutionary development of the species? Cognitive stylistics, then, is located on those peculiarly difficult borderlands of psychology, linguistics and literary studies. But, although it draws on these master disciplines, it also contributes to each in important ways: to psychology, in its investigation of the fundamental human activity of engaging with literary texts, when our cognitive faculties are drawn on in peculiar and heightened ways, so that they come to the fore and become conscious and visible; to linguistics, in its demonstration that language is not a discrete module comprising empty rules and representations but the most fundamental instrument that human beings have, one that they manipulate to achieve certain psychological effects in other members of the species; and to literary studies, in its insistence that our approach to literature be founded on sound scientific principles – in other words, that literary studies should have a clear object of study, an explicit methodology, and a real and significant purpose.

2  My Object of Study In this chapter, I want to give a sense of what a cognitive-stylistic approach to literature might look like by investigating readerly experience of Shakespeare’s sonnet 73 (‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’), and in particular readerly experience of the sonnet’s phonetic features. Work in cognitive stylistics has focused overwhelmingly on readerly experience in relation to the semantic level of a text, while some work has been carried out more recently on our experience of a text’s grammar or syntax. But, apart from the pioneering work of Reuven Tsur (e.g., Tsur 1992), very little has been done to investigate the effects on readers of sound patterns in literary texts. (This bias towards semantics and syntax reflects the priorities of cognitive linguistics more generally). This omission in cognitive stylistics is both strange and understandable. If we compare our experience of a literary text to an iceberg, then the meaning of a text is its very tip, what we see above the surface of the water, while the 111

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

text’s syntax is further down the iceberg, perhaps where it is intersected by the surface of the water. Our experience of a text in terms of its sound patterns, though, is the base of the iceberg, hidden at the very bottom of the sea. What I have in mind here is not so much the more superficial phonetic features of a text, such as rhyme or metre or alliteration, which readers are usually perfectly capable of detecting and identifying. What I mean, rather, are the much subtler and more complex sound patterns of a text – the clustering of certain types of consonant or vowel sounds in a text to create a kind of musical tone, for example, so that readers experience different emotions in different parts of the same text as a result of shifts in sound patterns. To explore these depths is extremely difficult and fraught with danger, but it is there that we can discover what is most fundamental about literary experience. For literature – and particularly its prototype, poetry – is, if nothing else, sound. Sound is the sine qua non of literature. And Shakespeare’s sonnet is, precisely, a sonnet, a little sound. To ignore its sonic features, as the vast majority of those working in literary studies have done and still do today, is therefore tantamount to talking about astrology without mentioning the stars. Here, to remind you, is sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold, When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang; In me thou seest the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self that seals up all in rest; In me thou seest the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the deathbed, whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourished by; This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well, which thou must leave ere long. The meaning of the sonnet is quite simple, I think: the speaker reflects on what the addressee sees in him (signs of ageing, decrepitude and proximity to death), and concludes in the distich that the fact that the addressee sees these signs only makes, or should make, the addressee’s love for the speaker even greater. ‘Although you see that I am old and approaching death’, the speaker is saying, ‘you love me, which shows how strong your love for me must be’. For me, Shakespeare’s sonnets are like legal statements: the speaker has 140 syllables (which take approximately a minute to read; the sonnet, like the haiku 112

Cognitive Stylistics

and the limerick, has a finite temporal form) in which to present a case or an argument, and therefore the speaker employs – must employ – enormously complex and sophisticated textual or rhetorical strategies to achieve his aim, to persuade the addressee (and reader), to make his case, to win his argument. The main strategy that the speaker uses in this particular sonnet is that of repetition, with each of the three quatrains making precisely the same point (you see in me the signs of ageing, decrepitude and proximity to death) and the distich giving the concluding argument (you see this, but you still love me, which must mean that your love for me is great). This repetition is foregrounded by the first line of each quatrain (lines one, five and nine), which are very similar syntactically and lexically (in particular, lines five and nine). The speaker says that the addressee (‘thou’) sees something (‘That time of year’, ‘the twilight of such day’, ‘the glowing of such fire’) somewhere (‘in me’). And the noun phrases that the speaker uses as the direct object in each clause are also very similar, with each consisting of a determiner (‘that’ or ‘the’) followed by the head noun (‘time’ or ‘twilight’ or ‘glowing’), which is post-modified by an embedded prepositional phrase introduced by ‘of’ (‘of year’ or ‘of such day’ or ‘of such fire’). Through this repetitive structure, in which the same argument is presented three times (an example of tripling, of course), the speaker seeks to press home his point. However, although each quatrain makes the same argument, there is also significant movement in how the argument is made from quatrain one to quatrain two to quatrain three, and this movement within the repetitive structure is a crucial textual strategy in the sonnet, too. Most importantly, there is movement in terms of the object of visual perception in each quatrain – from ‘That time of year’ to ‘the twilight of such day’ to ‘the glowing of such fire’. Each refers to a period of time and to a portion of time within that period: ‘That time’ is a portion of the ‘year’ (i.e. a season, either autumn or winter); ‘the twilight’ is a portion of the ‘day’ (i.e. the evening); ‘the glowing’ is a portion of the time that it takes for a ‘fire’ to burn (i.e. when the fire is almost out). What is important, though, is that the object of perception decreases in size and becomes more concrete and more distinct – and therefore more visible or visually salient. ‘That time of year’ clearly points to a vast temporal span (a period of time within 365 days); ‘the twilight of such day’, to a smaller temporal span (a period of time within twenty-four hours); and ‘the glowing of such fire’, to a still smaller span (a period of time within the time that it takes for a fire to burn: less than a day, in any case). And, clearly, a fire is something that can be experienced much more directly than can a year or a season, or a twilight or a day. We can see the flames or embers, we can feel its heat, we can listen to the sounds it makes, we can smell the burning pieces of wood or coal, we can even taste the smoke in our throats to which it gives rise. Also, a fire has particular salience for the human species, and that was especially the case four centuries ago, since humans make 113

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

fire to cook with and to provide themselves with warmth and light. Moreover, unlike the year and the day, which are abstract concepts that we give to natural phenomena and are therefore beyond human control, a fire can be lit, and extinguished, by a human hand. Thus, the rhetorical strategy that the speaker employs in the sonnet is that of zooming in or focusing, so that the reader first ‘beholds’ something that is vast and boundless and therefore beyond the limits of visual perception; and then, in the third quatrain, the reader ‘sees’ (and the shift in the lexeme is not insignificant) something that is much smaller and bounded and that therefore lies within those limits. The argument of the sonnet in these three quatrains is the same, therefore, but the way that the sonnet works on a discoursal level is to bring the object of perception – which is the metaphor for the speaker’s ageing process – much closer to the addressee and to the reader. The object of perception, in other words, decreases in size and increases in concreteness and therefore gains in clarity. What I want to focus on here primarily is the question of whether this movement in the sonnet towards clarity is mirrored also on the level of sound. In other words, are there significant shifts in the types of sounds that the speaker uses from quatrain one to quatrain three? Does the speaker use the resources of sound as a textual strategy to bring the object of perception closer to the addressee, to make the object, and his argument, clearer? Just as importantly, if that is the case (and I suspect very strongly that it is), then does this textual strategy work? Do we, as readers, experience those shifts in sound? In an attempt to answer these questions, I first conducted an experiment with university students to discover what expectations they had of the sonnet in terms of metre, rhyme, vowel sounds and consonant sounds, and then carried out my own phonetic analysis of the sonnet to see whether these expectations were confirmed or confounded. It is to the experiment and my phonetic analysis that I wish to turn now.

3  The Experiment: What Sounds do Readers Associate with Clarity? I conducted my experiment in an MA class on literary linguistics at Münster University in Germany in 2012. The class consisted of twenty-two students, most of whom were German speakers and all of whom had a very high level of English (at or above level 7.0 on the IELTS scale, in any case). We talked for the first four weeks of the class about the meaning, structure and syntax of sonnet 73, and established that there was a movement towards clarity on both a semantic and a syntactic level. (Indeed, I spent the whole fourteen-week semester talking about this single sonnet). In the experiment, I asked students what they expected from the sonnet in terms of sound patterns if we accept the argument that there is a movement in the sonnet between quatrain one and quatrain three 114

Cognitive Stylistics

from opaqueness to clarity. In other words, what sounds did they associate with clarity? The students had some background in phonetics and phonology, and so they understood what they were being asked to do. As far as I know, however, they had never been asked before to think about the meaning or effect of different sounds. These are the questions that I asked – students wrote down their answers and returned them to me immediately. Perhaps you would like to give your own answers before I present you with those of my students? 1. Does the sonnet become more regular or less regular in terms of metre? 2. Do the pairs of end-line rhymes become more similar or less similar? 3. Do the vowels become higher or lower? (the /i:/ sound in ‘see’ is high; the /æ/ sound in ‘back’ is low) 4. Do the vowels become more articulated at the front of the mouth, or at the back of the mouth? (the /i:/ sound in ‘see’ is front; the /u:/ sound in ‘soon’ is back) 5. Do the vowels become shorter or longer? (the /e/ sound in ‘met’ is short; the /i:/ sound in ‘meet’ is long) 6. Do consonant clusters become more frequent or less frequent? (‘clapped’ has two consonant clusters, one at the beginning of the word [/kl/] and one at the end [/pt/]) 7. Do voiceless consonants become more frequent or less frequent? (/p/ is a voiceless consonant; /b/ is a voiced consonant) 8. Do plosives become more frequent or less frequent? 9. Do consonants made at the front of the mouth become more frequent or less frequent? (in particular, bilabials such as /b/ and /p/) And here are the results: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

More regular: 17 More similar: 19 Higher: 18 Front: 19 Shorter: 16 More frequent: 10 More frequent: 14 More frequent: 15 More frequent: 14

Less regular: 1 Less similar: 2 Lower: 4 Back: 3 Longer: 5 Less frequent: 11 Less frequent: 7 Less frequent: 7 Less frequent: 6

Don’t know / no difference: 4 Don’t know / no difference: 1 Don’t know / no difference: 0 Don’t know / no difference: 0 Don’t know / no difference: 1 Don’t know / no difference: 1 Don’t know / no difference: 1 Don’t know / no difference: 0 Don’t know / no difference: 2

Despite the obvious crudeness of the questionnaire (which the students were only too happy to point out to me), I do think that the results are quite significant. In every case, the majority of students were willing to associate clarity with a particular phonetic feature, and, in almost every case (number six is the 115

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

exception), there was a clear tendency among students to see one particular phonetic feature as being more expressive of clarity than another; almost all the students, for example, expected the movement towards clarity in the sonnet to be mirrored by an increase in the number of high, front, short vowels (the / I / in hit is all three). Quite clearly, my respondents perceived high, front, short vowels as being more expressive of clarity than low, back, long vowels. In every case, moreover, with the exception of number six, my own expectations matched the expectations of the majority of students – and, I would guess, they match your expectations, too. This confirms what the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler discovered in 1929 when he gave radically different language communities two shapes, one with sharp edges and the other with rounded edges, and asked them to identify each shape either as a takete or a baluba (Köhler 1929). With great uniformity, Köhler’s respondents identified the sharp-edged shape as a takete and the round-edged shape as a baluba, which suggests very strongly that we do have images of sounds, that sounds do have a certain effect or meaning of their own, and that there is some connection between sound and meaning (between Saussure’s signifiant and signifié). The voiceless plosives /t/ and /k/, together with the short, high, front vowels in takete lend themselves to an image of sharpness, while the voiced plosive /b/ and the voiced approximant /l/, together with the long vowels in baluba lend themselves to an image of roundness. This is quite clearly not a matter of convention, since these associations are cross cultural. We should perhaps not be too surprised by such correspondence, since sound does have a clear physiological or biological or bodily basis. When we articulate a sound, we are quite clearly performing certain operations or actions in our mouth, and I believe that, when we read silently to ourselves, although we may not actually be doing anything with our mouths, we do imagine the movements that we would be doing if we were speaking the sounds aloud – this is the reason, for example, that tongue twisters spoken only in the mind remain tongue twisters. In reading a text silently, we still feel the texture of sounds on our lips, our tongue, our teeth, at the back of our throat, on the roof of our mouth, in our nasal cavity. Our experience of one sound is therefore very different from our experience of another, since we have to do different things with and in our mouth to produce the different sounds. For example, to make a /t/ sound, we touch the teeth ridge (or alveolar ridge) with the tip of our tongue (it is an alveolar); we block the air expelled from our lungs at the teeth ridge until the pressure is strong enough and then release it with a small explosion (it is a plosive); and we do not vibrate the sound in our vocal cords (it is voiceless). In contrast, when we make a /b/ sound, we bring our lips together (it is a bilabial); we also, as for the /t/ sound, block the air expelled from our lungs, but this time at the lips (it is a plosive, too); and we do vibrate the sound in our vocal cords (it is voiced). It seems, then, that the contrast in terms of place of 116

Cognitive Stylistics

articulation (alveolar vs. bilabial) and voicing (voiceless vs. voiced) is enough to give us a sense that a /t/ is expressive of sharpness, while a /b/ is expressive of roundness. We therefore map this physical experience of sounds in what is a complex act of metaphorical reasoning onto other things, such as our sense of sharpness and roundness or of opaqueness and clarity. Moreover, since sound originates in the body, and more precisely in our most vital organ, the mouth, which is the bodily means of both communication and nourishment, the same sound – the /t/ sound in takete, for example – is experienced in precisely the same way by vastly different language communities both synchronically and diachronically: our experience of sound, in other words, is both transcultural and transhistorical. This confirms one of the fundamental claims or arguments of cognitive science in general and of cognitive linguistics in particular: that the body is fundamental in human experience; that language arises from, and manifests, our bodily experience of the world. It is precisely the capacity that we have as human beings to perform this metaphorical mapping of our physical experience of sound onto our experience of other things (such as clarity and roundness) that, I would argue, poets exploit to achieve their effects; not only in using rhyme and metre and alliteration and assonance (which are all fairly obvious), but also (and much more subtly and interestingly) in varying, for example, the number of high and low vowels that appear in different stages of a poem. This, in any case, is what my students expected of Shakespeare’s sonnet 73: that there would be significant shifts in the sound patterns in the sonnet to reflect the movement from opaqueness to clarity. Is that true? Are these expectations met?

4  Phonetic Properties of the Sonnet For reasons of space, I cannot deal here with every phonetic feature nor give an exhaustive phonetic analysis of the sonnet (although both would be necessary for a full and proper cognitive-stylistic analysis). Suffice to say, a phonetic analysis will reveal, in most cases, that the sonnet meets our expectations in terms of its phonetic properties. Instead, I want to focus on one particular feature – that of voicing. Before I do so, though, I want to acknowledge, again, the crudeness of my analysis. For a start, I have read the sonnet from my perspective as a speaker of standard English today (I come from southeast England), so that the way that I experience the sonnet (the phonetic values that I attribute to each vowel and consonant) is clearly not identical to what the speaker had in mind or to how the sonnet was experienced phonetically some four centuries ago. To provide a fuller account, I would have to present a phonetic analysis that shows how I experience the sonnet today alongside a phonetic analysis showing how (some) readers experienced the sonnet four centuries 117

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

ago. Moreover, I do not take into account the fact that different sounds in a line might have different levels of salience, depending on which position in the line they occupy – most obviously, when a sound appears in a syllable that is stressed, or when it appears in the final syllable of the line, we would expect it to have greater salience. For reasons of simplicity and economy, however, I have ignored this obvious fact and treated every sound the same, regardless of where it appears. And, finally, I do not take into consideration the phenomenon of assimilation – the fact, for example, that the /t/ sound in ‘that pig’ is often pronounced as a /p/. Instead, I read every individual sound as if it were in isolation. Nevertheless, despite these obvious flaws in my phonetic analysis, I do think that it reveals some interesting patterns that we can interpret as tendencies in the sonnet. And this is just the beginning – we quite clearly need to refine our methodology here so that we can provide much more sophisticated phonetic analyses. I have chosen to focus on the feature of voicing here because, as I have already indicated, this feature does lend itself to particularly rich metaphorical mappings. It is no coincidence that the /t/ and /k/ in takete are both voiceless consonants, nor that the /b/ and /l/ in baluba are both voiced consonants. And it is also no coincidence that, in the vast majority of the world’s languages, a clock says tick tock (or something similar), while a doorbell says ding dong (or something similar), since /t/ and /k/ are voiceless while /d/ and /ŋ/ are voiced. When asked to describe the qualities of the sound of a clock and the sound of a doorbell, people will almost invariably say that the former is clear and metallic, while the latter is somewhat less clear and muffled. The fact that our bodily experience of a voiceless consonant is different from that of a voiced consonant (with the former, we do not vibrate the vocal cords; with the latter, we do) seems to be enough for us to assign different qualities to these sounds, with the former lending itself to the quality of clarity and the latter lending itself to the quality of opaqueness. Thus, what I would expect from sonnet 73 (and this is what the majority of my students expected, too) is an increase in the proportion of voiceless consonants during the sonnet to match the movement towards clarity that we have established. And this is precisely what happens. In the first quatrain, there are 68 consonant sounds in total, 49 of which are voiced and 19 voiceless (in line two, for example, 13 of the 15 consonant sounds are voiced). In contrast, in the third quatrain, there are 63 consonant sounds in total, 37 of which are voiced and 26 voiceless (in line eleven, for example, 8 are voiced and 7 are voiceless). Therefore, while there are more voiced consonants than voiceless consonants throughout the sonnet, which reflects the preponderance of the former in normal speech, the proportion of voiceless consonants does increase quite significantly from quatrain one to quatrain three: from 27 per cent of all consonant sounds in the first quatrain to 41 per cent in the third quatrain. 118

Cognitive Stylistics

Moreover, if we take into account vowel sounds, too, then we can see this shift from voiced to voiceless even more clearly, since all vowels are voiced (we vibrate the vocal cords when we say ‘I’, for example). Clearly, though, there can be very little variation in the number of vowels in a quatrain, since every syllable space has to consist of a vowel sound, and there are only ten syllable spaces per line. What a sonneteer can do, though, is vary the length of a vowel so that the vibration is longer or shorter. If the sonnet becomes less voiced and more voiceless, then do we expect the vowels to become shorter or longer? Quite clearly, we would expect them to become shorter, since, in a short vowel, the physical act of vibration that we perform to articulate it is less prominent than it is for a long vowel. In other words, all vowels are voiced, but we can reduce or increase the prominence of that feature by varying the length of the vowel, with short vowels being less voiced than long vowels. And what we find, in fact, is that there is a marked shift in the length of vowels in sonnet 73, with quatrain one containing 15 short vowels, 10 long vowels, 14 diphthongs (which is a sound consisting of two vowel sounds, such as in thou) and 1 triphthong (which is a sound consisting of three vowel sounds, such as in choirs); and quatrain three containing 29 short vowels, 4 long vowels, 5 diphthongs and 2 triphthongs. In other words, the number of short vowels in quatrain three is almost double the number of short vowels in quatrain one. Thus, the first quatrain of sonnet 73 has a much higher density of voiced sounds than the third quatrain. Is this mere coincidence? I do not think so. Rather, it appears that the speaker of the sonnet uses sound patterns – in particular, the feature of voicing – as a rhetorical strategy to create certain effects in the addressee or reader. In the same way that, from quatrain one to quatrain three, the object of perception becomes smaller and more concrete and therefore gains in clarity, so the sounds of the sonnet shift in ways that allow us to experience quatrain three as having greater clarity than quatrain one.

5  Conclusion and Some Implications What I have attempted to do in this chapter is give an idea of what a cognitivestylistic approach to literature might look like, and I have done so by investigating how readers might experience the sounds of Shakespeare’s sonnet 73. Readers quite clearly have certain expectations of the sonnet’s phonetic properties: they expect sounds to match the sonnet’s movement towards clarity on the semantic and syntactic level. And these expectations are sometimes – though not always – met: where readers expect more short vowels in quatrain three than in quatrain one, that is precisely what they are given; and, where they expect fewer voiced consonants in quatrain three than in quatrain one, then again, that is precisely what they are given. There are two obvious 119

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

questions here that I want to deal with (and that students always ask) by way of conclusion. The first concerns whether Shakespeare, or the speaker, was consciously aware of what he was doing, of whether this was all intentional. If what is meant by that is whether Shakespeare sat down and deliberately used as many voiceless consonants in quatrain three as he could, then I do not think so. However, what I do think is that, on a largely unconscious level, he felt the rightness of certain sounds within the context of his overall textual strategy; to express this movement from opaqueness to clarity, he required also some movement on the level of sound. Some sounds simply sound clearer than others, since our physical experience of them varies considerably, and it was this distinction that he was aware of and exploited in sonnet 73 (and, incidentally, in many other sonnets in the sequence). One of the consequences of the turn to theory in literary studies has been a turning away from the author and from the notion of authorial intention in general, as if texts came into being without human control or volition. Cognitive stylistics, in providing the tools to reveal the breathtaking linguistic complexity of literary texts, enables us to talk again about such matters as creativity, imagination and genius – not as mental characteristics that only a tiny minority possess but as cognitive processes that are fundamental to what we all are as members of the human species. Shakespeare may have been particularly adept at using the sounds of language to create effects in his audience, but such a creative use of language is more or less omnipresent in everyday life – the slogan for the Eurovision Song Contest of 2011, for example, was ‘FEEL YOUR HEART BEAT’, which is remarkably ­sophisticated on a ­phonetic level. The second question concerns whether readers actually experience these shifts in the sonnet; whether, in other words, quatrain three is experienced differently from quatrain one purely on the level of sound. We can but speculate here, unfortunately. I think that sound is the most important component of the sonnet (and of poetry in general), but I do not think that it operates in isolation from meaning and syntax. Rather, through sound, a certain tone or feeling is created that remains unconscious to readers but nonetheless shapes their experience. We know that readers associate certain sounds with certain qualities (hence, the uniformity of reader expectations in terms of the sonnet), and it is therefore not absurd to claim that sound patterns have certain effects. A cluster of voiced consonants would create a different feeling or tone than a cluster of voiceless consonants, for example. Although it is impossible to prove that readers do experience different parts of the sonnet differently because different parts of the sonnet have different sound patterns (we would perhaps have to investigate neurological processes to be able to do so), we can put forward the tentative hypothesis that that is in fact the case. Readers associate certain sounds with clarity; if these sounds proliferate in one part of the sonnet but 120

Cognitive Stylistics

not in another, then is it not reasonable to assume that readers will experience a feeling of clarity in one particular part but not in the other, albeit on a profoundly unconscious level? I am acutely aware of the limitations of what I have done in this chapter, and that any proper cognitive-stylistic account of the readerly experience of sonnet 73 will be much more sophisticated in how it elicits reader expectations of sound patterns and in its phonetic analysis of the sonnet. Really, as I have already indicated, what is required is a whole book just on this one sonnet. I offer my chapter very much as a rudimentary start to this kind of work, a preliminary attempt to fathom the mysteries of sound patterns in poetry and their possible effects on readers. Cognitive stylistics, I want to argue, is an approach to literature that, in possessing a clear object of study, a principled methodology, and an explicit purpose, can help the subject to become a proper and rigorous discipline, one that can explain what we do when we read literary texts and why we read them, sometimes again and again. It is an approach that, in my experience, students find extremely interesting and rewarding, for they have something solid and definite to work with (the text’s linguistic features) and they begin to develop a framework in which to understand the way that they think and feel, in relation not only to language and literary texts, but also to their everyday experience of the natural world, as cognitive, embodied beings. We are essentially narcissistic beings, and so the opportunity to gain a fleeting glimpse of ourselves in the mirror of our literary experience is an opportunity that we seize upon with relish.

References Burke, M. (2011), Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion, London: Routledge. Köhler, W. (1929), Gestalt Psychology, New York: Horace Liveright. Richards, I. A. (1929), Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment, London: Kegan Paul. Stockwell, P. (2009), Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tsur, R. (1992), What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive? The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception, London: Duke University Press. Turner, M. (1991), Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. van Peer, W. (1986), Stylistics and Psychology, London: Croom Helm. West, D. (2013), I.A. Richards and the Rise of Cognitive Stylistics, London: Bloomsbury.

121

8

Feminist Stylistics Shades of Grey?: A Feminist Stylistic Approach to the Representation of Heterosexual Desire in E. L. James’ Fifty Shades Trilogy Clare Walsh, University of Bedfordshire

Chapter Overview Introduction 122 The Fifty Shades Trilogy 123 Previous Work on Romance and Erotic Fiction 124 Macro-level Production and Reception 125 A Cotext-sensitive Approach to Transitivity Analysis 126 Transitivity Patterns and Markers of Affect in FSoG 126 Shifting Narrative Patterns Throughout the Trilogy 129 Refreshing the Schema of Popular Romance? 131 Affective Pleasures 132 Conclusion 134

1 Introduction Feminist stylistic analyses have been most persuasive when they have focussed on the close reading of relatively short texts, such as one or more advertisements (Mills 1998; Talbot 1995; Thornborrow 1994, 1998), or selected newspaper articles (Walsh 1998, 2001). One challenge is to provide analyses of longer 122

Feminist Stylistics

texts, both literary and non-literary, connecting micro-level analyses to macrolevel contexts of production and reception. Page’s (2007) study of Bridget Jones’ Diary is useful not only for its analysis of a full-length novel, but also for its foregrounding of structures that mediate between different levels of narrative organisation. Corpus-based quantitative studies, on the other hand, can sometimes overlook the nuances of an integrational cotext-sensitive approach (Toolan 1996). Another challenge for feminist stylistics is to articulate the affective pleasures of reading popular genres, such as women’s magazines and erotic fiction written by and for women. For instance, Jeffries’ (2007) otherwise excellent study of the textual construction of the female body in women’s magazines has little to say about the pleasures such magazines afford, beyond her comment that they ‘cannot be denied’ (197).

2 The Fifty Shades Trilogy This chapter provides a critical analysis of E. L. James’ Fifty Shades trilogy (2011–12) using a feminist stylistic approach. Despite, or perhaps because of, its success as one of the best-selling trilogies in publishing history (Rogers 2012), dismissive comments have been made about its allegedly pornographic representation of sex, the limitations of the author’s style (the common mantra being that it is ‘badly written’), and the gullibility of its readers. The patronizing phrase ‘mummy porn’, which has been widely applied to the trilogy by media commentators, is typical of the low esteem in which popular fiction written by and for women has traditionally been, and continues to be, held. While admitting that this label is condescending, Katie Roiphe (Newsweek, 16 April 2012) concludes a scathing article about the first book in the trilogy by commenting that ‘what gives it its true edge of desperation, and end-of-the-world ambience, is that millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level’. Likewise, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (the Independent, 1 July 2012), a self-confessed second-wave feminist, has dismissed its readers in very un-sisterly terms as ‘vacuous yummie mummies and middle-class singletons who are clueless about its implications’. The most controversial aspect of the trilogy is its depiction of a BDSM (bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism, hereafter S/M) relationship in which the male protagonist is dominant and the female protagonist is submissive. This has been deemed by many reviewers as being inherently reactionary because it is said to eroticize and thus reinforce unequal gender relations (Flood 2012), although few of these reviewers extend their critique beyond the first novel. By applying the tools of feminist stylistics to the trilogy as a whole, this chapter will consider whether it should be viewed as entirely retrograde or whether it could be said to refresh the schema of the traditional romance genre 123

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

(Driscoll 2006: 22). The challenge for practitioners of feminist stylistics is to engage critically with popular texts while avoiding patronizing and homogenizing all female readers of such texts as passive dupes. To this end, an attempt will be made to account for the affective pleasures afforded to both readers and writers of erotic fiction, something that is often neglected in feminist stylistic analyses.

3  Previous Work on Romance and Erotic Fiction The growing body of work by feminists on heterosexual romance and erotic fiction tends to reinforce the impression that, on balance, such fiction promotes harmful or, at best, contradictory, messages (e.g. Pathey-Chavez, Clare and Youmans 1996; Sonnet 1999). Given the absence of an emancipatory discourse about heterosexual desire amongst feminists, noted by Hollway (1995), there is a danger that feminist literary and cultural criticism may be seen as antisex, and especially as anti-heterosexual sex. Segal (1992) alludes to the perception that heterosexuality was perceived amongst some second-wave feminists as ‘sleeping with the enemy’. Talbot’s (1997: 118) work on romance fiction is unusual in its attempt to account for the pleasures of reading heterosexual romance, including its positive ‘celebration of women’s heterosexual desire’. Sonnet (1999: 176) argues that, partly as a reaction against the strictures of antipornography feminists, such as Andrea Dworkin and Katherine MacKinnon, ‘[the] frisson of readers’ pleasures … is increased’. The illicit appeal of womenoriented erotic fiction is likely to be enhanced further when the sexual relationship being represented involves non-heteronormative S/M sex with its potential for performativity and transgressive play. Debates about the politics of S/M relationships have been well-rehearsed amongst gay and lesbian theorists (Ardill and O’Sullivan 2005), yet remain largely taboo in relation to heterosexuality. McClintock (1995) suggests that sadomasochism can constitute transgressive play, at least when it involves a female dominant and a male submissive. When the reverse it true, it is undoubtedly more problematic since it would seem to reify gender differences in their most polarized form. This is precisely what happens in Fifty Shades of Grey (hereafter, FSoG), the first novel in the trilogy, to the extent that it could be said to hark back to a pre-feminist era in which men were ‘real men’ and women knew their place. Yet, according to Susan Cook (2006: 121), ‘S/M parodies normative heterosexual relations, performing traditionally gendered roles to hyperbolic excess’ (my italics). An alternative reading is that gender and power differences are deliberately exaggerated in the first novel in the trilogy, wherein clichés of the genre can be said to be both heightened and overdetermined, in order to emphasize a shift to more reciprocal sexual relations in the second book, and to what some readers might regard as the ultimate triumph of post-feminist femininity in the third. 124

Feminist Stylistics

4  Macro-level Production and Reception Mills (1995) stresses the need for feminist stylistics to take account of the context of production and reception of texts. The claim that the Fifty Shades trilogy is ‘badly written’ can be answered in part by the books’ origin in a work of Twilight fan fiction written by James and serialized online as Master of the Universe under the pseudonym Snowqueens Icedragon (FSoG: 2011:  832). The charge of derivativeness misses the point, in that knowing readers of fan fiction are invited to recognize the conventions used in the source text or ‘canon’ but with telling variations (Hellekson and Busse 2006). Far from being passive dupes, such fans are active readers who take pleasure in recognizing ironic echoes of, and departures from, the original text. For instance, the trilogy stands in a subversive intertextual relationship to the young adult Twilight series’ treatment of sex, in which it is perceived as sinful and off limits until after marriage. By contrast, Christian is astonished that Ana is a virgin (FSoG: 712) and, unlike Bluebeard, to whom he is explicitly compared with irony by Ana on a number of occasions (FSoG: 2012: 211; 212; 215), he positively encourages her sexual curiosity and experimentation. Ana is thus a much more proactive heroine than Bella, the heroine of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, who is depicted as a damsel in distress in constant need of rescuing. I will argue that the collaborative nature of feedback in online fan fiction also means that the Fifty Shades trilogy bears traces of dialogue with readers critical of more traditional romance fiction, as well as an admittedly more oblique and uneasy dialogue with contemporary feminisms.1 As works of fan fiction, the books that comprise the trilogy conform to Barthes’ (1970) concept of writerly texts, thereby drawing attention to the pleasures of writing, as well as reading, such fiction. The process of production seems to have been one that was empowering for James, providing a site for the projection of her own mid-life sexual fantasies (Singh 2012) as well as being a source of creativity, subversive intertextual play and, only incidentally, profit. FSoG was first published as an e-book2 by the Australian virtual publisher The Writer’s Coffee Shop and became a viral publishing phenomenon, only then being picked up by the mainstream Random House publishers. It is thus difficult to pin the ‘faceless corporate’ label on to James. Indeed, her ordinariness is stressed in profiles and in the rare interviews that she has given to the media, in which she is quick to acknowledge her lack of literary pretensions (Brennan 2012). The constituency of those who read the books would seem to be much more varied than the label ‘mummy porn’ would suggest, especially in terms of age, the irony being that young adult readers would appear to have (re)appropriated the texts because of their explicit sexual content (Lewak 2012). 125

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

5  A Cotext-sensitive Approach to Transitivity Analysis A key tool in feminist stylistics is transitivity analysis, which draws on the Hallidayan tradition of systemic functional linguistics (Halliday 1994). This is useful in foregrounding who acts and who, or what, is acted upon in a given text. Transitivity analyses of works of popular romance fiction have shown that female protagonists tend to be portrayed as passive recipients of the actions of male protagonists (Nash 1990; Wareing 1994; Mills 1995; Pathey-Chavez, Clare and Youmans 1996; Talbot 1997). If applied in a reductive way, this approach could play into the hands of postfeminist critics, such as Camille Paglia (1990) and Katie Roiphe (1993), who deride what they term ‘victim feminism’. This is especially true when applied to works of erotic fiction that deal with a noncommercial sadomasochistic relationship between (apparently) consenting adults. Mills (1995: 157) points out that ‘transitivity like other linguistic features can mean in a variety of different ways, according to the type of context in which it is set and also the set of assumptions which the reader brings to bear on the interpretative process’. The question then becomes not whether the heroine is acted upon by the hero, but whether or not she evaluates this as a consensual and pleasurable experience. Again, Mills (ibid.: 155) refers to the contradictions surrounding romantic love, including ‘the pleasures associated with passivity and with being the acted-upon rather than the agent, as well as acknowledging the wish not to be passive and acted upon’. In order to provide a more nuanced interpretative context, transitivity analysis therefore needs to be supplemented by a focus on linguistic markers of positive and negative affect (Biber and Finegan 1989; Watson 1999), including a consideration of whether the dominant metaphors used are enabling or disenabling ones.

6  Transitivity Patterns and Markers of Affect in FSoG In the Fifty Shades trilogy, the story is narrated in the first person by the twentyone-year-old heroine Anastasia Steele, which means we are privy to her affective responses, while the responses of the hero, the 27-year-old billionaire Christian Grey, are mediated through her point of view. The only direct access we have to his perspective is through reported speech, through the frequent emails he sends to Ana, and in an epilogue to the trilogy in which the events of the novel’s opening are re-presented from his viewpoint. One might assume that the pattern of transitivity relations would be predictable in a plot centring on an S/M relationship in which the male protagonist is the dominant and the female protagonist is the submissive. However, as a close reading of the trilogy will demonstrate, the picture is more complex than this, partly because of the use of an ‘I-narrator’ 126

Feminist Stylistics

(Emmott 2002) throughout the trilogy and partly because of the shifting nature of the narrative pattern that underlies each of the three novels. Ana’s first encounter with Christian does not suggest a heroine in control of her actions, speech or emotions. Her physical abjection – ‘I ... stumble on my hands and knees in the doorway’ (FSoG: 16) – is reminiscent of Bella’s clumsiness in the Twilight series as well as of the comic scenes of abjection in Bridget Jones’ Diary (1996). This is compounded by the reader’s insight into Ana’s feelings of powerlessness and by the hesitancy and uncertainty of her speech: ‘I  murmur’ (17), ‘I stutter’ (19). She perceives her own voice as ‘weak and apologetic’ (27) and acknowledges that Christian makes her ‘feel like an errant child’ (26). Yet, despite the difference in age, wealth and status between them, and despite the fact that she is interviewing him in the imposing surroundings of Grey Enterprises Holdings Inc., Ana threatens Christian’s positive face with a number of negatively inflected questions, including the highly personal bald unmitigated question: ‘“Are you gay, Mr Grey?”’(26). She may appear to Christian to be submissive (epilogue: 1178), but the reader is cued to infer otherwise from her name (Miss Steele), her confident assertion of her aesthetic taste (18) and her negative appraisal of what she perceives to be Christian’s arrogance (22; 33; 38). Pathey-Chavez, Clare and Youmans (1996: 85) focus on the heroine’s loss of virginity as a key trope in erotic romance, marking ‘a momentous, life-defining event’. What is unusual in FSoG is that this occurs early in the story, rather than after a protracted courtship or at its denouement; and that Christian is unaware that Ana is a virgin. She describes this experience as follows: ‘He slams into me.’ ‘“Aargh!” I cry as I feel a weird pinching sensation deep inside me as he rips through my virginity’ (196, my italics). The use of the italicized material action intention verbs would seem to underline the idea of heterosexual sex as aggressive, even brutal, yet Christian is adept and enthusiastic about foreplay and is also solicitous about Ana’s feelings during intercourse: ‘“You’re so tight. You okay?” … He stays still, letting me acclimatize to the intrusive, overwhelming feeling of him inside me’ (196). Ana goes on to appraise her transition from virginity to sexual experience positively: ‘Oh I want this. I … didn’t know it could feel as good as this’ (197). More conventionally, the bitter-sweet nature of her feelings is expressed in a series of oxymorons: ‘my whole body sings with sweet agony’ as a result of ‘his slow, sensual assault’ (194, my italics), while pleasure and pain are likewise connected in her admission ‘I feel sore, deliciously sore’ (214–15). Furthermore, the experiential gap between the romantic protagonists is reduced by the revelation that Christian is also an initiate in that he has never before experienced ‘vanilla’ sex (221). These constitute subtle, yet significant, changes to the sexual initiation scene as depicted in more traditional womenoriented erotic fiction, creating an identity for Ana from the outset as a desiring subject rather than the passive object of the hero’s desire. 127

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

The performative nature of S/M sex means that the roles of submissive and dominant have the potential to be reversed. Far from being invariably sexually submissive, Ana takes the initiative to engage in fellatio on their third sexual encounter (228) and is sexually proactive on numerous other occasions early on in their relationship. Indeed, she appears to relish this reversal of conventional gender roles in a manner that seems calculated to challenge reader assumptions about the insipid nature of romance heroines: ‘I am fucking him. I am in charge’ (437); ‘I kiss him long and hard’ (578) and ‘My attack takes him by surprise’ (603). Whereas Pathey-Chavez, Clare and Youmans (1996: 87) argue that the conceptual metaphor of sexual desire is mind altering (a drug or a trance) suggests that romance heroines in particular lack control over their actions, the most common substance used in relation to Ana is ‘adrenaline’, as in the following examples: ‘desire sweeps like adrenaline through my system, waking everything in its path’ (FGoG: 603) and ‘Adrenaline turns to lust and streaks through my body’ FSF: 1047), which signifies her sexual awakening rather than representing a passive, or even soporific, experience. Likewise, while Pathey-Chavez, Clare and Youmans claim that (1996: 91) ‘women never consume men’ in female-oriented erotic fiction, Ana is said to ‘consume’ Christian on numerous occasions throughout the trilogy (FSoG: 566; Fifty Shades Darker: 308; Fifty Shades Freer: 1726; 1732). This is significant since it suggests that Christian brings out her latent animal appetites. Warner refers to the cross-fertilization between the heroine and the hero (1995: 307): ‘[he] holds up a mirror to the force of nature within her, which she is invited to accept and allow to grow’. When Christian first proposes an S/M contract, it is perhaps not surprising then that Ana is vehemently resistant to the idea that she will find this empowering: ‘And apparently it’s for my benefit, to explore my sensuality, my limits – safely – oh, please! I scoff angrily’ (292, italics in the original). Likewise, she employs a verb of negative affect when she contemplates being subjected to ritualized punishment: ‘I shudder at the thought of being flogged or whipped’ (292). These insights into her thought processes invite the reader to question any simple distinction between consensual and coercive S/M sex. For instance, when Christian spanks Ana for the first time, she reveals: ‘I want to beg him to stop. But I don’t. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction’ (ibid.). Her description of a subsequent encounter, in the aptly named Red Room of Pain, comprises a number of linguistic hedges: ‘because this is on my terms, I don’t mind the pain. It’s somehow manageable and, yes, pleasurable … even’ (594, my ­italics). These weak markers of positive affect cue the reader to infer that she is enduring, rather than enjoying, this experience. Her growing awareness that ‘[Christian] uses sex as a weapon’ (333) and that he is capable of subjecting her to ‘a punishment fuck’ (570) culminates in her decision at the end of the first novel to leave him: ‘I want none of him’ (817). 128

Feminist Stylistics

7  Shifting Narrative Patterns Throughout the Trilogy The underlying narrative pattern in FSoG, the first novel in the trilogy, is that of problem-solution and, as Hoey (1997: 87) notes, an erotic narrative that follows this pattern ‘encodes the other’s body as a means of solving a Problem in the self’. Christian’s problem is that he ‘needs’ to exorcise memories of his ‘crack whore’ mother (597) by taking as his submissive a woman who physically resembles her, and Ana just happens to satisfy this criterion. This is made explicit in a reprise of their first meeting, this time from his point of view, in which he objectifies her as an ‘alluring little piece’ and admits to violent fantasies of ‘fucking her mouth’ and of ‘spanking’ her (Epilogue: 1786; 1788). For all her apparent agency, then, Ana’s sexual awakening is thus an incidental byproduct of Christian’s desire to dominate her. She herself acknowledges this in a knowing Carteresque allusion that underlines the power differences between them: ‘Truly I am a marionette and he is the master puppeteer’ (FSoG: 692). Their conflicting goals are linguistically encoded from the outset in stereotypically gendered terms: while she wants to ‘make love’, he wants to ‘fuck … hard’ (162); while she wants to ‘sleep with him’, he prefers to sleep alone (170). He initially sees their relationship as about possession, even claiming ownership of her orgasms. According to Talbot (1997: 117), ‘The hero’s task is to teach the heroine what she secretly knows but will not admit to herself.’ Hence, Christian tells Ana: ‘You need to free your mind and listen to your body’ (FSoG: 480), except that he takes it upon himself to ‘speak for’ her bodily needs in ways that just happen to coincide with his. Sonnet (1999: 180) argues that ‘this trope of the overwhelmed body which “speaks” the “truth” of female sexual ­pleasure … replays dominant cultural ideas about sexuality as existing outside social construction’. Perhaps in response to reader perceptions that Ana is too passive in the first book, Fifty Shades Darker (hereafter, FSD), the second book in the trilogy, marks a definite shift in the underlying narrative pattern. Christian is revealed as vulnerable, himself the victim of abusive relationships as a child and adolescent, and thus he increasingly becomes the object of Ana’s concern, while she becomes the grammatical subject of predicate verbs. Her desire to ‘drag him into the light’ (FSoG: 829) connects him to the vampiric Edward Cullen of the Twilight series, but his first name hints at his potential for redemption,3 while his surname, ‘Grey’, suggests that he exists in a liminal world between darkness and light. The narrative pattern at the outset of the second book is thus goal-achievement (Hoey 1997: 88) in that Ana’s goal is to heal Christian in order to make him a suitable marriage partner. As a result, she occupies an increasingly agentive role, instructing him, for instance, on how to please her sexually (FSD: 112 ff.). Lakoff (1987: 161) bemoans the fact that ‘we appear to have no metaphors for a healthy mutual lust’. An innovative attempt is made by James 129

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

to map out an alternative erotic discourse based on a language of reciprocal desire. For instance, Ana refers to her enjoyment of ‘possessing [Christian], possessing me’ (FSD: 199). The experience of sexual orgasm is even expressed in quasi-religious terms at one point: ‘my name is benediction on his lips as he finds his release’ (FSD: 309). The extent to which Ana has effected a transformation in him is evident in her reflection: ‘I just want to enjoy the quiet serene afterglow of making love with Christian Grey, because that’s what we’ve done: gentle, sweet love-making’ (FSD: 309, italics in the original). This contrasts markedly with the Christian of the first novel, a ‘hollow self’ (Tainio 1994) through whom desire goes like a force of nature. From this point on, the story conforms to the opposing character trajectories identified by Pathey-Chavez, Clare and Youmans (1996: 101): ‘the woman becomes sexual, the man learns how to cherish emotion’. Thus, Ana grows to enjoy ‘fucking’4: ‘It’s so raw, so carnal, making me so wanton’ (604), while Christian declares his love (449) and is at one point reduced to a state of tearful abjection (525 ff.). Modleski (1982: 45) foregrounds the element of ‘revenge fantasy’ in heterosexual romance, which manifests itself in a desire to bring a powerful man, literally in this case, to his knees. Ana’s reading of Christian’s transformation is more utopian, not to say literary: ‘it strikes me that he’s turned from Hardy’s Alec to Angel, debasement to high idea in such a short space of time’ (FSD, 342). Their reversal of roles is reflected playfully in their respective email signatures; his is ‘Completely & Utterly Smitten’ (487), while hers is ‘Sex Mad and Insatiable’ (488). Ana tells Christian: ‘“I think I’m doing a good job in taming you”’ (447), thereby underscoring for the reader the ubiquitous and consoling myth that a woman can civilize a dangerous man if she loves him enough. In this way, the pornographic plot that underpins the first novel is transformed into a recognisably erotic plot in the second. Throughout Fifty Shades Freer (hereafter, FSF), the final book in the trilogy, a desire arousal–desire fulfilment pattern (Hoey 1997: 91) prevails to the apparent mutual satisfaction of both protagonists, although with inevitable obstacles along the way to increase narrative tension and suspense. The significance of the title is that Ana frees Christian from his personal demons, while he frees her from any residual sexual inhibitions. Interestingly, unlike in more conventional romance fiction, marriage does not bring closure to the patriarchal plot but seems to mark the beginning of its subversion (Ana refuses to take the marital vow of obedience, FSF: 883). She blossoms into a post-feminist5 heroine who confronts and vanquishes a series of romantic antagonists who stand in the way of her ‘happily ever after’ (FSF: 819). The first antagonist is one of Christian’s emotionally damaged ex-submissives, Leila Williams. The second is the false surrogate mother, Mrs Lincoln, whom Ana insists on calling ‘Mrs Robinson’ in a nod to the Mike Nichols’ film The Graduate (1967). The final antagonist is the aptly named Jack Hyde, Ana’s predatory and misogynistic boss, who 130

Feminist Stylistics

represents Christian’s demonic double and the embodiment of what he might have become had Ana not rescued him from himself. In a scene reminiscent of the ending of Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Bloody Chamber’, a gun-toting Ana shoots Jack and rescues her sister-in-law (FSF: 1623). The book ends with the subversive message that ‘kinky fuckery’ and motherhood are by no means incompatible. As Pathey-Chavez, Clare and Youmans (1996: 98) note, ‘Sexuality becomes romance heroines’ (my italics).

8  Refreshing the Schema of Popular Romance? Montoro (2007) argues that the central pleasure of reading what she terms ‘cappuccino fiction’ or ‘chick lit’ is that its heroines conform to a relatively fixed social schema with which female readers can sympathize or even empathize. The pleasure of reading the Fifty Shades trilogy would seem to be not only that Ana departs from this schema, but that, as a result, readers are taken into an illicit sub-cultural world of S/M sex with which most will be unfamiliar. This world, with its own coded language (safewords, FSoG: 285), sex toys (such as the silver balls, ibid.: 588) and fetishistic rituals, could hardly be further from the safe coffee-shop setting of cappuccino novels. At one point, while reflecting on her tacit agreement to Christian’s proposal of an S/M relationship, Ana imagines how her nineteenth-century fictional forebears would have responded: ‘Elizabeth Bennet would be outraged, Jane Eyre too frightened, and Tess would succumb, just as I have’ (FSoG: 368). Yet, unlike Tess, Ana is not seduced against her will, nor does she ultimately pay a heavy price for her alleged sexual transgressions. Instead, at least within the confines of the intimate sphere, she satisfies the criteria by which Sonnet (1999: 179) defines a genuinely proactive romantic heroine: ‘one who is desirous, initiating, curious, controlling and self-possessed’. While Lee in the film Secretary (dir., Shainberg 2002)6 is drawn to an S/M relationship because she is emotionally and psychologically damaged, this is not true of Ana, who we learn has had a happy childhood and adolescence. She chooses to embark on the relationship with Christian in a spirit of sexual adventure to test her own limits for pleasurable pain, but she is equally quick to withdraw consent when she views the sex as punitive in intent. Sexuality as depicted in the trilogy does not, however, exist outside wider unequal power structures. Christian’s controlling tendencies in the bedroom extend to every aspect of Ana’s life: her clothes, her diet, her friendships, the car she drives and so on. As Pathey-Chavez, Clare and Youmans (1996: 94) point out, ‘In the world of women’s romance novels, violent, angry and dangerous men are attractive men. Some characters are even frankly sociopathic, careening unpredictably between anger and good humor’. This is an accurate description of Christian, whose mood swings Ana has to continue to manage carefully even 131

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

after she has transformed him into a more considerate lover: ‘I want to make some quip about being objectified and oppressed, but hold my tongue, uncertain of his mood’ (FSF: 997). As a spirited heroine, she often resists his efforts to constrain her choices, for instance, by expressing her reservations about his purchase of her clothes: ‘I’m not sure about accepting money for clothes. It feels wrong.’ I shift uncomfortably, the word ‘ho’ rattling round my head. ‘I want to lavish money on you, let me buy you some clothes. I may need you to accompany me to functions, and I want you dressed well. I’m sure your salary, when you do get a job, won’t cover the kind of clothes I’d like you to wear.’ (FSoG: 178–9) While Ana’s unease about this seems readily assuaged by Christian’s reasoning, the reader may be less easily persuaded, especially given the implication that he views her appearance as a reflection on him. Even more sinister is the fact that Christian’s other ‘gifts’, such as her BlackBerry, MacBook Pro and iPad, are not just instruments of seduction, but also of surveillance. Ana uses humorous banter in an attempt to diffuse his tendency to employ technology to track her movements, at one point addressing him in an email as ‘Overbearing Megalomaniac’ (FSF: 1125), yet his stalking behaviour persists. Furthermore, the increasing agency Ana experiences in her personal life is in inverse proportion to her growing, albeit reluctant, dependence on Christian in her professional life. He deliberately undermines her attempts to assert her independence in the workplace by buying up the small publishing company for which she works. Her one overtly feminist gesture is her decision to retain her own surname at work after marriage, but she capitulates on this all too readily when Christian asks her to do so (FSF: 1112). As she had anticipated, this undermines her integrity in the eyes of her work colleagues. Like Bridget Jones, Ana thus ‘overwrites professional development with personal desire’ (Page 2007: 103). At the trilogy’s end, she is absorbed by the demands of motherhood and domestic life, thereby ultimately reinforcing the conservatism of the traditional romance schema.

9  Affective Pleasures What, then, are the pleasures for readers of reading such apparently retro-sexist7 texts? These would appear to stem in part from the transgressive nature of their representations of heterosexual desire and sexuality. Radway (1997: 142) comments on the enduring appeal of works of popular fiction: ‘Whether cheap fiction books were to produce the skin-crawling sensations of fear, the upwelling tears of pathos, the erotic excitements of romance, or the bated breath of suspense, they 132

Feminist Stylistics

were picked up precisely because they were successful at moving the body and provoking the emotions’ (my italics). Thurston (1987: 10) alludes to a 1985 survey of female romance readers, which found that 70 per cent of respondents found the sex scenes sexually arousing. More specifically, Cook (2006: 125) refers to the tendency of contemporary mainstream culture to appropriate deviance. In the case of the Fifty Shades trilogy, this entails a kind of ‘queering’ of heterosexuality that injects subversive potential into the genre of popular romance. This in turn accords with a post-Sex & The City popular emancipatory discourse of heterosexuality. Whelehan (2010: 69) refers to ‘our postmodern identification with the popular world around us’ and suggests that cultural capital accrues to those who are familiar with popular texts. Such is the phenomenal popularity of the first novel in the Fifty Shades trilogy that it has come to be known amongst some groups of women readers as ‘the book’ (Schuster 2012). Evidence from online discussion groups would suggest that talk about its S/M plot has become a guilty pleasure amongst women of all ages and in a wide range of different cultural contexts, however critical they might be of its perceived literary shortcomings. Jauss (1982[1977]: 23) refers to the mode of emotion associated with ‘awaken[ing] memories of that which was already read’. The structuring intertext of the Fifty Shades trilogy is the ubiquitous ‘Beauty and the Beast’ myth, which Warner (1994: 274) traces back to a second century story by Apuleius, through transcultural folk and fairy tales about animal bridegrooms, to contemporary film versions of the story such as Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991). The contemporary young adult Twilight series of books and films fits into this tradition, albeit by introducing a paranormal twist to the tale. Diamond (2011: 42) argues that ‘The presence of the supernatural provides a narrative space for a female sexuality that is neither the passive, asexual “good girl” promoted by conservative discourses of adolescent sexuality, nor the specularised, sex object that has become the commercial representation of female (hetero)sexuality under the influence of so-called “raunch culture” (Levy 2005)’. Readers familiar with the Twilight series will no doubt recognise that its implicit treatment of sex, but with a hero who is literally a ‘beast’ (a vampire), is neatly inverted in the Fifty Shades trilogy in a grown-up narrative in which sex is treated explicitly, but with a hero who is, at least initially, a metaphorical beast (a sadist). The trilogy is, in effect, an adulterated work of cross-over het slash fiction,8 with all the subversive intertextual playfulness this implies. As Hermansson (2001: 9) points out, this kind of intertextual engagement is not necessarily dialogic in a Baktinian sense. Indeed, in its ultimate failure to unsettle the ‘master plot’ beyond the confines of the bedroom, the Fifty Shades trilogy would seem to fit Hermansson’s definition of ‘monologic intertextuality’ (ibid.). Such apparently non-interrogative intertextuality can still, however, yield writerly and readerly jouissance (Barthes 1973). The success of the Fifty Shades trilogy challenges a number of long-held assumptions about the gendered nature of erotic discourse, including the claim 133

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

by Pathey-Chavez, Clare and Youmans (1996: 100) that female readers evince ‘a distinct dispreference for the episodic sexuality celebrated by men-oriented erotica’. The trilogy does indeed include a high density of episodic sex scenes, but the possible shame that the reading of such sexually explicit material might induce in women is offset by the advent of e-reader technology, which enables them to disguise this fact in public spaces.9 Historically, those feminist cultural critics who have defended popular romance fiction have almost always insisted that readers of the genre are unlikely to conflate the fantasy world represented in these texts and the real world (Radway 1984; Krentz 1992). This distinction is rendered problematic by James’ novels, since she refers to emails received from readers, from those of university age to women in their nineties, who have claimed that the books have improved their sex lives and have even saved their marriages (Singh 2012). This gives a whole new meaning to the concept of the ‘embodied’ pleasures of reading popular fiction.10

10 Conclusion As I hope to have shown from a close reading using the tools of feminist stylistics in a co(n)text sensitive way, the Fifty Shades trilogy taken as a whole does not endorse female sexual passivity, in spite of the centrality of the S/M plot, but instead celebrates heterosexual experimentation that is playful and mutually consensual. In some ways, the trilogy is schema refreshing in that it extends what is sayable in women-oriented erotic fiction. The first novel, FSoG, sets up a binary model of asymmetrical gendered power relations only to deconstruct this in the subsequent two novels in favour of more equitable relations between the romantic protagonists, at least within the intimate sphere. The trilogy as a whole is, therefore, generically hybrid, in that it redraws the contested boundaries between the discourses of pornography, erotica and romance in ways that would seem to have proved liberating for huge numbers of female readers of all ages. I have attempted to articulate some of the affective pleasures, both sensual and emotional, that the trilogy is likely to afford to female readers, although a more fully developed erotic poetics is needed to account for the appeal of texts wherein these pleasures are not primarily aesthetic. For good or ill, the phenomenal success of the trilogy has led to a flowering of women-oriented erotic fiction (641 e-books were tagged under ‘Fifty Shades’ on Amazon at the time of writing), and it will be interesting to see whether these texts manage to build upon James’ innovative attempts to map out a language of reciprocal heterosexual desire. Much more problematic is the trilogy’s portrayal of gender relations beyond the bedroom and especially in the workplace. Under the seductive guise of transgressive fictions with a proactive heroine who unashamedly asserts her sexual subjectivity, the trilogy harbours a fugitive sub-text that is reactionary in 134

Feminist Stylistics

terms of its gender politics. While Christian is transformed by the soft power of femininity into a thoughtful lover and attentive husband and father, his sociopathic tendencies to control Ana’s friendships and career ambitions remain unchecked. The implication is that ‘active sexuality is not the path to full female liberation’ (Thurston 1987: 140). Indeed, the trilogy dramatizes the difficulties for women of achieving professional integrity in a relationship with a controlling and financially powerful man. Ana expends so much time and effort channelling her emotional energy into saving Christian from himself that she has little time left to devote to pursuing the alternative life goals of self-definition and social responsibility (Whelehan 2010: 68). The trilogy therefore depicts a triumph for post-feminist femininity, which ultimately proves to be a defeat for feminism.

Notes 1. As in the case of cappuccino fiction, the trilogy sets up a dialogue ‘between female characters and feminist beliefs and values’ (Montoro 2007: 74). This is achieved in Ana’s case through the device of warring split selves (Emmott 2002). Ana’s tutting ‘subconscious’, with her ‘half-moon specs’ (FSOG: 108), appears to represent the voice of a killjoy old-style feminism, while her hedonistic ‘inner goddess’ represents the voice of a life-affirming post-feminism, urging her to embrace a deviant sexuality. Needless to say, the latter gets all the best lines. 2. FSoG was the first e-book to sell one million copies (Thorpe 2012). 3. I would like to acknowledge my debt to Nicola Darwood for this insight into the significance of Christian’s first name. 4. The ‘graphic viscosity’ (Riley 2005: 99) of this verb contrasts starkly with the coy anatomical euphemism ‘down there’ frequently employed by Ana to describe her genitalia throughout the first book (FSoG: 185; 222; 541; 733; 786) and the mild exclamations ‘Oh my’ (119) and ‘Holy cow’ (196) used somewhat incongruously in anticipation of a range of sexually deviant acts in which she engages. 5. Ana could be said to be a ‘post-feminist’ heroine in that she manages to reconcile femininity and the transgressive force of an active female sexuality. 6. Lee’s sadistic boss in Secretary is called Edward Grey. 7. This is a term coined by Judith Williamson (2003) in order to describe the way in which ‘sexism’ has re-emerged in contemporary media texts under the cover of period setting or style. However, it can usefully be extended to all texts which exhibit nostalgia for a time when gender roles were more clear-cut. 8. ‘Slash’ fiction is the name given to fan fiction, predominantly written and read by women, which extends an established canon by imagining a homoerotic relationship between its leading characters, such as Star Trek’s Captain Kirk and Spock (Hellekson and Busse 2006). What is unusual about the Fifty Shades trilogy is that it takes a chaste relationship between the leading characters in the canon, in this case Bella and Edward in the Twilight series, and re-imagines it as a heterosexually transgressive one. 9. New technologies are not only transforming reading practices, but are also beginning to require a re-evaluation of gendered reading preferences. 10. The sex toys alluded to throughout the trilogy have become successful commodity spin offs (Berrill 2012).

135

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

References Alibhai-Brown, Y. (2012), ‘Do women really want to be so submissive?’, Independent, 1 July 2012. Ardill, S. and O’Sullivan, S. (2005), ‘Upsetting an applecart: Difference, desire and lesbian sadomasochism’, Feminist Review, 80: 98–126. Barthes, R. (1970), S/Z: An Essay, trans. R. Miller, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Barthes, R. (1973), The Pleasure of the Text, trans. R. Miller, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Beauty and the Beast (1991), DVD, directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, California: Walt Disney Pictures. Berrill, A. (2012), ‘Prepare for a very happy Christmas: Advance sales of Fifty Shades Of Grey sex toys go through the roof as frisky fans snap up 6,000 pairs of love balls in one day’, The Mail, 6 November. Biber, D. and Finegan, E. (1989), ‘Styles of stance in English: Lexical and grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect’, Text, 9 (1): 93–124. Brennan, Z. (2012), ‘The Shy Housewife behind Fifty Shades of Grey’, The Telegraph, 7 July. Carter, A. (1979), ‘The bloody chamber’, in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, 7–41, London: Vintage. Cook, S. (2006), ‘Subversion without limits: From Secretary’s transgressive S/M to Exquisite Corpse’s subversive sadomasochism’, Discourse, 28 (1): 121–41. Driscoll, C. (2006), ‘One true pairing: The romance of pornography and the pornography of romance’, in K. Hellekson and K. Busse (eds), Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, 19–36, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Co, Inc. Publishers. Emmott, C. (2002), ‘“Split selves” in fiction and medical “life stories”: Cognitive linguistic theory and narrative practice’, in E. Semino and J. Culpepper (eds), Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, 153–82, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co. Fielding, H. (1996), Bridget Jones’ Diary, London: Picador. Flood, A. (2012), ‘Fifty Shades of Grey condemned as “manual for sex torture”’, The Guardian, 24 August 2012. The Graduate (1967), Directed by Mike Nichols, USA: Embassy Pictures. Halliday, M. (1994), Functional Grammar, 2nd edn, New York: Routledge. Hellekson, K. and Busse, K., eds (2008), Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers. Hermansson, C. (2001), Reading Feminist Intertextuality Through Bluebeard Stories, Lewiston and New York: Edwin Merlin. Hoey, M. (1997), ‘The organisation of narratives of desire: A study of first-person erotic fantasies’, in K. Harvey and C. Shalom (eds), Language and Desire: Encoding Sex, Romance and Intimacy, 85–105, London: Routledge. Hollway, W. (1995), ‘Feminist discourses and women’s heterosexual desire’, in S. Wilkinson and C. Kitzinger (eds), Feminism and Discourse: Psychological Perspectives, 86–105, London: Sage. James, E. L. (2011), Fifty Shades of Grey, London: Random House Digital. James, E. L. (2012), Fifty Shades Duo: Fifty Shades Darker/Fifty Shades Freed, London: Random House Digital. Jauss, H. R. (1982[1977]), Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Jeffries, L. (2007), Textual Construction of the Female Body: A Critical Discourse Approach, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Krentz, J. A., ed. (1992), Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of Romance, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.

136

Feminist Stylistics Lakoff, G. (1987), Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. What Categories Reveal About the Mind, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Levy, A. (2005), Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, London: Simon & Schuster. Lewak, D. (2012), ‘The hot sex text’, the New York Post, 12 July. McClintock, A. (1995), Imperial leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context, London: Routledge. McClintock, A. (2004), ‘Maid to order: Commercial S/M and gender power’, in P. Church Gibson (ed.), More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power, London: British Film Institute. Mills, S. (1995), Feminist Stylistics, London: Routledge. Mills, S. (1998), ‘Post-feminist text Analysis’, Language and Literature, 7 (3): 235–53. Modleski, T. (1982), Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women, Hamden, CT: Archon Books. Montoro, R. (2007), ‘The stylistics of cappuccino fiction: A socio-cognitive Perspective’, in M. Lambrou and P. Stockwell (eds), Contemporary Stylistics, 68–80, London: Continuum. Nash, W. (1990), Language in Popular Fiction, London: Routledge. Page, R. (2007), ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary and Feminist Narratology’, in M. Lambrou and P. Stockwell (eds), Contemporary Stylistics, 93–105, London: Continuum. Paglia, C. (1990), Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pathey-Chavez, G., Clare, L. and Youmans, M. (1996), ‘Watery passion: The struggle between hegemony and sexual liberation in erotic fiction for women’, Discourse & Society, 7 (1): 77–106. Radway, J. (1984), Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Radway, J. (1997), A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle Class Desire, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Riley, D. (2005), Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Rogers, S. (2012), ‘The top 100 bestselling books of all time: How does Fifty Shades of Grey compare?’, the Guardian, Datablog (accessed 30 November 2012). Roiphe, K. (1993), The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism, London: Hamish Hamilton. Roiphe, K. (2012), ‘Spanking goes mainstream’, Newsweek, 16 April 2012. Secretary (2002), DVD, directed by Steven Shainberg, Los Angeles: Lions Gate Entertainment. Segal, L. (1992), Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate, London: Virago. Schuster, D. (2012), ‘Mamma Mia!’, the New York Post, 28 February. Singh, A. (2012), ‘50 Shades of Grey? Just an old-fashioned love story, says E.L. James’, The Telegraph, 6 September. Sonnet, E. (1999), ‘Erotic fiction by women for women: The pleasures of postfeminist heterosexuality’, Sexualities, 2 (2): 167–87. Talbot, M. (1995), ‘A synthetic sisterhood: False friends in a teenage magazine’, in K. Hall and M. Bucholtz (eds), Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self, 143–65, London and New York: Routledge. Talbot, M. (1997), ‘“An explosion deep inside her”; Women’s desire and popular romance fiction’, in K. Harvey and C. Shalom (eds), Language and Desire: Encoding Sex, Romance and Intimacy, 106–22, London: Routledge. Tainio, L. (1994), ‘The bodily self and the hollow self: Finnish everyday stories about the opposite sex’, paper presented at the Third Berkeley Women and Language Conference (April), Berkeley, CA.

137

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Thornborrow, J. (1994), ‘The woman, the man and the filofax: Gender positions in advertising’, in S. Mills (ed.), Gendering the Reader, 128–52, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Thornborrow, J. (1998), ‘Playing hard to get: Metaphor and representation in the discourse of car advertisements’, Language and Literature, 7 (3): 254–72. Thorpe, V. (2012), ‘Why does Fifty Shades of Grey turn British women on?’, Observer, 30 June. Thurston, C. (1987), The Romance Revolution: Erotic Novels for Women and the Quest for a New Sexual Identity, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. Toolan, M. (1996), Total Speech: An Integrational Linguistic Approach to Language, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Walsh, C. (1998), ‘Gender and mediatized political discourse: A case study of press coverage of Margaret Beckett’s campaign for the Labour leadership in 1994’, Language and Literature, 7 (3): 199–214. Walsh, C. (2001), Gender and Discourse: Language and Power in Politics, the Church and Organisations, Harlow: Longman. Wareing, S. (1994), ‘And then he kissed her: The reclamation of female characters to submissive roles in contemporary fiction’, in K. Wales (ed.), Feminist Linguistics in Literary Criticism, 117–36, Woodbridge, SK: Boydell & Brewer. Warner, M. (1994), From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, London: Vintage. Watson, G. (1999), ‘Evidentiality and affect: A quantitative approach’, Language and Literature, 8 (3): 217–40. Williamson, J. (2003), ‘Sexism with an alibi’, the Guardian, 31 May. Whelehan, I. (2010), ‘Introduction’ to R. Montoro ‘the stylistics of cappuccino fiction: A socio-cognitive perspective’, in M. Lambrou and P. Stockwell (eds), Contemporary Stylistics, 68–9, London: Continuum.

138

9

Corpus Stylistics Michaela Mahlberg, University of Birmingham

Chapter Overview Introduction 139 Corpus Linguistics 141 Computational Stylistics and the Digital Humanities 144 Corpus Stylistic Starting Points for Analysis 145 The Suspension as a Linguistic Unit 148 Conclusions 153

1 Introduction Corpus stylistics employs methods from corpus linguistics to study literary texts. These methods are computer-assisted and enable the retrieval and quantification of linguistic phenomena in electronic texts. The term ‘corpus stylistics’ has only become popular over the past decade, although computer-assisted studies of literary texts have a long tradition spanning different fields. In this chapter, I want to argue that ‘corpus stylistics’ can usefully serve to indicate a particular approach to literary stylistics that is not only methodologically but also theoretically motivated. The objects of study in corpus stylistics are literary texts. A literary text can be seen both as an example of language and as a work of art, so it can be the basis for linguistic description as well as literary appreciation. According to Spitzer (1948), the relationship between linguistic observation and literary insight is a cyclical one. Each provides both motivation and explanation for the other. With the descriptive apparatus that corpus linguistics adds to the observation of linguistic phenomena, the ‘philological circle’ that Spitzer refers 139

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

to can be extended to a corpus stylistic circle, as illustrated in Figure 9.1, where corpus methods open up an additional perspective on the linguistic analysis. This ‘corpus stylistic circle’ emphasizes an observation that Sinclair (1991: 100) makes very pointedly: ‘[T]he language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once.’ Corpus methods focus on the forms by which linguistic phenomena are realized and provide quantitative information on their occurrences and relationships. Because of this focus on form and the textual surface, it might be argued that corpus stylistics takes us back to debates in stylistics that questioned the value of quantitative information in the analysis of texts. Cognitive approaches in stylistics emphasize that literary meaning is not inherent to the text but is made in the mind of the reader, where textual cues interact with the reader’s background knowledge. As Stockwell (2006: 747) puts it, ‘[t]he object of stylistic analysis (the literary work as opposed to the material literary text) comes into existence only when read.’ Stylistics provides the tools to systematically aim to describe the relationships between textual cues and literary effects. Corpus linguistic methods can help this systematicity (cf. also Stubbs 2005; O’Halloran 2007). But the way in which corpus methods are employed is also situated within a theoretical and interpretative context. In this article, I first outline fundamental principles of corpus linguistics (Section 2) and situate corpus stylistics in the context of related fields (Section 3),

Figure 9.1  The corpus stylistic circle (Mahlberg 2013: 12), reproduced from Corpus Stylistics and Dickens’s Fiction by Michaela Mahlberg. Reproduced with permission of Routledge in the format Republish in a book via Copyright Clearance Center 140

Corpus Stylistics

before setting out to identify different aims and methodological starting points for what might be called ‘corpus stylistic’ analyses of literary texts (Section 4). Section 5 will then illustrate some of these methodological principles.

2  Corpus Linguistics ‘Corpora’ are large collections of computer-readable texts. On the basis of corpora, linguistic phenomena can be studied with the help of computational tools. Such tools make it possible to retrieve quantitative information and display linguistic data in a variety of formats. In our increasingly digital world some basic corpus linguistic principles can already be illustrated with the example of ‘word clouds’. Figure 9.2 has been produced with Wordle, a ‘toy for generating “word clouds”’. Such ‘clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text’ (Feinberg 2013: online), so word clouds provide a quantitative view on words in texts. Implicit in the way in which word clouds display texts is the distinction between content and function words. Word clouds typically focus on content words, so Figure 9.2 specifically highlights names (Elizabeth, Darcy, Bennet, Jane) and titles (Mr, Mrs, Miss). In contrast, Figure 9.3 shows the top of a ‘word list’ of Pride and Prejudice. Word lists, generated with standard corpus tools such as WordSmith Tools (Scott 2014) or AntConc (Anthony 2014), typically list words in frequency order. In Figure 9.3, the frequency is given in the column ‘Freq.’ and the column ‘N’ gives the rank of the word in the frequency list. The definite article, the, is the most frequent word (rank 1, frequency 4,331) and all 20 items shown in Figure 9.3 are

Figure 9.2  Word cloud for Pride and Prejudice, created with Wordle http://www.wordle.net/ (accessed July 2014) 141

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Figure 9.3  Top 20 words in a frequency list for Pride and Prejudice, created with WordSmith Tools (Scott 2014) function words. The two very prominent items from the word cloud, Mr and Elizabeth, only occur at rank 26 (frequency 786) and 33 (frequency 597) in the word list. This very simple example illustrates a basic principle of corpus linguistics. Corpus linguistic research is essentially comparative (cf. also TogniniBonelli 2001). By counting words – or quantifying linguistic phenomena more generally – they can be compared across texts. Typically, frequency lists will figure function words at the top, whereas content words appear further down the list but are more informative in terms of the topics and themes of a text or corpus. These basic observations are also relevant to how research in both computational stylistics and corpus stylistics approaches texts (see Sections 3 and 4, respectively). In corpus linguistics, linguistic features are often analysed in terms of their distribution across different types of texts, or registers are described in view of 142

Corpus Stylistics

the features that differentiate them from one another. Hence, corpora that are used to account for such variation also contain literary texts; see, for instance, the British National Corpus. In their grammar, Biber et al. (1999) include fictional prose as one of the four main registers that they use to describe the distributional features of grammatical phenomena. Another corpus linguistic display format used for comparisons is a concordance. Figure 9.4 shows a concordance sample for the node word room. The node appears in the centre with a specified amount of context on the left and on the right. This ‘key word in context’ (KWIC) display highlights patterns in which words occur. The concordance lines in Figure 9.4 are sorted on the first and second word on the left of the node. Figure 9.4 only contains 13 of the 112 occurrences of room in Pride and Prejudice. Among the patterns of room are walk/walked/walking about the room/up and down the room and entered the room. The context shows how the practical actions described by the patterns are associated with character information; for example, line 45 looking grave and anxious, line 49 in earnest mediation or line 54 with an air more stately than usual. In corpus linguistic studies, concordances are typically run across several texts to identify patterns that hold across a register or are relevant to the language more generally. Concordance analysis as a method had a rather revolutionary impact on lexicography, where patterns identified in concordances are included in dictionaries to distinguish senses of entries (Sinclair 1987).

40 ow my example, and take a turn about the room. I assure you it is very refreshin 41 terwards she got up and walked about the room. Her figure was elegant, and she w

42 rest of the evening in walking about the room, speaking occasionally to one of h 43 s, and then getting up, walked about the room. Elizabeth was surprised, but said 44 gs; and he was obliged to walk about the room, while Elizabeth tried to unite ci 45 rectly. Her father was walking about the room, looking grave and anxious. “Lizzy 46 as he walked with quick steps across the room, “is your opinion of me! This is t 47 he had soon felt acquainted with all the room; and, as to Miss Bennet, he could

48 r their choosing to walk up and down the room together, with either of which mot 49 ear her, and was walking up and down the room in earnest meditation, his brow co 50 seen; and as she walked up and down the room, endeavouring to compose herself, 51 rcy’s delight, when she should enter the room. “And this is always the way with

52 at some of the gentlemen would enter the room. She wished, she feared that the m 53 to what Elizabeth felt. She entered the room with an air more than usually ungr 54 e joined by Mr. Collins, who entered the room with an air more stately than usua 55 terwards the three gentlemen entered the room. Colonel Fitzwilliam, who led the

56 my dear Mr. Bennet,” as she entered the room, “we have had a most delightful ev 57 e stairs, and in a moment he entered the room. All Elizabeth’s anger against him

Figure 9.4  Concordance sample of 18 out of 112 occurrences of room in Pride and Prejudice 143

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

For the relationship between corpus linguistics and corpus stylistics, it is important to highlight the following at this stage. Corpus linguistic studies are mainly interested in generalizations about linguistic phenomena that can be based on quantitative information and that hold across a number of texts, a register, or the mainstream of a language. From this point of view, literary texts are seen as a register and not as individual texts. As Sinclair (2007: 3f.) points out, ‘a distinctive literary text is just not worth including in a general corpus because it will disappear below the waves since its textual patterns are not echoed in other texts’. Corpus stylistic studies, in contrast, are also interested in the meanings of individual texts, the patterns that are relevant to a particular text or even linguistic phenomena that are unique to a text. Still, I want to argue that corpus linguistics fundamentally highlights that a strict distinction between ‘language’ and ‘literature’ does not hold. As the corpus linguistic circle illustrates, the distinction is a matter of different emphasis in the application of corpus linguistic methods: searching for generalizations that hold across a large number of texts or the focus on an individual text.

3  Computational Stylistics and the Digital Humanities Corpus stylistics can be situated within the wider context of the digital humanities, wherein research is concerned with the accessibility and preservation of physical artefacts and archives as well as born-digital data. The availability of digital data makes it possible to support traditional humanities approaches through computer-assisted methods. At the same time, new formats of data open up possibilities for new methods in the humanities. Corpus stylistics clearly makes a contribution in this area. Although the term ‘corpus stylistics’ has only gained popularity rather recently, the application of computer-assisted methods to the analysis of literary texts has a long tradition (Hockey 2004) with corpus stylistics relating to literary computing and computational stylistics. Similar to corpus linguistics, computational stylistics uses methods to quantify and compare linguistic phenomena. Through comparisons, computational stylistics characterizes and classifies texts (Burrows 2004; Hoover 2013). In such comparisons, specific emphasis is typically placed on the most common words, as illustrated by Burrows’ (1987) study on Austen. Burrows (1987) employs a number of statistical measures to show how highly frequent words differentiate idiolects of characters, identify relationships between characters, and can be used to compare dialogue and narrative passages. Research on authorship attribution also typically focuses on the most common words. According to Hoover (2007: 176), stylometric techniques ‘assume that word frequencies are largely outside the author’s conscious control because they result from habits that are stable enough to create a verbal fingerprint’. A method that is often used in 144

Corpus Stylistics

computational stylistics to deal with common words is principal component analysis (PCA). To account for relationships between variables, PCA reduces an initial set of variables to a smaller number of composite variables. An example is Craig’s (2008) study of Shakespeare’s characters. Craig (2008) studies the fifty characters that speak more than 3,000 words. Focusing on the fifty most frequent words in this corpus, he uses PCA to identify relationships between characters. For instance, female characters are shown to be similar in that they use I and me, features of individuality, more than we and our, which characterize impersonal, collective authority. Studies in computational stylistics that investigate the variation of a set of features across texts are similar to research in corpus linguistics that studies register variation with the help of statistical methods (cf. Biber 1988). The main difference between the two approaches is that in computational stylistics the set of texts under analysis is defined by literary concerns. Variation is typically studied within texts by the same author or texts that are grouped together on the basis of literary criteria. In corpus linguistics, the interest is in variation between registers. Features are studied not because they may be idiosyncrasies of a particular author but because they highlight the similarities between texts within a register.

4  Corpus Stylistic Starting Points for Analysis Comparison plays a crucial role in both corpus linguistics and computational stylistics. It is also important to corpus stylistics, which can draw on methods from both fields. What makes corpus stylistics distinctive is the aim with which computer-assisted methods are employed. Corpus stylistics is concerned with meanings in texts. In terms of Leech’s (2008) distinction between ‘descriptive’ and ‘explanatory’ stylistics, it falls within the realm of the latter: corpus stylistics does not only describe linguistic features but explains their functions in the creation of textual meanings. For literary texts, meaning is best captured by focusing on an individual text. In corpus stylistics, the focus on a particular text or text extract is often achieved through comparisons across the whole text or with different types of reference corpora. Because of its explanatory aims, corpus stylistics seeks links to literary criticism and takes account of the interpretation of literary texts in context. Corpus stylistic studies can take a range of different starting points. A particular use of a word or phrase in a text extract can be analysed by comparing its meaning in the text extract with its typical patterns in a reference corpus. Louw (1993) illustrates this method of ‘matching texts against corpora’ with an example from David Lodge’s novel Small World. Louw (1993) shows how the meaning of bent on in the novel differs from its meaning in a reference corpus, thus creating an impression of irony. This comparison of an individual instance with 145

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

a more general pattern in the language as a whole (as represented by a reference corpus) relates to the notion of ‘deviation’, which is used in stylistics to account for creative patterns in literary texts and to explain the effects of foregrounding (Leech 2008). When Louw (1993) compares textual examples against reference corpora, the concept that he employs to describe meaning is the ‘semantic prosody’. According to Louw (1993: 159), habitual collocates ‘colour’ the meanings of words they occur with and in this way create semantic prosodies. The concept of the semantic prosody can also be used to help explain progression in a text. Looking at Larkin’s poem Days, Louw studies the phrase days are. Louw (1993) shows that in a reference corpus, days are is followed by words such as gone, over and past. So the line Days are where we live in the first stanza of Larkin’s poem triggers associations of melancholia that point forward to the theme of death developed in the second stanza. Such examples show that concordance analysis, when used to compare the instances in a text with their typical patterns in larger corpora, is a method that provides much more than just support for close reading, which Burrows (1987, 2004) seems to see as its main contribution to stylistic analysis. Words or phrases that form the starting points for a comparison against reference corpora can be identified through qualitative analysis. The analyst may notice words that are foregrounded or seem to be creating specific impressions on the reader. As illustrated by the corpus stylistic circle, corpus methods can then help to explain how these impressions are created. A different approach to identifying words that are potentially of literary relevance is by retrieving ‘key words’. Key words of a text are words that occur significantly more frequently in this text than in a reference corpus (Scott and Tribble 2006). Key words are retrieved on the basis of statistical criteria. To what extent they are of literary relevance will need to be assessed through more qualitative analysis. Studying Fleming’s Casino Royale, Mahlberg and McIntyre (2011) suggest an approach to classify key words into ‘text-centred’ and ‘reader-centred’. The first group features key words that contribute crucially to building the fictional world. They typically include the names of fictional characters, places or descriptions of props in the fictional world. The second group features key words that are more thematic than those building the (physical) fictional world and include words whose meanings tend to be more polysemous and open to interpretation. Corpus stylistic studies have illustrated how key words can also be used for comparisons within texts. Culpeper (2009) compares characters in Romeo & Juliet with the help of key comparisons. While such comparisons are technically relatively straightforward in drama, intra-textual key comparison in narrative texts is more complex. Walker (2010) illustrates how a key comparison can be a very useful method if it is appropriate for the text under analysis. He analyzes the novel Talking It Over by Julian Barnes. This novel is narrated by different narrators whose voices Walker (2010) compares through key comparisons. Both 146

Corpus Stylistics

Culpeper (2009) and Walker (2010) look at not only key ‘words’, but also key ‘semantic domains’. A key semantic domain analysis begins by automatically assigning each word to a semantic category. The key comparison then does not compare the frequencies of words but the frequencies of the tags that define a semantic domain. So words that are potentially related in meaning are grouped together before these groups are compared. The studies that I have discussed so far in this section all illustrate corpus linguistic approaches that prioritize lexis (cf. Mahlberg 2005). Patterns and frequencies of words are identified and compared and then interpreted in terms of their literary functions. Corpus stylistic studies can also take a different starting point that begins with questions rooted in more literary theories. Toolan (2009) studies how textual signals in the form of lexico-phrasal patterning guide readers’ expectations and add to their perception of the narrative progression of texts. Text-linguistic and narratological theory provide the research context in which Toolan’s (2009) work is situated. He uses automatic corpus techniques along with more directed searches motivated by theoretical concerns. Toolan’s (2009) corpus linguistic methods include key comparisons, concordance searches, cluster retrieval or measures to characterize lexical novelty over the length of a text. The range of methods that Toolan (2009) uses helps to identify a set of progression-signalling elements, including, for instance, sentences that contain top-key word character names, lexical key words above a certain frequency threshold or clusters. Toolan’s (2009) approach illustrates how a specific research question drives the combination of automatic techniques with analytical methods. Semino and Short (2004) conduct a study that starts off from a model developed for literary texts. They test the Leech and Short (1981) model of speech and thought presentation by applying it systematically to a corpus that enables comparisons between twentieth-century fictional, journalistic, and (auto)biographical narratives. From a quantitative point of view, Semino and Short’s (2004) work is a corpus study into register variation. The features that they quantify and compare across registers are the categories of the speech and thought presentation model originally developed for prose fiction. The study makes at least two major contributions. It shows that categories developed for literary texts are also applicable to a wider range of registers. At the same time, the model had to be revised and extended to include an improved set of categories. The need for the extension of the model only became apparent on the basis of the large amount of textual evidence provided by the corpus linguistic study. Methodologically, the study required a large effort of manual annotation. As Burrows (1987) already highlights, research concerned with discourse presentation in novels is less amenable to automatic procedures. Despite the sophisticated statistical methods that Burrows (1987) illustrates, the corpus he used to retrieve quantitative data required manual pre-processing. However, 147

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

unlike Semino and Short (2004), Burrows (1987) does not go far into the discussion of the analytical aspects of discourse presentation annotation. The studies discussed in this section show how corpus stylistic research can focus on lexical aspects derived mainly with corpus linguistic methods or on interpretative categories that might be less easy to operationalize. Ideally, corpus stylistic research will bring a range of approaches together in a linguistic model that can account for literary texts. At present, more research is still needed to identify linguistic categories that capture features of literary texts beyond lexical patterns. The following section discusses an example of such a category.

5  The Suspension as a Linguistic Unit A linguistic unit that benefits from a corpus linguistic approach is the ‘suspension’ or ‘suspended quotation’. In a literary context, Lambert (1981) drew particular attention to the suspended quotation in Dickens, which he defines as an interruption of the speech of a fictional character by the narrator. Such interruptions are at least five words long, as illustrated by example (1) where the suspension is italicized. (1) ‘Oh, if it’s nothing particular’, said Mr. Pickwick, with a smile, ‘you can speak with me first’. (Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers1) Lambert (1981) was particularly interested in the distribution of suspensions across Dickens’s novels and tackled this quantitative question with extensive manual effort. Mahlberg et al. (2013) demonstrate how corpus methods make it possible to extend Lambert’s (1981) work considerably. In addition to quantitative questions, corpus methods can also help to address qualitative questions. As Lambert (1981: 41f.) also observes, suspensions are likely places to contain information on a fictional character’s body language. They can create an impression of simultaneity between the character’s speech and the body language described by the narrator. Once suspensions are marked up in a corpus, they can be quantified, they can be used as a sub-corpus to investigate patterns of distributions and concordance searches can be restricted to suspensions. Mahlberg et al. (2013) study the distribution of body language patterns in Dickens and show that patterns in suspensions tend to present body language as circumstantial information. For Bleak House, Mahlberg (2012) illustrates how searching character names in suspensions is a useful technique to retrieve character information, and Mahlberg and Smith (2010), focusing on Pride and Prejudice, classify all the suspensions in the novel into functional groups. González-Díaz (2012) deals with similar phenomena by focusing on 148

Corpus Stylistics

Figure 9.5  Using CLiC2 to retrieve 4-grams in suspensions parenthetical constructions in Austen. From a wider corpus linguistic point of view, suspensions relate to recent research that highlights the relationship between lexical patterns and the places they occur in in texts (Mahlberg and O’Donnell 2008; Römer 2010; O’Donnell et al. 2012). In this section, I focus on patterns in suspensions across Dickens’s novels and a corpus containing twenty-nine novels by other nineteenth-century authors (in the following, these corpora are referred to as ‘Dickens’ and ‘19C’). The recently released online tool CLiC 1.0 is designed to enable corpus searches in different parts of literary texts. The screen shot in Figure 9.5 shows the options CLiC offers: users can search the whole text, only text within quotation marks (‘quotes’), text outside of quotation marks (‘non-quotes’) and suspensions, where ‘long suspensions’ correspond to Lambert’s (1981) suspended quotation, as they contain five words or more. There are also ‘short suspensions’ with up to four words. CLiC makes it possible to generate clusters (or n-grams3) in suspensions. Table 9.1 contains the top twenty-four 4-grams in Dickens and 19C. The most frequent clusters will show the main functions of suspensions. However, there is no particular reason to focus here on the top twenty-four, other than that this is a manageable number for illustrative purposes.4 The clusters in Table 9.1 fall broadly into two groups: clusters that are or include temporal information (after a short silence, after a short pause, after a moment’s pause, he said after a) and clusters that provide information on the manner in which a character speaks, including descriptions of body language (e.g. in a low voice, as if he were, laying his hand upon). The two examples said the old man and said the old gentleman mainly give information on who speaks, so they are excluded from the following discussion. 149

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Table 9.1  Top twenty-four 4-grams in Dickens and 19C R

4-gram

F

R

4-gram

F

1

in a low voice

65

13

with a look of

20

2

in a tone of

52

14

after a short pause

20

3

with an air of

46

15

he said as he

19

4

said the old man

42

16

he said with a

18

5

as if he were

35

17

and speaking in a

17

6

said the old gentleman

25

18

his hand upon his

16

7

he said in a

24

19

for the first time

16

8

he added in a

24

20

in a lower tone

16

9

she said in a

23

21

after a moment’s pause

16

10

after a short silence

21

22

back in his chair

16

11

as if he had

20

23

laying his hand upon

15

12

said in a low

20

24

he said after a

15

5.1  Manner of speaking Patterns that indicate a manner of speaking show different degrees of the narrator’s interpretation of a situation. The suspension in example (2) is mainly descriptive: in a low voice contextualizes the words of Nell’s grandfather when he is saying goodbye to her. In example (3) in contrast, David, the narrator, describes the impression that Agnes’s voice leaves on him. Her voice was full of sweet and hopeful consideration. (2) ‘Sleep soundly, Nell’, he said in a low voice, ‘and angels guard thy bed! Do not forget thy prayers, my sweet’. (Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop) (3) ‘I know you would not mind’, said Agnes, coming to me, and speaking in a low voice, so full of sweet and hopeful consideration that I hear it now, ‘the duties of a secretary’. (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield) Similar to descriptions of the speaker’s voice, descriptions of body language can vary in the extent to which they function as ‘contextualizing’ or ‘highlighting’ in a given context (cf. also Mahlberg 2013). The distinction between contextualizing and highlighting functions is not a hard and fast one but indicates nuances on a continuum. The cluster back in his chair (rank 22 in Table 9.1) illustrates body language in the form of practical actions. In example (4), the meaning of leaning back in his chair is interdependent both with the practical action of 150

Corpus Stylistics

sipping a renewed glass of gin twist and with Mick’s speech. The pattern is contextualizing, and the overall picture that is created shows the character in a relaxed and content mood. In example (5), speech and body language are also interdependent, but the practical action gives more emphasis to a specific meaning that is made explicit through the forcefulness of the action (throwing himself back in his chair), the additional detail of the body language (with a careless wave of both hands) and the narrator’s interpretation of it through the as if clause (as if the subject were quite settled, and nothing more could be said about it). So the cluster in example (5), back in his chair, has a more highlighting function. (4) ‘Well,’ said he when the waiter had cleared away their plates, and left them to their less substantial luxuries. ‘Well’, said Mick, sipping a renewed glass of gin twist and leaning back in his chair, ‘say what they please, there’s nothing like life’. (Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or the two nations) (5) ‘Very well,’ rejoined Martin, throwing himself back in his chair, with a careless wave of both hands, as if the subject were quite settled, and nothing more could be said about it – ‘There is an end of the matter, and here am I!’ (Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit) Clusters such as in a tone of, with an air of, with a look of are patterns that introduce the narrator’s interpretation in a prepositional phrase. Figure 9.6 shows ten examples of in a tone of. The occurrences are sorted on the first word to the right of the cluster, that is, the words that follow the preposition of. The characters speak in a tone of authority, calmer praise, careless dismissal, compassion, etc. The clusters as if he were and as if he had introduce clauses that give the narrator space to provide an interpretation of a manner of speaking or the body language that accompanies the speech, as in examples (6) and (7). Example (7)

Figure 9.6  Ten out of fifty-two examples of in a tone of in suspensions in Dickens and 19C sorted on the first word on the right 151

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

also illustrates that comments by the narrator can make suspensions quite long and/or give particular emphasis to the narrator comment. For Dickens, narrator comments introduced by as if have received particular attention when they can be interpreted as an instance of the ‘fanciful as if’, a comparison that ‘generally takes the form of the invention of some improbable but amusing explanation of the appearance or behaviour of one of the characters in a novel’ (Brook 1970: 33). An example of the fanciful as if is (7). For a more detailed discussion of as if patterns see Mahlberg (2013). (6) John Baptist seemed to desire to evade the question without knowing how. ‘By Bacchus!’ he said at last, as if he were forced to the admission, ‘I have sometimes had a thought of going to Paris, and perhaps to England.’ (Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit) (7) ‘No, Pip’, returned Joe, still looking at the fire, and holding his knees tight, as if he had private information that they intended to make off somewhere, ‘which I left it to yourself, Pip’. (Charles Dickens, Great Expectations) Because of the alternation of direct speech (or thought) and narrator comments, suspensions can also create effects that deliberately blur the boundaries of a character’s voice. Example (8) contains two suspensions. The first one, answered the man of business, is mainly descriptive. The second one, Mr. Lorry paused, and shook his head at him in the oddest manner, as if he were compelled against his will to add, internally, suggests the reader has insights into the character’s thought. What follows the suspension, however, is not direct speech or thought, but ‘virtual’ or ‘imaginary’ speech (Korte 1997: 86; Leech and Short 2007: 137). (8) ‘My meaning’, answered the man of business, ‘is, of course, friendly and appreciative, and that it does you the greatest credit, and – in short, my meaning is everything you could desire. But – really, you know, Mr. Stryver –’ Mr. Lorry paused, and shook his head at him in the oddest manner, as if he were compelled against his will to add, internally, ‘you know there really is so much too much of you!’ (Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)

5.2  Temporal Information The second group of clusters that figure prominently in Table 9.1 collects patterns that refer to temporal information (after a short silence, after a short pause, after a moment’s pause, he said after a). In these examples, the suspensions report a pause in the character’s speech. However, the pause is only described 152

Corpus Stylistics

retrospectively. Example (9) follows a paragraph of speech by Nicholas. The suspension, said the old man, after a short silence, reports a pause that follows Nicholas’s speech, but the effect that the suspension creates is more relevant to the speech of the old man. The suspension sets off the vocative, Mr Nickleby, from the rest of the speech. It has a discourse-organizing function that is more relevant to the narration than to the narrated time. This is also underlined by the fact that the silence is reported in the form of a prepositional phrase providing circumstantial information for the reporting clause. Example (8) also reports a pause, Mr. Lorry paused. In this case, however, the occurrence of the pause is not presented as circumstantial information but in the form of a verb that gives it more prominence. (9) ‘Mr Nickleby,’ said the old man, after a short silence, ‘you can do no more. I was wrong to expose a young man like you to this trial. I might have foreseen what would happen. Thank you, sir, thank you. Madeline shall be removed.’ (Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby) The examples in this section do not aim at a systematic quantitative approach but illustrate how corpus methods can provide data to identify patterns associated with particular functions in narrative texts. Already the identification of patterns and functions is an important contribution of corpus stylistics. Without the cumulative evidence gathered with corpus methods, such patterns are more difficult to see. However, once identified, they can form the basis for further quantifications and comparisons across a wider range of texts.

6 Conclusions Corpus stylistic methods are closely related to the quantitative techniques applied in corpus linguistics and computational stylistics. However, corpus stylistics is distinctive because of its emphasis on using qualitative, literary concerns to guide the analysis and interpret the results. Quantitative methods that rely on comparisons are applicable to literary texts to various degrees. Not every research question can be answered with such methods, as the necessary critical mass of data might not be available. Equally, running a concordance or generating key words does not in itself constitute an analysis. Without theoretical grounding and links to interpretative concerns, the application of corpus methods to an individual text can result in naïve observations. A challenge for the development of corpus stylistics is to identify research questions that can be usefully addressed with corpus methods. Such research questions might be shaped by the descriptive concepts that corpus linguistics has started to add to 153

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

the inventory of linguistic description, such as collocations or semantic prosodies. At the same time, models and concepts that originate in the realm of literary stylistics or criticism can be systematically applied and tested across a wider selection of texts. An example of this is the study by Semino and Short (2004) but also the concept of the ‘suspended quotation’. As Section 5 has demonstrated, when corpus methods are employed to study larger amounts of textual evidence for literary phenomena, textual functions can be more systematically described and the wider relevance of patterns becomes visible. As a result, the range of descriptive tools that stylisticians have at their disposal can be extended. The development of linguistic concepts and descriptive tools highlights that corpus stylistics is supported by computational methods, but crucially the corpus stylistic circle can only go full swing if the literary dimension is taken into account, too.

Notes This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/K005146/1] 1. As the examples are taken from the e-texts in the corpora, no page numbers are provided. 2. CLiC 1.0 is available at http://clic.nottingham.ac.uk. 3. We use the term ‘n-gram’ when the number of words in a cluster is specified. 4. For a discussion of frequency cut-offs for clusters and lexical bundles, see Mahlberg (2013: ch. 3).

References Anthony, L. (2014), AntConc (Version 3.4.3) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available online: http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/ (accessed July 2014). Biber, D. (1988), Variation across Speech and Writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biber, D., Conrad, S., Finegan, E., Leech, G. and Johansson, S. (1999), Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, Harlow: Longman. Brook, G. L. (1970), The Language of Dickens, London: Andre Deutsch. Burrows, J. F. (1987), Computation into Criticism. A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels and an Experiment in Method, Oxford: Clarendon. Burrows, J. F. (2004), ‘Textual analysis’, in S. Schreibman, R. Siemens and J. Unsworth (eds), A Companion to Digital Humanities, 323–48, Oxford: Blackwell. Craig, H. (2008), ‘“Speak, that I may see thee”: Shakespeare characters and common words’, Shakespeare Survey, 61: 281–8. Culpeper, J. (2009), ‘Keyness: Words, parts-of-speech and semantic categories in the character-talk of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet’, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 14 (1): 29–59. Feinberg, J. (2013), Wordle. Available online: http://www.wordle.net/ (accessed July 2014). González-Díaz, V. (2012), ‘Round brackets in Jane Austen’, English Text Construction, 5 (2): 455–95.

154

Corpus Stylistics Hockey, S. (2004), ‘The history of humanities computing’, in S. Schreibman, R. Siemens and J. Unsworth (eds), A Companion to Digital Humanities, 3–19, Oxford: Blackwell. Hoover, D. (2007), ‘Corpus stylistics, stylometry, and the styles of Henry James’, Style, 41 (2): 174–255. Hoover, D. (2013), ‘Quantitative analysis and literary studies’, in R. Siemens and S. Schreibman (eds), A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, 517–33, Oxford: Blackwell. Korte, B. (1997), Body Language in Literature, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lambert, M. (1981), Dickens and the Suspended Quotation, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Leech, G. (2008), Language in Literature. Style and Foregrounding, Harlow: Pearson Education. Leech, G., and Short, M. (2007[1981]), Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, Harlow: Pearson Education. Louw, W. E. (1993), ‘Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies’, in M. Baker, G. Francis and E. Tognini-Bonelli (eds), Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair, 157–74, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Mahlberg, M. (2005), English General Nouns: A Corpus Theoretical Approach, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Mahlberg, M. (2012), ‘The corpus stylistic analysis of fiction or the fiction of corpus stylistics?’, in M. Huber and J. Mukherjee (eds), Corpus Linguistics and Variation in English: Theory and Description, 77–95, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Mahlberg, M. (2013), Corpus Stylistics and Dickens’s Fiction, New York and London: Routledge. Mahlberg, M. and Smith, C. (2010), ‘Corpus approaches to prose fiction: Civility and body language in Pride and Prejudice’, in D. McIntyre and B. Busse (eds), Language and Style, 449–67, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mahlberg, M. and McIntyre, D. (2011), ‘A case for corpus stylistics: Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale’, English Text Construction, 4 (2): 204–27. Mahlberg, M. and O’Donnell, M. B. (2008), ‘A fresh view of the structure of hard news stories’, in S. Neumann and E. Steiner (eds), Online Proceedings of the 19th European Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference and Workshop, Saarbrücken, 23–25 July 2007. Mahlberg, M., Smith, C. and Preston, S. (2013), ‘Phrases in literary contexts: Patterns and distributions of suspensions in Dickens's novels’, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 18 (1): 35–56. O’Donnell, M. B., Scott, M., Mahlberg, M. and Hoey, M. (2012), ‘Exploring text-initial words, clusters and concgrams in a newspaper corpus’, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 8 (1): 73–101. O’Halloran, K. (2007), ‘The subconscious in James Joyce’s “Eveline”: A corpus stylistic analysis that chews on the “Fish hook”’, Language and Literature, 16 (3): 227–44. Römer, U. (2010), ‘Establishing the phraseological profile of a text type: The construction of meaning in academic book reviews’, English Text Construction, 3 (1): 95–119. Scott, M. (2014), WordSmith Tools version 6, Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software. Scott, M. and Tribble, C. (2006), Textual Patterns. Key Words and Corpus Analysis in Language Education, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Semino, E. and Short, M. (2004), Corpus Stylistics. Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing, London: Routledge. Sinclair, J., ed. (1987), Looking Up: An Account of the COBUILD Project in Lexical Computing, London: HarperCollins. Sinclair, J. (1991), Corpus, Concordance, Collocation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sinclair, J. (2007), ‘Introduction’, in M. Hoey, M. Mahlberg, M. Stubbs and W. Teubert (eds), Text, Discourse and Corpora: Theory and Analysis, 1–5, London: Continuum. Spitzer, L. (1948), Linguistics and Literary History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

155

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Stockwell, P. (2006), ‘Language and literature: Stylistics’, in B. Aarts and A. McMahon (eds), The Handbook of English Linguistics, 742–58, Oxford: Blackwell. Stubbs, M. (2005), ‘Conrad in the computer: Examples of quantitative stylistic methods’, Language and Literature, 14 (1): 5–24. Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001), Corpus Linguistics at Work, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Toolan, M. (2009), Narrative Progression in the Short Story: A Corpus Stylistic Approach, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Walker, B. (2010), ‘Wmatrix, key concepts and the narrator in Julian Barnes’s Talking it over’, in B. Busse and D. McIntyre (eds), Language and Style, 364–87, Basingstoke: Palgrave Education.

156

10

Critical Stylistics Lesley Jeffries, University of Huddersfield

Chapter Overview Introduction 157 Critical Stylistics 159 Framework 162 Application 168 Summary 174

1 Introduction This chapter is an overview of an approach that I have been calling ‘critical stylistics’ in order to distinguish it from mainstream critical discourse analysis (CDA) on the one hand and from literary stylistics on the other. In order to show how it works, I will need to introduce a broader framework to demonstrate how it fits into a general theory of language.

1.1  Centrality of Text The first thing to say is that stylistics puts text (understood broadly to include all language use) at the centre of its activity (Jeffries and McIntyre 2010). This is true of critical stylistics too (Jeffries 2010a, 2014). I do not wish to criticise those linguists who put context at the heart of what they do (though that makes it less clearly linguistic in nature). Nor would I want to dismiss the work of linguists who work mainly on de-contextual and de-textual understandings of how language (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics) works. It will be 157

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

seen below that these systematic aspects of language are vital to understanding how we interpret text, and this work is therefore one of the underpinnings needed to progress with stylistics, critical or otherwise. It is also, of course, important to understand how various aspects of context can and do affect the reception of texts. All I would add here is that, in my opinion, more progress is made by investigating natural phenomena (such as human language) systematically by focusing on specific parts of the object of scrutiny than by trying to explain everything at once.

1.2  Stylistics – Critical and Otherwise The rest of this book outlines the scope of stylistics, which is broad and constantly changing, as one would expect from a dynamic field of study. Here, I wish to point out the similarities as well as the differences between a literary/ aesthetic approach to stylistics and a critical one. Stylistics grew out of the realization that some of the progress being made in linguistics would be helpful in analysing the language of literary texts, and in the early days, this included the presumption that literary texts were somehow fundamentally different from other texts. This presumption was examined – and largely rejected – in the developing field of stylistics (Fowler 1966, 1975; Freeman 1971; Carter and Nash 1983), which concluded that text was text and the perceived differences in the way that it works is based on the text’s identity (e.g. its perceived genre or social purpose) and as a result its reception by readers or hearers (Cook 1994). Critical stylistics, it seems to me, can draw on the same range of systematic and text-analytic tools as literary stylistics. All that distinguishes the two is the motivation for carrying out the analysis in the first place. Thus, the same textual features could be analysed technically, and the effects of those features in the text may be interpreted either through the ideological or the aesthetic filter.

1.3  What about CDA? I need to address CDA here, because my use of the word ‘critical’ is certainly inspired by the early work in critical linguistics and CDA. This work first of all alerted me to the idea that linguistics could be used in real-world applications, including the development of a critical understanding in schoolchildren and the wider public. However, the word ‘critical’ is also often used more narrowly to imply a particular Marxist view of the problems of society. Such usage sees ‘critical’ analysis as being aimed solely for the viewpoint of the oppressed towards the dominant discourse produced by the meaning-makers: 158

Critical Stylistics

the politicians, business owners and media companies. This would imply that critical analysis is aimed specifically at highlighting social inequalities as they are (re-)produced by the powerful (e.g. Fairclough 1992). Though I have sympathy with much of this (socio-political) analysis, I cannot resist the notion that the linguistics of the case remains the same, whether you are analysing texts you agree with or those you find offensive. The dominance of society by certain sets of ideologies that those of us on the left might want to critique is a question that is separate from the one of how texts make meaning, and I think there is some value in continuing to investigate the latter question for its own sake, knowing that it can then be used for political and social purposes. I reluctantly concede, therefore, that the tools in this model can be used by those on the right to critique the ideologies of those on the left just as much as the reverse, though the truth is that they probably will not need to bother, as they have more of the power anyway.

2  Critical Stylistics I have already made clear that I see critical stylistics as mainstream text-based stylistics with a particular (critical) purpose. It is not, of course, always easy to distinguish between the analytical and the interpretative phases, but it is helpful to think of them as being separate. It is also worth understanding that there is a whole set of analytical tools belonging to the more conventional stylistics toolkit that cannot be used critically in the (ideological) sense intended here. These more mainstream tools of stylistic analysis are drawn largely from the underlying systematic aspects of language and include, for example, the musical aspects of phonology and the inventiveness of morphology or syntax. Such effects are not only found in literary texts, of course, and wherever they are found, their impact is largely aesthetic.

2.1  Ideology and Text The important distinguishing feature of critical stylistics, then, is the interest it has in exposing the underlying ideologies of texts. This aim is shared with CDA, though CDA has recently become much less interested, it seems to me, in developing the analytical tools of textual analysis and more interested in contextualization. There are some exceptions to this trend. For example, Hart (2013) applies cognitive-linguistic frameworks to CDA analysis, and Baker and McEnery (2005), amongst others, attempt to combine CDA with corpus methods. What these and many more approaches (which often draw upon other disciplines) do not usually attempt to do is to produce a fuller account of the 159

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

linguistic features and strategies used by text producers to embed ideologies in their texts. As Section 3 will demonstrate in more detail, the critical-stylistic approach to exposing ideology is to find out what kind of world is being presented by the text and, from this picture, draw some conclusions about what is seen as acceptable or unacceptable in the world created by the textual features. Stylistically aware readers will be thinking at this point that Text World Theory (TWT) might have some relevance here, and indeed it does – most obviously as the useful metaphor it is for what texts are doing. However, the aim of critical stylistics is to widen the range of textual features that are used to draw conclusions about the nature of the world created by the text and to some extent to make eclectic use of a range of models to cover such a broad set of features, rather than tidying up all the different aspects into a single model. It is also worth noting that although TWT (Werth 1999) has been applied to non-literary as well as literary texts (see e.g. Hidalgo-Downing 2000; Gavins 2007; Marley 2008), this has not focused specifically on the ideological aspect of texts, though this is an obvious next step for the model. Ideology itself is difficult to pin down as a concept, but it has been much discussed in the CDA literature as elsewhere, and I do not propose to spend long on it here. Suffice it to say that I do not take a narrowly critical view of ideology as something that is malicious and self-interested, as many popular uses of the word tend to do. Instead, I would accept that ideology is pervasive and reflects the values of the group or society in which it is accepted. Fowler (1966: 10) puts it clearly: Anything that is said or written about the world is articulated from a particular ideological position: language is not a clear window but a refracting, structuring medium. The definition of the scope of an ideology is deliberately vague here, as we all belong simultaneously to groups that reflect mainstream society (e.g. middleclass, educated society) and groups that may at times conflict with the mainstream (e.g. left-leaning – or right-leaning – political groups). Thus, our own personal ideologies may coincide with or conflict with those we find in the texts around us on a daily basis. Making sure that we are not subtly influenced by those ideologies (e.g. to feel that as a woman, I ought to be thin), because of their very ubiquity, is one possible application of critical-stylistic analysis.

2.2  Author Intentionality? The potential to apply critical-stylistic analysis to real texts, thereby exposing ‘harmful’ ideologies, can sometimes lead us to assume that what we are 160

Critical Stylistics

exposing is an authorial intention to deceive or influence the reader of the texts we analyse. It is important to remember that many of the ideologies we can find in texts are so naturalized that they are not consciously used by the author but are rather second nature to them. This makes them no less susceptible to exposure and criticism, of course, but we may wish to make our critique of such ideologies more general, so that we are commenting on the social acceptability of such attitudes as much as on the fact that they are taken for granted in a single text. This, it seems to me, is parallel to the oft-raised question of how self-conscious poets and other creative writers are about their use of language. It is not the most important question we can ask. We need to know what the ideologies are that are embedded within a text, irrespective of how deliberately they were included, just as we need to explain the literary effects of poems and novels without necessarily knowing how self-consciously they were used.

2.3  Reader Effects? Whilst the search for authorial intention might be something of a fool’s errand, the other end of the process – the question of how texts affect recipients – is much more important. It is assumed by many large organizations (political parties, commercial companies, etc.) that text sells ideas as well as consumer goods. This is the only possible explanation for the many billions of pounds spent on advertising. There is clearly a large industry which researches the responses of recipients to different kinds of texts, and this includes, of course, the multi-modal aspects as well as the strictly linguistic. CDA practitioners and other political campaigners usually also make the assumption that ideologies that are repeated in many public texts are likely to influence the outlook of their audiences. Even in our own personal lives, experience tends to tell us that we have to actively resist the influence of ubiquitous messages about lifestyle, body shape and weight, attractiveness, fashion, etc, even when we are politically aware of the invidious nature of some of these messages. So, we are convinced that texts can influence. But there has been as yet no clear explanation of the mechanism by which ideologies can gradually infiltrate even the most resistant mind. Though critical stylistics shares the assumptions of CDA with regard to the potential for texts to influence recipients, I would suggest that the analytical tools it uses can propose a ­mechanism for ideological influence. Mere repetition of an idea does not explain the cognitive aspects of this process, whereas the need for text processing to involve the recipient in not only constructing but also accepting (during the reading process) a mental image of the world being created by the text may just begin 161

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

to show how latent ideologies embedded in texts could begin to shape the world view of someone repeatedly having to process the same ideological assumptions. This cognitive question of how texts influence minds needs further investigation, though some recent work in CDA (e.g. Hart 2011) has started to use concepts from evolutionary psychology to explain the potential for texts to be persuasive; however, this work deals with the general propensity of human beings to monitor the logical reasoning and evidence for opinions rather than the cognitive processing of text worlds in general.

3 Framework In this section, I will outline a framework within which the critical analysis of texts can be situated. It is necessarily short but helps to explain the nature of the ‘textual-conceptual functions’ that are the basis of critical stylistics.

3.1  Ideational Aspects of Language Halliday’s famous meta-functions of language are the starting point for this framework. Halliday (1994) distinguished between the purely systematic aspects of language, which he called ‘textual’; the uses of language to represent a view of the world, which he labelled ‘ideational’; and the effects of language use on relationships, which he called ‘interpersonal’. This distinction is one that I think is valuable for us, but not quite in the way that Halliday and his followers have developed it. They have tried to link the whole language system and its use into a single over-arching model within which different aspects of language will be labelled as having one (or more) of these meta-functions. The result is a model of language that, far from simplifying, appears to be as complex as the data it is describing. This seems to go against the scientific principle of elegance which motivated the early linguists to make such extensive progress in the first part of the twentieth century. In the spirit of Halliday’s insightful distinction, however, I would suggest that it is useful to differentiate between those aspects of language that are relatively consistent in form-meaning relations (de-contextual), those aspects whose meaning takes effect in textual surroundings (co-textual) and those aspects of language that depend in greater measure on the situation, the relationships between participants and so on (contextual). These three aspects of language could represent the different meta-functions of Halliday’s model, or equally, they could be seen to correspond to the distinction between semantic and pragmatic meaning. What I would want to add to that latter distinction 162

Critical Stylistics

(roughly comparable to langue/parole or competence/performance) is a third level of meaning-making, which takes place in texts and is an effect of the combination of structures into texts but is more than the sum of its parts, in that it has the capacity to create a world view that the recipient is bound to conceptualize if they are to successfully process the text. Here is a schematic representation of the three-way distinction as described above: Textual meta-function

Ideational meta-function

Interpersonal meta-function

De-contextual form and meaning

Co-textual form and meaning

Contextual form and meaning

Semantic meaning

Textual/conceptual meaning

Pragmatic meaning

Although Halliday’s model is tripartite, I am keen to tie what he calls ideational meaning to the textual level of language use – not to the underlying systems (Halliday’s textual meta-function) nor to the contextual uses of pragmatics. This ideational meaning is the point at which conceptual text worlds are created, potentially leading to both the literary experience of someone reading a Jane Austen novel and also the ideological experience of someone reading a political manifesto. Note that the process in both cases is the same: the construction of a world and its values, which is necessarily accepted by the reader for the purposes of – and during the process of – reading (or listening to) the text.

3.2  Textual-conceptual Functions This textual-conceptual level of meaning, between the system and the fully contextual use, seems to me to be an intuitively satisfying notion. I will deal later with why it provides evidence for the existence of a de-contextual language system, but it is also seems worth separating out the ideological in a text from what happens to a recipient’s viewpoint when processing a text. If meaning only ever happens in readers’ minds when they process text, as some may wish to claim, then texts themselves are devoid of meaning, and I can see no place for a critical reading of a text whereby the reader can both see and resist the ideological meanings presented. Critical stylistics (see also Jeffries 2010a, 2014) aims to describe texts in relation to their ‘textual-conceptual functions’, which represent the different dimensions of the world as constructed by the text. This extends beyond the deictic dimensions of space, time and person, though it includes these, and also beyond the hypothetical nature of modality. It works at a fairly micro level to 163

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

demonstrate what the text is ‘doing’ at any one time, and the choice of everyday words to label the textual-conceptual functions is deliberate as it answers that question (what is the text doing?): zz Naming and Describing

Texts choose to name things in certain ways. This is not just a question of which noun is chosen but what is to be included in the boundaries of the noun phrase, including adjectives and post-modifying phrases and clauses, and also whether a nominalized verb is chosen. Thus, ‘the terrible mess this government has got us into’ is a label, which is not an invitation to the recipient to contest its existence but a reference to a pre-existing concept. zz Representing Actions/Events/States

Texts also choose to represent processes, actions and so on in certain ways. The choice of transitivity type is well known to have an effect on the way in which an occurrence is constructed, so that a text producer can make someone seem more or less responsible for their actions through the choice of intentional material actions (‘he somersaulted over the table’) or supervention (‘he tripped over the table’), respectively. zz Equating and Contrasting

The creation of equivalence or opposition by textual means is less well established as a textual-conceptual function, though it is beginning to be recognized more widely (Jeffries 2010b; Davies 2013). The ability to make opposites from apparently unrelated words (‘It’s a cowpat, not a roundabout’) is one of the pieces of evidence we have that interpreting texts necessarily requires an underlying system that we refer to subconsciously to enable us to see why such peculiar pairings work in context. There are many ‘triggers’ – usually syntactic frames – which cause such construction of opposites and fewer frames (such as apposition) which produce equivalence. zz Exemplifying and Enumerating

The three-part list is recognised as a rhetorical flourish loved by politicians and priests – and it is seen as symbolizing completeness (Atkinson 1984). This is just one aspect of the two overlapping textual-conceptual functions of exemplifying (where not all cases of a list are mentioned) and enumerating (where they are). The symbolic three-part list plays on our vagueness about when a list is conceptually complete and when it is not. The trick used by those trying to persuade us is to make sure their list has three parts, even if that means cramming everything into the final part of the list (‘we will ensure equality, sustainability and other important measures of excellence’).

164

Critical Stylistics zz Prioritizing

Text producers choose what is to be presented at the highest level of structure and what is to be subordinated, either within the phrase or within clauses. The use of subordination to background and foreground different elements of a narrative is partly about economy in language use, but it can also have the effect of naturalizing ideology by placing it low down in the structure. Compare ‘Immigration levels are too high for the good of hard-working British families’ with ‘The P.M. said that he thought that immigration levels are too high for the good of hard-working British families’. While the hedging of ‘he said’ or ‘he thinks’ might be seen as weakening the strength of the statement, these phrases partially obscure the real message (about immigration in this case), which is more difficult to challenge once it is at such low levels of structure. zz Implying and Assuming

Texts regularly embed within themselves the assumptions and implications that the producer wants to make. While there are some aspects of implicature (implying) in particular that belong more properly to the interpersonal (pragmatic) level of meaning, there are also textual triggers of both presupposition (assuming) and implicature that are less clearly contextual as they can be located, identified and either accepted or rejected by the alert recipient. ‘The disaster of austerity has been replaced by the folly of uncontrolled spending’ presents two assumptions (that these two phases of the financial crisis exist) which are more difficult to contest than if they had been clausal (e.g. ‘Austerity is a disaster’). zz Negating

Texts have a range of methods of negating, from the adverbial (‘not’, ‘no’, ‘never’) to the morphological (‘unsatisfied’) or the lexical (‘fail’, ‘lack’). Each one of these negating elements has the capacity to conjure up the positive as well as the negative, so that negating can be a powerful way of suggesting its opposite. This textual-conceptual function has been investigated (Nahajec 2009) as an ideological phenomenon. It has the power of suggestibility (‘Boris Johnson is not a maverick’), which can produce implicatures (‘Someone else is’) and/or the power to simply plant the idea of its opposite (‘But it’s worth thinking about his character, as he’s clearly not normal’) in recipients’ minds. zz Hypothesizing

Modality, conditionality and other similar mechanisms of the linguistic system can be used in texts to produce a hypothetical alternative reality. This can be future-related (‘I hope it doesn’t rain’) or unclear as to the

165

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

facts (‘It might have been the cat that did it’) and it expresses the expectations and/or the desires of the producer of the text. Halliday says that the modal system itself belongs in the interpersonal meta-function of language. I would say that it is ideational in its textual-conceptual function and interpersonal only in the sense that all ideational meaning is – that is, that it can influence or affect the recipient in various ways (Jeffries 2014). zz Presenting others’ speech and thoughts

Texts have options as to how to represent others’ speech and thoughts. This goes way beyond the direct and indirect speech as taught in composition classes and encompasses issues of how ‘faithful’ the representation might be, whether the speech or thought is ‘free’ in the sense that attention is not drawn to its quoted nature and whether thought is equivalent to speech in any case, though it is treated similarly on the surface (Semino and Short 2004). It is a textual function in my terms because it is something that texts ‘do’; they present others’ speech (and thoughts) for the recipient to process. This includes the potential to frame the speech using reporting clauses (‘he sneered’; ‘she mumbled’) but it also includes the capacity for re-wording and editing to exclude context. The ideologies of the person quoted are thereby able to be misrepresented by the text’s producer. zz Representing time, space and society

The final textual-conceptual function of the set is the one that is mainly carried by the deictic elements of the text and which, as a result, has had a great deal of attention from scholars working in Text World Theory and deictic shift theory (Werth 1999; Gavins 2007; McIntyre 2006). The capacity of texts to create a deictic centre from which the text world is viewed relies on the flexible reference of certain key items in the language, such as ‘here’ (which refers to the speaker’s position at the time of speaking) and ‘you’ (which references the addressee in the situation). This everyday facility of the spoken language has evolved into a complex set of generic effects in literary texts (e.g. first- or second-person narratives) and can equally create a point of view in non-literary texts (e.g. who is the addressee in a politician’s speech?).

3.3  What is Missing? The list of textual-conceptual functions is probably not complete yet, but I think it is probably also not infinite either. Various candidates to add to the list have occurred to me or have been suggested to me, and I will attempt to answer the 166

Critical Stylistics

question of why they do not belong in the list below. This is not to say that they are not important, of course, but they may simply belong at a different layer in the complex structure that makes up human language. zz Collocation

The origins of the notion of collocation are in (lexical) semantics. When linguists noticed that words have co-occurrence habits that can affect their individual meaning, the concept of restricted collocation was used to label this tendency for words to affect each other’s de-contextual meaning. Later, the basis of much corpus work became the analysis of collocation, and the concept of ‘semantic prosody’ (see Louw 1993) was one result of this investigation of huge quantities of linguistic data by computers. Whilst collocation can clearly have an ideological effect in texts (e.g. Baker and McEnery 2005), this is the co-textual result of underlying semantic structures in the language rather than something that the text is ‘doing’ to create a particular view of the world. It is a fine line, and there may be those who think collocation belongs with the textual-conceptual functions, but I would assign it to the linguistic level of meaning rather than the textual-conceptual. zz Metaphor

Another proposed textual-conceptual function I am currently not including in the list is metaphor. There is a great deal of interest in metaphor across stylistics, with some justification, as it is so widespread and yet very complex too. Metaphor is the opposite of collocation, in that it is less clearly linguistic than the textual-conceptual functions which, whilst ranging in their construction, are usually at least anchored in a prototypical structure or set of structures. Metaphor, on the other hand, has many different linguistic delivery mechanisms and is analysed mainly as a cognitive phenomenon, so that it could be seen as a non-linguistic effect of text, perhaps similar to some of the other cognitive effects that are discussed in recent literature, such as blending (e.g. Fauconnier and Turner 2002). zz Iconicity

The final potential textual-conceptual function I will exclude for the time being is iconicity. There are very many different aspects of language that can work iconically, from sound-symbolic and onomatopoeic effects to the potential of syntax to reflect the world directly (Jeffries 2010c). These all work co-textually, though their origins are the systematic aspects of language. They seem to me to straddle the linguistic (the systematic) and the contextual (the cognitive) without being clearly textual-conceptual in 167

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

the way I have been defining these meanings. However, this is probably the most borderline of the current exclusions, and I may yet decide to eat my words.

4 Application 4.1  Methods and Problems As students and researchers are beginning to find to their cost, the framework I am calling critical stylistics is very large and thus very time consuming to apply to actual data (though I will try to show below how it might work on a single text). This should not deter researchers from moving ever more in the direction of rigour and replicability in their work, so that others can see where their results spring from and can re-test, challenge and sometimes also accept their conclusions. The textual-conceptual functions differ in their frequency of course. There is ‘transitivity’ in every clause in a text because each verb produces a transitivity choice. This raises the question of whether and when to look at each and every clause. Sometimes it makes sense to look only at main clauses or only at subordinate ones. In the absence of such clarity, some kind of sampling can be used to reduce the burden of the sheer quantity of data. It is also important to decide at the outset whether it is a statistical question that you are asking (e.g. how much material action is connected to the male characters in this narrative?) or whether you might be interested in single clauses and their ideological assumptions (e.g. what does this sentence tell us about the politician speaking?). Naming, like transitivity, is also ubiquitous, as each noun phrase produces a ‘name’. Many are simple pronouns or short noun phrases with no ideological interest, so there has to be some kind of sifting of data to produce the analysis. Other textual-conceptual functions are less frequent and can be searched for by hand or in some cases automatically by computer, though there are usually too many different mechanisms to deliver, for example, modality, negation or oppositeness to be sure of having captured them all. These problems of methodology are taxing and yet very important if the aim of critical stylistics is to be upheld, which is to provide a more coherent and methodologically consistent framework for investigating the ideologies in texts.

4.2  David Cameron in Keighley The following analysis demonstrates how a qualitative analysis of a short extract from a longer text can provide insights into the ideologies being naturalized in 168

Critical Stylistics

the text. It is a perfectly proper thing to do and many undergraduate or even masters-level projects will not be able to take the methodology much further than this. However, longer or larger projects will need to rationalize their choice of data, the sampling methods used and other issues of rigour and replicability as described in the last section. Here is an extract from the early stages of a fairly long speech (4629 words) by the then British prime minister, David Cameron, to factory workers in the north of England in March 2013, when the financial crisis that hit the UK in 2008 was still seriously affecting its economy. And today I want to talk very plainly and clearly about our economic situation. I know that things are tough right now. Families are struggling with bills at the end of the month; some are just a pay check away from going into the red. Parents are worried about what the future holds for their children, and whole towns are wondering about where their economic future really lies. And I know that’s particularly true of people here in Yorkshire and in many parts of the north of our country, people who didn’t benefit properly from the so-called ‘boom’ years and who worry that they won’t do so again. But I’m here today to say that is not going to happen because we have a plan to get through these difficulties and to get through them together. It is a plan to fix the fundamental problems in our economy, to get the jobs and the growth that can make our country a success in the global race, and to back the aspirations of hard-working families who want to get on in life. And my argument today is simple: if we stick to the plan and if we reject the false choices, we can come through this together with a stronger, more resilient and more balanced economy. zz Naming and Describing

There are many noun phrases in the extract, but here I will look at just two of the more interesting ones. The first is ‘the fundamental problems in our economy’, which effectively presupposes the existence and acceptance of such problems on the part of the reader. The implication is that there is something structurally wrong which the government inherited and will put right. The second noun phrase to consider is ‘the global race’, which the reader is expected to accept as the only analysis of world economics; this helps to naturalize the idea that economic growth is the only future we can aim for  – and that this is a competitive situation that countries have to deal with. zz Representing Actions/Events/States

There are thirty-three verbs in this extract, which break down into the transitivity categories as follows: 169

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Material action intention: 11 Material action supervention: 2 Material action event: 4 Relational intensive: 7 Relational possessive: 1 Verbalization: 2 Mental cognition: 6 In itself, this does not tell us a great deal, except that, as we might expect in any text, there is a reasonable amount of action and some intensive relational transitivity. When we look at the participants in the relevant clauses, it is a different story. The material actions (intentional) are assigned to families (and ‘hard-working families’) three times, and these tend to be with actions that have negative connotations (‘are struggling with’, ‘going into the red’). The other eight occurrences all have either the explicit first person plural (‘we’) or imply that this is the Actor in these clauses. In all cases, the pronoun is the inclusive ‘we’ – that is, the government and the people together. This is not, therefore, a speech that is (in this extract at least) detailing a series of actions to be taken by the government. Rather, it is setting up the problems as only to be solved by efforts on the part of the public too. The six times that Cameron uses ‘I’ are linked to two verbalizations (‘talk’, ‘say’), two mental cognition verbs (‘know’ x 2, ‘want’) and one relational circumstantial (‘am here’), none of which involve intentional material actions. In the case of the one clearly exclusive use of ‘we’ where the government is the intended referent, the transitivity is possessive (‘we have a plan’). zz Equating and Contrasting

There is one use of apposition in this extract which produces an instance of equating: people here in Yorkshire and in many parts of the north of our country, people who didn’t benefit from the so-called ‘boom’ years and who worry that they won’t do so again. There are other interesting aspects to this example (see ‘Negating’ section), but first I want to emphasize the apposition, which is made up of two noun phrases which share the same referent as a result of their appositional position. I have laid them out on separate lines to make them clear. The effect of this apposition is to create a co-terminous group of people who are defined as both ‘northern’ (i.e. ‘other’ to David Cameron and his government) and disadvantaged. Cameron’s intended effect – to 170

Critical Stylistics

show sympathy – is undermined by the language he uses, which serves to demonstrate his view of the north as a problem and as ‘other’. It is worth noting that the construction of these two identifiers in appositional noun phrases, together with the use of a conventional opposite (north–south), creates the potential for other aspects of the construction to produce oppositional meaning. Thus, since we are presented with northerners as not benefiting from the boom, there is a tendency to construct southerners as being the ones to benefit. This is partly created by the negating (see below) and undermines Cameron’s apparent understanding by underscoring the divisions in the society that he governs. zz Exemplifying and Enumerating

As with most political speeches, any lists that occur are symbolic and therefore exemplifying rather than enumerating. The symbolic list par excellence, the three-part list, is evident in a couple of places. Here is one of them: a stronger, more resilient and more balanced economy As is often the case, these lists are not objectively either complete or real lists. The impression of closure and completion is purely rhetorical as is evident from the fact that the first two items in the list are very close in meaning, if not identical. The second example is longer, and I will separate out the three items for clarity: to fix the fundamental problems in our economy to get the jobs and the growth back that can make our country a success in the global race and to back the aspirations of hard-working families who want to get on in life. This example demonstrates the other common feature of symbolic threepart lists; they tend to have vague items or ones that in this case only hint at the kinds of policy that will be enacted. In the case of the final item, for example, experience tells us that the manner of doing this apparently positive thing is likely to be by treating the implied opposite group (those who do not work hard or who are not families) harshly. zz Prioritizing

There is a sentence in the extract that exemplifies the issue of prioritizing. You can see it represented diagrammatically below. This sentence has five levels of structure, one main clause and four levels of subordination. The top level has David Cameron as the subject, with an intensive relational verb (is) telling the hearer that he is ‘here’. The second level retains 171

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Sentence S

P

A

A

A (Clause)

P

O (Clause)

S

P

A (Clause)

S

I am here today

P

O

to say that this is not ..... happen because we have a plan

A (Clause)

to get through ....

A (Clause)

and to get through ....

Figure 10.1  Syntactic structure of Cameron’s sentence Cameron as the subject and uses a verbalization verb (to say). The third level has ‘this’ as its subject, referring to the previous proposition, and it is combined with an event verb (to happen). At the fourth level, we finally get a sense of the government’s intentions, though they are not expressed as a material action but rather as a possessive (have), and it is only at the fifth level, which explains the plan, that we get any sense of action (get through); even then, the actions are vague, and the verb is repeated in a coordinated clause where it is clear that the government wants the public to take as much action as they do (together). zz Implying and Assuming

I have already mentioned that some naming practices result in presupposition (e.g. ‘the global race’), but there are also examples in the extract of logical presuppositions: I know that things are tough right now. The use of the factive verb ‘to know’ produces the presupposition that the following subordinate clause is true. Thus, we are led to believe that Cameron is fully aware of the difficulties people are facing. There are also a few implicatures, the following arising from a flouting of the Gricean maxim of quantity: if we reject the false choices... 172

Critical Stylistics

As well as presupposing the existence of false choices, the unnecessary addition of ‘false’ to the noun phrase implies that there are others who adhere to the wrong ways forward and would encourage us to make false choices. This is reminiscent of fairy-tale structure, where the evil witch is there at the turning point in the road to tempt us onto the wrong path. Or perhaps it is an echo of the temptation of Christ by the devil. zz Negating

We saw earlier that negating can co-occur with other textual-conceptual functions as in the following example: people who didn’t benefit from the so-called ‘boom’ years and who worry that they won’t do so again. The textual-conceptual effects of negating are to produce a mental image of both positive and negative scenarios, which in this case brings to mind both the lack of benefit for northerners during the boom years and an image of people actually benefiting. This latter scenario, though strictly speaking linked to the same northerners, may well produce in the reader’s mind an image of those who did benefit from the boom – southerners and already rich people. This may not work in Cameron’s favour as a result, though he is trying to sound understanding, because he is entrenching the very divisions that make northerners less content with the government. zz Hypothesizing

Cameron’s speech is peppered with epistemic modal and other hypothesizing forms, such as conditionals. Many of these are at the highest level of structure (e.g. ‘I know that’) and this emphasizes the fact that the whole speech is Cameron’s own opinion. The effects of modalizing in this way can be useful to a politician who wishes to come over as personally thoughtful and responsible for his statements, though it can also sound weaker than a categorical (unmodalized) speech. Some of Cameron’s modality in the extract is also boulomaic, expressing his desires (‘I want’), and this is also at the highest level of structure, which can have the effect of making him seem like a dreamer rather than an Actor. zz Presenting others’ speech and thoughts

There is very little representation of others’ speech in this speech, though ‘the so-called “boom” years’ implies a vague other speaker or speakers and emphasizes Cameron’s rejection of that terminology. Though Cameron does not quote others, then, he does nevertheless project others’ thoughts when he makes his generalizations about the population’s concerns (‘Parents are worried’, ‘whole towns are wondering’). These cases 173

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

are general enough to be seen as ‘thought summary’ (see Short’s latest 2012 version of his model, though he excludes thought from his summary category) because there are no clear referents either to thinkers or to their thoughts in any detail. Cameron’s construction of an idealized oppressed northern (hard-) working class enables him to address this imagined community in order to try and gain votes for the Conservatives in the Labour heartlands of the north of England. zz Representing time, space and society

Cameron’s speech was performed at a workplace in Keighley (Yorkshire) on 7 March 2013. Although we can read it at this later stage and interpret it with the benefit of hindsight where relevant, it is likely that readers who were not present at the time will be conscious of the geographical, temporal and political setting of the speech when they read the text. The abundance of proximal features (‘today’, ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘this’) situate the speech very much in the time and space of the speech’s performance, and the effect is one of immediacy and intimacy (‘I’m here today to say...’), which may have worked in Cameron’s favour with his immediate audience (and the larger television audience on the same day) to show him as a man of the people and someone prepared to get his hands dirty. I have attempted above to show how each of the textual-conceptual functions works in a short extract of a much longer text. I kept them separate in this analysis, but there are a number of places where two or more are working either in tandem or more closely to produce effects that might be described jointly. This is what I would recommend to students wanting to produce critical-stylistic analyses themselves, though it is advisable to start by trying to separate the textual-conceptual functions out during the analytical phase of the project.

5 Summary This chapter has outlined the place of textual-conceptual meaning in the larger context of a model of human language and has attempted to show how the textual-conceptual functions work at the level of the text: how they draw on the underlying systems of language and participating in the interpersonal business of human communication but with their own identifiable range of forms and meanings, which link the interpersonal and the linguistic through the textual. The effects of these textual-conceptual functions may in some texts be aesthetic rather than (or as well as) ideological, but in the context of politically and socially important texts, such as those produced by powerful media moguls or 174

Critical Stylistics

politicians, they can become the mechanism for producing ideological consensus, sometimes among an unwitting audience. The idealism and drive of early critical linguistics and more recent CDA are vital to remind us that texts can manipulate and can produce consensus (for good and ill). This is my attempt to contribute a rigorous and replicable textual analytic framework which can be used to expose the naturalized ideologies of texts as part of that critical endeavour.

References Atkinson, M. (1984), Our Masters’ Voices: The Language and Body Language of Politics, London: Routledge. Baker, P. and McEnery, T. (2005), ‘A corpus-based approach to discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in UN and newspaper texts’, Language and Politics, 4 (2): 197–226. Carter, R. and Nash, W. (1983), ‘Language and literariness’, Prose Studies, 6 (2): 124–41. Cook, G. (1994), Discourse and Literature: The Interplay of Form and Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, M. (2013), Oppositions and Ideology in News Discourse, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Fairclough, N. (1992), Discourse and Social Change, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. (2002), The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities, New York: Basic Books. Fowler, R. (1966), Essays on Style and Language, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Fowler, R., ed. (1975), Style and Structure in Literature: Essays in the New Stylistics, Oxford: Blackwell. Fowler, R. (1991), Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press, London: Routledge. Freeman, D. C., ed. (1971), Linguistics and Literary Style, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Gavins, J. (2007), Text World Theory: An Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Halliday, M. A. K. (1994), An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd edn, London: Edward Arnold. Hart, C., ed. (2011), Critical Discourse Studies in Context and Cognition, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hart, C. (2013), ‘Event-construal in press reports of violence in two recent political protests: A cognitive linguistic approach to CDA’, Journal of Language and Politics, 12 (3): 400–23. Hidalgo-Downing, L. (2000), ‘World creation in advertising discourse’, Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 13: 67–88. Jeffries, L. (2010a), Critical Stylistics, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Jeffries, L. (2010b), Opposition in Discourse, London: Continuum. Jeffries, L. (2010c), ‘“The unprofessionals”: Syntactic iconicity and reader interpretation in contemporary poems’, in D. McIntyre and B. Busse (eds), Language and Style, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jeffries, L. (2014), ‘Critical stylistics’, in M. Burke (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics, 408–20, London: Routledge. Jeffries, L. and McIntyre, D. (2010), Stylistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

175

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Louw, B. (1993), ‘Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies’, in M. Baker, G. Francis and E. Tognini-Bonelli (eds), Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair, 157–76, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Marley, C. (2008), ‘Truth values and truth-commitment in interdiscursive dating ads’, Language and Literature, 17 (2): 137–54. McIntyre, D. (2006), Point of View in Plays: A Cognitive Stylistic Approach to Viewpoint in Drama and Other Text-types, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nahajec, L. (2009), ‘Negation and the creation of implicit meaning in poetry’, Language and Literature, 18 (2): 109–27. Semino, E. and Short, M. (2004), Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing, London: Routledge. Short, M. (February 2012), ‘Discourse presentation and speech (and writing, but not thought) summary’, Language and Literature, 21 (1): 18–32. Werth, P. (1999), Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse, London: Longman.

176

11

New Historical Stylistics Beatrix Busse, University of Heidelberg

Chapter Overview Introduction 177 Horizon Scanning of New Historical Stylistics 178 Conclusions 185

1 Introduction New historical stylistics is the application of the complex tools, methods, approaches and theories of stylistics to historical (literary) texts. It seeks to answer the question of how and why a historical (literary) text works and has meaning in the way it does. New historical stylistics discovers, analyses, describes, measures and interprets (foregrounded) stylistic patterns and patterns of styling. It also analyses and interprets their functions, effects and meanings, for example, not only in historical (literary) text types, but also in particular situations or communities of contact. Functions of historical patterns of styles and styling are arranged on a continuum that ranges from characterization, for example, to indexing social identities or to the creation of humour or of fictional minds. This research agenda includes an investigation of how stylistic patterns have developed, changed or remained stable. It also includes the synchronic investigation of particular historical (literary) texts from a stylistic perspective. If style can be defined as the characteristic/foregrounded features of, for example, a literary text, a character or a situation, new historical stylistics also asks how stylistic variation functioned in past periods, which factors influence and construe synchronic variation and to what effect. In general, different stylistic features relate to one another and stylistic features reflect and create socio-historical practices, which then construe and reflect styling. 177

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

The scope of new historical stylistics outlined in the first paragraph refers to the forefront of new historical stylistic investigations into meaning-making practices, literary and non-literary texts from past stages of a language, contexts of production and reception, the role of the speaker and conventions of ­language usage patterns as well as their purposeful deviations and their effects. Hall (2012) claims that there are too few historical stylistic studies that include a variety of canonical and non-canonical texts from different centuries, languages and countries of origin other than English or England. Even though there are not as many new historical stylistics studies as there are stylistic investigations of contemporary language data and other semiotic resources, new historical stylistics studies have been thriving, and they have been embracing all those modern (historical) linguistic approaches, methods and tools into which stylistics has also recently branched out. In addition, the digital turn in the humanities and the digitization of vast numbers of historical texts have led to exciting new ways of engaging with historical (literary) texts and historical styling that will do away with a ‘mass media bias’ (Warnke 2013). The fact that we can now describe stylistic features, social and pragmatic styling and their effects on a larger diachronic scale also overcomes what I have elsewhere called a rather unsystematic, intuitive, and impressionistic ‘firstness discourse’ (Busse 2014a: 102). There are also some additional general reasons for analysing historical texts from a stylistic point of view. One is to put into perspective the sometimes overrated and ahistorical impact of the new media. There are always preceding lines of communication which Carter (2012: 111) points to when he refers to a diachronic presence in new media practices, especially because text messaging or internet chat systems display a mixing or reregistering of genres and genre practices. Secondly, one needs to understand the past in order to understand the present and, what is more, the past is visible in the present. Hall’s (2012) focus on the pedagogical function of stylistics also comprises a historical component because students are generally interested in historical texts and their effects, but often lack the stylistic tools to analyse them.

2  Horizon Scanning of New Historical Stylistics Horizon scanning of new historical stylistics and outlining major and recent developments in the field must address the question of how we can make our analyses and interpretations of historical style valid (Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007) – of what counts as representative data. Also, it is crucial to be aware of what kind of historical data we can rely on if we want to investigate the use of language styles, their functions and effects and repetitive patterns or deviations from them over time, or at a certain point in time in the historical 178

New Historical Stylistics

past. What it means ‘to speak with the dead’ (Greenblatt 1988: 1) consolidates a continuum that ranges between essentialism and constructivism in favour of the latter because, as modern historical stylisticians, we reconstruct and mediate the past. For example, the stylistic investigation of Shakespeare’s plays is not a trivial exercise because one first needs to answer the question of whether a modern edition of Shakespeare’s plays will suffice as data under investigation or whether one draws on the First Folio edition from 1613 or other old texts of Shakespeare’s plays. In Busse and Busse (2012), we illustrated how the investigation of discourse markers in older texts of Shakespeare’s plays can help to retrieve forms of discourse markers, to assess their functions and to answer how variations, if not emendations, in the different historical editions of Shakespeare’s plays create subtle changes in meaning. New historical stylistic investigations have to address a number of additional challenges. For example, we do not have spoken data from the past, we cannot ask contemporary native speakers, nor can we carry out communicative or even psycho-linguistic experiments (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2013) – which are also all part of the tool kit of today’s stylisticians. In addition, the analysis of historical data requires knowledge of spelling and punctuation practices, manuscript and editorial traditions, textual interventions, production circumstances, practices of text dissemination and ‘original’ readerships as well as communicative and performative purposes. The concept of ‘authentic data’ is therefore relative and may be captured with such categories from historical pragmatics, such as ‘speech-related’ texts, which are nevertheless constructed (e.g. literary texts), or more authentic speech such as witness depositions (Culpeper and Kytö 2010). For example, in A Corpus of English Dialogues, Culpeper and Kytö (1997) have only include text excerpts from early modern English comedies, arguing that this allows for more colloquial language from ‘lower-class’ characters to be represented. In turn, even though witness depositions can be considered to be more authentic because we assume that a witness in court actually uttered his words, faithfulness claims can only be made in parts because it is usually a scribe who reports those words, albeit in direct speech. New historical stylistics is interdisciplinary in its outlook because we do not just need linguistic, but also historical, social and cultural expertise. As such, we include information about the social and historical contexts in which language is used, about speakers, their relationship to one another, communicative conventions, and so on. Context is multi-layered and includes the immediate linguistic co-text as well as conventions of genre and register, socio-historical conditions and contexts of cultures. We can use findings of modern styles as a starting point for the investigation of historical periods and texts because we can assume – following the uniformitarian principle (Romaine 1982) – that the linguistic forces operating today also functioned in the past. This is why it is possible for us as new historical sylisticians to investigate the stylistic functions 179

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

and effects of speech acts, discourse markers (cf. e.g., Fludernik 2000), politeness phenomena or speech, writing and thought presentation in texts from past historical periods. For instance, in Busse (2010), I show that in nineteenthcentury narrative fiction, direct speech presentation is the most frequently occurring discourse presentation mode, which is similar to twentieth-century narrative fiction, as Semino and Short (2004) have illustrated. However, I also demonstrate that in nineteenth-century literature, there are peculiar ways of representing a character’s mental states and thought processes that clearly deviate from twentieth-century strategies. Therefore, some modern linguistic and stylistic realization patterns have changed over time or are no longer used. Our knowledge of modern English, for example, may, thus, not always be a reliable stylistic seismograph. Consider also the following example, this time an early modern English insult: During the tempest in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), Sebastian attacks the Boatswain with ‘A pox o’ your throat, you bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog’ (Tmp. 1.1.40f.). While it can probably be assumed, from a modern perspective, that dog is among the set of insulting animal terms, the epithets, ‘bawling’, ‘blasphemous’ and ‘incharitable’, as well as the construction of the nominal group which is modified by three (partly no longer used) adjectives, need historically informed contextual input of early modern English pragmatic manifestations. Contemporary sources, for example, comment on linguistic phenomena in rhetorical handbooks or historical grammars, do not necessarily help to serve an interpretative agenda but as interpretative help, due to the fact that these historical sources on language practices are normative. Nevertheless, they therefore implicitly provide us with frequent – although often socially stigmatized or non-standard – past-language practices. For example, among the hot topics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century grammars are the split infinitive, double negation and preposition stranding. For a long time, these grammars have been considered to be prescriptive in tradition only, while more recent approaches have stressed their usage-based character as well as the need to view them within the contexts of their time, as guidebooks with a specific social and didactic function. Here is an example taken from Lowth’s (1762) Short Introduction to English Grammar, wherein he associates the use of preposition stranding with style in ‘common conversation’: The Preposition is often separated from the Relative which it governs, and joined to the Verb at the end of the Sentence, or of some member of it: as ‘Horace is an author whom I am much delighted with.’ ‘The world is too well bred to shock authors with a truth, which generally their booksellers are the first that inform them of.’ This is an idiom which our language is strongly inclined to; it prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the more familiar style in writing. 180

New Historical Stylistics

Similar to trends in historical linguistics in general and fields such as historical pragmatics in particular, new historical stylistics has extended its tools and research interests to all areas to which stylistics has recently branched out. This means that we take the standard stylistic tool kit, which includes stylistic investigations of core linguistic areas such as phonology, morphology, semantics or syntax in historical (literary) texts. But we also move beyond the rank scale and focus on pragmatic and sociolinguistic, cognitive and multimodal aspects of historical style and include corpus-linguistic methodologies. This development not only reflects a general change in contemporary linguistics but, at the same time, illustrates the potential for historical stylistics to address these research agendas because we can profit effectively from the digital turn in the humanities in general and in linguistics in particular. Corpus-assisted investigations allow us to particularly pursue our interest in historical patterns of language usage and styling. This is complemented by contextual and pragmatic explanations for patterns because of the strong communicative basis in new historical stylistics, in which language use is seen as functional and goal directed. It is a usage-based approach to changing and stable styles, styling and stylistic patterns and patterning and the stylistic principles underlying such developments. Methodologically speaking, new historical stylistics embraces a triangulation of methods that are both quantitative and qualitative, rely on form-to-function and function-to-form mapping, bottom-up to top-down and corpus-assisted (including corpus-driven and corpus-based) methodologies, philological work and complex contextualizations of language manifestations. In historical stylistics, we also accept the heterogeneity of language usage and styles and that there is and has always been variation on a continuum of spoken and written language; that is, forms of communication. One reason for this is the widening range of available historical data and the need to investigate this from an empirical perspective. Styles are therefore not stable or fixed but dynamic, contextually discursive and constructed. Literary language also has to be seen on a continuum. For a long time, diachronic or historical stylistics has been very much a qualitative, philological enterprise. There has been a focus on establishing styles in a particular author’s work, in a particular period or in a particular genre, while emphasizing aspects of rhetoric or classic linguistic features such as syntax or phonology. For example, Adamson (1999) investigates the history of style and its complex political, historical and philosophical contexts in the early modern English period and correlates her findings with the development of a standard English language, the role of rhetoric and ancient rhetorical concepts. In the recent past, historical stylistics has reacted to recent trends in historical linguistics, and it embraces approaches from, for example, corpus stylistics, pragmatic stylistics and multimodal stylistics. In ‘modern historical linguistics’ (Mair 2006), sociolinguistic and pragmatic features are being taken into account 181

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

to a much higher degree, and historical linguistics understood much earlier than linguistics that literary texts need to be seen as indispensable sources of data – and this is not just because there is, for example, no spoken data available for historical periods. So in new historical stylistics, we certainly subscribe to the view that ‘no systematic apparatus can claim to describe a language if it does not embrace the literature also; and not as a freakish development, but as a natural specialisation of categories which are required in other parts of the descriptive system’ (Sinclair 2004: 51). In historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics and even historical corpus linguistics, the concept of style is not unfamiliar. In historical sociolinguistics, the Helsinki group under the aegis of Terttu Nevalainen and Irma Taavitsainen have published a number of corpus-assisted studies that address social style in letters (e.g. Nurmi and Pahta 2012). In historical corpus linguistics, style is initially seen as a quantitative unit that comparatively analyses and describes the occurrence of linguistic phenomena in, for example, different genres or text types, with the aim of describing changing or stable genre conventions. Taavitsainen (2001, 2009) uses Biber’s (1988) multidimensional approach on the styles of contemporary written and spoken English for historical genre analyses, while Biber and Finegan (1989, 1992) show that the style of written registers, such as prose fiction, became more literate in the eighteenth century and then again more ‘oral’ in the nineteenth century. Biber’s (2004) multidimensional analysis of particular (literary) genres from 1600 to 1900 furthermore shows patterning in the grammatical marking of stance, and Fitzmaurice (2000) examines the historical pragmatic functions of modal auxiliaries as a means of expressing subjectivity in seventeenth-century prose. Fitzmaurice (2010) is an example of historical pragmatic approaches to ‘literary discourse’. She stresses the diversity of genres that comprise literary discourse as well as the internal variation in literary texts – she refers to ‘historical literary discourse analysis’, which addresses work by scholars from either a pragmatic, a philosophic-pragmatic or a sociological tradition. Historical literary pragmatic investigations include a focus on politeness, conversation analysis and speech-act theory (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2010; Hillis Miller 2001). Historical play texts function as sources for the investigation of pragmatic features and routines as well as their deviations from them, which is why Chaucer and Shakespeare have received major attention in both quantitative and qualitative historical pragmatic investigations (PakkalaWeckström 2010; Busse and Busse 2010). In addition, there is also a historical stylistic dimension included in investigations of pragmatic functions of lexicogrammatical categories such as deixis or discourse markers (Fitzmaurice 2010: 683), or nominal and pronominal forms of address in literary texts (Busse 2002; Busse 2006; Calvo 2003; Magnusson 2007). Fludernik focuses on metaphors 182

New Historical Stylistics

in literary texts (2012) and Taavitsainen (1998) identifies Jane Austen’s use of ­interjections,  while  Tandon (2003) investigates Gricean principles in Jane Austen’s fiction. There is also a strong historical stylistic focus on narratives and diachronic patterns (Toolan 2001; Emmott 1997; Todorov 1990; Simpson 1993; see also Jucker and Taavitsainen 2013: ch. 12). Fludernik (1993, 1996) demonstrates that in the history of English, narrative patterns showing marks of orality in medieval texts have been gradually replaced by a more complex interplay of discourse presentation modes indicating experientiality and subjectivity (see also Busse 2014a). Adamson (1995) discloses why what she calls a ‘free style of discourse presentation’ appears much earlier than in nineteenth-century narrative fiction. I have previously outlined (Busse 2010) a framework of ‘new historical stylistics’ that both uses the potential of stylistics and bridges the complex interrelationships between stylistic and modern historical linguistic approaches, methods and tools. Embracing the new overall stylistic developments (i.e. corpus stylistics, cognitive stylistics, multimodal stylistics) and also making use of the unparalleled and facilitated access to more diverse data leads to new ways of engaging with literature and texts, on the one hand, and novel ways of searching, browsing, comparing and linking data and analyses, on the other. New questions can/have be(en) asked, and answers to these questions will also have an impact on modern stylistic investigations of (literary) texts. Relying on the main tenets of stylistics – systematic, retrievable, detailed and rigorous – and on the core stylistic question of how a text comes to mean what it does, a new historical stylistician is now in the position to chart the time courses and effects of specific stylistic features in much more detail. We also accept the concept of evolving grammars and styles, and we recognize that language usage, styles and styling have always had fuzzy boundaries. They are not simply generic but also rather situational, local and dynamic. In Busse (2014a), I elaborate on this framework and conceptualize historical discourses and styles as functions of ‘place-making’. ‘New historical stylistics’ is now ‘mobile new historical stylistics’ situated in the ‘mobilities paradigm’ where places are conceptualized as progressive, open and hybrid. This embraces the historical social styling of identity. Thus, style is not just a measurable sociolinguistic profile, which deviates from or is parallel to certain norms, but it is also a communicative social practice (Moore 2012). Discourses index social values in particular situations and communities of practice and, as mobile new historical stylisticians, we serve as profilers and mediators of discourse patterns and their effects on all levels of language and interaction as well as in context. There is a focus on mobile discourse profiles – these are crucial for understanding the processes of meaning-making and how human beings put stylistic resources to work creatively, as part of their ideologies, as 183

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

representations and as expressions of materiality. Street art, which is visible and tangible on buildings or bridges, for example, is part of the semiotic landscape (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010) of an (urban) often gentrified neighbourhood (Busse and Warnke 2014). Street art frequently combines a number of semiotic modes, including language, and comprises a diachronic dimension. Materiality is also a crucial issue when it comes to the printing, editorial as well as production processes of historical texts. Genres and their historical developments are neither fixed anymore nor do they constitute an absolute set of conventions. Rather, they are dynamic and related to changing social institutions and purposes. Coupland (2007) and Moore (2012) point out that only in specific communities of practice or contact situations can linguistic features become socially meaningful (Moore 2012: 71). This entails an understanding of the social concerns of a historical community of practice and how they are embodied in historical social styles. Historical sources are materially visible as soon as they have been uttered. They are constitutive of discursive acts of so-called ‘mobile historical placemaking’. A place is something that human beings have made meaningful through interaction, and language is one of the semiotic resources used to make places. Historical discourses happen in situ and they also create places, which means that new researchable entities and the investigation of how they come to mean include the styling of style, places and areas. For example, in Busse (forthcoming), I illustrate that contemporary linguistic and other semiotic resources quantitatively and qualitatively manifest – that is, enregister – specific Brooklyn neighbourhoods as a brand that is construed as a unified whole, stands in contrast to Manhattan and is characterized by feelings of home or an ‘artsy’ atmosphere. For example, in a corpus of interviews made with Brooklynites in 2011, informants constantly compare Brooklyn with Manhattan or generically refer to Brooklyn as a whole and not to the individual neighbourhood – Williamsburg, Park Slope or Brooklyn Heights – in which they were interviewed. These linguistic and semiotic strategies of social styling have historical predecessors at the end of the nineteenth century, when the city of Brooklyn was united to become one of the five boroughs of the City of New York; they were developed in order to stress the need to keep Brooklyn independent despite the unification. Computer-assisted text analysis foregrounds patterns of style and styling in historical literary texts. These might otherwise have gone unnoticed and provide a norm that other results of a mobile new historical stylistic investigation can be measured against in order to establish the discursive practices of a particular genre or the linguistic profiles of an author or a place. Nevertheless, due to the fact that corpus-assisted methodology has a lexical bias, these forms need to be enhanced with meaning and a complex discussion of the relationship between intra- and extra-stylistic norms of the features under investigation in order to measure, assess, describe and interpret foregrounded (social) 184

New Historical Stylistics

styling. These procedures also need to be extended by complex qualitative contextual analyses that take account of ‘emergent grammar’. Highly useful tools which enhance historically informed (semantic) analyses are the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as well as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) (Busse 2012b) and other databases such as the Lexicons of Early Modern English. For example, in Kern-Stähler and Busse (2015), we use the HTOED to retrieve medieval and early modern constructions of vision and blindness in order to investigate styles and conceptualizations of sensory disabilities in medieval and early modern English medical texts. New historical stylistic investigations which quantitatively and/or qualitatively investigate functional or discursive phenomena include topics such as speech, writing and thought presentation (Busse 2010, 2014a; McIntyre and Walker 2011; Semino and Short 2004), clusters as local textual function (Mahlberg 2007, 2012), style and ideology in Reformation England (Canning 2012) or stance (Busse 2012a).

3 Conclusions There are a number of points of intersection between modern historical linguistic approaches, such as historical pragmatics or historical sociolinguistics, and new historical stylistics. One is the focus on interaction between ‘author’, reader and a contemporary audience as well as a focus on communicative functions of earlier literary texts (Sell 2000: 117). The other is the major theoretical focus on emergent and dynamic genres, features and the notion of emergent grammar. However, in new historical stylistics, the focus is more on answering why these features occur – on contextual analyses that address effects on the reader or on relevant micro-linguistic contexts. Also, new historical stylistic approaches are very interested in low-frequency linguistic strategies in relation to highfrequency items, which become meaningful in the context of patterned styles. This focus also relates to a warning by Cameron (2011) in which she expresses her concern about an exaggerated focus on empiricism in ‘humanities scholarship’ (Carter 2012) in general and the analysis of literature in particular, because not all research questions can and must emanate from ‘the science building’ (Cameron 2011: 68), just because it is currently en vogue. Instead, she also opts for a methodological pluralism that has characterized the fields of linguistics and literary criticism in the past in order to find out what literature is about. New historical stylistics serves as an apt example of the interplay between not only a number of disciplines, but also of complementing methods, which are necessary to do justice to the objects under investigation. New historical stylistics serves as an approach and sub-discipline of stylistics, which – through its focus on the stylistic analysis of past (literary) and 185

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

imaginary texts – offers the possibility of analysing, charting and understanding the evolution and development of multiple forms of creativity and even cognitive processes. The meaning-making stylistic practices and effects construed in historical texts need frameworks which account for the fact that historical language and literature are ‘many things at once’ (Cameron 2011: 70).

References Adamson, S. (1995), ‘Empathetic narrative – a literary and linguistic problem’, in W. Ayres-Bennett and P. O’Donovan (eds), Syntax and the Literary System, 17–42, Cambridge: Cambridge French Colloquia. Adamson, S. (1999), ‘The literary language’, in R. Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Volume 3: 1476-1776, 539–653, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biber, D. (1988), Variation Across Speech and Writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biber, D. (2004), ‘Historical patterns for the grammatical marking of stance: A cross-register comparison’, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 5 (1): 107–36. Biber, D. and Finegan, E. (1989), ‘Drift and the evolution of English style: A history of three genres’, Language, 65: 487–515. Biber, D. and Finegan, E. (1992), ‘The evolution of five written and speech-based English genres from the 17th to the 20th centuries’, in M. Rissanen, O. Ihalainen, T. Nevalainen and I. Taavitsainen (eds), History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, 688–704, Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Busse, U. (2002), Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus: Morpho-syntactic Variability of Second Person Pronouns, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Busse, B. (2006), Vocative Constructions in the Language of Shakespeare, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Busse, B. (2010), ‘Recent trends in new historical stylistics’, in B. Busse and D. McIntyre (eds), Language and Style: in Honour of Mick Short, 32–54, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Busse, B. (2012a), ‘Historical text analysis: Underlying parameters and methodological procedures’, in A. Ender, A. Leeman and B. Wälchli (eds), Methods in Contemporary Linguistics, 285–308, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Busse, B. (2012b), ‘A celebration of words and ideas: The stylistic potential of the historical thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary’, Language and Literature, 21 (1): 84–92. Busse, B. (2014a), ‘(New) Historical Stylistics’, in M. Burke (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics, 101–17, London: Routledge. Busse, B. (2014b), Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of 19th-Century Narrative Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Busse, B. (forthcoming), ‘Enregisterment in Brooklyn, New York’, Journal of Sociolinguistics. Busse, B. and Busse, U. (2012), ‘Methodological suggestions for investigating Shakespearean discourse markers in old texts of Shakespeare’s plays’, in C. Suhr and I. Taavitsainen (eds), Developing Corpus Methodology for Historical Pragmatics (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 11), Helsinki: VARIENG. http://www. helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/11/busse_busse/. Busse, B. and Warnke, I. H. (2014), ‘Sprache im urbanen Raum – Konzeption und Forschungsfelder der urbanen Linguistik’, in E. Felder and A. Gardt (eds), Handbuch Sprache und Wissen, vol. 1, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.

186

New Historical Stylistics Busse, U. and Busse, B. (2010), ‘Shakespeare’, in A. H. Jucker and I. Taavitsainen (eds), Historical Pragmatics, vol. 8, 246–81, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Calvo, C. (2003), ‘Pronouns of address in As You Like It’, Language and Literature, 1: 5–27. Cameron, D. (2011), ‘Evolution, science, and the study of literature: A critical response’, Language and Literature, 20 (1): 59–72. Canning, P. (2012), Style in the Renaissance: Language and Ideology in Early Modern England, London: Continuum. Carter, R. (2012), ‘Coda: Some rubber bullet points’, Language and Literature, 21 (1): 106–14. Coupland, N. (2007), Style: Language Variation and Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Culpeper, J. and Kytö, M. (1997), ‘Towards a corpus of dialogues, 1550-1750’, in H.  Ramisch and K. Wynne (eds), Language in Time and Space: Studies in Honour of Wolfgang Viereck on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday, 60–73, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Culpeper, J. and Kytö, M., eds (2010), Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Emmott, C. (1997), Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective, Oxford: Clarendon. Fitzmaurice, S. (2000), ‘Like talking on paper? The pragmatics of courtship and the eighteenth-century familiar letter’, Language Sciences, 22 (3): 359–83. Fitzmaurice, S. (2010), ‘Literary discourse’, in A. H. Jucker and I. Taavitsainen (eds), Historical Pragmatics, vol. 8, 679–704, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Fludernik, M. (1993), The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction, London and New York: Routledge. Fludernik, M. (1996), Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London: Routledge. Fludernik, M. (2000), ‘Genres, text types, or discourse modes? Narrative modalities and generic categorization’, Style, 34 (2): 274–92. Fludernik, M. (2000), ‘Discourse markers in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur’, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 1 (2): 231–62. Fludernik, M. (2012), ‘Introduction’, in M. Fludernik (ed.), Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory, 1–18, New York: Routledge. Greenblatt, S. J. (1988), Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hall, G. (2012), ‘A celebration of style: An introduction to the special issue by the current editor of Language and Literature’, Language and Literature, 21 (1): 5–8. Hillis Miller, J. (2001), Speech Acts in Literature, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jaworski, A. and Thurlow, C. (2010), Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, London: Continuum. Jucker, A. H. and Taavitsainen, I., eds (2010), Historical Pragmatics, vol. 8, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Jucker A. H. and Taavitsainen, I. (2013), English Historical Pragmatics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kern-Stähler, A. and Busse, B., eds (2015), The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures, Leiden: Brill. Lowth, R. (1762), A Short Introduction to English Grammar, London: J. Hughs. Magnusson, L. (2007), ‘A pragmatics for interpreting Shakespeare’s sonnets 1 to 20: Dialogue scripts and Erasmian intertext’, in S. Fitzmaurice and I. Taavitsainen (eds), Methods in Historical Pragmatics, 167–84, Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Mahlberg, M. (2007), ‘Corpus stylistics: Bridging the gap between linguistics and literary studies’, in M. Hoey, M. Mahlberg, M. Stubbs and W. Teubert (eds), Text, Discourse and Corpora: Theory and Analysis, 219–46, London: Continuum. Mahlberg, M. (2012), Corpus Stylistics and Dickens’s Fiction, London: Routledge. Mair, C. (2006), Twentieth-century English, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

187

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics McIntyre, D. and Walker, B. (2011), ‘Discourse presentation in Early Modern English writing: A preliminary corpus-based investigation’, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 16 (1): 101–30. Moore, E. (2012), ‘The social life of style’, Language and Literature, 21 (1): 66–83. Nurmi, A. and Pahta, P. (2012), ‘Multilingual practices in women’s English correspondence 1400-1800’, in M. Sebba, S. Mahootian and C. Jonsson (eds), Language Mixing and Code-switching in Writing: Approaches to Mixed-language Written Discourse, 44–67, New York: Routledge. Pakkala-Weckström, M. (2010), ‘Chaucer’, in A. H. Jucker and I. Taavitsainen (eds), Historical Pragmatics, vol. 8, 219–45, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Romaine, S. (1982), Socio-Historical Linguistics: Its Status and Methodology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sell, R. (2000), Literature as Communication, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Semino, E. and Short, M. (2004), Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing, London: Routledge. Shakespeare, W. (1611), The Tempest, in G. Blakemore Evans (ed.) (1974) and (1997) The Riverside Shakespeare, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Sinclair, J. (2004), Trust the Text: Language, Corpus and Discourse, London: Routledge. Tandon, B. (2003), Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation, London: Anthem Press. Taavitsainen, I. (1998), ‘Emphatic language and romantic prose: Changing functions of interjections in a sociocultural perspective’, European Journal of English Studies, 2 (2): 195–214. Taavitsainen, I. (2001), ‘Changing conventions of writing: The dynamics of genres, text types, and text traditions’, European Journal of English Studies, 5 (2): 139–50. Taavitsainen, I. (2009), ‘The pragmatics of knowledge and meaning: Corpus linguistic approaches to changing thought-styles in early Modern medical discourse’, in A. H. Jucker, D. Schreier and M. Hundt (eds), Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse, 37–62, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Taavitsainen, I. and Fitzmaurice, S. M. (2007), ‘Historical pragmatics: What it is and how to do it’, in S. M. Fitzmaurice and I. Taavitsainen (eds), Methods in Historical Pragmatics, 11–36, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Todorov, T. (1990), Genres in Discourse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Toolan, M. (2001), Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, London: Routledge. Warnke, I. H. (2013), ‘Urbaner Diskurs und maskierter Protest: Intersektionale Feldperspektiven auf Gentrifizierungsdynamiken in Berlin Kreuzberg’, in C. S. Roth and C. Spiegel (eds), Angewandte Diskurslinguistik: Felder, Probleme, Perspektiven, 189–221, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.

188

12

Empirical Stylistics Frank Hakemulder, University of Utrecht and Willie van Peer, University of Munich

Chapter Overview Introduction 189 A Historical Setting 190 Overview 192 Narrative Perspective 195 Deviation 199 Conclusion 202

1 Introduction Does it matter how we say things? That is the core of the problem we will be looking at in this chapter. Our intuitions are clear: of course it does. Remember that carefully formulated email you sent, which was still not understood the way you had intended? Did you never get the feedback ‘It was not what you said, it was the way you said it that bothers me’? We see something similar in the humanities; the main focus of studies of art, film and literature has been on the analysis of the way things are represented, plausibly because that is of some significance. Also for artists themselves, it seems a central axiom: A considerable portion of their mental energy is put into meticulous reflections about the way they formulate, carve, paint or film. Can we all be wrong? Of course we can. We do not really know whether this concentration on formulation makes a difference. And if it does, we do not know exactly how, and for whom. This chapter will look at a number of

189

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

hypotheses regarding the effects of style that were investigated empirically. We will briefly introduce the field with some historical background (Section 2) and a short overview of the most important research themes (Section 3) before we focus on two main clusters of hypotheses: first, those that pertain to stylistic devices that are alleged to engage readers with narrative worlds through narrative perspective (Section 4); and second, those that are assumed to stimulate readers to reflection on the text itself, mainly through deviations from normal language use (Section 5).

2  A Historical Setting The bulk of work in stylistics has been geared towards the analysis of literary (partly also other) texts. It has attempted to unravel the secrets by which such texts exert an influence on readers (or hearers/spectators). Yet for all this work, most of the conclusions drawn from text analyses, which project them on to what could be the reaction of a reader, are merely what they are: projections. Until one really investigates how real readers respond to particular texts (or textual devices) one does not really know how they react. Speculation certainly has its merits, but only up to a point. That point is where one really wants to know how readers feel when confronted with particular stylistic devices. Fortunately, there has been an offspring of stylistics that has endeavoured to do just that: to find out how specific stylistic devices influence readers’ responses. This offspring could be called ‘empirical stylistics’. But what of the term ‘empirical’? One could easily argue that the texts studied in stylistic analyses are also ‘empirical’, in the sense that they are documents, having some objective status in reality. It has been argued that this objective status is a chimera. There were some people in the 1980s and after who believed that texts only existed in readers’ minds. But that seems so counterintuitive that one wonders how the very idea could ever have gained ground. For how can you and I talk to each other about Hamlet if that text exists only in our minds? Of course, it also exists in our minds, but in order to get there, there must have been some input into those minds that let us know that this is the text of Hamlet. And with all the differences that each individual now brings to the reading, processing, understanding or evaluating that text, it is still the case that we both are conversing about Hamlet, a text that existed prior to our conversation. If that text only existed when we read it, we could never say that it was created at the beginning of the seventeenth century. But if texts have some independent existence in the world, then why not treat them as ‘empirical’ data? Here different avenues are followed. Some will argue that it is exactly the subjective nature of the processing activities that renders the immediate, stylistic approach to texts unreliable, and that certainly the 190

Empirical Stylistics

results are not trustworthy enough to base generalized conclusions on them. Others have fewer difficulties with the issue and magnanimously grant that the texts themselves have an empirical status in the world. The only requirement scholars have to meet, they say, is that the analyses are objective, so that others can independently check the results. But it is exactly here that difficulties begin. In principle, stylistics has attempted to free itself from the typical subjectivity that characterizes literary criticism; for early programmatic statements in this respect, see Fowler (1971). The question is, however, whether that attempt has been successful. Is it really the case that researcher B can ‘prove’ that researcher A made a mistake in his or her analysis? Or that the supposed effects can also be explained by alternative explanations that have not been ruled out? We are convinced that for the greater majority of articles appearing in Language and Literature or Style this is, unfortunately, not the case. Most of such stylistics approaches do genuinely try to build in a distance towards subjectivity and certainly should not be thrown in a bag with literary criticism, but they nevertheless do not succeed in making the analyses such that other researchers can disagree in a way that allows them to reject one and accept the other. This also is related to the lack of consensus over methodological standards with which to judge assertions made by stylisticians. There is as yet no such consensus around – and as long as there is not, stylistics remains bound to a high proportion of individual ingenuity, unable to implement independent falsification procedures. This in no way renders stylistic analyses trivial or uninteresting, but it does cast a shadow of subjectivity over the enterprise. It remains to be seen whether the original aims set for stylistics have been implemented and, above all, whether they have been realized. It is our own opinion that they have not – although some progress has certainly been made in specific areas. But to say that stylistics has now overcome traditional literary criticism is a form of megalomania that is certainly not going to help the discipline to develop further along the lines of how stylistics was originally conceived. But if the central aim of stylistics is to accurately describe the linguistic structure of (literary) texts, an immediate question raises itself: Why would one want to do this? What is the point of having an inventory of all linguistic features of a text described according to a particular model taken from (theoretical) linguistics? Supposedly this enterprise is not an aim in itself but furthers our understanding of how such texts function. Why, for instance, are such efforts made to come to terms with free indirect discourse (see further below)? Do we really need them? Hence the descriptive activity is not exclusive. Rather, stylistic analysis is inclusive of interpretative moments – hence its affinity with literary criticism. But such moments of interpretation are the Achilles heel of any effort at description, for they presume particular effects of these structures. But it can be asked how we can link such interpretative proposals to their actual workings. 191

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

For without such a link, stylistics remains largely sterile: an inventory indeed of various linguistic structures, but without a rationale. It is to this end that empirical investigations into the workings of stylistic devices came into being. At this point it becomes unavoidable to ask what we mean by ‘empirical’. This is not the place to delve deep into questions of epistemology, to be sure, and there are enough excellent introductions to this field available (e.g. Audi 2010). For our present purposes, suffice it to say that the term preserves some of its etymological origin from the Greek empeiría, meaning experienced, based on observation. Hence we define the term empirical as referring to assertions that can be independently controlled through experiential tests. This meaning becomes quite clear when we look at quantitative stylistics, the attempt to describe linguistic structures in literary texts by means of quantitative methods, which is nowadays almost exclusively carried out with the help of computer programs (e.g. Microconcord, Oxford Concordance, TACT, Wordsmith, LIWC, COH-Metrix, etc.). The computer program does not ‘interpret’ the texts in the way a human reader may, and therefore the results are in some way objective, in the sense outlined above. These results will have to be interpreted, no doubt, but at least such interpretation will have to take into account the ‘objective’ data generated by the computer program. And these data can be independently checked by any other researcher. For some succinct but excellent overviews of the field, see Adolphs (2006), Biber and Conrad (2009), Biber (2010), Biber, Conrad and Reppen (1998), Pennebaker and Ireland (2011), Louw (2008), Pennebaker (2011), Ireland and Pennebaker (2010), and Semino and Short (2004). As becomes clear from these works, empirical work can very well be carried out on texts themselves. It is with respect to readers, however, that the bulk of empirical stylistics has been carried out. The next section attempts to give a rough overview of some of the studies in this domain.

3 Overview It is not easy to give a full overview of empirical stylistics, one major reason being that the field is genuinely interdisciplinary. Hence, one finds contributions to it not merely from stylistics, but also from psychology and artificial intelligence, from history and sociology, from linguistics and literary studies. Some general introductions and collections that may be consulted are Auracher and van Peer (2008), Bortolussi and Dixon (2003), Sanford and Emmott (2012), Gerrig (1993), Gottschall (2008), Kreuz and MacNealy (1996), Miall (2006), Nardocchio (1992), Schram and Steen (2001), van Peer, Hakemulder and Zyngier (2012), van Peer (1986), van Peer and Chatman (2001) and Zyngier et al. (2008). Granted, these are all very different sorts of collections, but together they give a good impression of the state of the art. It should also be noted that there is an international 192

Empirical Stylistics

society, called by its original German acronym, IGEL (the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature), which runs the journal Scientific Study of Literature (published by Benjamins; see: http://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/ssol/main). The journal Poetics sometimes also publishes empirical work on stylistics, as do Style, Language and Literature, and Poetics Today. The journal Empirical Studies of the Arts occasionally publishes contributions on literature, as do the various journals in the respective disciplines mentioned above. As will be appreciated, it is impossible in the narrow space of the present chapter to give a detailed account of all avenues of research in empirical stylistics. Two major areas of study, those of narratology and of foregrounding, will be treated in separate sections. What follows here are just some of the many roads taken by empirical researchers to investigate literary texts. In general, we have selected the most recent publications, as these often also incorporate older research. One such area is the study of iconicity (also called sound symbolism, related to synaesthesia). For an insight in contemporary work in this field, see Elleström et al. (2013). Against Saussure, some of this work demonstrates that under certain conditions, the relationship between sound and meaning is not arbitrary; see, for instance, Wiseman and van Peer (2002, 2003). The most convincing study in this respect is Auracher et al. (2011), as it systematically investigates iconicity in the poetry in four different, partly unrelated languages, employing automatic text analysis (to avoid researcher bias). Prosodic phenomena have been studied empirically by Tsur (2012) and van Peer (1990). A good deal of attention has been given to metaphor, metonymy, simile, allegory, irony, sarcasm and the like – we will use the term ‘non-literal language’ as a hypernym in this respect. The work carried out in this domain over the past decades has made us acutely aware of the ubiquity of non-literal language in everyday speech and writing; see, for instance Gibbs (1994). This nonliteral language forms the foundation for innovative and novel uses by poets and writers. That novel metaphors are experienced as more pleasurable has been demonstrated by Bohrn et al. (2012). And the present book will certainly inform its readers about non-literal language in a variety of ways, for example, under the heading of ‘cognitive poetics’. The field has exploded in the wake of the seminal work by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), so that it is impossible to do full justice to it here. Excellent overviews are to be found in Giora (2014b), Giora (2014a), Hancks and Giora (2011). On metaphor comprehension, see Giora (2003), Kintsch and Bowles (2002), Gibbs (2008). Steen (1994) is one of the most extensive studies here. On irony, the reader should consult Giora (2009), Kotthoff (2003), Leggitt and Gibbs (2000). Often, ‘traditional’ topics such as allegory have been thought not to be amenable to empirical approaches, but Gibbs and Blackwell (2012) provide an excellent demonstration of how a more rigorous scientific approach of the topic is not only possible, but also illuminating. 193

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

The previous studies illustrated how specific textual features evoke certain reactions in readers. But it is also possible to approach stylistic phenomena from the opposite angle: to start from readers’ reactions and relate these to the qualities of the texts. In this respect, one of the areas that highlights the power of empirical stylistics is the realm of emotions. Already in 1994(a), Miall and Kuiken had found that stretches of a literary text containing a high number of foregrounding devices elicited the most powerful emotions in readers, even when those passages did not contain specific references to emotions. These findings have also been replicated by Sopcak (2007), while Auracher (2007) found even physiological effects for stylistic devices, effects that could be fed back into literary theory. It is still too early to say whether this is a universal phenomenon, but the results reveal a highly significant insight into literature and its functioning. Apparently, poets do not invest time and energy in formal devices for nothing, for they apparently create powerful emotions in readers/listeners. It is also a finding that could never have been unearthed by textual analysis alone. The role of emotions in literary reading is widely acknowledged, but studying the text without having recourse to readers’ real emotional experiences is never going to reveal the workings of stylistic devices on the emotional lives of individuals and social groups. Such workings have been recorded with respect to foregrounding (see the studies cited above), but also with respect to coping (Koopman 2011), empathy (Bourg 1996, Lászlo 2008), feminist issues (Odag 2008, 2011), film (Tan 1996), identification (Kotovych et al. 2011, Oatley 1994, Oatley and Gholomain 1997), personality (Djikic et al. 2009, Djikic, Oatley and Carland 2012; Mar 2008), story structure (see Brewer 1998; Brewer and Lichtenstein 1982; Graesser and Klettke 2001), sympathy (Andringa 1986; Oatley 1999; Sklar 2013; van Peer and Pander Maat 1996, 2001; van Peer 2001), and absorption and transportation in narratives (Bilandzic and Bussele 2008; Green 2004; Green and Carpenter 2011; Green, Strange and Brock 2002; Green and Brock 2000; Green, Chatham and Sestir 2012; Owen and Riggs 2012). Over the past decades, a historical dimension has been added to the research in the form of the study of past readers; see, for instance Darnton (1995), Rose (2001), and St Clare (2004). Meanwhile, there is a website that unites efforts in this domain: the Reading Experience Database (RED), which contains 30,000 records of reading experiences. Its limitation is mainly national – the contributors are all British readers – but the initiative might set an example for other nations to join and build a similar database of reading experiences. the RED project is actively trying to extend its objectives to other countries, including Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand. In the following sections, we focus on two domains in stylistics where we see a certain degree of consensus regarding the (alleged) effects of style on readers. In Section 5, we will look at deviation from normal language use and the role it 194

Empirical Stylistics

may have on readers’ responses. In Section 4, we will concentrate on the effects of narrative perspective.

4  Narrative Perspective It seems obvious (at least to many literary scholars) that perspective is a powerful instrument for influencing readers (van Peer and Pander Maat 2001). Stanzel (1979), for instance, says that it is a ‘highly effective means to control feelings of sympathy’ (173). Leech and Short (1981) argue that it is evident that the ‘very exposure … to a character’s point of view – his thoughts, emotions, experience – tends to establish an identification with that character, and an alignment with his value picture’ (275). Booth (1987: 278) states that readers’ exposure to the internal perspectives of characters will enhance sympathy even for the most vicious character. So, the general agreement seems to be that one of the ways in which readers engage with fictional worlds, and in particular with the characters in it, is through the perspective of characters, and in addition, narrators and implied authors. Researchers’ attempts to test this assumption, however, have sometimes met with negative results. For example, Ludwig and Faulstich (1985) and Andringa (1996) found that ‘narrative distance’ had no effect on emotional involvement. Andringa defined narrative distance as the level of intrusion of the narrator. In her study, passages with overt narrator comments from Borges’ ‘Emma Zunz’ were removed. Contrary to expectations, this did not affect participants’ scores rating sympathy and involvement measures. With the narrator withdrawing as much as possible from what is told, readers in her study had stronger experiences and fuller imagination, and they felt identification and empathy. When the narrator was present in a rather conspicuous way, readers’ engagement with the fictional world and its characters decreased, a finding that is also in correspondence with physiological indicators of attention in Auracher’s (2007) research. Predictions based on literary theory clearly are not always borne out by empirical evidence. Nevertheless, when we overlook the field, we can draw some cautious conclusions: it does seem that perspective affects the way readers process the text, that it determines the nature of their responses, that it biases their judgement of characters and that it might also affect their self-concept. Let us take a look at the relevant research. As to the first assumption, that narrative perspective affects processing of the text, we find evidence in studies assessing reading times. When reading times increase, we may assume that readers invest more cognitive effort in processing the text, for instance due to perspective; as the text gets closer to the consciousness of the character, readers pay more attention. Results, however, are 195

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

not unanimous in favour of this claim. Lászlo (1986) asked participants to read a literary text and measured their reading time per section. They either read a story from the perspective of the main character or a neutral version in which references to the character’s inner world were removed. The results showed no significant difference in reading times. However, in two other studies, we do see an effect of perspective on reading time. First, Cupchik and Lászlo (1994) registered higher reading times for segments providing insight into characters’ experiences, as opposed to those for more action orientated passages. Miall and Kuiken (2001) examined the relation between reading time and the degree to which narrative perspective is prominent in the text. They found a positive correlation: reading times increased with character perspective. A second conclusion from the available research is that perspective favours so-called F-responses over A-responses, where F stands for ‘fiction’ and A for ‘aesthetic’ (see Tan 2000). The former refers to responses that primarily pertain to the fictional world, such as the attention readers devote to psychological states of the main characters, empathy and identification, and a general engagement with the events, such as suspense, surprise and curiosity. A-responses pertain to the attention given to style and story construction. In a study by Fleisher Feldman et al. (1990), several literary stories were presented in two versions. The ‘conscious’ versions presented events from an internal point of view, while the ‘non-conscious’ versions narrated events from the outside, in a more descriptive mode. Participants responded to a number of open questions and were asked to retell the stories. The researchers found that the conscious versions produced richer responses, containing more information than was actually given in the stories, and resulted in more F-responses. Reading the non-conscious versions produced more A-responses. Similar results were obtained by Lászlo (1986). He found that participants were faster at imagining certain aspects of a story they read when it was presented in a ‘conscious’ version rather than in a version where all references to inner states of the character had been removed (non-conscious). This suggests that (internal) perspective helps readers to construct a mental model of the story world. A third, slightly less cautious, conclusion is that perspective affects judgements (arguably a special case of F-responses). We do not need to be very careful here, simply because there are quite a number of findings to support this claim. We will briefly review some of them. In an experiment by Bortolussi and Dixon (2003), perspective was found to affect identification with the character as a result of the ‘transparency’ of the narrator’s inner world. The researchers assume that narratives are processed as if they were everyday conversations. Thus, they view the narrator not as an abstract characteristic of a text but as a mental construction of the reader, who will construct the narrator as someone the readers have some form of conversation with. Such a ‘conversational partner’ is transparent ‘to the extent that readers believe that they understand the 196

Empirical Stylistics

character and his or her feelings, thoughts, and behavior’ (89). The researchers prepared an implicit preamble (based on the original text that was used in this experiment) and an explicit one. When the implicit preamble is read first, the assumption is that readers will have to attempt to interpret the narrator and find some form of ‘cooperation’ with the narrator, like they would in a conversation, in order to construct the narrator’s attitude, resulting in identification. A subsequent explicit preamble should merely confirm what readers have already inferred. If readers read the explicit preamble first and then the implicit one, however, they need not carry out the projections when reading the latter. As a result, they will not identify with the narrator. In their assessment of the effects of this manipulation, Bortolussi and Dixon used items that refer to fairness, reasonableness and justifiability of the position and actions of the character-narrator. As expected, placing the implicit preamble first led to more positive judgements of the character as compared to the judgements of readers who first read the explicit preamble. So, again we see that narrative perspective stimulates readers to take the perspective of the character. Andringa (1986), too, examined the effects of perspective on character judgement. She used a story describing a conflict between two characters, a judge and a thief. She constructed three versions of the text: one in which the judge is the I-narrator, a second in which the thief is the I-narrator, and a third in which a neutral external narrator presents the events in the story world. Andringa’s results indicate that readers felt more understanding for the I-narrator, especially for the thief. Secondly, readers judged the other characters from the perspective of the I-narrator, especially when this was the thief’s perspective. A different approach to character judgement is presented in a study by Gerrig (2001). He distinguishes situational and dispositional attributions, with the former explaining (character) behaviour in terms of circumstances, and the latter pointing to states or traits as main causes of behaviour. In his experiment, Gerrig applied a simple text manipulation, producing a third-person narration and a first-person narration about a baseball game in which one team, that of a character called Washington, is vanquished. The sentence ‘Washington was watching the baseball game from his position in right field’ in the one version would read ‘I was watching the baseball game from my position in right field’ in the other version. The question put to participants, who read either one of the two versions, was simple: ‘To what extent did the narrator cause his team to defeat?’ The hypothesis was that readers’ responses would be more biased towards causal attribution for the I-narrator as compared to the third-person narrator. And this is what was found. It should be noted that these results are somewhat confusing, especially when compared to those of Andringa. In Gerrig’s study, we see that the character-I-narrator gets the blame for the defeat of his team. In Andringa’s study, we see a positive bias towards the character-I-narrator. Of course, the solution to 197

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

such conflicting results is (1) to rerun the study with a greater number of stories and (2) to examine under which conditions first-person narration leads to a positive bias or a negative bias regarding the character. Van Peer and Pander Maat (2001) also examined perspective effects on character judgement, in this case both on sympathy and on attribution. In this study, however, they manipulated the text (a conflict between a husband and wife) by adding text in which we perceive the fictional world through the perspective of either the husband or the wife. The results showed significant effects on sympathy. However, this held only for parts of the sample rather than for all participants. As for attribution, the researchers also found an effect. For instance, they asked the readers why the wife does not leave her husband in peace. Participants’ responses to this multiple-choice question were dominantly in favour of the wife in the group where participants had read the text version with additional focalization for the wife (e.g. ‘she wants to get things done in the household’). The reverse held for the version of the husband (e.g. ‘she wants to have things her way’). Finally, Hakemulder (2000) examined the effect of perspective manipulation on character judgement using Ann Beattie’s ‘Learning to Fall’ and Chekhov’s ‘The Butterfly’. The texts were rewritten so that in one version the main character (in both stories an adulterous woman) is the main focalizer in the story, and in the other we perceive the fictional events through the eyes of other characters in the story. Participants were asked to rate the main character on a number of ‘morality’ scales, including ‘selfish’, ‘moral’, ‘promiscuous’ and ‘sincere’. Only in the case of the Beattie story was there a significant effect of focalization: in comparison with the version in which other characters perceived the fictional world, focalization by the adulterous woman made readers’ judgements on the four items for ‘morality’ significantly milder. It therefore seems that particularities of the texts (in this case most likely Chekhov’s irony) sometimes overrule the effects of narrative perspective. The influence of narrative perspective on reader response might go beyond the perception of fictional characters and may even affect readers’ perception of their own character. In the aforementioned experiment by Hakemulder (2000), the two stories were presented in several versions, with not only focalization as a manipulated variable, but also story outcome; some had a happy ending and one a sad ending. The hypothesis was that focalization would stimulate participants to experiment with the role of the character, and – in line with predictions of social learning theory (Bandura 1977) – would reject the role of the main character when she met with a sad ending (punishment of the ‘role model’) but would be more accepting of such a role in case of a happy ending (reward). Participants were presented with some personality items and were asked to what degree they thought the items applied to them. One item was ‘unfaithful to my partner’. Participants were requested to think about this item 198

Empirical Stylistics

and a number of filler items in three ways: whether it described them now, in the past or in the future (cf. Markus and Nurius 1986). Responses were compared to those of a control group that read a text about political economy. An effect was found for the focalization manipulation, but only for the male readers of the Beattie story. When they read the version in which the female character focalizes the events, they scored significantly lower on the ‘future self’ as an unfaithful partner as compared to the male readers of the other version of the text, as well as compared to the male readers of the control text about political economy. Presumably narrative perspective stimulates readers to engage in some form of imaginary role play, experimenting with the roles and actually learning from seeing the consequences. Thus, reading fiction might affect readers’ possible selves.

5 Deviation A second area in which empirical stylistics has been involved is readers’ engagement with texts on a different level than that of the story world. An impressive array of theorists has claimed that deviations from normal language use may cause readers to reflect on the form of the message rather than its content (see, for an overview, van Peer and Hakemulder 2006). Stylistic deviations are assumed to cause obstruction to the usual text processing; they may cause readers to take a little longer to understand the text, what is going on in the fictional world, what the narrator’s attitude is, what the meaning of (novel) metaphors are, and so forth. This ‘retardation’ may cause an increase in aesthetic pleasure, a savouring of the text, as it were. Theorists assume it is also associated with estrangement: we learn to look with a novice’s eye at things that are overly familiar to us. Ultimately, this might lead to a refamiliarization, an understanding of those same familiar things but now enriched with new insights (Fialho 2007). In empirical stylistics, this is a theory that has been well tested. For instance, the surprise effect of deviation was found in studies by Hoorn (1997), van Peer (1986) and van Peer, Hakemulder and Zyngier (2007). Deviation was shown to draw readers’ attention (van Peer 1986) and cause retardation in the reading process (Miall and Kuiken 1994a, b; Sopcak 2007). That deviation causes an affective impact was, as pointed out before, revealed by Miall and Kuiken (1994a, b), while an increase in appreciation from first to second reading was registered by Dixon et al. (1993), van Peer, Hakemulder and Zyngier (2007) and Hakemulder (2004). That deviation creates a new perspective on familiar things (refamiliarization) was described by Hakemulder (2004) for changes in the conceptions of what love is, by Sopcak (2011) for an understanding of our finitude and by Fialho (2012) as a cycle of deepened understanding in the aesthetic 199

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

perspective of readers. As we proposed earlier, it does seem that deviation is related to readers’ (self-) reflection and may lead to changes in beliefs, concepts and insights. A fruitful approach in empirical stylistic studies of deviation and its effects is the rereading paradigm, launched by Dixon et al. (1993). They propose that ‘one characteristic of literary effects is that they emerge over time. In other words, the hallmark of at least some literary effects is that they do not occur spontaneously on the first casual reading of the text, but are generated only later through study and reflection’ (14). This characteristic ‘refer[s] to effects that are produced later, after the initial reading, as emergent effects. Although all emergent effects are not literary effects and all literary effects are not emergent effects, our position is that the two tend to go together: Most emergent effects are literary and vice versa.’ In their research, they asked participants to read a story once, evaluate the text on a number of items assessing their appreciation, read it for a second time, and then respond to the same items again. They manipulated a Borges story, ‘Emma Zunz’, producing a version with less deviation than the original. The story is told by what they call an ambiguous narrator; one that admits to know little about, for instance, what is on the mind of the main character, or even what she is doing. What they found was that responses to the original did produce the emergent effect (i.e. the increase in appreciation from first to second reading) while the manipulated version did not. However, this held only for part of the population: those participants who had indicated they were frequent readers. The researchers also rewrote a popular text, a crime story, so that the events would also be narrated by an ambiguous narrator. This, however, did not result in an emergent effect. The idea that deviation in style (as the ambiguous narrator certainly seems to be) would lead to an emergent effect was replicated in several other studies (e.g. Hakemulder 2004; see, for similar effects in film reception, Hakemulder 2007). It seems that ‘literariness’ is indeed not only a text quality but also a phenomenon that comes about in interaction with certain readers. It is characterized by reflection and slower reading, and it seems that it is caused by deviation. See, for alternatives to the rereading paradigm, Sanford and Emmott’s text change detection method (Sanford and Emmott 2012), and Miall and Kuiken’s (1994a, b) reading pace study, or brain activity studies by Hoorn (1997) and Jacobs (e.g. Bohrn et al. 2012). In the second half of this section, we will take a look at a special case of perspective that is simultaneously an example of deviation: free indirect discourse (FID). This is a device that also occurs in non-literary texts, but certainly more often in literature. FID is assumed to be a way of representing events somewhere between direct and indirect discourse. Direct discourse minimizes the distance between characters and reader, eliminating the presence of the narrator, creating a dramatic effect, enhancing liveliness and stimulating reader involvement (Prince 1982). Indirect discourse is assumed to create a detachment 200

Empirical Stylistics

from characters and their words, giving the impression of a narrator who is in control, and reducing the involvement of the reader (Toolan 1996). Since FID is defined as a mixture of the two, there is some discussion about what the possible effects of this style characteristic might be. For instance, Rimmon-Kenan (1983) proposes that FID might lead to either an ironic stance towards the character or an increase in empathy (113). This ambiguity makes it an interesting subject for empirical research. An important question here is whether readers notice FID at all. A small group of expert contemporary readers (narratologists) clearly do; for them, it is a popular topic to debate and write about. However, the relevance of the distinctions they make increases considerably when non-specialists’ responses are also affected by such stylistic subtleties as those of FID. Results of the available studies suggest that readers do perceive FID, but certainly not all do. Sopcak, Kuiken and Miall (2006) asked participants to read the first five pages of Eliot’s Middlemarch. In response to passages with many FID indicators, there was substantially more disagreement among readers whether the events were presented from the perspective of the narrator or that of the character. Also, in a second study, it was found that passages in which readers noticed a higher degree of ‘co-presence’ (that is to say, they perceived both the narrator and the character as present in the phrasing of the text) were those that were high in FID markers. Interestingly, rereading the segments resulted in higher co-presence scores. This seems to provide reasons to believe that FID might result in emergent or literary effects (cf. Dixon et al. 1993). In a third study, the researchers investigated the role of individual differences in the degree to which readers responded to FID. Individual differences were assessed using the literary response questionnaire, an instrument to assess between-participants variation in attitudes towards literature (Miall and Kuiken 1995). The results showed that the higher participants scored on one of the scales (imagery vividness, defined as readers’ inclination to be involved in ‘imaginary elaboration of a literary world that becomes vividly present not only visually, but also in feeling, sound, and smell’, 41), the more likely they were to experience co-presence from the outset (see also Sotirova 2006; Bray 2007). Another personality variable that might play a role was found in a study by Cohen and Kaiser (2012). They found a correlation between participants’ sensitivity to FID and their scores on a spatial perspective-taking task: the easier it was for them to conceptualize different perspectives or orientations in space in that task, the better they were at detecting FID. A second question pertains to the possible effects of FID. Comparable to the effects discussed for other forms of narrative perspective, here too we see an increase in sympathy and understanding for the character (Schram 1985; Bortolussi and Dixon 2003). In a series of four studies by Hakemulder and Koopman (2010), only a limited effect of FID was found on such variables. However, a robust effect on the visibility of the character’s consciousness was 201

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

found. Similar results were found by Kotovych, et al. (2011), who also found that FID contributes to readers’ sense of ‘character transparency’, that is, the idea that the character’s actions and attitudes are clear and understandable; interestingly, this happens without the texts actually giving more information than a version written in the form of a third-person narration. It seems that the ambiguous position of FID between the categories ‘narrative perspective’ and ‘deviation’ is reflected in the research results. On the one hand, it may stimulate F-responses, just like narrative perspective; on the other hand, it might cause emergent effects that are indicative of A-responses.

6 Conclusion It does matter how we say things – at least as far as the formulation of literary texts is concerned. In this chapter, we have focused on two different forms of attention (or absorption) that are generated by different aspects of style. We have seen that some devices will cause more thorough processing. One possible cause is that they make the processing more complex; for instance, because of the deviations in the text. However, we have also seen that the engagement with the text may become more thorough because the text offers insights into the characters’ inner lives. Moreover, one group of devices may lead to more engagement with fictional worlds (F-responses, e.g. identification and judgement of the character), while others may stimulate attention for aesthetic qualities (A-responses). FID might cause a mixture of the two. Literary texts seem to consist of a number of devices that, on the one hand, pull readers inside (fictional) narrative worlds, and on the other hand kick them out. To understand this balance between pull and push, to see how that might differ per text or text passage, and even per audience, we need an empirical approach to stylistics. This chapter has shown that the research domain is far beyond its infancy. However, it is also clear that much work still needs to be done, and preferably in team work, a collaboration between psychologists and stylisticians, to our mutual interest and benefit. If there is a future for stylistics, it will have to embrace a more scientific approach, not just describing but also explaining the effects of textual features.

References Adolphs, S. (2006), Introducing Electronic Text Analysis: A Practical Guide for Language and Literary Studies, London: Routledge. Andringa, E. (1986), ‘Perspektivierung und Perspektivenübernahme: Zur Wahrnehmung literarischer Figuren’. [Perspectivation and Adoption of Point of View: On the Perception of Literary Characters], SPIEL, 5: 135–46.

202

Empirical Stylistics Andringa, E. (1996), ‘Effect of “narrative distance” on readers’ emotional involvement and response’, Poetics, 23: 431–52. Audi, R. (2010), Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, London: Routledge. Auracher, J. (2007), Psychophysiologischen Messungen zur Textwirkung. [Psychophysiological Measurements of Text Effects], Baden-Baden: Deutscher Wissenschafts-Verlag. Auracher, J. and van Peer, W., eds (2008), New Beginnings in Literary Studies, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publications. Auracher, J., Albers, S., Zhai, Y., Gareeva, G. and Stavniychuk, T. (2011), ‘P is for happiness, N is for sadness: Universals in sound iconicity to detect emotions in poetry’, Discourse Processes, 48: 1–25. Bandura, A. (1977), Social Learning Theory, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Biber, D. (2010), ‘Corpus linguistics and the study of literature: Back to the future?’, Scientific Study of Literature, 1 (1): 15–23. Biber, D. and Conrad, S. (2009), Register, Genre, and Style, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biber, D., Conrad, S. and Reppen, R. (1998), Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bilandzic, H. and Busselle, R. (2008), ‘Transportation and transportability in the cultivation of genre-consistent beliefs and attitudes’, Journal of Communication, 58: 508–29. Bohrn, I. C., Altmann, U., Lubrich, O., Menninghaus, W. and Jacobs, A. M. (2012), ‘Old proverbs in new skins – an fMRI study on defamiliarization’, Frontiers of Psychology, 3: 204. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00204. Booth, W. C. (1987), The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (1st ed. 1961). Bortolussi, M. and Dixon, P. (2003), Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourg, T. (1996), ‘The role of emotions, empathy, and text structures in children’s and adults’ narrative text comprehension’, in R. Kreuz and S. MacNealy (eds), Empirical Approaches to Literature and Aesthetics, 241–60, Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Bray, J. (2007), ‘The “dual voice” of free indirect discourse: A reading experiment’, Language and Literature, 16 (1): 37–52. Brewer, W. F. (1998), ‘Short story structure and affect: Evidence from cognitive psychology’, in B. Lounsberry, S. Lohafer, M. Rohrberger, S. Pett and R. Feddersen (eds), The Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story, 157–64, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Brewer, W. F. and Lichtenstein, E. H. (1982), ‘Stories are to entertain. A structural-affect theory of stories’, Journal of Pragmatics, 6: 473–86. Cohen, A. and Kaiser, E. (2012), In Someone Else’s Shoes: A Psycholinguistic Investigation of FID and Perspective Taking. Conference Paper at Quotation: Perspectives from Philosophy and Linguistics. Ruhr-Uni Bochum. Cupchik, G. C. and Lászlo, J. (1994), ‘The landscape of time in literary reception: Character experience and narrative action’, Cognition and Emotion, 8 (4): 297–312. Darnton, R. (1995), The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-revolutionary France, New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Dixon, P., Bortolussi, M., Twilley, L. C. and Leung, A. (1993), ‘Literary processing and interpretation: Towards empirical foundations’, Poetics, 22: 5–33. Djikic, M., Oatley, K. and Carland, M. (2012), ‘Genre or artistic merit? The effect of literature on personality’, Scientific Study of Literature, 2 (1): 25–36. Djikic, M., Oatley, K., Zoeterman, S. and Peterson, J. (2009), ‘On being moved by art: How reading fiction transforms the self’, Creativity Research Journal, 21 (1): 24–9. Elleström, L., Fischer, O. and Jungberg, C., eds (2013), Iconic Investigations, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

203

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Fialho, O. (2007), ‘Foregrounding and refamiliarization: Understanding readers’ response to literary texts’, Language and Literature, 16 (2): 105–23. Fialho, O. (2012), Self-Modifying Experiences in Literary Reading: A Model for Reader Response. Unpublished PhD disseration. University of Alberta. Fleisher Feldman, C., Bruner, J., Renderer, B. and Spitzer, S. (1990), ‘Narrative comprehension’, in B. K. Britton and A. D. Pellegrini (eds), Narrative Thought and Narrative Language, 1–78, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Fowler, R. (1971), The Languages of Literature: Some Linguistic Contributions to Criticism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Gerrig, R. (1993), Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gerrig, R. (2001), ‘Perspective as participation’, in W. van Peer and S. Chatman (eds), New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective, 303–23, Albany: SUNY Press. Gibbs, R. (1994), The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibbs, R., ed. (2008), The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibbs, R. W. and Blackwell, N. (2012), ‘Climbing the ladder to literary heaven: A case study of allegorical interpretation of fiction’, Scientific Study of Literature, 2 (2): 199–217. Giora, R. (2003), On our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative Language, New York: Oxford University Press. Giora, R. (2009), ‘Irony’, in L. Cummings (ed.), Pragmatics Encyclopedia, 265–67, London: Routledge. Giora, R. (2014a), ‘Happy New War: The role of salient meanings and salience-based interpretations in processing utterances’, in H.-J. Schmid (ed.), Cognitive Pragmatics Handbook of Pragmatics, vol. 4, 233–60, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Giora, R. (2014b), ‘Literal vs. nonliteral language – novelty matters’, in T. Holtgraves (ed.), Handbook of Language and Social Psychology, 330–47, New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Gottschall, J. (2008), Literature, Science and the New Humanities, New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Graesser, A. C. and Klettke, B. (2001), ‘Agency, plot and a structural affect theory of literary story comprehension’, in D. Schram and G. Steen (eds), The Psychology and Sociology of Literature: In Honor of Elrud Ibsch, 57–69, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Green, M. C. (2004), ‘Transportation into narrative worlds: The role of prior knowledge and perceived realism’, Discourse Processes, 38: 247–66. Green, M. C. and Carpenter, J. M. (2011), ‘Transportation into Narrative Worlds’, Scientific Study of Literature, 1 (1): 113–22. Green, M. C. and Brock, T. C. (2000), ‘The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79 (5): 701–21. Green, M. C., Chatham, C. and Sestir, M. A. (2012), ‘Emotion and transportation into fact and fiction’, Scientific Study of Literature, 2 (1): 37–59. Green, M. C., Strange, J. J. and Brock, T. C., eds (2002), Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hakemulder, F. and Koopman, E. (2010), ‘Readers closing in on immoral characters’ consciousness: Effects of free indirect discourse on response to literary narratives’, Journal of Literary Theory, 4 (1): 41–62. Hakemulder, J. (2000), The Moral Laboratory: Experiments Examining the Effects of Reading Literature on Social Perception and Moral Self-Concept, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Hakemulder, J. (2004), ‘Foregrounding and its effects on readers’ perception’, Discourse Processes, 38 (2): 193–218.

204

Empirical Stylistics Hakemulder, J. (2007), ‘Tracing foregrounding in response to film’, Language and Literature, 16 (2): 125–39. Hancks, P. and Giora, R., eds (2011), Metaphor and Figurative Language, 6 vols, London: Routledge. Hjort, M. and Laver, S., eds (1997), Emotions and the Arts, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoorn, J. (1997), ‘Electronical evidence for the anomaly theory of metaphor processing: A brief introduction’, in S. Tötösy de Zepetnek and I. Sywensky (eds), The Systematic and Empirical Approach to Literature and Culture as Theory and Application, 67–74, Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta. Ireland, M. E. and Pennebaker, J. W. (2010), ‘Language style matching in writing: Synchrony in essays, correspondence and poetry’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99: 141–55. Kintsch, W. and Bowles, A. R. (2002), ‘Metaphor comprehension: What makes a metaphor difficult to understand?’, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 17: 249–62. Koopman, E. (2011), ‘Predictors of insight and catharsis among readers who use literature as a coping strategy’, Scientific Study of Literature, 1 (2): 241–59. Kotovych, M., Dixon, P., Bortolussi, M. and Holden, M. (2011), ‘Textual determinants of a component of literary identification’, Scientific Study of Literature, 1 (2): 260–91. Kotthoff, H. (2003), ‘Responding to irony in different contexts: Cognition and conversation’, Journal of Pragmatics, 35: 1387–411. Kreuz, R. and MacNealy, S., eds (1996), Empirical Approaches to Literature and Aesthetics, Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980), Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lászlo, J. (1986), ‘Same story with different point of view’, SPIEL, 5: 1–22. Lászlo, J. (2008), ‘Narrative empathy and inter-group relations’, in S. Zyngier, M. Bortolussi, A. Chesnokova and J. Auracher (eds), Directions in Empirical Literary Studies, 113–25, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Leech, G. N. and Short, M. H. (1981), Style in Fiction, London: Longman. Leggitt J. S. and Gibbs Jr., R. W. (2000), ‘Emotional reactions to verbal irony’, Discourse Processes, 29 (1): 1–24. Lounsberry, B., Lohafer, S., Rohrberger, M., Pett, S. and Feddersen, R., eds (1998), The Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Louw, B. (2008), ‘Consolidated empirical method in data-assisted stylistics’, in S. Zyngier, M. Bortolussi, A. Chesnokova and J. Auracher (eds), Directions in Empirical Literary Studies, 243–64, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Ludwig, H. and Faulstich, W. (1985), Erzählperspektive empirisch. Untersuchungen zur Rezeptionsrelevanz narrativer Strukturen (Narrative Perspective from an Empirical Point of View), Tübingen: Narr. Mar, R. (2008), ‘Effects of reading on knowledge, social abilities, and selfhood: Theory and empirical studies’, in S. Zyngier, M. Bortolussi, A. Chesnokova, and J. Auracher (eds), Directions in Empirical Literary Studies, 127–8, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Markus, H. and Nurius, P. (1986), ‘Possible selves’, American Psychologist, 41 (9): 954–69. Miall, D. S. (2006), Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies, New York: Peter Lang. Miall, D. S. and Kuiken, D. (1994a), ‘Beyond text theory: Understanding literary response’, Discourse Processes, 17: 337–52. Miall, D. S. and Kuiken, D. (1994b), ‘Foregrounding, defamiliarization, and affect: Response to literary stories’, Poetics, 22: 389–407. Miall, D. S. and Kuiken, D. (1995), ‘Aspects of literary response: A new questionnaire’, Research in the Teaching of English, 29 (1): 137–58.

205

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Miall, D. S. and Kuiken, D. (2001), ‘Shifting perspectives: Readers’ feelings and literary response’, in W. van Peer and S. Chatman (eds), New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective, 289–301, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Nardocchio, E., ed. (1992), Reader Response to Literature: The Empirical Dimension, Berlin: W. de Gruyter. Oatley, K. (1994), ‘A taxonomy of the emotions of literary response and a theory of identification in fictional narratives’, Poetics, 23: 53–74. Oatley, K. (1999), ‘Meetings of minds: Dialogue, sympathy, and identification, in reading fiction’, Poetics, 26: 439–54. Oatley, K. and Gholomain, M. (1997), ‘Emotions and identification: Connections between readers and fiction’, in M. Hjort and S. Laver (eds), Emotions and the Arts, 263–81, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Odag, Ö. (2008), ‘Of men who read romance and women who read adventure stories. … An empirical reception study on the emotional engagement of men and women while reading narrative texts’, in J. Auracher and W. van Peer (eds), New Beginnings in Literature, 308–29, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publications. Odag, Ö. (2011), ‘Reading engagement: A matter of biological sex alone?’, Scientific Study of Literature, 1 (2): 292–325. Owen, B. and Riggs, M. (2012), ‘Transportation, need for cognition, and affective disposition as factors in enjoyment of film narratives’, Scientific Study of Literature, 2 (1): 128–49. Pennebaker, J. (2011), The Secret Lives of Pronouns: How Words Reflect Who We Are, New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press. Prince, G. (1982), Narratology: The Form and Function of Narrative, Amsterdam: Mouton. Rimmon-Kenan, S. (1983), Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, London: Methuen. Rose, J. (2001), The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sanford, A. J. and Emmott, C. (2012), Mind, Brain and Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schram, D. and Steen, G., eds (2001), The Psychology and Sociology of Literature: In Honor of Elrud Ibsch, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Schram, D. H. (1985), Norm en Normdoorbreking [Norm and violating norms], Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij. Semino, E. and Short, M. H. (2004), Corpus Stylistics. Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing, London: Routledge. Sklar, H. (2013), The Art of Sympathy in Fiction: Forms of Ethical and Emotional Persuasion, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Sopcak, P. (2007), ‘Creation from nothing – A foregrounding study of James Joyce’s drafts for Ulysses’, Language and Literature, 16 (2): 183–96. Sopcak, P. (2011), Epiphanies of Finitude: A Phenomenological Study of Existential Reading, Edmonton: University of Alberta. Sopcak, P., Kuiken, D. and Miall, D. S. (2006), Beyond ‘voices’: Empirical studies of free indirect discourse in Middlemarch. Paper presented at the 10th International Conference of IGEL (International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media), Chiemsee, Germany. Sotirova, V. (2006), ‘Reader responses to narrative point of view’, Poetics, 34: 108–33. St Clare, W. (2004), The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stanzel, F. K. (1979), Theorie des Erzählens (Theory of Narration), Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. Steen, G. (1994), Understanding Metaphor in Literature: An Empirical Approach, London: Longman.

206

Empirical Stylistics Tan, E. (1996), Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Tan, E. (2000), ‘Emotion, art, and the humanities’, in M. Lewis and J. M. Haviland-Jones (eds), Handbook of Emotions, 116–36, New York: Guilford Press. Toolan, M. (1996), Total Speech: An Integrational Linguistic Approach to Language, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tsur, R. (2012), Playing by Ear and the Tip of the Tongue: Precategorial Information in Poetry, Amsterdam: Benjamins. van Peer, W. (1986), Stylistics and Psychology, London: Croom Helm. van Peer, W. (1990), ‘The measurement of metre: Its cognitive and affective functions’, Poetics, 19: 259–75. van Peer, W. (2001), ‘Justice in perspective’, in W. van Peer and S. Chatman (eds), New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective, 325–38, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. van Peer, W. and Chatman, S., eds (2001), New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. van Peer, W. and Hakemulder, J. (2006), ‘Foregrounding’, in K. Brown (ed.), The Pergamon Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, 546–51, Oxford: Elsevier. van Peer, W., Hakemulder, J. and Zyngier, S. (2007), ‘Lines on feeling: Foregrounding, aesthetics and meaning’, Language and Literature, 16 (2): 197–213. van Peer, W., Hakemulder, F. and Zyngier, S. (2012), Scientific Methods for the Humanities, Amsterdam: Benjamins. van Peer, W. and Pander Maat, H. (1996), ‘Perspectivation and sympathy: Effects of narrative point of view’, in R. Kreuz and S. McNeally (eds), Empirical Approaches to Literature and Aesthetics, 143–54, Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing Company. van Peer, W. and Pander Maat, H. (2001), ‘Narrative perspective and the interpretation of characters’ motives’, Language and Literature, 10 (3): 229–41. van Peer, W., Zyngier, S. and Hakemulder, J. (2007), ‘Foregrounding: Past, present, future’, in D. Hoover and S. Lattig (eds), Stylistics: Prospect and Retrospect, 1–23, Atlanta: Rodopi. Wiseman, M. and van Peer, W. (2002), ‘The sound of meaning: A study in phonetic iconicity’, in J. Zerkowitz and S. Csabi (eds), Textual Secrets, 379–83, Budapest: Eötvös Lórand University Press. Wiseman, M. and van Peer, W. (2003), ‘Roman Jakobsons Konzept der Selbstreferenz aus der Perspektive der heutigen Kognitionswissenschaft’, in H. Birus, S. Donat and B. Meyer-Sickendiek (eds), Roman Jakobsons Gedichtanalysen. Eine Herausforderung an die Philologien, 277–307, München: Wallstein Verlag. Zyngier, S., Bortolussi, M., Chesnokova, A. and Auracher, J., eds (2008), Directions in Empirical Literary Studies, Amsterdam: Benjamins.

207

13

Pedagogical Stylistics: Charting Outcomes Sonia Zyngier, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Olivia Fialho, Utrecht University

Chapter Overview Introduction 208 Situating the Issue 209 Where does Pedagogical Stylistics Belong? 210 In Search of Roots 212 A Survey of Methodologies 217 Posing Questions: An Empirical Study 219 Conclusion 225 Acknowledgement 226

The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner? Virginia Woolf (2008[1922]: 75)

1 Introduction It often takes a long time for ideas to hatch in any area of research, and pedagogical stylistics has been no exception. Although much has been covered (Zyngier 1994b; Hall 2005; Watson and Zyngier 2007; Burke 2010; Burke et al. 2012; Jeffries and McIntyre 2011), empirical research on what actually occurs 208

Pedagogical Stylistics: Charting Outcomes

when interventions are carried out is still in need of attention. More specifically, we realize that the role of emotion in a stylistics learning environment has been kept on the back burner for too long. Considered a fuzzy area that makes grading rather difficult, the issue of affective responses to texts still remains a problem for teachers and critics. In 1977, Tompkins argued against the lack of feeling in critical discourse, explaining that ‘partly in reaction to the sentimentalism of the last [century], and partly in an effort to prove literary criticism a scientific discipline, the discussion or expression of emotional responses to literature was ruled illegitimate’ (169). Much earlier, Rosenblatt (1995[1938]) had already suggested that ‘discussion of literary experiences makes possible rehearsals of the struggle to clarify emotion and make it the basis of intelligent and informed thinking’ (226). Ten years after the publication of Tompkins’ work, Fabb (1997: 276) commented that the understanding of how emotional experience of verbal art relates to linguistic forms still needed attention. More recently, a great leap in this direction has been provided by studies in foregrounding (Miall and Kuiken 1994; van Peer and Hakemulder 2006; van Peer 2007; Fialho 2012), a stylistic feature that has been seen to influence literary response. As regards the learning environment, however, not many studies have empirically tested the role of emotions in students’ responses. Among the exceptions, Hanauer (2010) resorted to developments in arts-based studies to see how poetry writing may turn into a research method for second-language learning. Earlier, he used quantitative research tools in cognitive psychology to look at the processes of reading poems (Hanauer 1998, 2001). One of the few studies that empirically examined what processes actually occurred in the learning of stylistics was Bellard-Thomson’s (2010), where she argued for corpus-linguistic analyses of student writing. But what happens collectively when students are asked to respond to striking features of a literary text following an interpretive approach or more affective-oriented instructions is still in line. This chapter reappraises pedagogical stylistics, situates it historically and looks into students’ collective responses when shaping their verbal reactions to foregrounded passages.

2  Situating the Issue Using linguistic models and tools to arrive at textual meaning has been at the core of stylistics pedagogy (Carter and Nash 1990; Clark 1996; Carter and McRae 1996; Short 1989, 1996; Simpson 1996, 2004; Toolan 1990, 1997, among others). Systematizing affective responses, though, has not been so central despite the fact that, from classical philosophers to contemporary neuroscientists, scholars have worked towards understanding how emotion works, where it is located and how it regulates our interactions. According to Hjort and Laver (1997: 3), 209

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

‘art and emotion are inextricably linked, as is shown by even the most cursory account of the history of critical thinking about music, painting, literature, or theatre’ (see also Miall 2006). How does it come to be that most work in the area of pedagogical stylistics has remained on the interpretative level and has speculated little on how words affect readers? In this chapter, we will observe some readers’ accounts of foregrounded passages in literary texts. We start from the premise that any pedagogical intervention should consider students’ verbalized experience. We are in line with Canning and Simpson’s statement that ‘pedagogical stylistics should occupy a central position not only within its parent discipline, stylistics, but within other cognate disciplines that rely on the application of linguistic models to text and discourse’ (2012: 24). Here, we are not concerned with how students respond to foregrounding in literary texts but with how their responses to this stylistic feature compare when they are exposed to different sets of instructions.

3  Where does Pedagogical Stylistics Belong? Literary texts can be a source of pleasure within institutionalized walls, out in the fields or in the coziness of one’s home. Within the learning environment, however, fruition is taken for granted for the simple reason that it cannot be graded. Another complicating factor is that testing methods in education can involve a long process and not all teachers may be inclined to carry it out. They may be updated with the most recent theories and perhaps apply them to their teaching, but whether the theories actually work and what students get out of them, among other considerations, are left for later – or never. Unlike results in medicine or engineering, for instance, the effects of literary education may not be noticed at once. Hives will not flare up dramatically in students if they dislike a class, find some reading difficult, drop out of a course or just stop reading canonical texts altogether. In fact, literature teachers may get away easily if students do not remember what they experienced and learned. The effects may only be noticed years later. No bridges will fall and nobody will die as a result. However, the level of educational relevance may tilt towards biology, mathematics or physics. In France, Pennac (1992) and Snyders (1999) have already warned that literary studies are on the wane. In the English-speaking world, similar predictions have been made (see Ellis 1997; Scholes 1998; Rouse 2004; among others). In Brazilian high schools, literature classes have been incorporated into language studies. Should literary educators sit back and wait for the final removal of their discipline from the curriculum, or should objectives and methods be reappraised so that all participants involved in policy making, curriculum design and actual learning see the need for literature? 210

Pedagogical Stylistics: Charting Outcomes

Over a decade ago, one of the most prominent advocates for integrating language and literature in the curriculum stressed that literary texts were ‘a means of introducing learners to … a serious view of our world, of initiating them in the process of defining themselves through contact with others’ experience’ (our italics, Brumfit 2001: 92). Much earlier, Rosenblatt (1995[1938]: 57) had already warned that ‘all the student’s knowledge about literary history, about authors and period and literary types, will be so much useless baggage if he has not been led primarily to seek in literature a vital personal experience. Far from helping the student in this direction, much literature teaching has the effect of turning him away from it.’ How much have Rosenblatt and Brumfit, among others, been heeded? We can teach the circumstances of literature, the facts and the theories. This is what has traditionally been done. Knowledge about authors, contexts of production and other kinds of information are necessary and should continue to be part of cultural or literary studies, together with history, geography and other disciplines. But experiencing textuality and finding out what makes certain readings singular and unforgettable are to some extent still overlooked in many learning settings. If we want students to be aware of the relevance of verbal artistry and ensure that their experience becomes memorable, we must combine educational principles and stylistic methods. Educational theories must therefore be translated into methods and strategies that learners feel are natural to them. At this point in time, there is no lack of thinkers and theories to illuminate the ways into the classroom. But how can we find out empirically what happens when students come into contact with the language of literary texts? What patterns may emerge from their verbalized responses? This is where pedagogical stylistics can be of help. As the name indicates, pedagogical stylistics is one of the many applications of stylistics, defined by Simpson (2004: 2) as ‘a method of textual interpretation in which primacy of place is assigned to language’. He adds that the several forms and levels of language work as an ‘index of the function of the text’, which, in turn, becomes ‘a gateway to its interpretation’ (ibid.). In the learning environment, the function of stylistics is to promote students’ awareness of how language is selected, organized and used so that they are able to perceive to what extent the subtleties of these linguistic choices help produce certain effects (Zyngier 1994a). More recently, McIntyre (2011) offered a terminological distinction between a pedagogy of stylistics, or how to teach stylistics, and pedagogical stylistics, that is, ‘the application of stylistic techniques in teaching, though not necessarily the teaching of stylistics per se’ (3). It includes research on what occurs when certain techniques or methods are applied. The implications here are that pedagogical stylistics may study the language of learning literature – whether it be the teacher’s (i.e. instructions), the students’ (i.e. their production), classroom exchanges and so on. By doing so, it observes empirically what happens with 211

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

the participants and the circumstances involved when different toolkits and methods are used. In this sense, pedagogical stylistics requires scientific methods of investigation to assess classroom discourse and empirical data derived from practice. This chapter is an illustration in this direction. The next section traces a history of how we have arrived at this stage.

4  In Search of Roots Locating the bedrock of pedagogical stylistics is no easy task. One of the problems is that the birth of stylistics itself is not consensual. Some attribute it to classical rhetoric (Bradford 1997; Verdonk 2002; Burke 2013). Others see it as a more recent outcome of Saussurean linguistics and Russian Formalism (see Fialho et al. 2012). What can be ascertained is that the turn of the twentieth century offered fertile ground for the development of a more systematic approach to literary texts. This was a time when more ‘objective’ linguistic description took over prescriptive grammar (see debate in Short et al. 1998 and Mackay 1999), when more interest grew in descriptive reports of what happened in texts and the effects obtained rather than in determining what should be said or written (rhetoric); in sum, when there was a move from taxis to lexis (Lausberg 1967). While efforts towards installing a scientific approach to literary texts (Šklovsky 1965[1917]) were being carried out, literary studies were making their way into the curriculum (Graff 1987). The question of how teachers could help students acquire skills for interpreting texts in a systematic way, or what we call pedagogies of stylistics, became central. Pedagogical stylistics, or the research into what actually happens when stylistics is taught, was a later development.

4.1  Historical Survey As Dr. Seuss (Geisel 1955) wittily puts it: When you go beyond Zebra, Who knows ...? There’s no telling What wonderful things You might find yourself spelling! So you see! There’s no end To the things you might know, Depending how far beyond Zebra you go! 212

Pedagogical Stylistics: Charting Outcomes

As far as pedagogical stylistics is concerned, the different theoretical linguistic and pedagogical frameworks confound and prevent a linear and sequential history. Instead of a step-by-step narrative, what follows is a network rather than a chronology of outlooks. We are aware that this survey will need to be constantly revised and that the more the subject is probed, the more unexpected turns it will take around each corner. We hope, however, that this historical account may help situate pedagogical stylistics in a broader context. Literature has always been part and parcel with language. Emphases have differed, though. As they made their way into the curriculum at the turn of the twentieth century, literary texts were seen as superior to spoken language and as ways to improve human beings. They were models of language usage to be copied. The method was the same grammar-translation used for classical Latin and Greek centuries before. In the aftermath of the Second World War, different educational theories flourished, and a variety of linguistic perspectives have been shaping the way literary texts have been dealt with in the learning setting.

4.2  Political Background Depending on where it thrives, stylistics takes on different shapes (in France, see Maingueneau 1993). So it is rather ironic that it has been criticized as an example of a decontextualized and ahistorical approach to isolated structures and systems (see review in Zyngier 2001). In the United Kingdom, it was definitely born out of political interests and developed together with the increased attention to English as a foreign language, mostly through the efforts of the British Council, founded in 1934. The words proffered by the then Prince of Wales at the council’s official inauguration in the following summer may sound uncomfortably supremacist today: The basis of our work must be the English language ... [and] we are aiming at something more profound than just a smattering of our tongue. Our object is to assist the largest number possible to appreciate fully the glories of our literature, our contribution to the arts and sciences, and our pre-eminent contribution to Political practice. This can be best achieved by promoting the study of our language abroad. ... Reflecting on these words, Lott (1984: 283) comments: Finely wrought words indeed, and their message could hardly have been more auspicious for those concerned in any way with English language teaching. Of course, much on these lines was already being done, especially outside Britain. Distinguished creative writers and The British Council may 213

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

or may not have invented the term ‘applied linguistics,’ but at least it was there at the birth and gave the infant discipline a strong initial boost, for example by collaborating with the University of Edinburgh in the founding of the first School of Applied Linguistics, in 1957. It could be argued that it was the British Council which precipitated the widely current and characteristically British pedagogy that emphasizes the aspects of student interest, meaning, activation, communication, and discourse analysis. This pragmatic approach, which some may feel has at times involved an element of ‘muddling through,’ has complemented and by now largely overtaken language-teaching styles based on rigidly formulated orthodoxies.1 The teaching of contemporary English together with literature soon became a priority in official circles. In 1959, the Linguistic Panel of the British Council issued a memorandum. Among the members were J. C. Catford, R. Quirk and J. R. Firth. In their recommendations, they pointed out the need to ‘increase the number of British teachers going overseas and of oversea teachers coming to the United Kingdom for training’.2 In its Appendix A, it acknowledged that in some places literature and language were studied together but that language was ‘usually treated from an historical point of view. Only incidentally is the contemporary language dealt with. A good deal of stylistic study is devoted to contemporary literature, but only rarely are stylistics points linked with linguistic ones.’ Firth’s (1968[1930–55]) concern for a systematic and disciplined approach to the study of language and literature and his recommendation that we should use linguistic methods to study the context of the whole poem was in tune with the theory being developed by Roman Jakobson, who was by then already in the United States. At the Indiana Conference in 1958, Jakobson (1960) launched what has turned out to be a manifesto for a language-based stylistics. In the same year, Halliday, one of Firth’s students and followers, was appointed lecturer at the recently inaugurated School of Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. The ground was set for the integration between modern linguistics and stylistics aimed at learning environments. Efforts towards a pedagogical stylistics gained momentum in the late 1960s and early 1970s as linguists discussed the role of literary texts in the classroom. Among them were Sinclair (1966), who also came from the University of Edinburgh; and Leech (1969), who provided a series of examples of how to analyse different features of poetic style from a linguistic perspective. This period also witnessed the publication of many of Fowler’s contributions, the well-known debate he carried out with Bateson (1966a, b, 1971), and the rise of a series of great collections (Freeman 1970; Chatman and Levin 1967), which contributed with arguments for approaching literary texts from a linguistic perspective. Later, Fowler (1981) reiterated that stylistics was ‘the application of 214

Pedagogical Stylistics: Charting Outcomes

theoretical ideas and analytic techniques drawn from linguistics to the study of literary texts’ (11). As interest in language as discourse grew, definitions were also adapted. To Verdonk (2002: 4), stylistics was ‘the analysis of distinctive expression in language and the description of its purpose and effect’. To Simpson (2004: 2), the functional meaning of the text was ‘a gateway to its interpretation’. Many are the stylisticians involved with the learning environment (Carter 2007, 2012; Hall 2005; Short 1989, 1996; Simpson 1996, 2004; Toolan 1990, 1997, among others), but it was Widdowson (1975) who first described the place of stylistics in the curriculum. He understood it as a method of analysis rather than a discipline and claimed that it had ‘(as yet at least) no autonomous domain of its own’ (3). Rather, he saw it as a bridge between the disciplines of linguistics and literary criticism and the subjects (English) language and (English) literature. Widdowson’s description showed how students could move from linguistics into English literature and from literary criticism into language by means of stylistics. As Toolan (1990: 42) stated much later, ‘For students of English literature for whom the language is not a native tongue, and for those not already sensitive to the craft and effects of different ways with words, stylistics is an aid in the grasp of certain kinds of structuring, craft, and effect.’ It is never enough to stress that the application of stylistics in learning environments, like any other subject, involves educational, political and economic decisions about the profession and the disciplines (Dendrinos 1992: 102). Irrespective of the political inclinations of the educational setting, nearly forty years after the publication of Widdowson’s seminal work we can say that pedagogical stylistics still applies for both speakers of English as a first language and for students of English as a foreign language (EFL). In fact, five years after the publication of Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature, the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) was founded by a group of scholars who were looking for a forum in which to discuss matters of interest to the integration between language and literature. Initially British-centred, the association soon became international. Among its first members, some contributed greatly to pedagogical stylistics (in alphabetical order, Ron Carter, Roger Fowler, Geoffrey Leech, Mick Short, Peter Verdonk and Katie Wales). In over thirty years of existence, PALA has offered a healthy working ground for those involved in the way the language of literature is dealt with in the learning environment (see Clark and Zyngier 2003; Burke et al. 2012). Support from the British Council continued well into the 1980s and summer institutes for professionals of English as a second language (ESL) and of EFL were organized. For example, in 1981, the University of Lancaster hosted a course run by Mick Short, which had a more text-centred approach and innovated by looking at literary texts alongside other text types (see Short and 215

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Candlin 1989: 187–8). Following the ‘Linguistics of Writing’ conference held at Strathclyde University in 1986, Durant and Fabb (1990) organized a course in which stylistics was seen in a more cultural and historical context. From a text-oriented to a more contextualized outlook, the 1990s witnessed the need for more student-centred pedagogies, which materialized in different approaches and strategies, such as re-registration (Carter and Nash 1990), textual intervention (Pope 1995) and literary awareness (Zyngier 1994a). The cognitive turn at the end of the twentieth century has now been finding its way into the learning environment (Stockwell 2002). This means that as British governmental support waned, stylistics had already come of age and was well established.

4.3 ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’ Despite the richness, the strength and the relevance of this historical background, for some strange reason, in many academic settings, language, literature and linguistics still tend to be kept in separate departments. Instead of helping students account for their experience from a language-based perspective, many literary scholars still resist stylistics and rely on the ‘claim and quote’ strategy when responding to literary texts, thus running the risk of distancing students from the literary experience (see Section 3). It is true that integrating language and literature has taken place in many institutions, but it is definitely not a widespread practice. The literature produced so far allows us to say that methods and strategies vary and pedagogies of stylistics will remain eclectic (see Wales 1989: 438). Adding to contextual specificities, pedagogical practice depends on teachers’ personality, training and theoretical framework. A more formal approach to stylistics will lead to a more textually centred practice, with a focus on patterns and characteristics that may reveal more about a certain author and his or her intentions. A more contextualized approach will tend to focus on the social interactions that occur in and because of the text, on the dialogues that are established between the different participants of the discursive event at stake. Irrespective of the range and the intensity of these differences, what remains constant to pedagogical approaches to stylistics is the central attention to choice and effect. Pedagogical stylistics reflects on the practice that offers tools that enable students to understand why and how textual meaning is constructed and how relevant it eventually becomes to them. In this sense, pedagogical stylisticians should be conversant with at least six areas: psychology (how patterns, difference and choice are perceived), sociology (how choices function as an element of interpersonal relation), semiotics (how these choices are signalled), linguistics (how 216

Pedagogical Stylistics: Charting Outcomes

they are verbalized and how they work) and literary theory (how they can be explained in terms of a cultural and aesthetic product). As theories come and go, they leave in their wake room for reappraisals of earlier concepts and definitions. East and West can and should actually meet but some rephrasing is needed. Some years ago the first author of this chapter defined the area as follows: ‘Pedagogical stylistics is stylistics applied to classroom contexts or any other context which involves the objective of promoting the learning of how language works. It deals with the practicalities of description, interpretation and evaluation’ (Zyngier 2006: 1). Today, some classroom situations have been replaced by the virtual world. The more comprehensive and flexible phrase ‘learning environments’ needs then to be included. Description of how language works to obtain certain effects is still intrinsic to doing stylistics but the reader’s experience must also be taken into account. A more updated definition would read as follows: Pedagogical stylistics is an area of research into what happens when stylistics is applied to any learning environment and tools are provided for systematic accounts of the impact and the workings of texts on readers. In this way, the meta-language necessary for the description, interpretation and evaluation is considered, as well as the observation of the reader’s cognitive and affective reactions, and the diversity of moments in the reading experiences from an empirical perspective (van Peer 2011).

5  A Survey of Methodologies The historical account above explains why the teaching of literature has varied in focus and interest, as illustrated in a survey of the work produced in the last forty years, where three main strands are identified (see Zyngier 2006: 2–4 for details): (1) the study of the content and the context of literary texts; (2) language through literature (also called practical stylistics, see Carter 2012); and (3) literary awareness and intervention (or what Carter 2012 has called ‘Transformative Text Analysis’). If not mainstream in literary and language studies (see Menezes and Zyngier 2009), however, the concern for how to work with literary texts in learning environments has continued to be central to many stylisticians (see Brumfit and Carter 1986; Carter and Long 1991; Carter and McRae 1996; Hall 2005, among others). One of the most comprehensive volumes that successfully bridge the gap between historical surveys of traditional literary theory, ways of reading and methods and practices in stylistics is Durant and Fabb’s (1990), which David Lodge called the ‘textbook for the times’ (see cover). It typically represents all the work produced in the last decade of the twentieth century. In their very first activity, the authors ask students to assess their interest in literary studies on a Likert scale. Among the thirteen statements provided (with 217

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

the possibility of adding more if students felt like it), the second and third spell out an experiential approach to reading: ‘because it will allow me to experience the thoughts and feelings of other people including people who are no longer alive’ and ‘because it will help me in a process of self-discovery and personal development’ (4). Irrespective of how the students may have marked on this scale, the authors make very clear the distinction between the casual reader and one that has a rather larger investigative goal. They explain: ‘Usually you study a text in order to reach a view on it in relation to some more general historical or theoretical issue: and in practice this very often means giving a systematic account of your work on it (e.g. in the form of a class presentation, essay, examination answer, publication, lecture, etc.)’ (78). And they add: ‘Methods of researching and methods of presenting are in themselves ways of thinking’ (italics in the original, ibid.). Intuitions are defined as ‘the judgments you make by introspection (looking inwards at your own thoughts and assumptions)’ (ibid.: 80). Typically, thinking and feeling are here made distinct. More recently, Carter (2012: 1) elucidates that ‘In the period from the 1940s to the 1960s literature was seen as extraneous to everyday communicative needs and as something of an elitist pursuit. However in the 1970s and 1980s the growth of communicative language teaching methods led to a reconsideration of the place of literature in the language classroom.’ In this article, Carter described four different strands: 1. Practical stylistics, or the close reading of the verbal texture of texts and the assumption that literature is made from and with language 2. Transformative text analysis, based on textual manipulation by appropriation, re-writing and re-registration so as to make textual features more salient 3. Corpus stylistics, which, making use of computer software, allows ­language patterns to emerge that the analysis of individual words do not allow 4. Cognitive poetics, based on textual properties (deixis, modalization, narrative switches, speech presentation, metaphors, etc.) (see also Stockwell 2002) It is quite clear, then, that advances in stylistics have been finding their way into learning environments. So, it is not a matter of which method is better or more sophisticated than the other but what the precise objectives of the teacher are and how he or she poses the questions to the students. To avoid students from adopting a distant, clinical and analytical perspective (Gribble 1983; Todorov 2009), a critical pedagogical perspective (see Freire 1970; Zyngier and Fialho 2010) would be quite helpful in empowering students through a transformative experience. Whichever methods and strategies are chosen, pedagogical 218

Pedagogical Stylistics: Charting Outcomes

stylisticians should keep in mind that literary texts are more than just another school subject: they are a personal path to knowledge about the world and human passions. In sum, they are an optimal locus for experiencing humanity.

6  Posing Questions: An Empirical Study Here again we are not treading unknown territory. For some time now, researchers have tested the impact of texts on readers, some explicitly aiming at finding out the role of feelings in the act of reading (Miall and Kuiken 1994, 2002; Sklar 2013). One of the basic tenets of these studies is to provide empirical evidence of what happens with real readers as they engage in literary reading. A major question that needs to be addressed is how to engage students in literary reading in ways that resonate with their own lives and how to do it cognitively, emotionally and socially – while encouraging them to fresh understandings about themselves and the world. The research we describe here is in line with Sklar’s (2013: 185) call ‘for a problem-solving, emotionally-rich curriculum that takes as its primary aim the development of students’ capacities for emotional awareness and ethical reflection’. Pedagogical stylistics has a role to play here. As the language students use to construct their responses may reveal much of what they actually think and feel, pedagogical stylistics should also look into the nature of the questions posed to them. If methods in stylistics have already evolved to a point at which cognition and fruition are seen as necessary to the literary experience, the way students respond to the instructions needs to be addressed. In two previous studies (see Fialho et al. 2011, 2012), we have examined the effects of two different instructional interventions. In this chapter, we look at students’ collective responses from a different analytical perspective.

6.1  Context, Participants and Design The project was carried out in the context of a world literature course for firstyear undergraduates at a Canadian university, administered by the second author of this chapter. The context, the participants and the research design have been described in detail elsewhere (see Fialho et al. 2011, 2012). Here, we offer a summary. All in all, thirteen female and four male students participated in a two-week experiment. In the first week, they were asked to read and discuss James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and, in the second week, Clarice Lispector’s ‘The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman’.3 All participants attended six classes of fifty minutes each. The structure of the classes for each of the texts was: (1) ten- minute introduction followed by forty-minute small-group discussion and an in-class activity sheet; (2) thirty- minute group discussion, based on the in-class activity 219

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

sheet, followed by a twenty-minute lecture on the text studied; (3) thirty-­minute lecture, followed by twenty-minute group discussion. The students were randomly organized into two groups. Those in the control group (INT) worked with a set of what the researchers called ‘interpretive instructions’, or more traditional tasks of literary interpretation. The experimental group (EXP) was given a set of less typical ‘experiential instructions’, which focused on reading that brought out their personal responses (Rosenblatt 1995[1938]; Miall 2006; Fialho 2010). The aims of these instructions were to verify what happened as a result of reading for interpretive meaning or for responding affectively. Both groups read both texts and received the two different sets of instructions in a counter-balanced design. Although the instructions differed, in-class activities were equally adapted from Eva-Wood’s proposal (2004: 179; for more details, see Fialho et al. 2011: 242). In the first study (Fialho et al. 2011), the four measures used were (a) videorecording of classes and three post-reading questionnaires; (b) an adapted version of the literary response questionnaire (Miall and Kuiken 1995); (c) a selfperceptual depth scale of the experiencing questionnaire (Miall and Kuiken 1995; Kuiken et al. 2010); and (d) a class assessment questionnaire. The results revealed different attitudes on the part of the two groups. The video recordings showed that, in general, students working under the interpretive instructions were focused, demonstrated tension, spoke in low voices and were aware of the instructor’s presence, soliciting her whenever she approached. In contrast, students working with the experiential instructions were seen to be relaxed. They laughed and spoke loudly, did not ask the instructor any questions and also showed more voluntarily participation. Results from the post-reading questionnaires indicated that the interpretive group read for plot or storyline, whereas the experiential group seemed more interested in the more literary aspects of the stories. Regarding responses to the classes overall, the experimental group’s perception was that individualized responses were privileged and that they learned something considered valuable. In the second study (Fialho et al. 2012), another measure was analysed: the 500–750-word essays the two groups were asked to write and in which they were expected to report on (a) their initial reaction to passages they found striking or evocative; (b) what the class was about and (c) how they related what had been discussed in class and their initial reaction to the text. In total, thirty-four essays produced by the seventeen participants were examined to see what patterns emerged from their written responses to the reading. The objective here was to see if language patterns and preferences emerged by means of corpus linguistics methodology. Results indicated that, although the essays written by EXP were not longer than those from the other group, they were lexically richer. Students in this group drew more comparisons and were more imaginative than those who followed interpretive instructions. The interpretive intervention 220

Pedagogical Stylistics: Charting Outcomes

seemed to have promoted a more argumentative posture, as students focused on defining their experiences. The experiencing group also showed more involvement with texts and classes than the interpretive group, who regarded them from a more distanced perspective. In addition, it seems that the interpretive group read more for plot and storyline rather than relating the text to their own experiences. The patterns that appeared in the way both groups used pronouns were also revealing. Our findings, especially as regards the use of demonstrative pronouns, showed that the experiencing instructions seemed to promote an environment where a more intimate transaction between student-readers and texts took place. In this chapter, we provide further analysis in this direction.

6.2  Corpus-driven Evidence In his seminal book, Sinclair (1991: 36) stated that ‘the most exciting aspect of long-text data-processing … is not the mirroring of intuitive categories of description. It is the possibility of new approaches, new kinds of evidence, and new kinds of description.’ Corpus studies are now quite current, and researchers have applied their investigations to the most different needs (see Viana et al. 2011). In our case, the texts collected were samples of naturally occurring language that matched what we wanted to study; namely, responses to literary texts. In order to study collective attitudes rather than individual reactions, all response essays were typed verbatim into computer text files and probed by WordSmith Tools (Scott 2004–6). A total number of tokens was calculated for each group, with the interpretive group (INT) producing 10,153 tokens and the experiential (EXP) 9,769, which made a small but still valid corpus (BerberSardinha 2004). Instead of analysing one-word frequency lists (Fialho et al. 2012), the present study expanded the word range to look at strings of words extracted electronically. The objective of our earlier studies remained the same, that is, to see how the students verbalized their responses to foregrounded passages. By extracting unbroken sequence of words that repeat themselves (also known as clusters or N-Grams), we are in line with Sinclair’s (1991: 109–10) view that language is patterned and that words tend to be selected together (‘the idiom principle’). We assumed that if we looked at these multi-word units instead of one-word frequency, we might see meaning that would be unnoticed otherwise (for a detailed rationale of this kind of analysis with texts in Portuguese produced by public school pupils, see Shepherd et al. 2007). In this chapter, we detail further how the experience of the Canadian students investigated may vary after exposure to the two different interventions. The present study is based on Biber et al.’s (2004) description of four-word sequences (or ‘lexical bundles’) in four sub-corpora of university teaching 221

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

and textbooks in which they provide a structural and a functional taxonomy. In terms of structure, the bundles can be classified as type 1, containing fragments of verbal phrases; type 2, with dependent clauses fragments or the dependent clause itself; and type 3, with (fragments of) noun phrases or prepositional phrases (ibid.: 382). In terms of function, lexical bundles can be categorized in terms of stance, discourse organizers or referential expressions, each of which present sub-categories, as follows (adapted from Shepherd et al. 2007): A fourth category is also described by Biber et al. (2004: 388), but as it applies to conversational functions (politeness, simple inquiry and reporting), we decided not to look into it here. In the following section we report our findings. Table 13.1  Stance expressions A. Epistemic stance

Personal Impersonal

B. Attitudinal / Modality

Desire

Personal

Obligation/Directive

Personal Impersonal

Intention/Prediction

Personal Impersonal

Ability

Personal Impersonal

Table 13.2  Discourse organizers A. Topic introduction/focus B. Topic elaboration/clarification

Table 13.3  Referential expressions A. Identification / Focus B. Imprecision C. Specification of attributes

Quantity specification Tangible framing attributes Intangible framing attributes

D. Time/place/ text reference

Place reference Time reference Text deixis Multi-functional reference

222

Pedagogical Stylistics: Charting Outcomes

6.3 Results According to Biber et al. (2004), frequency and dispersion are the criteria used to decide what constitutes a bundle. Due to the size of the present corpus, the frequency was kept at a minimum of four occurrences to avoid idiosyncrasies, but we had to accept three-word sequences because with four-word sequences, we obtained only three instances for INT and two for EXP. With three-word sequences, we extracted twenty-nine lexical bundles for EXP and thirty-nine for INT. Once the frequency lists of lexical bundles in each of the two corpora were obtained, the standardized type/token ratios were observed4 and showed the corpora were quite similar, although EXP presented fewer types. Figure 13.1 shows that the two corpora are quite similar in terms of standardized type/token ratio. In terms of structure, however, the picture is somewhat different, as indicated in Figure 13.2. 97

100

97.32

80 60

INT

39

40

EXP

29

20 0 Bundles

Standard T/T

Figure 13.1  Distribution of bundles in each of the corpora

70%

62.1%

60% 50% 40%

48.7% 41.0% INT

31.0%

30%

EXP

20%

10.3%

10%

6.9%

0% Type 1

Type 2

Type 3

Figure 13.2  Distribution of structural groups 223

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Both INT and EXP groups show preference for types 1 and 3 bundles and less for type 2. This means that they describe the experience especially in terms of patterned noun phrases, perhaps influenced by years of schooling and emphasis on scientific discourse rather than on personal accounts. The fact that the EXP group shows a clearer preference for this type of writing style, however, is rather intriguing and needs further probing. In terms of use of functional categories, INT and EXP differ, as Figure 13.3 indicates. 70% 60% 50% 40% 30%

44.8% 33.3%

33.3%

31.0%

33.3%

24.1%

INT EXP

20% 10% 0% STANCE

DISCOURSE

REFERENTIAL

Figure 13.3  Distribution of functional categories INT presents equal distribution of functional categories, whereas EXP shows preference for referential bundles. Surprisingly, EXP does not prioritize stance, used to express attitudes towards the actions or events, as Biber et al. (1994: 189) suggest. While they were asked to express their feelings towards the passages they considered most striking and evocative, the EXP group preferred to use referential bundles, which ‘identify or single out some particular attribute of an entity as especially important’ (393). Experiential instructions seem to sensitize students to the particular attributes of a character or event that evoke feelings in them. Further analyses into whether and how the kinds of referential expressions used differ between the two groups is also revealing (see Figure 13.4). In the INT corpus, the referential expressions were identification/focus, place, possession and circumstance, with a clear preference for place and circumstance. This is in line with a mode of discourse that seems to be compatible with a more story-driven reading, which characterizes the INT group (Fialho et al. 2011, 2012). The EXP corpus present the same sub-categories but with the addition of time. Although place is high in both corpora, EXP shows a preference for possession and quantity whereas INT emphasizes circumstance. These findings add evidence that different instructions on how to deal with passages students find striking may indeed lead to different perspectives when producing their essays. 224

Pedagogical Stylistics: Charting Outcomes 60% 50% 40% 30% 20%

EXP

10%

INT im e T

nt ity ua

C

irc

Q

um st an

ce

sio n Po ss

es

ce Pl a

Id

en

tif i

ca

tio n/

fo cu

s

0%

Figure 13.4  Sub-categories of reference bundles

6.4  Attitude towards the Classes In our previous study (Fialho et al. 2012), we noted that EXP assumed a more intimate view, preferring the demonstrative pronoun ‘this’ to ‘that’ when evaluating the classes (70–1). A closer look at the lexical bundles obtained shows that EXP indeed seems to display a more inclusive attitude and sees the class as an entity in itself. If we compare ‘the class was’ (0.09 per cent) to the INT preference for ‘the class discussion’ (0.08 per cent), we notice that EXP places ‘class’ in the subject position, whereas INT opts for its use as an adjective. Moreover, EXP also uses ‘the group discussion’ (0.05 per cent) instead of only ‘the class discussion’. The occurrence of ‘as a group’ is also revealing of their attitude. Although this lexical bundle presents the same frequency in both corpora (0.05 per cent), it occupies the tenth position in EXP and the fifteenth in INT. In addition, the cluster ‘the rest of’ (0.05 per cent EXP, nineteenth position) collocates with the nominal phrases ‘the students’, ‘my group’, ‘the class’, which indicates that this group has more focus on the group itself, whereas in INT it occurs only once in this sense (‘the rest of us’). The other occurrences do not relate to the classroom experience (e.g. ‘the rest of Ireland’).

7 Conclusion Advances in technology and the use of computers in the learning environment can provide empirical evidence for what actually happens collectively when responding to literary texts. In this chapter, we have used corpus-driven evidence to verify whether interventions mattered when students responded to 225

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

passages they considered striking. The results obtained here reinforce our previous findings that the language of instructions can interfere. Much has already been written about the benefits and the need for empirical research in the Humanities (see all the issues of Scientific Studies of Literature and van Peer, Hakemulder and Zyngier 2012). We are aware that changes take a long time to be implemented and that the evidence we collected is small. Like charting a new territory, much effort must be expended before we arrive at detailed maps. The results from our earlier studies added to the ones reported here indicate that the challenge is not easy and that the results remain provisional. Replications with larger groups, using pre- and post-testing designs, and control for the influence of the teacher’s personality and rapport with the students are some of the possibilities ahead. Our main point, however, is that pedagogical stylistics is in much need of empirical research. It is understandable that different theories will see texts in different ways, but we should beware of ‘rigidly formulated orthodoxies’ (see Lott 1984 quoted above). Theories are formulated so as to help us make sense of our experience, and they are attempts to fill gaps left by earlier formulations. They can be refuted or validated, and each is singular in itself. With all probability, the more comprehensive and robust the approach, the more coherent and beneficial to students it will be. No theory will ever be fully comprehensive. Pedagogical stylisticians should therefore be flexible enough to take into account the strengths of each theory and how it can benefit students. We are in line with Tompkins (1977: 176) when she poses that ‘The best literary criticism requires emotional intelligence and the power to express it, as well as intellectual acuity and the techne of the craft.’ Whether doing pedagogical stylistics or pedagogies of stylistics, those involved should ‘bring emotion into the circuit of legitimate critical discourse’ (ibid.: 177) and promote an environment where students can finally master the language of accounting for feeling. As Dewey argued much earlier, ‘The conclusion is not that the emotional, passionate phase of action can be or should be eliminated in behalf of a bloodless reason. More “passions”, not fewer, is the answer’ (2008[1899–1924]: 136). But in order to do so effectively, pedagogical stylisticians must find out the precise implications of each theoretical approach. Whichever theory the teacher opts for as the most appropriate for his or her students, four factors – and all their underpinnings – should remain constant to any learning environment: observation, testing, innovation and accumulated experience.

8 Acknowledgement We would like to thank Prof Dr David Miall for granting access to the data and for supporting the research. 226

Pedagogical Stylistics: Charting Outcomes

Notes 1. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/research/collect/elt_archive/research_projects/ britishcouncil/). 2. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/research/collect/elt_archive/research_projects/ britishcouncil/bc_1959_-_university_training_in_the_teaching_of_english.pdf. 3. The essays derive from the same course delivered by the same instructor in 2009 (ten students) and its repetition in 2010 (seven students). The only difference was the replacing of Clarice Lispector, considered a Brazilian version of Virginia Woolf, with a text by Virginia Woolf. 4. Tokens are all the words present in a text, whether they are repeated or not. Types are the different words, without the repetition.

References Bellard-Thomson, C. (2010), ‘How students learn stylistics: Constructing an empirical study’, Language and Literature, 19 (1): 35–57. Berber-Sardinha, T. (2004), Linguística de Corpus, Barueri, São Paulo: Manole. Biber, D., Conrad, S. and Cortes, V. (2004), ‘If you look at … lexical bundles in university teaching and textbooks’, Applied Linguistics, 25 (3): 371–405. Bradford, R. (1997), Stylistics, London: Routledge. Brumfit, C. J. (2001), Individual Freedom in Language Teaching, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brumfit, C. J. and Carter, R. A., eds (1986), Literature and Language Teaching, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Burke, M., ed. (2010), ‘Special issue: Pedagogical issues in stylistics’, Language and Literature, 19 (1). Burke, M. (2013), ‘Rhetorical Pedagogy: Shaping and intellectually critical citizenry’, Inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, 23 January 2013. Burke, M., Csábi, S., Week, L. and Zerkowitz, J., eds (2012), Pedagogical Stylistics: Currrent Trends in Language, Literature, and ELT, London and New York: Continuum. Canning, P. and Simpson, P. (2012), ‘Chicken and egg stylistics: From lexical semantics to conceptual integration theory’, in M. Burke, S. Csábi, L. Week and J. Zerkowitz (eds), Pedagogical Stylistics: Currrent Trends in Language, Literature, and ELT, 24–44, London and New York: Continuum. Carter, R. A. (2007), ‘Literature and language teaching. 1986-2006: A review’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 17 (1): 3–13. Carter, R. A. (2012), ‘Methodologies for stylistic analysis: Practices and pedagogies’, http://teach-grammar.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/2010+-Grammar-and-Stylistics.pdf, 2012 (accessed 20 September 2012). Carter, R. A. and Long, M. N. (1991), Teaching Literature, Harlow: Longman. Carter, R. A. and McRae, J., eds (1996), Language, Literature and the Learner: Creative Classroom Practice, London: Longman. Carter, R. A. and Nash, W. (1990), Seeing Through Language, Oxford: Blackwell. Chatman, S. and Levin, S. R., eds (1967), Essays on the Language of Literature, Boston: Houghton and Mifflin. Clark, U. (1996), An Introduction to Stylistics, Cheltenham: Stanley Thornes. Clark, U. and Zyngier, S. (2003), ‘Towards a pedagogical stylistics’, Language and Literature, 12 (4): 339–3.

227

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Dendrinos, B. (1992), The EFL Textbook and Ideology, Athens, NC: Grivas Publications. Dewey, J. (2008), John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Durant, A. and Fabb, N. (1990), Literary Studies in Action, London and New York: Routledge. Ellis, J. M. (1997), Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of The Humanities, New Haven: Yale University Press. Eva-Wood, A. L. (2004), ‘Thinking and feeling poetry: Exploring meanings aloud’, Journal of Educational Psychology, 96: 182–91. Fabb, N. (1997), Linguistics and Literature: Language in the Verbal Arts of the World, Oxford: Blackwell. Fialho, O. (2010), ‘Linguistic basis for numerically-aided phenomenology: A study on self-modification in literary response’, Paper presented at the 2010 IGEL conference, Utrecht University, 7–11 July 2010. Fialho, O. (2012), Self-Modifying Experiences in Literary Reading: A Model for Reader Response, University of Alberta: Unpublished PhD Manuscript. Fialho, O., Miall, D. S. and Zyngier, S. (2012), ‘Experiencing or interpreting literature: Wording instructions’, in M. Burke, S. Csábi, L. Week and J. Zerkowitz (eds), Pedagogical Stylistics: Current Trends in Language, Literature and ELT, 58–76, London and New York: Continuum. Fialho, O., Zyngier, S. and Miall, D. S. (2011), ‘Interpretation and experience: Two pedagogical interventions observed’, English in Education, 45 (3): 236–53. Firth, J. R. (1968), Selected Papers of J.R. Firth 1930-1955, ed. F. R. Palmer, London: Longman. Fowler, R. (1971), The Language of Literature, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fowler, R. (1966a/71), ‘Linguistics, stylistics: Criticism?’, Lingua, 16: 153–65. Reprinted in The Language of Literature, 32–44, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fowler, R. (1966b/79), ‘Linguistic theory and the study of literature’, in R. Fowler (ed.), Essays on Style and Language, 1–28, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fowler R. (1981), Literature as Social Discourse: The Practice of Linguistic Criticism, London: Batsford Academic and Educational Ltd. Freeman, D. C., ed. (1970), Linguistics and Literary Style, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Freire, P. (1970), Pedagogia do Oprimido, Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Geisel, T. S. (1955), On Beyond Zebra, New York: Random House. Graff, G. (1987), Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gribble, J. (1983), Literary Education: A Revaluation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, G. (2005), Literature in Language Education, London: Palgrave. Hanauer, D. (1998), ‘Reading poetry: An empirical investigation of formalist, stylistic and conventionalist claims’, Poetics Today, 19: 565–80. Hanauer, D. (2001), ‘What we know about reading poetry: Theoretical positions and empirical research’, in D. Schram and G. Steen (eds), The Psychology and Sociology of Literature, 107–28, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hanauer, D. (2010), Poetry as Research: Exploring Second Language Poetry Writing, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Hjort, M. and Laver, S. (1997), Emotion and the Arts, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jakobson, R. (1960), ‘Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics’, in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, 350–77, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jeffries, L. and McIntyre, D. (2011), Teaching Stylistics, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kuiken, D., Campbell, P. and Sopcak, P. (2010), ‘The experiencing questionnaire: Locating exceptional reading moments’. Paper presented at the 2010 IGEL conference, Utrecht University, 7–11 July 2010.

228

Pedagogical Stylistics: Charting Outcomes Lausberg, H. (1967), Elementos de retórica literária, trans. Rosado Fernandes, Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian. Leech, G. N. (1969), A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, London: Longman. Lott, B. (October 1984), ‘ELT and the British Council – the first fifty years’, ELT Journal, 38 (4): 283–85. Mackay, R. (1999), ‘There goes the other foot: A reply to Short et al.’, Language and Literature, 8 (1): 59–66. Maingueneau, D. (1993), Eléments de Linguistique pour le Texte Littéraire, Paris: Dunod. McIntyre, D. (2011), ‘The place of stylistics in the English curriculum’, in L. Jeffries and D.  McIntyre (eds), Teaching Stylistics, 9–29, Basingstoke: Palgrave/English Subject Centre. Menezes, D. de A. and Zyngier, S. (2009), ‘Reflexões sobre o ensino de literaturas em língua inglesa no Brasil: um estudo diacrônico’, in S. Zyngier, V. Viana and J. Jandre (eds), Linguagem, Criatividade & Ensino: Abordagens empíricas e interdisciplinares, 1st edn, 275–94, Rio de Janeiro: Publit Soluções Editoriais. Miall, D. S. (2006), Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies, New York: Peter Lang. Miall, D. S. and Kuiken, D. (1994), ‘Foregrounding, defamiliarization, and affect: Response to literary stories’, Poetics, 22: 389–407. Miall, D. S. and Kuiken, D. (1995), ‘Aspects of literary response: A new questionnaire’, Research in the Teaching of English, 29: 37–58. Miall, D. S. and Kuiken, D. (2002), ‘A feeling for fiction: Becoming what we behold’, Poetics, 30: 221–41. Pennac, D. (1992), Comme Un Roman, Paris: Gallimard. Pope, R. (1995), Textual Intervention: Critical and Creative Strategies for Literary Studies, London: Routledge. Rosenblatt, L. M. (1995[1938]), Literature as Exploration, New York: Modern Language Association of America. Rouse, J. (2004), ‘Review: After theory, the next new thing’, College English, 66 (4): 452–65. Scholes, R. E. (1998), The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline, New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, M. (2004–6), WordSmith Tools. Version 4.0, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shepherd, T., Zyngier, S. and Viana, V. (2007), ‘A tale of two cities: Lexical bundles as indicators of linguistic choices and socio-cultural traces’, in L. Jeffries, D. McIntyre and D. Bousfield (eds), Stylistics and Social Cognition, 217–23, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Short, M. (1996), Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose, Essex: Addison Wesley Longman Limited. Short, M. and Candlin, C. (1989), ‘Teaching study skills for English literature’, in M. Short (ed.), Reading, Analysing and Teaching Literature, 178–203, Harlow: Longman. Short, M., Freeman, D. C., van Peer, W. and Simpson, P. (1998), ‘Stylistics, criticism and myth representation again: Squaring the circle with Ray Mackay’s subjective solution for all problems’, Language and Literature, 7 (1): 39–50. Simpson, P. (1996), Language Through Literature: An Introduction, London: Routledge. Simpson, P. (2004), Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students, London: Routledge. Sinclair, J. McH (1966), ‘Taking a poem to pieces’, in R. Fowler (ed.), Essays on Style and Language: Linguistic Approaches to Literary Style, 68–81, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sinclair, J. McH (1991), Corpus, Concordance, Collocation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sklar, H. (2013), The Art of Sympathy in Fiction: Forms of Ethical and Emotional Persuasion, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

229

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Šklovsky, V. (1965[1917]), ‘Art as technique’, in T. L. Lemon and M. J. Reis (eds), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, 3–24, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Snyders, G. (1999), Des Élèves Heureux: Réflexion Sur La Joie à l‘École À Partir De Quelques Textes Littéraires, Paris: L‘Harmattan. Stockwell, P. (2002), Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, London: Routledge. Todorov, T. (2009), A Literatura em perigo, trans. Cairo Meira, Translation of Tzvetan Todorov’s La Litterature en Peril, Difel. Tompkins, J. P. (October 1977), ‘Criticism and feeling’, College English, 39 (2): 169–78. Toolan, M. (1990), The Stylistics of Fiction: A Literary-Linguistics Approach, London and New York: Routledge. Toolan, M. (1997), Language in Literature: An Introduction to Stylistics, London: Hodder. van Peer, W., ed. (2007), ‘Special issue on foregrounding’, Language and Literature,16 (2). van Peer, W., ed. (2011), ‘Special issue: The future of scientific studies in literature’. Scientific Study of Literature, 1 (1). van Peer, W. and Hakemulder, J. (2006), ‘Foregrounding’, in K. Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 546–51, Oxford: Elsevier. van Peer, W., Hakemulder, F. and Zyngier, S. (2012), Scientific Methods for the Humanities, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Verdonk, P. (2002), Stylistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Viana, V., Zyngier, S. and Barnbrook, G. (2011), Perspectives on Corpus Linguistics, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Wales, K. (1989), A Dictionary of Stylistics, London and New York: Longman Group. UK Limited. Watson, G. and Zyngier, S., eds (2007), Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners. Theory and Practice, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Widdowson, H. G. (1975), Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature, Harlow: Longman. Woolf, V. (2008), Jacob’s Room. (original: Virginia Woolf, Jacob‘s Room, Richmond: Hogarth Press, 1922.), Rockville, MD: Arc Manor Publisher. Zyngier, S. (1994a), ‘Introducing literary awareness’, Language Awareness, 3: 95–108. Zyngier, S. (1994b), At the Crossroads of Language and Literature: Literary Awareness, Stylistics, and the Acquisition of Literary Skills in an EFLit Context, Birmingham: The University of Birmingham. Zyngier, S. (2001), ‘Towards a cultural approach to stylistics’, in J. McRae (ed.), CAUCE. Revista de Filología Y u Didáctica, vol. 24, 365–80, Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla. Zyngier, S. (2006), ‘Stylistics: Pedagogical applications’, in K. Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, vol. 12, 2nd edn, 226–32, Oxford: Elsevier. Zyngier, S. and Fialho, O. (2010), ‘Pedagogical stylistics, literary awareness and empowerment: A critical perspective’, Language and Literature, 19 (1): 13–33.

230

14

Stylistics and Translation Jean Boase-Beier, University of East Anglia

Chapter Overview Origins and Interactions Reading an Original Text for Translation Reading the Translated Text Reading the Original Text through Translation The Importance of Translation for Stylistics

231 234 236 238 241

1  Origins and Interactions Stylistics and the modern study of translation share common origins in the tradition of close textual analysis developed by the Russian Formalists and Prague Structuralists. For a scholar like Jakobson, linguistics, literature and translation were closely connected, as a 1959 article makes clear (Jakobson 1987). A 1958 work by Vinay and Darbelnet describes the study of translation as a practical application of comparative stylistics (1995: 4). Such works and others by Catford (1965) and Nida (1964) are often referred to as ‘linguistics-oriented’ (Venuti 2012: 4), as they tended to focus on equivalence in syntax and semantics. Literary translation scholars have often tended to distance themselves from a supposed view that translation could be a purely textual matter (cf. Gentzler 2001: 77), but in fact it is extremely difficult to find any examples of such a view; even writers like Nida or Catford wrote in detail about such extra-textual matters as the context, the effects of a text and how to preserve such effects in translation. What such authors did not have, though, was a particularly strong sense of what one might call poetics. That is, they were not concerned with the

231

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

way literary effects of source and target texts could be seen to be related to their specific linguistic features. More than this – and especially in the case of Nida, who was writing from the point of view of Bible translation – the author, understandably, loomed large. From the point of view of post-structuralist literary translation theorists (e.g. Venuti; see e.g. 2012: 397), such views were based on two fundamental errors: They appeared to focus on the text as though it had an absolute standing, independent of interpretation; and they saw meaning as in itself absolute (and, indeed, God-given in Nida’s case). In literary translation studies, a concern with seeing the original author as irrelevant, or at least unknowable, in the wake of post-structuralist views such as those of Barthes (1977), made the focus of writers such as Nida on the intention of the source text author seem at best quaint and at worst misguided or partisan. However, the linguistics upon which both stylistics and translation studies draw has developed very far from the semantically based deep structures that were, for Nida and his contemporaries, the locus of the meaning of the text. Especially cognitive stylistics (which, for the purposes of this chapter I take to be synonymous with cognitive poetics) is able to offer insights that earlier views, whether more textually based or more inclined to focus on the originator and less upon the reader, were not. Translation has always been concerned with what, on the one hand, writers as far back as the seventeenth century called the ‘spirit’ of the text (see Boase-Beier 2006: 10–11), and which in modern cognitive stylistics might be seen as a mental state or mind-style (in the sense of Fowler 1977: 103) informing a text; and, on the other hand, with the re-creation of effects upon the reader, which in cognitive stylistics would be described as cognitive effects – that is, changes to one’s perception or view, to what one thinks important, and feelings such as empathy, fear or pleasure. Furthermore, mental processes of conceptual metaphor or blending have a potentially universal aspect that is clearly important for translation. The interaction of the universal in terms of mental processes, and the specific in terms of cultural, personal and historical context, which informs stylistics, is exactly the same interaction that lies at the heart of all our thinking about translation. The modern discipline of translation studies is often considered to have begun with the work of James Holmes, published from the late 1960s until the mid-1980s. Holmes, like Jakobson, was a scholar of both linguistics and literary theory, as well as a poet and translator of poetry. His essays (collected as Holmes 1988) show him to have integrated work by Jakobson, Barthes, Nida and Leech, among many others, into his formulation of the discipline. Early formalist and structuralist criticism by Jakobson and others also had a huge influence on scholars such as Toury (e.g. 1995), who have considered the target text as part of a literary system.

232

Stylistics and Translation

The interaction of stylistics with translation theory has in fact been fairly constant since Jakobson, but, especially during the last decades of the twentieth century, it tended to be somewhat marginalized in translation studies by the focus on ethics and cultural systems, by an understandable need to foreground the translator as author of the target text and by misunderstandings of stylistics. Yet stylistics is, I will argue, crucial for translation studies, just as insights from translation have a great deal to offer stylistics. In this chapter, I will examine these interactions using the translation of poems by Paul Celan. His poetry can be considered to fall within the category of ‘Holocaust poetry’, that is, poems influenced by or that directly or indirectly make reference to the Holocaust (Rowland 2005: 3). The translation of such poems, as well as the analysis of their translation, involves a number of issues that have direct bearing upon the interaction of stylistics and translation:    (i) The process of translation involves particularly close reading of the original and thus is able to lead to an understanding of the original poem that arises directly from its use of language as thrown into relief by its mental confrontation with another language. Because many Holocaust poems, including Celan’s, were written by multi-lingual speakers, a stylistic analysis that did not take language interaction into account, as something both prior to and subsequent to the writing of the source poem, would be deficient. (ii) It is important to understand how translated poems can be read and understood as translations, that is, as something different from their originals, with a different author. For the reader of Holocaust poetry, the existing historical distance is increased by the translation into another language with its different cultural context. A comparison of several translations of the same poem can often highlight the author’s (that is to say the translator’s) choices particularly well. (iii) Reading the translated poem together with the original can highlight differences in style which help analyse the original poem. Because of the presence of traces of other languages (Hebrew, Yiddish, and often Eastern European languages such as Polish or Romanian) in the originals, the stylistic comparison of translation and original can be particularly helpful in highlighting the poetic value of such phenomena as etymology and polysemy. (iv) These various insights from translation can affect the way we do stylistics per se. In the following sections, I will examine each interaction in turn.

233

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

2  Reading an Original Text for Translation In Stylistic Approaches to Translation (2006: 24), I argue that reading a poem with a view to translating it is different from the way we read when we have no intention of translating, even when reading critically, in that reading for translation entails a mental comparison of the language of the poem with possible counterparts in the target language. One of the reasons for the particular challenges of Celan’s work is that there are many different ways of reading it. As he himself noted, poetry written in the wake of the Holocaust shows ‘a strong tendency to fall silent’ (Celan 1967: 143; my translation here and whenever not marked as someone else’s). While a literary critic might speak of its themes, its metaphors of silence, the sombreness of its imagery and its use of gaps (in the sense of which Iser wrote; e.g. 1974: 274–94) and ambiguities, a stylistician, and especially a cognitive stylistician, would look also at how particular effects of reading, such as conceptual blends, are triggered by the poem. In an earlier article on Celan’s work (Boase-Beier 2011b), I consider how a series of images of nature and the speaker’s mother are used in parallel, so that there is a suggestion of comparison but no possibility of blending because the comparison is negative. As an example, here are the first two lines of the poem: Aspen tree, your leaves glance white into darkness. My mother’s hair did not grow white. The poem continues with four more such couplets. One way of describing these images is as pathetic fallacy, the attributing of human feeling to nature by a mind ‘unhinged by grief’ (Ruskin 1863: 167), so that the natural object becomes blended with a human figure. For cognitive stylistics, pathetic fallacy is anything but a fallacy; it is a real state of mind. However, what is more interesting is what does not happen: the pathetic fallacy fails in the speaker’s mind because nature behaves in the opposite way to the mother. This is emphasized by the fact that in each couplet the image of nature comes first, and it is the mother who fails to imitate nature. If we equate the speaker with Celan and the mother with his real mother, this failure happens because she has been murdered by the Nazis. Each juxtaposition triggers in its turn an attempted blend in which the mother, like nature, would be renewed, revived, would return. But through a whole series of such anguished attempts at conceptual blending, we follow the speaker in realizing that no such hope can be entertained. This is what a stylistician, and in particular a cognitive stylistician, could say about the poem, and it ignores the question of translation; because it is largely based on imagery and overall form, it matters little whether we consider the German source text or a translation such as that given above. But bringing the 234

Stylistics and Translation

potential for translation into the analysis has further consequences. In fact, the lines of Celan’s original 1952 poem (Hamburger 2007: 48) that correspond to the translation above are as follows: Espenbaum, dein Laub blickt weiβ ins Dunkel. aspen-tree your leaves glance white into-the dark Meiner Mutter Haar ward nimmer weiβ. of-my mother hair became nevermore white A cognitive stylistic reading of this poem with a view to translating it will note the points just mentioned. But it will also ask about the significance of the word Espenbaum (when one would usually just say Espe, ‘aspen’). The assonance of the closely following word Laub, ‘leaves’, ‘foliage’, will make the reader think of Espenlaub and thus recall the German idiom Zittern wie Espenlaub, literally ‘to tremble like the leaves of an aspen’, with its suggestion of fear. Reading the German for translation into English suggests the idiom because it seems to have no equivalent; the image is not unfamiliar (and indeed Chaucer used it) but the expression suggested by the assonance on -baum and Laub is not an idiom in English. Though one can re-create the image and create assonance on ‘tree’ and ‘leaves’, this will not call up an idiom in the target reader’s mind. Furthermore, not realizing that such an idiom does not exist in English, one may not notice its presence in the original. But there are other things that a stylistic reading for translation will suggest. It is only when we consider the English equivalent of Espenbaum, ‘aspen’, that we realize the connection with ‘asp’, the venomous snake. Celan was a translator of Shakespeare and a scholar of English literature and linguistics, who was fascinated by etymology and cross-linguistic connections; further examples will be examined in Section 4 of this chapter. For now, and by way of evidence that one needs to confront Espen- with ‘aspen’ and will then think of the asp, I merely point out that the first lines of all the other couplets in this poem, apparently simple descriptions of nature, also make allusions to other literature, myth, religious symbolism and actual locations, in each case associated with death, suffering and anguish. Furthermore, once this becomes clear, it seems significant that Laub comes from middle high German loup, which means ‘wolf’ in French, and that its Indo-Germanic root leu is homonymous – though not etymologically connected – with the middle high German word for ‘lion’; a ‘lion’s-tooth’ (the German for ‘dandelion’) occurs in the next couplet. It seems, then, that in this poem the role of etymology as part of what lies behind language is important, and that homonymy is as real as polysemy in the poem. Indeed, cognitive stylistics would reinforce this: the link between leu and Löwe is potentially as present in the mind (though based purely on homonymy) as is, 235

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

for example, the etymological link, via leu, between Laub and the word Verlust, ‘loss’. And the fact that these are suggested to the reader (when reading for translation) as part of the mind-style of the poem makes them as cognitively real as if they were in the written words. If we read for stylistic analysis, we are likely to perceive some or all these references and allusions but not the etymological ones, which are not necessarily part of the linguistic knowledge of most speakers. Reading for translation makes them available because such reading makes one realize that the poems were written with translation written into them, as Felstiner (1995: 32) has noted about the poem Deathfugue in particular. Such reading will potentially influence an actual translation, for translation studies is not only the study of how we read original texts for translation, or how we read translations, or what the comparison of the two can tell us; it also implies, and may lead to, an act of creative writing. To a large extent, this is because most translation scholars are also translators. This is not the case generally where stylistic study is concerned. Often the stylistics of writing is seen as separate from the stylistics of reading, though there are exceptions: Oatley’s article ‘Writingandreading’ (2003: 161–73) is one. But in translational stylistics (Malmkjær 2004: 15), the practical consequences of the analysis of the source text or the translation are always implicit. Though translational stylistics, like any stylistics, tends to describe and explain rather than to evaluate – to explain what happens when we read rather than what the writer should or might have done instead – it can be assumed that stylistic knowledge affects actual translation. Elsewhere (Boase-Beier 2006: 113), I argue that a ‘stylistically aware’ reading of the source text can lead to better translation. Thus, in spite of the descriptive basis of both modern stylistics and modern translation theory, stylistics also has an important role as a tool to aid translation. In learning more about how we read, we can become more sensitive as readers. If this is true, then a stylistically aware translation will allow the translated poem itself to be available to a stylistically aware reading.

3  Reading the Translated Text It can be argued that a translated text, as read by the majority of its readers, is best understood as a conceptual blend (see Boase-Beier 2011a: 67–72). We conceptualize it as a combination of elements of our mental image of the untranslated source text with elements of an imagined target text that has originally been written in the target language. Neither of these texts is actually readily graspable by the mind of most readers; we do not usually have access to the original untranslated text, and a target text originally written in the target language is purely imaginary (though usefully so to translators since Dryden; cf. 1992: 19). Cognitive stylistics shows that we conceptualize 236

Stylistics and Translation

real, impossible and imaginary things in much the same way, and their effects are similar: atomic bombs make us afraid and so do ghosts. What is especially interesting about conceptual blends is that they contain elements that neither of the original conceptualizations (the two mental input spaces to the blend) themselves contain. Seen this way, we can read translated poems with a focus on the gains that translation brings to the poem, rather than, as has often traditionally been the case, on the supposed losses (cf. Vinay and Darbelnet 1995: 169–74). When this understanding of translated poetry is used as the basis for its stylistic analysis, it can be seen as the result of linguistic choices made by its writer, the translator; for Malmkjær, ‘translational stylistics’ (2004) always takes into account the text’s relation to its original and any particular patterns that can be observed in that relation. In a view of the translated poem as a conceptual blend, we can analyse what the translation has done as compared with the original, seen as one of its inputs. This is particularly interesting when several translations of the same poem exist. Consider Celan’s poem Stumme Herbstgerüche (Hamburger 2007: 192), which could be translated as ‘Dumb scents of autumn’. The original begins ‘Stumme Herbstgerüche. Die / Sternblume, ungeknickt, ging…’, literally ‘Dumb scents of autumn, the / starflower, unbent, went…’. The poem ends with a phrase that occurs, in varied form, in many of Celan’s poems: ‘you might almost have lived’. This suggests his mother’s death again as context. A comparison of translations of the first two lines by two of Celan’s most prolific translators, John Felstiner (2001: 152) and Michael Hamburger (2007: 193), shows the following differences: Felstiner: Mute autumn smells. The / aster, unbent, passed… Hamburger: Dumb autumn smells. The / marguerite, unbroken, passed… One could ask what, from a stylistic point of view, the difference is between ‘mute’ and ‘dumb’, not in their own right but as translations of stumme, and bearing in mind the differences between Felstiner’s American English and Hamburger’s British English. One could compare such translations with other work by Felstiner and Hamburger and so build up an idea of the translator as the poetic equivalent of Stockwell’s extra-fictional voice (2002: 42). One could ask what the significance of ‘marguerite’ is for Hamburger or ‘aster’ for Felstiner. Hamburger uses the flower that bears the same name as the goldenhaired Margarete (who in turn recalls the heroine of Goethe’s Faust) of Celan’s most famous poem, Todesfuge (Hamburger 2007: 70–3; cf. Felstiner 1995: 27). ‘Aster’, used by Felstiner, suggests a plant more likely to flower in autumn, as well as being etymologically derived from the Greek and Latin word for ‘star’, aster, and so more likely to trigger associations in the reader’s mind with the star as a Jewish symbol and with the debasement of that symbol by the Nazis. The 237

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

difficulty with this sort of analysis, though, is that the establishing of patterns in the translator’s stylistic choices is even more complex than with an original text. From the example just given, we could imagine that Hamburger is keen to make links throughout the poetry to its German literary heritage, whereas Felstiner is more interested in its particular Jewish background. While further comparisons, of the type that can be carried out using corpus-based tools (cf. Bosseaux 2007), may or may not substantiate such patterns, there are many factors that are difficult to account for, such as the translator’s development as a writer, the influence of translation theory upon his or her choices and the fact that the translator’s choices are always directly related to an interpretation of the original author’s choices.

4  Reading the Original Text through Translation In considering in the previous section how we read the translated text as a blend resulting from stylistic choices made by the translator, we saw that the differences between the blended poem and the original German poem that formed one of its inputs, though not accessible to most readers, could be examined by a critic familiar with the original poem and language. In fact, this sort of comparison, though it has a long tradition within translation studies (see, e.g. Toury 1995; Malmkjær 2004), can be problematic, because to compare a translation with its original can be seen as entailing, explicitly or implicitly, an evaluation, a measuring against a text that has often already stood the test of time and so can seem less open to question. This sort of evaluation, which has little place in modern stylistics, could be seen as particularly controversial in translation studies because of the suggestion that a translator is not to be treated as a writer. Even when it is used, as, for example, by Parks (2007: 12) to suggest points at which, in the source text, there is a particularly close ‘unity between style and content’, there could be a sense that such insight into the source text might only be gained because of what the target text fails to do. There are several ways of avoiding such evaluative overtones. One way is to avoid stylistic comparison of others’ translations with one’s own, because the implication of evaluation will always be greater in such cases. Another possibility is to see a translation as something that highlights, in the very differences of the translated text when read together with the original, the spaces for the reader’s engagement, so that such differences act as gaps in the way that Iser spoke about such gaps in an original text (1974: 274–94) and can therefore potentially lead to enhanced cognitive effects for the reader. Here I will look at a further poem by Celan, Weggebeizt (‘Etched away’), again with its translations by Hamburger (2007: 266–7) and Felstiner (2001: 247), not this time in order to compare the English poems in their relation to the source 238

Stylistics and Translation

text, but in order to examine what the differences between possible readings of the original and its translations might contribute to the stylistic analysis of the original poem and the poetics that inform it. Celan’s poem Weggebeizt (1967: 107), like many of his poems, does not have a separate title and so is known by its first word. The English expression ‘etched away’, used by both Hamburger (2007: 267) and Felstiner (2001: 247) has several different connotations. ‘Etched away’ suggests the action of acid upon metal, but ‘Etched away by the ray-shot wind of your language’, my translation of the first two lines of the poem, suggests another meaning. Celan had in fact underlined the word weggebeizt in a book about the effect of desert wind on the pyramids (Dischner 2011: 37). The action of the weather – usually sun or wind – on snow is a constant feature of Celan’s poetry; the compound Büβerschnee (­literally ‘penitents’ snow’), used later in the poem, denotes a specific phenomenon in areas with a great deal of weathering of lying snow, where the action of the sun melts the snow into tower-like structures that look like penitents in white robes. And a few lines later, the word Wabeneis appears; literally ‘honeycomb-ice’, this is also a type of ice affected by weathering. On the other hand, etching suggests the art of Celan’s artist wife Gisèle LeStrange, to whom he had remarked (Felstiner 1995: 219) that her etchings had a profound influence on his work. The realization of these two different meanings of the English word ‘etched’ leads to the thought that there may be several connotations of the original word wegbeizen, though it is not the word used for etching as an art form. In fact, beizen, related to English ‘bite’ (and an earlier version by Felstiner [2005: 215] has ‘bitten away’), also suggests the cauterizing of wounds, an important image in the poem, given that the word -schrunde, a few lines later, means both a crevasse in ice or rock and a wound on the body. Indeed, the poem could be read as having connotations of bodily injury and healing, not only in weggebeizt but also in Strahlen-, the word used both for rays of light and for the radiation treatment of injuries; and in the image, at the end of the poem, of the surviving Atemkristall, the breath-crystal, that which indicates that life remains. And the caustic substance used for cauterizing wounds also suggests a caustic curve, formed by a concentration of light rays. There is no adjective in the poem that might be translated as ‘caustic’, but a mental image of cauterizing is called into being by one meaning of weggebeizt, and it is the imagined English translation ‘cauterized’ that suggests the link to rays of light. There is another meaning, too, in beizen: it is related (if not etymologically, then at least phonologically, for Celan the linguist and speaker of Hebrew) to Hebrew bayeet, ‘house’. Thus weggebeizt is also ‘unhoused’, which might be seen as metaphorically referring to the understanding of language beyond its normal meanings. This is the first word of the poem. On reading Genicht, the final word of the first stanza, one is reminded of Genick, the nape of the neck, and of Genickschuss, the method favoured by Nazi guards for dispatching unfit or elderly camp 239

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

inmates, such as Celan’s mother, who had been shot for this reason, though we do not know by what method, in 1942. But it is also a negative form of Gedicht, a poem, a word whose corresponding verb, dichten, to write poems, is used elsewhere by Celan and is polysemous, meaning also to seal hermetically or to compress. Genicht contains the word nicht, ‘not’ (just as Schnee, one of Celan’s favourite words, contains the colloquial form of nein, ‘no’: nee). Reading Hamburger’s version of the final lines of this stanza, ‘the hundred- / tongued pseudo- / poem, the noem’, we see that he has translated das hundert/ züngige Mein- / gedicht, das Genicht, so that Meingedicht is interpretable only as relating to the Indo-Germanic root mei and middle high German mein (as in Meineid, ‘false testimony’), whereas the juxtaposition of deiner Sprache and Meingedicht also suggests a contrast: your language, my poem. Celan said in one of his talks about poetry (1967: 144) that a poem was always for another person, so Meingedicht also suggests a poem that remains with its originator, uselessly. Hamburger has written at some length on his translation of Celan, as has Felstiner, and he says that he is often not sure he has understood all the connotations of the original. The interesting point for comparative translational stylistics is that it is these very gaps between the original and the translation that, as we have seen, give rise to further engagement on the reader’s part. Thus ‘noem’, Hamburger’s word, suggests ‘noetic’, that is, purely intellectual. Hamburger does not suggest that this was intentional, but this is not the point. The connotation, that a poem can intellectually be appreciated but has no emotional effect on the reader, is an interesting further possibility for the reader of the translation and so becomes available for the original when it is read through the translation. Reading the original in the light of its translations allows similar insights about syntax. The second stanza of the German, which has Aus- / gewirbelt, / frei / der Weg, literally ‘whirled-out, / free / the way’, is translated by Hamburger as ‘Whirled / clear, / free / your way’. This suggests that the ‘you’ who is being addressed in the first stanza of the poem is now being instructed to find a way through what follows: snow, glaciers and ice. The realization that the German original has no addressee at this point arises because Hamburger’s version does have one. In fact, the German is using frei as an adjective, parallel to the adjectivally-used participle ausgewirbelt. This contrast leads the reader back to an earlier contrast: where Hamburger had ‘Etched away from / the ray-shot wind of your language’, Celan had weggebeizt vom, literally ‘etched away by’. This in turn suggests that the addressee has been able to take away all the trappings of facile conversation and have a healing effect upon the speaker; there is no need to exhort the du to ‘free your way’ because in fact the way has become free, cleared by the ‘ray-shot wind of your speech’. Here, the comparison of translation with original helps explain why we read the original as a contrast between the addressee, who has a healing, cauterizing 240

Stylistics and Translation

effect, and Meingedicht, ‘my poem’, which is ‘hundred-tongued’, complex, and full of bunte Gerede, ‘colourful talk’. Read in this way, the poem is a plea for simplicity, for the healing effect of direct thought, which can cleanse the mind of its complex play of connotation. The effect on a reading of the original poem is that Meingedicht is thrown into sharper contrast with deiner Sprache. This explains how we can read the du of the poem as a redemptive figure that is carried right through, though not actually mentioned again until the final two lines, ‘your undeniable witness’, giving rise to the strong sense of redemption that pervades this poem.

5  The Importance of Translation for Stylistics In the above discussions of three poems by Celan and their translations, what emerges is that the interaction of stylistics and translation does not just happen in one direction. We have seen that stylistics can help us understand how we read an original poem for translation, how we understand the translated poem as a blend and why a comparison of a text with its translation leads to an enhanced understanding of the style of the original. And this third type of understanding in turn suggests that translation studies also has an important role to play in enhancing or expanding stylistics as a discipline. What examples such as Espenbaum, Stumme Herbstgerüche and Weggebeizt suggest is that stylistics, in developing an increased sense of the importance of context and the cognitive aspects of context, must not forget the importance of linguistic detail, including etymology, an element that played a significant role in the study of style for the early structuralists, such as Jakobson. Etymology is not in the text but in the mind, and it is therefore particularly important as an example of how the words of the poem relate to knowledge, which is in many cases unconscious. There are two ways in which an enhancement of stylistic analysis in this way can happen. One is through the sort of consideration about a word like weggebeizt mentioned above. It is only when confronted with what those scholars who speak of translation loss would regard as an inevitable narrowing of stylistic nuance through translation that the sort of broadening can take place in the analyst’s mind that takes into account other linguistic connections beyond the word, such as the Hebrew bayeet. And it is only when a mental translation is performed, such as into English ‘cauterize’, that the connotations of the word in the other language can be activated. There are in fact many examples of such readings in the work of a translation scholar such as Felstiner (1995), who would probably not regard himself as a stylistician, and stylistics can thus learn from such scholars. In the case of a poet like Celan, who spoke several

241

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

languages and studied linguistics, such cross-linguistic stylistics seems essential in order to get a sense of his poetics. Secondly, it is only because a word such as Espenbaum makes us question what, in English, would be the difference between this and ‘aspen’ that we go back to the phrase Espenbaum, dein Laub and recall the German idiom about Espenlaub, with its suggestion of fear. In this sense, a confrontation of the text with its translation serves to focus on the language of the poem, which in turn prompts deeper linguistic analysis. These differences are of course clearer to the translational stylistician when the original is compared with an actual translation, as in Section 4 above. But in fact, an original can always be read as though it were to be translated, as happens in Section 2, for this is what the translator does; the basis for comparison is thus an imagined translation that has not yet come into being. This suggests another type of blend. I suggested in Section 3 that the translated poem is, for most readers, conceptually a blend of an (inaccessible) original and an imagined original poem written in the target language. But the type of blend I am now suggesting is in the mind of the translator reading the original: a blend between the source text and its imagined translation. This, I would argue, comes very close to the mind-style of Celan’s original poetry. It is also a useful approach to the style of any poetry that has arisen against a multilingual and multicultural background and, as in Celan’s case, is particularly concerned with the way language has developed historically, is conceived of, and is susceptible to being debased and abused, as German was by the Nazis. For stylistics, this suggests that the idea of poems such as these being seen as blends with their imagined translations will provide for richer stylistic analysis. The comparison of translations with originals in the examples above, in shedding light on the importance of etymology, also in turn suggests the value of cognitive stylistics as an analytical tool. This is because it is only in cognitive stylistics that the importance of homonymy is as great as that of polysemy: the imagined is as real as the historically documented. The comparison of translations with source text can also contribute to the discussion about the extent to which style, by being a direct effect of choice, presupposes an originator. Where different translations of the same poem exist, as examined in Section 3, such choices become particularly clear. Finally, stylistic analysis helps the translator to read and understand the source text and its effects and thus to write a more effective translated poem. That is to say, if the result of stylistic analysis is both an explanation of the text’s effects and a reconstruction of the poetics of the author, then it should be possible for a stylistically aware translator to translate the poetics and not just the poem. This in turn will make the translated poem itself more amenable to and more rewarding for stylistic analysis. 242

Stylistics and Translation

References Barthes, R. (1977), ‘The death of the author’, in S. Heath (ed. and trans.), Image – Music – Text, 142–8, London: Fontana. Boase-Beier, J. (2006), Stylistic Approaches to Translation, Manchester: St Jerome Publishing. Boase-Beier, J. (2011a), A Critical Introduction to Translation Studies, London: Continuum. Boase-Beier, J. (2011b), ‘Translating Celan’s poetics of silence’, Target, 23 (2): 165–77. Bosseaux, C. (2007), How Does It Feel? Point of View in Translation: The Case of Virginia Woolf into French, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Catford, J. (1965), A Linguistic Theory of Translation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Celan, P. (1967), Ausgewählte Gedichte, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Dischner, G. (2011), ‘“Flaschenpost” und “Wurfholz”: Reflections on Paul Celan’s poems and poetics’, in G. Hofmann, R. MagShamhráin, M. Pajevič and M. Shields (eds), German and European Poetics after the Holocaust: Crisis and Creativity, 35–52, New York: Boydell and Brewer. Dryden, J. (1992), ‘On translation’, in R. Schulte and J. Biguenet (eds), Theories of Translation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Felstiner, J. (1995), Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, New Haven: Yale University Press. Felstiner, J., trans. (2001), Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, New York: W. W. Norton. Fowler, R. (1977), Linguistics and the Novel, London: Methuen. Gentzler, E. (2001), Contemporary Translation Theories, 2nd edn, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Hamburger, M., trans. (2007), Poems of Paul Celan, London: Anvil. Holmes, J. (1988), Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Iser, W. (1974), The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jakobson, R. (1987), Language in Literature, ed. K. Pomorska and S. Rudy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Malmkjær, K. (2004), ‘Translational stylistics: Dulcken’s translations of Hans Christian Andersen’, Language and Literature, 13 (1): 13–24. Nida, E. (1964), Toward a Science of Translating, Leiden: Brill. Oatley, K. (2003), ‘Writingandreading: The future of cognitive poetics’, in J. Gavins and G. Steen (eds), Cognitive Poetics in Practice, 161–73, London: Routledge. Parks, T. (2007), Translating Style, Manchester: St Jerome Publishing. Rowland, A. (2005), Holocaust Poetry, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ruskin, J. (1863), Modern Painters, Vol. III, New York: John Wiley. Stockwell, P. (2002), Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, London: Amsterdam. Toury, G. (1995), Descriptive Translation Studies, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Venuti, L., ed. (2012), The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd edn, London: Routledge. Vinay, J.-P. and Darbelnet, J. (1995), Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

243

15

Stylistics and Literary Theory Geoff Hall, University of Nottingham Ningbo China

Chapter Overview Preliminaries. Theory as a Sceptical Orientation. The Problematic   Relation Between Stylistics and Literary Theory 244 Historical Perspectives, Theory as Poetics, Formalism,  Structuralism 247 ‘Language’ in Theory and in Stylistics 250 Discourse in Theory and in Stylistics. Poststructuralism 252 Some Productive Precedents for Theoretically Informed  Discourse Stylistics 255 Futures/Conclusion 258

1 Preliminaries. Theory as a Sceptical Orientation. The Problematic Relation Between Stylistics and Literary Theory1 In this chapter, I argue that while there have not been many, there should and could be more productive convergences between stylistics and literary theory. For some researchers, stylistics and literary theory represent very different projects, possibly even different fundamental intellectual orientations. Theory at a general level may be characterized as a ‘broad challenge to common sense’ (Culler 2011: xi), the fundamental and ongoing critique of founding ideas prevalent in societies and cultures at certain times. Theory at its best and broadest promotes reflexivity, asking the researcher to consider why and how she is doing what she is doing, often with a particular stress on the importance of language for our thinking and understanding. Stylistics, 244

Stylistics and Literary Theory

for its part, brings from linguistics a precise interest in what Eliot (1944: 15) memorably called the ‘intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings’, particularly an interest in creative language use. Arguably, both represent varieties of ‘poetics’, but top down versus bottom up respectively. In this chapter, it is proposed that, in the mutual concern with the central importance of language and investigating how texts work, literary theory and stylistics can and should be fruitfully brought into dialogue in various ways. The notion of ‘discourse’ and a broad understanding of ‘discourse analysis’ are proposed as the key to a fruitful possible interdisciplinary dialogue of theorists and stylisticians, with some examples given of suggestive work already published that is informed by an awareness of discourse drawing on both theory and linguistics. Literary theory poses some difficult questions for stylistics. Stylisticians sometimes need to lift their heads from the page, and this can lead to more significant and better informed enquiry. At the same time, stylistics is based on a valuable insistence on the need for empirical linguistic evidence, which is sometimes sadly missing from the more abstruse claims or speculations of Theory. The workings of language can be addressed in a more informed and less intuitive way without falling into the kind of scientism that Theory has taught us to beware of. Beyond this, stylistics and literary theory both claim to hold a particular relevance for literary studies, though neither has coincidentally widened to embrace the full array of actually occurring texts to be found in society. Crucially, we note that both stylistics and literary theory insist on the fundamental literariness of language use well beyond the bounds of texts conventionally considered ‘literary’. Finally, literary studies are pre-eminently where critical attitudes and ways of reading are taught, and a stylistics that is not critical would be of little value to those of us trained in literary reading. It is through reading of literature paradigmatically that we glimpse and construct visions of a better world. Indeed for some, literary theory is best seen as a branch of critical theory, just as literary ‘criticism’ must retain its evaluating function to remain a worthwhile human practice. Theory and literature both prompt us ‘to name the world differently, to positively refuse to accept dominant meanings, and to positively assert the possibility that it could be different’ (Apple 1996: 21 quoted in McKenna 2004: 19). Not coincidentally, this characterization of critical discourse analysis (CDA) also rather exactly summarizes the values a modern reader characteristically turns to literature to find. The satisfactions of literature reading at its best are also those of Theory at its best, and stylistics can help us extend and deepen our reflective understandings of how meanings are constructed from experiences of language use. Both disciplines are interested in meaning making through texts. The consequences of research in both areas have been not only to extend the boundaries of the ‘literary’ text, but also to understand the contingency and complexity of meaning making from texts. There is no divide here. 245

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

For some, the moment of theory has passed. But, ‘those to whom the title of this book suggests that “theory” is now over, and that we can all relievedly return to an age of pre-theoretical innocence, are in for a disappointment’ (Eagleton, After Theory, 2003: 1); ‘For better or worse, and more or less consciously, poststructuralism is part of the background of most of us working in the humanities today.’ (Davis 2004: 2). Once ‘radical’ critical theory has largely been absorbed into everyday academic thinking and practices – the awareness of ‘complexity’ I referred to above – there is no need to sign up to a specific single ‘theory’. Theory is better understood as more of an intellectually responsible orientation, a way of thinking that by its very nature is non-dogmatic. Stylistics needs the more reflexive and open approach to our activities that Theory teaches. On the other hand, Theory proposes ideas that can be investigated empirically, and in doing so our original questions become more precise and less speculative, leading to better understandings. Similarly, empirical work sometimes prompts the elaboration or revision of larger models and theories and so again, two ways of thinking and researching can inform each other if each party is prepared to make the effort to understand better the workings of the other. (Compare Coupland 2001, for a similar argument with regard to sociolinguistics and social theory.) Theory does not stand apart from but should (consciously) inform decisions on data, methods and analysis. What questions am I asking? What answers am I looking for? Why do they matter? The more precise questions of stylistics can, reciprocally, lead on to larger issues too. Reflecting theoretically on language and gender research in sociolinguistics, Cameron observes: ‘We need to ask not just how men and women differ, nor even just why they differ (i.e. “because of what local conditions”) but also for what large purpose they differ’ (quoted in Page 2006: 117). Furthermore, as Cameron asks persistently in her work, why do we look for ‘differences’ once we have identified ‘men’ and ‘women’ using language? Feminist stylistics is a pre-eminent example of the kind of theoretically informed stylistic work I have in mind for the productive future crossfertilization of theory and stylistics. Without theoretical reflection of this kind, stylistics is condemned to an ongoing secondary ‘handmaiden’ or ‘go-between’ role with respect to both linguistics and literary studies, where in fact it has the potential to pose the most profound and innovatory challenges to those two disciplines to the benefit of all (Compare again Stubbs [2004], urging greater ambition and reach upon the stylistics discipline: ‘If linguistics cannot account for the most highly valued texts in a culture, then what claims can it make to be a theory of language?’ [128]). This larger sense of ‘Theory’ and its pervasive influence across the arts and social sciences should be borne in mind even as we now turn to some more specific instances of historical and then possible future synergies and affordances between stylistics and literary theory. A final prefatory point to make is that Theory is difficult and unfinalizable. I am only too aware of the radical selectivity and partiality of the story I tell 246

Stylistics and Literary Theory

here of the relations between Theory and stylistics. But in the difficulty lies the value of Theory as of literature. Life (and literature) is not simple. Adequate study will not represent things as simple. Part of the resistance to stylistics on the part of literary critics has been a resistance to its apparent urge to simplify the complex, to label, generalize and categorize where literary studies typically prefer to emphasize and value complexity and contingency. Then again, for all its complexity of detail, part of the appeal of Theory is its big ideas: relativity, identity, power and the rest. These are self-evidently important concerns for many today, and I argue that a stylistics that cannot engage with such issues is doomed to triviality and ongoing marginality in academic enquiry. Stylistics does not have to resign itself to that uninteresting fate.

2  Historical Perspectives, Theory as Poetics, Formalism, Structuralism Historically, there has been mainly hostility, or at best indifference and divergence, between stylistics and literary theory. But it is simplistic to think in terms of a strict dichotomy: black versus white. We should also notice some unexpected, and in some ways revealing, interconnections. Auerbach and Spitzer, the founders of stylistics, as well as Foucault, were acknowledged important early influences on Edward Said, a ‘founding father’ of postcolonial studies and a key critical thinker. Early in his career, Said co-translated (1929) Auerbach’s ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’, an argument for philologists to think more widely (e.g. beyond the limits of ‘national literatures’ like ‘English literature’). Thereafter, he refers respectfully through his major writings to Auerbach’s book Mimesis and several times uses a favourite quotation taken from Auerbach’s essay: ‘The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is a foreign land’ (quoted in D’ Haen, 2012). This estrangement is a key component of a theoretically informed approach. From his beginnings in philology (and exile, like Auerbach, de Man or the majority of theorists), Said would continue to investigate the relations between ‘world, text and critic’ (to use the title of his 1983 book) until the end of his life, culminating in the posthumous meditations of Late Style (2006). Said represents a good example of a multilingual critical theorist returning again and again to details of style and language to prompt more comprehensive but also precise theorizing about culture and the arts, politics and ethics. He learnt from Foucault and Derrida in developing his ideas of discourse (colonialism and imperialism are discourses) but also critiqued excesses of self-indulgent Theory. His key motif was ‘worldliness’, which may act as a theme for the connections between theory and stylistics argued in this chapter. Thus in ‘The World, the Text, and the Critic’ (1984) he  contests Riffaterre’s (1973) ‘self-referring text’ in favour of more worldly 247

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

ideas from Arabic philology, acknowledging that relations between word and world are never simple but arguing that they are ultimately what matters. Better known examples of historical connections between literary theory and stylistics are those of the New Critics in the United States and the legacy of Russian Formalism (Wellek and Jakobson for example) and then of Structuralism, which is particularly associated with French writers from the 1960s. With regard to Anglo-American theory and criticism, in some ways New Criticism was arguably pre- or even anti-theoretical. But as Eagleton (1983) and others taught us long ago, to claim to have no theoretical position is a theoretical position. We are never so much in ideology as when we believe ourselves to be out of it, in Althusser’s formulation (1964). This was certainly very much the case for the staunchly conservative New Critics. In the United States too, however, in literature and comparative literature departments, Wellek (for example) traced his own roots back to Jakobson and Prague functional linguistics. Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature (1963) was an important early attempt to stand back from burgeoning literary studies and ask some hard questions about the value and the aims of all this activity, informed by a scientific critical ­orientation  – and also, it should be said, with a wise pan-European contemporary and historical awareness of relevant research not often found since in the Anglo-centric literary and stylistic institutions. Behind Prague Structuralism lay a history of Russian Formalism with its enquiries into the linguistic nature of ‘literariness’ and key ideas like ‘defamiliarization’ which continued to intrigue right through the twentieth century. Wellek and Warren (1963[1949]) argue for the need for a principled and ‘systematic’ study of literature, starting methodologically with and retaining a primary focus on the ‘intrinsic’ features of a literary text (not biography, history, etc.) Language is seen as central to these intrinsic features, and ‘stylistics’ is recommended to students of literature, as are also attention to figurative language and the study of genre features. Interestingly, by 1976, Wellek notes the need for a more thorough updating, but ‘who can master the astonishing and bewildering literature on theory which since [1949] has been produced in many countries?’ The misunderstandings or approximate understandings of linguistic terms and approach are revealing and anticipate much later work in theory, but also, as Wellek says, a lot had happened in theory between 1949 and even 1976. Most readers of Theory of Literature today would be as puzzled and bewildered by Wellek and Warren’s early handbook as the authors were in their time by burgeoning deconstruction and other modern developments. The chapter headings we expect are simply not there. Frye (1957) attempted a similarly ambitious poetics in the same period, arguing for the interest of the structural system of literature rather than interpreting or investigating the specifics of any particular literary work: ‘poetry can only be made out of other poems, novels out of other novels’ (Frye 1957: 97). Increasingly, Structuralism was linguistic in intellectual inspiration, usually 248

Stylistics and Literary Theory

explicitly basing itself on Saussure’s theories of language following the lead of Barthes, Derrida and others in 1960s Paris. Culler’s (1975) notion of ‘literary competence’ seemed to be in the first place a vague Chomskyan analogy, rather than one taken directly from Saussure – though nevertheless structuralist – but Saussure features largely in all Culler’s influential work on theory. In Culler (2011), Chomsky is still instanced as the leading linguist, which may be the case for linguistics in the United States but is certainly not the case elsewhere. Whatever the value of Chomsky’s proposed insights into the human mind, it is generally accepted by linguists, as it is by Chomsky himself, that he has little to tell us of actual language use in the real world, as for example in literary texts. Culler’s early foray into poetics is of great interest but is actually a good example of the problems of knowing little or nothing of contemporary linguistics even in that period, an ongoing issue in this chapter. The birth of ‘full on’ Theory is often dated to 1967, Derrida’s ‘annus mirabilis’, with the publication of three influential books promoting what came to be called ‘deconstruction’: Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology and Speech and Phenomena. Or again perhaps theory began notionally in 1966 with the special issue of the journal Communications (8), containing key essays by Barthes, Greimas, Genette, Metz, Todorov, Bremond and Eco (among others) writing on the structural analysis of narrative. Publication of the 1960s’ Parisian journal Tel Quel is the mythical moment of origin for Rabaté (2002). In one way or another, by 1968, a volatile time politically and culturally in Europe, Structuralism – a first very perceptible wave of Theory – had arrived in Paris. Structuralist ideas of language were being used by such writers on aesthetics and philosophy, and this necessitates a pause to distinguish the linguistics of theory at least in its formative stages, and linguistics as it is likely to be drawn upon by the stylistician. Typically for the theorist, ‘language’ is a metaphor or, at best, intuitive understandings of language and the workings of language are used; I would argue, however, that all would benefit from more up to date and informed understandings of language and language use. A suggestive early study was Derrida’s characteristically maddening but undoubtedly stimulating ‘Signature, Event, Context’ (1988[1977a and b]), an important critique of Austin’s ‘Speech Act Theory’ (Austin 1962; see also Attridge 1992). As with all the best critical, stylistic and theoretical writing, the real interest of Derrida’s essay is in the precise detail of linguistic observation, but his overall point is a simple deconstructive one: that very close critical attention shows that Austin’s theories were incomplete and not fully coherent. Exact repetition is the basis of language/writing, but it is at the same time an impossible dream. This is a good example of a more general point to be made in this area. A standard criticism of theory-led writings on texts is that they are too predictable. We know what the conclusion of a feminist/Marxist/deconstructive/new historical/postcolonial, etc., essay will be before we read it. In broad terms this is true, but it seems to me rather like 249

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

saying ‘Oh, stylisticians miss the point by talking about the language’. The conclusion, that ‘language is important in meaning making’ is indeed rather obvious. But tracing how, in a specific text, language is being used to what effects tells us much about both language and the literary text. The point, for Derrida as for stylistics, is the language. It is the close critical attention to the workings (or non-workings) of language for which all our work is valuable. Culler (2011) similarly observes: What are commonly seen as ‘schools’ of literary criticism or Theoretical ‘approaches’ to literature are, from the point of view of hermeneutics, dispositions to give particular kinds of answers to the question of what a work is ultimately ‘about’: ‘the class struggle’ (Marxism), ‘the possibility of unifying experience’ (the new criticism), ‘Oedipal conflict’ (psychoanalysis), ‘the containment of subversive energies’ (new historicism), ‘the asymmetry of gender relations’ (feminism), ‘the self-deconstructive nature of the text’ (deconstruction), ‘the occlusion of imperialism’ (postcolonial theory), ‘the heterosexual matrix’ (gay and lesbian studies). (Culler 2011: 65) What matters is the route not the destination, Culler argues: what a theoretical approach, a critic or indeed a stylistician prompts a reader to notice or consider carefully which they had not done initially.

3  ‘Language’ in Theory and in Stylistics Many of the key differences and apparent conflicts between stylistics and theory come down to different understandings of ‘language’. It is frequently observed that, where critical theory is informed by Saussurean structuralist linguistics, linguists themselves long ago moved on in areas like stylistics to the study of parole rather than langue – if we stay with Saussure’s terms. Understanding language in use is thought by the stylistician to be more likely to be of relevance, rather than language as an abstraction or some kind of grounded metaphor for producing interpretations (as in Theory). Thus, a historical theorist for the linguists is surprisingly central to literary theory. Structuralism was a common early move of linguistics and critical theory, but it is more likely, I suggest here as elsewhere (Hall 2008), that in a poststructuralist era, stylistics and critical theory can talk to each other more productively as indicated by a growing convergence on the use of the term ‘discourse’, which is understood roughly as ‘language in use’ – albeit again with different inflections if not wider differences in uses of the term. Pennycook (1994) offers a contrasting view of the ‘incommensurability’ of notions of ‘discourse in different approaches’. His contrasts are well taken, but subsequent writings in sociolinguistics and elsewhere have 250

Stylistics and Literary Theory

shown that he over-estimated these incompatibilities. It is unfortunate that distinct histories of development and imperfect understandings of each other’s projects have obscured the common concerns I will point to here. Harpham (2002) argues that Theory, with all its insistence on relativism and indeterminacies, needed ‘linguistics’ as its own ‘transcendental signifier’ of ‘science’, that is, sure knowledge, when of course for applied linguists still developing the field, linguistics offers no such final surety. There is an irony here in the light of the charges of naive positivism that are often levelled at the stylistician. It is relevant to note also in this respect some surprisingly linguistically naive comments by Derrida that are to be found in Monolingualism of the Other (1998[1996]), where he also very honestly notes his own purism about linguistic matters, and how this actually contradicts his own deconstructive programme and the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ supposedly basic to theory. Elsewhere he notes that he detests incorrect grammar (!) (in Royle 2003: 34). Descriptivism rather than purism (language ideologies in the most naive sense) is by contrast an axiom, rather than a problem for the trained linguist. It is similarly unfortunate and symptomatic that Culler (2011) or Barry (2002, 2009) and most other theorists seem to have very little awareness of research in contemporary applied linguistics when they make off-hand and inaccurate comments about ‘linguistics’ in their textbooks. Belsey (2002), in many ways a useful introduction to discourse analysis of literary text, manages to avoid using the word ‘discourse’ once. This seems wilful to a discourse analyst but is probably genuine ignorance of current applied linguistics. The deliberately fragmentary and unsystematic Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Bennett and Royle 2009[1995]), probably second only to Eagleton (1983) as the classic primer for students of literary theory, admittedly contains only two references to ‘linguistics’ in its index in the second edition (1999). One (24) cannot be found, though I do see references to Barthes, Foucault, and ‘discourse’. The other refers to ‘twentieth century linguistics (Chomsky, Saussure, Pinker)’ (22). There is no index entry for ‘discourse’, despite the frequent use of the term, and only a vague entry in the glossary (262), though we do find a chapter on ‘Voice’ (Chapter 9), another on ‘Figures and Tropes’ (Chapter 10) and one on ‘The Performative’ (Chapter 24). Nevertheless, there are twelve entries for ‘language’ including some substantial ranges (esp. 28–34, 80–8): ‘everything human that happens in the world is mediated by language’ (31) – what applied linguists would call ‘discourse’ nowadays, I would suggest (compare, for example, Potter and Wetherell 1987). Interestingly, Jakobson is referred to (34) and notions of ‘literary language’ (80), but such passing references, without which it seems these theorists cannot write, are not indexed. Deleuze and Guattari include a chapter on ‘Linguistics’ in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), wherein pragmatics and discourse are advanced in a limited but perhaps interesting way for a work first published in 1980, with references 251

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

to Benveniste, and also to Ducrot and Bakhtin-Vološinov. What is disturbing is how reverentially their work is invoked by literary critics and theorists thirtyfive years later, as if no further work has been done on pragmatics and discourse. Language is not about information exchange or code, it is declaimed, linguistics is not a science, when of course this is precisely the foundation of all areas of modern applied linguistics such as pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics or stylistics. Perhaps at the beginning of the twentieth century Saussure thought like this, or Bloomfield in the 1920s, but linguists have really moved a long way since then. How unfortunate that the theorists do not seem to read any linguistics published much later than 1968. Labov as a proponent of traditionalist sociolinguistics is indeed briefly instanced by Deleuze and Guattari against Chomsky (him again!) but is critiqued for his own rigidities. But of course this is exactly the position of a current sociolinguist like Coupland (2007). The difference is that Coupland does not speculate. He develops his critique of Labov’s model through a career built on empirical investigations, where the fascination and the conviction again lies in the detail and – which is important for us here – which leads Coupland to be able ultimately to develop a more sophisticated theory of variation than Deleuze and Guattari can offer.

4  Discourse in Theory and in Stylistics. Poststructuralism In 1957, Frye had advanced his view of what would now be called ‘intertextuality’ ten years before Barthes’s now notorious essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1977[1967]). What were perceptive gentleman-amateur speculations about ‘intertextuality’ in Frye or Barthes are now investigated more carefully and precisely; for example, through the study of recurrent words and phrases in Dickens’s writings in the corpus stylistic work of Mahlberg (2012). Repetition and parallelism (as creativity and originality) have often fascinated theory and the literary critics (Miller 1982; Said 1984, both influenced by French phenomenology) as well as poetics (Jakobson’s ‘parallelism’, 1996[1960]), but such ideas have only been investigated impressionistically in the literature departments (traced by Allen 2011). Gates’s pioneering studies of African-American ‘signifying practices’ also pointed to the central role of language play, pattern and variation and even ‘double voicing’ and complex speech-writing relations in his alternative literary canon, but once again these elements feature only selectively and impressionistically as dictated by his literary critical training (Gates 1988). Much of this suggestive work still remains to be filled out and more accurately described by stylisticians. Corpus stylistics (see Chapter 9 in this volume) is one important method now available for stylisticians to do this. Derrida saw language – indeed writing – as the basic reality or medium in which we move and inescapably have our being. He identified an intertextuality 252

Stylistics and Literary Theory

as radical as that of Bakhtin or Barthes: all words are always already in quotation marks (see Royle 2003: 1). All language acts are performatives even if their meaning must always remain finally undecidable. Language is as fundamentally and ubiquitously metaphorical as it is for Lakoff and Johnson (1980). For Derrida, genres (and genders) are always already hybrid, recognizably the same and identifiably different, and this is how they work (see also Kress, Van Leeuwen). Language exceeds the meaning and intention of the author as Jakobson had argued before Derrida. It is often pointed out that, in some ways, deconstruction found a natural home in US universities as an extreme form of ‘close reading’, wherein extended and obsessive attention to the language features of a text, uninformed by any linguistic training, could reveal meanings and practices far from any obvious everyday reader’s expectations. In the United Kingdom, where a more political approach to literary texts tended to lead the way, Raymond Williams led literary studies into cultural studies with his intuitive notion of ‘keywords’ (Williams 1976; extended by Bennet, Grossberg and Morris 2005). More recent corpus-stylistics work in CDA (Gabrielatos and Baker 2008; Baker, Gabrielatos and McEnery 2013) has again brought more stylistic precision to such ideas and extended those early intuitions in valuable ways, for example in the textual investigation of how racism works through popular media. The pattern is now familiar. Provocative and stimulating ideas can come from the best theory. Stylistics has filled in the detail and given a more accurate picture than can be imagined intuitively. The challenge is whether stylistics cannot sometimes now lead from this more informed empirical stance if practitioners can be persuaded to extend stylistic investigations, as a matter of course, into the realm of what Labov used to call the ‘so what?’, thus reflexively turning theory back upon its own project and prompting new issues for theory to address. Theory, then, can benefit from an updated knowledge of advances in applied linguistics (discourse analysis, corpus stylistics, sociolinguistics and all study of language in use), just as applied linguistics increasingly recognizes the need to reflect and work in more theoretically informed ways on its principles and procedures (Coupland 2001; see also the Applied Linguistics special issue ‘Poststructuralism and Applied Linguistics’ (McNamara 2012). Eagleton’s still dominant and bestselling Introduction to Literary Theory (1983) ends with a plea for studies of ‘rhetoric’ to redress weaknesses in current literary critical practice, though unfortunately the term is not explored or exemplified. What Eagleton seems to have in mind is a study of literary texts as instances of language use, and that all language uses need to be considered as necessarily political uses of language. If my inference is correct, this is a position remarkably close to that of CDA. Meanwhile, in 2002, Peter Barry referred to the ‘new stylistics’ of the 1980s (sic), for example, Roger Fowler, Carter and the Routledge ‘Interface’ series. He has another 253

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

chapter on ‘narratology’ (Chapter 12) but signals no obvious connection between stylistics and narratology, and again his idea of narratology as best represented by 1980s work (or rather translations) of Propp and Genette seems extraordinary to anyone who takes an interest in narratology today. Narratology has moved on a long way from such structuralist approaches – let us note, for example, postmodern feminist narratology in Page (2006), for example, or Toolan’s ongoing research (e.g. Toolan 2009), not to mention Herman, Emmott, Gavins, Fludernik, Palmer or a host of others. Page (2006: 74) notes with surprise that despite the avowal of interest in all ‘texts’ in theory, in both stylistics and in narratology, literary texts have been privileged objects of attention [even though there is nothing linguistically distinctive about a literary text]. It is disappointing that narratology has taken little or no notice of the extensive and stimulating work done in conversational storytelling and other areas of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis in the last twenty years. In 2009, Barry produced a third edition professing a renewed interest in narratology, but which unfortunately added little that was new to that chapter. There is still no later reference than 1989 in his chapter on stylistics (could there have been nothing of interest in the most recent twenty-five years?). A new section added at the end of the book considers cognitive poetics (urging readers to study Reuven Stur [sic], p. 309), which is said to share some of the weaknesses of ‘stylistics’ but is not otherwise apparently seen as connected. Again, there is no mention in Barry or other such introductions of any possible mutual interest between stylistics and new historicism or cultural materialism despite the linguistic (and ‘discourse’) preoccupations of such theorists. Another of those unexpected connections I mentioned earlier that can give pause for thought is the fact that leading cultural materialist Alan Sinfield began his career with a stylistic – or at least new critical – very ‘close reading’ of The Language of Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ (1971). It is revealing that when he returns to the study of Tennyson from a more theoretically informed point in his career in 1986, he studies textual variants and issues of editing, among other features, partly inspired no doubt by contemporary theorists like McGann (1985). Later his ‘queer’ readings of Tennyson and others are informed by similarly close attention to linguistic detail, however unsystematic. The linguistic interest is still there, however impressionistic, but then again it is complemented by a historical awareness that is sadly too often lacking in stylistics. This is the kind of literary work that stylisticians who profess to be interested in linguistic detail need to learn from in both ways. Both parties to the ongoing ignorance are to blame here. A comparable case might be McGann (1985) demonstrating that the weakness of Brooks’s (1960[1944]) new critical reading of Tennyson’s lyric ‘Tears, idle tears’ is not its close reading approach to linguistic detail. McGann’s point is to urge his literary colleagues to look more closely at textual details than they usually do. (McGann’s key idea of the ‘text as material object’ importantly anticipates a more recent hot topic in stylistics, that of multi-modality.) Rather 254

Stylistics and Literary Theory

ironically, (a deconstructive move broadly speaking) the problem is that Brooks has reproduced a linguistically inaccurate version of the text whose perfection he celebrates! Are we to conclude that Brooks produced a more perfect version of Tennyson’s nearly perfect poem? Or, more probably, do we not conclude that a method that can prove its point with regard to incorrect data is more than a little suspect. (Compare Cameron [2011] on discussions of language and gender in recent evolutionist approaches to literary study). In the later Sinfield, formal approaches at the level of words and sentences (deconstructive now in the approach) give way to a Foucauldian discourse analysis of the whole text and its contexts. In stylistics, historical and bibliographical perspectives are rare (Sotirova 2011 is an honourable exception). Good stylistics or discourse analysis should be fully aware of the historical issues in answering the basic CDA questions: Where has this text come from? How has it come to be? Whose interests does it serve? and How might it have been otherwise written? This encompasses the Bakhtinian idea of ‘answerability’, and that all texts look forward as well as backward. Texts have a history, readings have histories. Stylistics seems surprisingly ahistorical most of the time or uninterested in history, too often shunning the study of pre-twentieth century texts, which is perhaps an inheritance of its own pretensions to a transcendent scientificity or too easy a sense of ‘relevance’ and modernity. And in literary criticism and theory, in turn, the selective and impressionistic attention to language becomes ever more frustrating. It is particularly frustrating because often the speculations and intuitions are very interesting, but they do not need to remain as mere speculations and intuitional stabs in the dark, albeit on the part of very experienced readers.

5 Some Productive Precedents for Theoretically Informed Discourse Stylistics 5.1  Critical Stylistics, CDA as Critical Theory CDA is poststructuralist in inspiration, based on a constructivist view that language constructs, rather than represents or reflects, meanings. It does this through discourse, through offering language users positions that are recognizable and more obvious than others to take. Thus language use maintains and promotes mostly existing power relations (compare Simpson and Mayr 2010). This is what is known as the ‘naturalization’ of ideology. Stylistics meets cultural studies in a CDA study like Cook (2004) on GM foods, or Machin and Van Leeuwen (2005) on Cosmopolitan. CDA has its theory origins in Frankfurt School ‘critical theory’, where the informing idea of the cultural analyses of that school was that the world does not have to be like this/as bad as this. Similarly, the text did not have to be like this. There are alternatives. Hallidayan linguistics 255

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

operationalizes this idea for linguistic analysis by proposing ‘language as a system of choice’ (Kress, Van Leeuwen, etc.). CDA then asks ‘In whose interest is this utterance/ text? How did this text come to be? What is it responding to?’ (‘contexts’) or anticipating (Bakhtin)? Why are these forms found in this place at this time? Language use is considered as social interaction, and social interaction necessarily involves attention to power relations in an unequal and unjust society. Fowler led the field for stylistics here, extending earlier Hallidayan work in ‘critical linguistics’ with Literature as Social Discourse (1981) and becoming increasingly interested in analyses informed by Bakhtinian ideas of language as a ‘site of social struggle’ (Bakhtin 1981). Knowledge was there shown to be partial (in both senses), offering ways of understanding or representing the world that can be contested. CDA offers stylistics an arena in which it becomes a central rather than a peripheral discipline of social science. The linguistics can be specified grammatically as in Fairclough (after Halliday) or later by Jeffries (2007, 2010). The generally increasing role of corpus linguistics in CDA has already been instanced in Gabrielatos and Baker (2008); Baker, Gabrielatos and McEnery (2013).

5.2  Feminist Stylistics Feminist stylistics is inspired by feminist theory but attempts to investigate the workings of gender through linguistic analyses of texts. Burton (1982) remains one of the most impressive early publications in the field for its time. It offered advanced and theoretically explicit uses of stylistics to support a feminist agenda, showing how Plath represented herself in The Bell Jar as powerless and passive through her use of transitivity structures in English. Ryder (1999) produced related and similarly enlightening work with regard to the representation of women and love in the romance genre. Wales (1994), then Mills, perhaps the best known of the feminist stylisticians, took this work forward in important ways (see the more recent work of Mills (2006) on politeness). For many, such work would be labelled as ‘discourse analysis’. For others, discourse analysis is a kind of stylistics, or stylistics is a kind of discourse analysis. The point is precisely that feminist work in discourse analysis/stylistics (call it what you will) has extended and blurred the boundaries of both in a theoretically informed way. Mills (1993), for example, was noteworthy for extending a stylistic approach to a postcolonial feminist analysis of women’s travel writing. Feminist stylistics continues to appear in the journal Language and Literature and elsewhere, but often now the presumed broader appeal of the label ‘discourse analysis’ is preferred. Jeffries (2007) work on language and the construction of the female body in various texts is a good example of more recent feminist

256

Stylistics and Literary Theory

stylistics in this view. From the feminist side of Theory, Judith Butler is widely hailed for her work introducing the linguistic idea of the speech act to researchers in language and gender, but it has to be said that her work, while stimulating, (e.g. Excitable Speech, 1997, on racism and ‘hate speech’ in language) has been characteristic of theory by being more impressionistic and figurative than stylistic in its appeals to language. Important work remains to be done in applying Butler’s ideas to text and for those with linguistic training to test the ideas against actually occurring texts.

5.3  Narratology: Vološinov, Bakhtin, Free Indirect Discourse (FID) Bakhtin’s (1981) ‘sociological stylistics’ – ‘voices’ and the idea of ideological struggle through register, dialect and the like – has already been mentioned incidentally at various points as an important meeting place of theory and linguistics. For example, Coupland’s (2007) ‘stylization’ (arguably a sociolinguistic stylistics) shows the practical potential for Bakhtin’s writings for stylistics. Wales (1989) after Fowler (1981) tried to spell out how a Bakhtinian stylistics might be elaborated for literary writing. Generally, the inspiration has been more philosophical than precise, but the exception lies in some of the most exciting work in the study of free indirect speech (or ‘free indirect discourse’) in modern stylistics. The work of Bakhtin as a theorist of the ‘unfinalizability’ of discourse and his interest in speech genres, cliché, intertextuality and even undecidability (no origins/no ends) are clearly on the more speculative-theoretical end of our topic here for the most part. But in the work published under the name of Vološinov, more precise and suggestive applications appeared as studies of one of the founding interests of stylistics in Bally (1912): the phenomenon of free indirect speech (FIS). These works have prompted precise and revealing stylistic analysis, notably in Sotioriva (2011 and elsewhere) but we should note again that this work not only eventually leads us back to a better understanding, but also to an appreciation for more Derridean ideas of ‘writing’ and ‘undecidability’. ‘Better theory from better stylistics’ is a motto of this particular chapter. Thus I showed with examples in my study of newspaper ‘quotation’ (what some would want to call ‘reported speech’) that the writing takes precedence over any possible authenticity of reporting in journalistic story writing. A report is a story before it is a report of what happened (Hall 2005). A more profound and extended study of FIS in D. H. Lawrence shows meticulously and precisely that the arguments around ‘character’ in a theoretical work like Lynch (1998) – that ‘characters’ are just that, graphemes or ‘writing’ – is what Lawrence approached in his own way in showing the melding of personalities in interaction even as early as Sons and Lovers (Sotirova 2011).

257

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

6 Futures/Conclusion Recently in literary studies there has been noted a widespread return to interest in individual works rather than in ‘discourse’; to considering distinct and specific qualities of texts, specifically linguistic and aesthetic qualities, rather than looking at them as instances of some larger issue or topic. What, critics like Armstrong (2000) ask, is different or unique, or indeed of special value about the workings of literary texts? (see also Eagleton, Barry, Cunningham, 2002 among many other examples). And here the explicitly comparative method of stylistics – including cognitive stylistics – surely has a large role to play. After all, ‘deviation’ and variation from a norm are the classic staples of stylistic study. A central concern of stylistics (e.g. Simpson 2014) has always been with how literary texts are the same as but also differ from other non-literary texts. At the same time as arguing that a literary text is just one more instance of language use, stylistics has helped us to see how exceptionally interesting literary texts can be. Cameron (2011), in discussing literary readers and reading, makes the point that ‘a framework’s value for the purposes of literary criticism is not judged on criteria of scientific validity; rather it is judged by whether the framework produces insights when it is used systematically as a lens through which to read’ (67) to reveal ‘something non-obvious’ (70). Thus, feminism, Marxism, lately eco-criticism – ‘changing cultural preoccupations’ – now ‘theory of mind’ and cognitive poetics – all have prompted in turn, and sometimes in conjunction, valuable new insights. There is no ‘true’ reading of a literary text. There are only ‘partial’ readings and explanations. Literary theory taught us this, and it is confirmed by the best stylistic investigations. The explicit and replicable stylistic analysis of a text and/or of a reading is of value as an account of one partial reading. The ‘true’ is normally trivial or platitudinous. What is of interest in human affairs, including literature and language use, cannot be well discussed in terms of truth. Austin and Derrida confirmed Nietzsche’s original insights. Stylistics studies language use in literary texts to understand better both language and literature (Simpson 2014), and also because there are grounds for thinking that language as used in literature may be particularly interesting and even particularly central for understandings of language and of the world and of ourselves. Theory has tended to value the complex and the difficult, to emphasize indeterminability or undecidability (de Man 1986). An awareness of history is an awareness that you cannot step in the same river twice. Every interpretation or ‘reading’ is highly contingent, unique and never to be precisely repeated. Stylistics, by contrast, looks for clarity, transparency and replicability as defining principles. That these apparently irreconcilable imperatives can work fruitfully in tension is to my mind best exemplified to date in the stylistic study of the indeterminacies of free indirect discourse in Sotirova (2011). Derrida at his best gives painstaking step-by-step explicit readings of his 258

Stylistics and Literary Theory

chosen texts, however startling they may sometimes be. Sotirova does the same and (so) can sometimes be just as startling. Both establish, finally, that the best literary prose is precisely undecidable (Derrida, de Man) and that undecidability is at the core of the value of a literary text, however we arrive at this ineffable (denial of) truth. The deepest emotions or most cherished beliefs, for example, are ineffable in this way. It is interesting to see Stockwell (2009 and later) arguing the same from the perspective of cognitive poetics. Literature at its best deals with the stuff that ultimately matters, and it is where language excels but ultimately fails (Samuel Beckett showed us this); hence its inescapable difficulty and ultimate unanalysability. But only by attempting and ultimately failing in our stylistic analyses can this be fully appreciated. There is no final word. And that is my final word. Till the next attempt at analysis.

Note 1. I have capitalised ‘Theory’ at various points in the following chapter, to refer to Theory as a larger field than (lower case) ‘literary theory’, ‘critical theory’ and so on, which are more easily delimited. While the borders are not always clear, Theory (upper case ‘T’) in Derrida, Foucault, Nietzsche or others ranges ambitiously into philosophy, making large claims for human and social sciences, and  to my mind is itself an academic discipline and a way of thinking and writing, which exceeds the lower case more specific ‘theories’.

References Allen, G. (2011), Intertextuality. The New Critical Idiom, 2nd edn, New York and London: Routledge. Althusser, L. (1964), ‘Marxism and humanism’, For Marx, trans. B. Brewster, London: Verso. Armstrong, I. (2000), The Radical Aesthetic, Oxford: Blackwell. Attridge, D., ed. (1992), Jacques Derrida. Acts of Literature, London: Routledge. Austin, J. L. (1962), How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C. and McEnery, T. (2013), ‘Sketching Muslims. A corpus driven analysis of representations around the word “Muslim” in the British press 1998–2009’, Applied Linguistics, 34 (3): 255–78. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981[1934–5]), ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in M. Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, 259–422, Austin: University of Texas Press. Bally, C. (1912), ‘Le style indirect libre en français moderne’, Germanisch-Romanisch Monatsschrift, 4: 549–56; 597–606. Barry, P. (2002), Beginning Theory. An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 2nd edn, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Barry, P. (2009), Beginning Literary Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 3rd edn, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Barthes, R. (1977[1967]), ‘The death of the author’, in R. Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. S. Heath, 142–8, New York: Hill & Wang.

259

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Belsey, C. (2002), Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bennett, A. and Royle, N. (2009[1995]), Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education. Bennett, T., Grossberg, L. and Morris, M. (2005), New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Brooks, C. (1960[1944]), ‘The motivation of Tennyson’s weeper’, in J. Kilham (ed.), Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, 177–85, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Burton, D. (1982), ‘Through glass darkly: Darkly through glasses’, in R. Carter and D. Burton (eds), Literary Text and Language Study, 195–214, London: Edward Arnold. [Partially reprinted in P. Simpson, Stylistics, 187–94, London: Routledge, 2004]. Butler, J. (1997), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, London: Routledge. Cameron, D. (2011), ‘Evolution, science and the study of literature’, Language and Literature, 20 (1): 59–72. Cook, G. (2004), Genetically Modified Language, London: Routledge. Coupland, N. (2001), ‘Introduction: Sociolinguistic theory and social theory’, in N.  Coupland, S. Sarangi and C. N. Candlin (eds), Sociolinguistics and Social Theory, 1–26, Harlow: Pearson Education. Coupland, N. (2007), Style, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Culler, J. (1975), Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Culler, J. (2011), Literary Theory A Very Short Introduction, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cunningham, V. (2002), Reading After Theory, Oxford: Blackwell. Davis, C. (2004), After Poststructuralism. Reading, Stories and Theory, London: Routledge. de Man, P. (1986), ‘The resistance to theory’, in D. Lodge and N. Wood (eds), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 2nd edn, 332–47, Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1980), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi, London: Continuum. Derrida J. (1974[1971]), ‘White mythology: Metaphor in the text of philosophy’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass, 207–71, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982. Derrida, J. (1988[1977a]), ‘Signature event context’, in Limited Inc, trans. S. Weber and J. Mehlman, 1–23, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. (1988[1977b]), ‘Limited Inc a b c …’, in Limited Inc, trans. S. Weber and J. Mehlman, 29–110, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. (1998[1996]), The Monolingualism of the Other, trans. P. Mensah, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. D’ Haen, T. (2012), The Routledge Concise History of World Literature, London and New York: Routledge. Eagleton, T. (2008[1983]), Literary Theory: An Introduction. Anniversary edition, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Eagleton, T. (2003), After Theory, London: Allen Lane. Eliot, T. S. (1944), ‘East Coker’, in Four Quartets, 11–20, London: Faber. Fowler, R. (1981), Literature as Social Discourse: The Practice of Linguistic Criticism, London: Batsford. Frye, N. (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gabrielatos, C. and Baker, P. (2008), ‘Fleeing, sneaking, flooding: A corpus analysis of discursive constructions of refugees and asylum seekers in the U.K. press, 1996–2005’, Journal of English Linguistics, 36 (1): 5–38. Gates, H. L. (1988), The Signifying Monkey: A History of African American Literary Criticism, New York: Oxford University Press.

260

Stylistics and Literary Theory Hall, G. (2005), ‘Who said that? Who wrote that? Reporting, representation, and the linguistics of writing’, in M. Toolan and C. R. Caldas-Coulthard (eds), The Writer’s Craft: The Culture’s Technology, 151–65, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Hall, G. (2008), ‘A grammarian’s funeral: On Browning, post-structuralism, and the state of stylistics’, in G. Watson (ed.), The State of Stylistics, 31–44, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Harpham, G. G. (2002), Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity, New York: Routledge. Jakobson, R. (1996[1960]), ‘Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics’, in J. J. Weber (ed.), The Stylistics Reader, 10–35, London: Arnold. Jeffries, L. (2007), Textual Construction of the Female Body, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jeffries, L. (2010), Critical Stylistics: The Power of English, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980), Metaphors We Live By, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Lodge, D. and Wood, N., eds (2000), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 2nd edn, Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education. Lynch, D. S. (1998), The Economy of Character, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McGann, J. (1985), The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory, Oxford: Clarendon. McNamara, T., ed. (2012), ‘Special issue, poststructuralism and applied linguistics’, Applied Linguistics, 33 (5): 473–602. Machin, D. and Van Leeuwen, T. (2005), ‘Language style and lifestyle: The case of a global magazine’, Media, Culture and Society, 27 (4): 577–600. Mahlberg, M. (2012), Corpus Stylistics and Dickens’s Fiction, London and New York: Routledge. Miller, J. H. (1982), Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mills, S. (1993), Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism, London: Routledge. Mills, S. (1995), Feminist Stylistics, London: Routledge. Mills, S. (2006), Gender and Politeness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Page, R. E. (2006), Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Narratology, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pennycook, A. (1994), ‘Incommensurable discourses’, Applied Linguistics, 15 (2): 115–38. Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. (1987), Discourse and Social Psychology, London: Sage. Rabaté, J.-M. (2002), The Future of Theory, Oxford: Blackwell. Riffaterre, M. (1973), ‘The Self-Sufficient Text’, Diacritics, 3 (3): 39–45. Royle, N. (2003), Jacques Derrida: Routledge Critical Thinkers, London: Routledge. Ryder, M. E. (1999), ‘Smoke and mirrors: Event patterns in the discourse structure of a romance novel’, Journal of Pragmatics, 31: 1067–80. Said, E. (1984), ‘The world, the text and the critic’, in The World, the Text, and the Critic, 31–53, London: Faber & Faber. Said, E. (2006), On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, New York: Vintage Books. Simpson, P. (2014), Stylistics, London: Routledge. Simpson, P. and Mayr, A. (2010), Language and Power, London: Routledge. Sinfield, A. (1971), The Language of Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’, New York: Barnes and Noble. Sinfield, A. (1986), Alfred Tennyson. Rereading Literature series, Oxford: Blackwell. Sotirova, V. (2011), D. H. Lawrence and Narrative Viewpoint, London: Continuum. Stockwell, P. (2009), Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stubbs, M. (2004), Review of Peter Verdonk, Stylistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Applied Linguistics, 25 (1): 126–9.

261

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Toolan, M. (2009), Narrative Progression in the Short Story, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Vološinov, V. N. (1986), Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wales, K. (1989), ‘Back to the future: Bakhtin, stylistics and discourse’, in W. van Peer (ed.), The Taming of the Text, 176–92, London: Routledge. Wales, K., ed. (1994), Feminist Linguistics in Literary Criticism, Cambridge: Brewer. Wellek, R. (1976), ‘Collaborating with Austin Warren on theory of literature’, in M. Simon and H. Gross (eds), Teacher & Critic: Essays By and About Austin Warren, 68–75, Los Angeles: Plantin Press. Wellek, R. and Warren, A. (1963[1949]), A Theory of Literature, 3rd edn, Harmondsworth: Peregrine.

262

16

Sociolinguistics and Stylistics Varieties, Stereotypes and Literary Illusionism Sylvia Adamson, University of Sheffield and University of Cambridge

Chapter Overview From Variety to Stereotype From Stereotype to Satire From Satire to Illusionism

263 271 277

1  From Variety to Stereotype1 In accounting for the illusion of ‘voice’ in literary texts, literary stylistics has paid much attention to the role played by deictic elements of the language in prompting readers to imagine a persona located in space and in time.2 Considerably less has been written about the textual cues that enable us to endow the imagined persona with social identity and locate it in social space. In this chapter, I aim to address the social dimension of literary illusionism by engaging with the elements of language that sociolinguists have studied under the title of variety. Variety, however, turns out to be a more complex and conflicted concept than deixis, so it may be helpful to review its evolution in sociolinguistics (Section 1) before considering its applications to literary stylistics (Sections 2–3).

263

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

The traditional account, which I shall take as a starting point, is neatly encapsulated in Crystal’s dictionary definition of Variety as ‘any system of linguistic expression whose use is governed by situational variables’ (Crystal 1985: 324). The ‘situational variables’ affecting the choice of linguistic expression have been variously grouped or discriminated. For the purposes of the present chapter, it will be sufficient to recognize three broad categories, which are distinctive in the type of social context they represent and in the degree of constraint they exercise upon the speaker. They are the categories of provenance, role and relationship.3 Under provenance varieties, I include regional dialect, which reflects speakers’ geographical origins; sociolect, which reflects their position in a social hierarchy; and chronolect, which reflects their location in historical time. Together, these Varieties make up the version of the language that a child acquires initially and unconsciously. The degree of choice in using them is therefore – at least in the early stages of life – minimal. How we speak is to a large extent determined for us by where we are born in the multi-dimensional context of region, class and historical period. By role varieties, I mean those versions of the language known to some linguists as registers or diatypes and to non-linguists as jargons. In this category, the determining social context is the speaker’s occupation, profession or official social function. Speakers acquire one of these codes more or less consciously in taking on a specific role in society, and it becomes their prescribed form of language whenever they speak as one who fulfils that role. Liturgical language, scientific style and journalese are familiar examples of role varieties. Varieties of this type show relatively little influence from regional or class variables and many of them – such as the language of the law or the Navy – have proved surprisingly resistant even to historical change. The third category of varieties I have called relationship varieties, because the relevant social context in this case is the relationship between speaker and addressee. Speakers vary their language use under the prompting of such factors as their social status relative to their addressee, the degree of intimacy between them, and their attitude towards the topics of conversation. Formality, status, solidarity and politeness are terms commonly used to describe the parameters of relationship that most strikingly correlate with variations in linguistic structure, and speakers are characteristically able to express quite fine distinctions along these parameters. (In English, for example, Joos detected five distinct levels of formality [Joos 1961]). The choice of Variety in this category is clearly more dependent upon the individual’s attitudes and intentions than in the previous cases, since in most languages, speakers’ relationships are negotiable through speech in a way that their provenances and roles are not. Variety, then, is the theoretical construct that marks the recognition that a language is not a uniform system of signs used by a homogeneous 264

Sociolinguistics and Stylistics

speech-community but rather is a repertoire of more or less mutually intelligible sign systems, each associated with a particular social context and a particular social significance. The advocacy of this view in the 1960s and 1970s was part of the campaign by which sociolinguists attempted to redefine the object of linguistic study, rejecting the idealizations of theoretical linguists (whether Saussure’s langue or Chomsky’s ‘idealised speaker-hearer’) in favour of what Weinreich called the ‘orderly heterogeneity’ of actual language use (Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968: 100). But since the 1960s, the empirical investigation of Varieties has increasingly revealed that the standard account of them, epitomized in Crystal’s 1985 dictionary definition, itself involves a severe idealization of the data. By the time that definition was published, its implied assumption that Varieties are consistent and discrete ‘systems of expression’ had been challenged by a wide range of evidence.4 First, there is the fact that the distinctive features of a given Variety are only partially and variably diffused through the social context with which it is allegedly associated. This is so even in the apparently simple case of regional dialect, where the context is a geographical area. To take a specific example, the Survey of English Dialects (Orton and Halliday 1962) might lead us to suppose that Yorkshire English is distinctive in certain parts of its lexicon. But, as O’Donnell and Todd showed (O’Donnell and Todd 1980: 29–32), if we tabulate the occurrence of a number of these lexical items in different parts of Yorkshire, we find a considerable diversity in their distribution. Correlating twelve items of ‘Yorkshire’ vocabulary with thirty-four ‘Yorkshire’ locations, they found that no location produced the complete set of items, only two locations shared the same subset and some locations had no shared items at all. So how are we to define ‘Yorkshire’ as a stable and coherent geographical entity? This indeterminacy of context is matched by an inconsistency of code. In one of the classic dilemmas of sociolinguistics, Hubbell, having embarked on a description of the distinctive features of the New York dialect, found himself unable to decide whether or not to include rhoticity (the pronunciation of /r/ in words like car and cart), because The pronunciation of a very large number of New Yorkers exhibits a pattern ... that might most accurately be described as the complete absence of any pattern. Such speakers sometimes pronounce /r/ before a consonant or in final position and sometimes omit it, in a thoroughly haphazard fashion. (quoted in Labov 1966: 36) And if we look for explanations of this variability, we find other factors that complicate our model of discrete and consistent Varieties. For one thing, the categories of any taxonomy invariably overlap. In particular, Varieties of provenance and role have important displaced functions as Varieties of relationship. 265

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

As a result, there is no simple one-to-one correlation between code and context, and the social significance of any particular linguistic form is likely to be ambiguous. In the New York case, for instance, any attempt to classify rhoticity as a marker of middle-class provenance is frustrated by the fact that it also functions across classes as a relationship marker in the dimension of formality, so that, as Labov noted, ‘it may therefore be difficult … to distinguish, for example a casual salesman from a careful pipefitter’ (Labov 1972: 240). It is within the Varieties of relationship themselves that the most severe complications arise, since it is here that speakers exercise most freedom in the construction of an appropriate code to fit the context. One result is that individual utterances may be – and typically are – internally inconsistent, as speakers express complex or disparate responses to topic, situation and addressee. And while it may be possible in retrospective analysis to correlate each linguistic feature with some aspect of the context, it is not possible to predict in advance just which aspects of the context will be reflected in which features of the code. The complexity of the position can be seen in the following extract from a personal letter: Debbie is a beautifully-groomed young matron, having her third, apparently husbanded with an agreeable and pleasant young man. Esther has a delightful little girl (with whom I made a hit) and is married but not cohabiting with her journalist (Sunday Times) husband. She says she’s promiscuous, gets rather easily tight and goes into highly emotional fits. This passage contains features from both ends of the formal-informal spectrum. Formal lexis (such as the Latinate ‘matron’, ‘cohabiting’, ‘promiscuous’) coexists with demotic idioms (such as ‘having her third’, ‘made a hit’); and the syntax too exhibits features associated both with academic prose (as in the heavy use of qualifying expressions) and with colloquial narrative (as in the general preference for paratactic organization). The two Varieties are bound together, sometimes startlingly, by such practices as the introduction of a markedly informal idiom into a markedly formal construction (‘with whom/I made a hit’) or by the insertion of double qualifiers (‘rather easily’, ‘highly emotional’) into the middle of more racily colloquial phrases (‘gets tight’, ‘goes into fits’). The presence of this mixture may reflect complexities in the medium of discourse (personal letters are informal communications in the canonically formal medium of writing); or in the social identities of the participants (one academic writing to another academic who is also a close relation); or in the writer’s attitude towards his addressee (a desire, perhaps, to combine signals of solidarity and status). Alternatively, or simultaneously, the particular distribution of varietal markers may express nuances of feeling on the part of the writer (derision, maybe, in the transition from ‘beautifully-groomed young matron’ to ‘having 266

Sociolinguistics and Stylistics

her third’, or delight in the switch from the formal ‘with whom’ to the informal ‘I made a hit’); or it may reflect more settled attitudes towards the topics of discourse: For example, the consistent preference for a formal variety to refer to sexual relationships (‘cohabiting’, ‘promiscuous’) compared with the colloquial reference to other aspects of behaviour (‘having her third’, ‘gets tight’, ‘goes into fits’) may reveal an unwillingness, whether personal or conventional, to write about sexual matters without an element of euphemism. If the analysis I have just offered seems dominated by the words ‘or’ and ‘maybe’, this is only because the passage under scrutiny is typical of relationship varieties, both in its inconsistency of code and in the interpretative indeterminacy of its individual components. The situation is further complicated by the speaker’s freedom to draw metaphorically or allusively on Varieties not directly relevant to the actual context of use. A case in point here is the phrase ‘journalist (Sunday Times) husband’. The syntactic form of this noun phrase is one strongly associated with the role variety of journalism (where it presumably evolved as a device for compacting information); its occurrence here may reflect the writer’s sense of having himself temporarily adopted the role of gossip columnist, or it may be prompted by a momentary imitation – empathetic or parodic – of the person he is describing. The accumulation of such problems has caused many sociolinguists to reject the standard account of Varieties from which I began. Hudson, for example, proposed a radical and disintegrative revision in which ‘there is no place for the concepts “language X”, “dialect X” or even “variety X”’ (Hudson 1980: 48). In his account, the concept of a language with a repertoire of Varieties is replaced by the concept of an individual speaker with a repertoire of particular linguistic items, each of which s/he associates with particular social contexts and significances. Such associations may be shared with other speakers in a social group – as, say, the link between rhoticity and formality among New Yorkers – or they may be more or less private and idiosyncratic, the result of the speaker’s individual social history. In the letter we have just looked at, for instance, it is impossible for an outside analyst to say whether the writer associates the item ‘beautifully-groomed’ primarily with a context of kennels and stables or with the society pages of a 1930s Vogue – and our ignorance clearly impairs our ability to infer its significance. Yet there is a limit on how far we can dismantle the traditional definition of Variety from which we started and accept a picture of idiosyncratic idiolects that are mutually intelligible only in part. For one thing, there is much experimental work in sociolinguistics and social psychology to show that members of any given community do share both a well-defined image of a range of Varieties and also a set of attitudes towards them (Lambert 1967; Labov 1972: 247–51; Ryan and Giles 1982). It is indeed only by positing a fair degree of intersubjective agreement that we can account for either the indexical or the signalling 267

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

functions of language varieties. By the indexical function, I mean the capacity of particular forms of expression to promote accurate inferences about a speaker’s attitudes, profession or provenance. By the signalling function, I mean the capacity of a Variety to create rather than simply reflect a social context, as when speakers adopt the form of speech appropriate to a social identity they would like to possess or project. In many cases, and typically in literary texts, the two functions co-exist: Governor Wallace died and went to heaven. When he knocked at the pearly gates, a voice inside called out: ‘Who dat?’. ‘Never mind,’ said the Governor, ‘I’ll go to the other place.’ (Joke from the American Civil Rights Movement) From the beginning of the case I have been struck by one thing – the nature of those words which Mr Raymond overheard. It has been amazing to me that no one has commented on them – has seen anything odd about them. He paused a minute, and then quoted softly: ‘...the calls on my purse have been so frequent of late that I fear it is impossible for me to accede to your request’. Does nothing strike you as odd about that? (from Christie (1926) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, ch. 23) Within the represented worlds of the joke and the detective story, the varietal markers are indexical, providing the means by which the characters infer each other’s provenance or relationship, but the authors of the texts are using the markers in a signalling function, to create the illusion of a social identity they do not themselves occupy. And the success of that illusion – the reader’s ability to appreciate the joke in one case or the murder solution in the other – depends crucially upon a widespread intersubjective consensus about the social significance of the forms of expression used. The civil rights joke is based on the proposition that Governor Wallace, a strict segregationist, might prefer to suffer in hell rather than share heaven with a black St Peter, and the joke only works if all those who are able to identify the referent of ‘Governor Wallace’ are also able to infer a black ethnic provenance from the two words ‘Who dat?’ In the second example, Christie, writing for a wider and more heterogeneous audience of English speakers, relies on them all sharing Poirot’s judgement that the form of words cited implies a particular kind of relationship: it is ‘odd’ if spoken to a nephew or an importunate tramp, but perfectly appropriate as a formal response to a public charity, especially if we imagine its speaker is addressing a dictaphone. We are forced, then, to the paradoxical conclusion that Varieties do and do not exist. The paradox is perhaps more usefully cast in the form of a question: What is the manner of their existence? The answer reveals an important divergence between the sociolinguist’s view of Variety and the speaker’s. For most 268

Sociolinguistics and Stylistics

purposes of descriptive linguistics, the problems of variability and inconsistency I have described can be dealt with adequately enough by adopting quantitative methods and probabilistic models. A Variety can be described not absolutely but relatively, in terms of the quantitative likelihood of the occurrence and co-occurrence of certain features in certain contexts (and this has been the dominant methodology in Labovian sociolinguistics). By contrast, speakers appear to cope with variability by eliminating it and reducing Varieties to stereotypes. To put it provocatively, the popular stereotype is the ordinary speaker’s equivalent of the theoretical linguist’s idealization. A stereotype is constructed from a restricted selection of features which, for various reasons, have become perceptually salient; and unlike its empirical original or the sociolinguist’s model, it is internally self-consistent. So, for example, the stereotype speaker from the American South invariably uses certain monophthongs (pronouncing ‘life’ as /la:f/ not /laif/), has long and ingliding vowels and keeps saying ‘Y’all’ (Labov 1972: 315); the stereotype high-status speaker has a standard accent and a rapid speech rate (Brown 1980; Giles and Powesland 1975); and the stereotype woman speaker is verbose, polite and emotional (making frequent use of intensifiers and affective adjectives) (Kramer 1974; Siegler and Siegler 1976). There has been very little attempt to provide detailed linguistic descriptions of Variety stereotypes, largely because linguists have tended to regard them with the same impatience as folk etymologies, on the grounds that, at best, they offer ‘a sketchy and unsystematic view of linguistic structure’ (Labov 1972: 248) and, at worst, they are empirically counterfactual.5 Experimental evidence has, for example, discredited many of the features stereotypically attributed to women’s speech, such as its excessive wordiness (Wood 1966; Swacker 1975) or its use of polite tag questions (Dubois and Crouch 1975). Nevertheless, as social psychologists have realized, popular Variety stereotypes ought to be taken seriously because of their widespread impact on social attitudes and behaviour. Even in the narrower domain of linguistic behaviour, they have significant effects, since they play an important cognitive role in mediating between speech perception and speech production: it is, by and large, by means of stereotype that speakers conceptualize and imitate the Varieties of their language.6 One of the first linguists to take up the challenge of this insight was Peter Trudgill, who in two papers (Trudgill 1983: 141–60; Trudgill 1986: 1–38) investigated in some detail the linguistic adjustments made during what social psychologists call the accommodation process, that is, the process by which a speaker linguistically signals a desire to be identified with (or dissociated from) a specific group or interlocutor (Giles and Smith 1979). In the earlier paper, Trudgill examined the attempts of British pop singers (many of whom had not visited America) to imitate ‘the American Sound’ in the 1950s and 1960s; in the second paper, he studied the language of British expatriates adjusting to the empirical 269

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

realities of an American speech community in which they were actually living. As one might expect, the pop singers were clearly working to stereotype: their image of American English phonology was reductive (no more than half a dozen features were imitated) and aberrant (two of the most prominent features of their sound – Southern monophthongs and rhoticity – rarely co-occur in American dialects). Comparing the accommodation process of expatriates, he found, as expected, that they showed no sign of this contradiction (since none of them was living in the Southern states, none produced Southern monophthongs). But what was unexpected and very striking was the extent to which, in other respects, their behaviour corresponded to the pop singers’ stereotype: ‘it is indeed the features singled out by pop singers – and for the most part no other features – that are modified during accommodation’ (Trudgill 1986: 15). In other words, there appears to be a British stereotype of American English that is highly selective, yet widely intersubjective; moreover, it remains intact and retains its influence on the speakers’ productive capacities despite their exposure to an enriched empirical reality.7 But perhaps the most persuasive evidence of the impact of stereotype on linguistic behaviour is provided by the familiar phenomenon of hypercorrection. This shows that a Variety stereotype does not simply schematize empirical reality but may actively distort it. Even where speakers’ desires to be assimilated into another group are most powerful, the intervention of the stereotype, with its unnatural reductiveness and self-consistency, is liable to lead them into error. To take a common example from British English, the characteristic mistake of northerners who wish to be accepted as southerners is to concentrate their efforts on the production of the phoneme / ۸ / (salient because it does not occur in their native dialect) and to overgeneralize its occurrence by giving ‘butcher’ and ‘put’ the same vowel as ‘butter’ and ‘cup’.8 Labov’s study of New Yorkers’ speech reveals a similar pattern for rhoticity. Because postvocalic /r/ is identified as a marker of the most prestigious social dialect, lower middle class speakers use it, in formal styles of speech, far more consistently than the class they are trying to imitate (Labov 1972: 122–42; 291). Most striking of all, perhaps, is Thakerer, Giles and Cheshire’s (1982) account of conversational interactions in which speakers, trying to adjust their speech to match that of their interlocutors, repeatedly over-adjusted, apparently because their behaviour was targeted not towards the speech patterns they actually heard but towards their stereotype expectations of how an interlocutor of a given status would or should talk. Which brings us back to one of Trudgill’s pop singers: Cliff Richard, the British Elvis Presley, despite presumably many hours of listening to his role model, distorted the accent he was trying to copy because the British stereotype that links American-ness and rhoticity was stronger than the perceptual data that should have told him that Elvis was non-rhotic (Trudgill 1986: 147). 270

Sociolinguistics and Stylistics

What all this demonstrates is that Varietal stereotypes, like folk etymology, bear an unpredictable and disconcerting relation to linguists’ empirical descriptions but, like folk etymology, they nonetheless exercise a powerful influence on speakers’ beliefs and behaviour. In the last decade, a new generation of sociolinguists, influenced by work in ethnography and social psychology, has begun seriously to address the question of stereotype creation and function under the title of enregisterment, defined as ‘processes whereby distinct forms of speech come to be socially recognised (or enregistered) as indexical of speaker attributes by a population of language users’ (Agha 2005).9 This kind of investigation has given impetus to the recent shift of emphasis in sociolinguistics from quantitative to qualitative analysis (Moore 2011). There is a new focus on the ways that varietal fragments combine to form specific styles, which are used in specific speech encounters to negotiate group membership or to badge social identity. ‘Third wave’ sociolinguistics has thus moved closer to literary stylistics in taking the ‘texts’ of such encounters as its site of investigation. The two disciplines have much to gain from looking together at how Varieties are represented and responded to in literary texts, since literature both utilizes and promotes the practice of stereotyping/enregisterment.

2  From Stereotype to Satire The existence of Varieties provides the linguistic resources for the act of literary illusionism by which the reader is persuaded that what s/he is reading is not a collection of words on a page but the transcription of a human voice endowed with a specific social identity. There are two aspects to this illusionist enterprise. First, since no real utterance takes place outside a social context, the presence of a recognizable Variety in a text persuades us of its authenticity as utterance or address. Secondly, the specificity of the Variety invoked allows us to categorize and characterize the imagined source of the utterance; to infer, that is, that we are hearing or overhearing a speaker of provenance X, performing role Y or adopting attitude Z. In ordinary conversation, speakers sometimes advertise the persona they wish to project by explicit directives: ‘speaking as a friend...’, ‘as your lawyer, I have to advise...’, ‘as we say in Yorkshire...’. In literature, it is the reader’s recognition of the features of a specific Variety that supplies such cues and allows us to differentiate between a text’s society of voices. But the illusionist enterprise faces a number of problems. In this chapter, I shall concentrate on the special difficulties of writers attempting to represent a social identity distinct from their own by imitating the Varieties appropriate to a fictional character’s supposed provenance, role or relationships. These difficulties arise directly from the paradoxical situation I have described, in which, 271

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

on the one hand, speakers characteristically conceptualize and imitate Varieties by means of stereotypes; while on the other hand, the Varieties they encounter and naturally produce are characteristically heterogeneous and indeterminate. The result is that any literary representation of social identity is likely to be recognized simultaneously by stereotype and as stereotype. In the extreme case, the stage Irishman is funny not because he talks like an Irishman but because he does not: he parodies our recognition of Irishmen. The selectivity of the stereotype appears as reductiveness, its consistency as exaggeration. This can be seen if we look more closely at the linguistic mechanisms involved in my last two examples. Both work by appeal to the popular stereotype of the Variety concerned. In the civil rights joke, Black English is represented by just two features: the omission of the copula and the realization of /đ/ as /d/ (‘Who dat?’); in the Christie novel, formal style is signalled by the use of hypotactic rather than paratactic construction, of Latinate rather than Germanic vocabulary (‘accede to your request’ not ‘do what you ask’), and by the preference for abstract or impersonal subjects (‘the calls on my purse have been’, not ‘people have been making calls on my purse’; ‘it is impossible’, not ‘I can’t’). In the case of the joke, the use of stereotype is essential – it’s precisely what allows the point to be made with such witty economy (though even here the recognition that it is a stereotype – a reductive image of Black identity – prevents some audiences from finding the joke funny). In the Christie excerpt, realism rather than wit is the author’s primary objective, and here the problems of stereotyping appear in what some readers feel as a slight unnaturalness of tone; brief though it is, the quoted speech goes on long enough to make us ask ‘is any formal style really quite as unremittingly formal as this?’ Put in more general terms, because of its reliance on stereotype, the literary representation of a Variety bears the same relation to the actuality it imitates as a caricature does to a person’s appearance. By giving us an artificially reduced, consistent and discrete code of speech, it offers us the category of The Irishman, The Lawyer, The Father, rather than the human being who may combine these – and many other – aspects of identity. Like the genres of morality play or Theophrastan character, it reveals the social type at the expense of concealing individuality. As a consequence, its natural affinity is with satire. This is not necessarily a problem. In many kinds of writing, stereotype is courted rather than avoided, and the tug of satire is welcomed rather than resisted. Take, for example, Donne’s portrait of Coscus, the lawyer, who woos in language of the Pleas and Bench: “A motion, Lady;” “Speak Coscus;” “I have been In love ever since tricesimo of the Queen, Continual claims have made, injunctions got To stay my rival’s suit, that he should not 272

Sociolinguistics and Stylistics

Proceed;” “Spare me;” “In Hilary term I went. You said, If I returned next ‘size in Lent, I should be in remitter of your grace; In th’interim my letters should have place Of affadavits...

(Satire 2, ll.48–57)

Here Donne is playing on our sense of the norms of code-context correlation. The context of love-making demands that a relationship variety should predominate: Coscus incongruously produces a role variety, his professional jargon as a lawyer. The effect is almost exclusively comic; we are primarily amused at the author’s ingenuity in providing a one-to-one translation of the subject matter of love into the lexicon of the law (in the terms italicized); and insofar as we consider Coscus himself, it is simply as an object of ridicule. Satire rather than illusionism is also the primary aim in an exchange between Cornwall and Kent in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Cornwall wishes to insult Kent by inserting him into a category – the Hypocritical Plain Man – and to do this the more effectively, he describes the character in the Variety appropriate to it, which is a stylized version of Kent’s own speech style: He cannot flatter, he, An honest mind and plain, he must speak truth! And they will take’t, so; if not, he’s plain.

(King Lear, 2.ii, 97–100)

To which Kent replies: Sir, in good faith, in sincere verity, Under th’allowance of your great aspect, Whose influence, like the wreath of radiant fire On flickering Phoebus’ front – Cornwall: What mean’st by this? Kent: To go out of my dialect, which you discommend so much. I know, sir, I am no flatterer (King Lear, 2.ii, 105–10) Kent rejects Cornwall’s characterization of him, not by asserting his individuality but by adopting a contrasting Variety as a satire on the character that Cornwall might prefer him to assume, the Flattering Courtier. The satiric effect of Kent’s defence, as of Cornwall’s accusation, derives from the fact that in each case the adopted ‘dialect’ matches the popular stereotype of the assumed character (as depicted, for example, in the Character books of Earle and Overbury). The plain man is expected to be demotic, laconic and assertive 273

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

whereas the stereotype Courtier is correspondingly elevated, elaborative and deferential. Shakespeare takes these parameters of contrast and encodes them at all levels of linguistic structure. The demotic mode is represented lexically by the preference for Germanic vocabulary and syntactically by the dominance of simple sentence structure (even where subordination does occur, as in l.100, it is introduced by ‘and’, at this date a markedly colloquial variant of ‘if’). The elevated mode draws much more heavily on Romance vocabulary (the difference highlighted by the direct translation of ‘truth’ into ‘verity’); its sentence structure is periodic (the hallmark of an approved Latinate style); and, unlike the demotic mode, it makes conscious use of literary devices: metaphor, classical allusion and alliteration (all combined in the would-be gorgeous conclusion ‘flickering Phoebus’ front’). The equivalent climax in the last line of the Plain Man’s speech emphasizes his position on the second parameter of contrast; it is markedly laconic. This characteristic is signalled primarily by multiple ellipses: the phonetic reduction of ‘take’t’ and ‘he’s’, the syntactic ellipsis that represents full clauses by ‘so’ and ‘if not’, and the semantic ellipsis by which ‘they’ stands for an unspecified referent. The effect of curtness is enhanced by the use here (as throughout the speech) of a restricted vocabulary of largely monosyllabic words. The elaborative mode of the courtier deploys a wider vocabulary containing longer words. But its main expression is at the level of syntax: most nouns are elaborated by an adjective (in the case of ‘aspect’ by a relative clause and simile too!) and the speech consists of a sequence of steadily lengthening units, linked in a structure so extended that Kent has not reached the main verb when he is interrupted. The plain man’s assertiveness appears lexically in an aggressive repetition of his key words ‘plain’ and ‘he’ (the pleonastic formula in ‘he cannot flatter, he’ is generally associated in this period with emphatic declarations). On the syntactic-semantic level, it shapes the modality: the effect of the sequence of positive declarative clauses (three in as many lines) is to create a dominant mood of categorical assertion, which is intensified by the use of the deontic modal in ‘he must speak’; and ‘so’, which, as a deictic term is intrinsically self-assertive, is also, in its clause function, quasi-deontic (it is a form of colloquial fiat ‘let it be so’ or ‘that’s fine with me’). In marked contrast, the deferential courtier, since he fails to reach his main verb, makes no assertion at all. The whole speech, in fact, consists of a set of politeness formulae: a deferential address form, ‘sir’, followed by protestations of good faith and what appears to be a request for permission to speak. Those pragmaticists who discuss politeness in terms of ‘face-saving’ (Goffman 1972; Brown and Levinson 1987) might be intrigued to find Shakespeare here choosing to epitomize politeness by a speech that culminates in an enhancing image of the addressee’s literal face. I have analysed this passage in detail partly to show that stereotyping does not depend on the linguistic minimalism that we saw in Donne’s focus on legal 274

Sociolinguistics and Stylistics

vocabulary. Shakespeare’s two character sketches, although snippets in length, represent a tour de force in the richness and consistency with which the main lines of their opposition are orchestrated. But it is precisely this that makes for hyperbole rather than verisimilitude. In the texts I have just examined, Donne and Shakespeare are typical of their period both in their satiric aim and in the linguistic anxieties they express, against which the satire works as a means of defence or exculpation. This is a period in which the emergence of national vernaculars across Europe was raising urgent questions about the communicative adequacy of a vernacular variety compared to international Latin, about the relative status within English of its component regional and national varieties, and about the general relation between language and reality or language and identity (Jones 1953; Helgerson 1992; Blank 1996). In this context, the Kent-Cornwall exchange can be read as a tableau parlant of one of the pressing Renaissance debates concerning the form of the emerging national standard language. Should it be a literary and polite variety (the language of the courtier was advocated as a model by Puttenham) or should it be a plain propositional variety, as Bacon and the later Royal Society maintained? Both options are here satirized as enemies of ‘truth’ (or ‘sincere verity’). The Flattering Courtier poses the lesser threat – the linguistic gildings of poetry and politeness are self-advertised. The Plain Man’s style is more problematic in that it claims to be no style at all but rather the natural index of honest character and truthful reporting. Hence, as Earle warned, its ‘counterfeit is most dangerous, since hee is disguis’d in a humour that professes not to disguise’ (Earle 1628: 23). Or, in Cornwall’s words: These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness Harbor more craft and more corrupter ends Than twenty silly-ducking observants

(King Lear, 2.ii, 97–100)

The potential dangers of the Hypocritical Plain Man are tragically actualized in Othello, in the language and character of ‘honest’ Iago (Empson 1951: 218–49). Alongside problems of truth and sincerity, Renaissance writers saw language as the site for articulating problems of role and identity. The breakdown of feudal structures in Early Modern society meant that social role was no longer inherited as an aspect of an individual’s social provenance. Instead, a role could be actively chosen, and, with the growth of urbanization, it could be chosen from an increasingly diverse range of possibilities and changed several times during a lifetime. One index of the period’s interest in this topic is the rise of a new genre, the Character book, which anatomizes society into its component groups by means of representative portraits (Boyce 1947; Smeed 1985). The classical model for the genre, Theophrastus, was mainly concerned 275

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

with moral and psychological portraits, but his most popular English imitators – notably Overbury and Earle – extended his range to include social roles and occupations, and their descriptive essays influenced writers in other genres. (Indeed, Dekker, Donne and Webster have all had authorship of Overburian characters attributed to them.) Much of the literary representation of Variety in the period focuses on varieties of role, often shown in conflict with varieties of relationship.10 Donne, for instance, endows Coscus with the appropriate speech style for the character of ‘The Lawyer’ or ‘The Inns-of-Court Man’ and then convicts him of having inexcusably confused his public and private selves: Coscus appears as a comic automaton, so programmed by his professional role that he has no personal life of his own – or at least no language to express the relationships of personal life. The thematic and linguistic elaboration of this problem provides the satiric base on which much of the drama of the period is constructed. Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, the Princess in Ford’s The Broken Heart – for these and many other protagonists, effective action and even identity itself are seen to depend on the acceptance of a definable role; but the assumption of any role entails the adoption of its codes of action and speech, which then prescribe and circumscribe the speaker’s expressive powers and may end up by alienating him from his own desires and personality. In The Revenger’s Tragedy, for instance, Vindice takes on the role of the revenger, and the result, as charted by the progress of the play, is that he is gradually transformed into an unreasoning, unfeeling automaton, a personified function, like his name. In Middleton’s The Changeling, in a variation on the same theme, Beatrice-Joanna, as her double name implies, suffers a split identity: her actions belong to the world of ruthless realpolitik, but her language is so far imprisoned in the register of chivalry that she is incapable of understanding the moral significance of what she has done, or even of finding accurate terms to describe it, as De Flores tells her: ‘A woman dipped in blood and talk of “honour”!’ A stereotype representation of role varieties is adequate to express this problem, whether conceived in comic or in tragic form, but it is not adequate to resolve it. A dramatist who wishes to represent characters that transcend their social roles must provide them with a form of language that makes them socially identifiable but credibly complex. The technical difficulties of this feat are perhaps only fully appreciated when plays are read on the page. There, the stereotyping involved in the assigning of a distinctive Variety, disguised on stage by the animating, individuating presence of an actor, leaps to the eye. Yet the characters of Shakespeare, at least, have universally been felt to transcend this limitation. Dr Johnson, for instance, contrasted the ‘hyperbolical or aggravated characters’ of other dramatists with Shakespeare’s ‘men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should have himself spoken or acted on the same occasion’, noting that his skill was founded on the recognition that though 276

Sociolinguistics and Stylistics

men have roles, the roles are not the men: ‘his story requires Romans or kings, but he thinks only on men’ (Johnson 1765: 14–15). But if Shakespeare’s characters are literary creations, constructed with the common stock of representational techniques, how is it that they occupy recognizable social roles without turning into social stereotypes?

3  From Satire to Illusionism One answer is that Shakespeare exploits the switching of Variety as an index of complex identity. Where other dramatists are often content to represent a character’s social identity by the use of a single distinctive Variety or idiolect, Shakespeare provides many of his characters with different Varieties in different circumstances. It is a device that gives formal recognition to the fact that the same person may sometimes be speaking as lawyer and sometimes as lover. It is a measure of the efficacy of this device that many passages cited by literary critics as instances of Shakespeare’s powers of characterization turn out to hinge on Variety contrasts of this sort; for example, Lear’s much-praised line Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir. (King Lear, 5.iii, 310) which, in its contrast with his earlier peremptory speech style, linguistically marks his descent from King to ‘foolish fond old man’. This form of code switching can be seen as a psychologizing of a common Renaissance plot device by which a character adopts a series of physical and linguistic disguises, as in Jonson’s The Alchemist, where Face appears as captain, laboratory assistant and butler; and Dol Common as whore, learned lady, religious maniac and even Queen of the Fairies. But although Face is a character of great vitality, it is, as his name implies, a brilliance of the surface, a multi-faceted facade. Jonson does not create the impression of a coherent and evolving personality, which we find in characters such as Lear, partly because Face’s roles seem to be chosen arbitrarily or opportunistically or simply because they provide opportunities for verbal pyrotechnics. By contrast, Lear’s switch of Variety is managed in such a way as to make us conscious of continuities between his two selves by highlighting the parallels between this and his earlier forms of speech: the kingly speech act of command is here replaced by the speech act of request, and the address forms of power are replaced by the address forms of respect: ‘thou’ becomes ‘you’, ‘sirrah’ becomes ‘sir’. A similar linguistic foregrounding of continuity in difference humanizes Coriolanus. The switch from the General to the Son, which marks the capitulation of his public to his private self, is expressed in his use of contrasting terms for the same referent: ‘the honor’d mould/ Wherein this trunk was fram’d’ becomes ‘O my mother, mother!’(Coriolanus, V.iii. 23–4, 185). Even 277

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

in the verbal slapstick of the Kent-Cornwall scene, Shakespeare preserves our sense of Kent as a continuous personality by maintaining a continuity of topic between his radically divergent Varieties; his flatterer’s praise of Cornwall’s face inverts his earlier plain speaking: ‘I have seen better faces in my time’ (King Lear, 2.ii.93). In a further refinement of technique, Shakespeare locates the code-switching within a single utterance or dialogic interchange, thus approximating to the heterogeneity of Variety that, as we have seen, is typical of ordinary language use, but without fragmenting the discourse beyond categorial recognition. In a study of what Brown and Gilman (1960) called ‘the pronouns of power and solidarity’, Hope (1994: 54–64) shows that Shakespeare is distinguished from his contemporaries by the frequency with which his characters oscillate between ‘you’ and ‘thou’ within a single speech; instead of imaging a pre-established fixed relationship, the choice of form is used to imply a character undergoing momentary shifts of feeling. In Adamson (1989: 220–2), I noted a similar oscillation in Shakespeare’s handling of Romance and Germanic vocabulary. And the same pattern governs his use of other Varietal markers. The salient features of one Variety are allowed to establish themselves and are then displaced by the salient features of another. Both may be stereotypes, but the combination is sufficient to act as index of the character’s personal existence beyond stereotype. So, in the exchange between Kent and Cornwall, while the Plain Man and the Flattering Courtier are satirically diminished by the stereotyping of their varieties, Kent and Cornwall themselves are enhanced and humanized by the demonstration of their ability to command more than one style of speech. This is particularly important in the representation of Kent, since his language elsewhere in the scene displays all the features that Cornwall here attributes to the Plain Man, and he might be in some danger of himself appearing as a stereotype. When Shakespeare brings the Flattering Courtier on stage in Hamlet, he denies him this advantage: Osric, unlike Kent, is a mono-varietal speaker and accordingly appears simply as a caricature. The illusionist power of code switching may explain why so many of Shakespeare’s characters mimic the speech forms of others, annexing them, as it were, as fragments of their own complex identity. In 1Henry IV, for example, Falstaff mimics the king, Prince Hal mimics Hotspur, and Hotspur mimics his anti-type, the king’s ‘popingay’ messenger. It is no coincidence, I believe, that Variety switches in general, and particularly utterance-internal switches, occur most frequently in the language of those characters that readers have felt to be the most complex and elusively human in the Shakespeare canon, such as Cleopatra, Falstaff and, pre-eminently, Hamlet. At the beginning of the play, Hamlet, like Vindice, is invited to accept the role of Revenger (a popular profession in the Jacobean period, at least in the on-stage world), and he responds by a frequent adoption of the inflamed rhetoric that is 278

Sociolinguistics and Stylistics

associated with the role. Unlike Vindice, however, he habitually breaks Variety and avoids the stereotype by exposing and, as it were, satirizing it himself: Bloody, bawdy villain! Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain! Why, what an ass am I!

(Hamlet, 3.i, 580–2)

or, again: O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! My tables – meet it is I set it down That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain; At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark.

(Hamlet, 1.v, 106–9)

No sooner has Hamlet dropped into the language of revengerese (characterized by exclamatory repetitions and piled-up adjectives) than he moves out of it again, in the first example by juxtaposing it with an abusive formula associated with more homely contexts (‘what an ass!’), and in the second example, by resuming an earlier identity, the Scholar of Wittenberg, who acts as recorder and commentator on his own speech and pedantically restricts the general proposition to Denmark. In various forms, the effect is repeated throughout the play: Shakespeare frames for Hamlet a series of role varieties – the Player’s, the Soldier’s, the Madman’s – into and out of which he continually switches; the sense of an individual voice being somehow precipitated from the moments of breakage, as if the exercise of linguistic free will implies his independence as a human agent. On one reading of the play, Hamlet’s tragedy is the obverse of Vindice’s: he cannot accept the subjugation of self to role and so cannot perform a socially significant action. But our ability to offer that reading depends upon Shakespeare’s triumph in this play in wresting illusionism out of stereotype. An analogy with pictorial representation is, I think, illuminating. Early portraits, even when constructed in full perspective, are liable to resemble statues rather than people because of the inherent difficulty of representing motion on a flat surface. As Gombrich points out in his study of pictorial illusionism, it was a simple but profound discovery of Renaissance painters that the disposition of a figure in two planes would provide a visual cue sufficient to cause the spectator to infer motion and hence animacy. What I am suggesting here is that in literature, the breaking of Variety provides an analogous cue for readers to infer personality. Where a single Variety confers social identity but obliterates individuality, the co-presence of two Varieties is sufficient to create the illusion of a speaker who is socially situated but not socially bound. Code switching, in 279

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

however simplified a form it is modelled, provides the linguistic mechanism by which a Variety escapes stereotype and flat characters become round. I will conclude with a single example to indicate how the argument extends to a later period and a different genre. Jane Austen’s early admirers greeted her work as the inauguration of a new realism in the novel and, in defining its quality, were apt to distinguish Austen from Burney in the same terms that I used earlier to distinguish Shakespeare from Jonson. Macaulay, for example, drawing a line between characterization and caricature, put Austen firmly on the side of Shakespearean humanism rather than Jonsonian humours; and G.  H. Lewes echoed the belief that ‘out of Shakespeare it would be difficult to find characters so typical yet so nicely demarcated within the limits of their kind’ (Southam 1979: 122–3, 140). Burney, by contrast, was seen as the creator of ‘lively and spirited caricatures’ (Southam 1979: 107–8). Indeed, the element of stereotyping in Burney’s dialogue had been commented on earlier by Horace Walpole, who identified self-consistency as its source: ‘The great fault is that the authoress is so afraid of not making all her dramatis personae set in character, that she never lets them say a syllable but what is to mark their character, which is very unnatural.’ (letter of 1 October 1782, cited Lascelles 1939: 98). Austen too is capable of characterizing in this way when writing with satiric intent. Mr Collins and Lady Catherine de Burgh, for example, are notably mono-varietal characters. But as E. M. Forster pointed out (in recommending the terms ‘flat’ and ‘round’ as categories of character representation), one of Austen’s remarkable skills is her ability to modulate from flat to round and from satire to sympathy. Lady Bertram is the prime example Forster selects (Forster 1927: 81–4). Rather surprisingly, he does not cite the passage in Mansfield Park where Austen herself draws attention to the modulation and to the means by which it is brought about. The passage begins with a letter from Lady Bertram to Fanny, passing on the news that has just reached her of the dangerous illness of her eldest son, Tom. She writes in the genteel epistolary mode that Austen has already described as ‘amplifying little matter with polite language’: This distressing intelligence, as you may suppose, ... has agitated us exceedingly, and we cannot prevent ourselves from being greatly alarmed, and apprehensive for the poor invalid, whose state Sir Thomas fears may be very critical; and Edmund kindly proposes attending his brother immediately, but I am happy to add, that Sir Thomas will not leave me on this distressing occasion, as it would be too trying for me. We shall greatly miss Edmund in our small circle, but I trust and hope he will find the poor invalid in a less alarming state than might be apprehended, and that he will be able to bring him to Mansfield shortly, which Sir Thomas proposes should be done, and thinks best on every account, and I flatter myself, the poor sufferer will soon be able to bear the removal without material inconvenience or injury.’ ... 280

Sociolinguistics and Stylistics

The sufferings which Lady Bertram did not see had little power over her fancy; and she wrote very comfortably about agitation and anxiety and poor invalids, till Tom was actually conveyed to Mansfield, and her own eye had beheld his altered appearance. Then, a letter which she had been previously preparing for Fanny, was finished in a different style, in the language of real feeling and alarm; then, she wrote as she might have spoken. ‘He is just come, my dear Fanny, and is taken up stairs; and I am so shocked to see him, that I do not know what to do. I am sure he has been very ill. Poor Tom, I am quite grieved for him and very much frightened, and so is Sir Thomas; and how glad I should be, if you were here to comfort me. But Sir Thomas hopes he will be better to-morrow, and says we must consider his journey.’ (from Austen (1814) Mansfield Park, ch. 44) By comparison with Hamlet, the transformation of Lady Bertram from flat to round characterization is effected by strikingly simple means: a syntactic shift from the non-restrictive relative clauses in the first letter (‘whose...’, ‘which...’) to the insistent paratactic ‘and’ of the second; and a lexical shift away from Latinate polysyllables (foregrounded by the pairing of synonymic terms: ‘exceedingly agitated’ is replaced by ‘so shocked’, ‘apprehensive’ by ‘frightened’, ‘invalid’ by ‘ill’, ‘removal’ by ‘journey’). Lady Bertram is, after all, a simpler character than Hamlet and perhaps never wholly unsatirized. But looking across the other examples in this chapter, it is equally striking to find that the same oppositions – hypotaxis versus parataxis, Latinate versus non-Latinate lexis – have shown a remarkable historical persistence as varietal markers: they figure in Shakespeare’s representation of the clash between Kent and Cornwall (p. 273–4) as well as in the tonal shifts of the twentieth-­century personal letter (p. 266). At the same time, formal continuity goes hand in hand with interpretative change, providing support for recent sociolinguistic claims that ‘the meanings of variables are not precise or fixed, but rather constitute ... a constellation of ideologically related meanings, any one of which can be activated in the situated use of the variable’ (Eckert 2008: 453); or, in the terms I have been using here, varietal fragments modulate their meaning in response to differences in cultural norms. So where Shakespeare uses the ‘plain speaker’ features of paratactic construction and non-Latinate lexis as an index of ‘truth’ and ‘honesty’ (real or assumed), for Austen they represent ‘the language of real feeling’ breaking through the carapace of genteel convention. The continuities and discontinuities of practice that this comparison has revealed are equally striking, and both need further investigation to establish how the model of Variety outlined in this chapter maps on to the history of literary illusionism. But my account highlights what any such investigation will 281

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

need to include: the role of varietal code switching in the evolution of ­‘realistic’ characterization in both the nineteenth-century novel and sixteenth-century drama.11

Notes 1. This is a revised and expanded version of a paper first published in Y. Ikegami and M. Toyota (eds) (1993), Aspects of English as a World Language, 225–45. Tokyo: Maruzen. The present version was aired at the 2009 ‘Sheffield Workshop on The Representation of Dialect in Literature’ and has benefited from the input of other participants. 2. Two papers in this collection deal with deixis: Chapter 23, ‘Deixis in Literature’; and Chapter 38, ‘Dramatic Discourse’. 3. A terminological note: Although widely used, the term variety is not altogether satisfactory because its non-technical meaning (‘sort’ or ‘kind’) interferes in many contexts with its technical meaning (‘code-context correlation’). It is presumably to remedy this problem that some linguists have adopted the term lect. This, however, has the opposite disadvantage of semantic opacity. The term register avoids both of these problems, but unfortunately is already well established, at least in the neoFirthian school of linguistics, as the category label for a distinct sub-set of varieties. In this chapter, therefore, I shall follow the most common practice and adopt the term variety, using a capitalised form, however, to indicate that a technical sense is intended where the context might be ambiguous. 4. In many early accounts, these assumptions were not merely implied but stated, for example, Ferguson and Gumperz (1960) define variety as ‘any body of human speech patterns which is sufficiently homogeneous to be analysed by available techniques of synchronic description’; Crystal and Davy (1969) similarly posit a ‘stable formalfunctional correspondence’. By 1980, Chambers and Trudgill took a radically different view: ‘We shall use variety as a neutral term to apply to any particular kind of language which we wish, for some purpose, to consider as a single entity’ (1980: 5). 5. The major exceptions are Women’s speech and Black English, where, for obvious ideological reasons, investigators of the 1970s had an interest in comparing the stereotype with the empirical actuality. See, for example, Thorne and Henley 1975; Kramarae 1982; Stoller 1975. 6. This view was long resisted by linguists, as witness attempts in the 1970s to construct panlectal or polylectal grammars (usefully reviewed in Trudgill 1983: 8–30). Trudgill himself, under the influence of this style of thinking, claimed (in Trudgill 1973) that speakers could ‘imitate without error’ other Varieties in their community. For an early critique, see Matthews 1979: 49. Revisiting the question in 1983, Trudgill accepted Matthews’ arguments and adopted a position closer to that taken here (Trudgill 1983: 10–11). 7. The importance of Trudgill’s contribution to accommodation theory, which I cannot do justice to here, lies in its attempt to provide (a) an explanation for the salience of particular features in a Variety stereotype, (b) a hierarchical ordering of salient features, and (c) an account of the difference in accommodation behaviour between adults and children (who possibly do not work by stereotype). 8. Hypercorrection in cross-dialectal accommodation has often been explained as a performance error, analogous to a slip of the tongue. Knowles (1978), however, supports the view taken here by suggesting that there are two distinct sources of hypercorrection, one a failure of performance, the other a failure of analysis.

282

Sociolinguistics and Stylistics 9. A terminological note: enregisterment has the advantage of avoiding the negative connotations that the term stereotyping has acquired, but has the disadvantage of further complicating and confusing an already crowded corner of the field of linguistic terminology, in which register already bears more than one definition (Leon 2007; Dittmar 2010). 10. Blank (1996) remains the most substantial study of the Renaissance’s ‘discovery of dialect’. But apart from a chapter on thieves’ cant, her discussion focuses on Varieties of provenance, particularly on the political and ideological questions raised by differences between (and attitudes towards) national, regional and class Varieties. Early modern Varieties of role and relationship have not yet received the literary-critical attention they deserve, despite the early venture into ‘socio-­ stylistics’ by King (1941), and they remain ‘the Cinderella’ of socio-historical linguistics too (Görlach 1990). 11. As companion pieces to this paper, see Adamson 2006 on the function of deixis in Renaissance self-constructions, Adamson 2010 on a grammatical correlate of the role vs identity conflict in early modern texts, and Adamson 1998 on the history of Varieties in the linguistic formation of romantic realism and modernist surrealism.

References Adamson, S. M. (1989), ‘With double tongue: Diglossia, stylistics and the teaching of English’, in M. H. Short (ed.), Reading, Analysing and Teaching Literature, 204–40, Harlow: Longman. Adamson, S. M. (1998), ‘Breaking the standard’, in S. Romaine (ed.), Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 4, 598–614, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Adamson, S. M. (2006), ‘Deixis and the renaissance art of self construction’, SEDERI, 16: 5–29. Adamson, S. M. (2010), ‘Questions of identity in renaissance drama: New historicism meets old philology’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 61 (1): 56–77. Agha, A. (2005), ‘Voice, footing, enregisterment’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15 (1): 38–59. Austen, J. (1814), Mansfield Park, London: Egerton. Blank, P. (1996), Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings, London: Routledge. Boyce, B. (1947), The Theophrastan Character in England to 1642, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brown, B. L. (1980), ‘Effects of speech rate on personality attributions and competency ratings’, in H. Giles, W. P. Robinson and P. M. Smith (eds), Language: Social Psychological Perspectives, 293–300, London: Pergamon Press. Brown, P. and Levinson, S. (1987), Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, R. and Gilman, A. (1960), ‘The pronouns of power and solidarity’, in T. A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, 253–76, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chambers, J. and Trudgill, P. (1980), Dialectology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Christie, A. (1926), The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, London: Collins. Crystal, D. (1985), A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, Oxford: Blackwell. Crystal, D. and Davy, D. (1969), Investigating English Style, London: Longman. Dittmar, N. (2010), ‘Register’, in M. Fried, J.-O. Ostman and J. Verschueren (eds), Variation and Change: Pragmatic Perspectives, 221–33, Amsterdam: Benjamins.

283

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Dubois, B. L. and Crouch, I. (1975), ‘The question of tag questions in women’s speech: They don’t really use more of them, do they?’, Language in Society, 4 (3): 289–94. Earle, J. (1628), Microcosmographie. Pages refs to the edn by A. S. West, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920. Eckert, P. (2008), ‘Variation and the indexical field’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12 (4): 453–76. Empson, W. (1951), The Structure of Complex Words, London: Chatto & Windus. Ferguson, C. A. and Gumperz, J. J., eds (1960), Linguistic Diversity in South Asia: Studies in Regional, Social, and Functional Variation, Bloomington: Indiana University. Forster, E. M. (1927), Aspects of the Novel, London: Edward Arnold. Giles, H. and Powesland, P. F. (1975), Speech Style and Social Evaluation, London: Academic Press. Giles, H. and Smith, P. M. (1979), ‘Accommodation theory: Optimal levels of convergence’, in H. Giles and R. St Clair (eds), Language and Social Psychology, 45–65, Oxford: Blackwell. Goffman, E. (1972), ‘On face-work: An analysis of ritual elements in social interaction’, in J. Laver and S. Hutcheson (eds), Communication in Face to Face Interaction, 319–46, Penguin: Harmondsworth. Görlach, M. (1990), ‘The study of early modern English variation – the Cinderella of English historical linguistics?’, in M. Görlach (ed.), Studies in the History of the English Language, 108–22, Heidelberg: Winter. Helgerson, R. (1992), Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Hope, J. R. (1994), The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hudson, R. A. (1980), Sociolinguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, S. (1765), Preface to Shakespeare. Page refs to the version in Ralegh, W. (ed.), Johnson on Shakespeare, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908 (repr. 1965). Jones, R. F. (1953), The Triumph of the English Language, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Joos, M. (1961), The Five Clocks, New York: Harbinger Press. King, A. H. (1941), The Language of Satirized Characters in Poetaster: A Socio-stylistic Analysis 1597-1602, Lund: Lund Studies in English. Knowles, G. O. (1978), ‘The nature of phonological variables in Scouse’, in P. Trudgill (ed.), Sociolinguistic Patterns in British English, 80–90, London: Edward Arnold. Kramer, C. (1974), ‘Folklinguistics’, Psychology Today, 8 (1): 82–5. Kramarae, C. (1982), ‘Gender: How she speaks’, in E. B. Ryan and H. Giles (eds), Attitudes Towards Language Variation, 84–98, London: Edward Arnold. Labov, W. (1966), The Social Stratification of English in New York City, Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Labov, W. (1972), Sociolinguistic Patterns, Oxford: Blackwell. Lambert, W. E. (1967), ‘A social psychology of bilingualism’, Journal of Social Issues, 23 (2): 91–109. Lascelles, M. (1939), Jane Austen and her Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leon, J. (2007), ‘From linguistic events and restricted languages to registers: Firthian legacy and corpus linguistics’, The Henry Sweet Society Bulletin, 49: 5–26. Matthews, P. H. (1979), Generative Grammar and Linguistic Competence, London: Allen & Unwin. Moore, E. (2011), ‘Variation and identity’, in W. Maguire and A. McMahon (eds), Analyzing Variation in English, 219–36, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Donnell, W. R. and Todd, L. (1980), Variety in Contemporary English, London: Allen & Unwin.

284

Sociolinguistics and Stylistics Orton, H. and Halliday, W. J. (1962), Survey of English Dialects, vol. 1, London: Edward Arnold. Ryan, E. B. and Giles, H., eds (1982), Attitudes towards Language Variation, London: Edward Arnold. Siegler, D. M. and Siegler, R. S. (1976), ‘Stereotypes of males’ and females’ speech’, Psychological Reports, 39 (1): 167–70. Smeed, J. W. (1985), The Theophrastan Character: The History of a Literary Genre, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Southam, B., ed. (1979), Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1, 1811–70, London: Routledge. Stoller, P., ed. (1975), Black American English: Its Background and Its Usage in the Schools and Literature, New York: Delta. Swacker, M. (1975), ‘The sex of the speaker as a sociolinguistic variable’, in B. Thorne and N. Henley (eds), Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance, 76–83, Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Thakerer, J., Giles, H. and Cheshire, J. (1982), ‘Psychological and linguistic parameters of speech accommodation theory’, in C. Fraser and K. Scherer (eds), Advances in the Social Psychology of Language, 205–55, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thorne, B. and Henley, N., eds (1975), Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance, Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Trudgill, P. (1973), ‘Phonological rules and sociolinguistic variation in Norwich English’, in C.-J. Bailey and R. Shuy (eds), New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English, 149–63, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Trudgill, P. (1983), On Dialect, Oxford: Blackwell. Trudgill, P. (1986), Dialects in Contact, Oxford: Blackwell. Weinreich, U., Labov, W. and Herzog, M. I. (1968), ‘Empirical foundations for a theory of language change’, in W. P. Lehmann and Y. Malkiel (eds), Directions for Historical Linguistics, 97–195, Austin: University of Texas Press. Wood, M. (1966), ‘The influence of sex and knowledge of communication effectiveness on spontaneous speech’, Word, 22: 112–37.

285

286

Part III Current Areas of Research

17

Defamiliarization and Foregrounding Representing Experiences of Change of State and Perception in Neurological Illness Autobiographies Catherine Emmott and Marc Alexander, University of Glasgow

Chapter Overview Introduction 289 Defamiliarization and Foregrounding: Presenting Experience   Afresh and with Emphasis 290 Four Autobiographies about Neurological Illness 292 Language Reflecting Change 293 Conclusion 304

1 Introduction This chapter discusses the literary-linguistic theories of defamiliarization and foregrounding in relation to examples from four medical autobiographies of literary quality. All of these describe neurological illnesses reflecting ­profound changes in physical, psychological and social state, affecting the authors’

289

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

perceptions of the world. The books discussed are Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The  Diving-Bell and the Butterfly (2008)1; Robert McCrum’s My Year Off: Rediscovering Life after a Stroke (1998); Jane Lapotaire’s Time out of Mind (2004); and Ulla-Carin Lindquist’s Rowing without Oars (2005).2 The literary theory of defamiliarization (Šklovsky 2012[1965]) suggests that certain texts attract our interest and attention by presenting familiar events in an unfamiliar way. Linked to this idea, the theory of foregrounding (e.g. Mukařovský 1964, 1977) claims that particular linguistic features can facilitate this process by raising attention levels. Medical autobiographies can illustrate defamiliarization because, during serious illness, writers may view the most mundane aspects of everyday life, the people around them and their own bodies in an entirely different way from normal because of the effects of illness. This can include representing unusual states of mind (‘mind style’, Fowler 1996) such as extreme disorientation. Also there may be a heightened sense of engagement with the world felt by those who are recovering from critical illness or who are terminally ill (another type of ‘mind style’). Both these extremes are shown in the examples below: ‘time and experience became alien to me’ (Lapotaire, preface) ‘Everything, the smallest thing, assumed a heightened significance to me’ (McCrum, 89) As will be illustrated in the following sections, the literary autobiographies examined make heavy use of foregrounding to convey defamiliarization, using linguistic devices such as repetition, odd punctuation, under-specification and over-specification, interesting vocabulary and grammatical choices, striking similes and metaphors, recurrent thematic motifs, unusual narratological presentation and unusual textual layouts.

2  Defamiliarization and Foregrounding: Presenting Experience Afresh and with Emphasis Defamiliarization is a common translation of ostranenie, the Russian Formalist term for an aesthetic estrangement from the perception of the familiar and routine.3 First used by Viktor Šklovsky in 1917, the purpose of defamiliarization is the desire to increase both the effort and the duration of a perceiver’s experience of a text, a purpose that is in explicit opposition to habitualization or automatization, the aesthetic deadening that results from an over-familiarity with language. In a famous passage, Šklovsky argues: Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. […] art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to 290

Defamiliarization and Foregrounding

make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important. (Šklovsky 2012[1965]: 12, Šklovsky’s italics) In so doing, the effect of defamiliarization is to emphasize the conscious perception of experience that occurs through discourse, in addition to stimulating awareness of this ‘process of perception’ in its own right. As such, it is not surprising that the concept of defamiliarization is entwined with the notion of a text as a form of art, and therefore its conscious employment has become a marker of literary effect, in the sense of fictional texts with a high degree of cultural value.4 With defamiliarization as the intended aesthetic effect of a text, the textual and linguistic process by which it is achieved is often translated as foregrounding (or, occasionally, actualization [e.g. Wales 2011: 5]). In this term, first used by Jan Mukařovský (1964), the painting metaphor often employed by the Russian Formalists and the later Prague School is particularly explicit; the manifestation of defamiliarization is thought to be like the moving of an item into the foreground of the visual field. In this way, the automatized over-familiar standard language is disrupted and made defamiliar by a stylistic phenomenon that violates the standard expectations which habitualization creates – or, as Mukařovský puts it, ‘automatization schematizes an event; foregrounding means the violation of the scheme’ (1964: 19). The achievement of this in language can be carried out by a range of stylistic devices. Mukařovský focuses much attention on poetry and so discusses repetition as one of the primary foregrounding techniques – where, for example, repeated syllabic or rhythmic patterns in Czech can highlight words of a particular semantic group (1977: 24). Some later stylisticians have preferred to amalgamate repetition within the wider foregrounding technique of ­stylistic deviation,5 so that all techniques of foregrounding represent an ‘artistically ­motivated’ deviation from either a statistical or linguistic norm (Leech and Short 2007: 39). Even repetition can be viewed as a deviation from the standard pattern in English; that is, it can be viewed as an over-regularity. Accordingly, for stylistic purposes, defamiliarization can be broadly achieved through a motivated and unexpected linguistic irregularity or over-regularity within a regular context. Short (1996) highlights the range of such possible deviation, which can happen at the discoursal level (for example, with unusual generic expectations), through the semantic, lexical, grammatical and phonological levels to the graphological/layout level of a discourse (see Douthwaite [2000] for a wide range of examples). Foregrounding that occurs concurrently 291

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

in a text but across different linguistic levels is called congruence by Leech, while foregrounding cohesion occurs at the same level but across different parts of a text (2008[1985]: 64). Finally, the more recent analysis of defamiliarization and deviation within both cognitive stylistics and the empirical study of literature maintains a focus on the process of perception while bringing to bear further insights from closely related fields on this phenomenon. Van Peer (1986) carried out a classic empirical study on readers of poetry to confirm the ‘validity’ of foregrounding as a construct used by readers when they interpret texts. Sanford and Emmott (2012: 72–131) discuss psychological experiments aimed at investigating the depth of a reader’s processing of text via their model of rhetorical focussing, while Hakemulder (2004) presents evidence that a reader’s subjective aesthetic appreciation of a text is increased by the presence of foregrounding phenomena. All of these cognitive studies have demonstrated psychological evidence for the existence of an effect on the experience of reading caused by devices of foregrounding. For our purposes here, the significance of defamiliarization is that it represents the phenomenon of increased reader attention and the hindering of normal textual processing, however transitory. As such, we are interested, following Leech and Short (2007: 41), in its use as a framework to describe those instances where readers are encouraged to pay attention to salient and prominent linguistic features in a text, which are to be interpreted as significant and relevant to the author’s purpose.

3  Four Autobiographies about Neurological Illness The four autobiographies that are discussed here have some similarities, in that they are all narratives about serious neurological illnesses, affecting successful career people in their forties and fifties who had no previous major illness of this type. In all cases, the physical trauma is considerable and is accompanied by changes in physiological and psychological state as well as changes in perception. All the authors are ill for some period of time, needing to adjust to the day-to-day experience of disability. Their biographical details are as follows: zz Jean-Dominique Bauby was chief editor of French Elle when he had a stroke

at the age of forty-three and was left almost totally immobilized with lockedin syndrome – his account of his final days has become a classic of the neurological illness autobiography genre and was made into a major film. zz Robert McCrum was executive-in-chief of Faber and Faber publishers and a professional journalist and writer. His story tells of his stroke at the age of forty-two and subsequent year of recovery.

292

Defamiliarization and Foregrounding zz Jane Lapotaire was an established British actress and writer when she had

a brain haemorrhage due to an aneurysm at the age of fifty-three, and her story describes her collapse and convalescence. zz Ulla-Carin Lindquist was a Swedish newscaster who was diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or motor neurone disease) just before her fiftieth birthday and who died approximately a year later. In spite of some similarities in terms of the age of the writers and the nature of their illnesses, there are nevertheless clear differences in these medical conditions. Bauby, McCrum and Lapotaire all collapse suddenly and are critically ill for a while, whereas Lindquist’s terminal illness begins gradually and is more difficult to diagnose. The trajectories of the illnesses are also different. McCrum and Lapotaire’s stories are of recovery, although this involves considerable readjustment during the rehabilitation stage for both these writers. Bauby’s disability is considerable throughout his book, and although he appears to make a slight medical improvement, this seems to make little difference to his outlook and he dies shortly after his book is published. Lindquist is identified as terminally ill in the preface of her book, and as we read her story, we witness her gradual decline from the first hints of illness to her disabled state a few months before her death.

4  Language Reflecting Change (i) Reacting to Change: Sentence Fragments and the Difficulty and Bluntness of Communication The physical changes described in these narratives are so profoundly traumatic and have such an impact on the worldview, self-esteem and social roles of their authors that the writing style significantly reflects this. We present first some examples in this section which show foregrounding effects particularly clearly, then explore a range of ways that change of state can be communicated stylistically.

Difficulty in Coming to Terms with Illness and Disability

One striking type of foregrounding occurs when the sentence structure suddenly breaks down when writers try subsequently to narrate their collapse (due here to stroke or burst aneurysm), reflecting the difficulty in articulating the key moment and/or the flood of emotions. The examples below are dispersed through the first half of Lapotaire’s narrative, showing sentence fragments. By sentence fragments we mean fragments that are not full sentences (e.g. they are single words, phrases, or dependent clauses), but which are punctuated as if 293

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

they are sentences (i.e. with a capital letter at the start and a closing full stop [period] [Emmott, Sanford and Morrow 2006a, b]). The examples below occur in the main narrative (not in represented speech) and contrast with the syntactically well-formed surrounding text, so they appear to be highly strategic. Sentence fragments can have many different stylistic functions (see Emmott, Sanford and Morrow 2006b for a survey). Here, Examples (1) and (2) iconically reflect the difficulty of articulating the key point of collapse, before emphasizing each word in the deviantly punctuated ‘When. I. Fell.’, which might reflect the author deliberating over her collapse. Example (3) shows a linguistic repair, where the present-perfect verb phrase referring to the past (‘have been’) is replaced by the present (‘am’). This is the type of adjustment often made in real life when speakers try to come to terms with the first stages of bereavement. Lost health is here a form of bereavement. (1) Someone must have taken [my hearing aid] out of my ear when … when … when what? When. I. Fell. (Lapotaire, 20, Lapotaire’s ellipses) (2) I took [the pills] before – before – in England (Lapotaire, 43, Lapotaire’s italics) (3) I know I have been very ill. Am. Ill. (Lapotaire, 41) Similar fragmentation is found throughout the first part of this book (e.g. pp. 58, 60, 72, 84, 109 and 146). Some researchers have commented on fragmentation as a general property of illness narratives (Rimmon-Kenan 2002, 2007; Lazar 2012) since it might be argued to reflect the general breakdown of communication reflecting a state of serious trauma. In addition, this form of presentation might indicate the difficulty of articulation for some of these writers who may have speech deficits caused by the stroke (e.g. Bauby can only communicate by blinking). However, these fragments occur at very strategic points, and not all of the narrative is in this fragmented form, so this appears to be a rhetorical strategy to highlight specific aspects of the story. The fact that Lapotaire does not always write like this allows this type of syntactic disintegration to be foregrounded and thereby to stand out against other more coherent types of writing. In Examples (1) and (2) above, the collapse is defamiliarized by under-specification since Lapotaire has difficulty articulating it. Another strategy for underspecification is to create referential distance, as in Example (4), where a role label (‘the woman’) is used rather than the more explicit ‘Nurse Margaretha’, coupled with the explicit statement of an unwillingness to engage (‘I don’t want to understand’). (4) Nurse Margaretha has been the head of the Karolinska ALS team since the mid-sixties. She meets me without fear. She wants me to ask things. I feel an impulse to tease her, so I ask her to tell me stuff instead. [Nurse 294

Defamiliarization and Foregrounding

Margaretha gives Ulla-Carin Lindquist a detailed explanation of how Ulla-Carin will subsequently have to use a ventilator and the difficulties of doing this.] I don’t want to understand what the woman is talking about. (Lindquist, 41–2, our underlining)

Assessing Change in Blunt Summaries

An alternative communication strategy is to summarize the current state of play by a blunt over-specified (i.e. highly explicit) statement that refrains from getting emotionally involved and has a shock value. In her preface (which shows her knowledge state at the point she ceases her autobiography), Lindquist presents us with a stark statement of her lack of prospects: (5) There is only one end: death. No cure. No recovery. (Lindquist, preface) In the main body of her narrative, Lindquist’s book shows her gradual decline over the course of a couple of years. This can desensitize the reader, making us react as if the changes in her bodily state are a natural bearable progression, whereas her sudden decline is in reality quite shocking. In this way, her disabled state becomes familiar and she needs to occasionally surprise us, defamiliarizing by showing the extent to which her condition has changed. To do this, she uses summary to contrast her different states, in Example (6) presenting this at a pivotal mid-point in the story where she has lost much, but nevertheless still (apparently) has much left. In the following passage, foregrounding is achieved by a series of mini-paragraphs (paragraphs with just a single sentence or sentence fragment [Emmott, Sanford and Morrow 2006b]). (6) A year ago today [paragraph-length account of her carrying a photographer’s heavy tripod after she has conducted a news interview]. Camera tripods are heavy, and the fact that I could carry it seems odd to me now. Now I can’t even lift a fork to my mouth, let alone a glass. I can’t scratch my forehead and – it’s pointless to list all the things I cannot do. A year ago I carried a tripod along Sveavägen in Stockholm. Today I am fed strained food. A year ago I asked questions about travel insurance. Today I’m checking my life insurance. But. I can laugh. Hug my four children, or at least lift my left arm so that I can touch them. Hug my husband, and kiss him with my semi-paralysed mouth. Read. Listen to music. 295

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Breathe fresh air. Wander in the labyrinth of my memory. Peace …? Feel peace within me! (Sometimes.) (Lindquist, 131, our underlining, Lindquist’s ellipsis) She uses a combination of repeated contrasting time expressions (‘A year ago’ as opposed to ‘Now’ and ‘Today’) to frame a set of contrasts between the different stages of her illness. The verb forms in the pair ‘I carried’ and ‘am fed’ reflect the change, since they switch from active to passive voice. The repetition of the word ‘insurance’ highlights the very different types of cover. The ‘But.’ is unusual as the conjunction stands alone and acts as a pivot to contrast the negative change and the positive aspects of her current state. Nevertheless, the positive parallel statements (‘Hug my’ repeated) are mitigated by reminders that all is not well (‘at least’ she can touch her children even if she cannot really hug them; her mouth is already semi-paralysed and we know that her health will deteriorate further). Also she will need to be read to later rather than actively reading, and the reader already knows from the discussion with Nurse Margaretha (Example 4) that fresh air will soon be replaced by a ventilator. The ‘labyrinth of my memory’ will become a substitute for actual actions in later parts of the narrative (e.g. pp. 159–60). Even the mention of peace is partially revoked by the bracketed ‘(Sometimes.)’.

(ii) Disorientation Lapotaire’s book provides an extended account of her hospital stay after her collapse. This covers many pages (pp. 9–52) and simulates disorientation during her critical illness.6 Throughout much of this time, everyday experience in a hospital and, moreover, of agency and basic orientation is defamiliarized due to her partially conscious state. Deviant narrative presentation provides one form of foregrounding. Usually in narratives, specific episodes are monitored by contextual frames (Emmott 1997), with the author specifying details of time, place and participants, and the reader inferring contextual continuity over a stretch of text. Lapotaire’s narrative, by contrast, often switches from frame to frame without establishing who is present apart from the first person narrator. We get snatches of experience, which open with often unattributed actions and direct speech, and we have to work out who is doing these actions and speaking. For Lapotaire-the-patient, there is much confusion and under-specification, but Lapotaire-the-narrator gives us enough clues to recognize common 296

Defamiliarization and Foregrounding

schemata in the hospital context and monitor the contextual coordinates. When some of this information is given, it is clear that there is a later voice controlling the flow of information (e.g. expressions such as ‘I find out weeks later’ [p. 9] are recurrently used). Lapotaire is unsure of the time and location, but the reader has been told previously the name of the hospital (p. 9) and hence has a contextual anchor, although even then the rapid scene shifts with under-specified openings make the text relatively difficult to follow. Lapotaire’s contextual confusion is reflected in repairs (Example 7) and in completely wrong statements (Example 8, since she is in Paris), as well as wondering where she is when she has previously been told (‘I have no idea where “here” is.’ [p. 14]).  (7) I think I’m still in the ambulance, but I’m not. (Lapotaire, 9)  (8) I open my eyes. Is it morning or night? I don’t know, but I know I’m in Croydon. (Lapotaire, 18) Generally, there is a lack of clarity about who is doing actions. Some of the actions are shown to be performed either with passives with deleted agents (e.g. ‘The electric bed is activated’ in Example 9), or by parts of another’s body without the person being identified (e.g. ‘Two pairs of hands’ in Example 9) (although we can infer that it is medical staff, her friends or family), or with the objects seeming to appear or move of their own accord (‘this little pot’, ‘A ­teaspoon’ [Example 10]).  (9) Lights snapped on. […] The electric bed is activated […] One of my eyes is prised open by determined fingers and drops dropped in […] Insistent fingers force the other eye open for more smarting drops. Two pairs of hands push me into an upright position. I shout as their hands, either side of me, force some needles and drips that are in my arms in deeper. (Lapotaire, 11–12) (10) Inside this little pot in front of my face is a thick yellowish substance. A teaspoon of it comes towards me. I have no idea what it is and am reluctant to open my mouth. (Lapotaire, 28) These statements are representative of a lack of understanding of agency and causality, symptomatic of extreme disorientation.

(iii) Re-evaluating the Body and the Self One of the ways that change of state is signalled is by foregrounding the disjunction between the body and its parts. Normally we take our overall bodily 297

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

coherence for granted, but this may break down when there is physical trauma to the brain or spinal cord. It appears from neurological and nursing research (see below) that a sense of bodily disconnection may be a specific symptom of certain types of brain trauma, leading to various defamiliarized effects, as follows: zz Body parts may seem like separate entities (Examples 11 and 12), sometimes

with their own volition (Example 12):

(11) I don’t feel I have a body most of the time. Just a head. (Lapotaire, 19, our underlining) (12) I feel satisfied when I drive away from there. So does my hand, as it lies in its cradle. (Lindquist, 25, our underlining) zz Parts of the body seem not to belong to the writer (Examples 13 and 14) and

are not (at first) described using the usual possessive pronoun (Examples 15 and 16):

(13) There are two thin arms, black and yellow with bruises from wrists to armpits. There is a body attached to them (Lapotaire, 12, our underlining) (14) This body which is no part of me (Lapotaire, 57, our underlining) (15) In the mirror is a face. [...] The eyes […] the head (Lapotaire, 35, our underlining) (16) I still had no feeling on the – my – left side (McCrum, 154, our underlining) zz The self seems to become a separate entity, which is not recognized:

(17) I’m shocked by this woman who can’t sit in a bath for more than a minute. (Lapotaire, 63) (18) I am terrified of this person I seem to have become. (Lapotaire, 110) zz The self takes on another person’s identity (e.g. unidentified or an older per-

son’s identity):

(19) As if what happened, happened to someone else; which of course it did. (Lapotaire, 54) (20) My mother’s voice is coming out of my body. (Lapotaire, 12) zz The self seems to be at a physical distance from the body:

(21) I am watching myself from somewhere far above. (Lapotaire, 200) (22) I have taken my place in the look-out tower and observe myself from a distance (Lindquist, 113) There may be neurological reasons for this change in perception (e.g. Sacks 1985; Gallagher 2000; Svenaeus 2000; Haggard and Wolpert 2005; Brown 2007; Wertheimer 2008; O’ Toole 2012; Fuentes et al. 2013; Kitzmüller, Häggström and 298

Defamiliarization and Foregrounding

Asplund 2013). The self may also appear to be split, pivoting around identities before and after the trauma (see Emmott 2002 for further discussion).

(iv) Adjusting to Illness and Disability: Evaluations and Bodily Perceptions In all these autobiographies, the writers recount the process of adjustment to their illnesses and disabilities during the rehabilitation stage. As we will see, writers may haltingly distance themselves from their disability by attributing faults to the environment rather than the body (Example 23). Alternatively, there may be a sharply ironic portrayal of their change in status (Example 24).

Circumstances: Misattributed Evaluations

Lindquist’s disability begins gradually. Her illness is notoriously subtle in the early stages and difficult to diagnose (e.g. Baek 2007). She represents her puzzlement at the change in her physical abilities by what we term misattributed evaluation(s), these being comments that suggest that the surrounding objects and environment are at fault rather than that her own body is failing: (23) I complain about the shoddiness of Canadian needles. My seams are clumsy and ugly. And that can’t be my fault. Pens are of poor quality too. I get cramps in my hands when I write. The skin on the potatoes is too thick or the potato-peeler is no good. The list continues. [Description of her doing annual physical checks to monitor her physical fitness.] But now, here at home in Sweden, my strength is ebbing. Perhaps it’s the change that’s making me tired? And the boxes are so heavy. [Comment about pain.] I keep tripping. Surely the lawn wasn’t always so uneven? (Lindquist, 20, our underlining) These observations are presented in mini-paragraphs, some with short sentences, which immediately act as foregrounding devices. These describe different aspects of the everyday surrounding world, but the succession of negative misattributed evaluations must alert the reader to the global inference that something is wrong in this world, and that it may be the perceptions of the user of these implements, objects and walking surface, rather than 299

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

these items themselves, that need to be adjusted and the causality viewed accordingly. The preface to the text clearly tells us how this period of diagnostic uncertainty will turn out (‘[The book] is about my end’, with the medical condition ALS explicitly named). Readers have also seen Lindquist’s earlier problems with her strength (from rowing at the start of the narrative [the theme of the book] to subsequently trying to open a clothes peg). Although she supplies other explanations (e.g. ‘the change’ in Example 23), knowledge of the prior text makes it quite clear that there is a strong possibility that this is a serious illness.

Schema Clash: Conflicting Evaluations

Bauby’s disability is undeniable, but he does not initially understand that this is a long-term condition. (‘No one had yet given me an accurate picture of my situation’ [p. 15]). His description of his rehabilitation in Example 24 neatly reflects a script or schema clash (e.g. Schank and Abelson 1977; Cook 1994; Semino 1997) that juxtaposes conflicting evaluation(s). Mobility and prosthetic devices can become highly symbolic, and the hospital team clearly see the wheelchair as a major stage in his recovery, as he moves from the bed to the chair. However, Bauby himself is inadequately prepared for the delivery and trial of the wheelchair and has the quite different view that it labels him as being permanently disabled, and he has not yet had chance to come to terms with this (the underspecified terms ‘the event’ or ‘device’ may reflect the hospital staff’s taken-for-granted appraisal of the situation in contrast to Bauby’s obliviousness). For the hospital team, this is an important stage in rehabilitation and they are unaware of his feelings (not helped by the difficulty of communicating with a man who can only reply by blinking). There are echoes of a graduation schema gone wrong (‘(un)ceremoniously’, ‘graduated’, ‘official’, ‘didn’t applaud’, ‘future hopes’, ‘smile’, ‘good news’), but for Bauby the vocabulary reflects shock (indicated by ‘frightening truth’ and the similes ‘as blinding as an atomic explosion’ and ‘keener than a guillotine blade’). (24) I had never seen so many white coats in my little room […] – the whole hospital had turned out for the event. When they first burst in, pushing the device ahead of them, I thought it meant that I was being ejected to make room for a new patient. […] I still could not imagine any connection between a wheelchair and me. […] Two attendants […] dumped me unceremoniously into the wheelchair. I had graduated from being a patient whose prognosis was uncertain to an official quadriplegic. They didn’t applaud, but they came close. […] I was too devastated by this brutal downgrading of my future hopes to take much notice. […] ‘You can handle the wheelchair,’ said the occupational therapist with a smile intended to make the remark 300

Defamiliarization and Foregrounding

sound like good news, whereas to my ears it had the ring of a lifesentence. In one flash I saw the frightening truth. It was as blinding as an atomic explosion and keener than a guillotine blade. (Bauby, 15–17, our underlining) This is a key turning point for Bauby. In the next chapter, he overtly refers to this episode with the summary: (25) Oddly enough, the shock of the wheelchair was helpful. Things became clearer. I gave up my grandiose plans, and the friends who had built a barrier of affection around me since my catastrophe were able to talk freely. With the subject no longer taboo, we began to discuss locked-in syndrome (Bauby, 19) The experience he recounts is echoed in narratives of brain- and spinal-injury patients and their families who regard wheelchairs and other aspects of rehabilitation in both positive and negative lights and potentially as deeply symbolic, depending on the perspective and stage of adjustment (Couser 1997: 189–91; Cole 2004; see also Goffman 1963; Standal 2011; Dana and Burcaw 2013).

(v) Micro and Macro Levels One of the ironies of these narratives is that what would normally be small events have major implications. This can be expressed by extraordinary metaphors and similes which may seem oddly inappropriate to describe disability, but which are apt in context. Bauby compares his attempts to dislodge a fly as more strenuous than Olympic wrestling (Example 26), which makes sense when we understand the degree of effort it takes for him to move. Toes moving would not normally be a notable event, but obviously they are when the writer, McCrum, has been paralysed (Example 27): (26) A very black fly settles on my nose. I waggle my head to unseat him. Olympic wrestling is child’s play compared to this. (Bauby, 110) (27) There they were – my left toes moving! It was like finding life on Mars (McCrum, 153) The narrative style can also be extremely odd compared with normal stories. In Examples 28 and 29, the broad time spans of one or two years would normally be linked to large-scale events, but here minute observations are noted: (28) almost a year has passed since I discovered the hollow between my index finger and thumb. (Lindquist, 52) 301

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

(29) It has been over two years since the spoon wobbled because my hand trembled when I drank Thai soup at a restaurant on the Boulevard St Laurent in Montréal. (Lindquist, 188) Of course, in these narratives these tiny observations herald momentous changes of state, since they are key symptoms in these very serious illnesses.

(vi) Intensity and Hyperstimulus These narratives not only reflect the trauma of neurological illness, but also show some of the writers having a heightened interest in their surroundings. Lindquist says that ‘to see something for the last time can be as intense as seeing it for the first time’ (Lindquist, 30). She refers repeatedly to humour and happiness in her final year, balancing the sadness of her impending death. Another book about the same illness is subtitled ‘My Year of Joy’ (Spencer-Wendel and Witter 2013). There may be specific physiological reasons for Lindquist’s stimulation, such as the nature of the illness (her nurse tells her that it may accentuate emotional highs and lows), and the fact that she is on morphine. However, there are also understandable reasons why a dying person might focus more attention on the world they will be departing from, and physical disability inherently defamiliarizes the everyday environment and forces the disabled to pay more attention to it (in terms of using implements, not falling, etc., as shown in Example 23). In some neurological conditions, intense stimulus becomes hyper-stimulus. Lapotaire tells us this quite explicitly in her preliminary ‘Author’s note’ before the main narrative. As she says in this note, ‘The brain is left vulnerable to noise, physical jostling or any form of vocal and emotional harshness.’ The second half of her book is a moving and informative extended account of the problems of dealing with this hyper-stimulus and emotional volatility, particularly when people cannot see her disability, when they are ill-informed about her condition, and when her temper is alienating the friends who are helping her.7 The apparent sensory hubbub (which other people seem to be relatively oblivious to) is reflected in the foregrounded language. In Example (30), Lapotaire leaves hospital for the first time and is overwhelmed by the visual stimuli that are represented in the lengthy fronted list in the first sentence, iconically reflecting the perceptual rushing, and overwhelming and battering of parts of the body. Example (31) adds to this effect by the use of ‘-ing’ suffixes for the flurry of activity by anonymous crowds and disconnected objects such as shopping bags, coats and jackets. Example (32) uses parallelism with double lexical repetition and substitution. Example (33) repeats the semi-modal deontic expression ‘have to’ to show the demands on the sick 302

Defamiliarization and Foregrounding

writer. In each case, the link between these repetitions and the pressures on the ill writer is made explicit by overt statements about the psychological effect of this hyper-stimulation. (30) Cars, people, horns, engines, neon lights, traffic lights, pedestrians, cyclists, advertisements, taxis, shop windows, lamp-posts, pigeons, posters, sacks of garbage, rows of fruit, vegetables, rails of clothes, colours, dots, squares, stripes, lights, all converge and rush pell-mell into a bleary confusion as I squeeze my eyes tight shut against the world I have so wanted to see. It overwhelms my eyes and batters at my brain. It is all so vivid. So acute. (Lapotaire, 55, our underlining) (31) crowds of people milling about blocking the route, crossing the cobbled alleyway, disappearing into shops and popping out again. Coloured shopping-bags bobbing in and out beside grey coats, black coats, blue coats, brown jackets. I feel a swelling fury against each and every one of them. (Lapotaire, 68, our underlining). (32) Then the train journey, more traffic, more people, noise outside, noise inside, perpetual movement, perpetual stimulus that beat my spinning, exhausted brain with blow after blow. (Lapotaire, 101, our underlining) (33) I have to get some money. The little pension isn’t enough. I’ll have to sell the house. I have to go to London to sell the house. I have to face the demons. I have to visit the neuro-surgeon, I have to have an EEG test. (I have no idea at the time that all these haves are to stop me feeling have-nots.)  I have to go to London on my own. Who else is there? The idea terrifies me. The notion of being in London is full of terrors. (Lapotaire, 136, our underlining) The sensory overload continues in Example (34) as Lapotaire goes shopping for the first time after her hospitalization and is subjected to familiar objects which are defamiliarized to convey touch, taste, vision and sound (and also overpowering smell, p. 67). There is the surprise that she ‘seems never to have looked at’ these objects before (see also p. 55, where she returns home after her hospital stay and notices that ‘[t]he elegant curve of the thirties staircase sweeps me up into it’ and observes ‘Why did I never notice it before?’. We know from cognitive science that mentions of sensory images (in all modalities) can trigger the relevant sensory parts of the reader’s brain to respond (see Sanford and Emmott 2012 for a summary of this research, also Semino 2010), so the reader may also react in a similar way to the over-sensitized persona of the writer. (34) Every contact [from other pedestrians] is an affront, a burn to the part of me that has been touched. […] 303

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

There are oysters for sale with fantastic ridges of grey and purply blue in their shells. The lemons beside them are alive in their yellowness. I want to stop and eat the fat tempting lumps of sea-tasting tenderness. […] I am caught by the rows of fine chocolates. I stare till I can taste them dissolving against my palate and have to swallow all the saliva that has collected in my mouth. […] There is lacy underwear of such beauty that it makes me gasp with delight. Matching pants and bra in an exquisite shiny satin. […] I want this exquisite smoothness and gossamer filigree against my skin. Only this will do. […] There is a supermarket next to a greengrocer’s, which I reel into, clutching Ann now with both hands, my head spinning with the images of row upon row of shining red apples, a patina on them that looks like sheer polish, plump orange apricots, and dates from Tunisia, still on their stalks, redolent with memories of my mother and stepfather’s home in North Africa, fat green fingers of courgettes – I seem never to have looked at vegetables and fruit before. I am dizzy with colour and choice. I must buy a tube of the handcream […] I must have it. I grab it and totter. The bottles and boxes and shelves all threaten to converge. […] The noise in the café is deafening […] But they must be quiet. (Lapotaire, 65–7, our underlining) In this passage, the senses are in overload and suddenly the most ordinary shopping event becomes completely overwhelming. The boulomaic and deontic modals (‘want’ and the repeated ‘must’ at the end of the passage) reflect the lack of control her condition is prompting.

5 Conclusion The narratives discussed are unusual because they dwell on the most mundane events and turn them into extraordinary observations. Illness and disability make the authors view the world in a fresh light. As Lindquist observes, ‘Death brings me closer to life’ (p. 173). The authors appreciate the minutiae of existence more than they have ever done before, when they were too busy with their careers to notice it. These texts symbolize defamiliarization since they provide the classic reappraisal of life that is symptomatic of both great literary writing and, in Lindquist’s case, the realization that life may be slipping away from the writer. Foregrounding provides a range of techniques to reflect changes in states and perceptions and to convey the reappraisal of reality by linguistic means. These narratives provide insistent voices that shout out in adversity. As Lindquist’s daughter writes to her, ‘You are more alive than many other people’ (p. 175), and 304

Defamiliarization and Foregrounding

Lindquist herself in her terminal state observes that ‘It is too strange. The truth is that I would not wish to be without this part of my life!’ (p. 173).

Notes 1. Published originally in French. The discussion here is of the English translation. 2. Published originally in Swedish. The discussion here is of the English translation. 3. It should be noted that defamiliarization is far from an uncontentious translation of the original but has become standard in many stylistics discussions. Other options include estrangement or endowing strangeness, while Sher (1990: xix) argues instead for enstrangement, an expression intended to capture the sensation itself by providing an unusual and strange term. 4. The issue of defining ‘literariness’, however, is possibly intractable – perhaps rightly so – and the presence of the effect of defamiliarization is not necessarily a marker of these texts. Most recently, Jeffries and McIntyre (2010: 61ff) have explicitly challenged the assumption that this effect itself necessarily characterizes ‘literary’ style. 5. ‘Deviation’ is an accepted term in literary linguistics (stylistics) and does not have a pejorative meaning in this sense. Indeed, it may be viewed as potentially positive since it relates to unusual styles of writing that may be highly valued in society (e.g. in literature) and may have key rhetorical functions. We are not discussing social theories of deviance/deviation in this article. To avoid any confusion, we use the term ‘stylistic deviation’ here, which may be a deviation at any linguistic level or in the overall form of the narrative/discourse. 6. This is not relevant to Lindquist as we see only her gradually worsening disability. Bauby glosses over his early hospitalization, and McCrum relies on diary entries from both himself and his girlfriend for much of this period (although both Bauby and McCrum relate their collapses). 7. For many of these writers, rehabilitation into a life of possible or certain disability or semi-disability seems to be more challenging in certain respects than the emergency of critical illness (when there may be a lack of consciousness and where the ‘sick role’ [Parsons 1975]) of the patient may be more evident.

References Baek, W. S. (2007), ‘ALS: Pitfalls in the diagnosis’, Practical Neurology, 7: 74–81. Bauby, J.-D. (2008), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, London: Harper Perennial (First published in French in 1997 as Le Scaphandre et le Papillon). Brown, J. (2007), ‘How people with motor neurone disease talk about living with their illness: A narrative study’, Journal of Advanced Nursing, 62 (2): 200–8. Cole, J. (2004), Still Lives: Narratives of Spinal Cord Injury, Cambridge, MA: MIT/Bradford. Cook, G. (1994), Discourse and Literature: The Interplay of Form and Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Couser, G. T. (1997), Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability and Life Writing, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Douthwaite, J. (2000), Towards a Linguistic Theory of Foregrounding, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso. Dana, D. D. and Burcaw, S. (2013), ‘Disability identity: Exploring narrative accounts of disability’, Rehabilitation Psychology, 58 (2): 148–57.

305

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Emmott, C. (1997), Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Emmott, C. (2002), ‘“Split selves” in fiction and in medical “life stories”: Cognitive linguistic theory and narrative practice’, in E. Semino and J. Culpeper (eds), Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, 153–81, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Emmott, C., Sanford, A. J. and Morrow, L. I. (2006a), ‘Capturing the attention of readers? Stylistic and psychological perspectives on the use and effect of text fragments in narratives’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 35 (1): 1–30. Emmott, C., Sanford, A. J. and Morrow, L. I. (2006b), ‘Sentence fragmentation: Stylistic aspects’, in K. Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Vol. 11, 241–51, Oxford: Elsevier. Fowler, R. (1996), Linguistic Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fuentes, C. T., Pazzaglia, M., Longo, M. R., Scivoletto, G. and Haggard, P. (2013), ‘Body image distortions following spinal cord injury’, Journal of Neural Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 84: 201–7. Gallagher, S. (2000), ‘Philosophical conceptions of the self’, Trends in Cognitive Science, 4 (1): 14–21. Goffman, E. (1963), Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Haggard, P. and Wolpert, D. M. (2005), ‘Disorders of body scheme’, in H. J. Freund, M. Jeannerod, M. Hallett and R. Leiguarda (eds), Higher-Order Motor Disorders, 261–72, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hakemulder, J. (2004), ‘Foregrounding and its effect on readers’ perception’, Discourse Processes, 38 (2): 193–218. Jeffries, L. and McIntyre, D. (2010), Stylistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kitzmüller, G., Häggström, T. and Asplund, K. (2013), ‘Living in an unfamiliar body: The significance of the perception of self after stroke’, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 16 (1): 19–29. Lapotaire, J. (2004), Time out of Mind, London: Virago. Lazar, K. (2012), ‘The stricken word: Finding a syntax for stroke’, English Studies in Africa, 55 (1): 64–76. Leech, G. (2008[1985]), ‘Stylistics’, in G. Leech (ed.), Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding, 54–69, London: Pearson. Leech, G. and Short, M. (2007), Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, 2nd edn, London: Longman. Lindquist, U.-C. (2005), Rowing Without Oars, London: John Murray (First published in Swedish in 2004 as Ro Utan Åror). Mukařovský, J. (1964), ‘Standard language and poetic language’, in P. L. Garvin (ed.), A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, 17–30, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Mukařovský, J. (1977), ‘On poetic language’, in J. Burbank and P. Steiner (eds), The Word and Verbal Art: Selected Essays, 1–64, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. McCrum, R. (1998), My Year Off: Rediscovering Life after a Stroke, London: Picador. O’ Toole, S. (2012), ‘Narratives of dying with Motor Neurone Disease’, paper presented at the conference on Constructing Narratives of Continuity and Change, 12th May 2012, University of Canterbury, http://www.canterbury.ac.uk/education/conferencesevents/constructing-narratives/docs/OToole,Sinead.pdf (accessed 12 July 2013). Parsons, T. (1975), ‘The sick role and the health of the physician reconsidered’, The Millbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, Health and Society, 53 (3): 257–8.

306

Defamiliarization and Foregrounding Rimmon-Kenan, S. (2002), ‘The story of “I”: Illness and narrative identity’, Narrative, 10 (1): 9–27. Rimmon-Kenan, S. (2007), ‘What can narrative theory learn from illness narratives?’, Literature and Medicine, 25 (2): 251–4. Sacks, O. (1985), ‘The disembodied lady’, in The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, 42–52, London: Picador. Sanford, A. J. and Emmott, C. (2012), Mind, Brain and Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schank, R. C. and Abelson, R. (1977), Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Enquiry into Human Knowledge Structures, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Semino, E. (1997), Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts, London: Longman. Semino, E. (2010), ‘Descriptions of pain, metaphor, and embodied simulation’, Metaphor and Symbol, 25: 205–26. Sher, B. (1990), ‘Translator’s introduction’, in B. Sher (ed.), Viktor Šklovsky: Theory of Prose, xv–xxi, Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Short, M. (1996), Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays, and Prose, London: Longman. Šklovsky, V. (2012[1965]), ‘Art as technique’, in L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis (eds), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, 3–24, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press (first published in Russian in 1917). Spencer-Wendel, S. and Witter, B. (2013), Until I say Goodbye: My Year of Living with Joy, New York: Harper Collins. Standal, O. F. (2011), ‘Re-embodiment: Incorporation through the embodied learning of wheelchair skills’, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 14: 177–84. Svenaeus, F. (2000), ‘The body uncanny – Further steps towards a phenomenology of illness’, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 3: 125–37. van Peer, W. (1986), Stylistics and Psychology: Investigations of Foregrounding, Croom Helm: London. Wales, K. (2011), Dictionary of Stylistics, 3rd edn, London: Longman. Wertheimer, A. (2008), A Dented Image: Journeys of Recovery from Subarachnoid Haemorrhage, London: Routledge.

307

18

Metaphor Metaphor and Style through Genre, with Illustrations from Carol Ann Duffy’s Rapture Gerard Steen, University of Amsterdam

Chapter Overview Introduction 308 Metaphorical Conceptualization, Genre and Style   (‘metaphor in thought’) 311 Metaphorical Expression, Genre and Style (‘metaphor in language’) 315 Metaphorical Communication, Genre and Style   (‘metaphor in interaction’) 318 Conclusion 322

1 Introduction In this chapter, I present an encompassing approach to the study of metaphor as an important component of style. It is a novel approach that brings together some recent developments in the study of metaphor, style and discourse. For instance, for most researchers today, metaphor is not just a matter of style (and especially literary style), as it used to be in the 1970s (e.g. Lodge 1977) but has become a ubiquitous feature of all language and thought (e.g. Gibbs 2008). As we have come to realize since Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) groundbreaking Metaphors we live by, we think and talk metaphorically about almost everything 308

Metaphor

that is not concrete but abstract, and not simple but complex, including emotions, relations, organizations, societies and so on. This radical shift in the conceptualization of metaphor has produced a wealth of research, three dedicated scholarly journals (Metaphor & Symbol, metaphorik.de, and Metaphor and the Social World), one book series (Metaphor in Language, Cognition and Communication) and a new society for Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM). Metaphor has now become a ‘figure of thought’ instead of a figure of speech (Lakoff 1986) and is defined as conceptualizing one thing in terms of something else. Such metaphorical understanding presumably gives rise to conventionalized mappings across domains in our conceptual systems that are expressed in all sorts of familiar and occasionally innovative figurative ways in our everyday language use. All of this raises a question: How we can still approach metaphor as a feature of style? Moreover, how can we at the same time retain and indeed exploit the new insights about metaphor in language and thought? The answer to these questions, I argue, can be found in developing a broader view of the relations between metaphor and style on the one hand, and metaphor in language and thought on the other, through the notion of discourse, and in particular, genre. I define style as a feature of discourse, in that a style is a specific, often somewhat idiosyncratic language variety employed in a specific discourse situation. Style can therefore be found in one discourse event, as when we speak of the style of an important work, such as the Bible or a play by Shakespeare, but it can also be encountered across a number of discourse events, as when we are interested in the individual style of an author or speaker. I intentionally use the term ‘discourse event’ even though in most cases, stylisticians do not study discourse events but texts and transcripts; my reason is that texts and transcripts are related to written and spoken language use in discourse events, and that their stylistic analysis is typically structural-functional in relation to those encompassing discourse events, since stylisticians aim to describe and explain stylistic structures in relation to their functions in (albeit mostly postulated) processes of production, reception and interaction. Discourse events can be usefully approached through the notion of genre (Steen 2011). Adopting a genre approach helps to differentiate one discourse event from another on the basis of people’s default knowledge that they are engaged in a distinct language use activity. We listen to the news on the radio when we wake up, have a conversation at the breakfast table before we go out, read the newspaper on the train to work, read and write email messages before beginning the work day, go to seminars, lectures, faculty meetings and so on before we may end up in the bar at the end of the day for a drink with colleagues. Each of these activities involves so many distinct discourse events that are organized by more or less specific genre knowledge and expectations that, in turn, constrain our language use in production, reception and interaction. 309

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

The genre expectations involved can be grouped into three areas (Steen 2011), having to do with the text of a genre event, the code in which the text is expressed and the context in which the text is located (the notion of ‘text’ referring to spoken or written monologue, dialogue or multilogue). For any genre event, we have more or less specific knowledge and expectations about its text in terms of its content, form, type and structure. For any genre event, we also have more or less specific knowledge and expectations about its context in terms of participants, medium, situation and domain. And for any genre event, we have more or less specific knowledge and expectations about its code in terms of modality, language, register, style and rhetoric. Style is hence one ‘code’ variable in a wide range of genre variables that characterize the properties of a discourse event and affect observable language use. It is well known that there used to be an elaborate system of stylistic decorum for many different genres in Western civilization. Educated people had specific knowledge and expectations about which style to apply in which situations. This included conventions about metaphor use in, for instance, religious versus scientific versus literary texts. However, metaphor is not just driven by such stylistic expectations. Metaphor use may also be due to expectations about all other genre variables. Thus, Jonathan Charteris-Black (2005) has shown how Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and George W. Bush each display their personal repertoire of metaphor use, which has to do with knowledge and expectations about participants. Expectations about the role of metaphor in science versus literature versus politics and so on also vary with reference to the nature and function of distinct domains of discourse. Metaphors in narrative may work differently than metaphors in argumentation, which has to do with the variable of text type. But metaphor use may also be influenced by knowledge and expectations about register (the metaphors in a sermon by Martin Luther King orient themselves to a religious register, whereas the metaphors in his civic addresses relate to the register of politics) or style (metaphor use may be affected by the recent trend to conversationalization in public discourse, including, for instance, the news). What we therefore need is an elaborate model and careful theoretical definitions of, on the one hand, the relations between these genre aspects and, on the other, the way these are reflected in metaphorical versus non-metaphorical language structures and functions in language (cf. Biber and Conrad 2009 for genre and language use; and Deignan, Littlemore and Semino 2013 for the same with special attention to metaphor). In this complex relation between genre and language use, I have shown that the overall model of language use should allow for three distinct dimensions of metaphor: expression (‘metaphor in language’), conceptualization (‘metaphor in thought’) and communication (‘metaphor in interaction’). These dimensions derive from the effect of the three main components in any situation of 310

Metaphor

discourse: the means of discourse, that is, language (expression), the individual discourse participants using their minds (conceptualization) and the combined participants doing their joint interaction (communication). The three dimensions are clearly visible for all metaphor in all language use, which always displays distinct linguistic forms (e.g. metaphor versus simile), distinct conceptual structures (novel versus conventional metaphor) and distinct communicative functions (deliberate versus non-deliberate metaphor). There are other properties, too (cf. Steen 1999), but these are the ones that researchers have mostly concentrated on. In order to show how metaphor can be related to style from this genre-analytical perspective on language use, I will ask how metaphor is used in Carol Ann Duffy’s award-winning volume Rapture. I will first look at metaphorical conceptualization, then expression and finally communication, and in each case I will offer examples of descriptions and then genre-driven interpretations or explanations that zoom in on the role of metaphor in style. In the conclusion section I will offer some integrating comments on the construction of a stylistic profile for metaphor in this book of poems.

2 Metaphorical Conceptualization, Genre and Style (‘metaphor in thought’) Frank Tallis (2005), a clinical psychologist, has written a wonderful book, Love sick, without any reference to metaphor, even though the volume is one extended metaphor comparing love with mental illness. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), love is metaphorically conceptualized as a physical force, a patient, madness, magic and war. In all of these cases, it is clear that our culture and language offer conceptual metaphors or metaphorical models for understanding love in terms of something completely different. Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 49) offer evidence from conventionalized language use like the following: Love is a physical force I could feel the electricity between us. There were sparks. I was magnetically drawn to her. … Love is a patient This is a sick relationship. They have a strong, healthy marriage. … Love is madness I’m crazy about her. She drives me out of my mind. … Love is magic She cast her spell over me. The magic has gone. … I’m charmed by her. … 311

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Love is war He is known for his many rapid conquests. She fought for him, but his mistress won out. He fled from her advances. … The index of Kövecses (2010), an overview of metaphor research triggered since the publication of Lakoff and Johnson (1980), adds love as a bond, as a collaborative work of art, a journey, a nutrient, [sic] a rapture, a unity, an economic exchange, closeness and fire (2010: 373). All or most of these are supposed to be conventionalized mappings across two distinct conceptual domains, helping people to understand the relatively complex and abstract concept of love in terms of the simpler and more concrete domains of force, patient and so on. It is the main claim of this cognitive-linguistic approach to metaphor that we all automatically and unconsciously use these conceptual mappings as conventional, established thought structures in our everyday language use. How are these regular metaphorical conceptual structures used in Rapture and how can they be related to the genre variable of style? First of all, the volume is called Rapture, it has one poem called ‘Rapture’ at about one quarter of the book, and it ends on a note of rapture with the last poem, which is called ‘Over’ and describes the end of the love relationship. The epigraph to that final poem has the following quotation from a poem by Robert Browning: That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture! According to Kövecses (2010: 51), it is a conventional metaphor in thought to understand love as rapture. This would suggest that the entire frame for this book of poems is a direct and explicit expression of a conventional metaphor in thought. And also according to Kövecses, our use of this conceptual metaphor love is rapture is essential for understanding this text as a love poem, that is, for approaching it through the appropriate genre category. But is love is a rapture a conventional conceptual metaphor? For rapture is ‘a feeling of great happiness or excitement’ according to the Macmillan Dictionary (Rundell 2002). Can we call this a mapping across two distinct conceptual domains? Or is rapture one typical or extreme manifestation of love, which does not make it metaphorical at all? I believe that the latter is the case, and that there is nothing metaphorical about its use in conceptualizing love. This critique is not meant to belittle the merits of the cognitive-linguistic approach to metaphor in thought and language. On the contrary, it is intended to illustrate how difficult it can be to decide what counts as a metaphor in thought. Kövecses makes this proposal for a conventional metaphor love is 312

Metaphor

a rapture on the basis of an interpretation of an Emily Dickinson poem that presents love in terms of being drunk; he postulates the existence of an underlying conceptual metaphor love is a rapture as self-evident on the basis of everyday linguistic expressions like ‘I’m drunk with love.’ However, the way in which particular words and expressions in language are related to underlying metaphors in thoughts is highly complex and very difficult to establish in valid and reliable ways (Steen 2007; Cameron and Maslen 2010); it seems that in this case, the analysis is mistaken. By contrast, the idea that being in love is like being drunk seems thoroughly metaphorical to me, simply because the two conceptual domains are distinct, independent and in principle have nothing to do with each other. From the perspective of their (metaphorical) comparison, what they share is that they are both instantiations of rapture. However, this would plead for love is being drunk but does not make love is a rapture a metaphorical mapping. Instead, it is a mapping (if it is one) that signals a form of categorization or class inclusion: love is a form of rapture. The book of poems is quite non-metaphorically supposed to be about the state of being very happy and excited. In language use, the relation between metaphor in thought and metaphor in language is therefore quite tenuous and often difficult to analyse. What happens with some of the other conceptual metaphors for love and their expressions in Rapture? To give an impression of the relation between conceptual metaphor theory and the use of conceptual metaphor in this book of poems, I checked all fifty-seven content words used in the illustrations by Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 49) selectively quoted above. Of these, forty-three do not occur at all in Rapture. Eight do occur, but never as metaphorical expressions about love: ‘dead’, ‘feet’, ‘shape’, ‘mind’, ‘wild’, ‘fled’, ‘relentless’ and ‘ground’. Two conventional metaphorical expressions for love occur in novel applications: ‘the river staring up, lovesick for the moon’ (from ‘Absence’, line 20) and ‘hearing the sea, crazy/for the shore’, (from ‘Love’, lines 9/10). The latter is directly followed by a seemingly related expression: ‘seeing the moon ache and fret/for the earth’. In all three of these cases, a situation in nature is portrayed as if it involves a love relationship between two natural entities: river–moon, sea–shore and moon–earth. The river–moon relationship would involve love is a patient, the sea–shore relationship love is madness, and the moon-earth relationship perhaps a bit of both. If you accept the postulated conventional conceptual metaphors and their related conventional expressions in language, then these are solid manifestations. They are interesting projections by the poetic persona of her own amorous state of mind on her environment, creating three locally prominent personifications that enhance the volume’s overall concern with love. But the most interesting finding is that the volume’s central metaphorical conceptualization of love seems to derive from just one conceptual metaphor, love is magic. Thus, the opening and closing poems both have the word ‘spell’. 313

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

The opening poem ‘You’ sets off the love relationship on a conventional note of love is magic in its very first four lines: Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head, so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name, like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables like a charm, like a spell. The closing poem ‘Over’ does the opposite, concluding the whole volume with the following lines at the centre, emphasizing that the abandoned lover needs to live on without a spell now that love has died: What do I have to help me, without spell or prayer, endure this hour, endless, heartless, anonymous, the death of love? The opening poem ‘You’ reinforces the metaphorical idea that love is magic in line 4 by adding ‘like a charm’, another keyword from Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 49). In fact, ‘charm’ is used five times in the complete volume, the third poem ‘Name’ solidly reinforcing the metaphorical theme set by the first poem as follows: When did your name change from a proper noun to a charm? This link between the lover’s name and a charm is then re-instated in the poem ‘Ithaca’, two thirds into the volume. And then even nature is ‘spelling a charm’ in ‘Your Move’, reinforcing its above-mentioned assistant role in creating an all-encompassing atmosphere of love, this time with an interesting combination between ‘charm’ and ‘spell’ (the latter as a verb meaning something else). The two other linguistic expressions coming from the conceptualization of love as magic concern ‘magic’ (‘the magic hour when time becomes love’, from ‘Midsummer Night’) and ‘trance’ (‘where I watch you entranced’, from ‘Absence’). At first glance, it seems then that language use in Rapture is characterized by one central metaphorical conceptualization of love as magic, other possibilities being ignored (love as a force or as war) or used for specific local and supportive effects (love as a patient or madness). The central conceptualization is quite conventional and is presented as an explicit cross-domain mapping from the very first poem, appealing to our shared cultural knowledge 314

Metaphor

about love that has even become consolidated in familiar everyday language use. Novel uses applying other conventional mappings to natural entities such as the river and the moon or the sea and the shore are interesting local flares of metaphor use; they can be related to other features of the volume in the next section. We will see later that there are other interesting metaphorical conceptualizations of love that we need to attend to, but here we should wrap up this section by returning to the connections with style and other genre features. How do our observations of Rapture’s metaphorical conceptualization of love by means of magic and other conceptual metaphors relate to genre and style? The conceptualization via magic is conventional and presented as such, which is more a reflection of the context variable of domain (this is a typical volume of love poems in literature), the text variable of content (we speak of love in terms of magic and so on) and the code variable of register (this language variety makes use of expected metaphorical mappings in its lexis) than of style (this poet has a predilection for magic metaphors). We can only determine the latter if we can compare this book of love poems to a background of other, similar volumes, either by the same poet or other ones. Only then can Rapture turn out to have a specific style of metaphorical conceptualization of love as well. This would be an interesting challenge for further research.

3 Metaphorical Expression, Genre and Style (‘metaphor in language’) As is suggested by Lakoff and Johnson’s examples quoted above, most expressions of metaphor in everyday language use are of a particular kind, and these also feature in poetic language. Examples in Rapture include ‘… the river staring up, lovesick for the moon, …’, ‘… hearing the sea, crazy/for the shore’, and ‘… seeing the moon ache and fret/for the earth’. Expressions of metaphor typically do not come as similes (‘like a charm, like a spell’ in line 4 of the opening poem) or other explicit forms of metaphorical comparison between one distinct entity and another. Instead, most metaphor in language involves what is called indirect language use (Lakoff 1986; Steen et al. 2010); the theoretical assumption is that words like ‘staring up’, ‘sick’, ‘crazy’, ‘ache’, ‘fret’ all have basic meanings that have nothing to do with love and that these basic meanings function as lexical points of entry to distinct conceptual source domains from which an indirect, metaphorical meaning is derived by means of a cross-domain mapping to the target domain of love. Thus, our knowledge of the domain of madness is supposed to afford a conceptual basis for projecting a corresponding conceptual structure for the domain of love in which we can be metaphorically crazy for our lover: we do strange things, we talk strangely, our minds 315

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

are disordered and so on. This use of ‘crazy’ is indirect language use, since the word involved is supposed to exhibit a metaphorical meaning that is dependent on some prior more basic meaning, all of which is unconscious and automatic and does not require a representation of the source domain as a source domain in the meaning of the utterance. The above utterances simply instruct us to set up an utterance interpretation about nature in terms of love, not in terms of love via madness. This is fundamentally different for similes, which I have analysed as involving direct metaphorical meaning (Steen et al. 2010). Consider ‘like a charm, like a spell’. Here, the meaning of the words in the utterance is not indirectly metaphorical but profiles the relevant source domains of magic directly. We are supposed to think of the domain of magic as a relevant and distinct referential domain in the ongoing text when we comprehend these expressions. Moreover, when we have included the referents ‘charm’ and ‘spell’ as ‘charm’ and ‘spell’ into our representation of the meaning of the utterance, we need to connect them to the referential domain of love by means of some form of comparison, as is signalled explicitly by the two prepositions ‘like’. This is a very different linguistic form of metaphorical expression, even though it does express the same underlying phenomenon in thought, a mapping across two conceptual domains. Recent corpus work has shown that indirect metaphor is massively predominant and that direct metaphor hardly ever occurs (Steen et al. 2010). If metaphor is defined as understanding one thing in terms of something else, this presumably happens indirectly, automatically and unconsciously most of the time, while direct explicit comparison between two distinct domains is the exception. This ubiquity of indirect metaphor has been the reason of the attraction of the cognitive-linguistic approach to metaphor, as it suggests that metaphor may be pervasive in all of our language use but at the same time does its work automatically and unconsciously, presumably affecting our thought in all sorts of subtle but unavoidable ways. This raises the question, then, of how this works for a genre like love poetry, where one might expect more overt linguistic attention to, and play with, these conceptual metaphors. And, on top of this, one poet may do this in rather different ways than another (cf. Lodge 1977; Tsur 1987), which brings us back to the question of metaphor and style. Although I have not been able to perform an exhaustive reliable and quantitative analysis of Rapture, it is clear that it is full of indirect metaphor. What is more interesting here, however, is that it is also full of direct metaphor. A quick count of the number of occurrences of the preposition ‘like’ yields fiftyeight instances in a book of sixty-two pages, with only two non-metaphorical comparisons out of fifty-eight. The noun phrase following the preposition is on average three and a half words long, ranging from one word as in ‘Love loved 316

Metaphor

you best; lit you/with a flame, like talent, under your skin;…’ (from ‘Elegy’) to a maximum of eleven in ‘Then love comes, like a sudden flight of birds/from earth to heaven after rain.…’ (from ‘Rapture’). This means that some 4 per cent of all 6,732 words in the complete volume are involved in simile. This is ten times higher than the average for fiction, which in turn has exponentially more similes than, for instance, academic texts or conversations (Dorst 2011; Herrmann 2013; Kaal 2012; Krennmayr 2011; Pasma 2011). Naturally, these are considerations of register more than of style, and the question of poetic style between poets or even between works of poets has to be left aside here for reasons of space. It should be clear, however, that this is one way how stylisticians can go about determining the contribution of metaphor to style in poetry. It is a small step from simile to so-called ‘A is B’ metaphors. Simile is typically discussed in the literature as going back to the formula ‘A is like B’, and much philosophical and psycholinguistic research on metaphor has adopted this starting point in order to contrast simile to metaphor in the form of ‘A is B’. Two comments are in order. First of all, ‘A is like B’ similes and ‘A is B’ metaphors hardly ever occur in everyday language use. Secondly, all similes in Rapture mentioned just now are not of the allegedly classic ‘A is like B’ form. Instead, they typically comprise prepositional phrases with just the source domain preceded by ‘like’, which then function as an adverbial adjunct to offer a metaphorical comment, often of manner, on the main predication of the clause – as in the lines quoted in the previous paragraph from ‘Elegy’ and ‘Rapture’. Against this background, it is highly relevant that ‘A is B’ metaphors, by contrast, do feature quite prominently in the volume. A striking example comes on the very first page, setting the stage for the volume’s encompassing ambivalence towards the experience of love: Falling in love is glamorous hell; … (from ‘You’) There are even two poems that are entirely built around whole series of ‘A is B’ metaphors. The sixth poem, ‘Haworth’, has five triplets, each of which has a variant of an ‘A is B’ metaphor. Even more spectacular is ‘Absence’, which has a list of audacious comparisons between consecutive elements and moments of the day on the one hand and their projected similarity with the lover or the experienced love on the other. The last eight lines may serve as an illustration of the variety, audacity, beauty and occasional depth of the metaphors: Then a butterfly paused on a trembling leaf is your breath. Then the gauzy mist relaxed on the ground is your pose. Then the fruit from the cherry tree falling on grass is your kiss, your kiss. Then the day’s hours are theatres of air where I watch you entranced. 317

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Then the sun’s light going down from the sky is the length of your back. Then the evening bells over the rooftops are lovers’ vows. Then the river staring up, lovesick for the moon, is my long night. Then the stars between us are love urging its light. (from ‘Absence’) After these two early poems highlighting ‘A is B’ constructions, later local uses in, for instance, ‘New Year’ and ‘Night Marriage’ make for the reader’s recognition of a firmly established stylistic device, promoting the experience of a stylistic pattern. There are other linguistic forms of expression of metaphor that should be considered here, and for an intriguing overview I refer to Goatly (1997). But when it comes to the relation between the expression of metaphor in language use on the one hand and style as a feature of genre on the other hand, the above comments may suffice for present purposes. The observation that this volume is full of ‘A is B’ metaphors and similes is a clear indication that we are dealing with poetry, including love poetry. This could be a typical aspect of register (code) and domain (context), mostly. Again, whether these prominent uses are also due to the style of this volume or Carol Ann Duffy’s manner of writing is a question that can and should be posed but cannot be answered without further comparative research along the same lines as demonstrated in this section.

4 Metaphorical Communication, Genre and Style (‘metaphor in interaction’) One recent development in metaphor research has been the realization that metaphors are not just a matter of thought (conceptualization) and language (expression) but also of interaction (communication, Steen 2008); metaphors are occasionally used as metaphors for communicative purposes, that is, as crossdomain comparisons that are expressed as such so that addressees must pay attention to both target and source domain. Such metaphors are deliberate metaphors, as opposed to all other metaphors that are metaphorical in language and thought but not used deliberately as metaphors in interaction. In fact, the attraction of the cognitive-linguistic approach to metaphor lies in the tenet that most metaphors are not deliberately used as metaphors but work automatically, simply because they are already available in our linguistic and conceptual systems. This starting point launched a revolution in metaphor studies at the beginning of the 1980s but obscured the fact that there always have been metaphors that are deliberately used as explicit cross-domain comparisons that invite people to pay attention to the correspondences between two superficially unlike concepts or domains. 318

Metaphor

All ‘A is B’ metaphors discussed in the previous section are deliberate; they construct identity statements or class-inclusion statements that are clearly false, and by flouting the maxim of quality, they invite addressees to construct relevant alternative interpretations by comparison. The same holds for all similes discussed there; with simile, the intention to use a metaphor as a metaphor is made entirely explicit by the use of a metaphor signal, such as ‘like’. There are other forms of deliberate metaphor that we shall inspect in a moment, but let us first contrast these cases with non-deliberate metaphor use. Consider the following two lines from ‘Hour’: We find an hour together, spend it not on flowers or wine, but the whole of the summer sky and a grass ditch. From a conceptual and a linguistic point of view, the verbs ‘find’ and ‘spend’ are metaphorical. The first verb typically concerns discovering or obtaining concrete things in its basic meaning, here changing a stretch of time into a valuable object that can be discovered or obtained by chance. The second verb is related to the same idea, that time is a valuable object that can be spent on experiencing particular events and emotions. However, neither of these metaphor-related words shows any indication of having been intended to be used deliberately as a metaphor, in the sense of drawing attention to its original source domain as a relevant perspective for the meaning of the utterance. With deliberate metaphor use, by contrast, this is precisely the point: ‘A is B’ metaphors, similes and comparable constructions force the addressee to go to the source domain, represent it as a distinct referential area for the utterance and re-view the target domain concept of the metaphor from that perspective. The first lines of the first poem of the volume explicitly instruct us to see the beginning of this love affair from the perspective of a charm, a spell. Deliberate metaphors are perspective changers, intentionally introducing an alien referential domain into the meaning of the text, whereas non-deliberate metaphors do not. The communicative point of deliberate metaphors is always to instruct the addressee to set up a cross-domain comparison as part of the meaning of the text; non-deliberate metaphors do not have such a communicative point. To see how this analytical angle works, let us search for occurrences of the word ‘love’ and see how these are accompanied by metaphorical expressions around them. Ignoring the two dedicated poems called ‘Love’ and ‘The Love Poem’, I found some twenty-odd immediate metaphorical environments for the noun ‘love’, far outnumbering the immediate environments of ‘love’ that were not metaphorical. Space restrictions forbid exhaustive discussion, but here are some relevant observations. 319

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

One group includes those cases where ‘love’ is personified, portraying love as an agent who has control over people. Here follow examples from three poems, ‘River’, ‘Hour’, and ‘Elegy’: Down by the river, under the trees, love waits for me to walk from the journeying years of my time and arrive. … Then I can look love full in the face, see who you are I have come this far to find, the love of my life. (from ‘River’) Love’s time’s beggar, but even a single hour, bright as a dropped coin, makes love rich. … Time hates love, wants love poor, but love spins gold, gold, gold from straw. (from ‘Hour’) Love loved you best; lit you with a flame, like talent, under your skin; let you move through your days and nights, blessed in your flesh, blood, hair, as though they were lovely garments you wore to pleasure the air. … that love, which wanders history, singled you out in your time? (from ‘Elegy’) What is interesting here is that the personifications become part of a partial narrative frame imposed upon the text as a whole, turning the local metaphor into a device that lends additional coherence to the poem as a whole; the personifications invite extended comparison and analogizing between two domains across the text, which requires dedicated effort in order to construct a complex interpretation that is different than for most other metaphors. In the case of ‘River’, this happens in an almost symbolist setting in which the river may be a symbol for time and life where the ‘I’ persona meets love, who also is the love of her life. In the case of ‘Hour’, there is more of an expository text type based on a metaphorical argument in which the relation between love and time is personified, eliciting an almost metaphysical atmosphere. In ‘Elegy’, we have personification and narrative at a fairly abstract level of conceptualization. In none of these cases would it make sense to deny that the metaphors are intended to be interpreted as metaphors, the contrasts between the abstract nouns and the concrete verbs requiring hard work on the part of the reader to picture a coherent and relevant situation for the texts.

320

Metaphor

A second group comprises cases in which love is not personified but rather made concrete in a physical situation that metaphorically represents love as a mental state that people can be in. This may be relatable to the cognitivelinguistic proposal that mental states, including love, can be metaphorically conceptualized as containers: We passed it, walking and walking into our new love; … (from ‘Swing’) Then the stars between us are love urging its light. (from ‘Absence’) so my love will be shade where you are, and yours, as I turn in my sleep, the bud of a star. (from ‘World’) Note how the first example, from ‘Swing’, involves an indirect metaphor, in that there is no explicit comparison between love and some physical source domain; we have to see that covert conceptual connection via the combination of ‘love’ with the preposition ‘into’. There can be little doubt, however, also given the context of the poem, that there is a deliberate comparison intended between love and a place. In the second and third examples, these comparisons are made verbally explicit by means of the ‘A is B’ constructions, demonstrating how such constructions are clear cases of deliberate metaphor use. A third group turns the default expectation of this volume of love poetry on its head and uses love as a source domain: A century’s heat in the garden, fierce as love. (from ‘Rain’) The urgent fireworks fling themselves against the night, flowers of desire, love’s fervency. (from ‘New Year’) … The fireworks were as loud as love, if love were allowed a sound. … (from ‘Chinatown’) The significance of these cases is to show the persona’s utter obsession with love, such that everything that in everyday life has nothing to do with love but normally helps people to conceptualize love now itself gets interpreted via the reverse relationship. If love is normally conceptualized as heat, this now gives occasion to exploit the reverse direction and conceptualize heat as love. The third example even makes explicit the fact that this kind of metaphorical mapping is counterfactual (‘if love were allowed a sound’).

321

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

This is a playful and innovative, as well as functional, variation upon a conceptual convention that clearly suggests that these metaphors are deliberate metaphors. Deliberate metaphors range from ‘A is B’ constructions and similes to overt metaphorical utterances that have such abstract referents as love as their topic and construct highly deviant situations around them. Other variants include extended comparisons across texts, whether these are symbolist, metaphysical or have yet another character. These are deliberate metaphors, in that they instruct the reader to set up cross-domain comparisons as part of the meaning of the text. They introduce alien perspectives into the text that make the reader rethink the nature of love from the standpoint of, for instance, human agency (personification) or containment (concretization). Such deliberate metaphors work as metaphors in communication, while non-deliberate metaphors typically pass by unnoticed. From a genre perspective, deliberate metaphors are clearly first and foremost features of the domain of literature (including love poetry) and its associated register of literary or poetic language. Their reflection of the content parameter is probably striking, as love is indeed an abstract topic but is not always talked about in these deliberately metaphorical terms. Text structures, text types and even text forms are implicated as well when we have to do extended metaphorical comparison as in a metaphysical or symbolist setting. This may also be an aspect of the rhetoric of the poem, which clearly also contributes to the experience of a rich and complex and even sometimes abstract style of the volume. This may be the dimension where the stylistic role of Duffy’s metaphors becomes most prominent.

5 Conclusion A three-dimensional approach to metaphor in the language use of Rapture hence yields a number of observations that can then be related to an encompassing discourse approach of Rapture by genre, which includes style as one important variable for description. On the dimension of metaphor in thought, we observed that love was mainly conceptualized as magic. On the dimension of language, we saw that the volume expresses metaphorical mappings by means of numerous indirect metaphors, as is to be expected, but also exhibits a high number of similes and of ‘A is B’ metaphors. And on the dimension of interaction, many metaphors were found to have a deliberately metaphorical communicative function, in that they force the reader to pay explicit attention to the source domain as one that offers an alien and interesting and beautiful perspective on the target domain of love. These three dimensions of language use build a complex picture of metaphor in Rapture, which can be partly explained as a matter of style. 322

Metaphor

Style is one variable in the genre of a book of love poems. It can only be assessed if comparative work is done between different books of love poetry by the same or different authors, which unfortunately lies beyond the scope of this chapter. Style would be the individual variation of a work or an author on top of other variation that can be explained by, for instance, the domain of poetry, the content of love poetry or the registers of the language of love and love poetry that can be associated with them. In our analysis, it looks as if the style of conceptualization (love as magic) is rather regular and that, against that background, other moments stood out when the poet used cross-domain mappings for love involving natural elements loving each other. The style of expression, by contrast, does have a prominent feature that clearly belongs to this work and not to every work of love poetry in the same degree, and that is the varied use of rather striking ‘A is B’ metaphors on particular occasions. These are also deliberate metaphors, which adds to the style of communication. It is interesting to note that Carol Ann Duffy herself has commented on her style: she aims for an effect where simple words do complicated things. It is clear that some of the metaphors contribute to this effect. The symbolist and metaphysical examples mentioned above offer appropriate illustrations, just like the condensed ‘A is B’ metaphors. I have presented an approach to metaphor as a feature of style in relation to metaphor in language and thought. Style has to do with genre, while language and thought have to do with language use. My main message has been that we need good models for both. For language use, we should not restrict ourselves to language and thought but should also include interaction and employ a three-dimensional model for metaphor in order to examine its conceptual, expressive and communicative properties. For genre, we should develop a multidimensional model for discourse and include style as one of the variables that have to do with code. Only by bringing the two together can we study metaphor and style through genre.

References Biber, D. and Conrad, S. (2009), Register, Genre, and Style, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, L. J. and Maslen, R., eds (2010), Metaphor Analysis: Research Practice in Applied Linguistics, Social Sciences and the Humanities, London: Equinox. Charteris-Black, J. (2005), Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Deignan, A., Littlemore, J. and Semino, E. (2013), Figurative Language, Genre and Register, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dorst, A. G. (2011), Metaphor in Fiction: Language, Thought, and Communication, Oisterwijk: BOXpress. Duffy, C. A. (2005), Rapture, London: Picador.

323

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Gibbs, R. W., ed. (2008), The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goatly, A. (1997), The Language of Metaphors, London: Routledge. Herrmann, J. B. (2013), Metaphor in Academic Discourse: Linguistic Forms, Conceptual Structures, Communicative Functions, Cognitive Representations, Utrecht: LOT. Kaal, A. A. (2012), Metaphor in Conversation, Oisterwijk: BOXpress. Kövecses, Z. (2010), Metaphor: A Practical Introduction, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Krennmayr, T. (2011), Metaphor in Newspapers, Utrecht: LOT. Lakoff, G. (1986), ‘The meanings of literal’, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 1: 291–6. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980), Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lodge, D. J. (1977), The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature, New York: Cornell University Press. Pasma, T. (2011), Metaphor and Register Variation: The Personalization of Dutch News Discourse, Oisterwijk: BOXpress. Rundell, M., ed. (2002), Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, Oxford: Macmillan Publishers. Steen, G. J. (1999), ‘Metaphor and discourse: Towards a linguistic checklist for metaphor analysis’, in L. Cameron and G. Low (eds), Researching and Applying Metaphor, 81–104, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steen, G. J. (2007), Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage: A Methodological Analysis of Theory and Research, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Steen, G. J. (2008), ‘The paradox of metaphor: Why we need a three-dimensional model of metaphor’, Metaphor & Symbol, 23: 213–41. Steen, G. J. (2011), ‘Genre between the humanities and the sciences’, in M. Callies, W. R. Keller and A. Lohöfer (eds), Bi-directionality in the Cognitive Sciences: Examining the Interdisciplinary Potential of Cognitive Approaches in Linguistics and Literary Studies, 21– 42, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Steen, G. J., Dorst, A. G., Herrmann, J. B., Kaal, A. A., Krennmayr, T. and Pasma, T. (2010), A Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification: From MIP to MIPVU, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Tallis, F. (2005), Love Sick, London: Arrow Books. Tsur, R. (1987), On Metaphoring, Jerusalem: Israel Science Publishers.

324

19

Mind-Style David L. Hoover, New York University

Chapter Overview Introduction 325 Ideological Point of View 327 Satire 329 Horror 330 Characterization 331 Quintessential Mind-style 333 Conclusion 338

1 Introduction Mind-style has been an important concept for stylistics since its initial and often quoted introduction: ‘Cumulatively, consistent structural options, agreeing in cutting the presented world to one pattern or another, give rise to an impression of a world-view, what I shall call a “mind-style”’ (Fowler 1977: 76). Fowler later presents a broader and somewhat different definition (1977: 103): any distinctive linguistic presentation of an individual mental self. A mindstyle may analyse a character’s mental life more or less radically; may be concerned with relatively superficial or relatively fundamental aspects of the mind; may seek to dramatize the order and structure of conscious thoughts, or just present the topics on which a character reflects, or display preoccupations, prejudices, perspectives and values which strongly bias a character’s world-view but of which s/he may be quite unaware. 325

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

After discussing some relatively superficial examples of mind-style, he mentions Halliday’s (2002) now famous analysis of The Inheritors (Golding 1955) and discusses Lok’s mind-style in what have become familiar terms (Fowler 1977: 104–6). Fowler’s discussion of mind-style seems compelling, but his formulation seems overly capacious: treating the topics a character talks about as a mindstyle seems to ignore the high degree to which those are a result of outside forces. Ahab’s fixation on the whale in Moby Dick (Melville 1851) may suggest a mind-style, but Tommo’s preoccupation with the cannibals among whom he finds himself in Typee (Melville 1846) seems unavoidable. Superficial aspects of characters’ minds have largely been ignored in subsequent discussions of mind-style, and prejudices and biases seem more appropriately discussed in terms of characterization or ideological point of view. In their excellent discussion of mind-style, Leech and Short generally accept Fowler’s broad view and discuss a range of mind-styles (2007: 150–67), beginning with relatively normal authorial mind-styles in Steinbeck, Joyce and James, and then turning to unusual mind-styles in Hardy, Faulkner and Powys.1 They end their discussion with the distinctly strange mind-style of Lok in The Inheritors, which they have discussed more fully earlier (25–30), and finally (162–6) Benjy’s mind-style in The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner 1929) (see also Fowler 1996: 168–9). Their emphasis on the importance of distinguishing what the fictional world is from ‘how that world is apprehended, or conceptualised’ (150) has helped to make mind-style a staple of stylistics. Ideological worldview seems inadequate and inaccurate as an approach to Benjy and Lok, whose limited and unusual minds crucially shape how they experience and understand their worlds. Mind-style has been applied to many texts and discussed in many different ways. ‘Mind style twenty-five years on’ (Semino 2007) very ably surveys a variety of these approaches and suggests some remaining problems with the notion of mind-style. Semino mentions the importance of mind and consciousness in narratology, especially ‘fictional mental functioning’: ‘the constructions of the minds of fictional characters by narrators and readers are central to our understanding of how novels work because, in essence, narrative is the description of fictional mental functioning’ (Palmer 2004: 12), and the related ‘cognitive mental functioning’ (Margolin 2003: 277; Semino 2007: 155–7). Semino then effectively links mind-style with other cognitive approaches, revealingly discussing Benjy’s incomprehension of the golf round he describes as an instance of ‘frame-blocking’, but with the added literary effect of estrangement as we realize that the frame is blocked because Benjy’s mind is impaired (158–60).2 Semino and Swindlehurst (1996) have linked mind-style to metaphor, showing that a mind-style can be established by a character’s or narrator’s consistent metaphorical understanding of the world, as when Bromden structures 326

Mind-Style

his world through A PERSON IS A MACHINE in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey 1962). His mental illness results in a concentration of (inappropriate) metaphor rather than in any linguistic limitation. Semino has also shown that Christopher Boon’s inability to process metaphor normally in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Haddon 2003) helps to establish his unusual mind-style, as does his systematic violation of Gricean maxims (Semino 2007: 162–6). Finally, she uses corpus-stylistic methods to collect and characterize some of the linguistic correlates of Christopher’s mind-style (166–8). Most pertinent for my purposes, however, Semino also suggests that the term remains somewhat problematic, concluding that mind-style may be appropriate in some contexts but that ‘the two most central and interrelated aspects which need to be considered are a character’s internal representation of the world they live in (including the minds of other characters) and the workings of a character’s mind’ (169). The internal representation of the world, she suggests, may be more aptly referred to as ‘world-view’ and the latter as ‘fictional mental functioning’ (169). I have suggested that the relationship between the fictional world and mindstyle can be helpfully discussed by considering the four logically possible combinations of normal/abnormal fictional worlds and minds (Hoover 2004: 104). Only the combinations with abnormal minds are relevant to mind-style per se. Benjy’s world is the normal world of early-twentieth-century Mississippi. The Neanderthal world of The Inheritors is marked as abnormal by their preternaturally acute senses and ability to communicate nonverbally by sharing ‘pictures’, but it is sometimes difficult to tell whether the strangeness we perceive is located in the world or in Lok’s mind – a central problem for the combination of abnormal mind and abnormal world. Yet, Leech and Short are certainly right to emphasize the logical distinction between the what versus the how. A bizarre fictional world might cause a mind-style to become abnormal, and the presence of (only) abnormal minds in a fictional world marks it as abnormal, but no necessary connection exists between the abnormality of minds and the worlds they perceive.

2  Ideological Point of View The usefulness of ‘mind-style’ as a critical term can be investigated further by seeing how well it applies to a broad selection of texts. In Darkness and Dawn, two survivors awaken after a very long unconsciousness to a post-apocalypse world inhabited by a ‘horde’ of hideous, bluish, apelike creatures (England 1914: 112): They seem to be part of a nomadic race of half-human things, that’s about all I can tell as yet. Perhaps all the white and yellow peoples perished utterly 327

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

in the cataclysm, leaving only a few scattered blacks. You know blacks are immune to several germ-infections that destroy other races. ... It’s quite possible these fellows are the far-distant and degenerate survivors of that other time.’ ‘So the whole world may have gone to pieces the way Liberia and Haiti and Santo Domingo once did, when white rule ceased?’ ‘Yes, only a million times more so. I see you know your history! If my hypothesis is correct, and only a few thousand blacks escaped, you can easily imagine what must have happened.’ The appalling racism of the characters (and England?) may constitute a kind of mind-style that warps their thinking, but the novel treats this view as transparently true, so that ideological point of view seems more appropriate. The same is true for the equally appalling anti-Semitism in The Picture of Dorian Gray, (Wilde 1891: 71): A hideous Jew, in the most amazing waistcoat I ever beheld in my life, was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. He had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt. ‘Have a box, my Lord?’ he said, when he saw me, and he took off his hat with an air of gorgeous servility. There was something about him, Harry, that amused me. He was such a monster. In both novels, the working of a character’s or narrator’s mind is revealed, but it performs no significant literary work. The pervasive racism constitutes a serious barrier to enjoying the otherwise fascinating Darkness and Dawn for most modern readers (as does its sexism). In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the anti-Semitism is less pervasive and intrusive, and, leaving it aside, Dorian’s corrupt and decadent mind-style seems a promising focus. The Handmaid’s Tale presents a grim and chillingly dystopian imagined future in which an extreme drop in fertility has led to a religious coup and a government that force women who are possibly fertile to act as ‘handmaids’ on the model of the Biblical Rachel, who was barren and gave her handmaid to her husband in order to bear children for her (Atwood 1987: 10): I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed. There’s a lot that doesn’t bear thinking about. Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last. I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolor picture of blue irises, and why the window opens only partly and why the glass in it is shatterproof. It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge. 328

Mind-Style

So. Apart from these details, this could be a college guest room, for the less distinguished visitors; or a room in a rooming house, of former times, for ladies in reduced circumstances. That is what we are now. The circumstances have been reduced; for those of us who still have circumstances. Ideological point of view is probably the more appropriate lens through which to view this book generally, but the unnamed narrator’s persistent word play also suggests a mind-style. Above, we see her rationing her own thought as a self-defence strategy and reinvigorating the trite phrase ‘reduced circumstances’ to make clear (without overtly stating) that the government has reduced the circumstances and could easily eliminate her circumstances entirely. Her frequent reflections on her own behaviour and ways of thinking also reveal her mind-style.

3 Satire Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal might also suggest an abnormal mind-style. What could be less normal than suggesting that superfluous children should be eaten? The satirical intent of the piece, however, tends to block any serious portrayal of a cannibalistic mind-style, and the bitter, satirical authorial mindstyle must be inferred. Compare that with the following passage, narrated by a literally two-dimensional character – a square from the two-dimensional world of Flatland (Abbott 1884: 8–9): Our Professional Men and Gentlemen are Squares (to which class I myself belong) and Five-sided figures, or Pentagons. Next above these come the Nobility, of whom there are several degrees, beginning at Six-sided Figures, or Hexagons, and from thence rising in the number of their sides till they receive the honorable title of Polygonal, or many-sided. Finally when the number of the sides becomes so numerous, and the sides themselves so small, that the figure cannot be distinguished from a circle, he is included in the Circular or Priestly order; and this is the highest class of all. It is a Law of Nature with us that a male child shall have one more side than his father, so that each generation shall rise (as a rule) one step in the scale of development and nobility. Thus the son of a Square is a Pentagon; the son of a Pentagon, a Hexagon; and so on. But this rule applies not always to the Tradesmen, and still less often to the Soldiers, and to the Workmen; who indeed can hardly be said to deserve the name of human Figures, since they have not all their sides equal. 329

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

One of Abbott’s targets in this strange little novel is the Victorian class system, which he satirizes here by implicitly equating it with the Flatland class system based on how many equal sides a person has. (Women are straight lines, the lowest classes Isosceles triangles and the middle class equilateral triangles.) Ideological point of view is certainly important here, and the satire is pervasive, but Abbott also searchingly imagines how a two-dimensional mind might process the world, so that mind-style is also appropriate. The novel features visits by the unnamed narrator to our three-dimensional ‘spaceland’, the one-dimensional ‘lineland’ (in a dream), and to ‘pointland’, which has no dimensions at all (and is naturally inhabited by a single citizen, its king). In lineland and pointland we get brief glimpses of still more limited mind-styles. In spaceland, he struggles with the idea of a third dimension, and, after a personal breakthrough, tries to persuade his guide, a sphere, to acknowledge that still more dimensions must exist.3 Shades of Grey (Fforde 2009), which features a rigid class system based on what colours a person can see, is reminiscent of Flatland and might also repay an analysis based on mind-style. Huck’s first-person narration has a different satiric effect (Twain 1882: 18): The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it. She put me in them new clothes again, and I couldn’t do nothing but sweat and sweat, and feel all cramped up. Well, then, the old thing commenced again. The widow rung a bell for supper, and you had to come to time. When you got to the table you couldn’t go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn’t really anything the matter with them. ... There are non-standard speech features here, and Twain cleverly reveals that Huck does not understand prayer (compare the frame-blocking in the Benjy passage), but his mind is not inherently limited, only ignorant. Mind-style may still be a useful concept here, but ideological worldview seems more appropriate in discussing how Huck differs from the other characters in the novel. Revealing how his mind works helps to satirize the racist society in which he lives.

4 Horror The narrator’s mind in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ certainly seems abnormal, despite his protestations that he is not mad (Poe 1857: 382): It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. 330

Mind-Style

I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture–a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees–very gradually–I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever. Although the narrator’s madness is important to the story, its main function is horror rather than insight into his mind-style, and the same is true for the insane narrator of Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1997). ‘The Country of the Blind’ (Wells 1911) also contains some horrifying moments. A mountain climber named Nunez slides down a slope into an isolated valley inhabited by a race of people who have been congenitally blind for so long that they have forgotten what sight is. Rather than greeting Nunez as a king, as the ironic title suggests, they believe him insane. In one terrifying scene, Nunez tries to escape, only to be tracked by the sounds he makes. He eventually gives up trying to explain what sight is and falls in love, but he is rejected as a suitor by the girl’s father and others because of his insanity. Their proposed solution is chilling (Wells 1911: 563): Those queer things that are called the eyes, and which exist to make an agreeable soft depression in the face, are diseased ... in such a way as to affect his brain. They are greatly distended, he has eyelashes, and his eyelids move, and consequently his brain is in a state of constant irritation and distraction. ... And I think I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order to cure him completely, all that we need do is a simple and easy surgical operation–namely, to remove these irritant bodies.’ ‘And then he will be sane?’ ‘Then he will be perfectly sane, and a quite admirable citizen.’ Wells shows how blindness affects the mental functioning and even the cosmology of the valley people, so that mind-style (along with worldview) seems potentially relevant, if not central. The chief function of revealing how their minds work, however, is to produce a chilling tone.

5 Characterization In many of the passages above, mind-style is related to characterization (surely revealing the styles of characters’ or narrators’ minds characterizes them), but mind-style sometimes seems even more clearly a matter of characterization. In ‘The Adventure of the Norwood Builder’, a frantic young man bursts in, 331

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

announcing that he is ‘the unhappy John Hector McFarlane’, to which Sherlock Holmes responds: ‘You mentioned your name, as if I should recognize it, but I assure you that, beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a Freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you’ (Doyle 1905: 33). One of the chief pleasures of Sherlock Holmes stories is watching his preternaturally observant and logical mind solve the most obscure mysteries, yet his mind and his methods seem to be more usefully considered as memorable characterization than as mind-style.4 Characterization can seem primary even when the mind is much more alien than Holmes’s (Sewell 1895: 18): I had of course long been used to a halter and a headstall, ... but now I was to have a bit and bridle; my master gave me some oats as usual, and after a good deal of coaxing he got the bit into my mouth, and the bridle fixed, but it was a nasty thing! Those who have never had a bit in their mouths cannot think how bad it feels; a great piece of cold hard steel as thick as a man’s finger to be pushed into one’s mouth, between one’s teeth, and over one’s tongue, with the ends coming out at the corner of your mouth, and held fast there by straps over your head, under your throat, round your nose, and under your chin; so that no way in the world can you get rid of the nasty hard thing; it is very bad! yes, very bad! Sewell puts us inside Black Beauty’s mind so that we can imagine what being a horse might be like, but she creates a strikingly human character rather than rendering an inhuman mind-style. (The horse’s worldview is also obviously important.) The same seems true of the alien narrator of The Amulet of Samarkand (Stroud 2003: 3–4): The temperature of the room dropped fast. Ice formed on the curtains and crusted thickly around the lights in the ceiling. The glowing filaments in each bulb shrank and dimmed, while the candles ... had their wicks snuffed out. The darkened room filled with a yellow, choking cloud of brimstone, in which indistinct black shadows writhed and roiled. ... The sulfur cloud contracted into a thick column of smoke that ... hung above the middle of the pentacle. ... There was a barely perceptible pause. Then two yellow staring eyes materialized in the heart of the smoke. Hey, it was his first time. I wanted to scare him. And I did, too. The dark-haired boy stood in a pentacle of his own, smaller, filled with different runes. ... He was pale as a corpse, shaking like a dead leaf in a high wind. His teeth rattled in his shivering jaw. Beads of sweat dripped

332

Mind-Style

from his brow, turning to ice as they fell through the air. They tinkled with the sound of hailstones on the floor. All well and good, but so what? I mean, he looked about twelve years old. Wide-eyed, hollow-cheeked. There’s not that much satisfaction to be had from scaring the pants off a scrawny kid.1 Not everyone agrees with me on this. Some find it delightful sport. ... But it is a risky business. Often they are very well trained. Then they grow up and get their revenge.

1

This passage introduces us to the delightfully sly, satirical, humorous demon Bartimaeus, summoned by a young and inexperienced wizard, and the frequent footnotes contribute to the humour. The emphasis is again less on the demon’s alien mind than on his all-too-human failings, and characterization again seems more appropriate than mind-style as a term for analysis.5

6  Quintessential Mind-style Mind-style seems to apply most naturally and effectively to truly deviant mental functioning like that of Benjy and Lok. Benjy’s first-person narration is a tour de force that is both frequently discussed in terms of mind-style and also nearly unique. Benjy’s limited mind limits his language in clear and definite ways, including under-lexicalization, short sentences, and very simple syntax. As effective as the passage is, the Standard English spelling and punctuation and lack of the non-standard and dialectal forms found in Luster’s speech make it difficult to accept seriously as Benjy’s unfiltered thoughts. (Luster’s speech is generally less deviant than Benjy’s). Its relatively standard features and the poetic quality noted by Leech and Short (166) surely help to account for the novel’s continuing popularity, as does Faulkner’s shifting back and forth from Benjy’s to other characters’ voices and points of view. Lok’s mind is primitive rather than deficient. Golding’s third-person narration shares the under-lexicalization, short sentences, simple syntax and poetic touches of Benjy’s narration, and much of it is also basically Standard English. The shift to the point of view of the modern invaders of the Neanderthal world in the final chapter performs some of the same functions as Faulkner’s use of dialogue and different perspectives, as does Golding’s occasional narratorial intrusion (Hoover 1999: 8–9). It seems crucial that these unusual mind-styles are inherent in the limited mental abilities of the characters and that the limitations are central to the meaning of the novels (as is also true of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time).

333

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Compare Flowers for Algernon, which features a mentally retarded first-person adult narrator hoping for an experimental surgery to increase his intelligence (Keyes 1983: 372–3): progris riport 1 – martch 5, 1965 Dr. Strauss says I shud rite down what I think and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. I dont know why but he says its importint so they will see if they will use me. I hope they use me. Miss Kinnian says maybe they can make me smart. I want to be smart. My name is Charlie Gordon. I am 37 years old and 2 weeks ago was my birthday. I have nuthing more to rite now so I will close for today. progris riport 2 – martch 6 I had a test today. I think I faled it. and I think that maybe now they wont use me. What happind is a nice young man was in the room and he had some white cards with ink spilled all over them. He sed Charlie what do you see on this card. ... I told him I saw a inkblot. He said yes and it made me feel good. I thot that was all but when I got up to go he stopped me. He said now sit down Charlie we are not thru yet. Then I dont remember so good but he wantid me to say what was in the ink. I dint see nuthing in the ink but he said there was picturs there other pepul saw some picturs. Charlie also uses short, simple sentences and simple lexis. But unlike Benjy, Charlie writes his own story, and has serious problems with spelling and punctuation. These, and a few examples of non-standard usage like ‘a inkblot’, ‘remember so good’, ‘I dint see nuthing’ and ‘there was picturs’ reveal his limitations, though they seem less severe than those suffered by Benjy, who presumably cannot write at all. (One weakness in this story is that it suggests a correlation between incorrect spelling and punctuation and non-standard features and lack of intelligence.) As Charlie becomes increasingly intelligent, his language gradually becomes more complex (and correct). At the height of his augmented intelligence, he studies his own case and concludes: ‘The hypothesis here proven may be described simply in the following terms: Artificially increased intelligence deteriorates at a rate of time directly proportional to the quantity of the increase’ (395). What makes this story so poignant is the way Charlie’s language returns to its initial level as the effects of the surgery rapidly fade. Next, consider The Book Thief (Zusak 2005: 4): I could introduce myself properly, but it’s not really necessary. You will know me well enough and soon enough, depending on a diverse range of variables. It suffices to say that at some point in time, I will be standing over 334

Mind-Style

you, as genially as possible. Your soul will be in my arms. A color will be perched on my shoulder. I will carry you gently away. At that moment, you will be lying there (I rarely find people standing up). You will be caked in your own body. There might be a discovery; a scream will dribble down the air. The only sound I’ll hear after that will be my own breathing, and the sound of the smell, of my footsteps. The question is, what color will everything be at that moment when I come for you? What will the sky be saying? Personally, I like a chocolate-colored sky. Dark, dark chocolate. People say it suits me. I do, however, try to enjoy every color I see – the whole spectrum. A billion or so flavors, none of them quite the same, and a sky to slowly suck on. It takes the edge off the stress. It helps me relax. Here Death’s alien point of view is certainly significant, and the emphasis on how his mind works and unusual phrases like ‘a color will be perched on my shoulder’, ‘a scream will dribble down the air’ and ‘a sky to slowly suck on’ make mind-style an appropriate approach. Yet, compared to the cases of Benjy, Lok, Christopher and Charlie, the nature of Death’s mind is less integral to the novel, however appropriate a personified Death may be as the narrator of a book set during the Holocaust. Death’s mind-style is a powerful literary device, but the people whose stories he narrates, rather than the nature of his mind, are the central focus. Finally, two further quintessential examples of mind-style. The first is The Speed of Dark, coincidentally published the same year as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and also featuring a first-person autistic narrator (Moon 2003: 1): Questions, always questions. They didn’t wait for the answers, either. They rushed on, piling questions on questions, covering every moment with questions, blocking off every sensation but the thorn stab of questions. ... If they aren’t going to listen, why should I talk? I know better than to say that out loud. Everything in my life that I value has been gained at the cost of not saying what I really think and saying what they want me to say. In this office, where I am evaluated and advised four times a year, the psychiatrist is no less certain of the line between us than all the others have been. Her certainty is painful to see, so I try not to look at her more than I have to. That has its own dangers; like the others, she thinks I should make more eye contact than I do. I glance at her now. Dr. Fornum, crisp and professional, raises an eyebrow and shakes her head not quite imperceptibly. Autistic persons do not understand these signals; the book says so. I have read the book, so I know what it is I do not understand. 335

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

What I haven’t figured out yet is the range of things they don’t understand. The normals. The reals. The ones who have the degrees and sit behind the desks in comfortable chairs. The focus throughout is on Lou Arrendale’s mind-style – how he copes with the problems caused by his autism (Moon, unlike Haddon, has first-hand experience with autism as the mother of an autistic son). Most of the book deals with the differences between normal people and those with autism from the point of view of the autist, though there are a few brief passages from non-autistic points of view. The novel is set in the nottoo-distant future, when autistic infants have recently begun to receive gene therapy to make them normal. Lou is an adult high-functioning autist with a responsible job finding patterns in data, but like Christopher Boon, he has trouble with metaphoric and other non-literal language. Lou’s generation, born before the new gene therapy, is the last that will face these problems, but the interesting complication is that his employer pressures his autistic employees to undergo an experimental therapy that may make them normal. Lou and his fellow autists have to wrestle with what it would mean to be made normal and whether they would lose their personalities, their memories and their special abilities. This is a fascinating and in-depth exploration of an autistic mind-style. My final example of quintessential mind-style is The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin 1994). This extraordinary science fiction novel chronicles Genly Ai’s visit to the planet Gethen, where the human inhabitants are neither male nor female except during ‘kemmer’, a brief monthly period of intense sexual feeling and activity, when they can become either male or female, so that ‘the mother of several children may be the father of several more’ (91). The novel has been very popular and influential, and a quotation from it, ‘The King was pregnant’ (99), has entered Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (2012). Genly Ai lands in the country of Karhide and is befriended and supported by a Gethenian named Estraven. When he is imprisoned by agents of another country, Estraven helps him escape. As they return to Karhide by crossing a glacier, Ai notices a change in Estraven (Le Guin 1994: 234): We were both silent for a little, and then he looked at me with a direct, gentle gaze. His face in the reddish light was as soft, as vulnerable, as remote as the face of a woman who looks at you out of her thoughts and does not speak. And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. Until then 336

Mind-Style

I had rejected him, refused him his own reality. He had been quite right to say that he, the only person on Gethen who trusted me, was the only Gethenian I distrusted. For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being: who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty: and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance. I had not been willing to give it. I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man. He explained, stiffly and simply, that he was in kemmer and had been trying to avoid me, insofar as one of us could avoid the other. ‘I must not touch you,’ he said, with extreme constraint; saying that he looked away. Le Guin’s novel, one of the most fully realized pieces of science fiction ever written, focuses with great subtlety and power on the profound importance of the very different nature of gender in Ai and Estraven. In an earlier chapter, Estraven has recorded the same moment in his journal, but from the Gethenian point of view (220–1), and the echoes of that earlier account add significance to this one, as do other passages in which the Gethenians think of Ai as a pervert, a sexual deviant because of his single, constant, identifiable gender. In her afterword to the 25th anniversary edition of the book, Le Guin discusses the ‘generic’ ‘he’ that she uses throughout book – a use she no longer considers generic (1994: 287–93). She also experiments with alternatives in a series of appendices. She first prints chapter one of the novel using ‘e’, ‘en’, ‘es’ and ‘enself’ for ‘he/she’, ‘him/her’, ‘his/hers’ and ‘himself/herself’ (295–313), then reprints it again, changing all the gendered nouns like ‘king’ and ‘lord’ to their feminine equivalents and all the pronouns to feminine, noting that the reverse ‘generic’ is also coercive (314–32). She also reprints a version of chapter nine in which she uses her invented pronouns until the characters go into kemmer, then switches to ‘he’ and ‘she’, and then switches back to invented pronouns when kemmer ends (333–8). Finally, she prints a passage that includes the one quoted above but changes the generic ‘he’ to ‘she’ in the final paragraph above, showing Genly’s final full realization of Estraven’s dual nature. These very effective exercises in text alteration are reminders that the exploration of a mind-style may be most effectively pursued by using linguistic deviations, though it need not be. (For a fuller theoretical and practical discussion of text alteration, see Hoover 2004, 2008.) Le Guin has responded to some readers’ complaints that ‘Gethenians seem like men, instead of menwomen’ (Le Guin 1989: 14). She suggests that this is partly because in portraying Estraven she revelled in showing him in so many roles that have historically been predominantly male in our culture, roles like prime minister, prison breaker, and sledge hauler, but regrets that she did not also show her as a mother or in other more traditionally female roles (p. 15). 337

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Le  Guin further regrets that her Gethenians are purely heterosexual and intriguingly remarks that ‘In any kemmer-house homosexual practice would, of course, be possible and acceptable and welcomed’ (14). In 1967, it must have seemed natural that one of a pair of Gethenians in kemmer would become male and the other female: for Gethenians, gender is variable but it is also involuntary, biological and hormonally induced. Le Guin’s revisionist views would require further alterations in the novel to make it conform to modern ideas of socially constructed gender. This is further evidence of the enduring legacy of this daring thought experiment.

7 Conclusion Mind-style remains an important concept in stylistics. It can be created in various ways. Violations of grammatical, lexical or semantic rules are perhaps the most frequently used techniques, but almost any linguistic feature could presumably be used to develop a mind-style, and defective logic, metaphor and other tropes, idiom, or word play can also establish a mind-style, whether combined with linguistic deviance or not.6 That is, the style of the mind can be expressed either directly through its language or indirectly through reports of the character’s actions, beliefs and thoughts. The concept of mind-style can also be applied to a very wide variety of texts. It is most powerfully and effectively applied, however, to narrators or characters with relatively abnormal minds. Superficial mental characteristics or linguistic patterns, prejudice or bias, and even the characteristic preoccupations of characters and narrators can be analysed as mind-style. Yet the term does not seem particularly well-suited to them; other more traditional literary concepts like (ideological) point of view or characterization often seem more appropriate. Even when the mental characteristics of a narrator or character are clearly abnormal, the usefulness of mind-style as an analytic concept may be lessened by the lack of a close connection between the mind-style and the overall significance of the work, especially when the effect is horror, satire or humour. In general, one might say that mind-style is most appropriately applied to texts in which the operation of an abnormal mind is closely related to the meaning or theme, in which abnormal fictional mental functioning has what Halliday has so effectively discussed as literary or stylistic relevance (Halliday 2002). Finally, for me, the most interesting and effective fictional mind-styles are those that are thematically related to our own normal mental functioning, to the nature of humanity itself – mind-styles like those of Lok, Benjy, Christopher Boon, Lou Arrendale and Genly Ai.

338

Mind-Style

Notes 1. Leech and Short later suggest that ‘for a novelist’s mind style to be perceived by the reader as deviant it must presumably be very deviant indeed’ (p. 162). Because authorial mind-style and authorial style are so difficult to disentangle, I will not discuss authorial mind-style further here. After describing the mind-style of the narrators of the late novels of Henry James, Fowler comments, ‘his heroes are so consistently and thoroughly afflicted with the mind-style in question that we begin to suspect it is James’s own’ (1977: 109). 2. Most frame-blocking is less significant and less estranging. For example, when a character in a foreign setting lacks the relevant local schema, ideological point of view seems more appropriate. 3. Leech and Short argue that ‘although mind style is essentially a question of semantics, it can only be observed through formal construction of language in terms of grammar and lexis’ (2007: 151). As Flatland shows, however, the grammar and lexis need not be particularly deviant; an abnormal mind-style can be described rather than reflected in the language. 4. In contrast, Dan Mcintyre (2005) discusses an interesting case of a mind-style partly defined by abnormal use of deductive logic. An extraordinarily intelligent mind is obviously more difficult to depict than a limited one. 5. Bockting (1994) argues that the mind-styles of the Compsons, even Benjy, are revealed mainly in the service of creating fully realized characters. 6. Linguistic deviance need not suggest mind-style: Riddley Walker begins ‘On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.’ (Hoban 1981: 1). The linguistic deviance is important mainly as a way of estranging us from an imagined distant future, and Riddley’s mind seems relatively normal. Estrangement also seems the main function of the deviant language of A Clockwork Orange (Burgess 1962), though studying Alex’s mind-style still seems a promising approach.

References Abbott, E. A. (1884), Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, rev. edn, London: Seeley. Atwood, M. (1987), The Handmaid’s Tale, New York: Ballantine. Burgess, A. (1962), A Clockwork Orange, London: Heinemann. O’Brien, G. and Bartlett, J. (2012), Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 18th edn, New York: Little Brown. Bockting, I. (1994), ‘Mind style as an interdisciplinary approach to characterisation in Faulkner’, Language and Literature, 3 (3): 157–74. Doyle, A. C. (1905), ‘The adventure of the Norwood builder’, in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 31–60, New York: McClure, Phillips. England, G. A. (1914), Darkness and Dawn, Boston: Small, Maynard. Faulkner, W. (1929), The Sound and the Fury, New York: J. Cape and H. Smith. Fforde, J. (2009), Shades of Grey, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Fowler, R. (1977), Linguistics and the Novel, London: Methuen. Fowler, R. (1996), Linguistic Criticism, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Golding, W. (1955), The Inheritors, New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World. Haddon, M. (2003), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, New York: Doubleday.

339

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Halliday, M. A. K. (2002), ‘Linguistic function and literary style: An inquiry into the language of William Golding’s The Inheritors’, in J. Webster (ed.), Linguistic Studies of Text and Discourse, 88–125, London: Continuum. Hoban R. (1981), Riddley Walker, exp. edn, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hoover, D. L. (1999), Language and Style in The Inheritors, Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Hoover, D. L. (2004), ‘Altered texts, altered worlds, altered styles’, Language and Literature, 13 (2): 99–118. Hoover, D. L. (2008), ‘Text alteration as interpretive teaching method: The case of “The Snow Man”’, Style, 42 (4): 468–83. Kesey, K. (1962), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, New York: Viking Press. Keyes, D. (1983), ‘Flowers for Algernon’, in E. S. Rabkin (ed.), Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology, 371–401, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Le Guin, U. K. (1989), ‘Is gender necessary? redux’, in Dancing at the Edge of the World, 7–16, New York: Grove Press. Le Guin, U. K. (1994), The Left Hand of Darkness (twenty-fifth anniversary edn), New York: Walker and Company. Leech, G. and Short, M. (2007), Style in Fiction, 2nd edn, New York: Longman. Mcintyre, D. (2005), ‘Logic, reality and mind style in Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 34 (1): 21–40. Margolin, U. (2003), ‘Cognitive science, the thinking mind, and literary narrative’, in D. Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, 271–94, Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information. Melville, H. (1846), Typee, New York: Wiley and Putnam. Melville, H. (1851), Moby Dick, New York: Harper. Moon, E. (2003), The Speed of Dark, New York: Ballantine Books. Palahniuk, C. (1997), Fight Club, New York: Owl. Palmer, A. (2004), Fictional Minds, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Poe, E. A. (1857), ‘The tell-tale heart’, in R. Griswold (ed.), The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1, 382–7, New York: Redfield. Semino, E. (2007), ‘Mind style twenty-five years on’, Style, 41 (2): 153–73. Semino, E. and Swindlehurst, K. (1996), ‘Metaphor and mind style in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, Style, 30 (1): 143–66. Sewell, A. (1895), Black Beauty, New York, Boston: Crowell. Stroud, J. (2003), The Amulet of Samarkand, New York: Hyperion. Swift, J. (1729), A Modest Proposal, Dublin: Harding. Twain, M. (1885), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, New York: Webster. Wells, H. G. (1911), ‘The country of the blind’, in The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, 536–68, London: Nelson. Wilde, O. (1891), The Picture of Dorian Gray, London: Ward Lock. Zusak, M. (2005), The Book Thief, New York: Knopf.

340

20

Narrative Point of View Joe Bray, University of Sheffield

Chapter Overview Introduction 341 The Epistolary Novel and Internal Perspective 342 Les Liaisons dangereuses 344 Internal Perspectives and the Reader 347 Two Email Novels 348 Conclusion 355

I Introduction Narrative point of view is one of the most complex and hotly debated areas in stylistics. New theories and frameworks in the area continue to be proposed regularly, especially concerning the relationship between point of view and the categories of speech and thought representation. The various different accounts are broadly united though by a distinction between what Franz K. Stanzel calls ‘internal’ and ‘external’ perspective. While the latter ‘prevails when the point of view from which the narrated world is perceived or represented is located outside the main character or at the periphery of events’ (1984: 112), ‘internal perspective prevails when the point of view from which the narrated world is perceived or represented is located in the main character or in the centre of events’ (111). Genette’s introduction of the term focalization slightly complicated this binary, involving as it did a three-way distinction between zero focalization (involving an authorial narrator who is above the world of the action and is able to see into characters’ minds); external perspective (in which the view is limited to that of the world from outside, with no insight into characters’ minds); and internal perspective (in which the view is restricted to that of a

341

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

single character, or reflector) (see Genette 1980). Yet even Genette’s followers have pointed out the inconsistency of this model, noting that he confuses the instance of focalization with the object that is focalized, and that reflector figures must engage in what he calls ‘external focalization’ since they (usually) have no direct access to other people’s thoughts. As a result, they have tended to reinstate the binary opposition that Stanzel outlines; Mieke Bal, for example, contrasts ‘internal focalization’, which is ‘when focalization lies with one character which participates in the fabula as an actor’, with ‘external focalization’, which is when ‘an anonymous agent, situated outside the fabula, is functioning as focalizor’ (1985: 105). This chapter takes a closer look at one half of this opposition: internal perspective. It considers narratives in which more than one internal perspective is present and no single reflector character predominates. Its case study is the epistolary novel, which has traditionally been associated with the representation of one single, usually female, consciousness. With particular attention to an especially complex late-eighteenth-century example of the genre, it suggests that the epistolary form allows for a competing multitude of perspectives. While some epistolary narratives do concentrate on one internal, restricted perspective, others promote a chaotic clash of jostling points of view. In these cases, the reader’s role in untangling the perspectives becomes vital; only he or she can fully appreciate each character’s motivations and machinations. The chapter therefore argues that more account needs to be taken of the work required of the reader in narratives of internal perspective when no single point of view predominates. A contrast between two twenty-first-century novels composed entirely in emails further highlights this distinction in types of internal perspective and demonstrates the ways in which the flexible epistolary genre can be adapted to reflect changing means of communication.

2  The Epistolary Novel and Internal Perspective In most accounts of point of view, the epistolary novel is associated with a limited, internal perspective. Having outlined his distinction between external and internal perspective, Stanzel adds that ‘internal perspective is found in the quasi-autobiographical form of first-person narration, in the epistolary novel, in autonomous interior monologue and where the figural narrative situation predominates in a narrative’ (1984: 111–12). Around his famous and influential ‘typological circle’, ‘epistolary and diary novels’ (including Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa) are located in the ‘first-person narrative situation’ sector, ‘somewhere in the zone between’ novels in which ‘we meet the classic firstperson narrator in whom the narrating self and the experiencing self … are of equal importance’, and those in which ‘the experiencing self almost entirely 342

Narrative Point of View

displaces the narrating self in the reader’s field of vision’ (202). According to Stanzel, the crucial factor in the classification of the epistolary novel is ‘the spatiotemporal and internal, that is, psychological, distance which the correspondent attains from his experience’ (211). This can vary, even in a single novel like Pamela, from ‘one week, about which she gives a condensed report, to the “instantaneous description” of those critical moments in which her pen records the advances of her seducer and tormentor second by second’ (211). This focus on the internal, psychological aspects of the epistolary novel and the association of the genre with the perspective of a single correspondent has been matched by more recent critics. Noting that epistolary narrative participates in the development of what she calls ‘the novel of consciousness’, Monika Fludernik observes that, like the later William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, ‘Clarissa’s letters’ are ‘first-person texts’, in which ‘the perplexities of the experiencing self are elaborated in unprecedented detail’ (1996: 171). In her view, these novels are ‘important in the history of free indirect discourse, providing the first instances of FID for the representation of consciousness in a first-person context’ (171). It is not hard to work out why such a strong association between first-person consciousness and the novel has arisen when the earliest examples of the genre are considered. The work that, in Elizabeth MacArthur’s words, ‘is often said to inaugurate the epistolary tradition’ (1990: 78), the anonymous Les Lettres portugaises (1669) consists of five intense, emotional letters from a Portuguese nun to a former lover, a French officer who has deserted her. After its translation into English in 1678 (as Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier), a number of imitations and sequels followed, and its influence on the development of the novelin-letters was far-reaching; Natascha Würzbach claims that ‘the Portuguese Letters are so stamped with the personality of the passionate nun that they created a fashion which influenced letter-writing for a century’ (1969: xxvii). Subsequent early epistolary narratives that are clearly indebted to the model of Les Lettres portugaises include the first two parts of Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–7), which contain many letters from the anguished Silvia to the unfaithful Philander; and Eliza Haywood’s Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier (1721), which comprises a series of frantic letters from the married heroine to her beloved, in which she veers between excessive passion and equally excessive fear that their liaison will be discovered. The model of the suffering, anguished heroine was also of course important for Samuel Richardson. His first novel, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1741) consists primarily of increasingly desperate letters written by Pamela to her parents, and then, once she has been imprisoned by Mr B., a journal, which she hopes will be read by them. Though there is the occasional letter from her parents in the first volume, Pamela’s perspective almost totally predominates. In Richardson’s next novel-in-letters, Clarissa; or, the History of a Young Lady 343

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

(1747–8), however, the focus is less exclusively on the suffering heroine. The correspondence between Lovelace and John Belford becomes increasingly prominent as the novel continues, providing a counterpoint to that between Clarissa and her friend Anna Howe. Alternative perspectives on the novel’s tragic events are also offered by Belford and Anna, who even correspond with each other towards the end. An even greater number of letter writers is introduced in his third novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4). The exchange between the heroine, Harriet Byron, and Lucy Selby is just one of many; other correspondences include that between Harriet and Sir Charles’s sister Charlotte, that between Charlotte and her elder sister Lady L. and that between Harriet and Dr Bartlett, within which are thirteen letters from the latter detailing Sir Charles’s adventures in Italy and his entanglement with the virtuous Lady Clementina, partly based on transcripts from Sir Charles’s own letters. Following Richardson, the epistolary novel of the second half of the eighteenth century demonstrates the flexibility of the genre further. Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) not only contains an exchange of letters between Mr. Villars and Lady Howard concerning the heroine, to which she is not privy, but also hints of an extensive correspondence that we very rarely see between Evelina and her closest friend, Maria Mirvan. Charlotte Smith’s Desmond (1792) includes not only two parallel sets of correspondences – between the hero and his friend Bethel and between the heroine, Geraldine Verney and her sister Fanny Waverly – but also numerous examples of letters being delayed or crossing with each other, often as a result of the turbulence of post-revolutionary France, where part of the novel is set. Epistolary communication in the novel is so hazardous that characters spend a great deal of time considering how their letters are going to be delivered and then worrying when they do not hear back from their correspondents. When Fanny has not heard for a few weeks from Geraldine, Bethel attempts to reassure her that ‘a thousand circumstances might arise, from winds and posts, to delay [her] letters’, to no avail: ‘Where are you, my dear sister? and how shall I quiet my anxiety about you?’ (2001: 316). Nicola Watson connects such anxiety concerning epistolary correspondence to the political uncertainty of the period following events in France, arguing that ‘letters in the novels of the post-revolutionary years are always liable to go astray, to engage in duplicity and deception, or to circulate out of control, relativizing competing discourses and thus putting social consensus in jeopardy’ (1994: 16–17).

3  Les Liaisons dangereuses The late-eighteenth-century epistolary novel with the most duplicitous set of correspondences was, however, written in pre-revolutionary France. Choderlos 344

Narrative Point of View

de Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) takes the genre to a new height of complexity, achieving, in Helen Constantine’s words, ‘greater variety than any of his predecessors’ (2007: xvii). Aside from the exchange between the novel’s two main plotters, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, is an array of other correspondences, involving, amongst others, the younger lovers Cécile Volanges and the Chevalier Danceny; Cécile’s mother, Madame de Volanges; the married woman who is the object of much of Valmont’s scheming, the Présidente de Tourvel; and his aunt, Madame de Rosemonde. In the tangled, Machiavellian world of the novel, letters are the crucial currency, the primary means of seduction, manipulation and revenge. As Janet Altman notes, ‘the seven major correspondents alternate in the first-, second-, and third-person roles; they not only write but are written to and about. We therefore tend to read any statement with an eye both to the correspondent’s motives and to the reaction this statement is likely to provoke in the addressee.’ (1975: 226). The proliferation of correspondences in the novel leads to the possibility of several different versions of the same event being presented. Valmont’s trip to a nearby village in order to impress the Présidente by paying the taxes of a struggling family is recounted first in his letter to Merteuil (Letter 21), then in the Présidente’s letter to Madame de Volanges (Letter 22), which is based on the account of a servant who, as Valmont knows, followed him to the village. The two different narratives are heavily influenced by, in Altman’s terms, each letter writer’s motives and the reaction he or she is attempting to provoke in his or her addressee. Thus, while Valmont boasts to Merteuil of his cleverness in deceiving the Présidente, the Présidente herself sees the episode as an opportunity to rescue Valmont’s character in the eyes of the sceptical Madame de Volanges. When she afterwards still refuses to see him, Valmont is enraged and writes a long letter of complaint, only to think better of sending it. His reconsideration, as revealed to Merteuil, shows the calculated care he takes over his letters, and their lack of transparency and spontaneity: ‘I got up and read my epistle again. I realized that I had not been cautious enough, that I had displayed more desire than love, and appeared more irritated than dejected. I shall have to write it again.’ (2007: 54–5). Merteuil is also skilled at tailoring the content and style of her letters according to whom she is writing. Her account of her intrigue with Prévan to Valmont in Letter 85 is very different to the way she describes it to Madame de Volanges for public consumption in Letter 87, for example, and after Valmont and Cécile have recounted to her in contrasting ways the former’s seduction of the latter and Madame de Volanges has expressed her concerns about her daughter’s state of mind (Letters 96, 97 and 98), Merteuil writes very carefully considered responses to each, encouraging Madame de Volanges to persuade her daughter not to give up her arranged marriage to Monsieur de Gercourt (Letter 104), chastising Cécile for her scruples and naivety (Letter 105) and congratulating 345

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

and subtly provoking Valmont (Letter 106). Her aim is to encourage the affair in order to take revenge on Gercourt, who had previously betrayed her. She understands very well the purposes that letters can serve if used artfully. Having criticized Cécile in the postscript to Letter 105 for writing ‘like a child’, and saying ‘everything you think and never what you do not think’ (2007: 257), she urges her to be more calculating: When you write to someone, you see, you are writing for them, not for yourself. You should attempt to talk less about what you think and more about what the person you are writing to will wish to hear. (2007: 258) Even this advice is strategic; she is also trying to promote a liaison between Cécile and Danceny and fears that the former might reveal her affair with Valmont to the latter. As Altman has observed, in contrast to ‘the Richardsonian tradition of epistolary narrative, where correspondents generally write to sympathetic confidants before whom they do not have to pose’, Laclos ‘never lets us forget that his correspondents are writing “to someone”’ (1975: 224). Letters in Les Liaisons are also, like those in the late-eighteenth-century English novel, subject to much interception and tampering. Valmont manages, through various subterfuges involving his servant, to get hold of many of the Présidente’s letters, including those to his aunt wherein she confesses her feelings for him; and in order to persuade her to read his, he at one point fakes a Dijon postmark in order to convince her it has been sent by her husband. Both he and Merteuil freely show each other letters to and from Cécile and Danceny, at least until their own relationship turns sour. They also guide the younger lovers with the composition of their letters, with Valmont even dictating Letter 117 from Cécile to Danceny, in which she assures him of her openness and the fact that he can rely on Valmont as a true friend (she and Valmont are lovers by this point). For Valmont in particular, playing with the letter form and its transmission is a source of much amusement. He copies out a letter from Merteuil giving a series of tips on how to end an affair and simply sends it straight to the Présidente, to her great distress, and he also famously uses his mistress’s naked body as a desk to write a passionate letter to the Présidente, revelling in double entendres such as ‘In fact, as I am writing this to you, the situation I am in makes me more conscious than ever of the irresistible power of love’, and ‘I must leave you a moment to assuage a madness which increases every instant, and is stronger than I am.’ (2007: 104). The result is that the letter in Les Liaisons, far from being a ‘portrait of the soul’ (2007: 363), as Danceny naively suggests to Merteuil, is instead a complex site of fakery and deceit. Rather than transparent vehicles for the consciousnesses of their writers, letters in the novel are frequently opaque and designed to mislead. They are not only inflected by the point of view of their addressee 346

Narrative Point of View

and what he or she wants to hear but are also subject to interference on their perilous journey from sender to receiver, such that they are often not read by the person they were intended for. As the multiple perspectives jostle for attention in Les Liaisons, each trying to get their own way with varying degrees of success, letters are crucial weapons that are put to increasingly devious uses in the struggle for power. Merteuil boasts to Valmont in Letter 63 that she feels ‘like the Deity’ on receiving two notes from Madame de Volanges and from her daughter, both expressing the same sentiment (‘It is from you alone that I may hope for consolation’). ‘Is it pleasing, would you not say’, she asks Valmont, ‘to be the only agent of two directly contrary interests?’ (2007: 132). Yet, she is finally undone when the dying Valmont hands her letters to Danceny, just as he had been when she had revealed some of his to the latter. Though at the end of the novel Danceny and then Madame de Rosemonde are in possession of most of the key correspondences that have taken place, for its vast majority only the reader is privy to all the various plots and counter-plots that have been enacted through letters; it is only he or she who sees all the subtle masks that letter writers put on, and all the conflicting perspectives that the epistolary form can generate.

4  Internal Perspectives and the Reader Within narratology, there has been some recognition of the complexity and variety of the epistolary form and the resulting importance of the reader’s role. Focusing on what she calls ‘juxtaposition’ in postmodern narrative, where ‘no unitary perspective can be forced on a text’ (1996: 278), Fludernik notes the influence of the epistolary novel: ‘in so far as it combines several people’s letters and a number of plots and counterplots, [it] approaches a condition of juxtaposition, that is to say of apparent (surface-structure) randomness, that comes close to some of the less excessive games with juxtaposition in twentiethcentury writing’ (279). According to Fludernik, the traditional narratological approaches, such as those of Stanzel and Genette, fail to capture this kind of experimentation with point of view. Pointing to the inability of either to ‘integrate second-person fiction’, she argues that Stanzel’s model in particular ‘cannot terminologically embrace the positioning of narratees in the world of the story or of multiple characters as narrators and protagonists’ (2009: 104). Yet, Stanzel’s approach is perhaps more flexible than some have allowed. Emphasizing the ‘dynamization’ of the oppositions he mentions, he observes that ‘the narrative situation of a novel is constantly subject to modification, from chapter to chapter or from paragraph to paragraph’ (1984: 46–7). The distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ perspective in particular involves a large amount of interpretation, since it ‘directs the reader’s attention to the way in 347

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

which he perceives the fictional reality’ (49). In contrast to the other oppositions of person and mode, that of perspective, according to Stanzel, involves ‘the orientation of the reader’s imagination within the time and especially the space of the narrative, or, in other words, that of the regulation of the spatio-temporal arrangement with respect to the centre or the focus of the narrated events’ (49). He explains further that ‘if the story is presented from within, as it were, then the perceptive situation of the reader is different from when the events are seen or reported from outside’ (49). This emphasis on the importance of the reader’s perception and imagination in experiencing narrative perspective recalls the way in which the reader alone is privy to all the competing points of view in an epistolary novel such as Les Liaisons. Yet although the ‘story is presented from within’, the novel’s complexity ensures that ‘the perceptive situation of the reader’ is not; only an external observer is able to see the full extent of the deceptions and manipulations that the form enables. In discussing ‘character-bound focalization’, her equivalent of ‘internal perspective’, Mieke Bal acknowledges that it ‘can vary, can shift from one character to another. In such cases, we may be given a good picture of the origins of a conflict. We are shown how differently the various characters view the same facts’ (1985: 105). Yet nevertheless, she argues, ‘there usually is never a doubt in our minds which character should receive most attention and sympathy. On the grounds of distribution, for instance the fact that a character focalizes the first and/or last chapter, we label it the hero(ine) of the book’ (105). Though this is true of some epistolary novels, such as all of Richardson’s for example, in others, such as Les Liaisons, the reader’s attention and sympathy are harder to attribute. The proliferation of equally unsympathetic ‘characterbound focalizations’ in this text creates instead a chaos of conflicting points of view, which can only be fully untangled by the reader. In other words, the epistolary novel shows the need for a distinction in the concept of ‘internal perspective’; between examples where a single point of view predominates, even though there may be other letter-writers and correspondences, and those in which a multiplicity of sometimes contradictory points of view jostle for the reader’s attention.

5  Two Email Novels This distinction is highlighted by the contrast between two twenty-first-century novels written in the contemporary equivalent of the letter: email. David Llewellyn’s Eleven (2006) consists of emails sent during the working hours of September 11, 2001, by young corporate professionals in Cardiff. Many of the characters work at a multinational finance company. Matt Beaumont’s e (2000) is set in an advertising agency in London and covers several incident-packed 348

Narrative Point of View

weeks in the life of the company and its employees as they seek to secure new clients and manage to offend most of those they already have. Both are comic novels which experiment playfully with their form, adapting the epistolary genre to take account of the potential variations offered by email, showing both its advantages and disadvantages as a means of communication. Yet, there is a fundamental difference between them that highlights the distinction between two kinds of ‘internal perspective’ that this chapter is attempting to draw. While Eleven has a clearly defined central character, who either sends or receives all the novel’s emails, the reader’s attention in e is spread more widely, and, as the emails somewhat chaotically conflict and contradict each other, there is no single consciousness on which to focus. The first three emails in Eleven are all written by the same character, Martin Davies, detailing the previous night’s drunken activities. One of them also gives an extended account of a dream about his job, involving his manager Sue. Yet none of them is finished or sent; instead they are ‘SAVED IN “DRAFTS”’. Only the fourth email is actually transmitted, as a much-truncated version of the evening’s events is sent to his friend Lloyd Thomas, who works at another financial company: FROM:

Martin Davies (mailto: [email protected])

TO:

[email protected]

SENT:

08:51, Tuesday September 11, 2001

SUBJECT:

Morning!!!

How are you? Missed a good one last night. Lisa almost got into a fight over a tray of curry and chips, and some crazy bloke told us the world was going to end. (2006: 9) Martin’s self-editing here suggests that, like the letters of Valmont and Merteuil in Les Liaisons, the emails of Eleven, or at least those sent by the central protagonist, are not as spontaneous and unpremeditated as might first appear. Throughout the novel, the unsent emails that Martin saves in ‘DRAFTS’ are forms of interior monologue; internal, rambling, often troubled self-reflections. One such message, written after falling asleep in the toilet during his lunch hour, begins thus: ‘I don’t know who I’m even writing this for. Half the time I’m just looking at the reflection of my eyes in the monitor. They look black. Why the fuck did I come back here?’ (2006: 66) The rhetorical question and expletive here confirm Martin’s anger and confusion; as he stares into his computer screen writing to himself, his own dark emptiness is revealed. Other unsent emails reveal hidden desires that he lacks the courage to express openly. For example, 349

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

there are several ‘SAVED IN “DRAFTS”’ emails to his boss throughout the day in which he threatens to quit and expresses his ambition to be a writer. The unsent emails that are ‘SAVED IN “DRAFTS”’ thus establish Martin as the central consciousness of the novel, revealing his anxieties, frustrations and thwarted ambitions. Though there are a large number of other correspondents, including his colleagues, friends in Cardiff and London, and ‘Corporate Communications’ (which sends impersonal work messages), all the emails are either written or received by him; there are no correspondences presented to the reader that he does not see. Though he suspects at times that he is out of the loop as far as his friends’ relationships are concerned, complaining ‘I’m not quite there am I? In the pecking order, I mean’ (2006: 52), the reader is equally in the dark, finding out the often sordid details only as Martin does. The only extra knowledge that the reader holds over Martin, and indeed all the characters, is of course as a result of the date on which the novel is set. As the times at which the emails are sent approach the time at which the reader knows the characters will see and hear about events in New York, they acquire extra meaning of which they are not aware. In the early afternoon, Martin and Lloyd are engaged in an exchange concerning the names for different types of fears, and the final email before any mention of the news, sent from Martin to Lloyd at 14.05, reads simply ‘Then what chance do we stand?’ (2006: 73). Though the date on which the novel is set thus creates a dramatic irony, it is a character, rather than the reader, who has to try to make sense of the sometimes clashing perspectives that the email form generates. Though Martin does not see a television before he leaves work, he is able to piece together what is happening in New York and Washington from what his friends tell him. Part of the novel’s humour lies in the way their accounts are juxtaposed with arguments on more trivial matters and routine messages from his boss and ‘Corporate Communications’, which do not acknowledge that anything out of the ordinary is happening. Martin, who is wrestling with his feelings for a work colleague and an ex-girlfriend as well as trying to deal with a male friend’s declaration of love, feels increasingly confused and bewildered as the afternoon continues, writing one ‘SAVED IN “DRAFTS”’ email that says simply ‘It’s not real’ (2006: 104). Yet, the reader has no alternative but to follow his existential crisis from his perspective and to experience his doubts and fears as he does. The novel ends with a final email sent from Martin at 17:00 to all those with whom he has corresponded during the day, which opens ‘This is my life’ (2006: 129). In Matt Beaumont’s e, in contrast, there is no central perspective on which the reader can focus. The novel opens with an email from the CEO of Miller Shanks, David Crutton, to his PA, but he is a deeply unpopular boss who has a habit of firing his employees. Other characters at the agency are either incompetent, 350

Narrative Point of View

deluded or malicious or a mixture of all three. They include a head of client services, whom everyone ignores; a highly insecure creative director who keeps disappearing; his PA, who tries to soothe him and spy on his enemies; members of the creative team, who spend most of their time getting drunk; various secretarial staff who are continually swapping positions; a harassed personnel director; a series of even more harassed heads of IT; and a well-meaning man in accounts, who takes stationery supplies and fire drills very seriously. Other emails are sent by the US-based president of Miller Shanks Worldwide, Jim Weissmuller; and the CEO of Miller Shanks Finland, to whom David Crutton’s emails are, to his great annoyance, mistakenly redirected. Much of the novel’s humour revolves around the constant jostling for position within the organization and the way characters are perpetually trying to undermine each other. No sooner has Carla Browne been offered the job of PA to the CEO, for example, than her friend Zoe Clarke writes to the head of personnel, Rachel Stevenson, reminding her of an incident involving Carla and an Arabian Airways client, which leads to the following sequence: Carla Browne – 4/1/00, 12.09pm to…

Zoe Clarke

cc… re…

fuck, fuck, fuck, fucking shit, fuck!!!

God, you won’t fucking believe what’s happening!!! Just got an e from stupid bloody Rachel telling me I’m not being offered the job with Crettin any more!!!!! Just because of that stupid thing with the Arabs!!!! It wasn’t my fault – those tequilas were spiked. I honestly thought it was forgotten. Can you believe it?!!!! I feel so humiliated!!!! It’s not that I was going to take the stupid job – who’d want to work for that git anyway?!!!!! It’s the bloody principle!!!! Do you think I can get them for false misrepresentation? Can we go to Bar Zero for lunch? I really need your support right now!!! Cxxx Rachel Stevenson – 4/1/00, 12/11pm to…

Zoe Clarke

cc… re…

job changes

Unfortunately Carla Browne’s move to David Crutton’s office didn’t pan out as we’d hoped. However, David would very much like you to consider the position yourself. Obviously it would represent a big change for you and I’m sure you’d like to talk about it. Perhaps you could give me a call and we can find a time. 351

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Zoe Clarke – 4/1/00, 12.13pm to…

Rachel Stevenson

cc… re…

job changes

On my way!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Zoe Clarke – 4/1/00, 12.14pm to…

Carla Browne

cc… re…

fuck, fuck, fuck, fucking shit, fuck!!!

God, you poor fucking cow!!! This place doesn’t deserve you!!!!!! Got to do some urgent copying now!!!!! The stupid hippie is screaming for it!!!! I’d ask Susi to help, if she wasn’t such a bitch!!!!! See you at lunch – you need a friend right now!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Zxxx (2000: 35–6) While Carla is unaware at this point even that she has been double-crossed, the reader can see the irony of Zoe’s leaping at the opportunity to replace her, which she has created, and then one minute later assuring her of her friendship. The insincerity of her proffered support is partly indicated by her excessive use of exclamation marks (thirty-seven in six sentences) and expletives, both of which mirror Carla’s original email. In trying to accommodate her style to Carla’s, Zoe appears to be trying too hard to be empathetic; her exaggerated attempts to create an affective bond come across instead as crude and false. Throughout the novel, there are frequent such examples of characters stabbing each other in the back and saying one thing to one person and something completely different to someone else. After Jim Weissmuller has praised Harriet Greenbaum and Pinki Fallon in particular for their sensitive handling of the agency’s campaign for the Coca-Cola account, the head of client accounts, Daniel Westbrooke, who is on a shoot with another client in Mauritius, sends a generous response: [email protected] 12/1/00, 5.55pm (9.55pm local) to…

[email protected]

cc… re…

Coke

I cannot tell you how gratifying it is to see Harriet receiving recognition at last. When she joined a couple of years ago, few people rated her, but I saw 352

Narrative Point of View

the spark of something a little special. I must say that David had reservations about my protégée’s ability to manage Coke in my unavoidable absence. I am glad I talked him round. Fostering talent is part and parcel of a head of client service’s job, so thanks are not necessary. Inner satisfaction is its own reward. My very warmest regards and I look forward to seeing you on Sunday, jetlag permitting. Daniel

(2000: 230)

However, to creative director Simon Horne, who is with him in Mauritius, his tone is somewhat different: [email protected] 12/1/00, 6.20pm (10.20pm local) to…

[email protected]

cc… re…

NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES

Your phone is off the hook but we must talk. I am presuming that you have read Jim’s email. I did not become Head of Client Services by not being able to smell a plot. I am in my room awaiting your immediate response. (2000: 232) The formal tone of Daniel’s email to the worldwide president, with its elaborate use of negation and impersonal constructions (‘I cannot tell you how gratifying it is to see Harriet receiving recognition at last’) is thus replaced by a much blunter style in his email to Simon, with shorter sentences and fewer subordinate clauses. As Harriet begins to gain in confidence following Weissmuller’s praise, she starts undermining David, which the reader sees in a series of emails from her to the worldwide president containing passages such as ‘I have thought long and hard before writing to you with this. I have no desire at all to land David in trouble. As I said, he has only the best interests of Miller Shanks at heart, but I believe that his admirable zeal has clouded his judgement’ (2000: 290). In a world that is every bit as Machiavellian, then, as that of Les Liaisons, emails are, like letters in Laclos’ novel, the principal means of plotting against others and gaining power. As in the earlier epistolary text, characters are keen to exploit the possibilities of the form in order to prosecute their own ends. In complaining about the tone of an email from Zoe, Simon’s PA Susi Judge-Davis forwards a copy of it to Rachel, claiming she has ‘emboldened the parts that I 353

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

find the most offensive’ (2000: 105). However the reader, who has seen the original, knows that the bold words have in fact been added by Susi: Zoe Clarke – 6/1/00, 3.16pm to…

Susi Judge-Davis

cc… re…

you two-faced bitch!!!!!!

What the fuck have you been saying to Rachel? She’s just had me down there for fucking half an hour, talking to me about the importance of the job of PA to a CEO! What am I? A fucking idiot? I know how important this job is and I can do it standing on my fucking head which is more that can be said of you, you fucking self-important, precious bitch!!!!!!!! … (2000: 105) In trying to incriminate Zoe, Susi also blind copies David and Simon into her message, so that they too receive the tampered email. This is a frequent strategy throughout the novel. While the feature of email that characterizes Eleven is the ability to save it in ‘drafts’, in e it is the fact that it can be ‘blind copied’ (bcc’ed) and so read more widely than the named recipient(s) is/are aware of. As CEO and the holder of the most power in the London office, David is bcc’ed most often; for example, into Daniel’s email pulling rank on Harriet (2000: 168) and Susi’s email to Rachel complaining about the tone of her new PA Lorraine, which includes a copy of Lorraine’s original email (202). However, these attempts to undermine by appealing to the boss backfire; David reveals to Harriet that he was ‘blind copied on the “misunderstanding”’ (169) between her and Daniel and even congratulates Lorraine on her original email: ‘I have just read your email to Susi, which she kindly forwarded to me. Good work’ (206). As in Les Liaisons, then, characters in e are engaged in constant struggles for power. Email is their crucial weapon; a tool that, if used skilfully, can enhance one’s own position and undermine others. Like letters in Laclos’ novel, emails in Beaumont’s are often deceitful and duplicitous and rarely transparent. The result, as in Les Liaisons, is a somewhat chaotic mix of competing points of view with no single consciousness predominating. The reader alone is privy to all that goes on at Miller Shanks; only he or she can decipher each character’s agenda from their emails and see how they in turn are being connived against. Like the reader of Laclos’ novel, the reader of e has to work hard to understand the relationships between the diverse, conflicting perspectives with which he or she is presented; only from the outside can these clashes, and the humour they generate, be fully appreciated.

354

Narrative Point of View

6 Conclusion The two email novels studied in this chapter suggest then that the term ‘internal perspective’ can be applied to two very different kinds of texts. While David Llewellyn’s Eleven is, following the main tradition of the epistolary genre since its seventeenth-century origins, dominated by one single consciousness that sends or receives all the emails included, Matt Beaumont’s e, in contrast, generates a diversity of equally unsympathetic, clashing points of view, aligning it with Laclos’ masterpiece of pre-revolutionary skulduggery, Les Liaisons dangereuses. In these cases of a conflicting multitude of internal perspectives, the reader’s perception becomes more crucial, since he or she alone can fully appreciate the complexity of the relationships between characters that the letters/emails create. In some instances at least of the epistolary genre, it is only from an external vantage point that the variety of ways in which internal perspectives seek to outdo each other can be understood.

References Altman, J. G. (1975), ‘Addressed and undressed language in Les Liaisons dangereuses’, in L. R. Free (ed.), Laclos: Critical Approaches to Les Liaisons dangereuses, 223–57, Madrid: Studia Humanitatis. Bal, M. (1985), Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans. C. Van Boheemen, Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press. Beaumont, M. (2000), e, London: Harper. Constantine, H. (2007), ‘Introduction’ to Laclos, C. de. (2007[1782]), Dangerous Liaisons, trans. H. Constantine, xi–xxiv, London: Penguin. Fludernik, M. (1996), Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London and New York: Routledge. Fludernik, M. (2009[2006]), An Introduction to Narratology, London and New York: Routledge. Genette, G. (1980), Narrative Discourse, trans. J. E. Lewin, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Laclos, C. de. (2007[1782]), Dangerous Liaisons, trans. H. Constantine, London: Penguin. Llewellyn, D. (2006), Eleven, Bridgend: Seren. MacArthur, E. J. (1990), Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smith, C. (2001[1792]), Desmond, ed. A. Blank and J. Todd, Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Stanzel, F. K. (1984[1979]), A Theory of Narrative, trans. C. Goedsche, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watson, N. J. (1994), Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Würzbach, N., ed. (1969), The Novel in Letters: Epistolary Fiction in the Early English Novel, 1678-1740, Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press.

355

21

Speech and Thought Presentation Speech and Thought Presentation with a Case Study of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse Reiko Ikeo, Senshu University

Chapter Overview Speech and Thought Presentation Models 356 The Text: To the Lighthouse 358 The Corpus Annotation of the Text 359 Discourse Presentation in the Novel 361 Viewpoint Shifting by ‘for’ 370 Conclusion 377

1  Speech and Thought Presentation Models In stylistics, the presentation of speech, thought and writing in narrative has been analysed from the perspective of their effects on the reader. How someone’s speech, thought and writing are presented, as well as what is presented, affects the reader’s interpretation of the presented discourse.1 Vološinov (1996: 116–17) defines what is expressed in presented discourse as an ‘active relation of one message to another’ and states that his concerns are how discourse presentation is received by the reader and how the impression made on the reader is manipulated. In narrative, the key element for answering the questions that 356

Speech and Thought Presentation

Vološinov poses is the interrelationship between the reported discourse, the reported speaker and the narrator. The linguistic and stylistic choices of the author provide the links between these three parties. Because discourse presentation normally involves more than one viewpoint, attitude and speaker, it requires complex processes, and there are a number of ways of constructing it. Bakhtin (1981, 1994) incorporates discourse presentation into a global perspective of intertextuality. The discourse of another person can be introduced either by clearly marking it off from the narrator’s discourse or by indicating that the discourse originates from sources independent of the narrator, even though it is partially assimilated into the narrator’s discourse. How protagonists’ discourse is presented depends on the narrator’s choice of presentational modes, and the modes can be defined to some degree by syntactic and other linguistic patterns and textual/contextual conditions. How someone’s discourse is presented is often explained by classifying it into categories of discourse presentation such as ‘direct speech’ and ‘indirect speech’. Quite a few researchers have placed discourse presentation categories along a continuum according to whether the narrator or the character is speaking or the narrator and the character’s speech is conflated, and, thus, various scalar models were invented. The first scalar model was suggested by Hernadi (1972), which was based on the conventional tripartite scheme that featured direct discourse, indirect discourse and free indirect discourse as three major categories. Unfortunately, it was not able to explain cases outside these three categories. Yet the advantage of this model was its carefully assigned three subcategories of free indirect discourse. Hernadi’s distinction between what was effectively speech and thought presentation was a pioneering scheme, because up until that time, ‘speech’ had been used as a generic term for speech and thought presentation. One of the most influential discourse presentation models was invented by McHale (1978). He put emphasis on how anterior discourse is presented and suggested a systematic scale mainly for speech presentation. The speech presentation model later suggested by Leech and Short (1981) was also similar to this model. McHale, a narratologist, used seven categories and arranged them along a scale from the ‘purely’ diegetic to the ‘purely’ mimetic. McHale’s model is quite efficient in capturing cases that, before his work, had been regarded as peripheral in speech presentation. The remarkable feature of this model is that it introduced a scale that proceeds according to the degree of the narrator’s ‘imitation’ of a character’s discourse, or discoursal mimesis. In contrast to the conventional tripartite models, which consisted of DD (direct discourse), ID (indirect discourse) and FID (free indirect discourse), McHale’s model was capable of describing various distinguishable forms of discourse presentation in its gradational scheme without privileging one category over another. 357

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Although it was innovative and influential, McHale’s scalar system was rarely used in analysing actual cases of discourse presentation. A system that has a scaling based only on the distinction between diegesis and mimesis can account for how a protagonist’s discourse is presented in terms of the relative evaluation of the degree of mimesis, but it fails to give sufficient specification for each category, especially in the more indirect forms. A scaling system that could specify each category not in a relative way but with criteria for distinguishing one category from another was needed in order to describe and analyse discourse presentation with more accuracy and clarity. Leech and Short’s model is most often called upon in describing and analysing discourse presentation because of its systematicity and its wide coverage of discourse presentation types (see Slembrouck 1986; Toolan 1988: 125; Thompson 1996: 504–5). Leech and Short’s model (1981) emphasizes the gradational feature of the categories and fuzziness of the boundaries between them as McHale’s model had done. Although the mimicking of a character’s voice is maintained as the central notion in discourse presentation in fictional texts, the distinction between mimesis and diegesis is replaced by the idea of the narrator’s control over the character’s discourse. The definition of each category in Leech and Short’s model is based on a combination of linguistic evidence and pragmatic functions, which provides a more reliable set of criteria for analysing actual cases. In this study, a developed version of Leech and Short’s model is applied to analyse the discourse presentation in the fictional prose of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and to examine the effects it has on the reader.

2  The Text: To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (TL) depicts the complexity and subtlety of human relationships by presenting multiple characters’ consciousness. If the fabric of a narrative is woven from a plot of events and descriptions of characters’ internal states, the main yarn of TL is the presentation of the protagonists’ inner states and conscious thoughts, which are threaded together loosely by its uneventful plot. The characters’ consciousness and thoughts are presented very transparently, yet realistically, without obtrusiveness. David Lodge claims that literature is the richest and most comprehensive record of human consciousness we have (2002: 10), and thus, it might not be surprising that the depiction of consciousness constitutes the main element of a novel. Nevertheless, the narrative of TL is peculiar in drawing the reader very close to the flow of the multiple characters’ consciousness in a way that other fictional discourses cannot achieve. There should be some linguistic devices that relate one protagonist’s thoughts to another or to narration to construct this narrative structure. 358

Speech and Thought Presentation

TL, published in 1927, portrays a family who stay in the Hebrides on the Isle of Skye on holiday in the 1910s. The novel is in three sections. The first, ‘The Window’, depicts a summer day in the life of the Ramsays and their guests, featuring Mrs Ramsay as the central character. The novel starts with a scene in which the youngest child, James, wishes to visit the lighthouse but is denied by his father. At night on the same day, a dinner party is held at the Ramsays’ summer house. The second section, ‘Time Passes’, is short, and it bridges the time gap of ten years between the first and the third sections. Mrs Ramsay’s death and the deaths of her two children are briefly reported, and the desolation of the summer house is described. The last section, ‘The Lighthouse’, depicts the visit to the lighthouse by Mr Ramsay and his two children, which is finally accomplished ten years after James had initially expressed his desire to visit at the age of seven.

3  The Corpus Annotation of the Text In this study, I will analyse the text of TL, by applying a corpus approach, and examine how the characters’ thought presentation is not only woven into the text but makes up the major component of the narrative. Discourse presentation in the novel was tagged by the annotation system which was created and applied for the Lancaster Speech, Writing and Thought presentation (SW&TP) corpus. The 258,384-word SW&TP corpus is comprised of three genres of written texts: news articles, fiction and biography. The annotation system of the corpus is based on the scales of speech and thought presentation suggested by Leech and Short (1981: 318–51). Details of the corpus, its annotations and findings are discussed in Semino and Short (2004). The SW&TP corpus will be referred to as a reference corpus in the later section. Although speech, writing and thought presentation accounts for a substantial part of any narrative, in TL it is a medium used to construct the narrative worlds and through which the narrative worlds are seen. The text of TL was manually annotated by the use of discourse presentation categories that were applied for the annotation of the SW&TP corpus. The annotation system has three clines corresponding to three modes of characters’ discourse presented in narratives: speech, thought and writing. The main categories of the speech presentation cline and examples from TL (1992[1927]) are shown in Table 21.1. The categories are ordered from top to bottom in accordance with the amount of intervention from the narrator. At the top, NV receives the largest amount of intervention from the narrator and the reported speaker’s discourse is minimally presented, while at the bottom, FDS is the least affected by the narrator’s involvement and the reported speaker’s speech is most vividly presented. 359

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Table 21.1  Speech presentation categories NV

= Narrator’s representation of voice They kept their heads very low, and said things shortly and gruffly (p. 84).

NRSA

= Narrator’s representation of speech acts She was telling lies he could see (p. 94).

IS

= Indirect speech He said aloud he thought he would be off for a day’s walk if the weather held (p. 76).

FIS

= Free indirect speech What was the matter? It was that horrid skull again (p.124).

DS

= Direct speech ‘Poor little place,’ he murmured with a sigh (p. 76).

FDS

=Free direct speech Boots are among the chief curses of mankind, he said (p. 168).

Table 21.2  Thought presentation categories NI

=Internal narration Charles Tansley revived (p. 15).

NRTA

= Narrator’s report of thought acts Suddenly she remembered those little paths on the edge of the cliffs (p. 74).

IT

= Indirect thought For she supposed that he had gone upstairs to work (p. 126).

FIT

= Free indirect thought If only he would speak! (p. 128).

DT

= Direct thought ‘That’s my mother,’ thought Prue (p. 126).

FDT

=Free direct thought Go on reading. You don’t look sad now, he thought (p. 131).

In addition to the main speech presentation categories, reporting clauses such as ‘he said’ are separately categorized as NRS (narrative representation of speech). Since NRS can be attached to either IS, FIS, DS or FDS, it is not included in the scale. Leech and Short’s original model clearly separated speech and thought presentation clines, and the revised version in Semino and Short (2004) observes this principle. Table 21.2 shows the thought presentation categories, which are almost parallel to the speech presentation categories shown in Table 21.1. In annotating the text of TL, I observed the principle suggested by Semino and Short (2004) in most cases, apart from when dealing with an indirect form accompanied by the reporting clause, either in the middle of the reported clause or in the final position preceded by the whole reported clause.2

360

Speech and Thought Presentation

4  Discourse Presentation in the Novel The corpus shows that the major part of the novel is comprised of discourse presentation, particularly thought presentation. Table 21.3 shows the number of cases of speech, writing and thought presentation and cases of narration. In the novel, about half of the tags are of thought presentation occurrences. When the distribution of the three modes of presentation (speech, writing and thought) is compared with that in the SW&TP corpus, as Table 21.4 indicates, the percentages of narration and thought presentation in the novel show a clear contrast. In the fiction section in the SW&TP corpus, 45 per cent of the tags are ‘N’, representing narration, and thought presentation is less than 20 per cent. On the other hand, in TL, thought presentation accounts for about half of the tags (46.8 per cent), and the percentage of narration is only 18 per cent. Although almost half of discourse presentation is the characters’ thought presentation in the text, not all the characters think more than they speak. The corpus shows the frequencies of the characters’ thought and speech presentation. Table 21.3 The number of cases of speech, thought and writing presentation in TL No. of tags (%) Narration

795 (18.0%)

Speech

1447 (32.9%)

Writing

13

Thought

(0.3%)

2061 (46.8%)

Double-tags

85

Total

(1.9%)

4401 (100.0%)

Table 21.4  The percentages of speech, writing and thought presentation in the fiction section of the SW&TP corpus and TL Fiction in the SW&TP corpus

TL

Narration

45.1

18.0

Speech

31.6

32.9

Writing

0.6

0.3

Thought

19.2

46.8

Double-tags

3.5

1.9

Total

100

100

361

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Table 21.5 shows the number of cases of speech and thought presentation that belong to the main characters in the story. The reader is exposed to Mrs Ramsay’s thoughts 1269 times, which is three times more than her speech. On the other hand, the reader sees Mr Ramsay speaking much more often than thinking. Lily Briscoe, who is often observing the other characters, thinks much more than she speaks. William Bankes, a pragmatist and widower, speaks as often as he thinks. Such imbalance between the characters’ speech and thoughts affects the reader’s position: the reader tends to see the other characters and the outside world from Mrs Ramsay’s and Lily Briscoe’s inner point of view. On the other hand, Mr Ramsay and Tansley’s utterances and thoughts are being perceived through more critical eyes, those of Mrs Ramsay, Lily Briscoe and the children. In spite of the fact that the major part of the narrative is comprised of the characters’ thoughts, each individual’s thoughts are woven into the narrative without those thoughts being allowed to disperse incoherently. This is partly because a character’s speech and thoughts often refer to other characters. Aiken (1985: 17) calls such narrative structure of the novel a ‘process of triangulation’, in which the reader constructs the protagonist, Mrs Ramsay, for example, by being given the protagonist’s stream of consciousness, which is sufficiently supplemented by the streams of consciousness of her husband, Lily Briscoe and her children about her. The corpus shows, however, that the central character in terms of the other characters’ interest in and references to is Mr Ramsay rather than Mrs Ramsay. This data supports the judgement that is made by Pearce (1991: 137) that Mr Ramsay is the unifying character as paterfamilias. Table 21.6 shows how many times Mr Ramsay is thought of and referred to by other characters. His wife most often thinks of him, while Lily also frequently observes the man and reflects on his personality. Table 21.5  Occurrences of speech and thoughts of the main characters in TL Speech

Thoughts

Mrs Ramsay

455

1269

thinks

Mr Ramsay

267

186

speaks

Lily Briscoe

111

604

thinks

William Bankes

113

115

almost equally

Charles Tansley

75

55

speaks

Minta Doyle

25

12

speaks

Paul Rayley

43

32

speaks

James

22

108

thinks

1111

2381

Total no. of occurrences

362

Does s/he speak more or think more?

Speech and Thought Presentation

Table 21.6  Occurrences of speech and thought about Mr Ramsay Self

Mrs Ramsay

Lily Briscoe

Thought of

6

63

Spoken of

7

1

13

64

Total

Tansley

Bankes

James

Total

48

0

10

35

162

8

2

5

2

25

56

2

15

37

187

Table 21.7  Occurrences of speech and thought about Mrs Ramsay

Thought of Spoken of Total

Self

Mr Ramsay

Lily Briscoe

Tansley

Bankes

James

Total

10

23

83

14

10

4

144

0

11

8

0

4

0

23

10

34

91

14

14

4

167

Table 21.8  Occurrences of speech and thought about Lily Briscoe Self

Mrs Ramsay

Thought of

9

21

7

6

6

0

49

Spoken of

2

7

2

0

3

0

14

11

28

9

6

9

0

63

Total

Mr Ramsay

Tansley

Bankes

James

Total

Table 21.7 shows that the leading character, Mrs Ramsay, is also thought of and referred to by other characters. Lily Briscoe, Mrs Ramsay’s admirer and observer, thinks of Mrs Ramsay twice as many times as she thinks of Mr Ramsay. Mr Ramsay does not think of his wife as much as she thinks of him. Compared with Lily Briscoe’s references to Mr and Mrs Ramsay, she herself is much less frequently thought of and referred to by the couple. Table  21.8 shows the frequencies of Lily Briscoe being thought of and spoken of. She seems  to be a lonely spinster for whom people have little regard, with the exception of Mrs Ramsay. The frequencies of characters’ speech and thought presentation and how often they are thought of and referred to by other characters can be related to a larger narrative structure. In ‘The Window’, Mrs Ramsay thinks of others, especially her husband, and she is often in the thoughts of the other characters: her family members and guests, Lily in particular. On the other hand, in ‘The Lighthouse’, on the occasion of the family’s visit to the lighthouse ten years later, Mrs. Ramsay, whose point of view and consciousness governed the narrative world previously, is dead, and her consciousness has disappeared. Instead, Lily’s lonely, solitary view remains. This sequence generates a stark contrast 363

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

and leaves a sense of great loss in the reader’s mind. Mr Ramsay’s tyrannical dominance has also diminished due to the distant observations made by Lily Briscoe and his children’s obstinate silence in the face of their father. In the following subsections, I will examine how speech and thought presentations interact and construct the narrative worlds.

4.1  Speech Presentation In speech presentation, more indirect forms are used than direct forms. Table  21.9 shows the number of occurrences of each category in the speech presentation cline. The category with the largest number of occurrences is FIS, which is followed by DS. It is commonly assumed that direct forms of speech presentation are the ‘norm’ for speech presentation as opposed to indirect forms. In fact, in the SW&TP corpus, DS and FDS account for just under 50 per cent of all speech presentation tags in the whole corpus and about 75 per cent in the fiction section (Semino and Short 2004: 67). In fiction, direct speech presentation of characters’ dialogues is important in developing the plot and generating immediacy and dramatization as well as in constructing characters (Semino and Short 2004: 90). However, in TL, characters’ speech tends to be presented more frequently in indirect forms, particularly, FIS. Even for speech-dominant characters such as Mr Ramsay and Tansley, an indirect form of speech is most often applied. Table 21.10 indicates the number of occurrences of the main characters’ direct forms of speech (which include DS and FDS) and indirect forms of speech (which include IS and FIS). The numbers in the brackets in the last row indicate the occurrences of FIS. Table 21.9 The number of occurrences of speech presentation cline in TL Categories NV NRSA IS

41

(2.8%)

180 (12.4%) 76

(5.3%)

FIS

276 (19.1%)

DS

270 (18.7%)

FDS Others

364

No. of tags (%)

77

(5.3%)

 6

(0.4%)

NRS

521 (36.0%)

Total

1447 (100.0%)

Speech and Thought Presentation

Table 21.10  Occurrences of characters’ direct and indirect speech Mrs Ramsay

Mr Ramsay

Lily Briscoe

William Bankes

Charles Tansley

Minta Doyle

Paul James Rayley

Direct speech

115

61

26

17

12

3

7

2

Indirect speech

150

85

39

50

28

14

15

5

(FIS)

(93)

(40)

(27)

(32)

(10)

(7)

(4)

(2)

Two elements of the novel seem to be related to the fact that more indirect forms are used for presenting characters’ speech than direct forms. The first noticeable feature of TL is that the plot is uneventful and static, involving no drastic changes in the status quo or introductions of new characters. ‘The Window’ and ‘The Lighthouse’ describe only a day in the life of the family, and ‘Time Passes’ predominantly consists of narration. In such situations, as Herman (2006) suggests, the characters’ verbalized speech is not the primary means of their communication. The characters are engaged in exchanging highly nuanced illocutionary acts in broader sense-making contexts, into which their conscious thoughts are interwoven when the speaker and the addressee are participants in social activities, such as a wife giving sympathy to her husband or a child protesting his father’s tyrannical dominance. Secondly, each scene is narrated from a particular character’s viewpoint and through his/her consciousness. A certain character’s speech is often filtered through another character’s consciousness or memories. Applying free indirect forms to speech presentation produces the effects of remoteness and vagueness on the ongoing verbal exchanges or a character’s utterances in the past, which hints that the character whose viewpoint is highlighted is more occupied with his/her own thoughts than another character’s speech. Example (1) illustrates how FIS is applied in presenting a conversation between characters from one of the participant’s point of view. After James expresses his wish to visit the lighthouse, his father, Mr Ramsay disagrees because he is sure that the weather will not permit. The mother does not want to disappoint James, and she says she will take small gifts to the lighthouse guard and his family. The majority of the couple’s conversation is presented through FIS, from Mr Ramsay’s perspective. A speech tag is indicated at the beginning of the segment such as ‘’.

stands for a paragraph boundary and ‘N’ stands for narration: (1)

She was trying to get these tiresome stockings finished to send to Sorley’s little boy tomorrow,

365

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

said Mrs. Ramsay.

There wasn’t the slightest possible chance that they could go to the Lighthouse tomorrow,

Mr. Ramsay snapped out irascibly.

How did he know?

she asked.

The wind often changed.

The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women’s minds enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered and shivered;

and now, she flew in the face of facts, made his children hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies.

He stamped his foot on the stone step.

‘Damn you,’

he said. (Virginia Woolf, Lighthouse, 1992: 37) This scene is narrated from Mr Ramsay’s point of view, and the couple’s interaction is sifted through his consciousness, being presented in FIS in the first three segments. Then, in the fourth and fifth segments (NI), the husband’s psychological reaction to his wife’s utterances is first presented by the narrator, who seems to imitate Mr Ramsay’s voice, half humorously and half sarcastically. After the semi-colon, stronger, colloquial expressions such as ‘flew in the face of facts’, ‘utterly out of the question’ and ‘told lies’ more closely reflect Mr Ramsay’s thoughts, which are tagged as FIT. In the last segment, his impulsive, abusive swearing is presented in DS, which suggests that Mr Ramsay’s compulsion no longer allows him to be conscious of his utterances. As the reader is constantly exposed to the characters’ consciousness, Mr Ramsay’s impetuous DS has a strong impact.

366

Speech and Thought Presentation

4.2  Thought Presentation Almost half of the tags in the corpus are related to thought presentation categories. Among them, the number of occurrences of FIT is outstanding. Table 21.11 shows that there are 650 FIT cases, which represent 31.5 per cent of all the cases of thought presentation. The quantitative dominance of FIT is indicated by the number of words that can be attributed to the characters. Table 21.12 shows the number of occurrences and the number of words counted in the IT, FIT, DT and FDT segments of each of the main characters. Almost all the characters’ thoughts are, in most occurrences, presented in FIT, and the combined occurrences carry the highest word count of all the thought presentation categories. Table 21.11  The categories and occurrences of thought presentation in TL Categories

No. of tags (%)

NI

381 (18.5%)

NRTA(p)

126

(6.1%)

IT

138

(6.7%)

FIT

650 (31.5%)

DT

16

(0.8%)

FDT

145

(7.0%)

57

(2.8%)

Others NRT

548 (26.6%)

Total

2061 (100.0%)

Table 21.12  The characters’ IT, FIT, DT and FDT Mrs Mr Lily William Charles Minta Paul James Total in Ramsay Ramsay Briscoe Bankes Tansley Doyle Rayley text IT

42

11

31

8

4

1

4

7

138

words

No. cases

476

113

532

146

40

6

38

107

1819

FIT

No. cases

242

44

214

28

16

3

1

28

650

4334

1079

3631

493

334

23

5

452

11678

DT

No. cases

1

20

3

3

0

0

3

0

16

words

6

322

13

58

0

0

18

0

115

25

20

53

14

1

0

3

11

145

221

322

713

137

5

0

22

77

1621

words

FDT No. cases words

367

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Mrs Ramsay’s consciousness and thoughts are presented in FIT 242 times, having 4334 words in total. One third of words that are found in the FIT segments in the novel can be attributed to Mrs Ramsay. Lily Briscoe, who observes other characters and describes them, has the second largest number of occurrences of FIT. Lily Briscoe’s thoughts are more often presented in direct forms of either DT or FDT than any other characters’ thoughts. Approximately 42 per cent of words found in direct thought presentation are attributed to Lily Briscoe. Thus, the reader is constantly exposed to these two characters’ consciousness, thoughts and viewpoints in ‘The Window’. In ‘The Lighthouse’, however, only Lily Briscoe’s viewpoint is maintained, while Mrs Ramsay’s viewpoint is totally lost. Thought presentation constitutes the major part of the narrative. As mentioned at the beginning of this section, the protagonists often think about others, their behaviours and personalities. Through their thoughts about a character, the reader is able to characterize the protagonist and make assumptions about his/her relationships with others. In (2), Lily Briscoe and Bankes were talking about Mr Ramsay while she was painting outside the Ramsays’ summer house. Then, there comes a silence between them while they are looking at Mrs Ramsay reading a book to her son inside the house: (2)

She now remembered

what she had been going to say about Mrs. Ramsay.

She did not know how she would have put it;

but it would have been something critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness.

Looking along the level of Mr. Bankes’s glance at her,

she thought

that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped;

they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr. Bankes extended over them both. (TL, 1992: 54–5)

368

Speech and Thought Presentation

From this short segment of Lily’s thought presentation, the reader infers about the protagonists and their relationships (1) that although Lily admires Mrs Ramsay, she is sometimes critical of her and her occasional high-handedness, (2) that Lily observes Bankes’s admiration of Mrs Ramsay and she recognizes the quality of his ‘worship’ as being different from a woman-towoman admiration, and (3) that Bankes’s role in their circle is protective and chivalrous. The reader is exposed to such sequences of thought presentation and is forced to wonder how and on what occasions Mrs Ramsay can be high-handed and in what way Bankes admires Mrs Ramsay, because circumstantial evidence in the novel suggested by incidents and happenings is so scarce and limited. The answers to these questions are provided by another presentation of character consciousness. To Lily Briscoe, Mrs Ramsay’s high-handedness is represented in her firm belief that women should marry: (3)

Ah, but was that not Lily Briscoe strolling along with William Bankes?

She focussed her short-sighted eyes upon the backs of a retreating couple.

Yes, indeed it was. Did that not mean that they would marry? Yes, it must! What an admirable idea! They must marry! (TL, 1992: 78) An anecdote of Bankes’s telephone conversation with Mrs Ramsay reveals the way he admires her. The anecdote is presented in brackets: (4)

(‘Nature has but little clay’,

said Mr. Bankes once,

much moved by her voice on the telephone,

though she was only telling him a fact about a train,

‘like that of which she moulded you’.

He saw her at the end of the line Greek, blue-eyed, straight-nosed.

369

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

How incongruous it seemed to be telephoning to a woman like that. The Graces assembling seemed to have joined hands in meadows of asphodel to compose that face.

Yes, he would catch the 10:30 at Euston. ...) (TL, 1992: 34) The verbal exchange between Bankes and Mrs Ramsay on the phone is presented in indirect forms (NRSAp and FIS) while Bankes’s thoughts are presented in direct and free indirect forms. His thoughts are depicted in double layers. At one level, he was overwhelmed by Mrs Ramsay’s beauty, which had been associated with and visualized by her voice. He could not help almost verbalizing his admiration: ‘Nature has but little clay like that of which she moulded you.’ At another level, he was aware of the incongruity between his aroused emotions and the content of Mrs Ramsay’s speech. This second layer is presented in FIT, but his awareness is eventually outweighed by his admiration of Mrs Ramsay’s beauty (‘The Graces assembling...’). The examples (2) to (4) have shown that the relationships between the characters are gradually revealed and implied through the characters’ thought presentation rather than being constructed in the development of the plot or described by the external observer, the narrator.

5  Viewpoint Shifting by ‘for’ In TL, a character’s utterance or a brief exchange between characters triggers the speaker’s, addressee’s and bystander’s emotions, memories and mental associations, and the reader is exposed to the flow of these characters’ thoughts. However, these thoughts do not appear incoherently or at random. One character’s flow of thoughts is connected with another character’s thoughts like a chain,4 and a shift in viewpoint from one character to another occurs very quickly and frequently. Such smooth, quick shifts of points of view from one character to another greatly contribute to generating a naturalistic yet dreamlike quality for the reader by threading each character’s consciousness and thoughts into a narrative structure. Viewpoint shifting includes switching viewpoint from a character to another or a character to the third-person narrator, or from the narrator to a character.5 Even within a character, his/her perspectives can alter from one state to another when shifting from speech to thoughts. This type of shift often involves

370

Speech and Thought Presentation

alterations of time and space, and the third party’s discourse can be embedded in the characters’ discourse. Daiches (1963: 63–73) succinctly explains how characters’ thought presentation and viewpoint shifts are managed in Woolf’s narratives.6 Daiches mentions three linguistic devices. One is reporting clauses such as ‘she thought’, which keep the reader informed of whose thought is presented. The reporting clause tends to be placed either in the middle or at the end of the reported clause in indirect forms of speech and thought presentations, and this contributes to generating cohesion between the reported clause and another reported clause or narration in neighbouring sentences. Another linguistic marker that signals the narrator’s involvement with the character’s thoughts is the pronoun ‘one’. Daiches points out that ‘one imagines’ as opposed to ‘Mrs. Ramsay thought’ suggests a more universal experience that is shared by the narrator.7 The third marker is the conjunctive ‘for’. According to Daiches, this conjunctive is convenient for generating a pseudo-logical sequence in a character’s flow of thoughts, as thoughts and consciousness do not usually proceed in any logical order and yet are connected by intuitive logic in the mind. In the following subsections, I will analyse the use of the conjunctive ‘for’ in relation to the characters’ discourse presentation and examine how the conjunctive helps to shift viewpoints from one perspective to another. ‘For’ is used either as a coordinator or a subordinator and contributes to viewpoint shifting and the presentation of the protagonists’ thoughts. The use of the conjunctive ‘for’ seems to be one of the idiosyncratic elements of the writing style of this novel. As Table 21.13 shows, the subordinator ‘for’ appears 167 times in the 69,199-word text. When this frequency is compared with the one in the fiction section of the BLOB-1931 corpus, which is comprised of texts from the 1920s and 1930s, the log-likelihood of ‘for’ as a subordinator in TL is 134.46. This clearly shows that the conjunctive ‘for’ is overused in TL compared with contemporary fictional texts.

Table 21.13  Raw frequencies of ‘for’ in TL and the fiction in the BLOB1931 corpus and the log-likelihood of ‘for’ TL Frequency of ‘for’ as subordinator Corpus size Log-likelihood

167 69,199

The fiction in BLOB-1931 165 254,526 134.46>15.13

371

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Table 21.14  Occurrences of ‘for’ as a conjunctive in TL ‘For’ as (sub)coordinator

No. of cases which involve shift of viewpoints or the flow of thought

Part I

112 (100.0%)

93 (83.0%)

Part II

9 (100.0%)

3 (33.3%)

Part III Total

46 (100.0%)

36 (78.3%)

167 (100.0%)

131 (78.4%)

5.1  Discourse Presentation and the Conjunctive, ‘for’ The combination of the discourse presentation categories and linguistic features of the text offers a more holistic approach to the examination of shifting of viewpoints and thought presentation. As Table 21.14 indicates, there are 112 occurrences of ‘for’ as a conjunctive in ‘The Window’, and 93 of these cases (representing over 80 per cent of the occurrences) involve more than one discourse presentation category with a shift in viewpoint or the presentation of a fairly long stretch of a protagonist’s thoughts. Out of those 93 cases, 27 are found in section 17, which depicts the dinner party at the Ramsays’. The second part of the novel ‘Time Passes’ has very few occurrences of the conjunctive, and the final part, ‘The Lighthouse’, has 46 cases. Altogether, 78 per cent of the conjunctive ‘for’ are related to viewpoint shifting or presentations of protagonists’ flow of thoughts. There are mainly three types of uses of the conjunctive ‘for’ in the novel. The most frequent type of use is found in the shift in discourse presentation modes. The conjunctive ‘for’ can introduce a shift from narration to a character’s free indirect thought or from a character’s thought to narration. Occasionally, a protagonist’s thought is followed by his/her speech, which is headed by the conjunctive ‘for’. The second type of use of ‘for’ is as a connector within a protagonist’s flow of thought. There might not be drastic changes in discourse presentation categories, but a protagonist’s perspective is different before and after the conjunctive. The third type of application of the conjunctive is when it introduces a protagonist’s thought right after another protagonist’s inner state is presented. This does not occur frequently, but it is notable because it shows quick shifts in viewpoint between multiple characters within a short segment.

5.2  Connecting a Protagonist’s Thought or Speech with Narration It is not unusual that a protagonist’s thoughts are presented in indirect or direct mode of presentation after the narrator summarizes the protagonist’s inner 372

Speech and Thought Presentation

state or emotion. In TL, the conjunctive ‘for’ functions as a marker of the introduction of a protagonist’s thoughts as well as a connector that enhances the smooth shift from the narrative summary of the protagonist’s inner state to his/ her conscious thought. In example (5), immediately after Lily Briscoe’s inner state is roughly presented as ‘she was thankful’, her FIT is introduced by ‘for’. Lily heard from Paul Rayley that Minta lost her brooch on the beach, and Lily wanted to search for the brooch with Paul: (5) She actually said with an emotion that she seldom let appear, ‘Let me come with you,’ and he laughed. He meant yes or no – either perhaps. But it was not his meaning – it was the odd chuckle he gave, as if he had said, Throw yourself over the cliff if you like, I don’t care. He turned on her cheek the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupulosity. It scorched her, and Lily, looking at Minta, being charming to Mr. Ramsay at the other end of the table, flinched for her exposed to those fangs, and was thankful. For at any rate, she said to herself, catching sight of the salt cellar on the pattern, she need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution. (TL, 1992: 111) After her offer to help Paul was ‘cruelly’ dismissed, Lily looked at Minta as she was being ridiculed by Mr Ramsay. Lily desperately needed to heal the wound inflicted on her by Paul and restore her posture. ‘For’ is placed at the beginning of a new sentence, functioning more like a coordinator such as ‘and’ or ‘but’ than a subordinator. The causative connotation of the conjunctive generates a logical sequence between the preceding narrative summary and Lily’s thought. At the same time, the attribution of ‘for’ is ambiguous: it can derive either from the narrator or the character. This ambiguity helps the narrator’s summary of Lily’s mental state of being ‘thankful’ to shift smoothly to Lily’s thought presentation, revealing her strongly conscious thought. The following phrase, ‘at any rate’, represents her attempt not to be bothered by Paul’s cruelty and to change her mood. The viewpoint shift is also vouched for by the reporting clause ‘she said to herself’. This example shows that the conjunctive ‘for’ can connect the foregoing narratorial description of a character’s inner state with the character’s thought presentation implicitly and unobtrusively. By adding ‘for’ at the beginning of a protagonist’s thought, the reader would be unaware of at which moment viewpoints are shifted from the narrator to the character. The conjunctive can introduce either a direct or indirect mode of a character’s thoughts. The conjunctive ‘for’ can initiate a protagonist’s speech after the protagonist’s thought is presented. The conjunctive allows not only a change of 373

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

discourse presentation modes but also a shift of time, space and ontological level to which the discourse event belongs. In example (6), after responding to her husband’s prediction that the weather would not be fine the next day, Mrs Ramsay is thinking of the lighthouse keeper, his family and their desolate life. Sentences are numbered for ease of reference: (6) (1) ‘But it may be fine – I expect it will be fine,’ said Mrs. Ramsay, making some little twist of the reddish-brown stocking she was knitting, impatiently. (2) If she finished it tonight, if they did go to the Lighthouse after all, it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy, who was threatened with a tuberculous hip; together with a pile of old magazines, and some tobacco, indeed, whatever she could find lying about, not really wanted, but only littering the room, to give those poor fellows, who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish the lamp and trim the wick and rake about on their scrap of garden, something to amuse them. (3) For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn? she would ask; and to have no letters or newspapers, and to see nobody; if you were married, not to see your wife, not to know how your children were, – if they were ill, if they had fallen down and broken their legs or arms; to see the same dreary waves breaking week after week, and then a dreadful storm coming, and the windows covered with spray, and birds dashed against the lamp, and the whole place rocking, and not be able to put your nose out of doors for fear of being swept into the sea? How would you like that? she asked, addressing herself particularly to her daughters. (4) So she added, rather differently, one must take them whatever comforts one can. (TL, 1992: 8–9) This paragraph begins with Mrs Ramsay’s DS, addressed to her husband. The second sentence ‘If she finished it’ presents her thought in an FIT mode. Mrs Ramsay is thinking what they could take to the keeper when they visit the lighthouse. ‘For’ in the third sentence introduces Mrs Ramsay’s direct speech, which is not addressed to her husband but is imagined in Mrs Ramsay’s mind. The supposed addressees, her children, are referred to by the 2nd-person pronoun ‘you’. The modality of the reporting clause, ‘she would ask’, indicates the habitual nature of the presented speech. After the second question, her speech in a DS mode is followed by the reporting clause in the simple past, ‘she asked’. In the fourth sentence, which begins with the conjunctive adverb ‘so’,8 the narrative returns to the ontological level of the narrative present, in which Mrs Ramsay is talking with her husband about the visit to the lighthouse. Her speech is presented in DS mode with the subject ‘one’, which generates the 374

Speech and Thought Presentation

effect of distancing herself and generalizing the statement. This example shows that the conjunctive ‘for’ allows not only a switch of discourse modes but also a shift of ontological spaces from the present to the past.

5.3  Presenting a Protagonist’s Flow of Thoughts When a character’s inner state is described and presented in a fairly long stretch, the conjunctive ‘for’ is used not only to thread a flow of thoughts but also to shift the perspectives of the character. In the following example, while Bankes’s thought, sensation, emotion and what he imagines are described, the conjunctive appears twice. Bankes is looking at Tansley at the dinner table, who is speaking eloquently about politics: (7) Probably he will be extremely disagreeable to us old fogies, thought Mr. Bankes, doing his best to make allowances, for he knew by some curious physical sensation, as of nerves erect in his spine, that he was jealous, for himself partly, partly more probably for his work, for his point of view, for his science; and therefore he was not entirely open-minded or altogether fair, for Mr. Tansley seemed to be saying, You have wasted your lives. You are all of you wrong. Poor old fogies, you’re hopelessly behind the times. (TL, 1992: 102–3) After Bankes’s conscious thought is presented in the first clause, his attempt to be tolerant and fair towards Tansley is narrated. The first conjunctive ‘for’ marks a shift from narration to Bankes’s internal state (NI). The conjunctive introduces his physical sensation and ‘jealousy’ for Tansley, which seems to be a feeling habitually associated with the ‘nerves erected in his spine’. Bankes himself might have been unaware of his own jealousy until this moment, and the reader would have no clue as to how to interpret the sequence of Bankes’s thought, his attempt to be tolerant and his perception without the conjunctive ‘for’. The application of ‘for’ provides the segment with an uncontrived shift in Bankes’s inner perspectives and, consequently, gives the segment coherence. The second ‘for’ initiates Tansley’s DS, which Bankes imagines in his thoughts. The conjunctive ‘for’ allows the presentation of Bankes’s psyche to shift from one phase to another. It shifts first from his conscious thought to his physical sensation, then to his jealousy and finally to his imaginary world in which Tansley is criticizing him. Such an apparently effortless shift in a character’s inner state is critical in creating reality and plausibility in the narrative focusing on the characters’ inner worlds. The conjunctive ‘for’ also generates 375

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

a chronological sequence in a character’s thoughts without sacrificing its spontaneity.

5.4  Viewpoint Shifts from One Character to Another In TL, when multiple characters’ speech and inner states are presented simultaneously, they can often be woven into one segment rather than described independently in different segments. Although this sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish one protagonist’s viewpoint from another, the conjunctive ‘for’ can be a subtle marker of the viewpoint shifting. In the following example, William Bankes and Lily Briscoe are talking about Mr Ramsay and his personality. Lily criticizes Ramsay’s narrow-mindedness, and then Bankes responds: (8) ‘A bit of a hypocrite?’ Mr. Bankes suggested, looking too at Mr. Ramsay’s back, for was he not thinking of his friendship, and of Cam refusing to give him a flower, and of all those boys and girls, and his own house, full of comfort, but, since his wife’s death, quiet rather? Of course, he had his work. ... All the same, he rather wished Lily to agree that Ramsay was, as he said, ‘a bit of a hypocrite’. (TL, 1992: 52) The viewpoint is shifted from Bankes in his DS, via the narrator in the reporting clause to Lily in her FIT, and then back to Bankes. It is swift but unambiguous. The conjunctive ‘for’ pragmatically functions as an adversative coordinator rather than a causal subordinator. It could be substituted for ‘but’, deriving from Lily’s viewpoint. In fact, the application of the coordinator ‘but’ would make the viewpoint shift from Bankes to Lily more distinctive: (9) ‘A bit of a hypocrite?’ Mr. Bankes suggested, looking too at Mr. Ramsay’s back, but was he not thinking of his friendship … and of Cam refusing to give him a flower, and of all those boys and girls, and his own house, full of comfort, but, since his wife’s death, quiet rather? Of course, he had his work. ... The adversative coordinator, however, would emphasize Lily’s opposing stance against Bankes and, as a result, make Lily’s flow of thoughts about the children and Bankes’s household look more incoherent than the original. The conjunctive ‘for’ generates a more implicit viewpoint shift and more naturally connects one character’s speech with another character’s conscious thoughts. 376

Speech and Thought Presentation

6 Conclusion This chapter has discussed speech and thought presentation in TL by applying the scalar model of discourse presentation developed by Semino and Short. The combination of the scalar model and the corpus-based approach enabled me to describe the narrative both at local and structural levels. The textual analyses by use of the discourse presentation categories were also useful in identifying viewpoint shifting and revealed how the frequent shifts in viewpoint were managed in the novel. In TL, both speech and thoughts are presented more in indirect forms than direct forms. This is closely connected with the fact that a character’s speech is often presented through another character’s consciousness. As thought presentation is the main element of the narrative, the chapter examined how characters’ thoughts and consciousness are coherently woven into the text. The corpus data clearly showed which characters were ‘thinkers’ and which were ‘speakers’, and thus whose viewpoints the reader is more frequently exposed to. The corpus-based approach also revealed the fact that, although the leading character was Mrs Ramsay, Mr Ramsay was most often thought of by other characters, which underpinned his tyrannical dominance in the narrative world. The corpus has shown that the overuse of the conjunctive ‘for’ is closely related to viewpoint shifting in presenting characters’ speech and thoughts. The conjunctive artlessly bridges the gap between narration and a character’s thoughts or speech. It also allows for multiple perspectives to be presented within a character’s flow of thoughts. In some cases, the conjunctive generates viewpoint shifting from one character to another in a short segment.

Notes 1. I use ‘discourse presentation’ as a cover term for speech, thought and writing presentation. Whenever possible, I will refer to the three modes specifically. 2. In tagging FIS and FIT, a policy that is different from the Semino and Short model was applied. In the SW&TP corpus, an indirect form of speech presentation accompanied by the reporting clause, either in the middle of the reported clause or in the final position preceded by the whole reported clause, is categorized as ‘IS-FIS’, a portmanteau tag that indicates that the segment is intermediate or ambiguous between IS and FIS. Likewise, an indirect form of thought presentation, if it is accompanied by the reporting clause either in the middle or in the final position, was categorized as ‘IT-FIT’.  In my annotation of TL, such cases are categorized by single tags as either FIS or FIT. The inversion of the reporting and reported clauses makes the reported clause syntactically more independent and stylistically more flexible (See Reinhart 1983). Such effects of inversion are exploited in the novel, and their effects are almost equivalent to those of FIS and FIT. Blakemore (2009) further explores the relationship between parentheticals (inverted reporting clauses), and the reported clauses of FIS and FIT in terms of textual effects such as empathy and irony.

377

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

 Another reason the inversion of the reporting and the reported clauses in indirect forms in TL has a more FIS/FIT-like effect than an IS/IT effect is that the reported clause, not the reporting clause, creates textual cohesion beyond the sentential level when the same character’s speech or thought is consecutively presented. Halliday (2004: 447) shows that cohesion between the reported clauses of DS can be created beyond sentential level and the reporting clauses are inserted for the purpose of supporting the cohesion, not due to syntactic rules. In a similar vein, Hartnett (1995: 200) and Torsello (2007: 128) state that the inversion of the reporting and the reported clauses in indirect forms can help to generate cohesion between the reported clause and the neighbouring sentences by downtoning the narrator’s role in the reporting clause. The sub-category ‘p’ stands for ‘topic’ and can be attached to the narrator’s representation of speech act (NRSA) in the speech presentation cline and the parallel category in the thought presentation cline. NRSAp indicates speech act presentation with more detailed information about the topic of the utterance presented. Sotirova (2007) discusses the interactive nature of human consciousness and shows how it is illustrated in TL. In fact, it is not always easy to distinguish a character’s point of view from the narrator’s because the narrator often speaks for and through the characters. (see Auerbach 1953: 463–88; Leaska 1970: 50; London 1990: 144; Torsello 2007: 136). A more detailed discussion of the uses of the conjunctive ‘for’ in viewpoint shifts in TL is found in Ikeo (2014), in which its functions are compared to those of another conjunctive ‘but’. Daiches quotes almost all the examples from Mrs Dalloway when he discusses the linguistic features of Woolf’s novels, and these features are shared by TL. Saunders (1993) discusses the uses of ‘one’ in TL as one of the devices that can fuse ‘self’ with the external world. Matro (1984) discusses the uses of ‘so …’ phrases as a device for restoring the impersonal tone that adjusts a character’s thoughts to the surrounding situation.

References Aiken, C. (1985), ‘The novel as work of art [To the Lighthouse]’, in B. Morris (ed.), Critical Essays on Virginia Woolf, 15–17, Boston: G. K. Jall & Co. Auerbach, E. (1953), Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. Trask, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holoquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Austin and London: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1994), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. C. Emerson and M. Holoquist, trans. V. McGee, Austin: University of Texas Press. Blakemore, D. (2009), ‘Parentheticals and point of view in free indirect style’, Language and Literature, 18 (2): 129–53. Daiches, D. (1963), Virginia Woolf, New York: A New Directions Paperbook. Ikeo, R. (2014), ‘Connectives “but” and “for” in viewpoint shifting in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse’, Langauge and Literature, 23 (4): 331–46. Leaska, M. A. (1970), Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: A Study in Critical Method, London: The Hogarth Press. Leech, G. and Short, M. (1981), Style in Fiction, London: Longman. Lodge, D. (2002), Consciousness and the Novel, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. London, B. (1990), The Appropriated Voice, Ann Arbor: The University Michigan Press.

378

Speech and Thought Presentation Halliday, M. A. K. (2004), An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 3rd edition, rev. C. M. I. M. Matthiessen, London: Arnold. Hartnett, C. G. (1995), ‘The pit after the theme’, in M. Ghadessy (ed.), Thematic Development in English Texts, 198–212, London: Pinter. Herman, D. (2006), ‘Dialogue in a discourse context: Scenes of talk in fictional narrative’, Narrative Inquires, 16 (1): 75–84. Hernadi, P. (1972), ‘Dual perspective: Free indirect discourse and related techniques’, Comparative Literature, 24: 32–43. McHale, B. (1978), ‘Free Indirect discourse: A survey of recent accounts’, PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature, 3: 247–87. Matro, T. G. (1984), ‘Only relations: Vision and achievement in To the Lighthouse’, PMLA, 99 (2): 212–24. Pearce, R. (1991), Politics of Narration: James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. Reinhart, T. (1983), ‘Point of view in Language – the use of parentheticals’, in G. Rauh (ed.), Essays on Deixis, 169–94, Tubingen: Gunter Narr. Saunders, R. (Winter 1993), ‘Language, subject, self: Reading the style of To the Lighthouse’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 26 (2): 192–213. Semino, E. and Short, M. (2004), Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing, London: Routledge. Slembrouck, S. (1986), ‘Towards a description of speech presentation and speech reportage in newspaper language’, in A. M. Simon-Vandenbergen (ed.), Aspects of Style in British Newspapers, Ghent: Studia Germanica Gandensia 9. Sotirova, V. (2007), ‘Woolf’s experiments with consciousness in fiction’, in M. Lambrou and P. Stockwell (eds), Contemporary Stylistics, 7–18, London: Continuum. Thompson, G. (1996), ‘Voices in the text: Discourse perspectives on language reports’, Applied Linguistics, 17 (4): 501–30. Toolan, M. J. (1988), Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, London: Routledge. Torsello, C. T. (2007), ‘Projection in literary and in non-literary texts’, in D. R. Miller and M. Turci (eds), Language and Verbal Art Revisited, 115–48, London: Equinox. Vološinov, V. (1996[1929]), Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. L. Matejke and I. R. Titunik, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Woolf, V. (1992[1927]), To the Lighthouse, London: Penguin.

379

22

Consciousness Representations of Consciousness in Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce: Modernist Experimentations with the Free Indirect Style Eric Rundquist, University of Nottingham

Chapter Overview Woolf 382 Lawrence 387 Joyce 391

Literary modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century was influenced by important developments in the intellectual spheres, from Darwinian evolution to Freudian psychoanalysis and Einsteinian relativity (Wallace 2013), which were coupled with the disillusioning effects of the First World War. The changes in the zeitgeist were reflected in the subject matter of the literature as well as its formal structure. For one, writers desired to break away from the reassuring objectivity of the authorial narrator that characterized third-person narratives during the nineteenth century – what Pascal (1977) refers to as ‘the counterpart of a now discredited providential god’ (132). 380

Consciousness

This resulted in stories that were more dependent on the prismatic, fractured realities of the characters that inhabited them. ‘The truth is bound to reach us in a rather exhaustive and chaotic condition’, wrote Virginia Woolf in one of her critical essays (1924: 22). Modernist novels ‘manifest a general tendency to centre the narrative in the consciousness of [their] characters’ (Lodge 2002: 57), leading critics to characterize them as exercises in ‘psychological realism’ (McNeillie 2010) and as ‘novels of consciousness’ (Sotirova 2013). The deepening interest in psychology and the abandonment of a coherent, objective narrative reality essentially gave modernist writers a licence for experimentation: they would manipulate the linguistic structures of narrative discourse to new extents in order to capture and represent the subjective realities of characters’ minds. In this chapter, I will look at some linguistic techniques employed to this end by three key modernists, Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce, in order to analyse the semantic effects of their experimental styles for the representation of consciousness. A technique that is crucial for all three of these writers is the stylistic category known as the free indirect style, or FIS. FIS can be used in both speech and consciousness presentation (though this chapter will be focusing on the latter), and it is fundamentally characterized by the dual reference of deictic and subjective features to both the narrator and a character, what Adamson (1998) calls ‘the was-now paradox’. Typically, the past tense and third person of narration is combined with deictic adverbs, expressive constructs and subjective and evaluative language that pertain to the character. One basic effect of this dual reference is that it allows a narrative to express a character’s point of view without quoting them. Another important effect is that FIS, because of its paradoxical nature, can easily confuse the attribution of perspective and voice, blending a character’s subjective experience with narration of the fictional world. On the one hand, the style is often only identifiable based on pragmatic inference; on the other, it is often ambiguous as to locutionary agency, that is, which words are produced by the narrator and which, if any, are produced by the character. These ambiguities make the style an ideal technique for both modernist imperatives of undermining the narrator’s objectivity and for accessing ‘the dark places of psychology’ (Woolf 1919: 162). In the presentation of consciousness, FIS evokes a peculiar relationship between the narrative language and the fictional subjects of the narrative. It can be contrasted on the one hand to the quotative function of direct thought presentation, which purports to transcribe the language of a character’s thoughts exactly, and on the other to the descriptive function of indirect thought and ‘dissonant’ psycho-narration (Cohn 1978), wherein the narrator describes the character’s mental activity from an external vantage point. FIS, by maintaining the past tense and third person of narration, distances the language from the character so that none of the words need to have taken shape in their mind. But 381

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

at the same time, because the language is subjectively oriented to the character, the ideas that it expresses or the events that it conveys still seem to emanate, in some way, from the character’s mind rather than from a narratorial vantage point. This means that rather than describing or quoting a character’s mental activity, FIS has the effect of representing it. The representational function allows the style to present the narrative world from a character’s point of view, undermining the narrator’s objectivity and at the same time granting access to the aspects of their minds that do not occur as language, rendering them in the text linguistically.

1 Woolf In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf exploits these semantic properties of FIS in order to create a narrative that is all but devoid of narratorial authority, and which traces the unfolding and multifaceted operations of its characters’ consciousnesses. Her technique for rendering her characters’ minds has become known as stream of consciousness (Humphrey 1954), a term that evokes a conception of consciousness as a dynamic process, and the linear, temporal alignment of the narrative with the character’s subjective experience. It is important not to conflate stream of consciousness with interior monologue, as does Stevenson (1992). Whereas interior monologue is confined to (usually free) direct thought presentation (FDT), as in the ‘Penelope’ chapter of Ulysses, stream of consciousness accommodates both this narrative category as well as the free indirect representation of other aspects of consciousness. In her essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919), Woolf articulates her literary objectives as follows: Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness (161). As we will see, the atoms that fall upon the mind are diverse phenomena, and it is with alterations between consciousness presentation styles, employed within the stream of consciousness technique, that Woolf captures them as such. The following passage from To the Lighthouse conveys Mrs Ramsay’s consciousness as her party eats dinner. (1) Foolishly, she had set them opposite each other. (2) That could be remedied tomorrow. (3) If it were fine they should go for a picnic. (4) Everything seemed possible. (5) Everything seemed right. (6) Just now (but this cannot last, she thought, dissociating herself from the moment while 382

Consciousness

they were all talking about boots), just now she had reached security; she hovered like a hawk suspended; like a flag floated in an element of joy which filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly, not noisily, solemnly rather, for it arose, she thought, looking at them all eating there, from husband and children and friends ... (7) There it was, all round them. (8) It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out. – Woolf, To the Lighthouse 1994 (1927), 75–6 In this passage, Woolf manipulates traditional stylistic techniques to achieve an intricate and analytically problematic representation of consciousness. The discourse shifts frequently and unexpectedly between narrative categories in a manner that challenges our attribution of the language to narrator or character. FIS is the dominant category throughout the passage, but it transitions, in sentences 6 and 8, to FDT. In the same sentences, the narrative also transitions between more and less overt varieties of FIS, allowing it to represent different conscious phenomena that comprise Mrs Ramsay’s mind while she is reflecting on her dinner party. In this section, I will examine how Woolf’s erratic transitions between consciousness presentation categories foreground their semantic effects, leading to a very intricate representation of the character’s mental operations. When brought under the magnifying glass of stylistic analysis, the intrasentential juxtaposition of overt FIS and FDT in sentences 6 and 8 forces us to take into account the semantic differences between the two categories. In terms of the type of thought that a text conveys, FDT has a fairly straightforward semantic effect, whereas FIS is more complicated and ambiguous. Semino and Short (2004) claim, based on an analysis of a literary corpus, that FDT ‘tends to be reserved for cases where it is conceivable that characters could have mentally articulated their thoughts in verbal form’ (118), that is, as inner speech. In the above passage, the FDT does not contain the first-person pronoun, but the present tense at least opens up the possibility that it is an exact quotation of Mrs Ramsay’s verbal thought. And because it is juxtaposed with the past tense of the surrounding FIS, the FDT is foregrounded in the text along with the verbalized nature of the thought it expresses. The semantics of FIS in this regard are much more controversial. Apart from the FDT in the final sentence, all root sentences in this passage (that is, outside parentheticals and parentheses) are what I will refer to in this chapter as overt FIS, meaning, among other things, that it is not ambiguous with narrative report.1 There is a great deal of disagreement in the scholarship about whether overt FIS conveys thought as a purely verbal phenomenon, or as a 383

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

potentially – or necessarily – nonverbal one (see Rundquist 2014 for an overview). The only thing certain about FIS is that it cannot be an exact quotation of the character’s thoughts, because a character cannot plausibly articulate the past tense and third person of narration, even silently. As to which other aspects of the FIS discourse might be lifted from their mental language, if any, the style is decidedly ambiguous. As Cohn (1978: 103) puts it: By leaving the relationship between words and thoughts latent, [FIS] casts a peculiarly penumbral light on the figural consciousness, suspending it on the threshold of verbalization in a manner that cannot be achieved by direct quotation (103). Another way of dealing with this aspect of the style’s semantics is by acknowledging that rather than quoting a character’s thought, FIS represents it, with language that does not necessarily originate with the character. It is therefore possible, if not likely, that thoughts conveyed with FIS are either pre- or semilinguistic in nature. In sentence 6 above, the juxtaposition between FIS and FDT also foregrounds these important differences in their semantics, and it strongly implies that the two styles convey different levels of verbality in the thoughts that are expressed: the FDT is verbal, whereas the FIS represents thoughts that are not fully articulated in Mrs Ramsay’s mind. The semantic implications of these thought presentation categories can be applied to a more hermeneutic effort at understanding the mechanisms of Mrs  Ramsay’s consciousness. Throughout the entire passage, the thoughts represented with FIS are a cohesive continuation of the same tone and subject ­matter. However, the FDT within the parenthetical in sentence 6 has a markedly different semantic prosody. The FIS that surrounds it is highly positive: it shows Mrs Ramsay exaggerating the perfection of the situation (‘everything seemed right’), and it goes on to glorify her heightened emotional state (‘she hovered like a hawk suspended’). The FDT in 6, on the other hand, is decidedly negative (‘but this cannot last’), contradicting the FIS by recognizing the fleetingness of the situation. The stylistic differences in how these thoughts are presented give the impression that they are not just contradictory in tone, but are also of a different phenomenological nature. The cohesively linked FIS discourse, representing pre-verbal or semi-verbal mental activity, is interrupted by FDT, giving the impression that a coherent, verbalized sentence surfaces in Mrs Ramsay’s mind. It is as if the words occur unsolicited, and they remind her that her moment of bliss is fleeting. But rather than reflect on these cynical words that seem to come out of nowhere, she returns to her former line, and type, of thought. This reactivated FIS discourse even indirectly rebukes the FDT words with ideas about ‘security’ and ‘eternity’. 384

Consciousness

The FIS conveys Mrs Ramsay’s affirmation of both her own mental state and her dinner party, and it continues until the middle of sentence 8, where the text shifts again to FDT (‘there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out’). This time, unlike in 6, the FDT does not seem to come out of nowhere, interrupting her cohesive line of thought, nor does it alter the positive tone of Mrs Ramsay’s reflection. Rather, this transition to prolonged FDT gives the impression that she is putting her non- or semi-verbal sentiments into coherent language. The verb of cognition ‘meant’ in the attributive parenthetical reinforces this impression by indicating that she is revising her language, trying to find the right phrase to capture her ideas. In other words, she is attempting to solidify the euphoric sensations of the moment by putting them into language. Later in the novel, the reader discovers that the stable fabric of this social group, which Mrs Ramsay believed ‘partook of eternity’ and was ‘immune from change’, is in fact transient in more ways than one: she dies, her son dies, and Paul and Minta’s engagement, the main instigator of her joy during the dinner party, turns into a sour marriage. In the above passage, Mrs Ramsay’s mind can be seen clinging to the idealism of a blissful moment and ignoring the disillusioning voice that undesirably bubbles to the surface of her awareness. It is an intricate mental operation that Woolf effectively captures in her narrative by experimentally manipulating style; specifically, through strategic transitions between the consciousness presentation techniques of FDT and overt FIS. Apart from those two transitions to FDT, overt FIS representations of Mrs Ramsay’s reflective thought are also frequently interrupted by a more subtle variety of FIS, known, among other names, as represented perception (Brinton 1980). In sentences 7 and 8, represented perception occurs within attributive parentheticals, where the root sentences are overt FIS: 7: ‘... for it arose, she thought, looking at them all eating there, from husband and children and friends’; 8: ‘It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity’. The root sentences (bold) are identifiable as overt FIS not only because they contain unsubordinated subjective and expressive features, but also because they are specifically attributed to Mrs Ramsay’s thought with verbs of cognition in the parentheticals (‘she thought’ and ‘she felt’). At first glance, the language in these parentheticals (underlined) is just objective narratorial discourse that contextualizes her thought, telling the reader what she is doing while she is thinking. But upon closer examination, these parentheticals also contain unsubordinated subjective features that are oriented to Mrs Ramsay. 385

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

In 7, the pronoun-plus-quantifier (‘them all’) and the adverb (‘there’) are deictic features that strongly imply exophoric reference and therefore Mrs Ramsay’s point of view. Similarly, in 8, the unsubordinated evaluative noun phrase ‘a specially tender piece’ is more easily naturalized as an expression of the character’s subjectivity than the narrator’s. As a result of these features, the fictional world is expressed as Mrs Ramsay perceives it rather than from an objective narratorial vantage point. Thus, the narrative discourse is a type of FIS that represents her perception, an aspect of her consciousness that is distinct from the reflective thought represented with the more overt variety of the style. Represented perception exhibits the fundamental linguistic characteristic of FIS: the unsubordinated expression of the character’s subjectivity within the past tense and third-person discourse of narration. What distinguishes it stylistically from overt FIS is that it does not usually contain expressive constructions, like exclamations and direct questions, and therefore does not implicate the character in acts of reflective thought (Pallarés-García 2012). Such constructions are what give the impression that overt FIS represents a character’s thoughts ‘on the threshold of verbalisation’, as Cohn puts it. The FIS features in represented perception are usually confined to unsubordinated subjective features like deictics and evaluation. This more subtle characterization allows it to access what Banfield calls a character’s ‘nonreflective consciousness’ (1982). Moreover, by depicting events in the fictional world from a character’s perspective, represented perception allows writers to convey narrative action without implying the vantage point of an objective narrator. In ‘Modern Fiction’, Woolf claims that ‘everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss’ (164). In To the Lighthouse, the rapid fluctuations between different styles of consciousness presentation are precisely what allow Woolf to express the various qualities of her characters’ minds, tracing their multi-levelled streams of consciousness as they unfold dynamically in the fictional world. Of the techniques of modernist writers, Woolf’s is probably the foremost in achieving ‘psychological realism’ and also in minimizing the presence of an objective narratorial agent within the narrative. Woolf proclaims that the primary purpose of the novel is to ‘express character’ (1924: 9), and that the ‘myriad impressions’ of consciousness should be conveyed ‘with as little of the alien as possible’ (1919: 160). Rejecting the formal techniques of realism that centred narratives in the ‘objective’ reality of an authorial narrator, Woolf confines her narratives to her characters’ minds in such a way that ‘there is no room for an omniscient narrator in the text’ (Sotirova 2007: 8). Instead, all the discourse either transcribes or represents different aspects of her characters’ consciousness.2 386

Consciousness

2 Lawrence D. H. Lawrence, by comparison, was unwilling to turn his narratives over completely to his characters’ subjectivities. Stevens (2007) explains that this characteristic of Woolf’s ‘serious’ modernism derive[s] from and propagate[s] the self-consciousness which Lawrence regards as a problem with modern culture ... an awareness of the self as separated from the natural world, [evoking] dualisms and harsh delineation of subject and object. (137) In this section, I will examine how Lawrence’s deployment of FIS, while perhaps less experimental than Woolf’s, is in one way more problematic for analysis. Rather than simply refracting narration through his characters’ perspectives and effacing the narrator entirely, Lawrence often blurs the boundaries between subjective and objective vantage points on a character’s mind. This means that the relationship between the narrative discourse and the fictional subjects is more difficult to pinpoint, and that it is often necessary to acknowledge a multiplicity of perspectives working simultaneously. The following passage from The Rainbow conveys the experiences of a secondary character, Skrebensky, over an extended period of time during which he is separated from his fiancée. (1) He went on, disposing of her. (2) If only he could be with her! (3) All he wanted now was to marry her, to be sure of her. (4) Yet all the time he was perfectly, perfectly hopeless, cold, extinct, without emotion or connection. ... (5) He only became happy when he drank, and he drank a good deal. (6) Then he was just the opposite to what he had been. (7) He became a warm, diffuse, glowing cloud, in a warm, diffuse, aerial world. (8) He was one with everything, in a diffuse formless fashion. (9) Everything melted down into a rosy glow, and he was the glow, and everything was the glow, everybody else was the glow, and it was very nice, very nice. (10) He would sing songs, it was so nice. – Lawrence, The Rainbow 1995 (1915), 386–7. The extent to which this passage fits within the traditional paradigm of the free indirect style is somewhat problematic. On the one hand, it exhibits the fundamental characteristic of FIS: it is explicitly oriented to the character’s subjectivity within the past tense and third person of narration. But on the other hand, it is simultaneously distanced from the character’s mind because a durative time frame is evoked, so that the discourse summarizes his mental experience. 387

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

There are several features that indicate FIS in this passage, including unsubordinated subjectivity markers like deictic adverbs (‘now’ in 3), evaluation (‘it was so nice’ in 10), and clauses conveying subjective experience (‘everything melted down’ in 9). The occurrence of such features throughout the passage cause the discourse to convey Skrebensky’s point of view, and to represent his consciousness rather than simply describing it from outside. The passage also contains constructs that are typical of overt FIS, like the exclamative construction in 2 and the lexical repetition in 3–10. Such constructs are common in spoken discourse, and normally, in FIS, they do more than evoke a figural subjectivity; they also reflect the impromptu and discourse-like nature of a character’s reflective thought. While in this passage, these constructs evoke figural subjectivity, they cannot mirror Skrebensky’s thought because the discourse is temporally dissociated from his thought in the fictional world. This is the reason that the passage does not conform to canonical FIS and that its semantic effects require a more complicated explanation. One way to highlight this incongruency in the FIS in this passage is by employing Cohn’s (1978) ‘litmus test’, in which canonical, overt FIS discourse can be translated into the first person and present tense of FDT (interior monologue), resulting in a plausible quotation of the character’s inner speech. While this test is largely a pragmatic exercise and it only pertains to overt FIS, it is a good starting point for analysing problematic passages like this one. It enables us to identify the aspects of the language that are distanced from the character’s thought and that do not represent what he ‘would have felt and thought reflectively’ (Banfield 1981: 75). Put through the litmus test, the passage would read: (1) I go on, disposing of her. (2) If only I could be with her! (3) All I want now is to marry her, to be sure of her. (4) Yet all the time I am perfectly, perfectly hopeless, cold, extinct, without emotion or connection. ... (5) I only become happy when I drink, and I drink a good deal. (6) Then I am just the opposite to what I was. (7) I become a warm, diffuse, glowing cloud, in a warm, diffuse, aerial world ... (10) I [?]will sing songs, it is so nice. All the sentences in the passage apart from 2 and 3 would fail the test because they seem too reflective for Skrebensky’s thought. Again, while this is a pragmatic judgement, we can identify the aspects of the language that lead to it. What stands out most about the translated text and makes it seem too reflective is that it conveys cumulative rather than immediate experience. A durative time frame is explicitly referred to throughout the passage with adverbials in 4 and 5 (‘all the time’ and ‘when he drank’); the simple aspect in 1, 6 and 7 (‘go on’, ‘become’ and ‘drink’); and especially with the habitual aspect (‘would sing’) in the final sentence of the original, which is awkward to translate into the present tense. Because these features occur throughout the passage, the 388

Consciousness

durative time frame encompasses it entirely, so that even the sentences that pass the test like 2 and 3 cannot be located as specific thought-events but seem to express persistent sentiments over time. The translation shows the character taking a retrospective perspective on his own mind, describing and summarizing his mental states and experiences generally. This makes it seem more like a dramatic monologue than an interior monologue; it is as if he is reporting to a psychiatrist, for example, except within his silent thought. This type of reflection is implausible not only because it is uncharacteristic of Skrebensky, but also because it cannot be located in the fictional time as a specific thought-event. Of course, Cohn herself warns that it is essential that the original FIS text is not the litmus test translation, and that ‘words on the page are not identified as words running through the character’s mind’ (103). This is the reason, as I have argued already, that even overt, canonical FIS should be seen as a representation of pre- or semi-linguistic thought rather than a quotation of inner speech. However, in canonical FIS situations, the discourse is at least temporally aligned with the character’s thinking in the fictional world; in this way, it traces the flow of thought, essentially translating it into coherent language. In the original Lawrence passage, however, the discourse is not temporally aligned with Skrebensky’s experience, so instead of representing his thoughts as they unfold, it summarizes his durative sentiments and repeated behaviour over, presumably, a couple of weeks. Thus, the ‘atoms’ of Skrebensky’s consciousness are not recorded ‘the order in which they fall’, as in Woolf’s stream of consciousness technique. Nor does the reader simply experience fictional reality through the character’s consciousness, as in Pouillon’s notion of ‘vision avec’ (1946), or represented perception, since that too requires a sequential presentation of events. Skrebensky’s consciousness is not represented as a dynamically unfolding process – a stream – but as something that persists through time and is summarized by the discourse. It is this act of summary that distances the discourse from the character in the fictional present and that necessitates a vantage point that is external to his consciousness. Since there is no implication that a future Skrebensky is reflecting back on his own experience, this external vantage point seems to belong to an omniscient narrator with an expansive knowledge of the character’s thoughts and activities over a prolonged period of time. The narrator’s omniscient perspective occurs simultaneously with the character’s subjective perspective, which is indicated by FIS features in the same sentences. The intertwining of these two perspectives evokes what could potentially be considered a ‘dual voice’ situation (Pascal 1977), with Skrebensky’s ‘voice’ expressing his sentiments and evaluation, and the narrator’s summarizing his mental activity. Pascal, of course, applies his dual voice theory to FIS in general, although subsequent scholars have argued that the past tense and third person of narration are insufficient to 389

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

evoke a narrating subject (Banfield 1982; Adamson 1994a; Vandelanotte 2009). The act of summary in a passage like this one goes further than that in substantiating an omniscient perspective that is distinct from the character. Whether or not this omniscient perspective evokes a narrating persona, however, is largely a theoretical question. Some scholars, like Banfield, argue that third-person narratives evoke a narrator only when he/she is explicitly referred to by firstperson pronouns or other overtly subjective features; otherwise, the narrative discourse is ‘speakerless’ (1982). Regardless of its evocation of a fictional subject, an omniscient perspective is synonymous with ‘authorial narration’ (Stanzel 1984; Schmid 2010), and it is the type of centring and authoritative perspective that is more typical of nineteenth- century realism and that most modernists avoid. In keeping with the trends of modernism, The Rainbow is almost entirely concerned with its characters’ minds and mental experiences, and it often evokes their subjectivities within the narrative language as FIS. However, the combination of a durative time frame with FIS features is a technique Lawrence employs frequently throughout the novel, and it is one of the characteristics of his narrative that evokes the persistent presence of an omniscient perspective. The authorial narrator is also implied by occasional yet striking instances of narratorial prolepsis that foresee a future beyond characters’ limited awareness. For example: ‘She liked Anthony, though. All her life, at intervals, she returned to the thought of him and of that which he offered’ (352). Instances of prolepsis like this do not pass the reader by inconsequentially; they reinforce the impression of an omniscient perspective that permeates the text. According to Lodge (1990), the authorial narrator ‘is generally thought to be the dominant discourse in [Lawrence’s] fiction, and a formal characteristic that sets him somewhat apart from the modernist tradition’ (60). Several other Lawrence scholars have noticed how his peculiar style of FIS can blend and confuse narratorial and figural perspectives (e.g. Harrison 2008; Stevens 2007; Ryu 2005; Stevenson 1992), and some offer ideas about how this technique might relate to Lawrence’s ideological objectives. According to Stevenson, Lawrencian style is ‘poised ... between nineteenth century and modernist fiction’: he is ‘still partly traditional in retaining an element of authorial infallibility, a stabilising omniscience’ (36). But because the authorial narrative is often intertwined with FIS, Stephenson claims that a general effect of Lawrence’s narrative style is to ‘destabilise the ego, dissolving any easy, secure sense of identity in the voice of author or character, increasingly fused together in various shades and tones of intermingling’ (33). This merging of figural perspectives with authorial narration can also be understood as a means of furthering Lawrence’s ‘organicist’ ideology (Stevens 2007). Organicism posits that individuals are interconnected parts, or organs, within a larger whole, or organism, such as the world or the universe. By blending the subjectivity of 390

Consciousness

the individual with the objectivity and omniscience of the authorial voice, the narrative style enacts the interconnectedness between them, fusing the organic whole of the narrative world with the character playing a part within it. There is a final characteristic of Lawrence’s experimental FIS that relates it to the Joyce text we will look at next, and that is the use of ‘stylistic deviation’ to indirectly represent the character’s consciousness (Fludernik 1993). The most obvious type of deviation in this passage is the lexical repetition, but there are also rhetorical constructs like parallelisms (3, 7, 9), asyndeton (4), polysyndeton (9) and emphatic commas (5, 8, 10), all of which serve as emotive foregrounding devices and deviate from normal language use. In canonical, overt FIS there is nothing unusual about stylistic deviation, since it mimics the deviant norms of spoken discourse in order to represent the discursive and impromptu nature of reflective thought as it unfolds. However, because the FIS in this passage does not represent specific thought events, the deviant language cannot serve the same function. For example, in sentence 7 (‘He became a warm, diffuse, glowing cloud, in a warm, diffuse, aerial world’), structural parallelism and lexical repetition are used to convey Skrebensky’s intoxication. This discourse does not represent a thought event, nor does it assert that Skrebensky thought ‘like this’ or ‘in this manner’, like in canonical FIS (Banfield 1982). Instead of directly representing his thought, the symmetric and tautological language seems to iconically reflect the character’s blissful and puerile state of mind, which is another way of representing consciousness. All the repetitions and syntactic idiosyncrasies in this passage have a similar effect: they evoke Skrebensky’s subjectivity by means of an iconic relationship to his sentiments and sensations. Representation of consciousness is a general semantic effect of FIS, and most authors, like Woolf, use the style to directly represent the content of a character’s thought as it unfolds in the fictional world. The iconic representation of persistent aspects of consciousness with stylistically deviant rhetorical flourishes is an experimental characteristic of Lawrence’s style.

3 Joyce In the next passage, from James Joyce’s Ulysses, the narrative discourse also uses rhetorical constructs to evoke an indirect representation of a character’s consciousness. However, Joyce’s avant-garde style and his overtly deviant narrative techniques make him, arguably, the most experimental of the modernist novelists. The tenth episode of Ulysses, ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, is set in Dublin’s National Library. It concerns a discussion between Stephen Dedalus (Joyce’s alter ego and the chapter’s protagonist) and various other scholars, wherein Stephen articulates his eccentric theory on Shakespeare. The narrative 391

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

alternates between three discourse categories: the direct speech of the characters, Stephen’s interior monologue (FDT) and a fairly sparse narrative discourse that is confined, for the most part, to inquit formulas and brief descriptions of action. This analysis will focus on the last of these, the narrative discourse, which will be identified as a unique and ambiguous variety of FIS. The following is a passage that gives an idea of the alternating narrative categories that characterize the chapter. It is numbered by paragraph for ease of analysis. 1. Stephen looked on his hat, his stick, his boots. 2. Stephanos, my crown. My sword. His boots are spoiling the shape of my feet. Buy a pair. Holes in my socks ... 3. –You make good use of the name, John Eglinton allowed ... 4. Mr Best eagerquietly lifted his book to say: 5. –That’s very interesting. ... In Grimm too, don’t you know, the fairytales. The third brother marries the sleeping beauty and wins the best prize. 6. Best of best brothers. Good, better, best. 7. The quaker librarian springhalted near. 8. –I should like to know, he said ... 9. He caught himself in the act: looked at all: refrained. 10. An attendant from the doorway called: 11. –Mr Lyster! Father Dineen wants ... 12. –O! Father Dineen! Directly. 13. Swiftly rectly creaking rectly rectly he was rectly gone. –Joyce, Ulysses 2010 (1922), 189 The different narrative categories in this passage are well delineated by paragraphs and clear category markers, despite the absence of inverted commas for direct quotations. The first person and present tense of paragraph 2 allow us to identify it as entirely Stephen’s interior monologue or FDT. Paragraphs 3, 5, 8, 11 and 12 are quotations of various characters’ speech, marked by the dash and identified by inquit formulas. The discourse in paragraphs 1, 4, 7, 9, 10 and 13 is marked by the past tense and third person as narrative discourse (either narratorial or FIS). The only slightly ambiguous sentence is 6, which does not contain a finite verb but is stylistically and semantically cohesive with the narrative discourse and is therefore likely to be naturalized as such. Our present concern is with the narrative discourse throughout ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, and the extent to which it can be considered FIS. I have defined FIS fairly broadly as the orientation of third-person narrative discourse to a character’s point of view by means of other subjective features, and I have characterized its primary semantic function as the representation of a character’s consciousness. So the question is whether the stylistically deviant narration in the 392

Consciousness

‘Scylla’ episode is somehow indicative of Stephen’s subjectivity, thereby serving to represent some level of his mental activity. It will be helpful, before continuing, to provide some more examples of the narrative discourse in order to give a clearer idea of the types of deviation that characterize it and make it subjective. The following extracts are taken from passages throughout the episode: 14. –... One always feels that Goethe’s judgments are so true. True in the larger analysis. Twicreakingly analysis he [Lyster] corantoed off. Bald, most zealous by the door he gave his large ear to all the attendant’s words: heard them: and was gone (164). 15. Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with grace a notebook, new, large, clean, bright (166). 16. –But Ann Hathaway? Mr Best’s voice said forgetfully. Yes, we seem to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her (170). 17. –The sense of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to ugling Eglinton (183). 18. –Our gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently (185). 19. –History shows it to be true, inquit Eglintonus Chronologus (185). 20. The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with haste, quake, quack (187). The narrative discourse (underlined) exhibits a number of highly deviant features. Lexical items are manipulated morphologically to form irregular compounds (‘beautifulinsadness’) and derivatives (‘twicreakingly’). The names of characters are similarly manipulated (as in the Latinised ‘Eglintonus’) or modified with inventive titles or adjectives (‘Chronologus’, ‘gentle’). And the language of the characters’ speech is often repeated in the narrative discourse surrounding it (‘analysis’ in 14, ‘forget’ in 16). The deviance extends beyond the lexis to syntactic and graphological features as well. Adverbials are often preposed (as in 14), adjectives are disjointed from noun phrases (as in 15) and terms are occasionally employed with little regard for syntactic structure, apparently for onomatopoetic effect (as in 13, 14 and 20). There is also a preponderance of rhetorical constructs that stand out because of their simplicity as well as their apparent lack of narrative purpose or contextual motivation (e.g. paromoiosis in 15 – phonetic repetition between words of two clauses equal in length [Lanham 1990: 189]). The stylistic deviation throughout the ‘Scylla’ narrative strongly evokes a subjective attitude towards the secondary characters and the narrated situation. For one, the narrative epitomizes Aczel’s (1998) notion of ‘stylistic expressivity’, whereby style alone can evoke subjectivity, simply because the discourse seems so overtly contrived that it consistently implicates a subjective persona 393

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

in producing it. However, the subjectivity evoked by the stylistic deviation is not simply that of a linguistically innovative agent, but also an evaluative one. There is an openly parodic intent in the way characters’ language is repeated in the narrative in a manner that is ‘at odds with’ the original speaker’s intentions (Bakhtin 1981: 364). This repetition can also be seen as an act of echolalia, which Adamson (1994b) claims is often ‘actively ironic’. Characters’ actions and mannerisms are also parodied by means of stylistic deviation, which foregrounds them in the text and makes them seem ridiculous. This parodic tone pervades the entire episode, delegitimizing the actions and speech of the secondary characters and evoking a subjective centre of consciousness from which the scene is viewed. But that subjectivity is never unambiguously assigned to either Stephen or the narrator as the presiding subject. Joyce critics have offered different explanations for the subjectivity in ‘Scylla’. Fludernik (1986) offers a summary of the dilemma that is somewhat inconclusive: On the one hand the narrative of the entire chapter can be interpreted as Stephen’s narrated [i.e. represented] perception, i.e. narrative written from Stephen’s point of view. On the other, the narrative style ... is foregrounded to such an extent that one is tempted to argue for an independent narrative intent on wordplay that out of sheer exuberance cloaks itself in Stephen’s point of view. (29) She does not clarify what the difference is between represented perception and a narrative that cloaks itself in a character’s point of view. Nor does she address the subjective implications of the foregrounded narrative style. Stanzel (1971) implicates a narrator in the discourse, which Wales (1992) describes as engaging in a ‘metalinguistic dialogue ... to produce echoes, puns, distortions and soundplay’. Still others, including Hayman (1982), Kellogg (1974) and Warner (1977) argue that the primary purpose of the narrative discourse is to express Stephen’s point of view. According to Bersani (1980), one has a choice between attributing the deviant language to ‘Stephen’s mental horseplay ... or the fooling around of a lexically ebullient narrator’, implying that if it is not the narrator’s subjectivity that is expressed, then Stephen is conceiving the words as inner speech. Bersani goes on to argue that this type of ambiguity makes Joyce ‘one of the darlings of that branch of narratology obsessed with narrative origins ... the paranoid response to what might be called the ontological irreducibility of voice in literature to location and identities’ (206–7). Thus, he takes the ambiguous attribution of subjectivity in this chapter as grounds for altogether dismissing the question of narrative voice. But Bersani’s dichotomous choice between Stephen’s language and the narrator’s misses the main problem: the question this narrative poses is 394

Consciousness

one of subjectivity, not locutionary agency. He does not recognize the ability of narrative discourse to express a character’s subjectivity without implying their locutionary agency for the words on the page, which is at the heart of FIS. Thus, the important question is not who conceived the words, but whether to attribute the subjective perspective that they convey to Stephen’s consciousness as FIS, or to the narrator’s subjective intrusion into the story. One way to address this question is by accounting for the stylistic features that pull the reader either one way or the other. There are a few FIS features scattered throughout the ‘Scylla’ episode that can be taken as indications that the narrative discourse represents Stephen’s consciousness. For example, the terms ‘near’ in 7 and ‘gone’ in 13 are deictic expressions that imply a narrative internal observation point; and there is also an occurrence of the adverb ‘now’ (166) and various instances of ‘came’ throughout the episode, which have the same effect. While such features do not by themselves indicate FIS, they do help to at least bend the narrative towards Stephen and reinforce an FIS interpretation. There are also a few occasions where the narrative discourse is cohesively linked with Stephen’s FDT, strongly, albeit momentarily, implying his internal focalization (as in paragraphs 1 and 2, where nouns in the narrative co-refer with nouns in Stephen’s thought). While features such as these are sparse in the text, they should be considered alongside the following facts: (a) the parodic intent of the narrative is directed at every character but Stephen; (b) he shares the negatively evaluative regard this implies for his literary companions; and (c) he is himself inclined to the same types of linguistic innovation that characterize the discourse. This evidence suggests that the subjectivity conveyed by the parodic narrative is Stephen’s – that the stylistic deviation is in some way an FIS representation of his consciousness. However, stylistic analysis must also take into consideration the fact that the FIS features and the links to Stephen’s thought are actually so rare that there remains a noticeable disjunction between his reflective consciousness and the narrative discourse. The cohesive link between the narrative and Stephen’s FDT mentioned above is an exception to the norm; the two discourses are for the most part thematically distinct. While the narrative is almost entirely consumed by word play and parody of the secondary characters, Stephen’s verbalized thoughts are consistently self-reflective or focused on the elucidation of his argument. It is therefore unlikely that his conscious ideation would be alternating between the distinct themes. One way to deal with this complicated narrative situation is to understand it as a representation of parallel processing within Stephen’s cognition. Hogan (2013) explains that parallel processing involves multiple mental operations occurring simultaneously to produce a single result, that is, consciousness. He illustrates this with the metaphor of a piano score, involving left hand, right 395

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

hand and pedals: ‘parallel’ musical instructions that co-occur to produce a single musical piece that unfolds ‘serially’ through time (153). The mind, he claims, works in the same way, with parallel processes working together to produce the apparently singular and serial function of consciousness. If an author is to represent consciousness as a multi-levelled phenomenon with parallel processing, they must find a way to use the purely ‘serial’ medium of written language to convey parallel mental activities functioning simultaneously at different levels of consciousness. Hogan actually identifies the representation of parallel processing in another Ulysses episode, ‘Sirens’, which conveys Bloom’s thought while he is listening to music. While the narrative technique in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ is very different from the one Hogan identifies in ‘Sirens’, it too can be understood as a means of representing parallel processing. Essentially, while one aspect of Stephen’s mind is engaged in verbalized thought and in arguing his theory, he simultaneously harbours a cynical regard for his companions in the library, and he is experiencing their presence in this light. To express this less reflective aspect of his consciousness, the stylistic absurdities of the narrative discourse parody the speech and actions of each of the secondary characters. In this way, the narrative creates a persistent emotional and perceptual backdrop for Stephen’s verbalized thought and speech. For this reason, the stylistically deviant narrative discourse can be considered an indirect FIS representation of a lower-level, ‘non-reflective’ aspect of Stephen’s consciousness (Banfield 1981). As with the Lawrence passage, the narrative does not simply translate pre-linguistic ideation into language as in canonical FIS. Instead, it uses deviant stylistic techniques to evoke subjectivity. While the stylistic deviation itself is not the work of Stephen’s mind, the cynical attitude that it evokes towards his companions is – or, at least, can be. Indications of Stephen’s perspective are sufficiently sparse throughout the episode that the narrative retains a degree of ambiguity. Readers do not go through a text adding up the evidence for the interpretation of figural subjectivity. The scarcity of such features and the thematic disconnection with Stephen’s verbal thought not only leave plenty of room for the alternative interpretation, but also allow a deviant narrative to evoke the presence of a subjective, playful narrator as well as FIS. There are even a few occasions where the narrative language implies this narrating agent. In paragraph 16, for example, the attributive parenthetical pre-emptively mirrors the speech of a secondary character as a sort of narratorial prolepsis (– But Ann Hathaway? Mr Best’s voice said forgetfully. Yes, we seem to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her). Features like this, while rare, accentuate the fact that the stylistically expressive language obviously does not originate with Stephen, implying that the subjectivity it conveys might in fact belong to a narrator. But rather than simply

396

Consciousness

permitting two divergent interpretations – or undermining the attribution of voice altogether, as Bersani has it – these narrative complications allow us to identify another type of dual voice situation. Ambiguity and contradictory evidence in ‘Scylla’ implicate the subjectivities of both Stephen and a narrator in the background of the library scene. The problematizing of narrative subjectivity is an important characteristic of modernist narratives, and it is something that is achieved, to a large extent, by manipulating the free indirect style and expanding its parameters. According to Sotirova (2013) FIS ‘is not a stable category, its linguistic make-up is so fragile as to allow the narrator to be perceived alongside the character’s inner-most thoughts’ (57). Writers can employ the style not only to convey, but to confuse narrative perspective. It can deny the reader the reliability of narratorial objectivity, and it can also deny them the ability to unequivocally attribute narrative subjectivity. FIS also allows narratives penetrate the depths of characters’ minds, and to access the aspects of consciousness which characters do not reflect on, and may themselves be only minimally aware of. Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce all manipulate the style in different ways, bending it to their own literary and ideological imperatives. But their techniques also reflect a common imperative, what Kahler (1973) calls the ‘inward turn of narrative’. He explains this idea as the ‘increasing displacement of outer space by ... inner space, a stretching of consciousness. This in turn brings with it an internalization of more and more of the objective world …’ (5). There is a paradox in the inward turn, which has also been pointed out by Fludernik (1993: 431), and which the analyses of this chapter demonstrate: the deeper a narrative penetrates into the minds of its characters, the more it relies upon an external voice, a language that originates somewhere else. Consciousness consists of phenomena other than language, and if these phenomena are to be rendered into narrative discourse, it takes words that originate somewhere else to represent them. This discourse, serving the subjectivity of an other, is what characterizes FIS, simultaneously accessing the depths of the mind and disrupting the coherence of subjectivity itself.

Notes 1. Overt FIS is synonymous with what I refer to in Rundquist (2014) as free indirect thought (FIT). 2. The obvious exception to this claim is the ‘Time Passes’ chapter of To the Lighthouse, in which there is no character present to ground the subjectivity of the narrative. The continued employment of FIS techniques in this chapter maintains a story-internal perspective in the absence of a figural subject, evoking what Banfield (1982, 1987) refers to as the ‘empty centre’.

397

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

References Aczel, R. (1998), ‘Hearing voices in narrative texts’, New Literary History, 29 (3): 467–500. Adamson, S. (1994a), ‘From empathetic deixis to empathetic narrative: Stylization and (de)subjectivization as processes of language change’, Transactions of the Philological Society, 92 (1): 55–88. Adamson, S. (1994b), ‘Subjectivity in narration: empathy and echo’, in M. Yaguello (ed.), Subjecthood and Subjectivity, 193–208, Paris: Ophrys. Adamson, S. (1998), ‘Literary language’, in S. Romaine (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume IV, 589–692, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bakhtin, M. (1981), ‘Discourse in the novel’, in M. Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination, 269–422, Austin: University of Texas Press. Banfield, A. (1981), ‘Reflective and non-reflective consciousness in the language of fiction’, Poetics Today, 2 (2): 61–76. Banfield, A. (1982), Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Banfield, A. (1987), ‘Describing the unobserved: Events grouped around an empty centre’, in N. Fabb, D. Attridge, A. Durant and C. MacCabe (eds), The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature, 265–85, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bersani, L. (1980), ‘Against Ulysses’, Raritan, 8: 201–29. Brinton, L. (1980), ‘“Represented perception”: A study in narrative style’, Poetics, 9: 363–81. Cohn, D. (1978), Transparent Minds, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fludernik, M. (1986), ‘Narrative and its development in Ulysses’, The Journal of Narrative Technique, 16: 15–40. Fludernik, M. (1993), The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction, London: Routledge. Harrison, A. (2008), D.H. Lawrence: Short Stories, Tirrill, Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks, LLP. Hayman, D. (1982), Ulysses, The Mechanics of Meaning, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Hogan, P. C. (2013), ‘Parallel processing and the human mind: Re-understanding consciousness with James Joyce’s Ulysses’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 42 (2): 149–64. Humphrey, R. (1954), Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel, Berkeley: University of California Press. Joyce, J. (2010[1922]), Ulysses, Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions Limited. Kahler, E. (1973), The Inward Turn of Narrative, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kellogg, R. (1974), ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, in C. Hart and D. Hayman (eds), James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays, 147–80, Berkeley: University of Californial Press. Lanham, R. (1990), A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, Berkeley: University of California Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1995[1915]), The Rainbow, London: Wordsworth. Lodge, D. (1990), After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism, London: Routledge. Lodge, D. (2002), Consciousness and the Novel, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McNeillie, A. (2010), ‘Bloomsbury’, in S. Sellers (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, 1–28, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pallarés-García, E. (2012), ‘Represented perception revisited: The case of Jane Austen’s Emma’, Language and Literature, 21 (2): 170–88. Pascal, R. (1977), The Dual Voice, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pouillon, J. (1993[1946]), Temps et Roman, Paris: Gallimard. Rundquist, E. (2014), ‘How is Mrs Ramsay thinking? The semantic effects of consciousness presentation categories within the free indirect style’, Language and Literature, 23 (2): 159–74.

398

Consciousness Ryu, D. (2005), D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love: A Critical Study, New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Schmid, W. (2010), Narratology: An Introduction, New York: Walter de Gruyter. Semino, E. and Short, M. (2004), Corpus Stylistics, London: Routledge. Sotirova, V. (2007), ‘Woolf’s experiments with consciousness in fiction’, in P. Stockwell and M. Lambrou (eds), Contemporary Stylistics, 7–31, London: Continuum. Sotirova, V. (2013), Consciousness in Modernist Fiction, New York: Palgrave Macmillon. Stanzel, F. (1971), Narrative Situations in the Novel: Tom Jones, Moby Dick, The Ambassadors, Ulysses, London: Indiana University Press. Stanzel, F. (1984), A Theory of Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stevens, H. (2007), ‘D.H. Lawrence: organicism and the modernist novel’, in M. Shiach (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, 137–50, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stevenson, R. (1992), Modernist Fiction: An Introduction, Louisville, KY: The University of Kentucky Press. Vandelanotte, L. (2009), Speech and Thought Representation in English: A Cognitive Functional Analysis, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Wales, K. (1992), The Languages of James Joyce, London: MacMillon Education Ltd. Wallace, J. (2013), ‘Modernists on the art of fiction’, in M. Shiach (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, 15–31, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Warner, W. (1977), ‘The play of fictions and succession of styles in Ulysses’, James Joyce Quarterly, 15 (1): 18–35. Woolf, V. (1924), ‘Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown’, London: The Hogarth Press. Woolf, V. (1984[1919]), ‘Modern fiction’, in A. McNeillie (ed.), The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, 157–65, London: The Hogarth Press. Woolf, V. (1994[1927]), To the Lighthouse, London: Wordsworth.

399

23

Deixis in Literature ‘‘Help me to seke’: Deixis and the emerging poetics of Sir Thomas Wyatt Keith Green, Sheffield Hallam University

Chapter Overview Deixis and Literature Deixis and the Notion of the ‘cognitive’ Deixis Revisited Poetry Revisited: The Case of Thomas Wyatt

400 401 405 408

1  Deixis and Literature The study and analysis of deixis in literary texts has grown enormously over the past twenty years or so. Based largely in the tradition of stylistics, the early work of Balz Engler (1987) and Roger Sell (1987) on deixis in literature led naturally to work by Green (1992), Bex (1995), Tate (1995) and Herman (1997), among others. Attention was also drawn to the workings of deixis in literature by Culler (1975), who assimilated it into his broad structuralist approach. Such investigations and analyses were characterized by a number of key aims and approaches. The first was to define and describe the nature of deixis, a task that often led to the reorientation of definitions and the development of taxonomies of deictic terms and expressions (see Green 1992, and later, Stockwell 2002). At the heart of these programmes are issues such as the possible distinction between deixis and anaphora and issues of reference and definiteness 400

Deixis in Literature

(see Green 2006). The second aim was to consider the differences and similarities between deixis operating in literary and non-literary texts, as well as the relationship between spoken and written modes, given that the early pioneering work of Bühler (1934) focused on deixis as a phenomenon of a given speech situation. The third task was to investigate the workings (and occurrence) of deixis in specific texts or specific genres. In particular there was, and continues to be, a strong focus on deixis in poetry – the literary genre wherein (in general) the deictic aspect is foregrounded and exposed.1 The fourth aim was to attempt to extend deictic theory and to further develop taxonomies within a general theory of communication. The fifth, more recent, aim is to incorporate deictic theory with developments in cognitive linguistics.

2  Deixis and the Notion of the ‘cognitive’ Deixis is so much part of the critical vocabulary of stylistics that a lengthy definition would be redundant here, despite some problems of terminology, which I hope to clear up. ‘Deixis’ is generally understood to be the encoding of the spatio-temporal context and subjective experience of the language user. Terms such as ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘this’ (sometimes called, somewhat misleadingly, ‘pure’ deixis) are heavily context-dependent and are said to represent a kind of cognitive centre of orientation for the speaker. In a speech situation, my language is thus oriented to my own bodily spatio-temporal position as well as my perceptual and cognitive centre. This is essentially the default position of communication, where the utterer’s origo (cf. Bühler 1934) or deictic centre enables the various elements in the universe of discourse to function. It has long been recognized, however, that this centre of orientation can be displaced – indeed, it is routinely ‘shifted’ when we adopt a different perspective. Charles Fillmore (1971) quaintly called this ‘taking the other fellow’s point of view’, while more recent theorists (cf. Segal 1995) have preferred the more imposing title ‘deictic shift theory’ (DST). Developments in deictic theory over the past twenty years or so have meant a shift away from the notion of deixis as purely egocentric to seeing it more broadly as part of a communication continuum, albeit one with egocentric aspects (see Jones 1995, for an attempt to rid deixis of egocentricity altogether). In other words, deixis is seen as an element orientating both speaker and hearer in context, rather than being solely associated with the ‘I’ of the discourse situation. There is little point in reiterating or summarizing the many proposed taxonomies of deixis or in discussing the finer details of such questions as the relationship between anaphora and deixis (see, for instance, Jarvella and Klein 1982). Rather, I shall outline some of the key issues relating to recent developments in the analysis of deixis in literature and, more specifically, in poetry, 401

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

wherein the issues are more evident and manifest. In my 1992 paper on deixis and the poetic persona, I outlined six characteristics of the discourse of lyric poetry in relation to deixis. In this early stage of analysis, I had suggested rather too simply a model of poetry that was essentially part of a specific literary time and genre (Romantic poetry) and made it stand for poetry in toto. However, some of my claims I believe still stand, albeit that they have relevance to a particular kind of poem: i) Mobilization of a monologic ‘I’ figure. A strong tradition in lyric poetry is the idea of a dialogue between the enunciating ‘I’ and an addressee (whether the reader or a figure referred to in the text): Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call Ye to each other make; I see The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee; (Wordsworth: ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’) ii) Compounding of emotional and dramatic situation. Often characterized as a movement between observing and experiencing modes, this gives rise to the important deictic activity of the poem: The radio is playing downstairs in the kitchen. The clock says eight and the light says winter. You are pulling up your hood against a bad morning. Don’t leave, I say. Don’t go without telling me the name of that song. (Eavan Boland, ‘Distances’) iii) Referring expressions function on the basis of assumed knowledge. They are deictic in that they have not hitherto been introduced in the universe of discourse. At Last you yielded up the album, which, Once open, sent me distracted. (Philip Larkin: ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’)

The definite NP ‘the album’ functions deictically here.

iv) Spatial and temporal expressions used to orientate the reader to an assumed context. If you came this way, Taking the route you would be likely to take From the place you would be likely to come from, If you came this way in May time, you would find the hedges White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness. (T. S. Eliot: ‘Little Gidding’ from Four Quartets) 402

Deixis in Literature

This is essentially a series of claims about how deixis functions in the poem and how it interacts with the reader’s knowledge and expectations. Very much in the tradition of stylistics, this approach posits some broad functions that can be said to account for deictic activity in a range of poetic texts (notwithstanding my previous caveat). My thesis here is that there are certain functions of deictic expressions that act as place-holders for interpretations, which are in turn subject to a number of constraints, including the cognitive and, more specifically, the historical (as I show in my consideration of the poetry of Thomas Wyatt). However, deixis is sometimes reduced to a kind of cognitive testing ground in virtue not so much of what it tells us, but what it withholds from us. Mark Bruhn, in an otherwise illuminating paper on place deixis in poetry from Milton to Keats, states: Where there is no shared perceptual, interpersonal, or memorial field of reference – as is almost always the case for discourse encounters between writers and readers of literature – deixis must be construed with reference to conceptual-linguistic schemata rather than any extralinguistic spatiotemporal and psychosocial dimensions of the immediate situation-ofutterance or reception. (Bruhn 2005: 388) The proposition that deixis is different in literature because readers and writers are not part of the canonical speech situation is of limited assistance here, for it is clear that the difference is one of degree, not of kind. Further, the claim that there is no shared perceptual interpersonal or memorial field of reference is manifestly false: If it were so, we would not be able to understand any literary language. If I encounter the ‘I’ of a lyric poem, I respond to it by virtue of my knowledge of poetic convention, the language shared by me and the poet and our similarly shaped ‘worlds’ – despite obvious differences such as the distance in time between the composition of the poem and its reading. A question that immediately presents itself is whether deixis is a unique feature of language in that it demands (perhaps only in reading literary texts) a ‘cognitive’ interpretation – that is, in the words of Bruhn, that we can only access deictic terms through conceptual-linguistic schemata. I should gloss this phrase as patterns of thought or behaviour that embrace both concepts and language. Still, we are not being much clearer here. It is true that the referents of deictic expressions (their indexical meaning) can only be assigned once a kind of situation has been construed, but this may not be any different to other language features, and assigning referents to deictic expressions is only one aspect of the process of interpretation. Here is Mark Turner on language in general: Expressions do not mean; they are prompts for us to construct meaning by working with processes we already know. In no sense is the meaning 403

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

of [an]  … utterance ‘right there in the words’ … the words themselves say nothing independent of the richly detailed knowledge and powerful cognitive process we bring to bear. (1991: 206) This is the cognitive linguist’s position in a nutshell; but there are already serious theoretical and methodological questions awaiting the language analyst and, in particular, the stylistician. The first – and most obvious and pressing – is the ‘so-what’ problem: Given that meaning is largely generated by cognitive processes, what can we say about any linguistic fragment or text example such as deixis? The second question is whether literature is a special case, a unique cognitive activity, or does it function in more or less the same way as language as part of the canonical situation of utterance? These questions are relevant to our discussion of deixis because, as I have already intimated (via Bruhn), deixis is sometimes put forward as a particularly ‘cognitive’ feature of literary language, in that readers (for example) have to make inferences as to who is speaking, to whom, when, where, etc– all features that are partially encoded through the use of deixis. A cognitive approach to language should surely examine how certain mental processes both form and constrain our responses to language. It is not really enough to say things like ‘readers can project their minds into the other world [i.e. the literary world], find their way around there, and fill out the rich detail between the words of the text’ (Stockwell 2002: 51). Given that it is axiomatic that language is a prompt for us to construe meaning, this statement leads us nowhere. As far as deixis is concerned, it would appear, as Reuven Tsur has suggested, that deixis is ‘no more cognitive than any other linguistic phenomenon’ (2006: 250), although he further suggests that it might be usefully explained by reference to cognitive processes. For Stockwell, however, not only is deixis a particularly ‘cognitive’ phenomenon, it is also utterly ubiquitous: I argue that taking cognition seriously means that reference is to a mental representation and is a socially located act and is therefore participatory and deictic. (2002: 45) For Stockwell, practically the whole of language is deictic, and in consequence the term is rendered too vague for use. Stockwell’s book has had a fair amount of influence, and many are taking it as a statement of the ‘cognitive turn’ in stylistics. But nowhere does he feel it might be difficult to reconcile the mental with the social. I am not sure what ‘taking cognition seriously’ means (or what not taking it seriously would involve), but a clear problem here is the use of the term ‘mental representation’. Such a term is so widespread now that many would say its use and existence are incontestable. But I maintain that in the context of ‘cognitive stylistics’ it needs a much clearer formulation – otherwise it remains a catch-all to avoid any ‘serious’ engagement with complex issues. 404

Deixis in Literature

There is a distinction to be made between the philosophers’ and the cognitivists’ notions of mental representation. For the philosophers of mind, a mental representation is an example of mental content, which is represented by thatcomplement clauses, as in ‘I believe that England will win the World Cup’. The cognitivists’ idea of mental representation is not captured by any linguistic form. Stockwell (among others) does not say what form his mental representation takes, and consequently it becomes a kind of catch-all for the readerly experience of the text. Presumably the word ‘table’ – whether in a poem, a diary or spoken to a friend – elicits in us a ‘mental representation’ of a table and, by virtue of Stockwell’s statement, is ‘deictic’. Sperber and Wilson make a clearer case for the notion of mental representations: We assume that mental representations have a structure not wholly unlike that of a sentence, and combine elements from a mental repertoire not wholly unlike a lexicon. (1997: 107) This is quite a big assumption, but plausible nevertheless. Such an assumption enables Sperber and Wilson to make responsible claims about the nature of human communication. What may seem at first an issue or question that is too broad and unanswerable to be part of a paper on a specific linguistic feature (deixis) is actually central to my understanding of the issues relating to both deixis and to cognitive stylistics. The question is simply this: What are we to do with our knowledge and theory about how deixis operates? The next step – to ‘apply’ it to a particular text – is fraught with difficulties, but it is one that is at the heart of any stylistic analysis.

3  Deixis Revisited One of the problems with accounts of deixis – and specifically with those accounts that go on to look at the phenomenon in literature – is that they tend to be profligate in their taxonomies while treating different kinds of deictic phenomena in much the same manner. In my early desire to colonize the ground in such matters, I too, have been guilty of this. At present, the situation is compounded by the extravagant, over-confident application of so-called ‘cognitive’ models criticized by Tsur (2006). What is needed is a much more fine-grained reading of the issues of deixis and their relation to literary texts. To this end I am going to restrict myself to an investigation into the meaning and function of a limited number of deictic expressions before attempting to relate them to a reading of Thomas Wyatt’s poetry. For reasons outlined in my 1992 paper, 405

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

it is clear that poetry is the most useful genre in which to study the activity of deictic expressions – though this is not to say that other genres do not show us different, and interesting, issues. I am going to draw on the work of two people: on deictic theory, Geoffrey Nunberg (1993 and passim); on poetry, and specifically that of Wyatt, Sylvia Adamson (2006). I want to refine some of the terms used and make a distinction between indexical and deictic. It is true that the words deixis and indexical have become the same for many, with stylisticians in particular preferring ‘deixis’ while philosophers have tended to employ ‘indexical’. I propose to keep the term deixis for the general phenomenon under discussion as it so widely used outside of philosophy. The term indexical can be thus reserved for the kind of meaning that C.S. Pierce suggested, wherein the index establishes ‘a real connection between his [the speaker’s] mind and the object’ (1955: 10). I said earlier that there is a tendency to treat deictic expressions as functioning in much the same way, and that we perhaps need finer distinctions when it comes to the analysis of literary texts. To this end, I make a distinction, following Nunberg (1993) between participant and non-participant terms. Participant terms are those deictics that have as their index a participant or participants in the utterance. Non-participant terms are more ‘outward’ and do not contain such an index. Thus ‘I’, ‘we’ and you’ are participant deictics, while ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘it’ are not. I shall be concentrating solely on this small number of participant terms with the aim of showing that application to literary discourse can illuminate not only the text in question but also the deictic issue at hand. It is taken as axiomatic among some theorists that the ‘meaning’ of a deictic expression is not a description of its referent but that any referent is picked out ‘directly’ (according to the direct reference theorists) based on a semantic rule that accompanies that expression. As Grimberg states, ‘the semantic rule encoded in “I” … in direct speech invariably picks out the speaker as referent.’ (1994: 12). Analysis of deictic expressions, however, is not restricted to assigning referents to particulars. Here, we need a full description of the semantics of a particular term, and then we need to see precisely how they operate in particular texts. Interpretation of a token of ‘we’ can be resolved according to context, world-knowledge and addressee expectations. Nunberg (1993) breaks down deictic terms into three component elements: deictic, classificatory and relational. I shall take Nunberg’s own example of ‘we’ in order to examine these classifications. Terms such as ‘we’ are indicative – that is, their meaning is ‘not part of the utterance content’ (9). Take a simple word such as ‘book’. If I say ‘Great Expectations is a book’ the NP containing ‘book’ can be rewritten containing a definition of ‘book’ (‘a number of printed leaves, fastened and enclosed in a cover’). Its meaning, therefore, is part of the content of the utterance. Now take a sentence such as ‘We like reading’. Here, ‘we’ is not synonymous with the expression ‘a group of beings including the user of 406

Deixis in Literature

the term’. ‘We’ can be glossed as ‘the group of beings that includes the speaker’ (the user of the term ‘we’). Now, as we have already seen, this certainly does not define ‘we’, nor is it its semantic ‘meaning’. Further, its meaning is not those beings to which the term might refer. The difference between the NP ‘a book’ in the above example and the example of ‘we’ in ‘We like reading’ is that in the latter, its meaning does not complete its function in the utterance. Thus, for Nunberg, the deictic component of a term such as ‘we’ is a ‘function from occurrences or utterances of an expression to elements of the context of utterance’ (8). The second component, the classificatory, gives clues to the interpretation of that term and, as Nunberg notes, is in general associated with its interpretation. Thus in the case of ‘we’, the feature of plurality is an important classificatory aspect. That notion of plurality (a plurality that includes the speaker) is part of the semantics of the term and does not in itself function as an index (in other words, it does not point to that ‘we’). Nunberg further states: In addition to features like number and animacy, the classificatory component may include inflectional features like grammatical and natural gender. … (8) This is therefore like a kind of semantic and grammatical profile. The third component Nunberg calls relational, which ‘constrains the correspondence that has to hold between the index and the interpretation’ (9). With ‘we’, Nunberg further states that ‘the relational component stipulates that the index must be included in, or more generally, must instantiate the interpretation’ (9). This is not an easy distinction to grasp, but essentially it means that in the case of ‘we’ there are restrictions on its use that are governed by appropriate use by the speaker (or user of the term). Such a restriction does not apply to deictically used third- person pronouns (they are non-participant): ‘they’ is not restricted to particular users with a particular profile. Let us now consider the second person pronoun ‘you’. As in the case of ‘we’, the meaning of ‘you’ is not part of what is said by any utterance containing it. Nunberg’s thesis about the behaviour of terms such as ‘we’ and ‘you’ is tantalizing and apposite: The general idea is that on any occasion of use, the linguistic meaning of an indexical [deictic] expression takes us to a certain element of the context, and then drops out of the picture. (4) The contextual element picked out in such instances Nunberg calls the ‘indexical meaning’; but this, unfortunately, is where he gets in a tangle with the (non) distinction between deictic and indexical. For our purposes and for reasons of clarity I am going to proceed only with the three terms deictic, relational and classificatory. 407

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

So what happens when the linguistic meaning ‘drops out of the picture’? This looks like a question that cognitive linguistics should be able to answer or at least suggest possibilities of interpretation. But it is absolutely crucial to understand that, as Nunberg states, there are ‘few or no indexical [deictic] expressions that provide nothing more than an indication of the relation the index bears to the utterance’ (6). I am not sure I like the phrase ‘few or no’, but Nunberg’s point is nevertheless well taken. As he further notes, it is not clear how the additional information about number, animacy, etc. is used in the process of interpretation. There is a tendency to see the deictic term as a binary term, with one part of the binarism to be supplied by the addressee. Thus, ‘he’ contains a certain semantic element that, in order to be fully realized, must be matched with an indexical element – that is, we find out to whom ‘he’ refers. But this simply returns us to the old model of indexical versus symbolic meanings and turns the analysis of deixis into a kind of puzzle or code-cracking – though I am prepared to admit there is an aspect of this particularly in the interpretation of deixis in poetry (or I should say a particular kind of poetry). I hope to show that deictic expressions – with particular reference to ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘we’ – must be interpreted through the inferencing of a modal world: an intersubjective centre or extended Bühlerian origo wherein roles, objects and relations function. One might think that the above pronouns were straightforward in their interpretation – that is, that their relational and classificatory elements can easily be described, and with that the deictic route will become quite transparent. Take, for example, the sentence ‘I am here now’. Adamson (2006) states that it ‘can never be a lie’ (10). Now, I think it is always possible to find some example of use that contradicts these general statements about the role of deixis; the question is whether they really provide counter-evidence or they are mere eccentricities. In the above case, for example, I may be playing a board game and pointing to my counter say ‘I am here now’. The statement can be false, and it can be a lie. Out of a particular set of circumstances, it is certainly not, as Adamson suggests, ‘true by definition’. On a more broadly philosophical note, the ‘I’ can be glossed as ‘the person using the token “I”’, but this not only does not specify the deictic element, it also ‘drops out of the picture’ in the sense that ‘I’ does not specify the relational aspect that is presented to the addressee. Of course, as we shall see, the issue is compounded when we try to account for the ‘I’ of lyric poetry.

4  Poetry Revisited: The Case of Thomas Wyatt Perhaps the most interesting and successful readings of deixis and literature are those that also have a historical or diachronic focus. In this respect, 408

Deixis in Literature

Bruhn’s (2005) work on the lyric from Milton to Keats is important, despite my reservations about his use of cognitive terms. A full-length historical study on the development of deixis in literature (preferably by genre) is still to be written. Adamson, however, has produced some important work on Thomas Wyatt – as a deictic ‘experimenter’ and as one who is on the cusp of a new era in English poetry. Indeed, her thesis is essentially that texts of Wyatt’s era (known generally as the early modern era) ‘show an innovative and experimental awareness of the deictic resources of English’ (2006: 12). This era, poised as it is between the emerging print culture and the development of Renaissance aesthetics, shows literary language in flux and in general moving to a more personal and ‘I’-centred discourse. With that emerging culture, then, the possibilities of expression and the positioning of the writer with respect to a putative addressee become manifest. Part of the general development of writing is that, according to Adamson, it ‘turns relativity into opacity’ (17).2 I take Adamson’s meaning to be that whereas in spoken discourse, reference is relative to the canonical situation of utterance, in written discourse without the immediate context, reference is harder to discern. But we should not make too much of the distinction, for as I have stated, the difference is one of degree, not of kind. In what sense, then, is Wyatt’s employment of deixis ‘experimental’, and how can we use the analysis of Nunberg to say something pertinent about his poetry? Here is Wyatt’s poem: The Lover seeking for his lost Heart prayeth that it may be kindly entreated by   whomsoever found Helpe me to seke for I lost it ther, And if that ye have founde it ye that be here, And seke to convaye it secretely, Handell it softe, and trete it tenderly : Or els it will plain and then appere; But rather restore it mannerly, Syns that I do aske it thus honestly; For to lese it, it sitteth me to neere; Helpe me to seke. Alas and is there no remedy ? But have I thus lost it wilfully ? I wis it was a thing all to dere To be bestowed, and wist not where: It was mynhert, I pray you hertely Helpe me to seke. 409

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

This rondeau, from the Egerton manuscript (undated), is in a stylized form, full of conventional tropes of the courtly lyric, as suggested by the generalized, conventional and non-deictic epigraph. Adamson states: Deictically, the most interesting feature of this mysterious little poem is that its status as riddle depends on the referents for both there and here being withheld, a withholding which is in turn dependent on the medium of writing, since a gesture would dissolve the mystery immediately and a gesture (of hand or eye) would be the automatic accompaniment to the speaking of there and here. (18) Furthermore, it is not clear that the canonical situation would immediately disambiguate the deictic expressions (assuming that the poem is actually a ‘riddle’). There is, I think, too crude a distinction being made between written and spoken discourse – a distinction that must be re-evaluated when looking at the poetry of a figure such as Wyatt. The problem is that we tend (as Adamson does) to look at the poem in a New Critical manner, therefore reading the poem in some kind of putative ‘default’ perspective (‘the view from nowhere’, as I demonstrated with the problem of ‘I am here now’). Chris Stamatakis argues that ‘the textuality of early Tudor script culture often seems self-referentially inflected, as if manuscript texts nod, knowingly, to the textual practice in which they are implicated’ (2012: 60). Wyatt’s poems were written to be read aloud, as well as circulated within a very small group of no more than about one hundred men and women attached to the court of Henry VIII. The ‘I’ that is the speaker is at once the ‘I’ of the courtly poet, the ‘I’ of Thomas Wyatt, the ‘I’ of the experiencing man and the ‘I’ of the generalized literary/poetic persona. Thus, ‘I’ as the token of whoever uses the term ‘I’ will suggest remarkable and multiple interpretations. Adamson, however, continues her search for the ‘referents’ of the terms, ultimately stating that the reader is free to ‘construct any possible world with which they are consistent’ (19). She further states: Equally, there’s the possibility that you refers not to a singular addressee but to a general audience and that the scenario of the poem is one in which the speaker is appealing for public pressure to be brought to bear on his defecting lover. (19) Both of these possibilities are valid, but there seems no reason to suppose that readers will opt for one reading over another, or indeed that the poem demands of us one reading. It seems part of the nature of poetry , part of the nature of Wyatt’s discourse in particular and part of the function of deictics in general that tokens of ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘we’ and ‘here’ possess, to use Balz Engler’s 410

Deixis in Literature

expression, a ‘quasi-magical force’ whereby they ‘create a situation of their own in the ­imagination’3 (in Bruhn 2005: 390). Some may feel uneasy about the idea of linguistic items having a ‘quasi-magical force’, but such a conception has the advantage of suggesting the qualities of literary discourse, which some approaches to stylistics routinely downplay. With ‘I’ in particular, it is easy simply to consider its deictic meaning to be that of ‘whoever uses the token “I”’, in that it picks out the speaker as referent. Similarly, the classificatory element tells us that it is a singular term, while the relational aspect constrains its use in context; that is to say, the participant ‘I’ can employ the term in relation to non-‘I’ in the given context: ‘The relational aspect of “I” means that “I” functions in relation to an implied addressee and third-person entities that are not participants in the speech situation. The “I” therefore does not function as a self-contained, discrete voice.’ In the case of lyric poetry in general and Wyatt’s in particular, the ‘I’ is constrained both by poetic convention and the conventions of the court. In terms of the three aspects deployed by Nunberg, then, ‘I’ appears more tightly constrained than other deictic terms (for example, it is hard to imagine a user of ‘I’ being a non-‘I’). Once removed from the canonical situation, however, the constraints are manifestly fewer, and its linguistic meaning drops further ‘out of the picture’. However, I do not wish to suggest a simple opposition between the canonical situation and some absent context; once again the difference is one of degree, not of kind. ‘I’ is so closely bound up with identity that even in the canonical situation, hearers have to make certain assumptions about the speaker. While the deictic element guides us to pick out the user of ‘I’ as ‘I’, and the classificatory element enables us to confirm features of singularity and animacy, the relational aspects must be construed with a view to the role of the ‘I’ in the discourse, and this is never more evident than in the poetry of Thomas Wyatt. The poem’s centre is to be found in the three principal pronominal deictic terms, two of which I have so far discussed in relation to Nunberg’s theory – ‘I’, ‘you’ (ye), and ‘it’. The two participant terms function in relation to the non-participant ‘it’, revealed in the penultimate line, ‘It was myn hert’. The ‘I’ is at once the courtly poet and a specific figure within a definite group, some of whom may be picked out by the ye. Given the tradition of courtly love poetry we might expect the ye to refer to a particular (and of course at the same time general) woman – the lover addressed. Already, however, we can see the instance of the participatory ye guiding us towards an interpretation and then ‘dropping out of the picture’. Further, the ye seems to function at the interface between the two spatial contexts – the ‘here’ of the speaker and the addressee(s) and the ‘there’ of the lost heart. Indeed, ‘there’ seems almost to function non-deictically; we can’t imagine an accompanying demonstratum (that is, a space where the heart lies). The participatory pronouns of the poem both act as if they are construed within the canonical situation and as more oblique, distanced and ultimately 411

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

written elements. This is precisely what Greenblatt (1980) and Adamson suggest: the sixteenth century was a pivotal time in English letters, poised as it was between the public and the personal, partly as a result of the rise of print culture. Adamson states: As far as I know, no equivalent exploration has been undertaken of his deictic practice and the effect on it of his position at the watershed between oral and literate genres or manuscript and print cultures. (2006: 19) In Wyatt’s case, the world of the imagined courtly love ritual and the world of Henriad court. Indeed, Wyatt’s addressees and references have been subject to a fair amount of speculation (see, for example, Shulman 2011). The poems themselves, as Shulman (2011) has noted, were intended for a ‘close, incestuous coterie’ (66). The paradox of sixteenth-century poetry is that as it moved to a more personal discourse, its detail became less evident. Actually, this should not surprise us – public pronouncements and public discourse are of course more likely to mobilize non-deictic references (calendrical time units, for example), while the canonical situation of utterance is likely to mobilize deictics that act as an interpretive shorthand. It has been suggested that Wyatt’s poetry is the product of conflicting discourse structures that ‘point to crises in the whole social formation’ (Waller 1993: 113). But in the rondeau of the lover seeking his lost heart, there is not so much a conflict as a blend of two kinds of discourse (and indeed two modes) – Public and Private – that come together to create a unique aesthetic form. One might usefully bring to bear the cognitivists’ notion of the conceptual blend here, but that is beyond the scope of this paper. However, the public and private discourses that merge in the poem precisely exemplify Nunberg’s assertion that deictics lead us towards an interpretation and then ‘withdraw’, in this case leaving us poised between the inner and outer world of Wyatt’s drama. In perhaps Wyatt’s best known and most powerful poem, They Flee from Me, the blend of the political and personal is again evident, resulting in further deictic complexities: They flee from me, that sometime did me seek With naked foot stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle, tame and meek That now are wild, and do not remember That sometime they put themself in danger To take bread at my hand. ...  And later in the second stanza: Therewithal sweetly did me kiss, And softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this’?

412

Deixis in Literature

The relative clause ‘that sometime did me seek’ fails to give any real clue as to who ‘they’ are. As is often the case in lyric poetry, we are plunged right in the middle of a discourse situation, with the deictics featuring prominently. Here, the participant ‘you’ is identified through a direct voice, who speaks back at the ‘I’, rendering it impotent: the addressee and receiver of the ‘forsaking’. Here again, we see Wyatt’s poetry functioning at the interface between two discourses – the political and the sexual. As Waller states of the poem: Political power is expressed in terms of personal allegiance and pressure, erotic power is expressed in the codes of political domination. (1993: 113) The paradoxes here result in an extraordinary deictic ordering. The curious extreme passivity of the poetic voice throughout suggests that the voice itself is unsure of how to proceed – how to negotiate the worlds of the public and the private. For while in one sense this is a courtly love poem, in another it is a political poem that casts shadows on the activity of the court and indeed of the whole culture of courtly lover and courtly obedience. But these two genres invoke the discourses of their counterparts – the love seen as political and the political couched in the language of courtly love. Speculation about the ‘referents’ of deictic expressions, including participant terms, is not enough to produce a satisfactory reading of Wyatt’s poetry (or indeed, any poetry) because it reduces the complexity of deixis to a simple binary relation; but the fine-grained semantic analysis by philosophers of language such as Nunberg must also be augmented by a sensitivity to the discourse of poetry. The function of deixis in poetry – and crucially in Wyatt’s poetry – is to challenge the reader to construct a ‘coherent enunciative act’ (Culler 1975: 168). They flee from Me and Help me to Seke are poems that, in trying to establish a new kind of discourse – emerging as they do from the political and the courtly worlds – exploit deixis in a way that has us poised between the two. If not possessed of a ‘quasi magical force’, deixis is nevertheless a remarkable feature of human communication.

Notes 1. On this point I concur with Bruhn (2005); he slightly misreads my (1992: 133) comment about deixis not helping us in interpretation. 2. Adamson’s use of ‘opacity’ is as it is in standard discourse, rather than as philosophers of language would use the term. An expression that is referentially opaque typically involves a belief clause, as in the standard example is a linguistic context in which it is not always possible to substitute ‘o-referential’ expressions (expressions referring to the same object) without altering the truth-value of the sentence. For example, ‘believes y is a hero’ is an opaque context because 'Believes Superman is a

413

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics hero’ is true while ‘X believes Clark Kent is a hero’ is false, even though ‘Superman’ and ‘Clark Kent’ are co-referential expressions. 3. Engler is referring to the function of deictics in Keats’s his Living Hand, Now Warm and Capable, but it seems to me an observation pertinent in relation to the function of deictics in poetry in general.

References Adamson, S. (2006), ‘Deixis and the renaissance art of self construction’, Sederi, 16: 5–29. Bex, T. (1995), ‘Keats and the disappearing self: Aspects of deixis in the odes’, in K. Green (ed.), Language and Literature, 16: 1–78. Boland, E. (1990), Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990, New York and London: Norton. Bruhn, M. J. (2005), ‘Place deixis and the schematics of imagined space: Milton to Keats’, Poetics Today, 26 (3): 387–431. Bühler, K. (1934), ‘The deictic field of language and deictic words’, in R. Jarvella and W. Klein (eds), Speech, Place and Action, 9–30, Chichester: John Wiley. Culler, J. (1975), Structuralist Poetics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Duchan, J. F., Bruder, G. A. and Hewitt, L. E., eds (1995), Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective, 3–17, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Eliot, T. S. (1975), Collected Poems, London: Faber. Engler, B. (1987), ‘Deictics and the status of poetic texts in fries’, in U. Fries (ed.), The Structure of Texts, 65–73, Tubingen: Narr. Fillmore, C. (1971), Santa Cruz Lectures on Deixis, Bloomington: Indiana Linguistics Club. Gavins, J. and Steen, G., eds (2003), Cognitive Poetics in Practice, London: Routledge. Green, K. (1992), ‘Deixis and the poetic persona’, Language and Literature, 1 (2): 121–34. Green, K., ed. (1995), New Essays in Deixis, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Green, K. (2000), ‘The tip of the iceberg: Real texts, long texts and mental representations’, in T. Bex, M. Burke and P. Stockwell (eds), Contextualised Stylistics, 49–66, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Green, K. (2006), ‘Deixis and Anaphora: Pragmatic approaches’, in K. Brown (ed.), Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 415–17, Amsterdam: Elsevier. Greenblatt, S. (1980), Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Grimberg, M. L. (1994), ‘On Nunberg on indexicality and deixis’, UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 6: 341–77. Herman, V. (1997), ‘Deixis and space in drama’, Social Semiotics, 7 (3): 269–83. Jarvella, R. J. and Klein, W., eds (1982), Speech, Place and Action, Chichester: John Wiley. Jones, P. (1995), ‘Philosophical and theoretical issues in the study of deixis: A critique of the standard account’, in K. Green (ed.), New Essays in Deixis, 27–48, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Larkin, P. (1985), Collected Poems, London: The Marvell Press and Faber and Faber. Nunberg, G. (1993), ‘Indexicality and deixis’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 16: 1–43. Peirce, C. (1955), Philosophical Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Rauh, G., ed. (1983), New Essays on Deixis, Tubingen: Narr. Segal, E. M. (1995), ‘A cognitive-phenomenological theory of fictional narrative’, in J. F. Duchan, G. A. Bruder and L. E. Hewit (eds), Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective, 3–18, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

414

Deixis in Literature Sell, R. (1987), ‘The unstable discourse of Henry Vaughan: A literary-pragmatic account’, in A. Rudrum (ed.), Essential Articles for the Study of Henry Vaughan, 44–61, Hertford, CT: Archon. Shulman, N. (2011), Craven with Diamonds: The Many Lives of Sir Thomas Wyatt, London: Short Books. Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1997), ‘The mapping between the mental and the public lexicon’, UCL Working Papers 9 in Linguistics, 107: 1–20. Stamatakis, C. (2012), Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting: ‘Turning theWord’, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stockwell, P. (2002), Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, London: Routledge. Tate, A. (1995), ‘Deictic markers and the disruption of voice in modernist poetry’, in K. Green (ed.), New Essays in Deixis, 131–42, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Tsur, R. (2006), ‘Deixis in literature: What isn’t cognitive poetics’, http://www.tau. ac.il/~tsurxx/DeixisInLiterature.html. Turner, M. (1991), Reading Minds, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Waller, G. (1993), English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century, London: Pearson. Wordsworth, W. (1936), Poetical Works, London: Oxford University Press. Wyatt, Sir T. (1975), Collected Poems, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

415

24

Dialect in Literature Jane Hodson, University of Sheffield

Chapter Overview Introduction 416 The Novels 420 Indexicality 423 Conclusion 428

1 Introduction To begin with a simple definition: a dialect is a variety of language spoken by people from a specific geographical region and/or socioeconomic group. Such a definition, however, raises a series of problems: What distinguishes a dialect from a language? Where does one dialect end and another begin? Is the determining factor in making these decisions the linguistic features or the speakers? Chambers and Trudgill discuss the difficulties of reaching a satisfactory definition for ‘a dialect’, concluding that it is more helpful to think of ‘a dialect continuum’. As they note, however, ‘The notion of the dialect continuum is perhaps a little difficult to grasp ... because we are used to thinking of linguistic varieties as discrete entities’ (Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 6). What Chambers and Trudgill allude to here is the misfit that exists between the ways in which professional linguists and ordinary people conceptualize dialects. While linguists see dialects as being composed of sets of overlapping linguistic variables, the popular public perception is that dialects are characterized by distinct linguistic features. Research in the field of perceptual dialectology takes as its object precisely this topic of how non-linguists perceive language variation, finding that there is a high degree of consensus among the 416

Dialect in Literature

general public not only about which features are typical of which dialects but also about which kinds of people speak which dialects. These popular perceptions are very different from the way that professional linguists describe language variation. Recognizing the differences between how professional linguists and ordinary people understand dialect has a number of implications when we turn to ‘dialect in literature’. First, dialect in literature is not created with the aim of impressing dialectologists with its linguistic accuracy, but rather of communicating information to a general readership about the characters who speak it. Dialect in literature thus tends to be based in the model that dialects are discrete entities with distinctive linguistic features. Second, ‘real world’ dialects are spoken aloud, but ‘dialect in literature’ must be presented on the page. While dialectologists can use the international phonetic alphabet to transcribe ‘real world’ speech, writers who wish to suggest something about dialect must work within written English, a system about which the general public has strong culturally determined ideas, particularly in relation to correctness and incorrectness. Finally, although both linguists and non-linguists share the view that dialects in literature ought to bear some relation to real-world dialects, their very different concepts of what dialects are means that they understand that relationship in rather different ways. In the case of academic approaches to dialect in literature, there is a long tradition of attempting to evaluate ‘dialect in literature’ against the known facts about ‘real world’ dialect. Sumner Ives is a particularly influential figure in this regard, and his ‘A Theory of Literary Dialect’ (1950, rev. ed. 1971) sets stringent criteria for assessing linguistic validity. He insists that a correct appraisal of literary dialect depends upon the recognition that dialects are composed of ‘a combination of features which are individually diverse in their distribution but which are found in a particular combination in only one limited area’ (Ives 1971: 152). He argues that if, after conducting a careful study, the linguist finds that the features of a literary dialect do not correlate with the features of a real-world dialect, then the representation ‘may be nothing more than a mess of spurious and generally meaningless re-spelling’ (Ives 1971: 176). Ives thus applies the criteria of the professional linguist to the literary construct of dialect in literature. Such a procedure can help to make a judgement about whether or not the literary text is a reliable source of information for the historical dialectologist, but it reveals little about how the dialect representation functions for the general reader. For the general reader, dialect in literature has a long-standing association with literary realism. Dialect representation has been a part of literature since at least Chaucer’s time, but it came to prominence as a literary technique in the nineteenth century in the social novels of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, among others. In these novels, it serves to evoke the voices 417

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

of characters from a diverse range of socioeconomic backgrounds, a function it retains in many works of literature to the present day (for an account of the nineteenth-century development of dialect in literature see Blake 1981; Adamson 1998; Hodson and Broadhead 2013). Jaffe and Walton, in their study of readers’ responses to dialect representation, found that their informants ‘took for granted that orthography could authentically represent social voices and identities’ (Jaffe and Walton 2000: 582). Sylvia Adamson offers the following account of how dialect in literature functions: The existence of Varieties provides the linguistic resources for the act of literary illusionism by which the reader is persuaded that what s/he is reading is not a collection of words on a page but the transcription of a human voice endowed with a specific social identity. There are two aspects to this illusionist enterprise. First, since no real utterance takes place outside a social context, the presence of a recognisable Variety in a text persuades us of its authenticity as utterance or address. Secondly, the specificity of the Variety invoked allows us to categorise and characterise the utterance, to infer, that is, that we are hearing or overhearing a speaker of provenance X, performing role Y, or adopting attitude Z. (Adamson 1993: 232) When the general reader encounters the representation of a linguistic feature or features that they perceive as belonging to a specific dialect, it generates the perception that it must originate from a ‘real’ speaker. The knowledge that readers draw on is as much cultural as it is linguistic: readers know which features are associated with which dialect and which social characteristics are held to be typical of the speakers of that dialect. Unlike the professional linguist who measures ‘dialect in literature’ against known facts about ‘real world dialects’ in order to deduce whether the representation is accurate, the general reader considers ‘dialect in literature’ in light of existing cultural knowledge about that dialect in order to deduce information about the speaker of that dialect. Thus far, I have set up a distinction between ‘real world’ dialects spoken by authentic speakers and ‘dialect in literature’ spoken by characters in literary texts. This distinction is one that has often been observed by linguists, who have tended to ignore representations of dialect in film, literature and other media on account of their self-evident inauthenticity. More recently, however, some dialectologists and sociolinguists have begun both to question the extent to which ‘real world’ dialects are objectively ‘out there’ and to reconsider their idealization of ‘the authentic speaker’(see in particular Coupland 2003; Eckert 2003; Bucholtz 2003). This has intensified interest in style and the role of the speaker as an active agent (for a good survey of this work see Coupland 2007).

418

Dialect in Literature

It has also led to greater attention being paid to the role that popular media plays in creating and disseminating conceptions of dialects. For example, in his influential account of the historical development of the concept of received pronunciation, Asif Agha writes that the dissemination or spread of a register depends on the circulation of messages typifying speech. Such messages are borne by physical artifacts: in the case of face-to-face communication, by acoustical artifacts, i.e. ‘utterances’; in the mass mediated cases by more perduring text-artifacts – books, magazines, cartoons, musical scores, and the like – that are physical objects conveying information about cultural forms. (Agha 2003: 243) Following this argument, Barbara Johnstone et al. discuss the film The Deer Hunter as part of their seminal account of the development of ‘Pittsburgh English’ (Johnstone et al. 2006), Joan Beal analyses the use of Sheffield English features by the band The Arctic Monkeys (Beal 2009), Mary Bucholtz and Qiuana Lopez explore the performance of a version of African-American English by white characters in recent films (Bucholtz and Lopez 2011; Bucholtz 2011), Barbara Meek examines representations of what she terms Hollywood Indian English (Meek 2006) and Paul Cooper uses evidence from literary texts to investigate historical perceptions of Yorkshire English (Cooper 2013). All of this work has been conducted by linguists pursuing questions about how language relates to social identities. But there have also been a number of scholars who have considered the implications of these developments from the point of view of understanding the function of dialect in literary texts. Taryn Hakala, for example, has considered style shifting and authenticity in relation to Victorian literature (Hakala 2010a, b), Alex Broadhead uses recent work in sociolinguistics to explore the language of Robert Burns (Broadhead 2013) and Hugh Escott interrogates the linguistic practices of three authors from South Yorkshire (Escott 2015). What this work has in common is that, by using insights drawn from recent work in sociolinguistics, the authors are able to offer nuanced accounts of the way that literary works make use of dialect features. In the remainder of this chapter, I will explore what the concept of indexicality in particular has to offer to the study of dialect in literature by focusing on passages from two novels: Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (first published 1837) and Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English (2011). In both of these novels, a boy arrives in London and attempts to find a place for himself. Both are social novels, responding to specific sociopolitical issues of the day: the treatment of orphans in the case of Oliver Twist, and the impact of gang violence in London estates in the case of Pigeon English. In both novels, the use of dialect is a key part of creating a realistic voice for the underclasses it represents.

419

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

2  The Novels Oliver Twist (1837–39) was Dickens’s second novel, following Pickwick Papers (1836–7). It focuses on the plight of the young Oliver, who is brought up in a workhouse and later taken in by a gang of thieves in London. In the extract I focus on here, two of the young pickpockets, Charley Bates and Jack Dawkins (the Artful Dodger), discuss thieving with Oliver. ‘What a pity it is he isn’t a prig!’ ‘Ah!’ said Master Charles Bates. ‘He don’t know what’s good for him.’ The Dodger sighed again, and resumed his pipe, as did Charley Bates, and they both smoked for some seconds in silence. ‘I suppose you don’t even know what a prig is?’ said the Dodger mournfully. ‘I think I know that,’ replied Oliver, hastily looking up. ‘It’s a th--; you’re one, are you not?’ inquired Oliver, checking himself. ‘I am,’ replied the Dodger. ‘I’d scorn to be anythink else.’ Mr Dawkins gave his hat a ferocious cock after delivering this sentiment, and looked at Master Bates as if to denote that he would feel obliged by his saying anything to the contrary. ‘I am,’ repeated the Dodger; ‘so’s Charley; so’s Fagin; so’s Sikes; so’s Nancy; so’s Bet; so we all are, down to the dog, and he’s the downiest one of the lot.’ ‘And the least given to peaching,’ added Charley Bates. ‘He wouldn’t so much as bark in a witness-box, for fear of committing himself; no, not if you tied him up in one, and left him there without wittles for a fortnight,’ said the Dodger. ‘That he wouldn’t, not a bit of it,’ observed Charley. ‘He’s a rum dog. Don’t he look fierce at any strange cove that laughs or sings when he’s in company!’ pursued the Dodger. ‘Won’t he growl at all when he hears a fiddle playing, and don’t he hate other dogs as ain’t of his breed! Winkin! Oh, no!’ (Dickens 2003: 148) Oliver Twist is written from the point of view of an omniscient third person narrator. This narrator writes in standard English and deploys a high register, using Latinate words such as ‘resumed’, ‘ferocious’, ‘sentiment’, ‘denote’ and ‘contrary’. Where dialect appears in Oliver Twist, it appears in the direct speech of some characters. It is an established convention of the novel form that what appears within speech marks is a direct transcript of what was actually said. This means that dialect features often appear in direct speech as part of marking the general flavour of how characters really speak.

420

Dialect in Literature

Dialect in literature can be analysed at three primary levels of representation: respelling, grammar and vocabulary. Respelling typically does two things: it represents pronunciations that are distinctively different from the standard (received pronunciation) and also represents pronunciations that are the contractions of rapid speech. It is possible to find both types here: ‘anythink’, ‘wittles’ and ‘winkin’ all represent something specific about the accent of the Dodger; ‘you’re’, ‘I’d’, ‘so’s’ and ‘wouldn’t’ are common contractions and used by all three characters. In terms of grammar, there is non-standard concord with ‘He don’t know’ and ‘don’t he hate’, secondary contraction with ‘ain’t’ and a nonstandard relative clause marker in ‘other dogs as ain’t of his breed’. In terms of vocabulary, both Charley and the Dodger use non-standard vocabulary items: ‘prig’, ‘peaching’, ‘downiest’, ‘rum’ and ‘cove’. Taken together, the scene shows quite dense marking of dialect features for the Dodger and Charley. Oliver’s speech lacks this dialectal marking, despite his workhouse upbringing, and this has been a matter of commentary since the earliest reviews of the novel (see Ferguson 1998: 2). Hakala summarizes: ‘[a]ccording to most critics, the speech of characters is ‘elevated’ toward the standard not only in serious moments and formal settings but also in relation to the characters’ virtuousness’, although Hakala herself argues for a more complex understanding of the convention (Hakala 2010b: 12). In the context of this particular scene, the absence of dialectal features from Oliver’s speech illustrates that there is a gulf between Oliver and his new friends, although the fact that Oliver uses common contractions (‘it’s’, ‘you’re’, ‘I’d’) and does not employ Latinate vocabulary ensures that his voice is also distinct from that of the narrator. Pigeon English is the first novel by Stephen Kelman, published in 2011 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It tells the story of Harri, who has recently immigrated to London from Ghana. At the start of the novel, a friend of Harri’s has been murdered and Harri sets out to investigate the death. The passage I focus on comes early in the novel as Harri visits the makeshift shrine set up where the boy died: There were bottles of beer instead of candles and the dead boy’s friends wrote messages to him. They all said he was a great friend. Some of the spelling was wrong but I didn’t mind. His football boots were on the railings tied up by their laces. They were nearly new Nikes, the studs were proper metal and everything. Jordan: ‘Shall I t’ief them? He don’t need ‘em no more’. I just pretended I didn’t hear him. Jordan would never really steal them, they were a million times too big. They looked too empty just hanging there. I wanted to wear them but they’d never fit. Me and the dead boy were only half friends. I didn’t see him very much because he was older and he didn’t go to my school. He could ride his bike 421

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

with no hands and you never even wanted him to fall off. I said a prayer for him inside my head. It just said sorry. That’s all I could remember. I pretended like if I kept looking hard enough I could make the blood move and go back in the shape of a boy. I could bring him back alive that way. It happened before, where I used to live there was a chief who brought his son back like that. It was a long time ago, before I was born. Asweh, it was a miracle. It didn’t work this time. (Kelman 2011: 4) Unlike Oliver Twist, the narrative voice is not standard English and is not peppered with high register Latinate terms. Standard English does occur in the novel, primarily in the voice of the pigeon who watches over the boys: ‘You look so blameless from up here, so busy. The way you flock around an object of curiosity, or take flight from an intrusion, we’re more alike than you give us credit for. But not too alike’ (Kelman 2011: 26). The majority of the novel, however, is written in the first person by Harri and represents Harri’s speech patterns; it thus forms part of a long tradition of nonstandard first person narrators in British fiction, dating back at least to Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800). In terms of spelling, Harri’s narration shows the use of common contractions such as ‘they’d’, ‘didn’t’ and ‘that’s’. Grammatically, there is a non-standard pronoun form with ‘Me and the dead boy were’. There is not much dialectal vocabulary in this passage, but Harri uses the discourse marker ‘Asweh’, which reviewers of the novel assert to be a Ghanaian-English contraction for ‘I swear’ (see, e.g. Aspden 2011). Direct speech is only represented briefly in this passage, by Jordan’s utterance ‘Shall I t’ief them? He don’t need ‘em no more’. It is noticeable that these two sentences are much more densely marked with features of dialect representation than Harri’s narrative voice, including the respelling ‘t’ief’ to indicate TH-stopping, the contractions ‘don’t’ and ‘’em’ and the nonstandard use of ‘thief’ as a verb. The contrast between Jordan’s speech and Harri’s narration is further underlined by Harri’s assurance ‘Jordan would never really steal them’ which quietly translates Jordan’s ‘Shall I t’ief them?’ Thus both novels use dialect features in order represent young speakers from a socially disadvantaged background. There are significant differences between the ways the two novels handle dialect: the dialect representation is restricted to direct speech in Oliver Twist, but present (albeit lightly marked) in the first person narration of Pigeon English. But the two novels also have elements in common, particularly in the way in which the speech of the central characters – Oliver and Harri – is distinguished as less dialectal than that of their peers. In the next section, I consider what introducing the concept of indexicality can offer to the understanding of these passages. 422

Dialect in Literature

3 Indexicality Recent work on indexicality takes as its starting point Labov’s observation that linguistic variables can be classified according to the social evaluation that they receive: We can classify the various elements involved in linguistic change according to the kind of social evaluation they receive. Indicators are linguistic features which are embedded in a social matrix, showing social differentiation by age or social group, but which show no pattern of style shifting and appear to have little evaluative force. … Markers … show stylistic stratification as well as social stratification. Though they may lie below the level of conscious awareness, they will produce regular responses on subjective reaction tests. Stereotypes are socially marked forms, prominently labelled by society. (Labov 1972: 179–80) In the case of stereotypes, Labov notes that they ‘may become increasingly divorced from the forms which are actually used in speech’ (Labov 1972: 180). Barbara Johnstone et al. develop Labov’s account by drawing Michael Silverstein’s account of the ‘indexical order’ and Asif Agha’s account of how specific features become ‘enregistered’ to a particular geographical or social identity. They describe how ‘first-order’ indexical correlations between linguistic features and geographical area become the basis for ‘second-order’ indexical marking of place and social class, a subset of which become the basis for ‘thirdorder’ indexical use of sociolinguistic stereotypes. These third-order indexical features are widely recognized and allow speakers to ‘use regional forms drawn from highly codified lists to perform local identity’ (Johnstone et al. 2006: 83). In terms of understanding dialect in literature, it is evident why writers favour those features that are enregistered: they are precisely those highly salient features which bring significant cultural baggage. An introduction of indexicality into discussions of dialect in literature offers more, however, than simply an explanation as to why authors prefer to make use of enregistered features. In a 2008 article, Penny Eckert develops the idea of the ‘indexical field’, emphasizing that there is no strict one-to-one relationship between a variable and its social meaning. Rather, she argues, each linguistic variable has a range of potential meanings which will be realized in any specific context: I argue that the meanings of variables are not precise or fixed but rather constitute a field of potential meanings – an indexical field, or constellation of ideologically related meanings, any one of which can be activated in the situated use of the variable. The field is fluid, and each new activation has 423

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

the potential to change the field by building on ideological connections. Thus variation constitutes an indexical system that embeds ideology in language and that is in turn part and parcel of the construction of ideology. (Eckert 2008: 454) Eckert draws on Kathryn Campbell-Kibler’s experimental work on the variable (-ing) to explore how indexical fields are configured (Campbell-Kibler 2007). In many English-speaking regions, (-ing) can be realized as either apical [n] or velar [ŋ]. Campbell-Kibler demonstrates that listeners interpret the way that a speaker realizes (-ing) on the basis of both their general impression of the speaker’s style and the content of the speaker’s utterance. Eckert draws the following conclusion: Among other things, while a negative evaluation of a speaker using the apical variant might be that the speaker is inarticulate or lazy, a favourable evaluation might be that he or she is unpretentious or easygoing. Similarly, the speaker using the velar variant can be heard as simply articulate or as pretentious. Which of the meanings in the indexical field the hearer will associate with a given occurrence will depend on both the perspective of the hearer and the style in which it is embedded – which includes not only the rest of the linguistic form of the utterance but the content of the utterance as well. (Eckert 2008: 466) Applying this to literature, it can be seen that when a character in a work of fiction says ‘winkin’ rather than ‘winking’ it will be interpreted by the reader depending on how it relates to overall style of the character’s speech, what the character is saying and indeed what else the reader knows about the character. In the case of the Artful Dodger, his use of ‘winkin’ sits within a speech style that is marked as nonstandard in multiple other ways; the speech content is about being a thief and is uttered by a character who has already established his credentials as belonging to the criminal underclass. At the same time, however, the Dodger is shown to be articulate and is, according to his own lights, a person of principle. The use of ‘winkin’ thus helps to construct the image of the Dodger as a colourful and easy-going character, outside the rules of both the law and of standard English. In the case of Oliver Twist, however, it must be taken into account that ‘the rest of the linguistic form of the utterance’ includes the fact that it is a written work of literature. This in itself means that any variation carries with it a strong negative message. Michael Toolan has argued that readers are inherently resistant to ‘rendered speech that departs to any appreciable degree from standard colloquial speech’ and that they engage with such representations ‘in a spirit of enforced labour’ (Toolan 1992: 34). The reasons for this are both practical and 424

Dialect in Literature

cultural. In practical terms, for example, although children are initially taught to spell phonetically, proficient readers learn to recognize words on sight and only use phonetic clues when encountering unfamiliar words. As a result, when words are respelled to indicate something about pronunciation, readers are forced to resort to phonetic sounding in order to try to deduce what the respelling indicates; reading becomes more of a ‘labour’. Furthermore, many years of schooling means that readers are strongly encultured into understanding all spellings, grammar and vocabulary that deviate from the standard as ‘wrong’. Agha, in his discussion of representations of speakers of received pronunciation producing ‘kebinet office’ for ‘cabinet office’ and ‘clawth’ for ‘cloth’ argues: Here the use of mis-spelling constitutes an implicit metapragmatic commentary on norms of speech. For, armed with the folk-view that every word has a correct spelling and a correct pronunciation, the reader can only construe defective spelling as an implicit comment on defects of pronunciation – implicit, because no-one has actually said that the pronunciation is incorrect. The mis-spelling of words also invites inferences about oddity of character (viz., that upper-class speakers are pompous, eccentric, out of touch, etc.) rarely described explicitly in these texts. (Agha 2003: 237) Agha here notes two different impulses: first that respellings tend to be construed as ‘wrong’ and second that respellings invites specific inferences about the dialect and speakers in question. While the concept of the ‘indexical field’ means that specific instances of dialect features in literature can be interpreted in a range of ways, depending on the context of their use, each dialect feature has a pre-existing set of associations that may or may not be activated for a reader in that context. Following Agha, I would like to suggest that there are two primary dimensions along which readers interpret features in written texts that are markedly different from standard English: incorrectness and identity. These two dimensions do, of course, overlap; many features mark both incorrectness and identity. Nevertheless, they vary independently: some linguistic features are primarily associated with incorrectness and suggest very little about the identity of the speaker, while others are associated with a highly specific socio-geographical identity but less so with incorrectness. I argue that these two dimensions function rather differently in relation to each of the three levels of dialect marking I have previously discussed. In the case of orthography, as I have already argued, there is a strong cultural association between non-standard spellings and incorrectness. But it is also the case that respellings vary widely in terms of the extent to which they are enregistered to specific sociogeographical identities. Some respellings such 425

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

as the ‘‘em’ for ‘them’ used by Jordan in Pigeon English are very generically non-standard. Other respellings are much more specific, such as the use of ‘t’’ to mark definite article reduction (as in ‘there’s trouble at t’ mill’) in some Northern English dialects (primarily Yorkshire English, see Cooper 2013). This ‘t’’ representation makes little logical sense as a phonetic representation and is likely to be misread by anyone who is unfamiliar with the convention. For the reader who is familiar with it, however, it signals highly specific information about social and geographical identity. In the case of grammar, the dominant dimension is incorrectness. There are a few grammatical features that are enregistered to specific dialects, one example being the Hiberno-English use of ‘after’ with the present continuous. Much of the non-standard grammar found in literature is generically stigmatized, however, including double negatives, non-standard concord and non-standard tense formation. In the case of vocabulary, both dimensions are in play. Where words are perceived as common slang or obscenities, the dimension of non-standardness may predominate. In many other cases, however, the use of a word from a specific region or social group will specifically signal that identity. This may particularly be the case where the vocabulary item in question is unknown to the reader and may be used to suggest a worldview and knowledge that the reader does not have immediate access to. In the case of the Dickens, for example, the use of ‘prig’, ‘downiest’ and ‘peaching’ by the Artful Dodger and Charley serves to signal their membership of a criminal subculture that adheres to a code of conduct that is likely to be quite different from that of the reader. A further point to bear in mind in terms of ‘the indexical field’ is that it emphasizes the role of the reader in drawing meaning from the representation of linguistic variables. As I noted in relation to ‘t’’ for definite article reduction, for example, the meaning that readers take from it will be greatly determined by whether or not they are familiar with the convention. Similarly, readers may or may not be familiar with specific vocabulary items. Thinking of dialect representation in terms of ‘the indexical field’ thus allows for the fact that different people will respond to any given dialect representation in different ways, and also that that those meanings will shift over time; as Agha has noted, ‘cultural value is not a static property’ (Agha 2003: 232). Graham Shorrocks has previously drawn a distinction between dialect literature, which is ‘aimed essentially, though not exclusively, at a non-standard-dialect-speaking readership’, and literary dialect, which is ‘aimed at a general audience’, finding that these categories have implications for how the dialect is presented on the page (Shorrocks 1996: 386). Paul Cooper uses Shorrocks’s categories as part of his investigation into which features have been enregistered as ‘Yorkshire English’ in the nineteenth century as opposed to the present day. He finds that some items that were enregistered for nineteenth-century audiences, including 426

Dialect in Literature

‘bairns’, ‘gan’ and ‘mun’, are no longer enregistered for modern speakers. He concludes that ‘the cultural value of these features has diachronically shifted from being salient in representing Yorkshire to not being particularly salient for representing Yorkshire at all’ (Cooper 2013: 236). This capacity for the value of features to change over time accounts for one of the respellings in the passage from Oliver Twist – ‘wittles’ for ‘vittles’ – that is liable to puzzle modern readers. The v/w transposition was a common way of representing London English in the nineteenth century, but it had dropped out of use by the t­ wentieth century. Finally, I would like to note an additional feature specific to literature as opposed to ‘real world’ dialect that serves to constrain the indexical field for any given instance of dialect representation: meta-language. Meta-language is a constant feature of social life and, as Jaworski et al. have observed, everyday meta-language ‘can work at an ideological level, and influence people’s actions and priorities in a wide range of ways’ (Jaworski et al. 2004: 3). What is specific to literature is that, because of the fixed nature of the literary text, specific representations of dialect are consistently accompanied by the same meta-linguistic comments, which serve to guide the interpretation of that representation. In Dialect in Film and Literature, I suggest that in literary texts meta-language occurs in four primary areas: para-texts, third-person narration, first-person narration and character speech and thought. I argue that in para-texts and third-person narration, meta-language tends to be presented as descriptive of the dialect, while in first-person narration and character speech the focus of the meta-language is often on what it reveals about the relationship between characters (for further discussion, see Hodson 2014: ch. 8). In the case of the passage from Oliver Twist, the focus of the meta-language is interpersonal. The Artful Dodger asks Oliver ‘I suppose you don’t even know what a prig is?’ The Dodger anticipates that Oliver will be unfamiliar with the slang term, marking him as an outsider from the gang. Oliver demonstrates that he does understand the term, even if he is reluctant to define it, and the Dodger and Charley respond by using other in-group terms that exclude Oliver from immediate membership of their gang. As with the dialect representation in direct speech, which signals that Charley and the Dodger are part of the dialect-speaking criminal underclass, the meta-language here marks the differences between Oliver and his new friends. Pigeon English foregrounds the issue of language variety through its title, which puns meta-linguistically on ‘pidgin English’. In the case of the specific passage under consideration here, meta-language occurs when Harri comments on the writing of the children leaving messages for their dead friend: ‘Some of the spelling was wrong but I didn’t mind.’ Significantly, we are not directly shown the bad spelling of the children but only Harri’s assessment of it; it is Harri who is in focus. His statement works in concert with what is shown 427

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

of his language variety through his first personal narration: despite his recent arrival in England, he is a more competent user of written English than many of his peers.

4 Conclusion ‘Dialect in literature’ is not the representation of real-world dialect. As Jessi Eleana Aaron writes, ‘What is represented in literature is not usage, but representation itself; representation, especially of language and other complex symbolic systems, such as culture, is always partial and rarely representational’(Aaron 2009: 478–9). Authors who represent dialect features in their texts create a dynamic system of signs, which includes a range of linguistic features with different cultural associations, a series of meta-linguistic comments and the broader fictional context of the literary text. The reader then brings their preexisting social and linguistic knowledge of the reader in order primarily to derive information about the characters who speak that variety.

References Aaron, J. (2009), ‘Coming back to life: From indicator to stereotype and a strange story of frequency’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13 (4): 472–98. Adamson, S. (1993), ‘Varieties, stereotypes, satire – and Shakespeare’, in Y. Ikegami and M. Toyota (eds), Aspects of English as a World Language, 225–45, Tokyo: Maruzen. Adamson, S. (1998), ‘Literary language’, in S. Romaine (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume IV 1776-1997, 589–692, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Agha, A. (2003), ‘The social life of cultural value’, Language & Communication, 23 (3–4): 231–73. Aspden, R. (2011), ‘Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman – review’, The Observer. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/13/pigeon-english-stephen-kelman-review. Beal, J. C. (2009), ‘“You’re not from New York City, You’re from Rotherham”: Dialect and identity in British Indie music’, Journal of English Linguistics, 37 (3): 223–40. Blake, N. F. (1981), Non-standard Language in English Literature, London: Deutsch. Broadhead, A. (2013), The Language of Robert Burns: Style, Ideology and Identity, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Bucholtz, M. (2003), ‘Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentication of identity’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7 (3): 398–416. Bucholtz, M. (2011), ‘Race and the re-embodied voice in Hollywood film’, Language & Communication, 31 (3): 255–65. Bucholtz, M. and Lopez, Q. (2011), ‘Performing blackness, forming whiteness: Linguistic minstrelsy in Hollywood film’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15 (5): 680–706. Campbell-Kibler, K. (2007), ‘Accent, (ING), and the social logic of listener perceptions’, American Speech, 82 (1): 32–64. Chambers, J. K. and Trudgill, P. (1998), Dialectology, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

428

Dialect in Literature Cooper, P. S. (2013), Enregisterment in Historical Contexts: A Framework. Unpublished doctoral thesis. University of Sheffield. Coupland, N. (2003), ‘Sociolinguistic authenticities’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7 (3): 417–31. Coupland, N. (2007), Style: Language Variation and Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dickens, C. (2003), Oliver Twist, London: Penguin. Eckert, P. (2003), ‘Sociolinguistics and authenticity: An elephant in the room’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7 (3): 392–7. Eckert, P. (2008), ‘Variation and the indexical field’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12 (4): 453–76. Escott, H. (2015), ‘Speikin’ Proper’: Investigating Representations of Vernacular Speech in the Writing of Three Authors from South-Yorkshire Coal-Mining Backgrounds. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Sheffield. Ferguson, S. L. (1998), ‘Drawing fictional lines: Dialect and narrative in the Victorian novel’, Style, 32 (1): 1–17. Hakala, T. (2010a), ‘A great man in clogs: Performing authenticity in Victorian lancashire’, Victorian Studies, 52 (3): 387–412. Hakala, T. (2010b), Working Dialect: Nonstandard Voices in Victorian Literature. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Michigan. Hodson, J. (2014), Dialect in Film & Literature, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hodson, J. and Broadhead, A. (2013), ‘Developments in literary dialect representation in British fiction 1800-1836’, Language and Literature, 22 (4): 314–32. Ives, S. (1971), ‘A theory of literary dialect’, in J. Williamson and V. Burke (eds), A Various Language, 145–77, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Jaffe, A. and Walton, S. (2000), ‘The voices people read: Orthography and the representation of non-standard speech’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4 (4): 561–87. Jaworski, A., Coupland, D. N. and Galasiński, D. (2004), ‘Metalanguage: Why now?’, in A. Jaworski, D. N. Coupland and D. Galasiński (eds), Metalanguage: Social and Ideological Perspectives, 3–8, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Johnstone, B., Andrus, J. and Danielson, A. E. (2006), ‘Mobility, indexicality, and the enregisterment of “Pittsburghese”’, Journal of English Linguistics, 34 (2): 77–104. Kelman, S. (2011), Pigeon English, London: Bloomsbury. Labov, W. (1972), Sociolinguistic Patterns, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Meek, B. A. (2006), ‘And the Injun goes “How”! Representations of American Indian English in white public space’, Language in Society, 35 (1): 93–128. Shorrocks, G. (1996), ‘Non-standard dialect literature and popular culture’, in J. Klemola, M. Kytö and M. Rissanen (eds), Speech Past and Present: Studies in English Dialectology in Memory of Ossi Ihalainen, 385–411, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Toolan, M. (1992), ‘The significations of representing dialect in writing’, Language and Literature, 1 (1): 29–46.

429

25

Dialogue Credibility versus Realism in Fictional Speech Dan McIntyre, University of Huddersfield

Chapter Overview Introduction 430 Studying Drama as Discourse 432 How like Naturally Occurring Speech is Dramatic Dialogue? 435 Creating Credible Dialogue: From Downton Abbey to the   Roman Empire 437 Conclusion 442

1 Introduction This chapter focuses on dialogue, which is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as ‘a conversation carried on between two or more persons; a colloquy, talk together’. The OED definition also goes on to point out that there is often a tendency to understand the term dialogue as referring to speech between two persons, ‘perhaps through associating dia- with di-: cf. monologue’. My use of the term dialogue, then, incorporates duologue, the term for conversation between two persons specifically. Monologue, on the other hand, may be understood as ‘a long speech by one actor in a play, film, or broadcast programme’, as ‘a scene in a drama in which only one actor speaks (opposed to chorus and dialogue)’ and as ‘a dramatic composition for a single

430

Dialogue

performer’(OED). In this chapter, my comments about dialogue apply equally to monologue. In fiction, dialogue can be presented in various forms. In this chapter, I am interested in the exact words of a character, unfiltered through a narrator. In the analysis of prose fiction this is what Leech and Short (2007), in their model of discourse presentation, call free direct speech. This is in contrast to the discussion of fictional dialogue that includes other presentational forms, such as inter alia, indirect speech, the narrator’s presentation of a speech act and the narrator’s presentation of voice (for which, see Ikeo, this volume). My focus in this chapter, however, is on dialogue in dramatic discourse, incorporating plays, TV dramas and films. Models of discourse presentation such as Leech and Short’s (2007) tend not to be used to categorize fictional dialogue in this genre, since dramatic texts do not exhibit the kinds of narrators found in prose fiction (though see McIntyre 2006 for a discussion of the narratorial characteristics of drama and Poole 1994 for an argument in favour of deploying discourse presentation theory in its analysis). To date, the most extensive single study of dramatic discourse in general is Herman (1995), who advocates the study ‘of [dramatic] dialogue as interaction’ (1995: 13). This is on the assumption that dramatic dialogue shares ‘areas of commonality’ (1995: 4) with naturally occurring conversation. Herman argues that dramatists exploit ‘underlying speech conventions, principles and “rules” of use, operative in speech exchanges in the many sorts, conditions and contexts of society which members are assumed to share and use in their interactions in day-to-day exchanges’ (1995: 6). She is clear, though, that in dramatic dialogue we should not expect to see an exact mirror of naturally occurring speech but an illusion of the kind of dialogue found in real life. Herman’s point about the interactive nature of fictional dramatic dialogue applies to dialogue between characters in any genre (see, for example, Short’s 1995 analysis of speech in John Fowles’s The Magus). Nonetheless, the parallels between dramatic discourse and real-life interaction are arguably greater due to the unfiltered nature of the communication, as a result of the absence of a narrator. My aim in this chapter is to suggest some of the means by which credible fictional speech (i.e. dialogue that is convincing as an imitation of naturally occurring speech or seems plausible as a historical variety) is created through stylistic choices on the part of dramatists. (Of course, not all dramatic dialogue is aimed at establishing this kind of credibility). I also want to argue that realism is secondary to credibility in fictional dialogue. In so doing, I briefly survey some of the work that has been done on the degree of similarity and difference between dramatic discourse and naturally occurring speech.

431

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

2  Studying Drama as Discourse What is characteristic of most stylistic work on drama is that it approaches dramatic dialogue as interactive talk akin to naturally occurring conversation. This contrasts with traditional approaches to drama where the dynamic nature of discourse at the character level was largely ignored in favour of the analysis of poetic tropes such as metaphor (this kind of work is occasionally still done within stylistics; see, e.g. Freeman 1995). It was insights from sociolinguistics and the philosophy of language that revolutionized the stylistic analysis of drama from the 1980s onwards. Chief among this early work was Burton’s (1980) Dialogue and Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Modern Drama Dialogue and Naturally Occurring Conversation. What Burton (1980) demonstrates is that by applying analytical methods from the field of discourse analysis (cf. critical discourse analysis) it is possible to describe the linguistic structure of dramatic texts in such a way as to be able to explain the locus of particular stylistic effects. Additionally, the potential is there to use the detailed insights achievable by such methods to support a literary stylistic evaluation of the text. In effect, Burton assumes dramatic dialogue to have enough in common with naturally occurring conversation to be able to feasibly apply the methods of spoken discourse analysis to investigate its stylistic qualities. She analyses work by Ionesco and Pinter to demonstrate the validity of this approach (the underlying assumptions of Burton’s approach that dramatic dialogue is similar to naturally occurring conversation will be discussed more fully in Section 3). Shortly after the publication of Burton’s (1980) seminal work, Short (1981) demonstrated further the potential of discourse analysis to inform stylistic work on drama. Short’s (1981) focus is primarily on the analysis of dialogue using insights from pragmatics and the philosophy of language. To this end, he demonstrates how, for instance, Searle’s (1969) notion of speech acts, Grice’s (1975) co-operative principle, and the concept of linguistic presupposition expressed by, among others, Keenan (1971), Kempson (1975) and Leech (1974), can be deployed in the analysis of fictional conversation. A further significant contribution of Short’s (1981) article was to establish the primacy of the dramatic text as the object of study in stylistic analysis (Short 1981 argues that all dramatic criticism should focus on the text as opposed to performance, though outside stylistics, the analysis of performance is still common). Short’s argument in respect of this is that the text is the only stable element in prototypical drama. Critical discussion that focuses on performance will be inherently flawed since the falsifiability of a critical position is dependent on our having access to the original object of study. If this is a transient element such as a performance, it becomes impossible to invalidate critical positions that are based on this. 432

Dialogue

The work of Burton (1980) and Short (1981) was at the forefront of research on drama that viewed dramatic dialogue as dynamic interaction. Examples of work that followed include Simpson’s (1989) analysis of politeness phenomena in Ionesco’s The Lesson, Herman’s (1991) use of the techniques of conversation analysis for fictional dialogue analysis and Bennison’s (1993) deployment of Gricean analysis in pursuit of insights into character in Tom Stoppard’s Professional Foul. (For a fuller account of the historical development of linguistic work on dramatic dialogue, particularly in relation to television dramatic dialogue, see the survey in Richardson 2010: 42–62). Herman’s (1995) monograph built on her work on turn-taking in drama by offering a consolidation of the general research agenda of drama stylisticians up to that point. As with Burton (1980), Herman’s (1995) work is predicated on a degree of similarity between fictional and naturally occurring conversation, and Herman adopts much of the terminology of spoken discourse analysts. She points out, for instance, that the notion of a sentence is of limited value in the study of dramatic dialogue: The linguistic units of analysis appropriate to dialogue as interactional speech are utterances. The sentence is an abstract entity in linguistics, defined in relation to particular grammars, and not in absolute terms. Utterances bring back into reckoning the contextual factors which are abstracted away by grammatical sentences. Utterances are relevant to areas of ‘languagein-use’, sentences to grammars. Although further complexities can be introduced, the simple distinction made above will serve for our purposes although it must be noted that there is not always a one-to-one relation between them when sentences are used in context as utterances. Utterances may be liable to false starts, slips of the tongue, be elliptical, incomplete, etc. so that it could be unclear as to which sentence analogue is being used. (Herman 1995: 13) This notion that spoken language is somehow chaotic when compared to written language is an attitude that pertained in linguistics for a long time, notably in Chomsky’s distinction between linguistic competence and performance. While Chomsky’s objection to the study of linguistic performance was convincingly rebutted in sociolinguistics, in grammar the primacy of written language arguably remained until the advent of electronic corpora when grammars of spoken language began to be produced. Biber et al.’s (1999) grammar of spoken English, for instance, discards the notion of the sentence as an appropriate unit for describing speech and replaces this with the C-unit, a term that covers both clausal and non-clausal units. The latter are described by Leech (2000) as units of around five to six words. According to Biber et al., non-clausal units can be analysed grammatically but cannot be connected to anything else to form a 433

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

longer syntactic unit. For example, here is a string of spoken language divided into non-clausal C-units: Well, | you know | what I did, | I looked in the trunk | I was going to Vicky’s (Leech 2000: 699) The relevance of this discussion to dramatic dialogue concerns the extent to which we assume fictional speech to be a reflection of naturally occurring speech. Some dramatists have attempted to reflect the latter through the writing in of normal non-fluency features such as pauses, hesitations and interruptions. Some even attempt to reflect non-clausal structures, as in the following example from Pinter’s Old Times: Example 1 Kate The word friend … when you look back … all that time. (Pinter, Old Times, 1971: 9) Nonetheless, despite Herman’s claims that the linguistic units appropriate to dialogue analysis are utterances (and despite the fact that analytical methods for naturally occurring conversation have been demonstrated to be applicable to fictional speech), it is generally the case in contemporary drama that dramatists do not integrate characteristics of spoken grammar or the non-fluency features associated with linguistic performance into their scripts. As Richardson (2010:  77) points out, in television scriptwriting at least, ‘[t]he avoidance of instructions to actors regarding their performances is … a matter of professional distinction’. Part of the reason for this, she suggests, is that reflecting naturalistic speech patterns faithfully ‘would occlude the meaning of particular disfluent utterances as signs of hesitancy, embarrassment, uncertainty, disbelief, and so forth’ (Richardson 2010: 78). This is an important point: namely, that we infer interpretative significance from dramatic dialogue in a way that we do not in naturally occurring conversation. Bennison (1998) discusses this issue in his analysis of Tom Stoppard’s play Professional Foul, pointing out the implicatures generated by the character Anderson’s frequent performance errors. What all of this points towards is that dramatic dialogue can never be a mirror of naturally occurring conversation, since the impetus behind dramatization requires that every characteristic of natural speech be available for use as a stylistic device, whether this be in the service of character or plot. Fictional speech can therefore never be truly authentic in the sense of reflecting naturalistic speech patterns (perhaps the only exception to this would be the case of improvised drama; though even here the improvisation is in the service of a story, which is likely to shape the decisions that actors make about adopting particular linguistic traits in their speech). Nonetheless, work on the stylistics 434

Dialogue

of drama has to assume some degree of similarity between fictional and nonfictional dialogue in order to justify the use of the analytical methods used in the investigation of naturally occurring conversation. We might then ask just how similar the two types of dialogue actually are.

3  How like Naturally Occurring Speech is Dramatic Dialogue? As we have seen, early stylistic work on the sociolinguistic and pragmatic analysis of dramatic dialogue was predicated on the assumption that fictional speech was notionally similar to naturally occurring conversation. It was on this basis that theories from pragmatics such as Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory of politeness and Grice’s (1975) theory of conversational implicature were brought to bear on dramatic texts. To the extent that such theories have provided interpretative insights into the stylistic effects to be found in dramatic texts, whether or not dramatic dialogue is indeed similar to naturally occurring speech is something of a moot point. Nonetheless, insights from corpus linguistics allow us to investigate this question in a way that was not possible when, for example, Burton (1980), Short (1981) and Herman (1991) were first engaged in the stylistic study of dramatic dialogue. One corpus linguist who has carried out research in this area is Quaglio, whose study of the US sitcom Friends (Quaglio 2009) is a quantitative and qualitative comparison of transcripts of the show (approximately 600,000 words) with the conversation section of the Longman Grammar Corpus (approximately 4,000,000 words). Each corpus was tagged for parts-of-speech and investigated using Biber’s technique of multidimensional analysis (see Biber 1988). This is an analytical method predicated on the assumption that different registers (e.g., conversation, academic prose, fiction, etc.) will reveal different co-occurrences of linguistic items, which in turn will be indicative of the function of these registers. The method involves first identifying a wide range of linguistic features which have been shown to be associated with particular communicative functions. For instance, past-tense verbs and third-person pronouns have a tendency to be associated with narratives and narration, while modal verbs may be associated with persuasive rhetorical functions (no assumption is made at this stage that these will turn out to be the functions of these elements in the corpus data; the important issue is simply that these are elements for which clear communicative functions have been defined in previous research). The corpus of texts is then automatically annotated for the range of linguistic features already determined. A statistical procedure known as factor analysis is then carried out on the data to determine the patterns of co-occurrence of the tagged linguistic features. The shared functions of these patterns are then characterized as what Biber (1988) calls dimensions of variation. As Biber (2004: 16) puts it, ‘linguistic features co-occur in 435

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

texts because they reflect shared functions’ For example, Biber (2004) reports that present-tense verbs, contractions and first-person pronouns are characteristic of what he terms ‘dimension 1: information-focused vs. interactive discourse’. More specifically, they are characteristic of interactive as opposed to informational conversations. Quaglio (2009) uses Biber’s analytical method to determine the extent to which the fictional speech in Friends is similar to or different from the naturally occurring conversation found in the Longman Grammar Corpus. Quaglio’s results indicate a significant degree of similarity between the two datasets. For instance, on dimension 1 (information-focused vs. interactive discourse), Quaglio finds that the linguistic features in the Friends corpus are similar to those found in naturally occurring conversation, with first-person pronouns, second-person pronouns, contractions, present-tense verbs and discourse markers all co-occurring. Nonetheless, Quaglio’s other major findings show up both similarities and differences. He finds that (i) vague language (e.g. ‘kind of’, ‘stuff’ or ‘something’) is more prevalent in the corpus of naturally occurring speech, (ii) emotional language (e.g. expletives, emphatic ‘do’) features more in the Friends dataset, (iii) linguistic indicators of informality (e.g. informal lexis, contractions) are also found more frequently in the Friends corpus, and (iv) linguistic elements of narrative (e.g. past perfect aspect) feature more in the naturally occurring corpus than in the Friends data. Quaglio explains that the disparity in the standard deviation between the two datasets suggests that there is much less variation in the Friends corpus than in the spoken component of the Longman Grammar Corpus and that this should be taken into account when considering whether his results are really indicative of a similarity between the two corpora (the reason for the discrepancy, he explains, is the restricted number of settings – that is, social contexts – in the Friends corpus). Nonetheless, while he is careful not to extrapolate his findings to sitcoms or dramatic dialogue generally, it would seem reasonable to suppose on the basis of Quaglio’s evidence that there are likely to be significant degrees of similarity between (television) dramatic dialogue and naturally occurring speech. If so, a number of consequences would follow. Such a finding would suggest that the stylistic analysis of dramatic dialogue has the potential to contribute to our understanding of the function and effects of everyday conversation. Furthermore, it would also raise the prospect of using dramatic dialogue more prominently in the study of non-fictional speech, potentially circumventing some of the problems associated with collecting spoken corpus data by supplementing this with at least some fictional dialogue. The work of Quaglio suggests a degree of similarity between fictional dialogue and naturally occurring conversation that justifies the application of analytical techniques from the analysis of non-fictional speech to the investigation of dramatic dialogue. But it is also clear from his work that dramatic dialogue 436

Dialogue

is not an exact reflection of naturally occurring spoken discourse. In this sense, dramatic dialogue is hardly ever realistic, but it is often credible; that is, it is often believable as a replica of non-fictional speech. A wide range of stylistic devices can be employed to generate this illusion.

4 Creating Credible Dialogue: From Downton Abbey to the Roman Empire One of the most successful TV dramas of recent years, Downton Abbey, has been the subject of a lot of criticism with regard to the so-called authenticity of its dialogue (see Lugea 2013 for a summary). Downton Abbey is a period drama, set initially in 1912 and progressing through the early years of the twentieth century as the series has developed. Some critics have pointed out that the dialogue in the series contains numerous anachronisms that detract from the credibility of the characters’ speech. Take, for example, the following excerpt: Example 2 [Context: Violet is Lady Edith’s grandmother and suspects that Edith is fond of Sir Anthony Strallan, despite a significant age difference between the two. Cora is Edith’s mother.] Violet  Sir Anthony Strallan was at Lady Wren’s party. He asked after you. (Edith smiles and exits.) Cora Is she really serious about him? (Downton Abbey, Episode 7, Series 1; my underlining) According to the OED, while the word ‘serious’ in reference to romantic feelings was in use from 1841 onwards, ‘serious about’ is first attested in British English in 1961, making its use in the series seem inaccurate. Cora, though, is American, so we might suppose that the term is an Americanism. However, Mark Davies’s Corpus of Historical American English reveals the first usage with this sense to be in 1935. It would seem, then, that this is the kind of anachronism of which critics complain. That said, many of what appear to be anachronisms are in fact only clearly anachronistic in British English. Consider the following other examples: Example 3 [Context: Dr Clarkson is performing an operation on Mrs Drake.] (Clarkson and the nurse insert the needle and Mrs Drake turns away. Isobel steps over to comfort her.)

437

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

Dr Clarkson Steady. Yeah, all right. Nurse Yep.

(Downton Abbey, Episode 2, Series 1)

Example 4 [Context: Lady Edith is arranging a day out with Matthew Crawley.] Lady Edith Then Saturday it is. I’ll get Lynch to sort out the governess cart and I’ll pick you up at about eleven. (Downton Abbey, Episode 3, Series 1) Example 5 [Context: Thomas, a servant, is carrying two jugs of hot water.] Thomas

Can’t keep William waiting. Gangway. (Downton Abbey, Episode 3, Series 1)

In each of the above examples, the italicized element is attested in US English in the time period in which the episode is set, but not in British English. There are, though, a number of other issues for us to consider before we go ahead and dismiss these instances as flagrant anachronisms. In the case of example 3, ‘yeah’ is attested in British English in 1905 and ‘yep’ in 1891. However, the first attestation for ‘yep’ comes from Harper’s Magazine, a US publication, while the second comes from Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous, a story set in America. Until the 1960s, all further attestations are reformulations of American English (e.g. ‘America...has two substitutes for “yes.” One of them is “yep” and the other is “yah.”’). A clear anachronism then. However, the OED records attestations in written English; and dramatic dialogue, of course, is intended as a credible reflection of spoken language. It seems not unlikely that ‘yeah’ and ‘yep’ would have been used in British English speech of the time, for the simple reason that normal non-fluency in speech would have been likely to result in these variants (at least the former, and particularly given the context for this example). In example 4, Edith’s use of the phrasal verb ‘pick up’ is also attested in US English of the time (the OED records this as 1872). One potential anachronistic element here, however, is the insertion of a pronoun between the verb and preposition, something that is not attested to in US English of the time. And in example 5, Thomas’s use of the imperative ‘gangway’ may also seem anachronistic, since it is not attested in British English until 1918. It is attested in US English in 1894 though. Of course, it is possible to invent explanations whereby it is possible for the characters to have knowledge of such Americanisms. The fact that one member of the family is from America, with all the consequent letters from relatives and visits that that might have entailed, is perhaps enough to suggest that the other

438

Dialogue

characters may well have encountered such speech. Furthermore, there is the issue that the dialogue is intended as a reflection of spoken rather than written language; most of the sources used by critics of the anachronisms are written language. But what is perhaps more important is the issue of whether the use of anachronisms in the Downton Abbey dialogue really matters. As we have seen so far, dramatic dialogue cannot be an exact mirror of naturally occurring spoken language. Adopting the exact practices of a historical spoken variety would, even if possible, be likely to result in some jarring phrasing. Brenz (2007: 246), discussing the use of anachronistic swearing in HBO’s western drama Deadwood, makes the point that if characters used the authentic swear words of the time (the mid-1800s), ‘they would not sound very threatening to modern ears’. Essentially, criticisms of the anachronisms in Downton Abbey are centred on the notion that this makes the dialogue less credible. But in drama, credibility does not necessarily stem from authenticity; indeed, in some cases, authenticity is often simply not achievable. One drama in which this is clearly the case is Spartacus, which was a surprise hit for the Starz cable channel in 2010. The series is a graphic retelling of the story of Spartacus, a gladiator infamous for leading a slave uprising against the Romans between 73 and 71 BCE. In the case of the TV series, authenticity of dialogue was clearly not possible. The series is set in ancient Capua. To be truly authentic, the dialogue would have needed to be in Thracian and a variety of Italic languages, and then subtitled. This degree of authenticity, even if possible (there is little surviving evidence of Thracian), would likely have contrasted with the grotesquely violent scenes and heavy use of CGI effects, which often lend a comic-book feel to the drama. Instead,  the scriptwriters opt for a dialogic style that suggests formality and archaism through lexical and grammatical foregrounding. For instance, one repeated trope throughout the series is the nominalization of the speech act of apology, such that characters routinely say ‘Apologies’ rather than ‘I ­apologise’ (or even the indirect speech act ‘I’m sorry’). This usage is unusual, as can be seen from the concordance below, a representative sample from the spoken ­section of the British National Corpus: 2. (pause) Just a reminder that erm, expenses and apologies should be given to Suzanne or Eileen. (pause) Erm P:PS004) He can't leave her. And he erm sends his apologies. (SP:KB0PSUNK) Apology from Mrs (-----), she's no pause) I'm sorry David. (SP:PS1E5) No, no, no, no apologies I just don't want to know (unclear) (pause) I'll t with her! (laugh) (SP:PS510) (unclear) it's all apologies. (unclear) out before we've absolutely (pause) ab ) first erm (pause) meeting. (SP:PS527) Give your apologies as you walk in (unclear) (SP:PS527) Well yes, and orry. (SP:KPVPSUNK) (laugh) Ar, look at all these apologies (SP:KPVPSUNK) (unclear) (SP:KPVPSUNK) she's havin tary. (SP:PS6PH) Right. Better make a start then. Apologies for absence for Sir (-----) who is in Fiji. Erm ( o we welcome you Bill. We've received a number of apologies for absence. And the ones I've had so far are the for the salt together and upset it and there was apologies and talks and then he discovered that he was the d that he was the buyer for the London County JA5 Apologies for absence (unclear) (SP:PS40Y) Councillor Peter 've got erm, a letter from Ron in addition to his apologies. (SP:D95PS000) Right and you'll be reading that o L8) No, no. No. (pause) Right. To the agenda. Erm apologies for absence. Erm (pause) er (pause) er Mrs, Jacki

439

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics SP:PS1L8) Oh yes (unclear) (-----), yes, sent his apologies, right. (pause) Er minutes of the previous board t it doesn't matter. And er (pause) are there any apologies? (SP:F7VPSUNK) Yes, Celia (-----) and John (----PT) Erm right! Er Martin (-----) see--, sends his apologies I'll be actually chairing the meeting for him. Er ent secreta-- chairman, secretary, Julia, Judith. Apologies were received from Phil, Malcolm, John and Paulin 7T) Okey doke. (SP:PS27S) (unclear) talking about apologies for this meeting (unclear)2. (SP:PS27R) Can you s et (-----), Kell (-----), Barbara (-----) and me. Apologies from Anne. The minutes of the previous meeting we to be added is there? (SP:PS27R) Don't think so. Apologies for tonight's meeting have been received from Nan S27S) Mhm. (SP:PS27R) However. So anyway, no more apologies. (SP:G59PSUNK) (unclear) flowers no? (SP:PS27R) O mpaign around er saving (-----). I have a few erm apologies for absence to er make. One from Joyce (-----), w le to join you on this occasion. Please accept my apologies and best wishes, and rest assured (pause) of my o

Of the 104 instances of the node word in the spoken section of the corpus, the vast majority come from formal business meetings, where a standard agenda item is often ‘apologies for absence’ from those unable to be at the meeting. What is apparent from the concordance is that when the word ‘apologies’ is used, it tends to be pre-modified by a possessive pronoun (‘my apologies’, ‘his apologies’) or quantified (‘a number of apologies’, ‘any apologies’). Where it is used without pre-modification or quantification, this is usually in the context of recording an apology from a third party (‘apologies were received’, ‘Apologies from Anne’). Only six times in 104 examples is it used in the first-person as a substitute for a direct speech act. So, while not absent from the corpus, this usage is rare. What makes it foregrounded in Spartacus is that no other formulation is used for offering apologies. What is unusual in standard English becomes the norm in the fictional dialogue. The foregrounding of this word gives the dialogue an exotic flavour, with perhaps a sense of detachment on the part of the speaking character (cf. the responsibility inherent in the direct speech act). Further examples of lexical and grammatical foregrounding in the dialogue of Spartacus can be seen in the example below: Example 6 [Context: Batiatus, a slave-owner, is the lanista of his father Titus’s ludus, the gladiator school to which Spartacus belongs. Lucretia is Batiatus’s wife. Gaia is a close friend of Lucretia. In this scene, Batiatus is unaware that his father has returned to the ludus from a long sojourn away from Capua. The scene begins with Batiatus celebrating a victory over one of his rivals.] 1. Batiatus At last the Gods remove cock from fucking ass! The House of Batiatus, no … the House of Quintus Lentulus Batiatus rises to the fucking heavens! Soon my champions will be carved in stone, towering above all who came before. And Gannicus will be the first of them after his victory in the fucking primus. 2. Lucretia The position was not gained absent aid. 3. Gaia I offered naught but introduction and a few selected words of suggestion. 440

Dialogue

4. Batiatus You could wile the Goddess Laverna herself. Your place in this will not pass without much fucking gratitude. [Batiatus begins to make love to Gaia. Titus, Batiatus’s father, enters and is shocked at the scene.] 5. Titus Quintus! 6. Batiatus Father! 7. Titus Gather yourself. I would have words. (Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, Episode 4, ‘Paterfamilias’, Starz 2011) A repeated trait in the above example (and one that is again common to the series) is the deletion of determiners where they would be expected in standard British English. For instance: zz [Turn 1] ‘At last the Gods remove cock from fucking ass!’ (cf. ‘At last the

Gods remove their cock[s] from my fucking ass!’)

zz [Turn 2] ‘The position was not gained absent aid’. (cf. ‘The position was

not gained absent some aid’. zz [Turn 3] ‘I offered naught but introduction’ (cf. ‘I offered naught but an introduction’)

But it is also apparent that this trait is not followed consistently by the writers, as can be seen by the numerous instances where determiners are used before nouns (e.g., ‘Gannicus will be the first of them’, ‘a few selected words of suggestion’). This is unsurprising, since to follow such a pattern slavishly may well result in dialogue that not only jars but becomes difficult to interpret (the same principle can be seen in the way that linguistic indicators of mind style in fiction are not always used consistently, for the same reason). Indeed, there are instances where ambiguities arise from this usage, as when, in a later plot to persuade Titus to leave Capua, Batiatus says to Lucretia: ‘We must prove this house in fucking order and prompt decision for his quick return to Sicilia.’ Here, the lack of an article before the noun ‘decision’ may lead to the interpretation of ‘prompt’ as an adjective rather than a verb, which in turn may make the whole sentence difficult to process. Elsewhere in example 5, we can note the use of archaisms (e.g. ‘naught’, and ‘wile’ as a transitive verb; for the latter, see the entry in the OED). Furthermore, in turn 2, Lucretia uses the word ‘absent’ as a preposition with the sense of ‘without’. And in turn 7, Titus uses the modal auxiliary ‘would’ as a main verb in an archaic non-conditional sense, in which ‘would’ means ‘desire’ (as in the 1682 attestation from John Bunyan’s Holy War, ‘He would that Captain Credence should join himself with them’, cited in the OED; though the Spartacus example also has the speech act force of a command). 441

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

These examples give a flavour of some common traits in the dialogue of Spartacus. Clearly they are not realistic, as corpus analyses and searches of the OED reveal. Instead, they work to give the illusion of a stilted and archaic form of speech that seems appropriate for the formality of the characters and the situational context of the drama. In this way, the dialogue seems credible for the fictional world (note that credibility has to be seen in the context of the fictional world inhabited by the characters; outside of this context, for example, the Spartacus dialogue is not necessarily credible as a historical variety).

5 Conclusion I have argued in this chapter that, while fictional dialogue is similar to naturally occurring speech, it is not the same as naturally occurring speech. As I hope to have shown, fictional dialogue that is an exact mirror of naturally occurring conversation runs the risk of losing the possibility for the nuances of spoken language to inform characterization. This is not to say that fictional dialogue cannot offer a credible illusion of naturally occurring speech. Indeed, the illusion of realism often stems from stylistic choices that make the dialogue appear credible for the fictional world of the characters, as the Spartacus example illustrates. Furthermore, a lack of authenticity in fictional dialogue is not necessarily a barrier to the creation of a credible fictional world.

References Bennison, N. (1993), ‘Discourse analysis, pragmatics and the dramatic “character”: Tom Stoppard’s Professional Foul’, Language and Literature, 2 (2): 79–99. Bennison, N. (1998), ‘Accessing character through conversation: Tom Stoppard’s Professional Foul’, in J. Culpeper, M. Short and P. Verdonk (eds), Exploring the Language of Drama: From Text to Context, 67–82, London: Routledge. Biber, D. (1988), Variation Across Speech and Writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biber, D. (2004), ‘Conversation text types: A multidimensional analysis’, in G. Purnelle, C. Fairon and A. Dister (eds), Le poids des mots: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on the Statistical Analysis of Textual Data, 15–34, Louvain: Presses universitaires de Louvain. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. and Finegan, E. (1999), Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, London: Longman. Brenz, B. (2007), ‘Deadwood and the English language’, Great Plains Quarterly, 27 (Fall): 239–51. Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. (1987), Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burton, D. (1980), Dialogue and Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Modern Drama Dialogue and Naturally Occurring Conversation, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

442

Dialogue Freeman, D. (1995), ‘“Catch[ing] the nearest way”: Macbeth and cognitive metaphor’, Journal of Pragmatics, 24 (6): 689–708. Grice, H. P. (1975), ‘Logic and conversation’, in P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds), Syntax and Semantics, Volume III: Speech Acts, 41–58, New York: Academic Press. Herman, V. (1991), ‘Dramatic discourse and the systematics of turn-taking’, Semiotica, 83 (1/2): 97–121. Herman, V. (1995), Dramatic Discourse, London: Routledge. Keenan, E. L. (1971), ‘Two kinds of presupposition in natural language’, in C. J. Fillmore and D. T. Langendoen (eds), Studies in Linguistic Semantics, 45–54, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Kempson, R. M. (1975), Presupposition and the Delimitation of Semantics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leech, G. (1974), Semantics, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Leech, G. (2000), ‘Grammars of spoken English: New outcomes of corpus-oriented research’, Language Learning, 50 (4): 675–724. Leech, G. and Short, M. (2007), Style in Fiction, 2nd edn, London: Pearson. Lugea, J. (2013), ‘Language in the news: Linguistic bloopers’, Babel, 3: 6–7. McIntyre, D. (2006), Point of View in Plays: A Cognitive Approach to Viewpoint in Drama and Other Text-types, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pinter, H. (1971), Old Times, London: Faber and Faber. Poole, J. (1994), Towards a Descriptive and Explanatory Stylistic Analysis of Thought Presentation in Drama with Special Reference to Femme Fatale by Debbie Isitt, Unpublished PhD thesis, Lancaster University. Quaglio, P. (2009), Television Dialogue: The Sitcom Friends vs. Natural Conversation, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Richardson, K. (2010), Television Dramatic Dialogue: A Sociolinguistic Study, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Searle, J. R. (1969), Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Short, M. (1981), ‘Discourse analysis and the analysis of drama’, Applied Linguistics, 11 (2): 180–202. Short, M. (1995), ‘Understanding conversational undercurrents in The Ebony Tower by John Fowles’, in P. Verdonk and J.-J. Webber (eds), Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context, 45–62, London: Routledge. Simpson, P. (1989), ‘Politeness phenomena in Ionesco’s “The Lesson”’, in R. Carter and P. Simpson (eds), Language, Discourse and Literature, 170–93, London: Unwin Hyman.

443

26

Text-Worlds Joanna Gavins, University of Sheffield

Chapter Overview Text-worlds in Stylistic Analysis Literary Text-worlds in a Discourse Context Discourse-worlds and Textured Reading

444 445 453

1  Text-worlds in Stylistic Analysis The text-world approach to the analysis of discourse originated in the last decades of the twentieth century in the work of the late Paul Werth (see Werth 1999 for a full explication). Werth’s original, context-sensitive model of discourse, grounded in cognitivist research in linguistics and psychology, offered a rigorous and transparent means of examining language in its full textual and contextual complexity. In the years since Werth’s death, the model has been tested and refined by a growing body of text-world researchers against a broad spectrum of discourse types (see, e.g. Gavins 2003, 2005, 2007, 2010, 2012, 2013; Gavins and Stockwell 2012; Gibbons 2011; Giovanelli 2013; Hidalgo Downing 2000a, b; Lahey 2006, 2010; Lahey and Cruickshank 2010; Lugea 2013; Marley 2008; Nahajec 2009; Stockwell 2005, 2009; Whiteley 2011). The resulting, unified Text World Theory is now one of the most dynamic areas of research in contemporary stylistics. Although capable of accounting for a wide range of discourse contexts, the framework’s most frequent application has been to the analysis of literary texts, following its creator’s primary interests in literary stylistics (Werth 1994, 1995a, b, 1999). Thus, in what follows, I have chosen to explain the key mechanics of Text World Theory through an analysis of the poem Saxton Churchyard by Michael McCarthy (2009). I show how the text-world approach enables the systematic examination of the interdependency of text and context under a single, cohesive, analytical framework. As I will demonstrate over the 444

Text-Worlds

coming sections of this chapter, McCarthy’s poem operates across multiple conceptual levels of discourse and thus provides an ideal literary example through which to outline Text World Theory’s analytical capabilities within the realm of stylistics. This chapter focuses, in particular, on the text-world level of the framework and examines its reliance upon the knowledge and experience of discourse participants in the real-world.

2  Literary Text-worlds in a Discourse Context A further motivation for examining the poem Saxton Churchyard in this chapter is the significant personal connection I have with this poem. I will explain the relevance of this to the purposes of the current discussion shortly. To begin, however, here is the full text of McCarthy’s poem: Saxton Churchyard

To Edward, and in memory of Amy

Close to where Lord Dacre was buried beside his horse after the battle of Towton your family and friends gather in a half-circle your Mum & Dad next to the small white box. In front of them an array of bouquets: Gingerbread-man with silver sleeves, a bear in a purple jump-suit, a cake with interlocking hearts, each accompanied by its love note. You, still in your ventilator at the LGI weighing in at just over two pounds and armed only with your wrist band are fighting your own battles. On this day of loss, and clear June light the tall priest, in white alb and stole soothes out his words. Above him in the ancient yew tree, a thrush singing her heart out.

(McCarthy 2009) (Reproduced with permission from Michael McCarthy)

Like all discourses, Saxton Churchyard exists within a real-world context, which Text World Theory terms ‘the discourse-world’ (see Gavins 2007: 18–34). This 445

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

term is used by text-world theorists to describe the immediate situation surrounding the production and reception of language. This immediate situation has the potential greatly to influence the speaker or writer’s linguistic choices and the listener or reader’s understanding of the resulting text. Not only may the physical environment impinge upon a discourse at any moment (consider, ‘Look! It’s raining!’ or ‘Watch out for that bus!’), but also our ability to comprehend what we hear or read is entirely dependent on the cultural and linguistic knowledge we bring with us to a language event. For this reason, Text World Theory views discourse as a dynamic process of negotiation between the discourse participants, located in a material and pragmatic context that is highly culturally determined. In the case of my reading of McCarthy’s poem, the discourse-world contains McCarthy himself, as producer of the text, and me as its reader. As discourse participants, McCarthy and I share a number of real-world connections: McCarthy is an Irish-born poet, but also a parish priest at the Roman Catholic church in the North Yorkshire village where I went to school as a child. However, I have never met McCarthy, and he is not present at the time of my reading of the poem. For this reason, our discourse-world is split temporally and spatially, with me and my co-participant occupying separate spaces and temporal points. This means that, like the majority of readers of literary texts, I must rely on the text itself and on my existing background knowledge to help me understand the language at hand. Where, in face-toface conversation, discourse participants have visual and auditory cues to aid their comprehension, such as intonation, facial expression and gesture, readers in split discourse-worlds must draw on resources of memory, knowledge and imagination to a greater extent. The real-world information I have about McCarthy thus plays an important role in my reading of Saxton Churchyard, and the specific nature of this knowledge is what makes my response to the text, and the particular responses of all other readers, unique. This is not to say, however, that literary readings are completely individualistic and autonomous. The broader social and cultural ties which connect communities of practice (c.f. Eckert 2000) tend to result in loosely consensual readings of texts. For example, it is likely that any native speaker of English would recognize the title of McCarthy’s poem as referring to the churchyard of an English town or village, and many may also infer the age of this location from the Anglo-Saxon nature of the name. For me, however, the title carries far greater significance. Equipped with existing information about McCarthy’s background, I recognize ‘Saxton’ as having a real-world counterpart and referring to a small North Yorkshire village about three miles north of where I grew up; ‘Saxton churchyard’ is immediately familiar to me as a place I visited often as a child, most memorably on day trips with my primary school. My specific background knowledge and previous experiences mean that McCarthy’s title conjures up a mental representation for me that is 446

Text-Worlds

instantly vividly detailed and emotionally connected to my past. In Text World Theory, all such mental representations are termed ‘text-worlds’ (see Gavins 2007: 3–73). Text-worlds are conceptual spaces, constructed in the minds of discourse participants primarily on the basis of the deictic information supplied in a text: these are known in Text World Theory as ‘world-building elements’ (see Gavins 2007: 36). World-building is further enhanced by discourse-world knowledge, which allows participants to ‘flesh-out’ the information provided by the text with their own memories, imagination and experience. For this reason, text-worlds have the potential to develop into highly immersive mental spaces, as apparently richly detailed as the real-world context from which they develop. Figure 26.1 provides an illustration of the basic typology of Text World Theory, to which I will refer at various points throughout this chapter. The

MODAL-WORLD t: time l: location e: enactors

BLENDED WORLD

TEXT-WORLD

WORLD-SWITCH

t: time l: location e: enactors

t: time l: location e: enactors

t: time l: location e: enactors

DISCOURSE-WORLD

author

reader

Figure 26.1  A simplified typology of Text World Theory 447

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

diagram follows what has become standard Text World Theory notation and shows the split discourse-world of written communication at the bottom of the figure. The text-world that the participants create from the language they encounter is shown emerging above the discourse-world, with its key worldbuilding elements listed as follows: the location of the text-world (l); its timezone (t); and any enactors present (e) (see below for a further explanation of this particular aspect of world-building). The construction of all text-worlds is governed by the ‘principle of text-drivenness’, according to which the text itself defines which areas of background knowledge will be accessed by the participants in order to process and understand the discourse (see Gavins 2007: 29). As I have already noted, from the two-word title of McCarthy’s poem alone, my mental representation of the text was immediately imbued with considerable conceptual detail cued by the reference to a real-world place of significance in my life. The following line of the text, an epigraph reading ‘To Edward, and in memory of Amy’, further confirmed for me the real-world connections being drawn in the poem. However, since Edward and Amy are not known to me, I also recognized that this line of text belongs to a separate conceptual level from the rest of the poem. Specifically, the epigraph here refers to the author’s half of the discourse-world, a world separated in time and space from my reading of the poem and to which only McCarthy has access, as shown in Figure 26.1. Poetic epigraphs such as this one are often graphologically emphasized as separate from the main text, either through indentation or a difference in font. In Saxton Churchyard, both of these features are evident and the direct address signalled by the preposition ‘To’ further indicates addressees existing outside the main text-world of the rest of the poem. In the vast majority of cases, when encountering a literary epigraph, readers are likely to assume that the entities to which this part of the text refers have counterparts in the real-world. As Lahey, drawing on Genette, explains: epigraphs will tend to be processed at the discourse-world level more frequently than at the text-world level. … The effect of an epigraph is to give the reader the impression that he or she is receiving extra-textual (contextual) information from the author, a ‘succinct preface’ which is deemed important for the understanding of the poem (Genette 1997: 153) … the epigraph effectively acts as a ‘link’ to a body of information which might not otherwise be available to the reader but which is seen by the author as important for the current discourse. (Lahey 2006: 152) Thus, in Saxton Churchyard, the poet makes both himself and two direct addressees textually evident through the epigraph, which picks out entities

448

Text-Worlds

in his real-world context and gives extra-textual information as described by Lahey above. Crucially in this example, the phrase ‘in memory of Amy’ marks an emerging theme of death or bereavement, which is already likely to have been at least partially prompted in the mind of the reader by the word ‘Churchyard’ in the title. As the first stanza of the poem begins, the theme of death continues with the first mention of a burial. The most noteworthy stylistic feature in this stanza as a whole is the highly specific nature of the world-building deictic elements it contains. In particular, spatial deixis and spatial references are carefully constructed in these lines, most noticeably through an abundance of spatial prepositions which detail the physical relationships between the various items which populate the text-world (e.g. ‘Close to’, ‘beside’, ‘in a half-circle’, ‘next to’, ‘In front’, and so on). These items help to define the location of the text-world to a high level of specificity. The proper names ‘Lord Dacre’ in the first line and ‘Towton’ in the second are similarly specific, although many readers may not possess the background knowledge needed to link these referents to real-world entities and places. In my own reading of the poem, however, my discourse-world connections to the text and its location once again enable to me to form these links and to bring further historical context to bear on my conceptualization of the poem. Saxton church is a popular destination for educational visits by local schools precisely because of the important local and national history associated with Lord Dacre’s name. Lord Dacre was killed on Palm Sunday in 1461, fighting on the side of the Lancastrian king Henry VI in the final and decisive battle of the first of the Wars of the Roses (1455–87). The battle took place in the fields between Saxton and Towton, another village about two miles to the north. Lord Dacre is said to have been killed by a Yorkist’s arrow after taking off his helmet to drink during the battle (see Gravett 2003: 77–8). Furthermore, local legend has it that he is buried in Saxton churchyard standing upright beside his horse, a tale that gained subsequent credibility after grave-diggers discovered a horse’s skull near to Lord Dacre’s tomb in 1861. Lord Dacre and his tomb, which is now capped by an impressive seventeenth-century tombstone, thus hold iconic status in the area of North Yorkshire in which McCarthy’s poem is set. Although a Lancastrian buried in Yorkshire (a place where 500-year-old grudges are still borne against Lancashire to this day!), the legend that surrounds his burial means that Lord Dacre’s name is synonymous locally with bravery and noble sacrifice. All of this information, then, contributes to my construction of a text-world for Saxton Churchyard and, because of the rich store of local knowledge available to me, my experience of that text-world is highly immersive and emotionally affecting. This is not for a moment to say that a reading of the poem equipped with this discourse-world knowledge is necessarily the ‘correct’ or ‘best’ reading, or that an emotional response is not possible without it. It does, however,

449

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

at least provide a partial explanation of my own particularly strong emotional reaction to the text. An understanding of the real-world counterparts referred to in the poem also allows a striking juxtaposition to operate in the first stanza. Importantly in Saxton Churchyard, the burial of Lord Dacre standing beside his horse exists in a separate text-world from that depicted by the rest of the stanza. With the same high levels of deictic specificity that characterize the rest of these lines, we are told that Lord Dacre ‘was buried / beside his horse after the battle of Towton’. I have emphasized here both the simple past tense used to describe this event and the even greater world-building precision provided by the temporal preposition ‘after’, since both of these features render this episode temporally distinct from the surrounding text. The rest of the stanza is written in simple present tense (e.g. ‘your family and friends gather’) and the shift away from this into a past time-zone constitutes what Text World Theory calls a ‘world-switch’ (see Gavins 2007: 48). Figure 26.1 shows how worldswitches operate at the same level as the text-world, resulting from any change in the spatial or temporal parameters of the matrix text-world from which they spring. In this way, readers must construct two separate text-worlds in the opening lines of McCarthy’s poem: one in which the burial of Lord Dacre in the fifteenth century can be conceptualized, and one in which a more recent burial is taking place. Significantly, however, the spatial location of both of these text-worlds remains constant and located within the churchyard. This enables a direct comparison to be made between the burial of a nobleman, slain in battle, with that of a child: knowledge of the supposed circumstances of Lord Dacre’s dramatic interment, standing bravely with his horse, adds greater poignancy to the committal of the modest ‘small white box’ hundreds of years later. Of further interest in the first stanza of Saxton Churchyard are the linguistic means by which particular objects and entities are nominated as present in the text-world of the present-day burial. As already noted, the ‘small white box’ signals that this text-world is describing the funeral of a child, and it becomes clear by the fourth line of the poem that this child is in fact the addressee of the main text, picked out by the second person pronouns used throughout the first stanza. The contemporary setting of the text-world is indicated not only through the use of present tense, discussed above, but was reinforced in my own reading through the reference to the child’s parents as ‘your Mum & Dad’, rather than ‘your Mum and Dad’ or even ‘your Mother and Father’. In my own text-world, the inclusion of an ampersand here, instead of the full form of the conjunction ‘and’, was strongly reminiscent of the floral tributes normally present at modern British funerals and particularly the increasing trend for these to be shaped into the name or familial status of the deceased (for example, ‘Mum’ or ‘Sister’). Such tributes commonly use abbreviated forms in order to reduce the complexity, and consequent cost, of the flower 450

Text-Worlds

arrangement (so, ‘Mum’ instead of ‘Mother’, ‘Dad’ instead of ‘Father’ or ‘Daddy’). They are also normally placed on top of or immediately next to the funeral casket. Read with this in mind, it is not clear whether ‘your Mum & Dad next to the small white box’ in the fourth line of the first stanza refers to the child’s parents themselves, or simply to their names fashioned from flowers, or to both of these at once. Whichever way the line is read, the first stanza of McCarthy’s poem constructs a meticulously defined tableau, populated with iconic imagery associated with death and its associated rituals and ceremonies. It is worth noting here the overall lack of activity in this part of the text, where the first of the only two verbs present in the stanza is in the passive (‘Lord Dacre was buried’) and the second describes a supervention process, in Halliday and Mathieson’s (2004) terms, where the mourners appear to ‘gather’ at the graveside without deliberate intention. In the second stanza, the iconicity of the text continues as the ‘array of bouquets’ is also given further world-building detail. Across these four lines, additional images are introduced into our mental representation that not only develop a more meticulous picture of the graveside tributes but, in so doing, underline the tragedy of infant mortality. What is noteworthy here is how, with the appearance of each of these items, a point of crossover can be identified between the prototypical conceptual category of childhood play and the contrasting separate domain of chivalry and romance. Thus, the ‘Gingerbread man’ wears rather grand and archaic ‘silver sleeves’, the cake is decorated with ‘interlocking hearts’ and each item listed is ‘accompanied by its love note’. At this point, I would argue, McCarthy’s text encourages further comparisons to be made between the text-world of the modern-day funeral and the fifteenth-century text-world in which Lord Dacre’s somewhat theatrical interment took place. Again, the shared physical location of both text-worlds works to diminish the temporal separation of these two scenes and to foster the formation of the associative links that the reader may make across world boundaries. A much sharper distinction between text-worlds is drawn in the third stanza of the poem, where a further world-switch shifts the spatial parameters of the text to a new location. Once again, access to local knowledge about the geographical setting of the poem enables a real-world referent to be identified from the phrase ‘the LGI’ here. This abbreviation refers to Leeds General Infirmary, the closest major hospital to Saxton, one of the largest specialist paediatric centres in the United Kingdom, particularly famous for being one of only ten units in the country to carry out children’s heart surgery. The tense of this stanza remains consistent with that of the text-world of the modern-day funeral, signalling that the events it depicts are taking place at a concurrent moment. An odd slippage occurs here in the repeated use of the second person in this section of the poem: where ‘you’ and ‘your’ in the first stanza address a dead child 451

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

on the day of his or her burial, the same pronoun is used in the third stanza to address a different child. The effect of this is once again to blur the boundaries between text-worlds and between the text-world entities that populate them. The two separate children to which ‘you’ refers at different moments in the poem, despite inhabiting separate text-worlds set in different locations, appear somehow closer through the use of the same address form to identify them both. Indeed, in my own reading of the poem, this illusory proximity led me to infer that the children mentioned in Saxton Churchyard were, in fact, twins. Furthermore, in my attempts to disentangle the confusing pronominal reference in the text, I made use of the extra-textual information provided by the epigraph of the poem to infer that ‘Edward’ and ‘Amy’ are the text-world children’s real-world counterparts, the ones to whom the poem is dedicated. In order to deal with precisely these kinds of complex nominal and pronominal references in texts, Text World Theory terms the entities that exist at different conceptual levels in a discourse ‘enactors’ (see Gavins 2007: 41). Thus, in Saxton Churchyard, an enactor of Amy and an enactor of Edward exist in the author’s half of the discourse-world, signalled by the use of their names in the extratextual epigraph to the poem. Separate enactors of both children also exist at the text-world level of the discourse, where McCarthy’s choice of a single secondperson pronoun, ‘you’, to refer to them both causes a degree of conflation in our mental representations of these entities. A third text-world, then, is constructed in the third stanza of McCarthy’s poem which has a Leeds hospital unit as its location. Not only does the sharing of the second person pronoun between two text-world entities serve to forge connections across text-world and discourse-world boundaries, but this stanza is also structured around an extended metaphor that further connects not only the dead child in Saxton churchyard with its surviving twin in hospital, but both children with Lord Dacre in his fifteenth-century setting. A baby is described in these lines as ‘weighing in at just over two pounds’, ‘armed only with a wrist band’ and ‘fighting your own battles’, framing the child’s struggle for survival within a clear survival is a battle conceptual metaphor. In Text World Theory terms, this metaphor operates by creating a new conceptual space, shown to the left of the main text-world in Figure 26.1, in which our mental representation of the baby in a ventilator is integrated with that of a violent battle. Metaphors such as this, and their resulting ‘blended worlds’ (see Gavins 2007: 146–64), are often made up of more than two mental representations combined. Text World Theory draws upon another cognitive framework, Conceptual Integration Theory (c.f. Fauconnier and Turner, 2003), in its account of metaphor in this way. Conceptual Integration Theory argues that metaphors are constructed from separate input spaces, which can be numerous even in short texts and are blended together to create a new mental representation with its own unique characteristics or emergent structure. In this manner, the extended 452

Text-Worlds

metaphor that develops over the third stanza of Saxton Churchyard can be conceptualized as a blend of a baby input space, a battle input space, and a boxer input space (suggested by the use of language familiar from this sport in the line ‘weighing in at just over two pounds’). In my own reading of the poem, the surrounding text, combined with my existing discourse-world knowledge of local history, led me to make a direct comparison between the baby in the ventilator, fighting bravely to survive, and Lord Dacre, the notoriously courageous soldier. Thus, the text-world created by the extended metaphor becomes more complex than the sum of its linguistic parts, not only taking on a conceptual life of its own, but also feeding back into the main text-world of the poem to illuminate and enrich our understanding of the human struggle depicted there. This conceptual interdependency is shown in Figure 26.1 through the doubleended arrow that connects the blended metaphor world with its matrix textworld. It is again worth noting at this point how active the critically ill baby in the ventilator appears compared with the relative inertia of his mourning parents in the churchyard in the first stanza. Although he is placed in a passive position in one verb phrase in the stanza, ‘armed only with your wrist band’, he is nevertheless ‘weighing in’ and ‘fighting’ in two more actively framed and intentional present participles.

3  Discourse-worlds and Textured Reading The final stanza of McCarthy’s poem switches back to the text-world situated at the graveside of the child in Saxton churchyard. It does so, however, following a series of shifts backwards and forwards through different spatial and temporal locations and after the construction of an extended metaphor that has seen a critically ill sibling depicted as a valiant warrior. These multiple worldswitches and embedded blended worlds have a cumulative effect as the poem progresses, each one adding greater world-building detail, increased emotional poignancy and metaphorical depth to the preceding lines. Saxton Churchyard is, of course, a modern lament, a poetic genre that has already received considerable cognitive-poetic attention from Stockwell (2009: 56–105). Examining a variety of poetic laments on the death of children from across a range of time periods, Stockwell argues that each of them relies to a great extent for its emotional effect on shifting the reader through numerous spatio-temporal boundaries. He explains: we can see that the tactile sense of texture is a product of crossing worldboundaries. The deictic projection and shift that is the necessary component of world-building forms the uneven texture between one world and another, which is experienced dynamically as the reader reads. A simple 453

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

analogy, along the lines of understanding reading as a journey, would be to consider the textural difference between riding a bicycle over smooth consistent ground and riding over cracked and fractured rocks. Not only does consistency feel more solid, it also requires less effort and attention to negotiating your way over the points of disjunction. (Stockwell 2009: 89–90) According to Stockwell, then, imaginary movement between worlds is both conceptually demanding for readers and also a felt experience that can intensify emotional reactions to literary texts. By the time the reader reaches the final stanza of McCarthy’s poem, a total of four world-switches have taken place, along with an extended departure into a metaphorical world in the middle of the text. It is important to observe at this point that Figure 26.1 includes a further level of Text World Theory, the ‘modal-world’ level (see Gavins 2007: 73–125), which occurs whenever epistemic or ontological distance is expressed in a text. This can happen, among other ways, through the use of modality, conditionality or hypotheticality of any kind, all of which create new, remote text-worlds with their own worldbuilding parameters. Interestingly, McCarthy’s text contains no such departures, unlike all of the poetic laments that Stockwell (2009) analyses. Rather, the ‘cracked and fractured’ texture of this poem arises purely from worldswitches either at the text-world level, or through shifts from discourse-world to text-world and back again. As I have aimed to show in the analysis of my own response to the text, the dynamic and emotional experience of reading Saxton Churchyard is amplified when the reader is engaged in the cross-world mapping of real-world elements into a mental representation at the text-world level. Indeed, in the final lines of the poem, the accumulation of connected text-worlds, blended text-world entities and juxtaposed situations gives a final effect of juggling multiple text-worlds concurrently. Once more, the material links between the text-world of Lord Dacre, the text-world of the modern-day funeral, and the text-world set in the hospital are emphasized through the use of proximal deixis in ‘On this day of loss’, the temporal referent of which is again ambiguous and could be resolved in any of these three text-worlds. All three of the distinct situations that have been described throughout the preceding text appear to merge into one in these closing lines, as the deictic worldbuilding elements nominated here seem to have been selected to be equally at home in any one of the text-world settings which have so far been constructed. Note, for example, the attention drawn to the archaic dress of the priest in this stanza, as he is described as standing tall ‘in white alb and stole’. Note, too, that he ‘soothes out his words’, seemingly comforting both the mourners at the graveside, the deceased hero beside his horse and the distant child in the hospital ventilator simultaneously.

454

Text-Worlds

A further gesture towards the distant past is also made here through the foregrounded presence of ‘the ancient yew tree’ in the poem’s final scene. This species is known not only for its remarkable longevity – yew trees are estimated to be able to survive for over a thousand years – but also for its traditional presence in graveyards across the UK. There are many diverse theories and legends which surround this tradition, but most agree on the symbolic connections frequently drawn between the yew tree and everlasting life in the folklore of the British Isles. Even more pertinent within the context of McCarthy’s poem is the fact that branches from the yew were for many centuries in British churches carried in processions on Palm Sunday, the day, of course, of Lord Dacre’s demise in 1461. The yew also served another ancient purpose, doubling its symbolic weight in the poem, as a popular raw material for the manufacture of arrows, the instrument of Dacre’s death. Rather than harbouring a murderous Yorkist, however, the yew tree in Saxton Churchyard shelters a solitary thrush ‘singing her heart out’. Having been led repeatedly to map my discourse-world knowledge onto my text-world representation of the poem, I made a final association in this line between the romantic imagery prevalent earlier in the text (and the ‘interlocking hearts’ in particular), the LGI’s reputation for children’s heart surgery and the bird’s heart in the closing phrase. In my personally situated, contextually framed reading of McCarthy’s text, I elaborated the deictic foundations of my text-world to infer that a heart condition of some description must be responsible either for the tragic death of Amy, or for Edward’s struggle for survival, or perhaps even for both. As I have already emphasized earlier in this discussion, I am not for a moment suggesting that my reading of Saxton Churchyard is ‘correct’ or ‘preferred’ in any way. The inferences I have described myself drawing, my mapping of real-world counterparts onto text-world components, may, for all I know, be highly eccentric when examined within the broader cultural parameters from which they were generated. What I have attempted to demonstrate, however, is that my reading of the poem is essentially grounded in my own previous experiences and knowledge and inextricably linked to the discourse-world in which my first encounter with the text took place. My emotional response to the poem is therefore dependent not only upon the imaginary worlds I am able to construct from the poetic language before me, but also upon the dynamic shifting between the real-world and the multiple textworlds that Saxton Churchyard demanded of me as a reader. What Text World Theory has offered throughout the preceding discussion is a systematic means of describing this dynamic process through a single, unified framework which recognizes the context-sensitivity of all literary reading and of human communication in general.

455

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

References Eckert, P. (2000), Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High, Oxford: Blackwell. Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. (2003), The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending And The Mind’s Hidden Complexities, New York: Basic Books. Gavins, J. (2003), ‘“Too Much Blague?” An exploration of the text worlds of Donald Barthelme’s Snow White’, in J. Gavins and G. Steen (eds), Cognitive Poetics in Practice, 129–44, London: Routledge. Gavins, J. (2005), ‘(Re)thinking modality: A text-world perspective’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 3 (2): 79–82. Gavins, J. (2007), Text World Theory: An Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gavins, J. (2010), ‘“And Everyone and I Stopped Breathing”: Familiarity and ambiguity in the text-world of “The Day Lady Died”’, in M. Lambrou and P. Stockwell (eds), Contemporary Stylistics, 133–43, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gavins, J., (2012), ‘Leda and the stylisticians’, Language and Literature, 21 (4): 345–62. Gavins, J. (2013), Reading the Absurd, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gavins, J. and Stockwell, P. (2012), ‘About the heart, where it hurt exactly and how often’, Language and Literature, 21 (1): 31–50. Genette, G. (1997), Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibbons, A. (2011), Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature, London: Routledge. Giovanelli, M. (2013), Text World Theory and Keats’ Poetry: The Cognitive Poetics of Desire, Dreams and Nightmares, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Gravett, C. (2003), Towton 1461: England’s Bloodiest Battle, Oxford: Osprey Publishing. Halliday, M. A. K. and Mathieson, C. (2004), An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics, London: Continuum. Hidalgo Downing, L. (2000a), Negation, Text Worlds, and Discourse: The Pragmatics of Fiction, Stamford, CA: Ablex. Hidalgo Downing, L. (2000b), ‘Negation in discourse: A text world approach to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22’, Language and Literature, 9 (3): 215–39. Lahey, E. (2006), ‘(Re)thinking world-building: Locating the text-worlds of Canadian lyric poetry’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 35 (2): 145–64. Lahey, E. (2010), ‘Megametaphorical mappings and the landscapes of Canadian poetry’, in P. Stockwell and M. Lambrou (eds), Contemporary Stylistics, 157–67, London: Continuum. Lahey, E. and Cruickshank, T. (2010), ‘Building the stages of drama: Towards a text world theory account of dramatic play-texts’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 39 (1): 67–91. Lugea, J. (2013), ‘Embedded dialogue and dreams: The worlds and accessibility relations of Inception’, Language and Literature, 22 (2): 133–53. Marley, C. (2008), ‘Truth values and truth-commitment in interdiscursive dating ads’, Language and Literature, 17 (2): 137–54. McCarthy, M. (2009), At the Races, Sheffield: Smith/Doorstop. Nahajec, L. (2009), ‘Negation and the creation of implicit meaning in poetry’, Language and Literature, 18 (2): 109–27. Stockwell, P. (2005), ‘Texture and identification’, European Journal of English Studies, 9 (2): 143–53. Stockwell, P. (2009), Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

456

Text-Worlds Werth, P. (1994), ‘Extended metaphor: A text-world account’, Language and Literature, 3 (2): 79–103. Werth, P. (1995a), ‘“World Enough and Time”: Deictic space and the interpretation of prose’, in P. Verdonk and J. J. Weber (eds), Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context, 181–205, London: Routledge. Werth, P. (1995b), ‘How to build a world (in a lot less than six days and using only what’s in your head)’, in K. Green (ed.), New Essays on Deixis: Discourse, Narrative, Literature, 49–80, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Werth, P. (1999), Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse, Harlow: Longman. Whiteley, S. (2011), ‘Text World Theory, real readers and emotional responses to The Remains of the Day’, Language and Literature, 20 (1): 23–42.

457

27

Texture Peter Stockwell, University of Nottingham

Chapter Overview Capturing Texture Transitions in Attention Transitions in Ambience Experiencing Literary Texture

458 463 468 472

1  Capturing Texture Texture is the experienced quality of textuality. Textuality refers to the stylistic patterns in evidence in a text. A text is a linguistic object in which elements are perceived as being linked or patterned, and which is most typically perceived as being coherent. Text, from the Latin textus, is a weave, with an etymology that transferred from woven fabric to patterns in words and grammar. It is clear through this sequence of terms that there is a common thread that ties together the objective properties of a piece of language and the experiential effects on a reader. Texture, in everyday understanding, is the quality of feeling that is associated with different objects in the world. It is primarily a physical sense, with its main usage associated with fingertip touch and then the haptic system in general; secondarily, the notion of texture is transferred to the visual field, and then to the sense of taste; and lastly it is used in an abstract, conceptual sense. In bodily semantic terms, texture starts at the fingertips and is then associated with the eyes and the mouth. It is only loosely associated with sound and smell in everyday usage, though musicians and perfumiers deploy the term in their own specialist domains. So, in reverse order (drawing on the 100 million-word resources of the British National Corpus (BNC), which produces 925 occurrences 458

Texture

of the word ‘texture’), the use of the term in collocations with sound is actually quite rare (an unusual example is: ‘without the chant, in a remarkable texture of three equal tenors with an optional treble part riding above’). Most of the written sources (arts criticism, biography, and fiction) in which the term is used apply it to colour, shape and other visual aspects of patterning. Notably, there are far more uses of the word in prose than in poetry, suggesting that it is more of an analytical term than poetic in its own right. The texture of the visual field might be regarded as a metaphorical extension of physical, haptic texture, and it is true that the more literal usage seems to be predominant in BNC sources from speech, popular culture, commerce and technical or scientific writing. In cognitive poetics, which explores the interaction between readers and literary works, the definition of texture and its actual set of usages in the world is the starting point for an exploration of the ways in which stylistic patterns and readerly experience inter-animate each other. The etymological distinction between a literal and a metaphorical extension of texture is rendered less important within the scheme of cognitive poetics, which follows the cognitive linguistic principle that metaphorical projection is a fundamental part of all language: the continuities between the different bodily-sensual and abstractconceptual aspects of ‘texture’ are complex, significant, and mutually affecting. In other words, the sense of texture as an abstraction draws some of its experiential effects from its bodily basis. The importance of physical touch in human evolution has been very recently reaffirmed. Human fingerprint patterns, for a long time viewed as not having a particularly advantageous adaptive function in evolution, turn out to be both exponentially sensitive and to offer an effect that multiplies friction when in contact with other textured objects such as trees to climb, smooth or wet rocks to grip, and so on (Dominy 2013). The literal end of the notion of texture should remind us that texture itself requires cognisance of two media or surfaces; texture is an experience that arises when one set of patterns is brought into close relationship with a different pattern. In the physical realm, the close presence of two patterned media results in the generation of some sort of force. Friction between fingertip and object, or the deflection of one object upon contact with another, or damage to one object as a result of an encounter – all of these are examples of force produced by textural effects in the physical world. Furthermore, the interface between two textures (air and water, or air and land, for example) provides the opportunity for motion if both textures are engaged or crossed (by a sail and keel, for example, or by wheels and an engine). Texture, in other words, is fundamentally a contrastive phenomenon: we notice texture at all most often when we have crossed from a different texture, and it is the difference that forces us to notice the new textural quality. The key to the literary experience of texture, therefore, lies in the moments of transition or shift across different cognitive stylistic patterns. The cognitive 459

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

poetic account of texture relies on capturing and describing as precisely as possible these transitional moments. Several different forms of transition can be identified, as will be briefly demonstrated in the rest of this chapter. However, rather than offer a simple and static list, I will organize the discussion around many of the features that can be found in the extraordinarily rich, resonant and popular poem The Lady of Shalott, by Alfred Tennyson. In a BBC vote to find ‘the nation’s favourite poem’ in 1995, this poem was beaten only by Rudyard Kipling’s If (both collected in Jones 1996, and see Stockwell 2005 for an analysis of If ). The poem is reproduced in full here in its most well-known 1842 version. The Lady of Shalott Part I On either side the river lie Long fields of barley and of rye, That clothe the wold and meet the sky; And thro’ the field the road runs by To many-tower’d Camelot; And up and down the people go, Gazing where the lilies blow Round an island there below, The island of Shalott. Willows whiten, aspens quiver, Little breezes dusk and shiver Thro’ the wave that runs for ever By the island in the river Flowing down to Camelot. Four gray walls, and four gray towers, Overlook a space of flowers, And the silent isle imbowers The Lady of Shalott.

By the margin, willow veil’d, Slide the heavy barges trail’d By slow horses; and unhail’d The shallop flitteth silken-sail’d Skimming down to Camelot: But who hath seen her wave her hand? Or at the casement seen her stand? Or is she known in all the land, The Lady of Shalott? Only reapers, reaping early In among the bearded barley, Hear a song that echoes cheerly From the river winding clearly, Down to tower’d Camelot: And by the moon the reaper weary, Piling sheaves in uplands airy, Listening, whispers ‘’Tis the fairy Lady of Shalott.’

Part II There she weaves by night and day A magic web with colours gay. She has heard a whisper say, A curse is on her if she stay To look down to Camelot.

460

She knows not what the curse may be, And so she weaveth steadily, And little other care hath she, The Lady of Shalott.

Texture And moving thro’ a mirror clear That hangs before her all the year, Shadows of the world appear. There she sees the highway near Winding down to Camelot: There the river eddy whirls, And there the surly village-churls, And the red cloaks of market girls, Pass onward from Shalott. Sometimes a troop of damsels glad, An abbot on an ambling pad, Sometimes a curly shepherd-lad, Or long-hair’d page in crimson clad, Goes by to tower’d Camelot;

And sometimes thro’ the mirror blue The knights come riding two and two: She hath no loyal knight and true, The Lady of Shalott. But in her web she still delights To weave the mirror’s magic sights, For often thro’ the silent nights A funeral, with plumes and lights And music, went to Camelot: Or when the moon was overhead, Came two young lovers lately wed: ‘I am half sick of shadows,’ said The Lady of Shalott.

Part III A bow-shot from her bower-eaves, He rode between the barley-sheaves, The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves, And flamed upon the brazen greaves Of bold Sir Lancelot. A red-cross knight for ever kneel’d To a lady in his shield, That sparkled on the yellow field, Beside remote Shalott. The gemmy bridle glitter’d free, Like to some branch of stars we see Hung in the golden Galaxy. The bridle bells rang merrily As he rode down to Camelot: And from his blazon’d baldric slung A mighty silver bugle hung, And as he rode his armour rung, Beside remote Shalott. All in the blue unclouded weather Thick-jewell’d shone the saddle-leather, The helmet and the helmet-feather Burn’d like one burning flame together, As he rode down to Camelot.

As often thro’ the purple night, Below the starry clusters bright, Some bearded meteor, trailing light, Moves over still Shalott. His broad clear brow in sunlight glow’d; On burnish’d hooves his war-horse trode; From underneath his helmet flow’d His coal-black curls as on he rode, As he rode down to Camelot. From the bank and from the river He flash’d into the crystal mirror, ‘Tirra lirra,’ by the river Sang Sir Lancelot. She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces thro’ the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look’d down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack’d from side to side; ‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried The Lady of Shalott.

461

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics Part IV In the stormy east-wind straining, The pale yellow woods were waning, The broad stream in his banks complaining, Heavily the low sky raining Over tower’d Camelot; Down she came and found a boat Beneath a willow left afloat, And round about the prow she wrote The Lady of Shalott.

Heard a carol, mournful, holy, Chanted loudly, chanted lowly, Till her blood was frozen slowly, And her eyes were darken’d wholly, Turn’d to tower’d Camelot. For ere she reach’d upon the tide The first house by the water-side, Singing in her song she died, The Lady of Shalott.

And down the river’s dim expanse Like some bold seër in a trance, Seeing all his own mischance– With a glassy countenance Did she look to Camelot. And at the closing of the day She loosed the chain, and down she lay; The broad stream bore her far away, The Lady of Shalott.

Under tower and balcony, By garden-wall and gallery, A gleaming shape she floated by, Dead-pale between the houses high, Silent into Camelot. Out upon the wharfs they came, Knight and burgher, lord and dame, And round the prow they read her name, The Lady of Shalott.

Lying, robed in snowy white That loosely flew to left and right– The leaves upon her falling light– Thro’ the noises of the night She floated down to Camelot: And as the boat-head wound along The willowy hills and fields among, They heard her singing her last song, The Lady of Shalott.

Who is this? and what is here? And in the lighted palace near Died the sound of royal cheer; And they cross’d themselves for fear, All the knights at Camelot: But Lancelot mused a little space; He said, ‘She has a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace, The Lady of Shalott.’ (Alfred Tennyson 1987)

The objective of the discussion that follows is not at all to provide a new interpretation of the poem’s meaning: there is a rough literary critical consensus on the significance of the poem as a work reflecting on history, myth, industry and the connections between the Arthurian and Victorian periods; on the figure of the Lady as an emblem of confined female experience, bound in by unspoken conventions and a masculine environment; or on the nature of art and the place of the artist as a reflector of society set apart from it (see McKelvy 2007 for a review and discussion). Rather, my intention is to illustrate different

462

Texture

causal aspects of texture, and to explore the emotional and aesthetic sense of the poem, which is where, I believe, its enduring popularity resides.

2  Transitions in Attention It is a fundamental principle of the cognitive turn in arts and humanities research that there are continuities between different bodily experiences, perceptions, sensations, and the abstract concepts that are projected from them (see Stockwell 2002a). So, for example, in a series of famous experiments (Gibbs 2006, 2012), people who had just read a fiction about a relationship that was going well were then observed walking forward faster than other readers who had just finished a similar relationship story in which the life is a journey metaphor was obstructed or disrupted. Readers holding a warm drink felt more emotionally warm towards characters they were reading about at the time. Readers sitting on hard rather than cushioned surfaces were more likely to offer hard and harsh judgements about characters. These appear to be simple metaphorical extensions, but the nature of embodied experience suggests that humans use the same cognitive faculties to process reality and projected fiction, and furthermore that similar processes underlie different sensory inputs. Reading a tragic narrative or poem really makes you cry (see Stockwell 2011). Reading about a character in a particular difficult situation really makes you feel empathy for them (see Keen 2007). You might know at a higher level of awareness that your emotional absorption in the fictional world is attenuated, but the immediate effect is still real: your tears are not ‘pretend’ tears, and your sense of empathy does not feel like fake empathy. There might be a difference between your sense of grief at a fictional death compared with an actual one, but the main difference is ethical rather than aesthetic (and in any case it could be argued that the proper emotional comparison is between a fictional death and hearing about the death of an actual person faraway whom you did not know). Just as you would notice the difference in texture if you walked from stone paving onto grass or ran your fingertip from paper onto carpet, so the major causal feature for bringing texture to awareness is the point of transition. Of course, this is primarily a matter of attention, and that means that your readerly disposition to attentiveness will also be a factor in your reading. However, even given that there will be situated and personal variations in the latter regard, it is possible to identify a set of aspects of attentional shift that serve to delineate texture. (For the original theoretical statement underlying these aspects, see Stockwell 2009a).

463

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

2.1  Transitioning World-boundaries In Text World Theory (Werth 1999; Gavins 2007; see Gavins, this volume), a discourse is the ground on which a mental representation is constructed in the mind of the reader. This initial or matrix text-world delineates an ontological domain that can be departed from or switched attentionally by one or more stylistically-based features: flashback or flashforward, metaphor, direct speech, negation, and modal worlds of various sorts such as speculation, hypotheticality, belief, wish, dream, and other versions of alterity. When a text encourages a reader to create a world-switch of this sort, that reader’s attention is taken into another world where different parameters apply. Text World Theory is fundamentally deictic in orientation, in that different deictic centres are set up for the reader to engage with. Creating these world-switches and crossing these world boundaries are occasions for feeling a literary work’s textural organization. In The Lady of Shalott, the overall world structure is fairly simple, so the few major world-switches are all the more significant. The whole of Part I of the poem is essentially a single consistent world, with an equal balance between world-building elements (there is a high density of newly introduced nounphrases and few ellipted pronouns) and function-advancing propositions (almost every individual noun-phrase has its own verb, and these are generally varied in type and mainly active). This is the matrix text-world that begins and ends the poem. The break at Part II signals a world-switch from the exterior pastoral scene previously described to the interior world of the Lady in her island confinement. The trajectory here from external view to inner perception encourages a sense that the world-switch is at least partly into the mind of the Lady. This is further reinforced by very many fleeting minor world-switches around this point: the section ends with a switch to direct speech, as the reaper ‘whispers ‘“’Tis the fairy Lady of Shalott”’; there is a spatial deictic shift marker ‘There’ and a temporal shift marker ‘by night and day’ that reiterates the continuity of her action; there is a small metaphor switch in ‘magic web’; there is a quick embedding of perceptions in ‘She has heard’ and ‘a whisper say’ and a conditional world-switch in ‘if she stay to look’; and lastly a combined epistemic and negational world-switch in ‘She knows not’. Such rich and dense complexity of world-switching is probably beyond discrete processing on a natural reading, but I suggest the residual subliminal effect is a priming for the larger and more sustained world-switch into the Lady’s perspective in Part II. The subtlety of this effect is also to draw a reader in to her situation, both perspectivally and empathetically. The perspective is abruptly switched back to the exterior scene with the Part III break: ‘A bow-shot from her bower-eaves’. This is denotatively a nounphrase measurement of the short distance, but its jarring world-switch power

464

Texture

is iconically matched with the strikingly active sense carried in the pseudo verb ‘shot’ and the prepositional trajectory ‘from’, and the plosive /b/ alliteration contrasts with the immediately prior sibilants in the Lady’s perspectival world. The matrix world is sustained through Part III until the moment when Lancelot’s image ‘flash’d into the crystal mirror’. This is clearly what she sees (and hears, as his direct-speech singing is also immediately presented). We move to her world perspective in a flurry of short function-advancing verb-phrases (‘She left the web, she left the loom’ etc.), ending again with direct speech: ‘“The curse is come upon me.”’ Part IV is structured with a set of interesting and aligned convergences. To summarize so far, the poem begins in the world (W1) of the valley of Camelot (Part I), and slides into the Lady’s perception (W2 in Part II); then it returns to the general scene of the matrix world (W1) in most of Part III, with the last stanza and a half switching into the Lady’s perspective (W2) again. In Part IV, this perspectival W2 is maintained until the moment of her death, and then in the final two stanzas the poem returns to W1, with the Lady’s body but not her consciousness embedded in it as the focus of all the W1 characters’ attention. Essentially, the major world-switch (W2) is closed off and brought firmly back into the matrix world. This is not done abruptly, however, as in all the preceding world-switches, but gradually. The narrative perspective follows the Lady’s intentions with her actions, and follows the boat with her body down the river. The people in the valley are at first merely fleeting aspects of her consciousness (‘They heard her’). Only after ‘she died’ is the transition to the matrix textworld effected. ‘They’ come into sharper focus as ‘Knight and burgher, lord and dame’. Instead of the focus being on the still Lady with the riverscape sliding past, the perspective shifts to the static ‘garden-wall and gallery’ and the ‘houses high’ and ‘wharfs’, with the boat and the body now moving past. The effect of the fleeting world-switches at the major world-switch boundaries is to ease the passage of the reader’s attention into the Lady’s situation and consciousness. They also make the transitions less sharp, so the slippage from practical industry and society into magical imprisonment and the realm of the symbolic and perhaps allegorical is blurred and rendered less abrupt. The transition in Part IV, in which what has until then been almost a parallel matrix world (W2) converges into an embedded switched world, is particularly brilliant. The Lady’s conscious mind is gently lost as the world in which it existed floats out into the social world of the country. In Stockwell (2009a: 123–33 and 2011), I suggested an account of empathy and sympathy on the basis, respectively, of a direct relationship between reader and character across a world boundary and a deflected relationship across several world boundaries. In other words, a reader is likely to be more intensely empathetic with a character who is deictically close, but more loosely sympathetic with a character whose

465

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

mind is mediated by a narrator, modalization, hypotheticality, and so on. The Lady of Shalott plays an effective trick of readerly absorption in its world structure. What would be an emotional distance to the Lady in a consciousness narrativized through W1 becomes a more direct empathy by switching to her in W2, not at first as an embedded mediation but as a direct, parallel matrix world. Having established this empathetic connection (for those readers who make it, of course), the end of the poem manages to capture the onlookers’ sympathy at the same time as we readers have privileged knowledge of the Lady’s life and fate. Lancelot himself does not realize what his image has done.

2.2  Transitions for Resonance Attention can be shifted in reading a literary text not only across its worldstructure, but also by the manipulation of attentional focus. Drawing on the fundamental cognitive linguistic distinction between figure and ground, we can explore how a reader is encouraged by textual organization to foreground some features and aspects, to the relative neglect of others. The consequently complex effect of strikingness and literary textual power captures the experiential sense of literary resonance (Stockwell 2009b). There are fundamentally three ways in which attentional texture can be generated. Firstly, attention can be zoomed in or out so that the feature in focus shifts in relation to its background. Secondly, a state change of the object in view (where one thing becomes another) shifts attention from what was to what is now. Thirdly, the occlusion of the previously attended object by another, new object coming into the foreground of attention can generate a renewal of focus. In The Lady of Shalott, the most prominent type of focal shift in the poem at the discourse level is in the attentional zoom with which the text cinematically sweeps across the landscape and down the river to the island of Shalott, and then into the tower, into the room, and into the Lady’s mind. This attentional shift takes the form of a great deal of fictive motion and apparent motion across the entire text but it is especially striking in the opening. Fictive motion is a conventional feature of language, as in the line ‘The road runs by’ (Talmy 1996, 2000), though it takes on a thematic significance in poetry (Matlock 2004). In this poem, the animation of the landscape and the perspective is effected by several examples. Most notably, the high density of prepositional phrases and personification verbs in the opening serve to animate the landscape as a preparatory contrast to the Lady’s imprisonment. The barley and rye ‘lie’ and ‘clothe’ and ‘meet’. Prepositions, in cognitive grammar (Langacker 2008), steer readers into profiling different parts of image schemas (abstract representations of spatial relationships that are psychologically deep seated). So, ‘On’, ‘of’, ‘of’, ‘thro’, ‘by’, ‘To’, ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘round’ and ‘below’ all occur just within the first stanza; 466

Texture

they not only set out the physical relationships of the landscape but also do so by generating a sense of apparent motion as a reader has to shift attentional profiling around. By contrast with the vivified landscape, humans are depersonalized in Part I. The syntax of the first line prepares a pattern in which the verb precedes the subject (it would conventionally be ‘Fields lie on either side of the river’). This misprimes the syntax in the line ‘And up and down the people go’ so that ‘people’ are fleetingly backgrounded, like ‘river’. Even in the next line, where the people are active, the verb form and choice ‘Gazing’ is relatively passive and mindless. In the rest of the section, trees and breezes have active agency. The ‘people’ are unnamed, sidelined (‘barges trail’d’), negated (‘unhail’d’) or passivized (‘known’). Only the ‘reapers’ receive a rather passive agency (‘hear a song’), and even then they are depersonalized – named by role – by contrast with the ‘bearded barley’. When one unnamed finally speaks, it is only a whisper. In the poem as a whole, there are few examples at the overall discourse level of thematic state changes. The most obvious one is the death of the Lady, which also marks the shift of her deictic position out of the ‘four gray walls, and four gray towers’ of her prison: she becomes free by her death. ‘The mirror crack’d’ as a moment of transition is also a heavily symbolic example of a resonant state change. Similarly, there are few examples of occlusion at the discourse level, other than the over-ridingly prominent one by which the landscape perspective is replaced by the Lady’s perspective, as described in terms of worlds above. At a more detailed level, however, there are a great deal of new, strong figures which occlude previously attended items, particularly within the domains of light and shade. Where a new lexical phrase or agentive verb choice makes a strong claim on attention, the previous feature in focus will be neglected (occluded) in favour of the new attractor. Elsewhere I have noticed the widespread literary effectiveness of attractors of light and dark, aligned with good and evil, life and death, action and stasis, and other parallel binary qualities (see Stockwell 2002b, 2003, 2009a). In The Lady of Shalott, the interplay of brightness with these other alignments is especially prominent, and this is a major source of the texture of the poem. There is not the space here to identify all of the attractors of brightness and colour throughout the poem in order to illustrate this, but it is clear that the introductory description of Lancelot through most of Part III focuses on the attractors of brightness, highly active agency, noisiness, and increase in size. The brightness is conveyed not only in ‘sun’, ‘dazzling’, ‘flamed’, ‘brazen’, ‘redcross’, ‘sparkled’, ‘glitter’d’, ‘golden’, ‘blazon’d’, ‘silver’, ‘bright’, ‘clear’, and ‘glow’d’ but also in the contrastive dimming of the backgrounded elements: ‘shadows’ just prior to this illuminated description and ‘purple night’ towards the end. The aura effect of this is so strong that his ‘coal-black curls’ cannot 467

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

undermine the brightness; they are placed in neglected post-verb position and framed with high action (‘flow’d’ and ‘rode’), and are already semantically associated with burning. In any case, they simply serve as a preparatory mini-contrast for the climactic dazzling of his image flashing in the crystal mirror. Lancelot is noisy at the same time, arriving with ‘bridle bells’, a ‘mighty silver bugle’ and his armour ringing. He is enlarged, not only in the repeated additives ‘And’ but also by association with ‘for ever’, ‘the golden Galaxy’, ‘All in’ and ‘together’. And his description is aligned with highly active agency: prominently, the verb ‘rode’ is repeated six times. At the moment of greatest brightness, when Lancelot distracts the Lady (as he has distracted the reader), his light is multiplied. Already viewed through the mirror, he dazzles from two sources at once, ‘from the bank and from the [reflecting] river’, alongside the repeated ‘as on he rode, as he rode down’, and Tennyson – for the first and only time and right in the centre of the poem – rhymes a word (‘river’) with itself. Lancelot’s song (‘Tirra lirra’) is even phonetically echoic, and echoes Autolycus’ song of the lark from The Winter’s Tale (IV iii), where the phrase is repeated. This climax shifts immediately to the Lady, in which she occludes Lancelot’s agency in exactly also six verbs (‘left’, ‘left’, ‘made’, ‘saw’, ‘saw’ and ‘look’d’). In Part IV, the brightness is dimmed down in the first two stanzas (‘stormy’, ‘pale’, ‘waning’, ‘heavily’, ‘low’, ‘raining’, ‘dim’, ‘closing of the day’), before the Lady’s dying body floats transfigured in brightness. However, this brightness is cold (‘snowy white’) and diminishing rapidly (from ‘falling light’ to ‘noises of the night’), until she is ‘darken’d wholly’ and ‘dead-pale’. Aligned with these brightness effects in the attractors are parallels between the four stanzas of Part I and these four stanzas of the five-stanza Part IV, as will be outlined below.

3  Transitions in Ambience The literary-critical sense of ambience is a composite effect of a text’s atmosphere and tone. Deggan (2013) explores ambience through fictive motion, extending it to general kinetic features in literary texts that he describes as scenic motion – my brief discussion of agency in attractors above can be seen as relating to this approach. Elsewhere (Stockwell 2014) I have distinguished atmosphere and tone on the basis of the readerly relationship with world levels. Atmospheric effects are attached to the fictional or imagined world being presented, whereas tonal effects are a matter of the mediating voice (whether authorial, narratorial or character-centred). Most of the texture of The Lady of Shalott that is most appreciated by readers in general can be located in its atmospheric qualities. Atmospheric texture is most obviously enacted in diction: lexical choices that generate in a reader not only conscious denotation but also less conscious associations that might even be fleeting, ineffably evocative or even subliminal. 468

Texture

The atmospheric effects of lexical choice can draw on the reader’s cultural knowledge, as in the poem when the inventory of a medieval past is sketched in archaic words such as ‘shallop’ (from middle French chaloupe, a shallowdraught river-boat), ‘churls’ (from Old English ceorl, a peasant-man) and ‘greaves’ (leg-armour), or ‘baldric’ (a shoulder-belt). These historical cultural placements are also accompanied by an enormous number of richly evocative descriptive terms throughout the poem that encode a romantic Victorian view of medieval chivalric life (which of course was anachronistic, placing it not in the probable Arthurian fifth to sixth centuries but in a romanticized twelfthto fifteenth-century period of writers such as Chrétien de Troyes and Thomas Malory). The antique flavour is captured with archaic lexis (‘aspens’ for the more common ‘poplar trees’, ‘imbowers’, even ‘damsels’) and archaic morphology (the old third-person verb ending on ‘flitteth’, ‘hath’, ‘weaveth’). Of course, much of the poem’s attractive texture can be ascribed to echoes that are internal across the text too. As mentioned at the end of the last section, these serve to create delicate connections between the four stanzas in Part I and those in Part IV before the final stanza. Aside from straight lexical repetitions and equivalences in both places (‘field’, ‘river’, and barges and shallops and her boat) there are several more echoic lexical patterns such as the following: ‘lie’ / ‘Lying’, ‘On either side the river’ / ‘loosely flew to left and right’ ‘clothe the wold’ / ‘robed in snowy white’ ‘Willows whiten’ / ‘willowy hills’ ‘Hear a song that echoes cheerly’ / ‘Heard a carol, mournful, holy’ ‘many-tower’d Camelot’ / ‘Under tower and balcony’ And even more associatively, the world-building inference of Autumn in ‘Long fields of barely and of rye’ / ‘The pale yellow woods were waning’ or of evening in ‘Little breezes dusk’ / ‘leaves upon her falling light’. Some of these transitions create atmospheric contrasts quite distinctly, of course, from a cheery song to a mournful one, or even more subtly from the ‘river winding clearly’ to ‘the boat-head wound along’, which allows the inclusion of the double meaning of ‘wound’ (especially primed up with the personifying lexical choice of ‘boat-head’ for the previously used ‘prow’). These effects might blend into subliminal or delicate effects that are diffused over the reading experience, of course. Other such rarefied effects might be the funereal associations of ‘lilies’ in the river in the opening, or remembering ‘her wave her hand’ in farewell, or the romantic echoes of ‘bridal’ in ‘bridle bells’ shortly after the 469

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

‘lovers lately wed’, or the ‘funeral, with plumes and lights’ that foreshadows the moment when dazzlingly bright Lancelot with his ‘helmet and the plume’ signals her death later on, again just after she has seen ‘the water-lily bloom’. Even more subliminal might even be the masculine nature of the landscape and the universe: both the barley and the meteors are ‘bearded’. These examples of echoic semantics create an atmosphere that is richly evocative and dense in associations at both the denotative and rarefied levels. The sense of enigma, mystery and ambivalence that seems to appeal to most readers of the poem is also a product of many of these micro-transitional shifts in ambient effect. The unresolved nature of the poem might also be placed into sub-consciousness by certain phrases. The first stanza of Part II introduces the curse in a highly-embedded manner as ‘a whisper’ that she has heard ‘say’, and the curse itself is presented in a conditional clause ‘A curse is on her if she stay To look down to Camelot’. There is ambiguity in ‘stay’, meaning ‘stops her weaving’ or ‘remains where she is’. The immediately prior mention of ‘the fairy’ and the ‘magic web’ might prime up a reading of the supernatural curse as real, but it is not entirely clear that she believes in it completely. After all, ‘She knows not what the curse may be’, and the placement of the negation and the modalization here certainly allow it to be read not as ominous but as dismissive (recall ‘her wave her hand’). ‘And so’, putting supernatural nonsense from her head, ‘she weaveth steadily’, and the final phrase ‘little other care hath she’ can then be ambivalent between her care-ful single-mindedness and her care-less leisure. These ambivalences are probably not prominent at the moment of reading, but they arguably produce a diffused possibility of ambivalence that the poem certainly does exploit by the end. It is perhaps better argued that their articulation is not so much an atmospheric matter as a matter of tone, in the sense that their ambient effects can be attached to the narrative voice. In the absence of a characterized narrator, most people default to regarding the poetic voice as ‘Tennyson’ and thus ascribe thematic concerns of Victorian rural life and industry to the poem. Certainly there are many examples across the poem in which a self-conscious and wrought diction that foregrounds craft and artifice are in evidence. The compressed pre-modification of ‘many-tower’d Camelot’, ‘longhair’d page’, ‘red-cross knight’, and ‘thick-jewell’d’ are all highly poeticized, as are the post-modifiers in ‘mirror clear’, ‘damsels glad’, ‘clusters bright’, ‘east-wind straining’, and the post-positioning of ‘flitteth silken-sail’d’, ‘upon her falling light’, and ‘darken’d wholly’, a form that is sometimes regarded as archetypally Miltonic and Latinate. All of these are tonal qualities that seem to emanate from the poetic composer. Similarly, the metrical patterning (mainly iambic tetrameter with some variations) and the elegantly sustained rhyme in each stanza evoke a historically authentic poetic tradition, and the repetitions can easily be thematized 470

Texture

alongside the reflective symbolism in the poem, its parallel structures, and the inevitable fatalism of its core narrative. All of these features could be traced precisely in a longer analysis in terms of textual and compositional deixis (Stockwell 2009a: 127–31), but the most important aspect for the current discussion lies in the potential for a perceived mismatch when the reader moves from the highly poetic compositional tone, which most people generally find seductive and attractive, and the bathos of the final stanza. In particular, Lancelot’s tone allows for variant interpretations. The free direct speech (‘Who is this? and what is here?’) compresses the narrative viewpoint with the people and ‘All the knights at Camelot’ who have come out to see the body in the boat. The first four lines pick up the richly contrary attractors from the previous discourse: ‘lighted’ yet ‘died’, ‘cheer’ and ‘fear’. Across these four lines, proximal deixis is prominent: ‘this’, ‘here’, ‘in’, ‘near’, ‘themselves’. That Lancelot’s final utterance is to be viewed as contrary to all this is signalled not only by the contrastive ‘But’ but by the reference to ‘a little space’ that sets him deictically elsewhere from all those in the previous lines, including the poetic voice. He is given his own direct speech to finish. What Lancelot says can be taken as a conventional chivalric and Christian blessing, but it can also be read as trite, superficial, initially colloquial and possibly inarticulate, especially in contrast with the brilliantly richly crafted texture of all that has gone before. Lancelot’s linguistic clumsiness matches his oblivious actions, which earlier caused the Lady’s death. His is the only example of direct speech in the poem in which the speaker creates his own rhyme (‘face’ / ‘grace’), rather than rhyming with the framing poetic voice. He also imitates the post-positioning appositional structure of the poetic tone in the form, ‘She has a lovely face. ... The Lady of Shalott’), but he does not answer the questioner’s questions. He is the only character in the poem who is named, and the woman remains unnamed, or is named (even by her own writing hand) by her role. Lastly, the perspectival shifts in worlds and the shifts in tone come together at the end, so that the preposition in ‘of Shalott’ in this final line alters its meaning. In every prior iteration, The Lady of Shalott sets up a profiling of the image-schematic structure for ‘of’ that is possessive: she belongs to and is imprisoned by the island of Shalott. In cognitive linguistic terms in the conceptual structure of the prepositional phrase, ‘Lady’ is the figure and ‘Shalott’ is the background or landmark, and the context primes a profiling of the figure as being a part of the landmark. In Lancelot’s final phrase, following the spatial deictic shift and the transition into his direct speech, and within his anti-poetic compositional tone, the meaning of ‘of Shalott’ is rather simply spatial: the end of the image-schematic trajectory is profiled, so the phrase is closer in sense simply to ‘The Lady from Shalott’. This captures both the enigmatic sense of her mysterious origins and also the fact that she has been freed from the island. 471

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

4  Experiencing Literary Texture It is impossible to avoid discussion of interpretation, because texture and meaning condition each other in unavoidable ways. However, the point of the foregoing analysis is not primarily to present a particular reading. It is inconclusive whether the Lady is an ideal artist cut off from society and released by falling for the sensual physical world or is merely an artisan released from her mechanical reproductions by an encounter with transcendence so that her action, inscription and beautiful exit embody her actual entrance into the artistic realm (see Gray 2009 for a review of the two sides in this literary-critical argument). If I had to take a position on this, I would argue that the poem sets up the subliminal and symbolic ambience of ambivalence and unresolvability: the ongoing literary-critical discussion itself is a working response to the richness of the poem. Rather, my argument is that the enduring popularity of the poem amongst natural, non-academic readers is a consequence primarily of its rich, engaging texture rather than its status as a historiographic or literary-critical puzzle to be solved. The feeling of the enigma is part of its attraction. Readers commenting on the poem in seminars or online in blogs and such discussions most often talk about its atmospheric and tonal qualities, the way it sounds and the evocations it brings to mind. It is clear that ‘The Lady of Shalott’ succeeds for most people because of its texture. My own belief is that poetry exercises its transforming, striking, engaging, resonant and emotional power in general mainly through its texture, and it is thanks to new insights and analytical frameworks in cognitive poetics and stylistics that we are able to articulate and explore these effects precisely and in all their richness.

References Deggan, M. (2013), ‘What is literary “atmosphere”? The role of fictive motion in understanding ambience in fiction’, in B. Dancygier, M. Borkent and J. Hinnell (eds), Language and the Creative Mind, 173–92, Stanford: CSLI. Dominy, N. (2013), ‘Beyond vision: Touchy-feely primates’, Paper presented to AAAS Conference, Boston, 16 February 2013. Gavins, J. (2007), Text World Theory: An Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gibbs, R. W. (2006), Embodiment and Cognitive Science, New York: Cambridge University Press. Gibbs, R. W. (15 May 2012), ‘Walking the walk while thinking about the talk: Embodied interpretation of metaphorical narratives’, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 42: 1–16. Gray, E. (2009), ‘Getting it wrong in “The Lady of Shalott”’, Victorian Poetry, 47 (1): 45–59. Jones, G. R., ed. (1996), The Nation’s Favourite Poems, London: BBC Books. Keen, S. (2007), Empathy and the Novel, New York: Oxford University Press.

472

Texture Langacker, R. (2008), Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction, New York: Oxford University Press. McKelvy, W. R. (2007), ‘Iconic destiny and “The Lady of Shalott”: Living in a world of images’, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 47 (August), http://id.erudit.org/ iderudit/016699ar. Matlock, T. (2004), ‘Fictive motion as cognitive simulation’, Memory and Cognition, 32 (8): 1389–1400. Stockwell, P. (2002a), Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, London: Routledge. Stockwell, P. (2002b), ‘Miltonic texture and the feeling of reading’, in J. Culpeper and E. Semino (eds), Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, 73–94, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Stockwell, P. (2003), ‘Surreal figures’, in J. Gavins and G. Steen (eds), Cognitive Poetics in Practice, 13–25, London: Routledge. Stockwell, P. (2005), ‘Texture and identification’, European Journal of English Studies, 9 (2): 143–53. Stockwell, P. (2009a), Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stockwell, P. (2009b), ‘The cognitive poetics of literary resonance’, Language and Cognition, 1 (1): 25–44. Stockwell, P. (2011), ‘Authenticity and creativity in reading lamentation’, in J. Swann, R. Pope and R. Carter (eds), Creativity in Language, 203–16, Palgrave: Basingstoke. Stockwell, P. (2014), ‘Atmosphere and tone’, in P. Stockwell and S. Whiteley (eds), The Handbook of Stylistics, 360–74, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Talmy, L. (1996), ‘Fictive motion in language and “ception”’, in P. Bloom, M. A. Peterson, L. Nadel and M. F. Garrett (eds), Language and Space, 211–76, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Talmy, L. (2000), Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Volume I: Conceptual Structuring Systems, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tennyson, A. (1987), The Lady of Shalott, in C. Ricks (ed.), The Poems of Tennyson, vol. I, 2nd edn, 387–95, Harlow: Longman. Werth, P. (1999), Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse, Harlow: Longman.

473

28

Iconicity Christina Ljungberg, University of Zurich

Chapter Overview What is Iconicity? The Relation Between Signs and Their Objects Imagic Iconicity Diagrammatic Iconicity Metaphorical Iconicity

474 475 476 478 482

1  What is Iconicity? Iconicity is a term used in semiotics to characterize the relationship of similarity between a sign and the object it represents. A sign that is similar to (or ‘motivated by’) whatever it represents is an icon. In language, the best known form of iconicity is the one of onomatopoeic words, also called sound symbolic words, such as the word ‘tick-tock’, which imitates the sound made by a large clock. The founder of structural linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), claimed that language consists of signs that are essentially arbitrary, conventional and unmotivated in relation to their objects (or meanings). Research in iconicity, by contrast, has given evidence of many ways in which verbal expressions are iconic (motivated) in relation to their objects. Iconicity is a powerful stylistic device of poetry, but it is also characteristic of efficient prose style, the language of the mass media and even the language of scientific discourse. Saussure’s principle of arbitrariness, which postulates that verbal signs are essentially unrelated to whatever they signify, has been a dogma in linguistics for generations of linguists. However, after Roman Jakobson argued 474

Iconicity

against Saussure in his pioneering article ‘Quest for the essence of language’ (1971[1965]), more attention was given to iconic aspects of language. Whereas such aspects were first considered marginal, further research has shown that there is iconicity at all levels of language in phonology, morphology and syntax as well as at the textual level. Iconicity is a feature of all known languages (see, e.g. the work by Haiman, Givon, Hopper and Thompson, among many others). Iconicity is also utterly pervasive in literary texts. Metrical patterns (rhyme, prosody, versification, stanzaic ordering) as well as typography and layout are essentially iconic in their structure (see Nänny 1985, 1986; Nöth 1994; Johansen 2002; Ljungberg 2004; Colapietro 2010). Publications on iconicity in language and literature include the collection Iconicity. Essays on the Nature of Culture (Bouissac, Herzfeld and Posner 1986) in honour of Thomas A. Sebeok, Eco’s Kant and the Platypus (1999), Stjernfelt’s Diagrammatology (2007), the special issue on the ‘Semiotics of Resemblance’ of Sign System Studies (2010), as well as the book series ILL (Iconicity in Language and Literature), which comprises monographs such as Limiting the Iconic: From the Metatheoretical Foundations to the Creative Possibilities of Language by De Cuypere (2008) or Ljungberg’s Creative Dynamics. Diagrammatic Strategies in Narrative (2012), and thematic volumes such as Naturalness and Iconicity in Language (Willems and De Cuypere 2008) or Prosody and Iconicity (Hancil and Hirst 2013). The series also presents the main results of the biannual conferences of the International Interdisciplinary Iconicity in Language and Literature project, which comprise eight volumes so far with programmatic titles such as Form Miming Meaning (Nänny and Fischer 1999); The Motivated Sign (Fischer and Nänny 2001); Insistent Images (Tabakowska, Ljungberg and Fischer 2007); Semblance and Signification (Michelucci, Fischer and Ljungberg 2011); and Iconic Investigations (Elleström, Fischer and Ljungberg 2013).

2  The Relation Between Signs and Their Objects According to Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914), the founder of modern semiotics, a sign in relation to its object is an icon, an index or a symbol. Whereas an icon is similar to its object in the sense that it shares certain acoustic, visual or other qualities with it, an index stands in an existential relation (such as the relation of causality or temporal and spatial contiguity) to it, and a symbol is a sign by convention or habit essentially unrelated to whatever it refers to. This does not mean that signs in use are solely iconic, indexical or symbolic. On the contrary, they often combine features of all three types of signs. The question whether a sign is an icon, an index or a symbol depends on which of its features is more predominant. For instance, all photographs are icons insofar as they are similar to the objects they represent, but they are also indexical signs 475

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

insofar as they are caused by the light rays of the objects projected on a film. If their documentary character predominates, they are indices, but when we consider the way they are similar to whatever they represent, we interpret them as icons. Knocking at the door before entering a room may be a conventional and hence a symbolic sign, but it is an index insofar as it draws our attention towards a certain direction or steers our attention towards this direction. That one and the same sign may be a symbol, an index or an icon at the same time is particularly evident when iconicity in language and literature is concerned. As Nöth (2001: 19) points out, ‘every language sign, even an iconic or an indexical sign is a symbol’ – insofar as it is conventional. Deictic words such as ‘here’ or ‘today’ are indexical symbols. They are related to their meanings not only by relations of time and space but also by the conventions of language. In this sense, symbolic words are both icons and symbolic signs that are similar to their objects and signs that are determined by conventions. Even though language consists of primarily symbolic signs, it thus also makes use of iconic and indexical signs. These two last sign classes correspond with Jakobson’s principles of the metonymic and metaphoric poles in language. Metonymic contiguity matches the principle of indexicality since the metonymic sign is related to its object through its spatial juxtaposition, and the principle of metaphoric similarity to that of iconicity (cf. Nöth 2000: 347–8). This becomes particularly obvious when we look at Peirce’s subdivision of iconic signs into images, diagrams and metaphors, the importance of which for linguistics Jakobson was the first to observe. An image shares significant qualities with its object, a diagram is an abstract representation of relations that corresponds to the relations of its object, and a metaphor evinces a relation of similarity mediated by a third sign (the classical tertium comparationis), which makes it structurally even more complex than diagrams (Haley 1988; Nöth 2001; Johansen 2002: 195; Colapietro 2010).

3  Imagic Iconicity Despite its name, the first type of iconicity, ‘imagic iconicity’, does not only encompass visual phenomena but also nonvisual ones. What is important is that there is a perceptible similarity, as in onomatopoetic words such as ‘cuckoo’ ‘miaow’, ‘moo’, ‘hiccup’, ‘fizz’ or ‘sizzle’, whose forms imitate the sound that an animal or an act produce. Another example is the use of ‘ping pong’ instead of its ‘official’ name, table tennis, which demonstrates how effectively an iconic sign evokes a much livelier mental sound image than does its symbolic expression. However, the shape of writing systems also seems to have an imagic iconic foundation. As the cognitive scientist Mark Changizi (2006) and his colleagues 476

Iconicity

have shown, all natural writing systems share certain basic topological features with the environment that seem to be easy for our neuro-visual system to recognize, identify and translate. Investigating more than a hundred ancient and new natural language writing systems, they found that all (including alphabetic and Chinese systems) share certain basic topological features with the environment. As they suggest, these ‘have been selected to resemble the conglomerations of contours found in natural scenes, thereby tapping into our already-existing object recognition mechanisms’ (2006: E117). Since antiquity, imagic iconicity has been a useful tool for poets, writers and rhetoricians to conjure up meaning by using semantic stimulation, either appealing to our sound imagination or to our visual imagination by, for example, exploiting the visual form of the alphabetic letters in order to create an iconic image in literary texts. This form of iconicity is also what underlies signed languages (cf. Herlofsky 2010). The repeated occurrence of elaborate initials and the play with alphabetic form in medieval manuscripts show an awareness of the iconic potential of letters that must have been there since the beginning of written literature. This seems, however, to have been overlooked in early linguistic and literary research. As Nänny (1999: 173) argues, ‘long before E.E. Cummings made a full poetic use of the alphabet as a rich source of iconic signs, e.g. in his typographic rendering of the word “look” by “l oo k”, authors since the Renaissance had been aware of the inherent iconicity of alphabetic letters’. Shakespeare, for instance, alludes to the form of the Globe theatre in the Prologue to Henry V as ‘this wooden O’, and writers like Victor Hugo read images into letters such as seeing a roof in capital A, the crescent of a moon in capital C, leg and foot in capital L and a snake in capital S, to mention just a few examples. The poem’s typographical shape on the page has also frequently been used to create meaning. The renewed popularity of Carmen figuratum – an ancient poetic genre that re-emerged during the Renaissance and again in the seventeenth century as well as in nineteenth-century and contemporary poetry – in which the poem’s typographic shape iconically mirrors its referent, shows the extent to which poets play with form. Famous examples range from George Herbert’s The Altar, whose typographic form has the shape of an altar, or his Easter-wings, in the shape of two wings (cf. Bauer 1999; Nänny 1999; Ljungberg 2012) to more recent examples such as Guillaume Apollinaire’s’ ‘lyrical ideograms’ (cf. Gahl 2007) or modern avant-garde poetry (cf. White 2001, 2007) to Margaret Atwood’s postmodernist Pastoral Elegy (1961: 9), her witty parody/ pastiche of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. Shaping her poem into an icon of a butterfly to evoke rebirth or metamorphosis, she replaces Eliot’s negative views of sexuality with an abundantly fertile landscape challenging the barren civilization of Eliot’s poem (cf. Ljungberg 2001).

477

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

4  Diagrammatic Iconicity In language and in literature, however, the second type of iconicity, diagrammatic iconicity, is much more frequent. A diagram is not defined as sharing simple qualities with its object. Instead, its similarity with its object is abstract, since the relations among its parts are similar to the relations among the parts of the object it represents. An example of a diagram is a subway map. It informs us about the stations and how to get from one to the other, but the distances between these stations on the map need not correspond to the distance between the stations in reality. The iconic diagram is thus characterized by a formal similarity between the various elements of the sign and those of the object it represents. On a city map, for instance, the shape and length of its streets must be proportionally exact to their map representation, otherwise we would get hopelessly lost, since there is no visual similarity between the city and its map representation. In verbal texts, it is the sequencing of the verbal signs that can be used to have them diagrammatically enact, for instance, temporal or spatial order, continuity, change, hierarchy or movement. The structural combination and the typographical arrangement on the printed page can function as diagrammatic icons to express, for instance, reversal, centring, symmetry, balance, relative position or fragmentation (cf. Nänny 1986; Ljungberg 2001). The similarity is hence structural or relational, such as in, for instance, Caesar’s famous remark ‘veni, vidi, vici’ – I came, I saw, I conquered – in which the syntactic structure of the verbs represents the supposed historical order of Caesar’s ascent to power, which was already pointed out by Roman Jakobson (1971[1965]). Diagrammatic iconicity is ubiquitous in language as it concerns our structure of meaning. As Nöth (2008: 90) points out, verbal diagrammaticity can be found at all levels of the language system. Even at the level of its monomorphemic lexical elements whose composition reveals morphological arbitrariness and lack of motivation, words may be considered diagrams. At this level, they may be considered a phonological diagram since its phonological form is a mental diagram of the order, articulation, and stress pattern of its articulation. The ordo naturalis of Caesar’s dictum, the way the narrative order corresponds to that of the events, transforms the narrative following this order into a ‘syntactical diagram’. For instance, even though the result is the same, the sentences ‘Mary went to the library and borrowed a book’ and ‘Mary borrowed a book when she was at the library’ are not identical, since only the first sentence expresses the exact order of events. The relationship between text and conceptual structure can thus be motivated by the perceiver’s temporal and/or spatial 478

Iconicity

perception, or the perceiver’s order of knowledge (cf. Tabakowska 1999). The ways in which we string our sentences can therefore be considered to be mental diagrams of our thoughts. That iconicity in spoken language has become an accepted part of modern linguistics is in part due to the awareness of the importance of diagrammatic iconicity to cognition. This also accounts for the new interest in analogy. Analogies are mental diagrams with the effect of the parallel mapping of the structures of two conceptual domains. Analogies are important to linguistic theorizing and modelling, and they are important factors of language change, language evolution and language acquisition, as the studies by Hofstadter (1995), Deacon (1997), Itkonen (2005), Wanner (2006), Fischer (2007) and others have shown, giving evidence that the basic mechanism of learning is analogy. This makes iconicity a precondition both for learning as well as for communicating and mutual understanding. It is the diagrammatic icon that structures discourse and reasoning, thus making texts and arguments clearer and more transparent by laying bare the path of the argument. Diagrammatic icons in language are therefore both cognitively necessary as well as rhetorically efficient because, as Nöth (2008: 95) notes, ‘[a]n icon is superior to other signs because it represents its object more clearly than a symbol or an index; it has the quality of clearness. This is so because it does not only represent its object as a mere otherness but as something whose structure it conveys simultaneously with its own structure’. This is of course also the case in literary texts in which diagrammatic iconicity can be found both on the syntactical as well as on the phonological level. In the tradition of literary studies, however, there has been much resistance to accepting the concept of iconicity in language. Too frequently, the tendency to reduce icons to imagic icons such as onomatopoeia or sound equivalence as well as the more obvious typographical compositions of Carmina figurata and modern visual poetry mentioned above have presented it as a rather marginal phenomenon. Such a superficial view disregards the fundamental function that diagrammatic iconicity performs in the structure of a literary text. Poets make frequent use of diagrammatic features such as lineation, stanza breaks, sequence, iteration and chiasmus, a rhetorical pattern of inversion. Although the majority of rhymes seem arbitrary, rhyming units frequently function as diagrammatic icons whose phonetic relationship mirrors a semantic relationship. As Nänny (2005: 195) shows, perfect single rhymes can have a performative function or express semantic similarity, whereas imperfect single rhymes often express uncertainty or doubt, discord, disorder, inaccuracy or negation. And even though the gendered label for masculine rhymes (accentuated on the last syllable) and feminine rhymes (not accentuated on the last syllable) is wholly arbitrary and conventional, the use of these different rhymes was, Nänny argues, often instrumentalized in metaphorical games of meaning making by 479

The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics

neo-classical poets such as John Dryden. In addition, not only the uses of single rhymes but also of entire rhyme schemes ascertain to poets’ use of diagrammatic icons to express ‘change, disorder and framing’ (cf. Nänny 2005: 203). This is the case, for instance, with the wrecked rhyme scheme of P. B. Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, the form of which, in combination with its ruptured syntax, mirrors the damaged condition of the Ramses II statue that ‘the traveller from an antique land’ finds in the desert (2005: 207). Symmetry is the most common model of iconicity in language and occurs much more often than is commonly perceived. In particular, the symmetrical pattern of inversion called chiasmus (1-2-3-3 >  2 > 3 : 3 > 2 > 1) or as a sequence reverting the direction (1