Language, Discourse and Literature

An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics

Ronald Carter, Paul Simpson, Ronald Carter, Paul Simpson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415119535
• eBook ISBN: 9781134812387
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection shows students of English and applied linguistics ways in which language and literary study can be integrated. By drawing on a wide range of texts by mainly British and American writers, from a variety of different periods, the contributors show how discourse stylistics can provide models for the systematic description of, for example, dialogue in fiction; language of drama and balladic poetry; speech presentation; the interactive properties of metre; the communicative context of author/reader. Among the texts examined are novels, poetry and drama by major twentieth-century writers such as Joyce, Auden, Pinter and Hopkins, as well as examples from Shakespeare, Donne and Milton.

Each chapter has a wide range of exercises for practical analysis, an extensive glossary and a comprehensive bibliography with suggestions for further reading. The book will be particularly useful to undergraduate students of English and applied linguistics and advanced students of modern languages or English as a foreign language.

Introduction to Chapter 1

Walter Nash examines a very familiar piece of text, the opening of Hamlet, using three complementary methods of presentation. The first of these is paraphrase; the second, commentary, or line-by-line exposition; and the third, a synopsis couched in terms of pragmatics and discourse analysis. Nash presents a brief study of the transactional structure of the dialogue, of its component discourse acts, and of its evidences of power and deference in the management of language in formal situations. From this study he concludes that the three methods—paraphrase, commentary and analytical synopsis—support each other; further, that discourse analysis in quite simple forms may actually enhance the interpretation of a text by bringing into sharp focus elements in the literary pattern not so clearly defined by other methods. What is thus revealed about the ‘microtext’, he suggests, may have particular relevance to the interpretation of the ‘macrotext’—i.e. the scene, the act, or even the whole play. The chapter ends with some suggestions for further exploration.

1: Changing the Guard at Elsinore

WALTER NASH

I: A Paraphrase

(A fortification. On a parapet, a sentry is keeping guard. His name is Frank. It is evidently a very cold night, or Frank is ill at ease, or both; as he paces back and forth he stamps, shivers, whistles under his breath. Presently another soldier, Bernie, is dimly seen on the stairs that climb to the parapet. As Frank comes towards him, he starts nervously.)

Bernie: Who’s there?

Frank: (startled and affronted.) Eh? Oh no you don’t!(Then remem bering the drill, issues the formal challenge.) Halt! Who goes there?

Bernie: (Trying to get the password right.) Long live the king!

Frank: (Uncertain.) Bernie?

Bernie: Yes, it’s me.

Frank: Here on the dot, aren’t you?

Bernie: It’s gone twelve. Time you were in bed.

Frank: I won’t say no. It’s freezing cold, and I’ve got the shakes.

Bernie: (Intensely casual.) Anything to report?

Frank: No. Dead quiet.

Bernie: Off you go, then. If you run into Harry and Mark, tell them to get a move on, will you?

Frank: (He has been moving away from Bernie, and now stands at the head of the parapet stair.) Here they are now, I can hear them. (As the newcomers emerge into view, he slips into his ‘sentry’ routine, forgetting, perhaps, that Bernie has now assumed the duty.) Halt! Who goes there?

Harry: (Who is not a soldier, but perceives the need to say some thing reassuring.) We’re on your side.

Mark: (Who is, and who can therefore hastily produce a password not unlike the one already given by Bernie.) Soldiers of the king.

Frank: (Evidently satisfied with this response.) Good-night, then.

Mark: (A little surprised at this abrupt departure of the ‘sentry’ who has just challenged them.) Oh! Cheerio, old son! Who’s relieved you?

Frank: Bernie just took over from me. I’ll say goodnight.

Mark: Hey there, Bernie!

Bernie: Over here. Say, is Harry with you?

Harry: (Whimsical.) Some of him is.

Bernie: Hello, Harry. Mark, I’m glaa you’re here.

Mark: (With a stifled eagerness.) Why—has—you know what—paid us a visit?

Bernie: (Cautiously, watching Harry.) Not that I know of.

This is how Hamlet opens; not in so many words, it is true, but in so many interactions or exchanges between professional soldiers who are frightened and excited and behave, on the whole, rather unprofessionally. The paraphrase of their conversation may reduce to modern banality the sharp impact of Shakespeare’s dramatic language, but it has one advantage. The commonplace phrasing, unsanctified by time and literary reputation, presents a direct reading of motives, a reading here freely supported by the interpolation of explanatory directions. This means, of course, that the paraphrase is not simply a translation of the scene into modern colloquial English, but also an interpretation, or more precisely a close sequence of interpretations, from sentence to sentence, emphasis to emphasis, inflection to inflection. The paraphrase simply does what any producer of a play has to do. It reflects decisions about context and motive, which lead to decisions about language, about underlying meanings, about the stylistic cohesion of the scene. But any reader of a drama is a producer of the drama, for an audience of one. To read is to construct mentally an image of performance, and the mental image is reflected in paraphrase.

II: A Commentary

To explain, and if need be justify, that mental image calls for a retracing, step by step, of the paths of meaning laid out in the original text. The first point for commentary is the obvious one, that Hamlet begins with an abortive exchange: a sentry is challenged by an intruder. Shakespeare put it thus:

Bernardo: Who’s there?

Francisco: Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself.¹

In the theatre, the onlooker must become instantly aware of the irregularity of Bernardo’s behaviour. It is Francisco who is in charge, and who insists, correctively, on his authority; the actor playing him must surely stress the pronoun me. His first words are indignant and alarmed, but he then proceeds by the book, making the formal challenge his duty prescribes. In response, Bernardo produces what is evidently a password. Yet still there is a hint of abnormality in the conventional exchange:

Bernardo Long live the king!

Francisco Bernardo?

Bernardo He.

We have the impression that Francisco is not altogether certain of the newcomer’s identity. It is in any case not the ‘password’ that reassures him; it is Bernardo’s homely and laconic ‘He’ (= ‘It’s me’). It is a minor and possibly irrelevant detail, but it seems none the less that there is a momentary flaw in the formal exchange, a stutter, as it were, that is to be recalled a few lines further on, when the question of the correct password is again highlighted.

Francisco comments with surprise (or possibly gratitude, or even irony) on Bernardo’s apparent punctuality:

Francisco: You come most carefully upon your hour.

Sentries are not in the habit of arriving at their posts a moment earlier than the duty roster demands. Francisco’s remark thus draws attention to a further oddity in Bernardo’s conduct. He is a professional soldier, but tonight he is so inept that he challenges the man he is supposed to be relieving, gives a dubious password, and, most significantly, is nervously eager to come on duty. As to this matter, however, he is quick to disclaim punctuality, alleging that he is in fact late:

Bernardo: Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.

Late or early, Francisco is relieved to be relieved; so relieved, indeed that he openly confesses his relief:

Francisco: For this relief, much thanks; ‘tis bitter cold

And I am sick at heart.

‘I am sick at heart’ has the ring of a significant announcement, though as yet the significance is obscure. Does he simply mean ‘I am frozen to the marrow’ (because of the ‘bitter cold’), or is he complaining of something else, a psychic chill, a nameless glacial dread?² Bernardo’s next remark could be a response to the hidden implication, though on the face of it it seems non-commital:

Bernardo: Have you had quiet guard?

This may be the conventional inquiry, the customary speech act of the relieving sentry (‘Everything OK?’ ‘Anything to report?’), or it may be taken as an oblique reference to something no one dares name on this dark night in this cold and lonely place. The words appear to carry a message beyond their commonplace significance, and Francisco’s reply has the same air of coded cliché:

Francisco: Not a mouse stirring.

We are at this point no more than ten lines into the play, and its language is already touched by tremors of ambiguity and covert meaning. Bernardo’s ‘quiet’ (in ‘Have you had quiet guard’) and Francisco’s ‘stirring’ are suspect words, referring indirectly to some knowledge shared by the characters and as yet hidden from the audience.

These oblique references yield, for the moment, to the ordinary business of changing guard:

Bernardo: Well, good-night.

If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus,

The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste.

Either Bernardo is understandably anxious not to be left alone (it is, incidentally, a matter for puzzlement that Francisco has been allowed to stand solitary guard, without ‘rivals’), or he is keen for some reason to have witnesses at hand. Francisco announces their advent:

Francisco: I think I hear them—Stand, ho! Who’s there?

We are back to the business of challenging—and still it is a challenge from the wrong quarter, for Francisco has now been relieved and the sentinel’s authority is properly invested in Bernardo. Once again, the military convention is violated, in a moment of excited apprehension. Horatio and Marcellus emerge from the darkness to reply to the challenge:

Horatio: Friends to this ground.

Marcellus: And liegemen to the Dane.

But what is Horatio doing, answering the challenge? As we are presently to learn, he is not a soldier, and his ‘Friends to this ground’ does not quite have the air of a soldierly response. It is apparently left to Marcellus, the professional, to redeem Horatio’s civilian incompetence with a formula (liegemen to the Dane’) having the ring of a real password and bearing, as it happens, some resemblance to the earlier ‘Long live the king!’ Francisco admits the incomers without further ado:

Francisco: Give you good-night.

Yet why should Francisco be so obviously satisfied with ‘liegemen to the Dane’ when earlier he has apparently been so cautious about ‘long live the king’? Which is the correct password? Are there two passwords? Is the ‘password’ simply a brief expression of the appropriate sentiment, a variable form of loyal words? Surely not. A plausible explanation is that ‘Long live the king!’ is an approximation to the correct password, a fumbled attempt produced by Bernardo in his excitement. Given such a doubtful or approximate password, Francisco might well question the identity of the intruder; whereas, when the password convinces him, he has no more to say.

And now Marcellus is understandably a little surprised at being challenged by a man so obviously about to quit the scene:

Marcellus: O, farewell, honest soldier:

Who hath reliev’d you?

Here is yet another piece of confusion. It is barely a moment since Bernardo has identified Marcellus as one of his ‘rivals’, and yet Marcellus apparently does not know the identity of the person he is about to join. Francisco obligingly reminds him:

Francisco: Bernardo has my place.

Give you good-night.

That word ‘place’ is of some consequence. Earlier, in his ‘place’, Francisco has rightly insisted, ‘Nay, answer me’; but it is not his ‘place’ to challenge Horatio and Marcellus, and he knows it. His exit speech serves merely to emphasize what we already know, that the usual drills are at sixes and sevens, and that nothing is being done properly or routinely on this strange night.

The subsequent exchanges between Marcellus, Bernardo and Horatio ask us to envisage a spacious darkness, an isolating expanse not easily represented on a small stage, Thus, the interlocutors are first within earshot, yet cannot see each other clearly:

Marcellus: Holla! Bernardo!

Bernardo: Say,

What, is Horatio there?

Thus attention is drawn to Horatio, whose presence is evidently of some importance. He responds, speaking up on his own behalf:

Horatio: A piece of him.

The response is laconic and ironic, a humorous utterance that marks out the speaker as a different sort of animal from those around him. It is, to be sure, a very cold night, and people are behaving rather oddly, and Horatio may well be wondering why he is out at this hour with the superstitious soldiery when he might be tucked up in a warm place. Bernardo greets him and his companion:

Bernardo: Welcome, Horatio; welcome good Marcellus.

These ‘welcome’s seem a little out of the ordinary. Is ‘welcome’ a conventional salutation from one soldier on duty to another, or is Bernardo perhaps a little effusive, and do his words once agan reveal an unwonted nervousness? Marcellus’s next remark reads, indeed, like a response to some suppressed agitation in Bernardo’s manner; or possibly Marcellus himself is so excited that he plunges straight into the matter that concerns him most, cutting short the exchange of civilities:

Marcellus: What! has this thing app...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Introduction to Chapter 1
• 1: Changing the Guard at Elsinore
• Introduction to Chapter 2
• 2: Phatic Communion and Fictional Dialogue
• Introduction to Chapter 3
• 3: Poetry and Conversation: An Essay in Discourse Analysis
• Introduction to Chapter 4
• 4: Polyphony in Hard Times
• Introduction to Chapter 5
• 5: Dickens’s Social Semiotic: the Modal Analysis of Ideological Structure
• Introduction to Chapter 6
• 6: Semantic Relational Structuring in Milton’s Areopagitica
• Introduction to Chapter 7
• 7: Discourse-Centred Stylistics: a Way Forward?
• Introduction to Chapter 8
• 8: Discourse Analysis and the Analysis of Drama
• Introduction to Chapter 9
• 9: Politeness Phenomena in Ionesco’s The Lesson
• Introduction to Chapter 10
• 10: Analysing Conversation in Fiction: an Example from Joyce’s Portrait
• Introduction to Chapter 11
• 11: Subject Construction as Stylistic Strategy in Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Introduction to Chapter 12
• 12: Metre and Discourse
• Introduction to Chapter 13
• 13: ‘Working Effects with Words’—Whose Words? Stylistics and Reader Intertextuality
• Glossary