In Chapter 8 we saw how the flow of thought is reflected in prosody – in pitch, loudness, timing, and voice quality. Prosody performs the four functions listed at the bottom of Figure 19.1 (Chafe Reference Chafe, Juge and Moxley2000a). Two of these functions involve the way thoughts are organized and two of them involve the way they are evaluated. In signaling the organization of discourse, prosody delimits units such as words, phrases, sentences, and topics. At the same time it signals relations between those units and their larger contexts, as when a rising pitch at the end of a phrase shows there is more to come and a falling pitch shows closure. With respect to the way thoughts are evaluated, some elements stand out more prominently than others, expressing new information, contrast, or emphasis. Our concern in this chapter, however, is the role of prosody in expressing emotions. The first three items are realized in some fashion in any sample of speech, which is always segmented into units that are related in various ways and which show various degrees of prominence. While emotions are nearly always signaled with prosody, the absence of such marking may itself communicate an attitude of emotional detachment.
Figure 19.1 The functions of prosody
One need only listen to any sample of speech to appreciate the continually varying contributions of pitch, volume, timing, and voice quality in communicating a speaker’s emotions or their absence. They may range from detachment at one extreme to strong involvement at the other, and specific prosodic patterns convey a variety of emotional states. Few studies have examined in detail this relation of emotion to the prosody of naturally occurring speech, but observations in that area have the potential to offer important insights into varieties of emotional experience.
Previous work in this area has been largely experimental. Some of it has used actors to simulate standard emotions like anger, sadness, or joy, testing whether and how well subjects can identify those emotions from their acoustic signals (e.g. Bezooyen Reference Bezooyen1984). The most detailed and ramified experiments were those conducted by Klaus Scherer and his collaborators during the 1970s and 1980s. A summary of that work is available in Goldbeck, Tolkmitt, and Scherer (Reference Goldbeck, Tolkmitt, Scherer and Scherer1988), which mentioned that “a close collaboration between psychology and the language sciences will be required to disentangle the complex web of factors that determine human vocal expression” (Goldbeck et al. Reference Goldbeck, Tolkmitt, Scherer and Scherer1988: 137). This chapter offers a linguistic contribution to that effort, focusing on emotional expression in the course of a conversation.
Prosody often expresses a generalized heightening of emotional involvement that is associated with a variety of experiences. Much of the discussion in this chapter focuses on fundamental frequency and its perceptual correlate in pitch, but timing, volume, and voice quality may enter the picture as well. In the course of one recorded conversation the discussion turned to the way an acquaintance dressed, and particularly to the shoes he wore. Someone said:
That was the ugliest set of shoes I ever saw in my life!
As written, this statement can be read as a relatively straightforward negative evaluation of part of the man’s attire. The exclamation point at the end may suggest something of its prosody, but the full range of involvement is shown more adequately in the display of fundamental frequency and timing in Figure 19.2. Noteworthy are the prolonged rise–fall pitch contours on the first syllable of ugliest and, less exaggerated, on the word life. Rise–fall contours, sometimes supplemented with lengthening as here, are common signals of emotional involvement.
Figure 19.2 Extreme involvement
Figure 19.3 and those that follow are taken from a conversation in which the prosody of the principal speaker, Kay, fluctuated considerably with degrees of her involvement. One of the topics in this conversation was initiated by Sue as follows.Footnote 7
(1) Sue: What I’d like to find out more about.. is.. your operátion.
(2) Sue: That you’re having (laugh).
(3) Kay: My nô=se operation.
(4) Sue: Yes.. your nose operation.
If one were to read line 3 in an uninvolved way, one could imagine it being spoken with either of two prosodic contours. One of them would have heightened pitch on nose and a further rise at the end. That contour is suggested by the question mark here:
My nóse operation?
Spoken in that way, line 3 would have requested confirmation of the operation Sue had in mind. With a different prosody, the peak on nose would be followed by a fall that continued to the end, as suggested by the period here:
My nóse operation.
Spoken in that way, line 3 would have expressed an emotionally neutral confirmation of the topic Sue had just introduced.
Figure 19.3 F0 of “my nose” in line 3
What Kay actually said differed from both of these, although it had more in common with the second. The word nose was spoken with a rise–fall contour, the peak of which reached 396 Hz, well above Kay’s range when she was speaking in a more neutral way. Figure 19.3 traces the fundamental frequency (F0) on the words my nose. The word nose was prolonged, occupying more than half a second, as compared with Kay’s average speaking rate of about 150 milliseconds per syllable.
The idea of Kay’s nose had not been activated previously in the conversation and was thus a new idea. We would expect it, then, to be uttered with a higher pitch than my, which expressed the given idea of Kay herself. The same can be said of the word operation, which expressed an idea that had already been activated by Sue. In less involved utterances Kay expressed new ideas with F0 levels no higher than about 260 Hz. Why, then, did nose rise to almost 400?
Kay was conveying her acceptance of a newly introduced topic, but it was a topic that was emotionally loaded. The operation promised to be a major event in her life, and Sue’s introduction of it aroused in Kay a feeling of high involvement. By way of comparison the following example and Figure 19.4 illustrate Kay’s less involved speech. The maximum frequency was 264 Hz on the first syllable of “maybe,” with a minimum 163 Hz at the end of the entire sequence. Both maybe and why showed minor rise–fall contours that expressed mild, brief, and localized involvement. The word maybe qualified the factuality of what Kay was saying – there was no certainty that she should preface this thing as she did. The word why signaled a contrast with Sue’s request, which focused on the operation itself rather than the reason for it. A brief rise–fall contour can serve to localize minor involvement on a single word in this way.
(1) Well,
(2) … mâybe I should preface this thing whŷ I want it done.
Figure 19.4 Minor involvement
For some time Kay had entertained the thought that she could modify the shape of her nose, but because of the unwillingness of her insurance company to pay for cosmetic surgery she had not acted on this wish. Then came the exciting discovery that she actually had a medical condition that her insurance would cover. She reacted with the highly positive evaluation of this news shown in Figure 19.5.
Figure 19.5 Exciting news
Her nurse proceeded to confirm this finding as shown in Figure 19.6. Quoting another person’s speech often leads to a raised pitch level, but quoting the nurse here led to a peak F0 as high as 432 Hz on the word sure, evidently conveying excitement on the part of Kay herself rather than the nurse.
(1) … She said … súre.
(2) … It’s a médical problem.
Figure 19.6 Quoting the nurse
In what followed, similar rise–fall peaks extending to nearly 500 Hz occurred in the two instances of the word no that answered Sue’s questions in lines 1 and 3, reaching 490 Hz in 2 and 496 Hz in 4. Here we can see also that, whereas ideas tend to be replaced at intervals of one or two seconds, an emotion dissipates more slowly, often extending across a sequence of ideas:
(1) Sue: Didn’t you notice you had a deviated septum?
(2) Kay: … Nô.
(3) Sue: You couldn’t breathe through one side of your nose?
(4) Kay: … Nô.
Later in this conversation Kay mused as follows:
(1) Kay: … Well,
(2) … imagine this.
(3) .. I mean all those years you’ve been keeping yourself away from muggers,
(4) … rapists,
(5) … things like that,
(6) and then all at once,
(7) … you díe.
(8) … Because you’ve got a nose op.
(9) Sue: Choked on a piece of food.
(10) Kay: I mean that’s a real … sort of a … disgusting way to go.
The climax of this scenario came in line 7. Figure 19.7 shows F0 at the top and intensity at the bottom. F0 on the word die reached no higher than 260 Hz, and the emotion associated with this phrase was reflected chiefly in the greater loudness of the word die as can be seen at the bottom of this figure.
Figure 19.7 F0 and intensity in line 7
For an emotion that was triggered in a very different way we can move to a segment later in this conversation when Kay described her frustration with computers, and specifically the tendency of her word processor to delete material against her will:
(1) … Or. . when the paragraph goes … off the page,
(2) when you’re just trying to. . type in that … little bit of information,
(3) and I’m screaming to Jim
(4) . . it just léft.
(5) … I didn’t dó it.
(6) … I only wanted to put an A in there,
(7) instead of an E,
(8) … and he keeps saying,
(9) . . you . . are the person in charge of this computer,
(10) . . and . . it only listens to whatever you punch in.
This sequence began with a restrained, matter-of-fact prosody, but then came the self-quote in lines 4–7, with an expanded range and a raised baseline that are conspicuous in Figure 19.8. The peaks on “left,” “do,” and “A” reached 487, 466, and 411 Hz respectively:
(4) . . it just léft.
(5) … I didn’t dó it.
(6) … I only wanted to put an A in there,
(7) instead of an E,
Figure 19.8 F0 of lines 4–7
Jim’s quoted remarks in lines 9 and 10 provide a significant contrast with the F0 in Figure 19.8, as shown in Figure 19.9. By imitating Jim’s speech in this way Kay conveyed his attitude of condescending instruction such as one might express to a child – his careful explanation, one syllable at a time, of an elementary fact. The accented syllables of person, charge, and computer in line 9 were evenly spaced approximately 700 ms apart:
(9) Yóu are the pérson in chárge of this compúter,
(10) and it only listens to whatever you punch in.
In parallel fashion, the words only, whatever, and in from line 10 were evenly spaced at approximately 350 ms, as can be seen in Figure 19.10:
Figure 19.9 F0 of line 9
Figure 19.10 F0 of line 10
Summary
This chapter described and illustrated a few of the ways prosody communicates emotion. Among the many factors that can stimulate emotional involvement are the uptake of an emotionally charged new topic, the anticipation of a life-changing experience, and frustration with recalcitrant equipment. A rise–fall contour on a single element expresses localized involvement that may be associated with contrast or a subjective evaluation. There are numerous specific pitch contours that convey specific attitudes. They are expressed not only with pitch but also with variations in intensity, timing, and voice quality. Emotions are gradient and not categorical, and they change more slowly than the ideational content of language. This chapter illustrated just a few of the ways speakers use their voices to express their feelings. Many conversations need to be studied in a similar way before more generally applicable conclusions can be drawn.
Instructions for making macaroni: take a long thin piece of air and wrap pasta around it.
Reading these instructions may elicit a familiar emotional experience with unique properties that affect the way one thinks. Chafe (Reference Chafe2007) called this emotion the feeling of nonseriousness and discussed its effect on thought as well as the nature of the sound that is often associated with it, the sound we call laughter. It shares properties of other emotions, including the fact that it is experienced to varying degrees, that it persists longer in thought than is true of unemotional ideas, and that it is contagious, universal, and difficult to describe with language. Because it is a pleasant emotion, people have invented ways to experience it, ways that fall under the heading “humor.” They may be jokes, but humorous situations often arise spontaneously in other contexts. Furthermore, this feeling is often elicited by experiences that are not at all humorous, so we need to understand its relation to those experiences as well.
Humor
To begin with humor, it is generally agreed to depend on a conjunction of two features, one of which is a recognition of absurdity. The absurdity of wrapping pasta around a thin piece of air is obvious. Absurdity alone, however, is not enough to elicit humor, which requires that the absurdity be accompanied by a realization that the idea actually possesses a certain plausibility. One can at least imagine making macaroni by wrapping pasta around something that is long and thin, making these instructions in that respect “pseudo-plausible” despite the absurdity of wrapping pasta around air. Elie Aubouin recognized this requirement years ago: “If we strip off from our examples that justification, whether real or apparent, then the contradiction, incongruity, or unsuitability becomes simply absurd, ceasing thereby to be humorous” (Aubouin Reference Aubouin1948).
Salvatore Attardo and Victor Raskin wrote more recently “It has been frequently noted in humor research … that a joke must provide a logical or pseudological justification of the absurdity or irreality it postulates” (Attardo and Raskin Reference Attardo and Raskin1991). That is true not only of jokes but of humor in all its forms. Pseudo-plausibility may be experienced in any number of ways, but what is important is that the absurd idea have some partial basis in reality.
There are multiple facets to the absurdity in Figure 20.1. Among other things dogs do not formulate theories they express in language. And the idea that opposable thumbs might have led to what dogs see as the crazy behavior of humans is certainly an absurd idea. But if all that absurdity is set aside, combining human behavior with the human possession of opposable thumbs lends a pseudo-plausibility to the theory expressed.
Figure 20.1 Canine theorizing
Because jokes are deliberately designed to elicit the feeling of nonseriousness, they provide useful illustrations. Jokes have a bipartite structure consisting of a “buildup” followed by a “punchline.” The buildup may be any length, but the punchline is usually short and expresses something that comes as a surprise while it also conflicts with reality and is thus absurd. Here is an example (Chafe Reference Chafe2007: 105):
A man was driving a truckload of penguins to the zoo. On the way his truck broke down and he was forced to park beside the road. Pretty soon a farmer came along with his own truck, which was empty, and the first man flagged it down and asked, “If I give you a hundred dollars, can you take these penguins to the zoo?”
“Fine,” said the farmer. So they transferred the penguins to the second truck, the farmer received the hundred dollars, and he drove off. Some time later, however, the first man was still trying to fix his truck when the farmer came back with the penguins still there.
“Hey,” said the first man. “I thought I gave you a hundred dollars to take these penguins to the zoo.”
“Oh, I did,” said the farmer. “We had a great time and there was some money left over, so now I’m taking them to a movie.”
The idea that penguins would enjoy visiting the zoo and then going to a movie is patently absurd. But the request to “take these penguins to the zoo” is ambiguous between delivering them to a zoo and taking them somewhere where they would be entertained, and it is this second interpretation that makes the story pseudo-plausible. The buildup sometimes foreshadows the humor to come, in this case by introducing penguins, whose upright posture and what looks like formal dress are unexpected characteristics of birds.
Laughter
When the feeling of nonseriousness is strong enough it may be manifested audibly with laughter. This sound may be produced by a speaker or a listener or both, and it serves not only to signal the presence of this emotion but also to affect the behavior of those who are experiencing it. Laughter consists of sudden, spasmodic expulsions of air from the lungs, usually with greater force than is found during normal breathing or speaking. These exhalations are usually followed by a single, more prolonged inhalation that replenishes the lost air. The sound wave in Figure 20.2 shows twelve exhalation pulses followed by an inhalation.
Figure 20.2 Components of a laugh
The laugh pulses pass from the lungs into the larynx, where in many cases they are voiced and are thus subject to variation in pitch. The pulses in this illustration began at a frequency of 516 Hz and descended to 157 Hz, but rising pitches are also found and some laughs are even in the falsetto range. Laugh pulses then pass from the larynx into the mouth, where the tongue usually occupies a relaxed position so that most laugh pulses resemble the vowel sound of a schwa, leading them often to be spelled ha ha ha. Laughs seldom sound like ho ho ho, unless at the North Pole.
The number of pulses can vary from one to many, although there are seldom more than about a dozen, as in this example. Typically their rate is slightly below five pulses per second, but sometimes there is an acceleration or deceleration. Although the pulses are most often voiced, voiceless laughs are by no means rare. Most laughs allow the expelled air to pass relatively freely through the mouth, but sometimes the lips are closed so that air can pass only through the nose, resulting in a laugh with an M-like sound: hm hm hm.
People often laugh at the same time they are speaking. Speaking and laughing both begin with air from the lungs that passes through the larynx and exits through the mouth, so these two competing uses of the same vocal channel must be reconciled in some way. Sometimes the two activities are separated, with segments of speech alternating with bursts of laughter. Sometimes speech is superimposed on the laugh pulses, either with one spoken syllable per pulse or with a more complex intermingling of the two. Particularly interesting is the introduction of tremolo: rapid oscillations imposed on a single exhalation to produce a machine-gun-like sound. Tremolo is relatively common when laughter is superimposed on speech, but it has not been observed elsewhere except when a child is imitating a machine gun.
Laughter forcefully removes air from the lungs but the lost air is replenished by the subsequent inhalation. This interference with normal breathing affects the cardiovascular system, elevating the heart rate to a degree roughly proportional to the duration and intensity of the laugh. Nevertheless, although both speaking and laughing interfere with breathing, neither produces a drop in blood-oxygen level (Fry and Stoft Reference Fry and Stoft1971), a fact which suggests that the human body has evolved to retain stability in spite of the respiratory disturbances produced by both speaking and laughing.
It is difficult to laugh without smiling. There appears to be a continuum in which the feeling of nonseriousness in its weakest form is expressed by nothing more than smiling, then more strongly by chuckling, and finally by full-throated laughter as described above.
Nonseriousness as a Property of Thought
The physical properties of laughter that were sketched above are relatively easy to record and measure, but the question of why people behave in this special way has been open to debate. The question is related to speculations on the nature of humor, but the relation between laughter and humor cannot provide a complete answer because laughter often occurs without humor.
Bachorowski, Smoski, and Owren (Reference Bachorowski, Smoski and Owren2001) suggested that a laugh aims at eliciting some sort of emotional response in those who hear it, and that laughers use the variable acoustic features of their laughs to shape the particular emotional responses they want their listeners to experience.
Provine (Reference Provine2004) moved out of the laboratory to record more than a thousand instances of spontaneous laughter in shopping malls and a university student union. He found that speakers laughed more often than listeners, showing that laughter is not just a reaction to things said by others but is in fact more often an accompaniment to one’s own speech. He also found women laughing more often than men, but men doing more to provoke laughter. He found, too, that laughter occurred more often in social situations than in solitary environments. And he found that things said just prior to a laugh were often not humorous. He concluded that laughter functions to solidify friendship and bring people together. He went further to speculate on the place of laughter in human evolution, noting that the evolution of bipedality gave humans a freedom of breath control that set the stage for both speech and laughter.
The view proposed in Chafe (2007) is that the feeling of nonseriousness, whether or not it is expressed overtly with laughter, functions as a kind of safety valve that keeps us from taking seriously experiences where seriousness would be counterproductive. We are hindered from responding physically by the spasmodic expulsions of air from our lungs that interfere with breathing and make it difficult to perform physical tasks. (Try doing pushups while laughing.) At the same time we are distracted from serious thought by the euphoria that accompanies this emotion. We are thus for a time incapable of either performing serious acts or thinking serious thoughts.
The feeling of nonseriousness can also mitigate unpleasantness, as can be observed in the instances where laughter occurs without humor. Chafe (2007: 73–87) describes a variety of nonhumorous experiences that elicit laughter, including the use of profanity, talking of something disgusting or depressing, uncertainty about a choice of words, interrupting another person’s talk, self-deprecation, regret, bereavement, embarrassment, criticism, and talking of subjects that are abnormal, anomalous, surprising, or awkward. As an example of an attempt to mitigate depression, the following exchange took place during a discussion of a book in which the author described how the world of nature was being replaced by humans (Chafe 2007: 81):
Roy: And then he goes on, for the rest of the book …
Marilyn: Then it gets really depressing.
Pete: [sarcastically] Oh good. [laughs]
While much depends on the people involved and the topic under discussion, laughter may occur frequently in ordinary conversations as an overt manifestation of the feeling of nonseriousness, whether it is triggered by humor or by experiences whose negative properties it serves to mitigate. The ability to manipulate that feeling in conversational interaction is a frequently observable human trait.
The question of whether laughter is restricted to humans or whether other animals also laugh has been controversial, although it is difficult to see how other animals could experience the clearly human cognitive basis of laughter. It is true that chimpanzees and other primates emit a panting noise that sounds a bit like laughing. However, each noisy exhalation is immediately followed by an equally noisy inhalation, a pattern very different from the sequence of exhalations followed by a single inhalation that is characteristic of laughter. Jaak Panksepp and Jeff Burgdorf (Reference Panksepp and Burgdorf2003) discovered that stroking rats in sensitive areas caused the rats to emit a chirping sound above the range of human hearing. The rats evidently enjoyed the experience and their chirping communicated their pleasure to other rats. The chirping, however, is physiologically unlike laughter, and it is unlikely that rats emit those sounds in the same way or for the same reasons as the laughter of humans. Despite these superficial resemblances, it seems probable that laughter is an exclusively human trait.
Summary
The feeling of nonseriousness may for many people be as frequently if not more frequently experienced than generally recognized emotions like anger, sadness, or joy. It prevents people from interpreting seriously experiences with respect to which it would be counterproductive to think or act in a serious way. At a mild level it may be experienced with a silent smile, but it is often expressed overtly with laughter, which not only signals the presence of this emotion but also disrupts serious action by interfering with breathing while at the same time it hinders serious thought with a distracting euphoria. The pleasurable nature of this feeling has led people to invent ways of enjoying it, ways that fall under the heading of humor, which depends on combining absurdity with pseudo-plausibility.
Poetics deals primarily with the question, “What makes a verbal message a work of art?” … Poetics deals with problems of verbal structure, just as the analysis of painting is concerned with pictorial structure. Since linguistics is the global science of verbal structure, poetics may be regarded as an integral part of linguistics.
Jakobson’s use of the word “poetics” need not be understood as restricted to poetry in any narrow sense but rather as applying to any use of language with an aesthetic purpose or effect. Given the importance and variety of aesthetic experiences in people’s lives and their frequent manifestations in language, one might indeed ask why linguistics, the systematic study of language, has given this area so little attention. For one thing, of course, investigating the relation between language and beauty is hardly something linguists are trained to do; they have been educated to channel their efforts in quite different directions. Perhaps, too, it is not the sort of thing in which most linguists feel they should take a professional interest, seeing it as lying outside their professional domain. One should not conclude that linguists are philistines, and there are some who have responded to Jakobson’s challenge in ways that cross disciplinary boundaries, profiting from the vigor and coping with the confusion that interdisciplinary studies entail. There exists in fact a relatively new and promising discipline known as “cognitive poetics” whose approach is, however, different from the approach followed in this chapter (e.g. Tsur Reference Tsur2008; Burke and Troscianko Reference Burke and Troscianko2017; Kukkonen Reference Kukkonen2017).
This chapter attempts to deal, in what can only be speculative ways, with three fundamental, intriguing, and challenging questions:
(1) What is beauty?
(2) How is beauty created?
(3) In particular, how is beauty created by language?
These are obviously large questions with no simple answers, but that does not mean we should avoid exploring areas where answers might be sought. It is the third question that brings these questions within the scope of this book, where it will be approached by looking at a few examples of language with a clear aesthetic value, trying to identify some of the properties that contribute to that value and in that way trying to provide at least some preliminary answers to the last question.
But we need to begin with the first question. I suggest that beauty can be understood as a property of anything in our experience that elicits a certain identifiable emotional response, a response we recognize when we feel it and one that is pleasurable and often sought after. As with other emotions, experiencing beauty can vary in intensity, and English sometimes recognizes degrees of it with sets of words like pretty, beautiful, and gorgeous. To some extent beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What you find beautiful may not be what I find beautiful. And although many experiences may be considered beautiful everywhere, there may also be cultural differences. Individuals, furthermore, may differ in their sensitivity to beauty, some being overwhelmed by experiences to which others may react only mildly if at all. Any conclusions we may reach need to allow for variations like these.
If anyone would question whether we are dealing here with an emotion, it may be instructive to begin with an experience entirely outside of language. Ever since I first visited it many years ago I have found Yosemite Valley in California to be extraordinarily beautiful. Its beauty was immediately apparent to one of the first white men to look upon it. A soldier named Lafayette Bunnell belonged to the Mariposa Battalion whose assignment was to rid this valley of the Indians who had long inhabited it, but who were proving to be a nuisance to white people in the surrounding area. Bunnell wrote, “None but those who have visited this most wonderful valley, can even imagine the feelings with which I looked upon the view that was there presented…. As I looked, a peculiar exalted sensation seemed to fill my whole being, and I found my eyes in tears with emotion” (Bunnell 1892: 59).
Reports like this suggest that beauty has the power to elicit “a peculiar exalted sensation” which, when it is strong enough, may be felt throughout one’s body and even elicit tears. Can we identify properties of the scene confronting Bunnell that produced this feeling? These properties share something that might be called “transcendence,” by which I mean departure from the ordinary, mundane experiences of daily life. There are many ways in which transcendence can be manifested, and this chapter tries to identify some of them. Yosemite Valley contrasts with ordinariness in various ways, perhaps the most obvious being its magnitude. Things there are just big. Their transcendent size is accompanied by a repetition of shapes that is apparent in an array of huge cliffs that extend into the distance. And there are waterfalls whose sights and sounds far exceed our ordinary ways of experiencing water. But above all, as with other mountainous landscapes, there is a radical departure from the usual ways we experience the earth on which we walk. Bunnell continued: “The grandeur of the scene was but softened by the haze that hung over the valley – light as gossamer – and by the clouds which partially dimmed the higher cliffs and mountains. This obscurity of vision but increased the awe with which I beheld it.”
Evidently the degree to which beauty is experienced can be augmented by a partial obscuring of the very properties that elicit it. There may be two factors at play here. For one thing an experience can in this way be reduced to its essentials, freed of irrelevant and extraneous details. At the same time there is an appeal to imagination, an invitation to augment our interpretation of a scene in our own way.
To summarize up to this point, we have seen how transcendence from the mundane may include such factors as unusual magnitude, repetition, a reduction to essentials, and an appeal to imagination. We can look for these and other factors as we shift our attention now to language. In doing so we can recall findings from two earlier chapters. In Chapter 14 we saw how literature can highlight the distinction between an immediate and a displaced thought, whether that displaced thought is remembered or imagined. Immediacy is characterized by continuity and rich detail, displacement by islands of experience and attenuated detail. In Chapter 19 we saw how emotions are expressed with variations in prosody. In this chapter we can see how language may take advantage of these and other factors as beauty is created.
Poetry
Because poetry is a use of language that is intentionally designed to create beauty it is a good place to begin. Examples here are from Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, two very different American poets who created beauty in ways that overlap but also differ considerably.
Robert Frost
Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is widely known and appreciated (Frost 1979: 224). It begins:
As Frost himself knew, the effects of such a poem can be divided into features on the sound side of language and features on the thought side. Obvious features on the sound side are meter and rhyme, to which Frost paid a great deal of attention. Metrically the entire poem is organized into lines of iambic tetrameter:
Whose wóods | these áre | I thínk | I knów.
Rhyme is centered on the final syllables of each line. Three of the four stanzas follow the rhyme pattern AABA, a pattern that has been called the Rubaiyat Quatrain because it was followed in Edward FitzGerald’s Reference FitzGerald1997 [1859] translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Frost may or may not have known that, but it suggests that adherence to an established tradition may contribute to a pattern’s effectiveness.
In this poem the B of one stanza becomes the A of the next, or in other words:
AABA
BBCB
CCDC
The final stanza, however, preserves the same rhyme throughout: DDDD.
Frost evidently believed that a different third line (DDED) would have predicted that another stanza would follow. “What it [the repeat of the last line] does is save me from a third line promising another stanza … I considered for a moment winding up with a three line stanza. The repetend was the only logical way to end such a poem” (Gillespie 1994).
How then is beauty created by the repetition of iambic tetrameter and final-syllable rhymes? Ordinary uses of language exhibit a diversity of prosodic patterns that reflect the diversity of ordinary experience. Replacing that diversity with regular patterns of meter and rhyme is one way of reducing ordinary experience to essentials, a process already included on our list of transcendent devices.
What can be said about the thought side of this poem? Its most obvious property is its invitation to the reader or listener to inhabit the poet’s consciousness and share with him his thoughts as he lingers by dark woods on his way home. His (and our) thoughts focus first on stopping to enjoy the beauty of the woods through which he is passing, while at the same time thinking about the owner of those woods who won’t know he is stopping there. Then he thinks how his horse won’t understand why he is stopping and wants to keep moving. Finally his thoughts return to the beauty of the woods, which are “lovely, dark and deep,” but then he remembers that he is expected elsewhere and still has “miles to go.” Snow, it is worth noting, has an inherent beauty that may be attributed to its obliteration of extraneous detail, serving once more to reduce an experience to its essentials. We will meet it again at the end of this chapter.
Those who analyze poetry often feel obliged to discover in it some deeper meaning; for example:
The theme of “Stopping by Woods” – despite Frost’s disclaimer – is the temptation of death, even suicide, symbolized by the woods that are filling up with snow on the darkest evening of the year. The speaker is powerfully drawn to these woods and – like Hans Castorp in the “Snow” Chapter of Mann’s Magic Mountain – wants to lie down and let the snow cover and bury him. The third quatrain, with its drowsy, dream-like line: “Of easy wind and downy flake,” opposes the horse’s instinctive urge for home with the man’s subconscious desire for death in the dark, snowy woods. The speaker says, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” but he resists their morbid attraction.
Frost rejected such fanciful interpretations and recommended that we take his poem to mean what it says.
To summarize, the beauty of this poem derives in part from its imposition of a pattern of sounds that reduces the complex prosody of ordinary speech to a few essentials, while at the same time inviting us to share in the poet’s consciousness. As we move to a second illustration we can see how powerful inhabiting another consciousness can be.
Emily Dickinson
Dickinson’s poems demand more effort on the part of a reader, and this one can be challenging (Dickinson 1924: 293-294).
With one small exception meter and rhyme are just as regular here as they were in Frost’s poem, although a bit more complex. Each stanza is composed of two couplets, and in each couplet the first line is iambic tetrameter and the second iambic trimeter:
I stárt | ed éar | ly – tóok | my dóg –
and ví | sitéd | the séa –
The tetrameter of the first line creates an expectation that the next line will also contain four feet, but that expectation is thwarted by a second line of only three. We see here another way of creating transcendence: creating an expectation and then flouting it. There is a deviation from Dickinson’s pattern here in the third line, which lacks the final accented syllable that would have made it tetrameter:
the mér | maids ín | the báse | ment …
This exception to what is otherwise a very regular prosody might signal a transition from the normal content of the first couplet into the fantastic world that follows, or perhaps Dickinson was just being inconsistent. One wonders why she couldn’t have said “the básement flóor.”
Rhyming is restricted to the second and fourth lines of each stanza. In the fifth and sixth stanzas the rhymes are less complete: heel and pearl, know and withdrew. There are several instances of alliteration: hempen hands, presuming me to be a mouse, till the tide, simple shoe, belt and bodice, dew and dandelion. Alliteration can be added to meter and rhyme as a third kind of poetic sound patterning.
But what can we make of the puzzling thoughts expressed in this poem? Like the Frost poem it also puts us inside the poet’s mind, in this case as the narrator sets out with her dog to “visit the sea,” which initially welcomes her but then threatens to engulf her. Finally she reaches the safety of “the solid town,” where “bowing with a mighty look” at her, the sea withdraws.
Unlike many of Dickinson’s poems, this one has a plot – a plot that follows a sequence of events in which a normal walk by the sea turns into a disturbingly dangerous experience that finally runs its course and subsides. Does this plot reflect anything in Dickinson’s life? Lyndall Gordon (Reference Gordon2010: 114–136) makes a convincing case that Dickinson suffered from periodic and unpredictable epileptic seizures. Her fear of their recurrence may help to explain what appeared to others as eccentric behavior: “What seemed eccentric was simply dread” (p. 117). Interpreted as a fantasy that traces the course of a seizure the poem makes a great deal of sense.
Although Gordon did not mention it, it is possible that Dickinson also experienced episodes of a scintillating scotoma, a common problem that begins with a small blind spot that gradually expands to the edges of the visual field and then disappears. Although epilepsy and scotoma are different problems, Dickinson and her doctors may very well have associated the two, both of which begin without warning, are disturbing and debilitating at their climax, and eventually subside, a pattern that is captured with powerful imagination in this poem.
The poem is full of surprising images that depart radically from ordinary experience: the mermaids, the frigates with their hempen hands, the dandelion’s sleeve, and the sea’s mighty look. These images stand in sharp contrast to the normalcy of Frost’s experience by the woods, but each is effective in its own way. Dickinson shows well the aesthetic value of imagery that transcends the ordinary.
Prose
The beauty of prose writing is centered more on the thought side of language, although sound-based features like alliteration and rhyme may occasionally intrude. Chapter 14 showed how leading the reader to inhabit another consciousness sheds light on the nature of consciousness itself. Here, as with the poems discussed above, we can appreciate its contribution to the aesthetic effect of a piece of writing, transcending ordinary solipsistic experience.
James Joyce
Discussed here are certain aspects of Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” which, like “Eveline” in Chapter 14, belongs to the collection Dubliner’s. The story is divided into two distinct episodes, the first describing a dance party at the home of Aunt Julia and Aunt Kate. The second takes place almost entirely within the consciousness of Gabriel, one of the guests at the party, as he returns to his hotel with his wife Gretta. This section begins:
The morning was still dark. A dull yellow light brooded over the houses and the river; and the sky seemed to be descending. It was slushy underfoot, and only streaks and patches of snow lay on the roofs, on the parapets of the quay and on the area railings. The lamps were still burning redly in the murky air and, across the river, the palace of the Four Courts stood out menacingly against the heavy sky.
The reader shares Gabriel’s anoetic experiences as he begins walking to the hotel. Aside from the value of inhabiting Gabriel’s consciousness, one finds beauty in the description itself. We share visual detail like the “dull yellow light” and tactile detail like “slushy underfoot,” as well as the emotion conveyed by the words “brooded,” “murky,” and “menacingly.”
From this point on, the story follows Gabriel’s changing emotions before he is finally ready to retire. His attention shifts from the surrounding scene to Gretta as he imagines things he might do:
She was walking on before him so lightly and so erect that he longed to run after her noiselessly, catch her by the shoulders and say something foolish and affectionate into her ear. She seemed to him so frail that he longed to defend her against something and then to be alone with her. Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.
Then come three islands of memory, each of which Gabriel experiences briefly:
A heliotrope envelope was lying beside his breakfast-cup and he was caressing it with his hand.
They were standing on the crowded platform and he was placing a ticket inside the warm palm of her glove.
He was standing with her in the cold, looking in through a grated window at a man making bottles in a roaring furnace.
Once they are in their room he notices Gretta crying and there follows a sequence of questions and answers that lead to a narrative climax. The beauty of this passage resides in our sharing of Gabriel’s changing emotions as the narrative unfolds:
—Gretta, dear, what are you thinking about?—
… —O, I am thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim—
… —What about the song? Why does that make you cry?—
She raised her head from her arms and dried her eyes with the back of her hand like a child. A kinder note than he had intended went into his voice.
—Why, Gretta? he asked—
—I am thinking about a person long ago who used to sing that song—
—And who was the person long ago? asked Gabriel, smiling—
—It was a person I used to know in Galway when I was living with my grandmother, she said—
The smile passed away from Gabriel’s face. A dull anger began to gather again at the back of his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to glow angrily in his veins.
—Someone you were in love with? he asked ironically—
—It was a young boy I used to know, she answered, named Michael Furey. He used to sing that song, The Lass of Aughrim. He was very delicate—
Gabriel was silent. He did not wish her to think that he was interested in this delicate boy.
… A thought flew across Gabriel’s mind.
—Perhaps that was why you wanted to go to Galway with that Ivors girl? he said coldly—
She looked at him and asked in surprise:
—What for?—
Her eyes made Gabriel feel awkward. He shrugged his shoulders and said:
—How do I know? To see him perhaps—
She looked away from him along the shaft of light towards the window in silence.
—He is dead, she said at length. He died when he was only seventeen. Isn’t it a terrible thing to die so young as that?—
… —And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?—
—I think he died for me, she answered—
Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake.
Later, in a different location, Gabriel imagines Aunt Julia’s death:
Soon perhaps he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless one. Yes, yes, that would happen very soon.
The last sentence exemplifies what has been called “free indirect style” or “erlebte Rede” (McHale Reference McHale1978) as it applies not only to speech but also to thought – to what I have called “verbatim indirect thought” (Chafe Reference Chafe1994: 247). The repeated “yes” is verbatim language, while the words “that would happen very soon” are indirect thought that follows the pattern of indirect speech.
The story approaches its end with a peaceful conclusion that rounds off the emotional turmoil of what preceded as it exploits the beauty of snow and zooms out to take in a much larger picture:
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.
At the very end there is a return to Gabriel’s consciousness, with alliteration in “his soul swooned slowly” and “falling faintly … faintly falling,” and even the orthographic overlap of “swooned” with “snow”:
Summary
This chapter explored certain features of writing that stimulate in a reader the feeling of beauty. It was suggested that beauty arises from experiences that transcend the ordinary while appealing to the imagination and transporting the reader into another consciousness. In poetry an important role may be played on the sound side of language by meter, rhyme, and alliteration. On the thought side both poetry and prose may create beauty by inviting a reader to share with another consciousness its perceptions, actions, and emotions. To follow Jakobson’s recommendation by interpreting these and other considerations as concerns of linguistics can present linguistics with new and exciting challenges.
