ELTWeekly Vol. 3 Issue#103 | October 31 | ISSN 0975-3036
Subscribe to ELTWeekly (FREE)
A Study of Literary Analysis: Application of Poststructuralist Approaches to Sylvia Plath’s Literature
by
Mohammad Saber Khaghaninezhad, Ph. D student of TEFL, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran
Sahar sadat Hadigheh, Shiraz University of medical sciences, Shiraz, Iran
Abstract
The development of literary analysis is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, inter-textual, historically, socially-aware and politically-motivated. This study is an attempt to show how literary analyses/criticisms rely on a number of interrelated and competing theoretical, methodological and ideological positions. It is also an account of the development of critical practices of literary analysis which implicitly inculcate that close reading is an integral part of literary practices. Hence, three key types of poststructuralist literary analysis/criticism, (i.e., textual, feminist, and political) have been implemented for Sylvia Plath’s (a modern American poet) literary works to illustrate the application of these theoretical foundations in practice and also to imply the possibility of interpreting the literary pieces of a single poet through quite different approaches.
Key words: textual analysis, poststructuralist, political analysis, feminist analysis
1- Introduction
Understanding the world is not simply a matter of end-stopped, closed-off classification of a dichotomy between object and subject. To Heidegger (1971, p. 123), language is not about representing something; ‘it performs real actions in the world of beings’. Analysis sets out to understand the whole of a text from its details, and the detail of a text from its whole (the hermeneutic circle). This is an important point to understand, because it creates a method of reading and re-reading. Understanding is a dynamic activity, an interaction or dialogue which is never fully completed, never finished, never closed off. Understanding, therefore, is not an activity which people can perform perfectly; it is not something that is done; it is a part of being, of existence, of language. In this sense it becomes anti-rationalist, almost mystical, and art and therefore literature assumes a status where the truth of the world speaks for itself (Eagleton, 1983). Language shows rather than tells. Telling concentrates on the idea of language as referential; showing concentrates on the idea of language as manifestation. Analysis therefore focuses not on the expression of language, but on what it means for language to speak.
What is therefore crucial about this way of thinking is that it foregrounds not the individual subject, but an interaction, a struggle, a play, where understanding and meaning can never be fixed. The ego is therefore decentred, and reality becomes a play of languages, where neither voice can ever be determined as correct or incorrect. And it is here that we have a central, fundamental contrast to the traditional empiricist preoccupation with fixed, determinate, unchanging meanings of text, for, there is a preoccupation with indeterminacy and with changing, dynamic, meanings of text.
For Derrida, text is a complex network of unfinished meanings, ‘a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself’ (Derrida, 1979). The notion of text is therefore, no longer an easy, comfortable one, in which openings and endings of meaning are recognizable by readers. Its openings and endings are never actually found, and as a consequence reading becomes a much more dynamic, but an uncertain activity.
Harold Bloom (1979) points out that ‘our idealisms about texts are poor illusions’ and that in practice there are no texts, just interpretations—a position that has led Geoffrey Hartman (1980) to argue that the critic, on reading a literary text, becomes the creator of the text. This notion opens up a crucially important, and sensitive, area in literary studies, because the difference between literature and criticism has always been controversial.
The practice of literary analysis is a critical practice which argues that linguistic/literary criticisms as an intellectual pursuit should not be ever assumed to be a quest for knowledge for its own sake. It is a practice which recognizes that intellectual activity has social and political responsibilities; In short, this critical practice recognizes that analyzing literary text is first and foremost an institutional practice, requiring institutional skills—something that teachers in most institutions often seem blissfully unaware of.
The present study focuses on the analysis of literary works inspired by various underlying cultural, social, psychological and political considerations. It is intended to draw the possibility of having a close reading of multi-faceted literary pieces. In addition to focusing on some theoretical foundations three types of literary analysis (textual, feminist, and political) their practical implementations are also presented. For this to achieve, Sylvia Plath’s literary works are chosen.
2- Literature review
The developing critical literary/textual practices of the last decade or so has incorporated a number of theoretical and methodological opinions, including selected ideas from Derrida, Foucault, Bakhtin, Barthes, Freud, Kristeva, Lacan, Althusser, Habermas, Marx, Bourdieu, Halliday and many others, and has resulted in a markedly different analysis from traditional approaches of criticism.
This developing critical practice has led to a far greater diversity of theoretical awareness, informed by a wide variety of discourses and political commitments (Harland, 1987). It has also encouraged a deconstructing of the literary canon with more and more critics turning their attention to other traditionally marginalized non-canonical texts and discourses. The consequence is that many interests and disciplines that, for many working within intrinsic criticism, were usually considered separate are now combined. Keyser (1983), for example, combined his interest in poetry with an interest in advertising in order to assess the extent to which modern advertising ‘makes use of the many formal devices that literature and the visual arts do’.
This is an important point and a crucial aspect of post-structuralist critical practice which follows the works of Michel Foucault (1972). Indeed, one of the central aims of Foucault is to demonstrate that texts mean not because of their supposed ‘objective’ structures, but because they are the result of discursive formations ‘which are intricated in the ideological system of a society’. Discourse is a social process; its subjects are ‘interdiscourses’ determined ideologically and politically by a variety of discursive practices. This signals a use of the term ‘discourse’ that is quite distinct from its use in ‘everyday’ practice. Discourse, in this sense, indicates formations that are much larger than individual language texts: the discourse of doctor-patient relationships, the discourse of apartheid, the discourse of feminism, the discourse of educational practices, and so on.
Analysis, hence, therefore a political activity, in more obvious ways than theories of deconstruction; such an analysis operates on a principle that all texts are political because all discursive formations are political (Fairclough, 1988). They are political because they are involved in power, and power is immanent in discourse. Analysis of discourse, and of the discursive practices that generate text, is therefore an analysis of history, because history is basically a series of discursive practices, each with its particular ideologies and ways of controlling the power (Said, 1983). There is therefore no room, for ‘objectivity’ in critical practices. Knowledge is relative to a particular discursive practice that may change at a given time and in a given space. According to Said,
Monocentrism is practiced when we mistake one idea as the only idea, instead of recognizing that an idea in history is always one among many. Monocentrism denies plurality, it totalizes structure, it sees profit where there is waste, it decrees the concentricity of Western culture instead of its eccentricity, it believes continuity to be given and will not try to understand, instead, how continuity as much as discontinuity, is made. (Said, 19783:188)
Eagleton (1976) broadly following the theories of Karl Marx, argued for a recognition that the forms of literature (for example, the novel) do not change internally; that is, they do not change as a result of some autonomous force solely within the genre, but as a result of political, social and economic pressures upon the genre. Understanding meaning, therefore, is a question of recognizing social reality. Generally, a Marxist position grounds social reality in a history of struggles centered upon class and systems of production, reflecting at any given moment a dialectical relationship between history and society. The capitalist society of ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ criticism in the west has been founded on a base of exploitation, and as a consequence Marxist analysis of that society is effectively centered on conflict of one form or another.
Central to this approach, then, is the analysis of ideology—and crucial to any understanding of ideology is the role of language. Macherey (1978) did not develop this idea to any great extent, but the work of Bakhtin (1930) did. The work of Bakhtin gained prominence in the 1980s, mainly through the work of Julia Kristeva (1980) and Fowler (1981), for a developing critical practice concerned with ideology.
The theory of language introduced through this article rejects the dichotomies of structuralism and argues that the text is a site for the ‘negotiation of meanings’; meanings that result from a range of other texts and contexts—other ‘voices’. The text is the product of social interaction and intertextualities; the basic unit of language is interactive (dialogic), ‘a two-sided act’ (Bakhtin, 1973). The ‘sign’ is multi-accented (heteroglossic), resulting in discourse as an ‘arena of struggle’. Ideology for Bakhtin is ‘the material embodiment of social interaction’ with the emphasis upon discourse, dialogue and literature as practices rather than expressions of social reality. The subject is therefore a social subject constituted by ideology rather than by some form of rational consciousness. The following section presents theoretical basis of three poststructuralist approaches of literary criticism and their practical samples.
3- Poststructuralist approaches of literary analysis
3-1 Linguistic/textual analysis
Analysis requires a curiosity about the way language works in discourse, and it is this curiosity that requires an analyst not simply to describe by using a series of grammatical and linguistic labels, but to probe the language. This probing requires a shift of attention away from the idea that meanings are contained within the words and structures towards explaining and understanding meanings constructed by all producers of language—writers/readers, speakers/hearers. From the beginning it seems necessary to recognize that for an analysis the analyst needs, in the first instance, to engage with (or reject) two main assumptions:
- that there is a meaning in a text ‘put in’ by a writer which has to be ‘fished out’ by the reader/hearer/critic/analyst in order for the interpretive process to take place;
- that a text can be treated as self-contained and contextless ‘in its own right’.
Central to this rejection is the crucial notion that analyzing text is an activity which is concerned with understanding how a text means, not with what a text means (Norris, 1984). Analyzing what a text means implies a position that involves finding and extracting meaning(s) from a text; it is a ‘search and remove’ activity. This undertaking is based on a theory that states that meanings have been ‘put into’ the text by the writer or speaker, and that it is the job of the reader/hearer/analyst/critic to discover them. It is effectively a static operation, and has produced over many years a wide variety of formal objective approaches, in which the personality, beliefs, background, biases of the reader/critic are considered not only irrelevant, but a positive hindrance to textual interpretation.
Analyzing how a text means involves a much more dynamic activity, whose underlying theory suggests that meanings aren’t simply ‘put into’ a text by a writer/speaker, but are constructed by the reader/hearer. That doesn’t mean that the writer/speaker has nothing to do with the text; it rather means that the only way to have of constructing a reading for a text is through our own socially determined language as reader/hearer. In other words, each time a reader reads a text, a new text is created. The reader cannot escape his own language. He cannot stop using his language in order to construct a reading of what he might consider to be someone else’s text. What he constructs is his own linguistic engagement with the text—his own language, which is constructed and determined by social, cultural, ideological, and institutional forces. The American critic Harold Bloom puts it this way: ‘I only know a text, any text, because I know a reading of it, someone else’s reading, my own reading, a composite reading’ (Bloom, 1979, p. 8).
The consequences of this position are that one’s language, background, biases, ideas, beliefs, politics, and education determine his understanding. These features are socially determined by the institutions and discursive practices that constitute the social networks he is involved in. Consequently, whatever he constructs as a reading of a text is what he as a reader/critic has created for that text, and it is the result of critical decisions that has been developed as an integral part of his background. As analyst and critic one is not a nameless and faceless explicator of someone else’s meaning. He is involved in explaining how texts mean for him and no one else. The way he constructs meanings for texts depends on the way he constructs theories about the world, about realities.
A sample of linguistic/textual analysis
It is an instance of investigating the processes, the participants and their power relations from chosen passage from ‘The Bell Jar’ by Palth (1978). Linguistic structures—the way realities are constructed through language—can be restructured in ways which become more or less damaging to people. Language as linguistically constructed reality can be changed to add or remove classist, sexist, and racist injustices in the world. The Plath’s passage reads:
The wall-eyed nurse came back. She unclasped my watch and dropped it in her pocket. Then she started tweaking the hairpins from my hair. Doctor Gordon was unlocking the closet. He dragged out a table on wheels with a machine on it and rolled it behind the head of the bed. The nurse started swabbing my temples with a smelly grease. As she leaned over to reach the side of my head nearest the wall, her fat breast muffled my face like a cloud or a pillow. A vague, medicinal stench emanated from her flesh. ‘Don’t worry,’ the nurse grinned down at me. ‘Their first time everybody’s scared to death.’ I tried to smile, but my skin had gone stiff, like parchment. Doctor Gordon was fitting two metal plates on either side of my head. He buckled them into place with a strap that dented my forehead, and gave me a wire to bite. I shut my eyes. There was a brief silence, like an indrawn breath. Then something bent down and took hold of me, and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant. I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.
Burton (1982) gave the passage to a number of readers who responded that the patient appeared to be helpless, that she was distanced from her surroundings, and that the medical staff seemed more interested in getting the job done than in caring for her as patient. Burton looks at three things: who (or what) is ‘“doing” each process’; what sorts of process they are; and who the participants affected by the process are. The results are simple but effective because they immediately give a stronger image of who is doing what and when in the patient’s world.
There are eight processes associated with the nurse, seven with the doctor, four with the electricity, and seven with the patient. Twenty of the thirty processes in the passage are material action intention processes, that is, they are processes in which someone intentionally does something to someone else. All of the processes associated with the nurse, the doctor, and the electricity are material action intention processes. The only material action intention process associated with the patient is when she shuts her eyes, thus shutting out the active world of the nurse, doctor and electricity. All of the processes associated with the nurse and the electricity affect the patient, but the doctor only affects the patient with one of the processes associated with him. For the rest he affects equipment.
This is a clear example of how to articulate a response that the doctor is uncaring—his concerns are with equipment rather than with the person. This is a simple analysis requiring skills in linguistic analysis in one main area, but it is also an explanation of how a text means according to a particular response. Linguistic analysis along these lines gives a vocabulary to help explain a reading.
3-2 Feminist analysis
Analysis of literature as the product of social relations has found its strongest, and one of its most politically necessary, expressions in feminist analysis of text. When Millett (1969) read the work of Lawrence as ‘a progression from misogynistic homo-eroticism in ‘Aaron’s Rod’ to the narcissistic cult of male supremacy in ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ in her book ‘Sexual Politics’, she was developing in criticism a polemicism which had found a voice in De Beauvoir (1949) and which would continue to develop in force in the 1970s and 1980s. These voices have a clear message: women are oppressed by the patriarchal order (e.g. Eisenstein, 1979). Text analysis therefore needs to recognize that every reading is a gendered reading because all text production is gendered. Speaking/writing is not neutral/neuter.
Oppression comes not simply with the obvious patriarchal structures; it can also come with the psychological and social formation of gendered subjects, who can be disabled as objects by controlling, dominant, but often unconscious, gendered interests (Kelly-Gadol, 1976). Analysis, therefore, is concerned with the construction and deconstruction of the political, social, psychological, and historical formations and processes of gendered text (e.g. Moi, 1985). Analysis is therefore about conflicting ideologies. Elaine Showalter argues that ‘the task of feminist critics is to find a new language, a new way of reading that can integrate our intelligence and our experience, our reason and our suffering, our skepticism and our vision’ (Showalter, 1985). Criticism and reading is therefore ‘re-visionist’; it questions the adequacy of existing conceptual structures’ (Godard, 1985).
Language is of course one of the major means of oppression but a difficulty arises in the creation of ‘new worlds from words’. Godard asks,
‘How can one be an object, be constructed by a ruling discourse and still constitute an opposition to it, be outside enough to mark an alternative? If outside, how can one be heard at all? (Godard, 1985).
The answer, for her lies in writers who ‘redraw the circle for us, shift the relationships of centre and periphery, of authoritative word and marginal silence’ (Godard, 1985).The challenge to the centre is not new, but in feminist analysis and criticism it is ideologically motivated, intent on seeing the concept of difference (by which that centre has been defined for so long as an opposition between presence and absence) changed. This, then, is more than just analysis aimed at demythologizing negative images of women; it is the development of a feminist ideology, a feminist poetics (Showalter, 1985). As part of the move towards that poetics, some feminist critics have turned their attention to the psychoanalytic work of Lacan (1977), who argues for understanding perception by means of recognizing the split subjectivity, divided between ‘being’ and the ‘social speaking self’ (the split between moi/je). The ego is constructed by perception of objects; it is not ‘in’ the perception already. This theory is important because it argues that meaning is not ‘in’ anything, it is a construction, a drama. It also enables the act of analysis to be more prominent.
Lacanian psychoanalysts do not psychoanalyze a text (as Freudian psychoanalysis does); it ‘rescrutinizes’ the way meanings are made (Ragland-Sullivan, 1984). Bearing this in mind, analysis of text is not just a matter of discussing certain effects of language in a text; it can be—needs to be—a powerful method for understanding the ways in which all sorts of realities are constructed through language. As Godard, cited; ‘…every theory of language implies a whole philosophy of history: every form of practice implies and presupposes a form of theory whose denial is a mask’ (Godard, 1985, p. 165).
A sample of feminist analysis
“Wintering” a poem from Plath (1979), is credited as one of the greatest poems of Plath in terms of artistic imagery and symbolization .The following lines present a feminist analysis of the poem; Wintering
This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.
I have whirled the midwife’s extractor,
I have my honey,
Six jars of it,
Six cat’s eyes in the wine cellar,
Wintering in a dark without window
At the heart of the house
Next to the last tenant’s rancid jam and the bottles of empty glitters —-
Sir So-and-so’s gin.
This is the room I have never been in
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint
Chinese yellow on appalling objects —-
Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neither cruel nor indifferent,
Only ignorant.
This is the time of hanging on for the bees–the bees
So slow I hardly know them,
Filing like soldiers
To the syrup tin
To make up for the honey I’ve taken.
Tate and Lyle keeps them going, The refined snow.
It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.
They take it. The cold sets in.
Now they ball in a mass,
Black
Mind against all that white.
The smile of the snow is white.
It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen,
Into which, on warm days,
They can only carry their dead.
The bees are all women, Maids and the long royal lady.
They have got rid of the men,
The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.
Winter is for women —-
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanis walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.
Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste spring.
The poem’s speaker which represents Plath herself, is able, in “Wintering,” to accept the activities of women who “have got rid of the men,/ The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.” Knitting, tending the cradle, harboring life in her body-bulb, she will survive. The bee sequence tells of the search for a female identity in a world without men, without stings, without knives. It is “the room I have never been in,” where the “black” is bunched “like a bat.” The speaker now enters with her “torch,” lighting “appalling objects,” “Black asininity”. This open confrontation with the blackness at the center of her own existence, and not associated with some outside threat, is the source of her tentative recognition that she will survive. For once she is totally on her own — a painful recognition which reflects Plath’s own situation.
“This is the easy time, there is nothing doing,” the poet says in the first line of the poem in a colloquial manner that expresses her own ease and patience. A similar line later confirms that she views her wintering as a distinct phase, a certain kind of time: “This is the time of hanging on for the bees.” Her recognition that wintering is one part of a larger cycle of time is important because it qualifies the images of hibernation–elements that lead many readers to assume this is a poem about passivity and death. She shares the experience of wintering with her bees, and she will learn a great deal from them. Like them, she has put up her winter stores: “I have my honey, / Six jars of it, / Six cat’s eyes in the wine cellar.” These jars of honey are clearly more than just pantry supplies, however. It is as though she has gathered that overwhelming “sweetness” of the earlier poems and stored it where it is available but also contained. In fact, the number of jars supports the notion that they serve a symbolic purpose: Plath was married for six years, and they may represent that period of memories and emotions that now must be put away. Moreover, “cat’s-eye” is the name of a semiprecious gem distinctive for its band of reflected light that shifts position as the stone is turned. Thus the jars contain treasures that have great value to her and great beauty. And finally, in their similarity to actual cats’ eyes, the jars suggest the power of their vision, especially the ability to see in the darkness she is facing.
Though she considers her stores precious, she also understands that she cannot survive on memories alone. Proof of this comes when she sees that what is preserved in the jars now is not permanent; they may seem so at the moment, but others have been here before and discovered the transience of such things. She places her jars of honey “Next to the last tenant’s rancid jam / And the bottles of empty glitters– / Sir So-and-so’s gin,” evidence that even these domestic treasures spoil and evaporate. The symbolic importance of the setting is further established through sound, repetition, and metaphors of the unconscious. The cellar parallels the core of the self, where normal perception fails her because she has never before been there.
Wintering in a dark without window
At the heart of the house . . .
This is the room I have never been in.
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The soft alliteration of w’s and h’s creates a tone of silent, solitary reflection, yet the sense of calm that these sounds convey does not completely offset the agitation she feels in such surroundings. The repeated, “This is the room,” suggests how difficult it is for her to accept where she is. The gothic imagery, accompanied by the alliteration of the explosive b’s, incites her nervous dread: “The black bunched in there like a bat.”
She enters the room with “No light / But the torch,” a primitive, or again, gothic, source of illumination that is consistent with the atmosphere of imminent revelation. It is significant that she must supply her own light. Further, she is in another sense “carrying a torch” for her lost love, and that aspect of the light may contribute to the distortion of her vision. More important, though, is that she is looking into the room for the first time in “a dark” that receives no other illumination, and therefore she has trouble seeing. At first she distinguishes only “appalling objects”; but gradually her vision adjusts and she sees, in turn, “appalling objects,” “Black asininity,” “Decay,” and finally “Possession.” This may constitute a list of things she sees in the room (a psychological hoard of mementos from the past that she has relegated to her emotional “cellar”) or shifting views of the same object, perceptual superimpositions, each one more accurate in perceiving the actual thing.
In either case, she describes a progression from lack of control (appalling objects) to control (possession). At the word “possession” the poem seems to pivot in another direction, away from the past and its emotional keepsakes that have previously “owned her,” toward a present that distances itself from that past, paradoxically, by accepting it. The word “possession” triggers an ambiguous statement, “It is they who own me,” a recognition of (or “owning up to”) this new relation of present and past. Like the beekeeper, who possesses the bees and yet is possessed by them (because she must fulfill her responsibilities to them in order for them to survive), the speaker is possessed by the memories that she herself possesses. Thus, in acknowledging her reciprocal relation to the bees, she turns from the appalling objects of memory with a tacit understanding that they too are her possessions in this double sense: “This is the time of hanging on for the bees.” The easy, accommodating tone of the line suggests an even deeper acceptance and understanding.
The key to the survival of the bees is their willingness to accommodate their circumstances. As the speaker consents to their claims on her, they accept hers on them. She gives them Tate and Lyle syrup “To make up for the honey” she has harvested, and “They take it.” It is no surprise to learn that “The bees are all women, / Maids and the long royal lady. / They have got rid of the men, // The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.” The sense of alliance and cooperation that the speaker and her bees share simply has no parallel in the world of gender difference glimpsed in the other poems (with the exception of the bee seller in “Stings,” where the business relationships of the apiary are apparently modeled on the social practices of the bees). Some readers make an effort to extract from this passage a vindictive spirit toward men, but the tone is so obviously detached and humorous (the onomatopoeic “stumblers” playing on “bumble-bees,” the idea that men are merely boors and not tyrants or attackers) that such an interpretation is unconvincing. Furthermore, the lovely, unperturbed portrait of the mother over the cradle immediately detracts attention away from the men who are not there and refocuses it on this female community: “The woman, still at her knitting, / At the cradle of Spanish walnut, / Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.” The alliteration of w’s (winter, women, woman, walnut) recalls the opening tone where that sound has already been associated with forbearance and equanimity.
The poem has retreated inward, arriving at the image in the penultimate stanza of the woman’s body as “a bulb in the cold.” That she is at the moment “too dumb to think” need not suggest stupefaction and passivity; rather, it represents the period of silence that is necessary to still the incessant questions of “The Bee Meeting” or the maniac metaphor-making of “The Arrival of the Bee Box.” It seems that the poet wills herself to assert a compelling prophecy, continuing to hope, as she has throughout the rest of the sequence, that saying would make it so. Thus, the image of the woman as bulb is unquestionably one of renewal both in its similarity to the (implied) baby in the cradle and, of course, in the realization of the image in the final stanza, where the questions, at last, resolve:
Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste of spring.
It is the lyric beauty of this passage that convinces–the long “I”s once again suggesting the unity of the hive, the emotional, anticipatory line breaks, the promising “glad” in “gladiolas,” the marvelous image of the bulb’s vitality as fire (bringing both warmth and color to the ending) and the rounded shape of the bulb redoubled in the verb “banking,” the perfectly timed forthrightness of the third line, the Christmas roses that are themselves a symbol of renewal, and the three questions that blend into affirmation in the last line. The poet learns from the bees in that spring will follow this time of introspection and stillness, of uniting resources and waiting. The answer to her questions comes in the form of an act rather than in words and thus embodies certainty through enacting it. Only then is she certain that they actually “taste the spring” and have not been deceived by the early blossoms of the Christmas roses.
3-3 Political analysis
What analysts are involved in is a socially and politically oriented explanation of language and not simply a neutral description of it. Analysts deal with the articulation of their meanings of texts, not reconstructing, by detailed surgery other people’s meanings. This form of analysis is therefore a critical linguistics (Kuhn, 1962). It does not mean that writers are belittled or ‘dead’, or have become pointless and useless, or that their ideas and emotions are of no interest and that the writing process is of no importance at all. Far from it—what it means is that as readers we can never speak on their behalf. We often (though not always) engage with texts because of the writer, but we can only explain and articulate our own understanding of how the text means, not theirs. And this attempt at explanation is, consciously or unconsciously, ideologically determined.
The choice of text is no longer constrained by a traditional literary canon, but is very often made less because of the intrinsic (internal) value of a text, than because an analyst has an interest beyond the text. A good example is the work on a passage from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar provided in the following lines. Central to this argument is that an analyst has to be politically committed, and this commitment cannot be conveniently put on one side while the analysis is taking place. In fact, Burton (1982), like many contemporary analysts of discourse, argued that the choice of the particular text an analyst is working on should not be arbitrary;
…I take it as axiomatic that all observation, let alone description, must take place within an already constructed theoretical framework of socially, ideologically and linguistically constructed reality’ (Burton, 1982, p. 196).
A sample of political analysis
Here, a political analysis of one of Plath’s works called “The swarm” is presented, however, Plath is not known as a great poet of politics; once she was asked by an interviewer in October 1962, “do you have a great and keen sense of the history?” she replied, “I am not a historian, but I find myself being more fascinated by history and politics and now I find myself reading more about history. I am interested in Napoleon, at the present: I’m very interested in battles, in wars, in Gallipoli, the First World War and so on, and I think that as I grow older I am becoming more and more historical.”(Frow, 1986)
The swarm
Somebody is shooting at something in our town —
A dull pom, pom in the Sunday street.
Jealousy can open the blood,
It can make black roses.
Who are the shooting at?
It is you the knives are out for
At Waterloo, Waterloo, Napoleon,
The hump of Elba on your short back,
And the snow, marshaling its brilliant cutlery
Mass after mass, saying Shh!
Shh! These are chess people you play with,
Still figures of ivory.
The mud squirms with throats,
Stepping stones for French bootsoles.
The gilt and pink domes of Russia melt and float off
In the furnace of greed. Clouds, clouds.
So the swarm balls and deserts
Seventy feet up, in a black pine tree.
It must be shot down. Pom! Pom!
So dumb it thinks bullets are thunder.
It thinks they are the voice of God
Condoning the beak, the claw, the grin of the dog
Yellow-haunched, a pack-dog,
Grinning over its bone of ivory
Like the pack, the pack, like everybody.
The bees have got so far. Seventy feet high!
Russia, Poland and Germany!
The mild hills, the same old magenta
Fields shrunk to a penny
Spun into a river, the river crossed.
The bees argue, in their black ball,
A flying hedgehog, all prickles.
The man with gray hands stands under the honeycomb
Of their dream, the hived station
Where trains, faithful to their steel arcs,
Leave and arrive, and there is no end to the country.
Pom! Pom! They fall
Dismembered, to a tod of ivy.
So much for the charioteers, the outriders, the Grand Army!
A red tatter, Napoleon!
The last badge of victory.
The swarm is knocked into a cocked straw hat.
Elba, Elba, bleb on the sea!
The white busts of marshals, admirals, generals
Worming themselves into niches.
How instructive this is!
The dumb, banded bodies
Walking the plank draped with Mother France’s upholstery
Into a new mausoleum,
An ivory palace, a crotch pine.
The man with gray hands smiles —
The smile of a man of business, intensely practical.
They are not hands at all
But asbestos receptacles.
Pom! Pom! ‘They would have killed me.’
Stings big as drawing pins!
It seems bees have a notion of honor,
A black intractable mind.
Napoleon is pleased, he is pleased with everything.
O Europe! O ton of honey!
In one week in October, Plath wrote a sequence of poems she originally called “Bees,” in which the female speaker’s progress toward self-possession and self-definition is realized through identity with the queen bee, emblem of generation, or birth and rebirth. The sequence consists of five poems: “The Bee Meeting” (3 October), “The Arrival of the Bee Box” (4 October), “Stings” (6 October), “The Swarm” (7 October), and “Wintering” (9 October). With the exception of “The Swarm,” the bee poems are ahistorical, drawing on a background not of historical horror but self-begotten myth. Although bees provide the imagery and the title of “The Swarm,” this poem, unlike the others in this sequence, is focused neither on the queen bee nor on a female speaker striving for an authentic self. Of all the poems Plath wrote during October 1962 only “The Swarm” reflects a particular historical interest she mentioned in the interview she gave that month, for the central figure in the poem is Napoleon.
For Plath, bee imagery, like the references to Germany, evokes the figure of her father, Otto Emil Plath, a German-speaking emigrant from Grabow, a biologist specializing in entomology and author of Bumblebees and Their Ways (1934), who died when she was eight. Generally underlying all of Sylvia Plath’s work is the theme of a daughter’s relationship to a dead father she ambivalently loves and hates, who seems to her a malign god against whom she is compelled to struggle to salvage identity and, the consequence of that compulsion, the theme of a desperate recovery of the self. From this figure, then, issues the political poems, with their German, or Nazi, references.
In “The Swarm” the speaker parallels her own personal story with world of politics; “The Swarm” extends its interest outward to others. Only in the first stanza does the speaker briefly account for the shooting in terms of her own experience: “Jealousy can open the blood, / It can make black roses.” Her first impulse when she hears the shooting is to think what would motivate her to violence–jealousy. She indulges her imagination in one vivid metaphor–that visualizes blood-saturated gunshot wounds as “black roses”, but then immediately turns to the larger question: “Who are they shooting at?” The voice that emerges in the second stanza to answer this question is powerfully accusatory, marshaling a variety of rhetorical resources to the task of declaring an important truth about history. It begins, “It is you the knives are out for / At Waterloo, Waterloo, Napoleon”; the long, repeated u-sound of “Waterloo” echoes the direct indictment, “It is you,” and insistently recalls the place name of his crushing defeat. The image of the throats is used again in this poem to suggest victimization and vulnerability–the facts about the masses that “somebody” like Napoleon would deny:
Shh! These are chess people you play with,
Still figures of ivory.
The mud squirms with throats,
Stepping stones for French bootsoles.
The gilt and pink domes of Russia melt and float off
In the furnace of greed.
The narrative of Napoleonic aggression is interwoven with that of the swarm. The bees have swarmed into the top of a tree; the sound of the gun shots is supposed to draw them down (it is not the case, as some readers suggest, that the man is actually shooting into the hive). The bees, like “everybody,” have learned that the lesson of history is violence:
So the swarm balls and deserts
Seventy feet up, in a black pine tree.
It must be shot down. Pom! Pom!
So dumb it thinks bullets are thunder.
It thinks they are the voice of God
Condoning the beak, the claw, the grin of the dog
Yellow-haunched, a pack-dog,
Grinning over its bone of ivory
Like the pack, the pack, like everybody.
The bees “argu[ing], in their black ball,” the “yellow-haunched” pack-dog, Napoleon with “The hump of Elba on [his] short back, the “man with the gray hands” (whose hands turn out not to be human hands at all but “asbestos receptacles”) all appear stooped and deformed by violence. Each has learned hostility at the hands of the other and chooses to return it, believing that the sound of aggression is “the voice of God.” In fact, the gunman’s excuse for shooting at the swarm is that “They would have killed me.”
The pervasiveness of violence is what allows Napoleon to be “pleased” at the end of the poem, even despite his own defeat at Waterloo. The weapons of the bees, “Stings big as drawing pins!” (their version of the “knives” and “cutlery” and possibly an image suggesting map pins used by military strategists to pinpoint battle sites), prove to him that the “bees have a notion of honor / A black intractable mind.” “Napoleon is pleased, he is pleased with everything” because he recognizes that “everyone,” indeed “everything,” condones the beak and the claw.
The stylistic instruments which are prevalent in “The Swarm” are alliteration (“Somebody is shooting at something” and at every repetition), the assonance (“The man with gray hands stands,” “marshals, admirals, generals,” “black intractable mind,”), the frequent repetitions (“pom, pom” [repeated eight times], “Waterloo, Waterloo,” “Mass after mass,” “Shh! // Shh!” “Clouds, Clouds,” “The pack, the pack,” “Elba, Elba,” “Napoleon is pleased, he is pleased with everything”), the buckling anagram (“Elba, Elba, bleb on the sea!”) and the onomatopoeics “pom, pom.” Additionally, the poem ricochets from metaphor to simile as the parallel between Napoleon’s army and the bees provides constant opportunity for analogy. Thus, the speaker, who has been striving throughout the sequence to relinquish verbal excesses, discovers in “The Swarm” the efficacy of such a style once more. The poetic excess that characterizes the poem is, it seems, necessitated by the speaker’s attempt to square off against history. What she confronts in the poem is the same oppression she experiences in her private life–played out on a world scale. Understandably, then, the tactics that enabled her to withstand her own hardships permit her to address the suffering of others as well.
4- Conclusion
All discourses are ideologically, textually, institutionally and politically determined. A great deal of the work undertaken by contemporary analysts aims to break down the myth that the discourse of literary studies has to be dominated by an institutional literary canon. The relationship of ideology and meaning is something that has influenced a great deal of work in language and literature studies over the last twenty years or so, and many of the theoretical influences have come from disciplines like philosophy, sociology, and political science (Ellis, 1977; Burton & Carlen, 1979; Frow, 1986). Burton (1982) argues,
There is no such thing, as a-political analysis. We cannot be politically neutral in anything we do as analysts, and, as a consequence, I believe all academic work should be committed to influencing the better development and improving the rights of human beings; all knowledge is ideologically determined and we are politically irresponsible if we do not recognize this. (p. 131).
The theory that language is simply a means of representation—language as saying—, is really a very inadequate one. Language does more than say; it does more than pass on information or reflect an already existing reality ‘out there’ somewhere in the world. Language is about action and interaction; it is about performance, about showing, about doing. Language is not a neutral instrument: it is biased in a thousand different ways, and those ways are of course determined by any number of differing ideologies, knowledge and power systems, and institutions. it is the role of a responsible critical linguist to develop the means of understanding and explaining the mechanics of those thousand different ways.
To summarize, the main implications of the study are:
- Language is a means of understanding what it means to ‘be’, rather than a means of expressing a ‘given’ reality. What it means to ‘be’ is best seen in terms of socially constructed realities rather than in terms of the world as psychologically ‘real’.
- Analysis of text is therefore a dynamic activity, concerned with language as a dynamic process, not as a static product. It therefore concentrates not just on what language says, but on what language does.
- What language does is not done through a single voice, but through a process of interaction; it is dialogic, so the interactive voices, not the single, individual voice, become the focus of analysis. The ego is therefore decentred, and consequently social, institutional and textual constructions of reality are fore grounded.
- Socially constructed realities are understandable only in terms of ideological variation. Such variation inevitably means that the construction of meanings for texts is a process of indeterminacy. There are no fixed, determinate meanings encoded within the texts; texts are best understood in terms of indeterminate meanings constructed by readers.
- There is therefore no such thing as ‘the single, correct, meaning of a text’. This means that the status of the writer is deprivileged, and the role of the reader, governed by institutional and social discourses, is given a much more prominent role in the construction of meaning.
- This type of criticism is therefore a political act, aiming to understand not simply what a text means but how a text means.
The main goal of this sort of analysis is much larger than that of simply being able to describe linguistic or stylistic structures in texts; such analysis plays a major part in understanding the nature of language, and hence in understanding people and the discursive practices they are engaged in.
References:
Bakhtin, M. (1930). Rabelais and His World (trans. Helena Iswolsky), Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Bakhtin, M. (1973). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (trans. R.W. Rostsel), Ann Arbor: Ardis.
Bloom, H. (1979). Language literature and critical practice. Routledge publications: Landon & Newyork.
Burton, D. (1982). Through glass darkly: through dark glasses. Carter series.
Burton, T. & Carlen, P. (1979). Official Discourse, On Discourse Analysis, Government Publications, Ideology and the State. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Derrida, J. (1979). Margins of Philosophy (trans. Alan Bass from Marges de la Philosophic, Paris: Minuit, 1972), Brighton: Harvester Press.
Eagleton, T. (1976), Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory, London: Verso.
Eagleton, T. (1983), Literary Theory: An Introduction, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Edwards, C.L. (1984), ‘“Stop me if you’ve heard this one”: narrative disclaimers as breakthrough into performance’, Formula, 25/3–4, 214–28.
Eisenstein, Z.R. (1979). Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case of Social Feminism, New York: Monthly Review.
Ellis, J. (1977), Visible Fictions, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Fairclough, N. (1988). Register, power and socio-semantic change. London: Batsford.
Foucault, M. (1972), The Archeology of Knowledge (trans. A.M.Sheridan Smith), London: Tavistock.
Fowler, R. (1981), Literature as Social Discourse: The Practice of Linguistic Criticism, London: Batsford.
Frow, J. (1986), Marxism and Literary History, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Godard, B. (1985), ‘Redrawing the circle. Power, poetics, language’, in Kroker (ed), 1985, 165–81.
Harland, R. (1987), Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, London: Methuen.
Hartman, G. (1980), Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1971), Poetry, Language, Thought (trans. A. Hoftadter), London: Harper & Row.
Kelly-Gadol, J. (1976). ‘The social relations of the sexes: methodological implications of women’s history’, Sign, 1, 809–24.
Keyser, S.J. (1983), ‘There is method in their adness: the formal structure of advertisement’, New Literary History, 14(2), 305–34.
Kristeva, J. (1980). Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kuhn, T.S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Lacan, J. (1977) Ecrits, Paris: Seuil.
Macherey, P. (1978). A Theory of Literary Production (trans. G.Wall). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Millett, K. (1969), Sexual Politics, London: Virago.
Moi, T. (1985). Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London: Methuen.
Norris, C. (1984a). The Deconstructive Turn. Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosoph. London: Methuen.
Ragland-Sullivan, E. (1984), ‘The magnetism between reader and text: prolegomena to a Lacanian poetics’, Poetics, 13, 381–406.
Said, E. (1983). The World, The Text, and the Critic. Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Showalter, E. (1985). ‘Toward a feminist poetics’. Harvard University Press.
1 comment