Below is another extract from the book “Ulysses” by novelist James Joyce where none of the sentences apart from the narrative ones, are grammatically correct or complete by strict standards. Yet one is drawn
to the characters not by being told about them, but by sharing their most intimate thoughts, represented as silent, spontaneous streams of consciousness.
On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off. Must get it. Potato I have. Creaky wardrobe. No use disturbing her. She turned over sleepily that time. He pulled the halldoor to after him very quietly, more, till the footleaf dropped gently over the threshold, a limp lid. Looked shut. All right till I come back anyhow.
(James Joyce, Ulyssess, 1922 p 56)
Ulysses is a psychological rather than a heroic epic. By varying the grammatical structure of his discourse, combining interior monologue with free indirect style and orthodox narrative description, Joyce renders the most commonplace incident or object as if we had never encountered them before.
The first extract concerns Leopold Bloom leaving his house early in the morning to buy a pork kidney for his breakfast. “ On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey” describes Bloom’s action from his point of view, but grammatically implies a narrator, however impersonal. “Not there” is interior monologue, a contraction of Bloom’s thought, “It’s not there.” The omission of the verb conveys the instantaneousness of the discovery, and the slight panic it entails.
The next sentence, describing how Bloom pulled the house door almost shut, returns to the narrative mode, but it maintains Bloom’s point of view and remains within his vocabulary range. The past tense of the next sentence, “Looked shut” marks it as a free indirect style, and provides and easy transition back to interior monologue: “All right till I come back anyhow,” in which “ All right” is a contraction of “ That will be all right.”
(Lodge, David , 1992 p 48-49)
Some writers make a particular feature of breaking the rules of English morphology and syntax. The American poet ee cummings refuses to use upper-case letters ( as in the spelling of his own name), change word classes, adds morphological endings to words that do not normally have them and plays with negation. A familiar structure that cummings plays with is where a word is repeated with by in the middle, as in the everyday examples: ‘one by one’, ‘side by side’, ‘year by year’. Below is an extract from the poem ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’, cummings uses this structure but subverts paradigmatic rules by choosing words that normally belong in another word-class.
Busy folk buried them side by side
Little by little and was by was ( cummings, 1969,p. 44)
Here cummings sets the scene with a conventional phrase, side by side. He then moves on to the phrase, little by little, which normally means ‘gradually’. However, since one can hardly bury a body’gradually’ we are forced to understand little as a noun. The last phrase turns the past tense form of the verb ‘to be’ into a noun in was by was. The echoes of another noun derived from the verb ‘to be’, ‘has-been’, perhaps suggest that these people were never very ‘present’ in their lives, even before they died. (Maybin and Mercer,1996, p167)
One important aspect of literary language is the way in which it plays with, and subverts, relationships of meaning, through metaphors, similies and puns.
An example of metaphor comes from Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘ Litany’ where she condemns the lives of her parents’ generation in the lines:
The terrible marriages crackled, cellophane
Round polyester shirts.
( Duffy, in France, 1993, p117)
In ‘Litany’ Duffy is relying on the reader’s knowledge of the collocations of the word ‘crackle’ to make sense of her unusual choice of verb. When we hear or read a word a whole range of possible associations may be invoked, drawn from our experience of its use in other contexts. The artist juxtaposes particular words or phrases to highlight unusual and striking associations of meaning.
Another example of this juxtaposition and the use of alliteration can be seen in Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls.
Some nights she would halt, as one frozen by some shudder of the mind, and stand stark still till she could move again.
( Beckett, 1984, p 242 )
Beckett exploits the reader’s familiarity with the common collocations ‘stock still’,’stark naked’ and ‘stark staring mad’, to make the phrase stand stark still particularly concise, evoking both madness and nudity as well as the stillness it conveys more directly. The effect is achieved by exploiting the reader’s usual collocational expectations. For example, the verb awaken is normally constrained to occur with an animate object such as a person or an animal. The effect of placing an inanimate object after it, as the poet Sujata Bhatt does in the following lines from ‘ The Langur Coloured Night’ is to suggest that the cry was loud enough to wake objects considered unwakeable. (Maybin and Mercer,1996, p168)
It was a cry
to awaken the moon ( Bhatt, 1991, p 11 )
In “ The Prelude” (Book 1 ) Wordsworth describe skating on a frozen lake in midwinter. . Using Iconic (sounds and shapes of words and phrases imitating particular objects or processes) through the manipulation of grammatical rules, he managed to invoke the childhood pleasure of making one dizzy.
………………. and sometimes,
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks on either side,
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me – even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal round! ( Wordsworth 1991, p 26)
The passage consists of a single rather long, sentence whose main subject and verb, I and stopped, occur very late in its structure. This late placing of the verb, the two obligatory clause elements in English, contravenes a general ‘rule’ of English sentences, in which commonly the main verb appears in the sentence, with any lengthy and complicated phrases occurring after the verb. The result of this general tendency in English sentences is that speakers of English expect the verb sooner rather than later. When it fails to occur, there is either a feeling of frustration and expectation, or in this case, a breathless, headlong rush towards the verb. (Maybin and Mercer,1996, p 172 -173)
Some writers go against tradition by using their own variety or some other nonstandard variety of English for characters’ voices, or even for whole poems and novels. The use of strongly vernacular language would seem to go against the idea that literary language represents the best or most prestigious forms of English, and is distinctly different from everyday usage. Vernacular English is not particularly widespread in traditional English literature, although there are some famous examples of dialect in character’s speech. ( eg. Dicken’s Hard Times ). (Maybin and Mercer,1996, p177)
“Huckleberry Finn” is one of the most influential models of nonstandard usage in English literature. It has a first-person narrator, the young American boy, who draws us into the world of a homeless, rootless child on the edges of respectable society in the USA of the late nineteenth century. Here he describes part of his wanderings, aboard a raft on the Mississippi.
It must be ‘a’ been close on to one o’clock when we got below the island at last, and the raft did seem to go mighty slow. If a boat was to come along we was going to take to the canoe and break for the Illinois shore. And it was well a boat didn’t come, for we hadn’t ever thought to put the gun in the canoe, or a fishing line, or anything to eat. We was in ruther too much of a sweat to think of so many things. It wasn’t good judgement to put everything to the raft. ( Twain, 1976, p 41 )
This passage illustrates the power of the vernacular in fiction-writing to add a very special kind of authenticity to the characters, the setting as well as the the story which is being depicted.
Marvellous work are created by writers who generate imaginative fictional worlds, expressing original insights into the real world, and skillfully manipulating language to create patterns and new usages.They have invented something without precedent, made the reader perceive what we already, in a conceptual sense, “know”, by deviating from the conventional, habitual ways of writing. But are such writers under the guise of ‘creativity’ and ‘originality’ justified?
Canon which is the identification of a body of indispensable and authoritative writings has been a central part of cultural and intellectual life in the English speaking world. For some, canons are necessary to organize the past and to provide some form of standards; for others, they are unnecessarily conservative and rigid force stifling new and different forms of creativity.
Therefore it is not unusual that new writers in their creativity often challenge the way the traditional canon has been constructed and used which is the authority of particular writings and genres within it, and the narrow scope of the stories it contains. (Maybin and Mercer,1996, p241)
T.S. Eliot summarized it well when he said that although he believed that English language and literature had degenerated from the eighteenth century onwards, he did suggest that if a really great new piece of writing was admitted to the canon, the ‘existing monuments’ should shift slightly so that our perception of the canon, and of literature would be subtly altered. ( Eliot, 1932) However, it was still important , for new literature to stand the test of time. (Maybin and Mercer,1996, p245)
Indeed, many great writers such as Ernest Hemingway, “ The old man and the sea”stood the test of time. Such writers have produced great works not because of their “fine writing” complete with flowery language that is filled with stylistic decoration. It is their simplicity, originality, authenticity, breaking language conventions that allow the reader to feel and see what the author wanted them to, which in turn make the impression everlasting.
In conclusion I tried writing Martin Amis’s Money quoted in the beginning, in the conventional, grammatically correct way but I could not seem to create the same comical effect that leaves a smile and an impression.
“Refusing to sleep with Selina is the only way to make her yearn for me. Such tactics has never failed me as it would build up her desire. However, it was ironic that I could not use such tactics as I am really serious when I refused to sleep with her. To make matter worse is the fact that she is only desirable to me when she rejects me. Giving her money, threatening or shouting at her will get her to do it too.”
Josephine leong
Q0300865
Blk 95 #12-1417
Bedok North Ave 4
S 460095
Reference:
1. Amis, Martin, (1985) Money, London, Cape. New York, Viking
2. Beckett, Samuel, (1984) Collected Short Plays, London, Faber & Faber
3. Bhatt, S. (1991) Monkey shadows, Manchester, Carcanet
4. cummings,e.e. (1969) selected poems, London, Faber & Faber
5. Dickens, C. [(1853) 1907] Bleak House, London, Dent.
6. Duffy, C.A. (1993) Mean Time, London, Anvil.
7. Joyce, James (1916) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London, Egoist, New York, Penguin.
8. Lodge, David ( 1991) The Art of Fiction. Middlesex, England.
9.Maybin, J., Mercer N. (eds) ( 1996) Using English, from conversation to canon. London: Routledge
10. Twain, Mark (1884) 1976 Huckleberry Finn, Maidenhead, Purnell.
11.Rusdie, S. ( 1982) Midnight’s children, London, Pan.
Ernest Hemingway’s novel “ In Another Country” stood the test of time. He became one of the greatest writers known.
In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game handing outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.
It is a story about trauma, and how men cope with it, or fail to cope. The unspoken word which is a key to all the repeated words in the text is “death”.
The American word for autumn, fall, carries in it a reminder of the death of vegetation, and echoes the conventional phrase for those who die in battle, “the fallen”. The description of the snow powdering in the fur of the foxes, and the wind ruffling the birds’ feathers tightens the association of fall, cold, dark, wind, blew and death. Three of the repeated words come together for the first time in the last sentence with poetic effect for closure: “ It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.” (Lodge, David , 1992, p 91)
There is an extraordinary number of “ands” in this short paragraph. This is a symptom of its very repetitive syntax stringing together declarative statements without subordinating one to another. Lexical and grammatical repetition on this scale would probably be frowned upon by conventional writers.
But Hemingway rejected traditional rhetoric. He thought that “fine writing” falsified experience, and strove to “put down” what really happened in action by using simple, denotative language purged of stylistic decoration creating the great effect of tension between irony and relief and a great piece of work.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolares on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
(Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita,1955)
This novel takes the form of a brilliant piece of special pleading by a man whose attraction to a certain type of pubescent girl, whom he calls a ‘nymphet’, leads him to commit evil deeds. The book aroused controversy on its first publication, and still disturbs because it gives a seductive eloquence to a child abuser and murderer.
To achieve such spectacular effect there is the clever use of parallel syntactical structures and similar sounds- just the kind of repetition one expect to find only in a poetry. Explosion of alliteration in the first paragraph, ‘l’s and ‘t’s : shows his lust in his celebration of his beloved’s name. (light, life, loins, tip, tongue, trip, Lo. Lee. Ta)
In the first paragraph there is a lyrical outburst in the series of exclamations without finite verbs. Its opening metaphors is extravagant and faintly archaic in diction: light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul.
The second paragraph sees a series of identically structured clauses listing the various names of the beloved like a profane litany: She was Lo…. She was Lola…. She was Dolly… She was Dolares… But in my arms she was always Lolita. So much so that one could even set it to music.
(Lodge, David , 1992 p 94)
Reference:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolares on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Lolita ( 1955)
This novel takes the form of a brilliant piece of special pleading by a man whose attraction to a certain type of pubescent girl, whom he calls a ‘nymphet’, leads him to commit evil deeds. The book aroused controversy on its first publication, and still disturbs because it gives a seductive eloquence to a child abuser and murderer. To achieve such spectacular effect certain English rules have to be bent as seen by the series of repetition in the opening passage.
There is the clever use of parallel syntactical structures and similar sounds- just the kind of repetition one expect to find only in a poetry. Explosion of alliteration in the first paragraph, ‘l’s and ‘t’s : shows his lust in his celebration of his beloved’s name. (light, life, loins, tip, tongue, trip, Lo. Lee. Ta)
In the first paragraph there is a lyrical outburst in the series of exclamations without finite verbs. Its opening metaphors is extravagant and faintly archaic in diction: light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul.
The second paragraph sees a series of identically structured clauses listing the various names of the beloved like a profane litany: She was Lo…. She was Lola…. She was Dolly… She was Dolares… But in my arms she was always Lolita. You could even set it to music. (Lodge, David , 1992 p 94)
As seen by the example given above, certain rules of English are broken to achieve special artistic effects. Linguistic analysis known as stylistics try to pinpoint a number of language features commonly found in artistic uses of English. One key idea used by stylisticians is the notion that literary language is different from everyday language because it draws attention to some property of the language itself, and highlights or foregrounds it. Foregrounding can be achieved by focusing on sounds, grammar, or meanings. One example of foregrounding is the way in which literary language especially poetry, uses regular controlled patterns of rhythm, rhyme and repetition. Foregrounding also occurs when particular language rules are played with, or broken.
Duffy uses metaphorically the verb ‘crackled’ which normally follows an inanimate subject ( eg, sticks crackling in a fire ). This together with her metaphoric comparison of the marriages with cellophane around polyester shirts, evokes images of relationships which are dry, brittle and syntactic – just like the materials which were at that time first being produced and which were replacing natural materials in every area of life.