Language in Literature

Michael Toolan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134631544
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

An activity-based introduction to stylistics, this textbook explains some of the topics in literary linguistics and helps students in analysing written texts. How can you tell good writing - the excellent, the brilliant and the ingenious - from bad writing - the weak, the banal and the confusing? By looking at the technique and the craft of writing, Language in Literature examines the ways in which language is organised to create particular meanings or effects. Covering a range of topics - naming patterns, modality and evaluation, the structure of simple narratives, the recording of character speech and thought, the dynamics of dialogue, presuppositions and textual revision - the book presents the structuring principles within the English language. Activities and end-of-chapter commentaries encourage a 'learning by doing' approach and equips the reader with the main linguistic terms necessary for the analysis of literary and non-literary texts.

1

Getting started

Let us begin with two rather different poems, written at about the same time, by rather different poets: Philip Larkin’s ‘Here’ and Margaret Atwood’s ‘This is a Photograph of Me’. We shall take these in order. After Larkin’s poem, there are several notes and questions, on the basis of which you should be able to build up quite an extensive stylistic commentary on the poem. Similarly, after the Atwood poem I will raise several questions, and invite you to respond to them by attending to patterns and structures in the text, in much the way that will have been demonstrated in the discussion of ‘Here’. As always, these questions and the discussion they trigger are intended to advance our insight into the poet’s craft and the poem’s effects.

Here

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows

And traffic all night north; swerving through fields

Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,

And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields

Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude

Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,

And the widening river’s slow presence,

The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

Gathers to the surprise of a large town:

Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster

Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,

And residents from raw estates, brought down

The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,

Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires –

Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,

Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers –

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling

Where only salesmen and relations come

Within a terminate and fishy-smelling

Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,

Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;

And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges

Fast-shadowed wheat fields, running high as hedges,

Isolate villages, where removed lives

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands

Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,

Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,

Luminously-peopled air ascends;

And past the poppies bluish neutral distance

Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach

Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:

Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

The stylistic mentality is always on the lookout for one or more of the following:

pattern

repetition

recurrent structures

ungrammatical or ‘language-stretching’ structures

large internal contrasts of content or presentation.

And it is not embarrassed about beginning a discussion with broad or vague first impressions, so-called intuitive or subjective responses, and keeping those in mind as the discussion works its way from the general to the specific. What, then, are your first impressions of this poem? It would be useful if you read over the poem again, and jotted down your first impressions and reactions, before reading on.

My own first impressions are that the poem seems to involve a journey, a movement from one place to a different one; that it is highly descriptive, indeed quite packed with mentioned things; and that the final eight lines contrast, in many respects, with what goes before. For instance, they seem both more contemplative and more positive in tone than the earlier lines, or more approving of what they report. These immediate reactions do much to shape the closer language analysis that follows; they are claims that the more detailed attention will now seek to bolster, or adjust. I believe a similar progression, from first impressions to closer study shaped by those first impressions, typically happens whenever we encounter a new poem, or new picture – or a new acquaintance for that matter. Influential though they are, first impressions can also be unreliable, which is why the closer look, the analytical inspection, is necessary.

But how does ‘analysis’ begin? I believe it begins with attempts to answer perhaps the most foundational of ‘analytical’ questions we can pose of any object:

What do you notice about this object?

This is the first and most basic analytical question that you are likely to be asked, or will ask yourself, when you really look at a particular Rembrandt painting for the first time, or hear a musical composition for the first time. Not ‘What is it?’; nor ‘Do you like it?’: these are not truly analytical questions. But ‘What do you notice in this (from among, by implication, all the innumerable things you could notice here)?’. The following comments itemize some of the language-based things that I notice in ‘Here’, together with attempted explanations of what those noticed features may have been intended to signify.

Activities

ACTIVITY 1

1 Besides the title, the word here is used four times in the poem: once in the second stanza and three times in the final one.

Time Out: here, a deictic word

Here is a deictic word (deixis is explained more fully in Chapter 2), which means that whatever place here is referring to depends entirely on the assumed location of the speaker. Right now, even as I write this, I can refer to the University of Birmingham campus as here (it’s where, currently, I am); you, on the other hand, unless you too are on this same campus, have a different here. What here refers to depends entirely on the assumed location of its utterer.

Now an obvious point about the four heres in Larkin’s poem is that the first refers to one place, a town, while the later three refer to somewhere beyond the town, the seacoast. There is a simple explanation for a text with contrasting heres, namely that the speaker’s implied location has shifted. Note that the speaker need not have literally moved from, for example, the town to the country: he or she only needs to have shifted their attention (and the reader’s attention) from one place to another, and to have given some verbal indications of such an attention-shift. In the case of this poem, what word-choices would you point to as suggesting that the speaker is describing a literal journey from some place to a different one? How might we argue that, however vivid the description of a real journey, it is the speaker’s mental or figurative journey that is finally of greater significance? (§)

2 I notice the inordinate length of the poem’s first sentence. It runs on until the word clarifies at the beginning of the final stanza, a 24-line trek. What are the sentence’s subject, and its finite main verb?

In order to answer the latter of these questions, what ‘finite main verb’ means may need clarification.

Time Out: main verbs

By the ‘main verb’ I mean the verbal word or phrase which is the state or action upon which the entire sentence hinges. The main verb of a sentence is the verbal hinge or fulcrum of the material which the sentence simply cannot do without. Every grammatical sentence _____ a main verb. Otherwise it _____ incomplete, and difficult to interpret. By ‘finite’ I mean a verb phrase which gives, in the first word of that phrase, some indication that it is either present or past tense (and that, thereby, the whole sentence is somewhat temporally defined). All main verbs need to be finite.

What, then, is the main verb in the last sentence preceding this box? This was:

In order to answer the latter of these questions, what ‘finite main verb’ means may need clarification.

That sentence is quite a complex one, with several verb-like chunks: answer, means and may need. To identify which of these is the ‘crucial hinge’ of the sentence we must first recognize that the sentence itself is made up of a grammatically dispensable part and an indispensable part. The dispensable portion is

(a)	In order to answer the latter of these questions

and the indispensable portion is

(b)	what ‘finite main verb’ means may need clarification.

The simplest reason for saying this is that portion (b) can stand alone, as a coherent and grammatical sentence, without (a)’s support; but (a) cannot stand alone without support from a clause like (b). Now when it comes to identifying the main verb within this main portion, (b), reading aloud is a good policy: for many people, as soon as What ‘finite main verb’ means may need clarification is spoken aloud, it becomes clear that What finite main verb’ means is the sentence’s Subject, may need is the finite verb, and clarification is some kind of Object. But when uncertainty remains, a good next step is to try substituting pronouns or short phrases for the chunks you believe the given sentence to be made up of.

In the present case, suppose you are inclined to think that means is the main verb of the sentence. To confirm this, you should be able to find pronouns or short phrases that will substitute for the material which appears on either side of means, and that will do so without wrenching the meaning away from that of the original sentence.

What finite main verb’	means	may need clarification.
?It	means	?business

As you can see, neither the material before or after this alleged main verb means can be replaced satisfactorily while retaining the general sense of the original sentence, by simpler phrases or pronouns; there simply are no pronoun substitutes for the chunks What ‘finite main verb’ means or may need clarification, because these are not, on this occasion, genuine phrases (or ‘constituents’) in the first place. If, on the other hand, we propose that may need is the finite verb, then numerous substitutes, which do not distort the basic meaning of the entire sentence, can be found (including substitutes for the finite main verb):

What ‘finite main verb’	means	may need	clarification.
This phrase		needs	explaining.
It		requires	a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preliminaries
• 1. Getting started
• 2. Cohesion: making text
• 3. Modality and attitude
• 4. Processes and participants
• 5. Recording speech and thought
• 6. Narrative structure
• 7. A few well-chosen words
• 8. Talking: acts of give and take
• 9. Presupposition
• References and recommended further reading
• Index