Units 14 and 15 looked at non-narrative and narrative texts, respectively, but did so chiefly so as to characterize their typical structure, content, discoursal uses, and so on. Text analyses of that sort are always interested in generalizing from the particular: for example, we want to try to specify, on the basis of studying a few written advertisements, those features which are characteristic of virtually all such advertisements. But you can be interested in a linguistically-minded analysis of texts for quite different purposes, e.g., because you want to move from the general to the particular. For example, you are not interested in the structural patterns of sonnets in general but in the specific and unique patterns and effects, using language, of a particular and unique poem, such as Shakespeare's sonnet 130 ('My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;'). This is what Stylistics is all about.
Once upon a time Stylistics was, roughly, the language-oriented study of authorial style. But for many years now Stylisticians have been interested in something broader. If you say you study Shakespeare's style it gives the impression (a) that you believe there is a major distinction to be made between style and content and (b) that you are only interested in the former not the latter. But in fact stylisticians today do not set any great reliance on a separation between style and content, between what you say and the way that you say it: in literature (and stylistics has chiefly looked at literature, although more recently it has turned to advertisements, religious texts, journalism, political discourse, etc.), what you say and the way that you say it constitute a pretty seamless whole. They are in a profoundly symbiotic relationship in which each depends upon the other; if what you said could be easily detached from the particular form in which you expressed it, what would be the point of expending time and effort on the complex form you might have adopted for it? It is because the what and the how are not, strictly, separable in the case of great literature that we treat them as great literature at all. Any text can be paraphrased, but literary ones are those in which paraphrase is least adequate. (Try paraphrasing sonnet 130!)
1. Read over Seamus Heaney's poem, `An Ulster Twilight', a couple of times.
An Ulster Twilight
The bare bulb, a scatter of nails,
Shelved timber, glinting chisels:
In a shed of corrugated iron
Eric Dawson stoops to his plane
At five o'clock on a Christmas Eve.
Carpenter's pencil next, the spoke-shave,
Fretsaw, auger, rasp and awl,
A rub with a rag of linseed oil.
A mile away it was taking shape,
The hulk of a toy battleship,
As waterbuckets iced and frost
Hardened the quiet on roof and post.
Where is he now?
There were fifteen years between us two
That night I strained to hear the bells
Of a sleigh of the mind and heard him pedal
Into our lane, get off at the gable,
Steady his Raleigh bicycle
Against the whitewash, stand to make sure
The house was quiet, knock at the door
And hand his parcel to a peering woman:
`I suppose you thought I was never coming.'
Eric, tonight I saw it all
Like shadows on your workshop wall,
Smelled wood shavings under the bench,
Weighed the cold steel monkey-wrench
In my soft hand, then stood at the road
To watch your wavering tail-light fade
And knew that if we met again
In an Ulster twilight we would begin
And end whatever we might say
In a speech all toys and carpentry,
A doorstep courtesy to shun
Your father's uniform and gun,
But--now that I have said it out--
Maybe none the worse for that.
2. Would you agree that there are arguably two narratives here - a sequence of events in the distant past (probably more than twenty years earlier), and a contemporary second narrative sequence, of thoughts, in the speaker's head (`Eric, tonight I saw it all')? Or would it be better to say that the speaker's contemporary narrative sequence of reflections contains, embedded within it, a recalled earlier narrative?
3. The first five stanzas (and the first two lines of stanza 6) focus fairly straightforwardly on the distant, or embedded-recollected narrative. But what about the line Where is he now?: in Labovian terms, what functional element does this remark perhaps contribute to?
4. As for lexical cohesion, you will have noticed the inventory of carpenter's tools and instruments, predictably co-occurring: scatter of nails, shelved timber, plane, pencil, and spoke-shave. (Incidentally, many of these are named in the order in which Eric would come to use them, in making the toy, so that they are not an unordered list but a narrative one.) Thus a large cluster of items, depicting tools and setting, fit unproblematically into a scene of `toys and carpentry'. But one tool does not thus fit: the cold steel monkey-wrench weighed (or imagined being weighed?) in the speaker's (soft) hand. Why this mention of the cold steel monkey-wrench?
5. What poignant twist to this narrative (or narratives) is given by the late reference to Eric's father's uniform and gun? Assuming that this means that Eric's father is or was a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (which historically has always been overwhelmingly Protestant and Unionist), what complications--or clarifications--does this belated Orientational material bring?
6. In the context of Northern Ireland, especially, all sorts of small details of the poem can be read as resonant. The fact that the toy is a battleship, an instrument of conflict and violence, is a straightforward enough marriage of war and peace. But battleships, as a product, are especially significant in Northern Ireland (by contrast with, e.g., tanks and machine guns) since for decades shipbuilding--including naval shipbuilding--was one of the major sources of employment, and the industry was notoriously discriminatory towards Catholic applicants for work. Similarly, a Raleigh bicycle has a resonance in Ireland in a way that a Dunlop or Motorbecane does not: a Raleigh is a quintessentially English bicycle, and the brand name recalls the Elizabethan Sir Walter Raleigh, one of the colonizing ravishers of Ireland (and other lands), to whom Heaney has referred in other poems.
7. One of the finest attributes of this poem, to my mind, is the choice of title, which prompts the reader to find answers to the questions `Why specifically an Ulster twilight?' and `Why an Ulster twilight?'. The phrase appears again in the speaker's hypothesized meeting again with Eric, these many years later. Formulate, in your own words, reasons why the title is so fitting to the complex circumstances depicted. Would you agree, for instance, that there is a kind of parallel between doorsteps (which figure on two occasions in the poem) and twilight?
Read over the following poem, `Here', which is by Philip Larkin.
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.
Philip Larkin
The stylistic mentality is always on the lookout for one of the more of the following:
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 `Here'? 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, in that they seem both more contemplative and more positive in tone 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.
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?'. Isn't this 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)?'. Below are some things I notice, and questions that then arise:
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. Why? To what (where) do they refer? If the speaker is describing a journey, why might we argue that the literal journey is less important than a mental or figurative one implicit in the text?
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?
3) It seems that there is neither a Subject nor finite main verb in the first sentence of `Here'. Instead we are treated to much swerving, in the nonfinite progressive form, suggestive of ongoingness without clear beginning or end. Who or what is it that does the swerving?
4) I am also struck by certain semantic and grammatical patterns in the poem, relating to `swerving': the `swerving' in this poem is not quite like swerving in its everyday contemporary uses. Typically, swerving is an act of avoidance: you `swerve away from' something unwelcome, but without a positive goal. You swerve not so as definitely to meet something, but in order definitely to not meet something. But in Larkin's poem swerving from is complemented by swerving to. In fact the full sequence is
Swerving from ..... swerving through .... swerving to
This sequence describes a curved line, but one with a clear endpoint; thus this is not a swerving which is semantically akin to a circular whirling or turning, as in Yeats's `The Second Coming': `Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer'. What difference does it make that the sequence of prepositions here is `from, through, to'? How does that sequence contrast with, e.g., `through, to, from', or `to, through, from'? Think about the idea of the order of our language descriptions often matching the actual order in which things are experienced. Do you find B's reply, in the exchange below, awkward?
A: How was your holiday? Where did you go?
B: It was great! We travelled overland to Beijing through Russia from Paris.
Notice too that the same three prepositions are used, in the natural `purposive' order of `from, through, to', to describe the residents: they are residents from raw estates who push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires.
5) lexical congruities and incongruities
One way to analyse this poem into parts is by noting where and on which subjects its vocabulary (its lexis) tends to cluster. There seems to be an extensive use of vocabulary relating to town or urban life, and alongside this a number of words relating to the country. If we treat these - `town lexis' and `country lexis' - as two broad groupings, we can go on to consider whether the poem divides into two sections, each section revealing a preponderance of the former and of the latter, respectively. Do you find that these putative sections overlap or merge, or are they rather separate from each other? What might your finding here (i.e., a merging of town and country lexis, or a separation of them) suggest about the speaker's conception of town life vis a vis country life?
Stanza 2 is perhaps the most `thing'-dominated stanza of the four. We can support that claim by counting the number of nouns (some functioning adjectivally, like barge in barge-crowded water) in each stanza: I count 26 nouns in stanza 2, 21 in stanza 1, 20 in stanza 3, 16 in stanza 4. For reference purposes, here is Stanza 2 with those words I would count as nouns rendered in bold:
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 -
If we agree that stanza 2 is particularly `thing'-oriented, what might this reflect in the speaker's conception of the town and the residents from raw estates? Concerning the town, line 2 says that here cluster domes, statues, spires and cranes. What do these four have in common? Is this particular foursome in any respects an incongruous or unpredictable clustering?
6) puns and word-play. In line 5, at least two words seem to invoke a double interpretation: dead, and stealing. Give paraphrases of the different senses being brought to mind. In each case, can you `rank' the two senses attributable to the word, treating one meaning as definitely and deliberately intended by the speaker and the second meaning as only possibly intended? If so, is it fair to say that the first and definitely-intended meaning is more neutral, less evaluative, while the second and `deniable' meaning is pejorative, antipathetic, and negative about the residents and their lives?
In the case of dead, the double interpretation involves a structural contrast-between treating dead as a modifier or degree word qualifying the adjective straight, and treating it as a separate adjective. On the first interpretation, the miles are utterly straight (simply); on the second interpretation, the miles are both dead and straight. How might one put square brackets around these words, to pick out just one interpretation and not the other? Consider, first, that miles is separate from both the words that precede it, so that we might begin by bracketing off dead straight from miles:
[ dead straight ] miles
This implies that dead straight as a whole is less important than miles. Following the same logic, if you want to highlight the `degree word + adjective' interpretation of `dead straight', you would want to put further brackets around just the word dead, to show that, relatively speaking, it is less important than straight, just as, again relatively speaking, both words are less crucial than miles:
[ [dead] straight ] miles
Typical degree words (very, rather, quite, slightly) cannot create such an ambiguity. Can you explain why this is so?
7) In the privacy of your own head, try to list a few of your strongest desires. Compare these with those things claimed by the speaker, here, to be the desires of these residents, c.1960.
What are the words that might come to mind to characterize, collectively, the `mentionable' attributes of these residents' desires, particularly cheap, red, sharp? What is striking about the sound and rhythm of the final line of desired goods-
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers--
What evaluative attitude to the list does the sound of it, particularly as a line in a poem, suggest?
8) Assess the vocabulary (both content words and grammatical words such as prepositions) in terms of spatial orientation. Specifically, do you find a contrast in the poem between one section in which a horizontal plane is focussed on, and another section in which a vertical one is focussed on? Annotate this contrast and comment on any implications you feel it has for the poem as a whole.
9) In note 2, I commented on the extended length of the sentences in the early stanzas. How is the final stanza sharply different? How many independent clauses do you find in stanzas 1-3, how many in the final stanza? How might you relate the contrast in the frequency of clauses in stanzas 1-3 and in stanza 4 to any thematic purposes of the poem?
10) Genuine oddities or excesses of grammar are almost invariably intentional and authorially motivated. Sort out the grammar of the last three lines of stanza 3 and the beginning of stanza 4: identify the Subject, the Predicator, the Object, and any subordinate clauses. How do the similarities between the words isolate and removed retard rather than simplify the sorting-out? What might be the motivations, then, for the cluster of grammatical complexities, at just this point in the poem, after the relatively simple grammatical structuring (no matter how extended the sentences are) of the earlier lines?
11) By comparison with the Atwood poem to be discussed below, which is titled `This is a photograph of me', we could almost re-title Larkin's poem `This is a photograph of them'. Nevertheless, the poem is not only about `them' but also about the `me' that tells us about `them': there is an `I' buried within Larkin's poem-a sharply occluded speaking `I'. The speaker is there in the poem in the same way that a photograph not only records its visible contents but also implies something about the interests of the photographer who chose to record just those contents.
But consider again the question of `portraying them', which may be a way to get at such issues as whether Larkin's speaker is a snob, or riddled with class-prejudice. The middle section of the poem seems to make unflattering comments on the (Hull) working class, circa 1960. But we might want to welcome a speaker who comments frankly-and unflatteringly, if necessary-on what he or she sees. If a speaker's right to make negative (or approbatory) comment is accepted, what is more interesting and contestable is the question of whether the negative comment is fair comment. Are there any words in the poems, associated directly and unqualifiedly with the lower-class residents or by implication not to be associated with them, which make or entail evaluative judgments which seem highly contentious, unfair (i.e., `classist')?
Now draw up some questions (and answers, where possible), in the same sort of stylistic vein as those above, that you find useful to ask about the following poem, by Margaret Atwood.
This Is a Photograph of Me
It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;
then, as you scan
it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.
In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.
(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.
I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.
It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion
but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)
