‘Approaching a Literary Text Stylistically’ by Dr Shibu Simon

[ELTWeekly Volume 6, Issue 10 | March 31, 2014 | ISSN 0975-3036]

---

 

The crux of the problem in teaching literature is how to guide the learners to develop an individual response to literature. Such a guidance will have to focus on the values linguistic units acquire in contexts of use and in orienting learners to discover these values on their own. H.G. Widdowson in his epoch-making work Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature underlines this observation:

Since poetic meanings are of their very nature unspecific and ambiguous . . . there is no such thing as a definitive interpretation. What is important, however (particularly from the teaching point of view) is that the individual interpretation should be based on an understanding of how linguistic items take on particular values in discourse1.

This paper can be described as an attempt to evolve a practical methodology for the teaching of literature with this specific objective in mind: how the learners can be led to discover independently the way language items are conditioned in the context to take on meanings other than those they have in the language code and to infer the message the writer is trying to convey as part of it.

It follows logically that the context has a crucial role to play in conferring unique values on linguistic items. This initial hypothesis can be read side by side with the common perception that readers are able to infer values of words from the context of a text even when they do not know what these words signify in the code. What explains, then, the uniqueness of context in communication?

It is an inevitable part of the business of communication that linguistic units selected from the paradigmatic axis have to be combined with one another at the syntagmatic axis. Combining of linguistic units in this way in the context signals, as well as is dictated by, semantic relationships between them. In a sentence like Lions roar, lions comes from one paradigmatic set and roar from another set. The combination of these linguistic items in the context of the sentence is dictated both by the rules of the language system and the conventions of normal language use. The ‘subject-predicator agreement rule’ of the language system specifies that the subject (lions) should agree with its predicator (roar) in number and in person. But the subject (lions) cannot be combined with any predicator that possesses these grammatical features. They have also got to fulfill a convention of language-use (collocation), which stipulates that linguistic units sharing the same linguistic environment should share a common semantic feature. This limits lions to roar and restricts it from being linked up with predicators like shout, bay or bark. The context, thus, puts restrictions on the combination of linguistic units through rules of the language system and conventions of language use. The former ensures what is communicated is grammatical, and the latter ensures it is appropriate or meaningful.

The context puts up not only restrictions but also linguistic signs. These signs indicate the semantic relationships linguistic units enter into on combination. Even in an ordinary sentence like The earth tremors in Kerala have given the people widespread fear and anxiety, it is possible to locate three different linguistic signs signalling corresponding semantic relationships. The context signals the collocational relationship between earth and tremors by making them co-exist in space and related in grammar – earth (a classifier) and tremors (a noun) are related as constituents of the same noun phrase. That they share the same linguistic environment and are related in grammar reinforce the common semantic feature between them. Another relationship the sentence displays is the cause-effect relationship between its linguistic units. It is the verb phrase have given that functions here as the linguistic sign. The verb phrase relates cause, which precedes it, with effect, which follows it. ‘The widespread fear and anxiety’ people experience is the effect resulting from its cause ‘the earth tremors’. The third kind of semantic relationship the sentence throws up   is the relationship of similarity between fear and anxiety. That the lexical items fear and anxiety are co-ordinated by and serves to foreground whatever similarity that exists between them: at the grammatical level, both are nouns; at the functional level, both are direct objects of the predicator; at the semantic level, both are emotional states of mind specific to animate beings. And functions as the linguistic sign here and serves in its capacity as co-coordinator to signal the semantic relationship.

It is worth noting here that students even when they do not know the meaning of tremors can infer it from the context. Firstly, tremors collocates with earth and therefore acquires a meaning related to it. Secondly, tremors being the purported cause of the ‘widespread fear and anxiety among people’ is required to assume a negative meaning the intensity of which might be proportionate to that of the undesirable effect produced. In linguistic communications, students are always benefited by the fact that linguistic units never exist in isolation; they combine with one another and set up semantic relationships, which the context makes explicit through linguistic signs. In short, it might be the presence of intra-textual relationships in a context, which lends itself to its uniqueness in communication.

The systematic exposure of learners to the rules of the language system and the conventions of normal language use equips them not only with an explicit linguistic skill to select and combine linguistic units both grammatically and meaningfully but also with an implicit linguistic knowledge to identify what signals a particular semantic relationship created in the context and what that relationship, in turn, signifies in the code. That is, the learners will be able to locate linguistic signs and to infer from these signs. Thus when faced with an expression like The man stammered, learners recognise the collocational relationship between the words man and stammered. The context signals this semantic relationship by pointing to the same linguistic environment the words share by virtue of their being placed side by side in the context and also by the close grammatical relationship between them as subject and predicator which reinforces their spatial association. From their formal knowledge of language, learners also realise what such a relationship signifies in the code: the words sharing collocational relationship in the context should inhere a common semantic feature in the code. In other words, what the context demands is that the words man and stammered should be understood as collocating and the learners readily accept this demand for these words habitually co-occur in the code. Thus in normal linguistic communication, the code justifies what the context demands.

But in literary communication, as is evidenced in Linda Pastan’s “Marks,”

My husband gives me an A

for last night’s supper,

an incomplete for my ironing,

a  B plus in bed.

My son says I am average,

an average mother, but if

I put my mind to it

I could improve.

My daughter believes

in Pass/Fail and tells me

I pass. Wait ’til they learn

I’m dropping out.2                             (1-12)

the code doesn’t justify what the context demands. The poem demands that grades and assessments like A, incomplete, B plus, average, improve, pass, fail, and dropping out could collocate with words denoting  ‘wife’ and ‘mother’. That is, the context proposes that a wife or a mother can be habitually assessed as passed or failed and graded, in their domestic chores, as B plus or average. But the significations of wife and mother in the language code do not justify these values the context proposes. It is the students who are routinely graded and assessed in their academic work, and not wives and mothers in their family duties. The absence of a common semantic feature between the words sharing collocational relationship in the poem results in semantic oddity.

I would like to claim that it is this experience of semantic oddity, which a literary text invariably comes to possess, that marks a transitional stage in the learners’ progression from a non-literary to a literary text. Literary texts are bound to be semantically deviant because literary artists, attempting to give concrete expression to their uniquely personal view of things, habitually confer meanings on linguistic items which are different from their significations in the code. Literary students are bound to experience this oddity more overtly than literary critics for they are not yet fully initiated into, nor are used to, the conventions of literary communication. What they are used to as part of their general education are the rules of (English) language system and the conventions of its normal use. It is these rules or conventions or both which are systematically broken in the context of literary use, resulting in an apparent semantic oddity.

At this juncture where the context proposes a particular semantic relationship between linguistic units and the code contradicts it, there is every reason for readers to opt out, declaring literary   communication as non-sense. But students of literature cannot similarly opt out. They have to proceed on the assumption that the text communicates. Also, they know that the writer is a gifted user of language and that the text is probably the result of the labour of continued deliberations. It is illogical to think that a text can be the result of commissions and omissions by its writer.

Instinctively one feels that one has to proceed with a view to find out a meaning. But how can this be possible with the whole system of communication breaking down and the code rejecting what the context proposes?

A way-out is possible only if the learners are prepared to go beyond the restrictions set up by the code and meet the demands thrown up by the context. This will require them to confer meanings on language items different from what they inherit in the language code. In Linda Pastan’s “Marks”, what the context demands is that the educational grades and assessments conferred on the woman (such as B plus, A, pass, fail and average) collocate with her person in her capacity as mother and wife. In order to meet this demand, the learners have to confer on the semantic make up of the woman an additional feature of  [+student) which will equip the woman to receive grades and assessments which are unmistakably educational in character. In the language code, the lexical item does not possess this feature; but in the context of the poem, it has to in order to sustain communication. As a result, the relationship the woman holds to her husband and her children in the family undergoes a change and acquires a dimension typical of student-teacher relationship in a classroom. The family can continuously advise, suggest to, direct and order about the woman; what is more important, she can be continuously assessed and judged in her work. She is subordinated to her husband and children in the family hierarchy as a student is to the teacher. The domestic chores she carries out is not something to be shared by other family members but to be done wholly by herself as students doing their class work.

In conclusion, it might be argued that linguistic units acquire meanings in literary context not on the basis of what they signify in the code but on the basis of what the semantic relationships into which they enter signify in the code. This invariably results in the negation of meanings linguistic units in the code, leading, thereby, to semantic oddity and communication- breakdown. From the pedagogical point of view, it is the learners’ experiencing of this communication-breakdown which marks a transitional stage in their progression from non-literary to literary texts and serves to effectively orient them into literary communication and the unique values created in its context.

Works Cited

¹ H.G.Widdowson, Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature (London: Longman, 1975) 39.

² Linda Pastan, “Marks,” The Norton Introduction to Literature, eds. Carl E. Bain, Jerome Beaty, and J. Paul Hunter (New York: Norton, 1982) 392.