Introduction

Genre analysis is a crucial component of both literary and linguistic investigations. Genres may be defined as different categories of texts which are determined by both formal and functional criteria (Jucker and Taavitsainen Reference Jucker and Taavitsainen2013). In other words, genres unite certain repetitive and generalisable features because their users in turn share certain goals and are prone to using a specific genre over and over again. In most cases, genres have labels, such as epic, limerick or sonnet, which are genres of poetry, or textbook and review, which are genres of academic discourse. Another example would be recipes – medical and culinary – which have retained many of their prototypical features throughout the history of English. Due to the fact that their purpose is to instruct us in how to make medicine or prepare food, they show, for example, a high number of imperative structures containing the verb take (Jucker and Taavitsainen Reference Jucker and Taavitsainen2013).

Existing linguistic definitions, especially, show some variety in the ways they define genre (Moessner Reference Moessner2001: 131). Genres may be seen as instruments for text classification and as ‘cultural products and social forms of communication, conditioned by their time and social setting’ (Jucker and Taavitsainen Reference Jucker and Taavitsainen2013). Genres and genre development have always been dynamic and procedural, as they may show variation and intertextuality in function and in linguistic realisations (Corbett Reference Corbett and Brown2006). Both literary and non-literary genres entail the possibility of changes: new genres and their features evolve and others disappear. Contextual factors mark and create the ways in which genres change over time and they interplay with the processes of making texts as well as processing them. Genres have the ability to create meaning because the continuum of adherence to linguistic conventions and social practices, on the one hand, and of creative deviation, on the other, direct readers’ meaning inferences. Hence, one crucial issue to resolve is how particular texts function in a particular social and cultural context.

In this chapter, I will outline the major tenets and developments of communicative approaches to genre. I will also describe the points of intersection between style, styling and genre, drawing on systemic-functional linguistics, applied linguistics, historical pragmatics and stylistics. I argue for a cultural stylistic framework in which historical and contemporary genres, their accompanying linguistic features and functions, and their variation and change are seen as communication in a cultural context. Genres and genre studies as I understand them do not rely on frequency patterns and statistical significance alone. Rather, they overcome the modal linguistic bias of contemporary mainstream genres in an attempt to address generic materiality and mediality in their full cultural complexity and to address massive societal changes, such as the impact of the new technologies, globalisation, mobility and multilingualism. Singular places and isotopes that people have made meaningful can be patterned as well as generic. Mobile discourse profiles embrace and are construed by social styling and social practice.

Genre essentials and conventions

The conception of genre is crucial for both linguistics and literary studies and took place as early as Aristotle’s Poetics. It is literary in origin: in the eighteenth century, the French term genre (‘kind’) was introduced as a loan word by so-called ‘English commentators’ (Corbett Reference Corbett and Brown2006: 26) or literary historians who attempted to differentiate between different types and developments of literary or artistic text production. Following the models and literary conceptions first outlined by Aristotle and Plato, they stress that literary genres and their dynamics are considered to be recognisable by their compliance with conventions of form, content and use of language (Corbett Reference Corbett and Brown2006: 26). Aristotle also distinguishes between the genres and characters of tragedy and comedy, focusing on the stylistic features of the different sub-genres. This basis in the Aristotelian model is enhanced by ‘a metaphysics and an epistemology which derive from Aristotle’s natural philosophy and the link between the philosophy of natural kinds of texts and sociocultural classes of people’ (Threadgold Reference Threadgold and Mesthrie2001: 235). In other words, human beings have always categorised along a scale of values or a set of characteristics.

The conception of genre has been applied to a number of (linguistic) disciplines, but with different emphases. Generally speaking, categories and theories of genre initially serve the purpose of acting as descriptive and analytical, and prescriptive or pedagogical tools (Threadgold Reference Threadgold and Mesthrie2001: 236). At the same time, they are, however, used in models of text reception and reading and seen as forms of communication in a sociocultural context. In the twentieth century, the focus shifted from viewing genres as a fixed and absolute set of conventions to regarding them as dynamic conventions connected with changing institutions and social goals. Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin, Emerson and Holquist1986) refers to speech genres, which are forms of speaking or writing that people employ, mix or change according to particular social contexts. He shows that genres are at the centre of language use because all language usage belongs to one genre or another, and genres are essential for communication and for creating and interpreting texts. Bakhtin distinguishes between primary genres, which are everyday communication activities, and secondary genres, which are more explicitly and consciously produced, such as literary works. The evolution of genres is therefore a dialogue because new writing builds on earlier forms and creates a mosaic of quotations. Textual transmission and adjoining genres can thus be investigated through the study of intertextuality. Alastair Fowler (Reference Fowler1982) also emphasises the blurred and fuzzy edges of genres, the dynamics of genres and their changes in the course of time. He draws on the prototype approach and illustrates that knowledge of genres is one of the prerequisites to recognising generic patterns.

Classifications of genre and their contextual embeddedness include and disclose a complex system of values of, for example, an institution, an author or a speech community: ‘There have always been implicit and explicit social and aesthetic, and even moral values associated with the classification of genres’ (Threadgold Reference Threadgold and Mesthrie2001: 235) and what counts as canon in the teaching of literary studies, for example (especially Bloom Reference Bloom1995). Hierarchies of genres are often linked with explicit or implicit social and moral values expressed in handbooks or style guides, or, more ideologically loaded, in fierce attempts to suppress minority languages as the Plain English Debate in the UK shows. As early as classical rhetoric, high, middle and low styles have been emphasised. These classifications resonate processes of sociocultural labelling of social classes based on the modes and styles that characterise them. At the same time, these labels are associated with the most powerful social and cultural institutions of government, religion, law and cultural authorities or with the label high culture (as opposed to popular or low culture). Analogous to the social foundation of any genre formation and evaluation are, for example, the formation of national language standards and attempts at critiquing language or at what Deborah Cameron (Reference Cameron2012) calls ‘verbal hygiene’. A standard of a language is often selected according to what is considered ‘the best’ by a prestigious, elitist social group. Verbal hygiene, in turn, describes active practices of improving and filtering normative patterns of language usage – that is, ‘discourses and practices through which people attempt to “clean up” language and make its structure or its use conform more closely to their ideals of beauty, truth, efficiency, logic, correctness and civility’ (D. Cameron Reference Cameron2012: ix).

The use of the term genre incorporates conceptions such as convention, communication and styling as well as value judgements and descriptions of the characteristics of actual texts, classes of texts, groups and systems of text classes, and descriptions of genre, which are theorised as social practice. At the same time genres may be conceptualised as reflecting human beings’ cognitive schemata and world knowledge. Here genre is seen as a mental frame in people’s minds which consists of their knowledge of schemata, scripts (Schank and Abelson Reference Schank and Abelson1977) and belief systems (Jucker and Taavitsainen Reference Jucker and Taavitsainen2013). People are able to understand and recognise these genres because in cultural contexts they are realised on a continuum of conventions on the one hand and creative foregrounding on the other. Genres may function as ‘horizons of expectations’ (Jauss Reference Jauss1970) for readers to know what to expect. These help guide the making, writing and processing of texts. Indeed, more recent attempts at defining genre and genre analysis have ‘gone social’ and see genre as ‘an approach to communication which emphasises social function and communicative purpose’ (Swann et al. Reference Swann, Deumert, Lillis, Mesthrie and Swann2004: 123). Genres are inherently ‘dynamic cultural schemata used to organise knowledge and experience through language. They change over time in response to their users’ sociocultural need’ (Taavitsainen Reference Taavitsainen2001: 129).

As such, interpersonal relations and functions of genres become more and more important because the communicative situation is one of the essential criteria in assessing why a text is written the way it is or whether it still shows some of the features of textuality outlined by de Beaugrande and Dressler (Reference de Beaugrande and Dressler1981). Enkvist (Reference Enkvist, Steele and Threadgold1987) defines text strategies adopted by the genre-user according to their envisaged goals as the basic communicative principles in the broader framework of texts. Another crucial text-linguistic model which is based on communicative situations is Werlich’s (Reference Werlich1976) model of the five basic text types: descriptive, narrative, expository, argumentative and instructive. He provides prototypical linguistic realisations of these text types and stresses that they can be combined. Berkenkotter and Huckin’s (Reference Berkenkotter and Huckin1995) conceptualisation of genre incorporates this communicative and contextualised view of genre by developing a number of useful questions, which include:

1. 1. Where does the genre come from and where is it going?

2. 2. What does a text in this genre look like and what does it say?

3. 3. How (and where and when and why) do people use this genre?

4. 4. What sort of society does the genre create?

5. 5. Who owns this genre?

In corpus linguistics, genres as well as representative extracts of text types are essential for the compilation of a corpus because linguistic features and repeated patterns, which have functional and conventional associations, are distributed in certain ways in various registers and genres. In other words, genres are one of the important parameters in compiling a representative, evenly balanced and evenly sized corpus for comparative studies of communicative phenomena (see Biber and Finegan Reference Biber, Finegan, Kytö, Ihalainen and Rissanen1988). Register is a related term here because it refers to situated language usage, which includes the setting, interactiveness, the mode of speaking, the goal and the theme addressed (Biber Reference Biber and Hogan2011: 707). At the same time, it can also be described in relation to the linguistic features used. Register would then relate to the language of advertising or the language of sports. With a focus on variation, register is at the centre of investigations in corpus linguistics and usually any corpus also includes excerpts from literary language, usually narrative fiction (see also Mahlberg, Chapter 17, this volume, on ‘grammatical configuration’ and the conception of ‘local grammar’). For example, the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al. Reference Biber, Finegan, Johansson, Conrad and Leech1999) uses a corpus-based methodology to analyse how the characteristics of particular linguistic features can be described on the basis of their grammatical and structural functions and their ‘behaviour’ across spoken and written text types. They also have a chapter on ‘lexical bundles’, which describe multi-word patterns of usage that are characteristic of a particular register. In the multidimensional approach (Biber and Finegan Reference Biber, Finegan, Kytö, Ihalainen and Rissanen1988), statistical and corpus-based investigations are employed to analyse profiles of linguistic patterns that vary in register. Biber’s study can be seen as one of the most important studies of genre which, in (historical) corpus linguistics and pragmatics, sparked ground-breaking genre-based quantitative investigations of linguistic patterning. From over 481 text extracts over 23 genres, Biber and Finegan (Reference Biber, Finegan, Kytö, Ihalainen and Rissanen1988) chart the co-occurrence of 67 linguistic features and their functions. The dimensions of variation and stability are identified statistically by factor analysis (later cluster analysis), providing the co-occurrence patterns of linguistic features. Communicative functions are categorised along the following dimensions of styles: a) involved versus detached; b) elaborated versus situated; c) abstract versus non-abstract. Styles are simply defined in terms of the joint effects of multiple features and co-occurrence patterns.

In these approaches, register differs from genre in that the former denotes more generally a type of language use of or in a particular domain. Special emphasis is placed on the analysis of lexicogrammatical features. Genre here receives additional cultural nuances because specific profiles and conventions are known and actively produced by particular groups of people in a sociocultural context.

Genre studies since the early 1990s have focused on a number of text types, both literary and non-literary. This is due to new technologies and massive digitisation processes as well as discoveries of new texts. At the same time, genre boundaries have been moved.

Genre as communication, culture and styling

Conclusions

Genre studies are indispensable components of research in literary criticism and for the investigation of language in use. The conception of genre refers to categories of text types and their accompanying functional and formal linguistic features which mark them. At the same time, genres are theorised as communication and as situated in their cultural contexts of usage. As such, genres play a crucial role in the production and reception of meaning. These complex genre profiles have changed throughout the history of English, resulting in speech genres that carry intertextual dimensions. Genres may also serve as mirrors of values and evaluations of a community of practice. Due to massive technological, global, political and cultural transformations, the view of genres as fixed and stable entities has given way to a more dynamic view of genre as social practice which draws attention to all sorts of multimodal (spoken) discourses. The interest in cultural stylistics lies in how styles – linguistic or multimodal – index social meanings in a cultural context.

Allusion

As already noted, allusion is based on an ordinary language concept and as such it is relatively theory-neutral. A concise, fairly standard definition is offered by Frye et al. (Reference Frye, Baker and Perkins1985: 15): ‘A meaningful reference, direct or indirect.’ Probably the only part of this definition that may seem controversial is the clause ‘direct or indirect’. It may seem that, to be allusive, a reference must be indirect. That may be the case in ordinary language usage. But in verbal art, we commonly refer to direct quotations as allusions also. For example, we are likely to take Stephen Dedalus’s quotation of ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ as an allusion by Joyce even though there is a direct quote. We may still distinguish explicit and implicit allusions. Thus Frye et al. explain that paradiorthosis is a particular ‘kind of allusion, in which a writer quotes some famous line or phrase without acknowledgment and with a new context or twist’ (Reference Frye, Baker and Perkins1985: 334). We find parallel concepts in other traditions. For example, in Japanese poetics, mommondori is ‘Borrowing or taking over more or less as it is a passage from an older work’ (Miner et al. Reference Miner, Odagiri and Morrell1985: 277). Here, the idea of a ‘new twist’ is itself separated off into another concept, honkadori, which is to say ‘Allusive variation’, in which a ‘later poet would take some diction and conception from an earlier “foundation poem” (honka) and vary (-tori, -dori) with a new conception’ (Miner et al. Reference Miner, Odagiri and Morrell1985: 277).

One might also question whether the reference must be to a specific work or may be more general. Our prototypical cases of allusion do seem to be like Stephen’s reference to the Yeats poem. However, Stephen’s indirect reference to the idiom ‘let the cat out of the bag’ seems also to be a fairly clear instance of allusion. A similar point is suggested when, for example, the great fifth-century Chinese theorist Liu Hsieh includes references to texts and to facts in his chapter on the parallel concept (Reference Hsieh and Shih1959: 202–8). Indeed, Liu includes ‘maxims of antiquity’ (Reference Hsieh and Shih1959: 203), which may have a specific source, but undoubtedly are in many cases available more broadly in the culture.

Nonetheless, the preceding definition does not seem quite complete. Allusion may be direct or indirect, a matter of unique source texts or commonplaces. However, it cannot be fully elaborated. It must be in part a matter of suggestion, significance that goes beyond anything explicitly stated. Suppose a few years ago, a politician was planning to bring his family to stay with Bill Clinton for a week. A friend, remembering the politician’s college-age daughter, wishes to caution against this. If the friend simply mentions Monica Lewinsky, then we may say that he alludes to the affair. In contrast, if he explains carefully that Clinton does not seem particularly trustworthy around young women, citing the case of Monica Lewinsky, then he is not simply alluding.

In keeping with these points, Joyce’s use of the Yeats poem clearly suggests far broader relevance than is spelled out in the text. Indeed, in this case, the relevance is so broad that it is not practical to treat it here. The same general point holds for Stephen’s allusion to ‘letting the cat out of the bag’. However, in the latter case, the suggestions are more manageable. Specifically, Stephen aims to use his allusion for comic effect. There is a sort of crude physical mapping by which he uses the ‘bag’ to refer to female genitals – first the vagina, then the uterus. In the first case, letting the cat into the bag, the cat is a man; in the second case, the cat is a foetus. This is all clearly developed by Stephen. However, Stephen does not elaborate on the reasons for using this idiom. The idiom refers to secrecy. ‘Letting the cat out of the bag’ means revealing a secret. The joke here is that a secretive act of sex is necessarily revealed when the woman gives birth. But Stephen does not spell out this significance of the idiom. It is therefore an allusion.

Indeed, it seems that all the forms of textual interrelations that are of interest in this context are not fully elaborated. This is why theorists do not generally consider book reviews, textual commentaries, reader’s guides, and the like, to be relevant to the sort of theorisation that treats allusion and intertextuality. Clearly, book reviews, and so on, are prime cases of works exhibiting textual interrelations. They are separate, however, precisely to the extent that those textual relations are extensively and explicitly spelled out (e.g. one text is an argument against the other).

Intertextuality, archetypes and influence

As mentioned above, intertextuality is a more complex and theoretical notion than allusion. It does not derive from an ordinary language concept. Rather, it is a term introduced into literary theory by the psychoanalytic semiotician Julia Kristeva (Reference Kristeva, Roudiez, Gora, Jardine and Roudiez1980; see Roudiez Reference Roudiez, Kristeva, Roudiez, Gora, Jardine and Roudiez1980: 15). Thus, in its origins, it is closely bound up with a particular theory.

We may try to give a relatively theory-neutral statement of what intertextuality might be. The fundamental idea is that every text includes a complex set of relations to other texts. These relations include allusions. But they are not confined to allusions. Of course, it cannot be that every link is part of intertextuality. Many such ties would be contingent, ephemeral and insignificant (e.g. having an even number of words). One way of reducing the extent of such ties is by saying that intertextuality encompasses all ties that are recurring and have literary significance (e.g. for interpretation). Crucially, however, they would not need to be so specific as allusions, but could include motifs or patterns that are much more general.

Phrased in this way, the idea of intertextuality could be seen as closely related to Northrop Frye’s idea of archetypes. Intertextuality, in that case, would refer to the linking of texts, whereas archetype would refer to the elements that link the texts. Specifically, for Frye, an archetype is ‘a typical or recurring image . . . a symbol which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience’. In connection with this, ‘archetypal criticism . . . attempts to fit poems into the body of poetry as a whole’ (Reference Frye1957: 99). The same point could be made for intertextual analysis. It locates individual texts in what might be called a ‘discourse space’ of other texts. On the other hand, there is at least a difference in emphasis here. Archetypes are more likely to have specific sources in a tradition (e.g. the Bible) as well as trajectories of dissemination. Intertextuality is often viewed as more diffuse. Indeed, in some versions it rejects the idea of a source for intertextual elements.

As these points suggest, intertextuality and archetypes are often discussed in terms of something like autonomous relations among texts in a sort of ideal or Platonic system. Putting the idea in cognitive psychological terms, we might say that everyone in a society talks and listens, communicating ideas, phrases, attitudes and so forth. This constant interaction with others and assimilation of the thoughts, words and feelings of others has effects on the content and configuration of, for example, one’s mental lexicon. A person’s concepts come to be interconnected in certain ways, forming recurring structures and resonances in his or her mind. When someone writes a poem or a story, he or she does so using linguistic and other resources that are necessarily marked by these ‘dialogical’ experiences (as Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981) would say). Here too, however, we do not want to count all ‘dialogical’ elements equally, since some are ephemeral or trivial. Those recurring patterns of literary significance are what merit our attention.

Here, we might briefly distinguish intertextuality from the more common notion of influence. In a sense, intertextuality, as defined psychologically, is a sort of influence. However, it is a diffuse influence. It is an influence that typically does not have a specific, isolatable source. It is an influence of countless small contacts with countless people and texts, producing countless recurring patterns across texts. In contrast, what we usually refer to as influence involves a much stronger, more limited and more distinctive relation between a current text and some precursor. Instead of countless ‘source texts’ by countless speakers and writers, an influence study looks at a limited number of source texts produced by a single writer. Rather than a diversity of recurring, non-distinctive patterns, an influence study seeks to isolate a limited number of highly distinctive patterns. Indeed, one could formulate the purposes of influence study in direct opposition to the study of intertextuality. If intertextuality seeks broadly shared patterns, influence study seeks to isolate the patterns that are not broadly shared, but are rather distinctive of the source text or texts and the target text or texts. In cognitive terms, this is commonly a matter of internalised principles for the generation and evaluation of literary texts (for a cognitive account of influence, see Hogan Reference Hogan1995). For example, an influence study might concern itself with the ways in which Joyce internalised certain writing principles initially distinctive of Flaubert, then manifested those principles in Ulysses.

The preceding account of intertextuality is roughly compatible with Kristeva’s views. However, Kristeva does not articulate her account in this way. Thus Kristeva writes that ‘the text . . . is a permutation of texts, an intertextuality’ (Reference Kristeva, Roudiez, Gora, Jardine and Roudiez1980: 36). She goes on to maintain that ‘in the space of a given text’ there are ‘several utterances, taken from other texts’ in a process that incorporates ‘citations and moral precepts’ (Reference Kristeva, Roudiez, Gora, Jardine and Roudiez1980: 52). These appropriated and incorporated texts ‘intersect and neutralize one another’ (Reference Kristeva, Roudiez, Gora, Jardine and Roudiez1980: 36) in the recipient text. The idea of neutralisation relates to Kristeva’s view that texts involve tensions and oppositions (e.g. ‘the thematic loops: life-death, love-hate, fidelity-treason’ – Reference Kristeva, Roudiez, Gora, Jardine and Roudiez1980: 48). Different genres treat these tensions and oppositions differently. Perhaps more significantly, in keeping with trends in literary theory over the past half-century or so, she sees intertextuality as bound up with politics. Specifically, she sets semiotics (the study of signs) the task of locating ‘the specificity of different textual arrangements . . . within the general text (culture) of which they are part and which is, in turn, part of them’ (Reference Kristeva, Roudiez, Gora, Jardine and Roudiez1980: 36). Any given text presents a ‘materialized’ (Reference Kristeva, Roudiez, Gora, Jardine and Roudiez1980: 36) version of this generalised intertextuality of culture, making it an ‘ideologeme’ or minimal meaningful unit of ideology, which should be studied ‘as intertextuality . . . within (the text of) society and history’ (Reference Kristeva, Roudiez, Gora, Jardine and Roudiez1980: 37).

One might dispute Kristeva’s views in various ways. For example, a standard view of dominant ideology is that it comprises sets of common beliefs and goals that function to maintain exploitative hierarchies. There is no clear reason to assume that every text does this. Of course, Kristeva is free to use ‘ideology’ more broadly, particularly since her view of textual tensions and oppositions may suggest that the idea of ‘common beliefs and goals’ assumes too great uniformity. But then her use of ‘ideology’ seems to be nothing more than ‘society and history’, which seems to lose the specificity and value of the concept of ideology. Perhaps more significantly for present purposes, it is not clear that intertextuality is itself adequately specified, along the lines mentioned at the outset of this chapter.

Parameters of textual interrelations

Clearly, there are many ways in which one might differentiate connections across texts. Which is most worthwhile will depend on one’s specific purposes at any given time. However, there are some patterns that seem to be more common and of more general value than others.

Before going on to these parameters, however, we need to draw a fundamental division between what might be called autonomist and cognitivist (or more broadly psychological) accounts of textual interrelations. Theorists of the former sort see textual interrelations as objective facts about texts in themselves. Theorists of the latter sort see textual interrelations as contingent on cognitive or affective processes. In the general cognitivist (or psychological) view, texts are not related to one another as such. Rather, texts are related to one another through the production of authors/speakers and/or through the reception of readers/listeners. This does not mean that textual interrelations need to be self-consciously chosen and manipulated. Cognitive and affective processes operate on unconscious contents and through unconscious patterns all the time. However, it does mean that textual interrelations are inseparable from cognitive structures, processes and contents. For example, in autonomist terms a text may be seen as literally alluding to another text. However, for a cognitivist, ‘This text alludes to . . .’ must be shorthand for ‘The author of this text alludes to . . .’ – again, with the proviso that the author’s allusion may be self-conscious or unselfconscious.

The following discussion will adopt a cognitive account. Readers who prefer an autonomist approach should feel free to consider the correlates of the present account within autonomism. There initially appear to be problems with both approaches. For example, they both have difficulties limiting what might count as an allusion. It seems impossible to differentiate allusion from independent convergence if the relations among texts or between texts and facts are simply autonomous. For example, what prevents some parallelism in Ulysses from ‘alluding to’ the discussion of parallelism in Liu, if we do not require that Joyce have some direct or indirect connection with Liu’s discussion? The problem for the cognitive approach goes in the opposite direction, given that allusive connections can be unconscious. For example, an author may derive a scene in a novel from some trivial experience that not even the most meticulous biographer would ever discover. We would not want to count this as an allusion. In the case of the cognitivist problem, however, a solution may be found in the isolation of parameters.

In the cognitive view adopted here, textual interrelations involve the following components. Framing the entire event, there is an author or speaker and a reader or listener. Within that communicative frame, there are at least two texts. Most obviously, there is the target or recipient text, the work composed by the author and read by the reader. Second, there is the source, some precursor. Finally, there is some sort of mapping relation between the source text and the target text. For example, in the simplest case, the mapping is a matter of quotation. Joyce quotes Yeats and thus ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ has a mapping relation of quotation to Ulysses – quotation that does not occur autonomously, but is made by Joyce and recognised by readers. The preceding points may be summarised in the simple diagram:

The section in square brackets is governed by the cognitive and affective processes of the persons outside the brackets (author and reader), with the former (roughly) producing textual interrelations and the latter (roughly) recognising (or not recognising) them.

The key variables in textual interrelations may be defined based on the source/mapping/target division. First, the crucial parameter for the source text is socially distinctive versus non-distinctive. There are some textual interrelations that bear on a unique source or limited number of sources. The lines from ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ have one or two unique sources (the song in The Countess Cathleen and the poem in The Rose). In contrast, ‘letting the cat out of the bag’ has no socially distinctive source. Note that the important issue here is the socially distinctive source, not the contingent source encountered by the author. For example, Joyce may have learned the expression ‘let the cat out of the bag’ from his father, who perhaps used it frequently. He may have come upon the connection between ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ and The Countess Cathleen in a review of the play. In both cases, the key textual interrelation, however, is to the socially available source – common usage, in one case; the play, in the other case.

It is worth pausing for a moment to say how this may be the case. As an author is composing a work, he or she is continually evaluating and adjusting it in light of a simulated audience. That simulated audience would not be aware of the author’s idiosyncratic background. Rather, they would be aware of socially available texts. The author does not have to reason out any of this. Rather, he or she judges that the text will or will not produce the desired effect on readers. If an author is successful, that intuitive judgement will, in general, tacitly incorporate the relevant social adjustment. This simulated, receptive response may be identified as the implied author. (The idea is discussed at length in Hogan Reference Hogan2013.) Thus, for the biographical author, ‘letting the cat out of the bag’ may be linked with a distinctive (autobiographical) source. However, for the implied author, it would not – and the implied author is the relevant norm here.

It is also important to distinguish different types of non-distinctive source. One is culturally specific. The other is universal. Sources of the second type are a matter of the operation of the human mind, principles of social dynamics, and/or other cross-cultural factors. The universal genres, such as romantic tragi-comedy, would fall into this group.

A second key parameter concerns the extent of correlates between the source and the target. This is not a simple, bivalent parameter, since there are innumerable degrees of correlational extent. However, there does seem to be a broad difference between highly localised and more extended correlations. Joyce’s citation of ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ is highly localised, whereas his use of the story of the Fall is extended across the text. Note that this is not the same as relevance. The story of Fergus is the story of a king who gave up his kingship and whom Yeats characterised as ‘the poet’ of one main cycle of Irish myth (quoted in Rosenthal Reference Rosenthal and Rosenthal1962: 237). The poem may be taken to ask who accompanies the poet, rather than the king, and to extend the novel’s imagistic connections between poets (such as Milton) and the sea. Both have relevance at various points (e.g. Bloom literally goes with the poet, parting from the King’s soldier). However, the precise correlates, the incorporations of the source into the target, are limited to the quotations.

Commonly, the more limited correlates are a matter of direct borrowing, the transfer of some element from the source to the target. This element may be a phrase, as in the case of Joyce and Yeats. However, it may equally be a character trait, a particular plot event, or even a feature of narrative discourse. In contrast, the more extended correlations may be a matter of a principle, rather than an element. In other words, they may result from the recipient author taking over a way of generating events from the precursor author. For example, one technique used by Flaubert involves contrasting unrealistic romances with a more realistic depiction of actual conditions, interpersonal or political. Joyce may be seen as taking up this technique in the ‘Cyclops’ and ‘Nausicaa’ chapters. In the former, he contrasts the actual conditions of an Irish patriot (or pseudo-patriot) with the mythologising rhetoric associated with some political and cultural writing of the period. In ‘Nausicaa’, he contrasts the actual conditions of a young Irish girl with some of the romantic writing of the period. In this way, there are extensive textual interrelations between Ulysses and some of Flaubert’s works. However, the interrelations are a matter of assimilated principles rather than specific borrowings.

A final, crucial parameter concerns the process of mapping. Again, the author evaluates and revises the work based in part on a tacit, ongoing simulation of the response of an audience. In some cases, the source will be integrated into that response. In other cases, it will be absent from that response. Note that this is not the same as being self-conscious or unselfconscious. The presence of a precursor text may be integrated into an author’s receptive evaluation of a work, and a reader’s response to the work, without either thinking self-consciously that there is, say, a specific allusion. For example, I suspect that many Indian viewers of Deepa Mehta’s Water find their response to the film enhanced by its subtle use of Kṛṣṇa/Rādhā iconography. However, caught up in the events of the film, I suspect that most of them do not remark self-consciously on the presence of that iconography.

Based on these parameters, we may generate a set of alternatives for textual interrelations, shown in Table 9.1. ‘Absent’ here means ‘absent from receptive response,’ whereas ‘integrated’ means ‘integrated into receptive response.’ ‘U’ and ‘C’ mark universal and culturally specific (non-distinctive) sources respectively. Given their nature, universal sources (e.g. cross-cultural genres) are almost necessarily of the ‘absent’ variety. They are part of the way we think more than something we might reference. Manipulating the three parameters adds models to the tripartite division discussed above and distinguishes between broadly cultural and distinctively literary textual interrelations. It also allows us to link particular forms of textual interrelations more closely with Fryean archetypes and with ideology, hewing a bit closer to the usual Marxist account.

Table 9.1 Alternatives for textual interrelations

For simplicity, I have left out some distinctions. Perhaps most significantly, in referring to ‘integrated’ and ‘absent’ sources, I have taken the implied author as the standard. This of course leaves out the literary critic, who may seek any type of source, from influence to biography. It also leaves out the real reader. This is perhaps not so crucial when the real reader is idiosyncratic. However, there are some cases where the response of the real reader is theoretically important. Perhaps the clearest case of this is with influence. Authors are perhaps more likely to exclude their influences from consideration, even in cases where the influence is clear to readers. Indeed, this suggests the truth in Harold Bloom’s famous account of influence (Bloom Reference Bloom1973). Influence is likely to give rise to a degree of anxiety and misreading in authors, depending on the extent of the influence. However, it seems that authors do not so much misread their precursors as misread themselves.

A note on the functions of textual interrelation

Here one might reasonably ask: what is the point of isolating textual interrelations? In fact, there are many reasons to define and describe these connections, just as there are many reasons for authors to employ them initially. Due to constraints of space, it is possible only to sketch these briefly, based on the preceding organisation.

First, we may consider the ‘absent’ relations, comprising cultural intertextuality and influence, literary intertextuality and influence, and universal motifs and structures. As Kristeva’s comments suggest, cultural intertextuality is likely to be the most pervasive and thus the most consequential for our thinking and response, not only to texts but also to the world. In such intertextuality, the source is absent precisely because the repeated pattern seems natural. To take a simple case, an author may draw extensively on cultural commonplaces about gender. However, there is a great difference between alluding to these commonplaces and drawing them into the work intertextually. In the former case, there is at least the possibility of establishing a critical attitude. If the source is genuinely absent from authorial and readerly response, however, such a critical attitude seems impossible, or at least far less likely. In the case of distinctively literary sources, the importance of studying absent sources would seem to be primarily a matter of understanding the organisation of literature generally (Frye’s project) as well as the operation of influence, itself part of the more encompassing project of understanding human creativity. The study of universal sources, finally, is of considerable significance for understanding the human mind. Both literary and universal sources may have ideological implications as well.

The study of integrated sources is more clearly connected with the implicit goals of the author. These generally involve fostering certain sorts of emotional response and communicating political or social themes. Thus Joyce’s integration of lines from ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ may bring some of the pathos of Yeats’s play into the reader’s response to Stephen’s mourning over his mother. Moreover, it may bear on the political concerns of the novel, including to its rather critical attitude toward the anti-colonial mythologisation of the Irish past.

Allusion and modelling may also operate to fill in different aspects of the story world or to alter aspects of discourse. For example, as to the story world, the modelling of Blazes Boylan on Satan may serve to suggest his insincerity and Molly’s likely disappointment in his subsequent behaviour, reinforcing literal suggestions elsewhere. As to discourse, allusion and modelling may serve to distinguish distinct implied readers, as when an author aims a text simultaneously at two separate groups. An extreme case of this comes in politically dissident works. Such works may avoid government prosecution through the use of textual interrelations that are obscure to government censors but evident to the distinct implied readership of government opponents. Sargent cites a case of this sort from thirteenth-century China. ‘In response to the desecration of the Sung royal tombs at the direction of the Mongols’, he explains, some poets included ‘allusions to earlier poems, and historical allusions to build up a recurring pattern of references that covertly point to objects associated with the imperial corpses and their fate.’ These textual interrelations served ‘the purpose of expressing moral outrage’ (Sargent Reference Sargent and Mair2001: 331) – or, more exactly, they served this purpose for one set of implied readers while being inconsequential for another.

Two examples

Khushwant Singh’s 1956 novel, Train to Pakistan, concerns violence between Sikhs and Hindus, on the one hand, and Muslims, on the other, at the time of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. One of the main characters in the novel is a young Sikh man, Jugga. He is a petty criminal and often in jail. He is in love with Nooran, the daughter of the mullah at the local mosque. This love, which crosses communal boundaries, is ultimately what saves the local Muslims from destruction at the hands of the local Sikh majority.

At one point in the novel, the village leaders determine that the Muslims must leave the village the following day. Jugga is in jail at this point, in this case for a crime he did not commit. The pregnant Nooran goes to Jugga’s family home. At first Jugga’s mother rejects her, asking, ‘What relation are you to us?’ Nooran explains that ‘Jugga has promised to marry me.’ Jugga’s mother dismisses the idea and insults Nooran. Nooran goes ‘down on her knees, clasp[s] the old woman’s legs and [begins] to sob’ (Singh Reference Singh1989: 130). The mother’s attitude changes only when she hears of Nooran’s pregnancy. She then promises that Jugga will come and get her when he is released from prison. Nooran then feels ‘as if she belonged to the house and the house to her’ (131).

This scene derives from one of the most moving scenes in Premchand’s (Reference Premchand2004) Godān, a paradigmatic work of Hindi fiction published originally in 1936. Gobar, a peasant youth, has fallen in love with and impregnated Jhuniyā – a forbidden mate, due to her status as a widow. He promises to marry her, but he abandons her at the last moment. She goes to Gobar’s parents. Though they reject her initially, she throws herself at his father’s feet, weeping and begging that they kill her rather than sending her away. This softens his heart and he addresses her as ‘daughter’, telling her, ‘It’s your house’ and ‘we are yours’ or ‘you are one of us’ (2004: 152, my translation). The parallels between the two scenes seem fairly clear. Thus this is a candidate for modelling. However, the parallels are probably not salient for most readers, and perhaps were not salient for Singh himself. Thus it seems more likely that this is, instead, a case of influence, one of many affecting the novel.

Singh set out to simulate a relation of forbidden love leading to separation. In doing this, he followed the cross-cultural romantic prototype, specifying it with respect to features of scene, society and character. The separation is a variant of the usual romantic structure, where the lover is often exiled. Singh’s shift here is to exile the woman, rather than the man, and to exile her entire community – a shift entailed by the conditions in which he re-imagined the romantic prototype (specifically, the location of the events in Indian Punjab at the time of partition). The pregnancy is perhaps a more common feature in the Indian tradition, as the abandonment of a pregnant beloved occurs in such paradigmatic works as The Rāmāyaṇa and Abhijñānaśākuntalam. Thus we see both the levels of universality and unselfconscious intertextuality or culture in this development. The specific scene of the young woman going to the home of the prospective in-laws, however, appears to be taken from Premchand.

Specifically, it seems likely that when Singh thought of such a scene, the most prominent instance in his memory was that of Jhuniyā and Gobar’s parents. This perhaps implicit, perhaps explicit memory served to guide his simulation of what Nooran would do, how Jugga’s mother would react, and what Nooran’s final feeling about the house would be. Even more importantly, it served as a standard against which he could judge whether or not his scene produced the ‘right’ response – the sort of empathy produced by Premchand’s scene. Indeed, a partial culmination of the scene in Godān comes when Jhuniyā calls Gobar’s parents ‘bāp’ and ‘mā’ (Reference Premchand2004: 153, papa and ma). At the culmination of Singh’s scene, Nooran leaves Jugga’s mother and, instead of the Muslim salutation, she uses the Sikh version, ‘Sat Sri Akal’ (Reference Singh1989: 132). Though semantically very different, the emotional impact is similar. Both suggest an overflowing of attachment that makes the beloved’s family an object of deep love and respect. That feeling is presumably something that Singh carried over from Premchand as well.

An in some ways more complicated case may be found in the paradigmatic romantic tragi-comedy of Sanskrit literature, Abhijñānaśākuntalam (Kālidāsa Reference Kālidāsa and Kale1969, from the fourth century). The story concerns a king, Duṣyanta, and a young girl, Śakuntalā, who fall in love and marry informally in a hermitage. The king returns to his kingdom promising to send for Śakuntalā. In the brief interim, Śakuntalā inadvertently insults a visiting sage who, in keeping with conventions of Sanskrit literature, curses her. The curse is that her beloved will not recognise her. When the pregnant Śakuntalā goes to the king on her own, he indeed does not recognise her. He goes on to revile her as a schemer and to criticise women generally. Śakuntalā then calls on the earth to open and receive her in death. She is led off stage and it is subsequently reported that Śakuntalā’s mother, a celestial being, has taken Śakuntalā up into heaven. Years later, when Duṣyanta’s memory is restored, he meets his son, then Śakuntalā herself, and the family is reunited.

Here we see several levels of textual interrelation. As already noted, there is the intertextual motif of the curse. This is part of the literary culture, whether or not it was part of the everyday culture of the time. Some aspects of the curse motif were almost certainly confined to literature – an important point for recognising that literary conventions do not invariably have ideological consequences. We also have a variation on the cross-cultural romantic plot in which social authorities interfere in the romantic union of the lovers, preventing their union. (For a fuller discussion of this and other points, see Hogan Reference Hogan2011a: 165–81).

More significantly for the present analysis is the relation of the story to events in the ‘Uttara Kāṇḍa’ of Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa. There are many connections between the two works. Some are likely to be noticed only by experts in the Rāmāyaṇa. But others are almost obtrusive. In any case, the connections are clear enough that they were almost certainly integrated into Kālidāsa’s receptive intention. In other words, he almost certainly expected his readers to connect the events in Abhijñānaśākuntalam with parallel events in the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa. Specifically, in the final canto of the epic, Rāma is faced with public scandal over his wife, Sītā, having lived in the home of another man, where she had been abducted. In consequence, Rāma has Sītā taken away and abandoned in the wilderness when she is pregnant. Years later, he meets his sons, then Sītā. He agrees to accept her back ‘if she should be again shown to be unpolluted before all the world’ (Vālmīki Reference Vālmīki and Raghunathan1982: 606) by passing unharmed through fire. Sītā calls on her mother the earth to receive her. The earth opens and Sītā descends, leaving the realm of human life.

The relation of these scenes nicely illustrates a particular form of self-conscious modelling. Kālidāsa was clearly guided by the Rāmāyaṇa in his treatment of Śakuntalā’s dilemma. Moreover, he followed the source closely enough that any reader in that literary and religious tradition would be likely to recognise the relation. Kālidāsa’s alterations tell us something about the way the human mind works in varying such source models. For example, the shift from earth to heaven suggests that proximity of semantic association is involved in such transformations. Though heaven and earth are opposed, they are closely linked in most people’s mental lexicons. A similar point holds for the change from self-conscious rejection (by Rāma) to unselfconscious rejection (by Duṣyanta). A more subtle alteration is the one from the popular denunciation of Sītā to Dusyanta’s sexist comments on women in general and Śakuntalā in particular. This is a change from the coercive force of patriarchal social structure to the ideology that serves to rationalise that force and structure.

More significantly, the modelling has thematic and emotional purposes. Of course, the work is not entirely unequivocal on these points. But the most likely possibility seems to be that Kālidāsa is taking part in a long tradition of revising or responding to, even criticising the Rāmāyaṇa (see Richman Reference Richman1991). He is taking up a problematic part of the great epic – Rāma’s abandonment of Sītā – and reworking it. But, if the work does indeed have something like a critical purpose, that changes the way that the textual interrelation operates. Commonly, the source text functions to affect our response to the current text, as knowledge of Premchand might affect a reader’s response to Singh’s novel. But in cases of critical or ideologically resistant revision, the direction of the primary effect is reversed. The point of a critical revision of the Rāmāyaṇa is to affect the reader’s or audience member’s understanding of and emotional response to the Rāmāyaṇa. Thus the functions of intertextual modelling may move not only from source to target, but from the target (the later work) to the source (the earlier work). In this way, it is possible to think of some cases of intertextual modelling as ‘counter-ideologemes’ or at least as opposed to dominant ideology.

Conclusion

Intertextuality and allusion are clearly important concepts. However, they are vague as technical terms as well as being inadequate to treat textual interrelations, even when supplemented by the notion of influence. In order to solve this problem, we may distinguish several parameters of such interrelations. The first parameter concerns whether the source is or is not distinctive. There is a sub-parameter here which concerns whether the non-distinctive source is cultural or universal. The second concerns whether the correlates (or incorporations) are limited or extensive. The third concerns whether or not the textual interrelation is or is not part of the response of the implied author and the implied reader. These parameters yield a set of textual interrelations that adds modelling and that differentiates sub-types of all four kinds of interrelation (i.e. intertextuality, allusion, influence and modelling). These various kinds of textual interrelation serve different purposes. Some bear only on critical practices, such as the study of literary creation or the critique of ideology. Others, however, are important for our understanding of story and discourse, our inference of themes and our emotional response. Finally, the concluding examples show that textual interrelations are often highly complex, combining different sorts of connection and different types of function. Indeed, in some forms of textual interrelation, the new text is not only the target, but a source for re-understanding and re-evaluating the prior text. This seems to be particularly the case in ideologically critical revision of culturally paradigmatic works.

Authorial intention: the debates

For much of literary history, writers believed that the meaning of their work was inseparable from their intention; in other words, that in order to fully grasp the meaning of a text one had to uncover the intention of its author. It was in the formalist vein of analysis that intention itself became a radical problem, particularly with Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essay ‘The intentional fallacy’ (Reference Wimsatt, Beardsley and Wimsatt1954). In this chapter I trace the main arguments for and against intentionality and its inclusion in, or exclusion from, critical paradigms. I also present a stylistic case-study of authorial intention.

While the assumption that intention and meaning are somehow inseparable has been regarded as natural, this is not to say that authorial intent did not enter the critical consciousness of classical and medieval authors. ‘The extent to which the earlier criticism, at least until Aristotle’s Poetics, de-emphasises authorial intent and tends to interpret poetry as contained solely within the text’, because it ‘is thought of as resulting from inspiration by a god’ is singled out by modern commentators as an ‘especially striking’ phenomenon, one that shows that ‘Classical criticism anticipated features of such twentieth-century developments as semiotics, hermeneutics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and reader response criticism’ (G. Kennedy Reference Kennedy1997: xi).

For Plato and Socrates the divinely inspired poet may not be capable of understanding the meaning of his poem: ‘since poetry as such is not thought and feeling but the performance of thoughts and feelings, the poet or performer need have no proper understanding of what he says, but may as it were be aping the appropriate words’ (Ferrari Reference Ferrari and Kennedy1997: 104). Ferrari’s modern attempt to rescue Plato from the contradiction posed by the invocation of authorial intention in some dialogues and the banished inferior status of poets proclaimed in others, when he says that ‘it is not what the author but what the work “intends” that the Athenian insists we should know’ (Ferrari Reference Ferrari and Kennedy1997: 107), cannot detract from the fact that intention is very much a guarantor of meaning in Plato, albeit meaning as properly understood by the purveyors of truth, the philosophers. In some of the earlier dialogues Socrates seems to explicitly invoke the poet’s meaning for a proper understanding and interpretation of a poem, as when challenged by Protagoras that a poem contains a contradiction, he suggests that they should consider ‘what the poet meant’ (Ferrari Reference Ferrari and Kennedy1997: 100), or when he urges Protagoras to abandon poems in their discussion because ‘Simonides cannot answer him back’ (Ferrari Reference Ferrari and Kennedy1997: 102).

The work of Aristotle spells out clearly a distinction between rhetoric and poetics. According to Halliwell, Aristotle’s Rhetoric ‘can be turned inside out to provide a system of rhetorical criticism’ and if this is done, ‘the basis of critical judgement becomes authorial intent and how that is transmitted by artistic techniques through the text to the audience’ (Reference Halliwell1986: 191). But it is not so, Halliwell claims, in the poetic text, where ‘a poet, according to Aristotle, should speak in his own person as little as possible’ and should not manipulate the text ‘to give it topical meaning’ (Reference Halliwell1986: 191). This suggests that an advanced understanding of polyvocality is already present in Aristotle’s poetic theory where rhetorical input is only allowed in the speeches of characters, and not in the direct expression of the author’s own views. The three elements of Aristotelian rhetoric – ‘logical argument, the impression of the speaker’s moral character (ēthos) . . . and the awakening of emotion (pathos)’ (Halliwell Reference Halliwell1986: 191) – presuppose the importance of authorial intent, which should be included under ethos as an important factor in establishing the ethical stance of the author. That is why the standard characteristics of Aristotle’s rhetoric are ‘authorial intent as the basis of criticism, teaching of a method of composition applicable to varied situations but within a standardised notion of oratorical genre and form, interest in argumentation, character portrayal, and emotion’ (Halliwell Reference Halliwell1986: 191). The excellence of a rhetorical argument, then, is firmly based in authorial intent and moral character.

The medieval tradition leaves us in no doubt that intentio auctoris (intentio scribentis) is a basic component of meaning. This tradition goes back at least to fourth-century grammarians, who are quite explicit on this point. The prologue to the Aeneid, attributed to Servius, states that

The 6^th-century philosopher Boethius considered vital the following: ‘the intention of the work (operis intentio)’; ‘its usefulness (utilitas)’; ‘its order (ordo)’; its genuineness; ‘the title of the work (operis inscriptio)’; the part of philosophy to which it pertains’ (Minnis Reference Minnis2010: 18).

The role that intention plays in determining meaning is captured in the apt metaphor of a twelfth-century scholastic philosopher:

Significantly, Dominicus Gundissalinus worked in the Toledo School of Translators who in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries undertook to translate philosophical works of Arabic, Greek and Hebrew provenance. His insistence on the importance of intention derives from a practical engagement with the interpretation of linguistic meaning.

Gesturing towards twentieth-century reader response theories, Montaigne, the Renaissance thinker of subjectivity par excellence, says in 1580 that both in writing and in painting poetic touches slip from the hand of the artist to surprise even himself, and that

This brief historical sketch shows that the issue of authorial intention is not ‘new’ with the New Critics. To properly understand Wimsatt and Beardsley’s position we need first to understand two aspects of historical context. The first is what it reacts against; the second, the period of literary history that has produced it. Wimsatt and Beardsley make it clear that intentionalist criticism and ‘the intentional fallacy’ are romantic notions – romantic as pertaining to a specific historical period and in a figurative sense – and they insist that all the ‘romantic corollaries’ of the ‘intentional fallacy’ should be questioned because ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art’ (Reference Wimsatt, Beardsley and Wimsatt1954: 3). Their understanding of intention is as a ‘design or plan in the author’s mind’ (Reference Wimsatt, Beardsley and Wimsatt1954: 4). They align the two camps of intentionalists and anti-intentionalists with ‘the polar opposites of classical “imitation” and romantic expression’ (Reference Wimsatt, Beardsley and Wimsatt1954: 3), thus firmly positioning their arguments in the history of this perennial debate and endorsing, if anything, Plato’s ‘reiterated mistrust of the poets’ (Reference Wimsatt, Beardsley and Wimsatt1954: 7).

The romantic enchantment with the author as uniquely inspired original genius is shown by Wimsatt and Beardsley (Reference Wimsatt, Beardsley and Wimsatt1954: 6) to run through history. This insistence on the importance of the author’s personality and experience is spelled out by more recent critics who claim that ‘Romantic thinkers working in aesthetics and poetics . . . didn’t look at the literary work as essentially a completed written text but as the vital embodiment of the expression of an author’s spiritual individuality and uniquely personal creative experience’ (Mitscherling et al. Reference Mitscherling, DiTommaso and Nayed2004: 39). When this outlook is adopted, ‘we get a new conception both of the author’s intention and of the reader’s understanding of that intention: the author’s intention is identified as the psychic experiences, especially the emotional experiences, undergone during the actual writing of the text, and the understanding of this intention consists in the reader’s re-experiencing of these experiences, the experiencing of the identical “psychic states”’ (Mitscherling et al. Reference Mitscherling, DiTommaso and Nayed2004: 39).

The main quarrel of Wimsatt and Beardsley with romantic intentionalism has to do with ‘the use of biographical evidence’, which if used wisely may ‘be evidence of the meaning of [an author’s] words’ (Reference Wimsatt, Beardsley and Wimsatt1954: 11), but if misused may detract from the meaning of the work and result in ‘danger of confusing personal and poetic studies’ and in ‘writing the personal as if it were poetic’ (Reference Wimsatt, Beardsley and Wimsatt1954: 10). In Wimsatt and Beardsley’s manifesto for a language-based interpretative criticism, the true poetic approach to the literary work is to treat it as a self-contained whole and to analyse its language as the primary evidence of its meaning. Their insistence on the centrality of language in literary interpretation belongs to a line of Formalist criticism which was crystallised in Shklovsky’s dictum of 1917 that ‘The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception’, because ‘art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony’ (Shklovsky Reference Shklovsky, Lemon and Reiss1965: 12); in other words, the aesthetic value of art is not in its particular content or in the images portrayed. Rather its significance lies in verbal technique.

It is not coincidental that Wimsatt and Beardsley’s position is voiced contemporaneously with, or shortly after, the heyday of literary modernism. For Eysteinsson, ‘Modernism, in its rejection of traditional social representation and in its heightening of formal awareness, would seem the ideal example of the New Critical view of the poem as an isolated whole, whose unity is based on internal tensions that perhaps remain unresolved but nonetheless do not disturb the autonomy of the work’ (Reference Eysteinsson1990: 11–12). Accordingly, this new vein of criticism is due in no small part to the fact that ‘Many Modernists have to a great extent shared the “purist” views of formalists and New Critics, and have even forcefully uttered ahistorical notions of poetic autonomy in their essays and other commentaries’ (Eysteinsson Reference Eysteinsson1990: 11–12). It is the formal innovations of modernism that facilitate the ahistorical and anti-intentionalist stance in criticism.

The formalist and structuralist attempts to explicate technique and linguistic construction, when taken to their (un)natural conclusion, have resulted in the extremes of post-structuralist anti-intentionalism. Famously proclaimed originally in 1969 by Foucault (Reference Foucault and Rabinow1984), ‘the death of the author’ became a slogan adopted by the Barthesian school (Barthes Reference Barthes and Heath1977). The thrust of the poststructuralist argument for expurgating the author from the text rests on a newly developed understanding of language not as a means of the expression of individuality, but as already inhabited by other discourses, including the politically tainted ones of ideological dominance. If the writer does not possess language, language utters and articulates the subject and beyond the utterance there is no subjectivity, just void: ‘the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence’ (Foucault (Reference Foucault and Rabinow1984: 102). While the claims of poststructuralist thinkers would be perceived by many as ‘counter-intuitive’, some of their political value has to be acknowledged. The dethroning of the author is seen by Barthes (Reference Barthes and Heath1977) as an important move in shattering authority more generally, including the authority of the author.

The New Critical and Formalist positions on how most properly to conduct criticism and interpretation and where to locate textual meaning were challenged no sooner than they were first formulated. Hirsch (Reference Hirsch1967, Reference Hirsch and de Molina1976) has persistently argued that ‘once the author had been ruthlessly banished as the determiner of his text’s meaning, it gradually appeared that no adequate principle existed for judging the validity of an interpretation’ (Reference Hirsch and Iseminger1992: 12). Hirsch locates the linguistic and anti-intentionalist trend in criticism in the modernist practices of criticism and writing: ‘In the earliest and most decisive wave of the attack (launched by Eliot, Pound, and their associates), the battleground was literary: the proposition that textual meaning is independent of the author’s control was associated with the literary doctrine that the best poetry is impersonal, objective, and autonomous’ (Reference Hirsch and Iseminger1992: 11). Eradicating the author as the final guarantor of meaning results in locating meaning with the reader. For Hirsch, ‘as soon as the reader’s outlook is permitted to determine what a text means, we have not simply a changing meaning but quite possibly as many meanings as readers’, and allowing this potential multiplicity of interpretations and giving them all validity is ‘a reductio ad absurdum’, ultimately denying any objectivity in interpretation (Reference Hirsch and de Molina1976: 29). But, he insists, ‘if criticism is to be objective in any significant sense, it must be founded on a self-critical construction of textual meaning, which is to say, on objective interpretation’ (Reference Hirsch and de Molina1976: 27). This objectivity in interpretation is only possible if the critic or reader in the act of interpretation tries to reconstruct as closely as possible the author’s meaning: ‘objectivity in textual interpretation requires explicit reference to the speaker’s subjectivity’ (Hirsch Reference Hirsch and de Molina1976: 48). The counter-argument, that meaning can be determined linguistically and thus that paying close attention to the text’s language would allow for objectivity in interpretation, is considered by Hirsch to be nothing more than ‘open[ing] the door to subjectivism and relativism, since linguistic norms may be invoked to support any verbally possible meaning’ (Reference Hirsch and Iseminger1992: 18).

That the argument surrounding intentionality is alive and well today is witnessed by two recent publications by Mitscherling et al. (Reference Mitscherling, DiTommaso and Nayed2004) and K. Mitchell (Reference Mitchell2008). Mitchell’s claims in particular, formulated in the wake of Derrida (Reference Derrida1997), put forward an anti-theory of intentionality in which ‘intention and subjectivity need not be so facilely run together’ and according to which it might be possible to ‘conceive of some intention after the subject’ which ‘entails the re-conceptualisation of intention as material, linguistic, textual (of the text) rather than mental, subjective (of the subject)’ (2008: 114). This, according to her, ‘will open up the possibility of an “ethics” of the text, in contrast to the limited anthropocentric ethics of Hirsch’ (K. Mitchell Reference Mitchell2008: 114). Thus, Mitchell’s argument tries to save intention not by locating it with the subject of the author, but by attributing it to the sheer textuality of a literary work, which for the deconstructionist critic is apparently capable of generating meanings by the very nature of the linguistic sign.

More recently cognitive narratologists in their drive towards a ‘natural’ narratology have tried to reinstate authorial intention as a vital part of any critical discussion. David Herman (Reference Herman2008) has argued that we have to accept as natural the human propensity to attribute meaningful intentions to any piece of language, including written and literary language. The formulations of such claims, albeit couched in unnatural terms, state that ‘humans approach one another . . . as intentional systems, that is as constellations of actions whose behavior can be explained and predicted by [a] method of attributing beliefs, desires, and rational acumen’ (D. Herman Reference Herman2008: 237). Herman illustrates this natural inclination of readers with an analysis of deixis, asserting that ‘shifts among deictic centers are assumed to be motivated; that is, readers assume that a communicative intention of some kind drives the filtering of the action through a particular center, the shifts from one center to another, and the combined effect of sequences of shifts as a narrative unfolds’ (Reference Herman2008: 250).

It seems to me that by this rationale any linguistic choice made by an author can be said to be motivated and so conveys some communicative intention. Why deixis places a particular demand on the reader to invoke authorial meaning and intention is encapsulated in its strong dependence on the spatio-temporal positioning of the speaker and its strong affinities with spoken discourse where context and gesture help the hearer to construe its meaning. I have argued (Sotirova Reference Sotirova2010) that deixis requires the joint participation of author and reader in the construction of meaning. Thus, as a linguistic feature, its decipherment is dependent on a dialogical model of narrative that works through analogy with spoken discourse. Crucially, this theoretical model places authorial intention at the heart of interpretation.

It is, then, possible to integrate authorial intention in the interpretation of literary texts while also retaining the rigour of a linguistic analysis. The accusation that linguistic criticism, having its roots in Russian Formalism, has impoverished literary interpretation with its exclusive focus on the text is ill-founded. Many stylistic studies of literary texts demonstrate this union of form and content through close integration of the historical and cultural milieu of text production in the linguistic analysis. As part of this historical and cultural purview, authorial intent is not necessarily located outside of a linguistic argument. Or, to put it differently, the set of principles that define the stylistic study of literary texts (rigour, objectivity, replicability, empiricism and falsifiability, as outlined by Jeffries and McIntyre Reference Jeffries and McIntyre2010: 22–4), are sometimes necessarily bolstered by the consideration given to authorial intention.

In the next section I will demonstrate how one can uncover authorial intention stylistically by tracing the revisions introduced by Virginia Woolf on early versions of the opening of her 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway (Woolf Reference Woolf1969). I show how literary intention can be brought back into our discussion and interpretation of literature without thereby compromising the accuracy of the linguistic analysis that formalism can offer. In other words, my attempt here will be to bring together the two irreconcilable foes of literary study: literary intention and formalist precision.

Intention and re-vision

It is not possible to talk about authorial revisions without making reference to the author. Authorial agency is nowhere more clearly visible than in the construction of a final text from early drafts. Grammar alone forces us to mention the author as agent, and the analysis of authorial revisions must necessarily account for intention and rationale in the changes introduced. What revisions reveal is that authors are thinking beings whose intentional meaning as expressed in words is subject to a re-visionary process. This process need not necessarily be fully consciously grasped, but it is nevertheless a process of production which shows that aesthetic aims are not always fully realised in first drafts and that they involve some careful consideration. As Redpath observes: ‘when a poet changes expressions in a poem during revision, is that not sometimes because he considers that the words he is rejecting do not express as well as the new words, what he meant?’ (Reference Redpath and de Molina1976: 15).

One might object that when revisions take place after a longer period of time their execution is merely testimony to a development in the author’s aesthetic vision. While it is possible that this might be the case, more often revisions do not radically alter the work as initially conceived; they tend to intensify techniques already present, themes already established. Revisions are most often stylistic, rather than about plot or event, and their careful unpacking can offer evidence for an interpretation that is based on a linguistic analysis, at the same time as the linguistic analysis can illuminate their meaning in the overall conception of the work.

Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway is, according to the editor of its earlier version ‘The Hours’, ‘not “final”, but is created from constant dialogue as it speaks to and out of its associate texts’ (Wussow Reference Wussow2010: ix). These are: Woolf’s short stories ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ and ‘The Prime Minister’ written in 1922, which ‘together are the first textual layer of Mrs Dalloway’ (Wussow Reference Wussow2010: ix–x); an early notebook from 1922 which contains notes on the composition of ‘The Hours’ and part of its opening section; and, the complete manuscript of ‘The Hours’, begun in June 1923 and completed in October 1924. The English edition of the book from 1925 is based on a set of page proofs, now lost, but containing Woolf’s latest revisions.

The dialogic formation of the published text, as Wussow describes it, does not preclude the presence of authorial intention in the composition of the text. Even if the text of Mrs Dalloway is not final, the linguistic forging of Woolf’s technique still bears testimony to an aesthetic ideal that is pursued through different versions of the text. My exploration of Woolf’s revisions and their impact on the portrayal of narrative viewpoint will focus on ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, which will be compared to the opening of the finished text of the English edition. That Woolf intended to insert this earlier material in the opening of Mrs Dalloway is proved by the fact that in her 1923 manuscript of ‘The Hours’, after a very short unnumbered section at the beginning of the first notebook, she begins a new section of the book and numbers it: III. The missing parts of the opening, then, are the short stories describing Mrs Dalloway’s early morning stroll around London and the episode recounting Peter Walsh’s and Clarissa’s meeting at her house, which was written in the notebook from 1922 (Wussow Reference Wussow2010).

The first significant difference between the opening of the short story ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ and the published novel is found in the two passages shown in Figure 10.1. Passage (A) contains a cluster of present-tense verbs that do not stem from the direct thought of the character, but are rather the authorial present used in ‘aphoristic generic sentences’ (R. Fowler Reference Fowler1977: 86). The generalising meaning of the first-person plural pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ confirms this interpretation, as do generic statements of the kind ‘there is nothing to take the place of childhood’. Authorial present, as Fowler explains, is the vehicle of narrative authority, which is why ‘the generic sentence is a regular tell-tale of the intrusive, assertive, author’; its ‘moralistic and authoritarian connotations’ (R. Fowler Reference Fowler1977: 86) make it a favoured device by ‘outspoken, sententious writers’ (R. Fowler Reference Fowler1977: 89). What we see here then is Woolf adopting a narratorial position that is consistent with an earlier tradition – that of nineteenth-century realism.

Figure 10.1: Comparison of extracts from ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ and Mrs Dalloway (Woolf Reference Woolf1969: 6)

The second paragraph of (A) presents a more subjectively nuanced experience of Big Ben. We find here the characteristic Woolfian disruption of perspective: the story had been oriented through Mrs Dalloway’s point of view, with some narratorial interruptions, up to this point; at the start of the new paragraph we are given an external glimpse of Mrs Dalloway through the perspective of another character. But the different perspectives are nicely contained within sentence boundaries. The sentences: ‘Big Ben struck the tenth; struck the eleventh stroke. The leaden circles dissolved in the air’, although using the past simple tense, can be aligned with Clarissa’s perception of the clock’s strokes, because of the iconic arrangement and repetition. The final sentence of this passage is most explicitly anchored in Mrs Dalloway’s consciousness, with its exclamative constructions, the use of the parenthetical ‘she thought’, the proximal temporal deictic ‘now’ and the modal verb ‘must’, which are all indices of free indirect style. So, the technique of rendering consciousness is already fully grasped by Woolf, but its execution is within traditional boundaries.

In the revised passage from the novel cited in (B) Scope Purvis’s perception of Mrs Dalloway is rendered in more complex syntax. The initial noun phrase ‘a charming woman’ is followed by the parenthetical ‘Scope Purvis thought her’ and by a non-finite clause in parentheses ‘knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster’. The perception of Scope Purvis is then resumed with two loosely connected appositional phrases: ‘a touch of the bird about her, of the jay’ and a series of adjectives and a subordinate clause that describe Mrs Dalloway. This syntactic construction layers loosely linked phrases, not always expanded into complete clauses, to make the processing of the syntax when presented in the written medium more difficult than the corresponding sentence in the short story. The perspective, although limited to that of one character, is frequently interrupted by asides, parentheses and appositions, and results in a more fragmented style that follows mimetically the meandering thought of the character.

The first sentence of the new paragraph opens with the conjunction ‘for’, ambiguously linking Clarissa’s thoughts to something which is not actually present in the prior discourse but must be part of her own inner train of thought. The main clause of this sentence (‘For having lived in Westminster . . . one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, . . . a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense . . . before Big Ben strikes’) is interrupted three times: by an aside, semantically related to the initial clause, but not syntactically integrated in the sentence (‘how many years now? over twenty’), a parenthetical (‘Clarissa was positive’) and parentheses ‘(but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza)’. The present tense of the main clause and the generic pronoun ‘one’ are here part of Clarissa’s interior monologue. The sentence structure thus mimetically follows the interruptions and digressions of spoken discourse, as well as iconically mimicking the paused expectation of the chimes of Big Ben. The passage continues in the interior monologue form with verbless clauses (‘There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable’). Another use of the conjunction ‘for’ in: ‘For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh’ poses a semantic challenge to the reader because it does not actually provide a semantic link, and is thus only loosely attached to the foregoing discourse. The causal meaning of ‘for’ is only to be inferred in relation to Clarissa’s train of thought, which is not made entirely explicit to the reader and which, by its nature of being thought, is elliptical and associative. This sentence returns to the present tense of Clarissa’s interior monologue and, as it progresses, makes use of several parallel constructions of participial clauses: ‘making it up’, ‘building it round one’, ‘tumbling it’, ‘creating it every moment afresh’. All of these are what Sylvia Adamson (Reference Adamson and Romaine1999) calls the free modifier: a construction characteristic of the style of the period which leaves the logical relationship between the non-finite clause and the main clause unspecified because of the lack of conjunction. The lack of logical coherence explains why the free modifier is favoured by modernist writers in their attempts to dismantle the logic of written language. This sentence also makes a deictic reference to something left vague in the surrounding discourse. Clarissa’s ‘it’ would be clear to her in her consciousness; to the reader, however, it emerges as a more definite reference towards the end of the next sentence, some way from its first mention when we learn what she loves: ‘life; London; this moment of June’. The colloquial omission of the subject in the clause ‘can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament’ intensifies the orality effect. The three long lists of noun phrases embedded in prepositional phrases that open the last sentence further contribute to the overall looseness and speech-like quality of the passage. The last sentence also makes another shift, less noticeable, to the past tense of free indirect style: ‘In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge . . . was what she loved.’

The revisions, introduced by Woolf in this passage, allow us to discern a marked evolution from a narrator-dominated narrative which might well belong to an earlier tradition of the point-of-view novel, towards a modernist rendition of consciousness that is syntactically more verisimilar and that does away with the voice of the authoritative narrator altogether. The experimental technique of consciousness presentation in the later passage is the result of Woolf’s radical disregard for syntactic norms in the written medium. Her intention, therefore, can be uncovered on the basis of the transformation of her earlier text: to render consciousness in a verisimilar way by approximating spoken discourse in its grammatical construction.

The next extract I will consider – Clarissa’s meeting with her friend Hugh Whitbread – illustrates another feature that disrupts the syntactic continuity of Woolf’s discourse – the embedding of one discourse within another (Figure 10.2).

Figure 10.2: Comparison of extracts from ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ and Mrs Dalloway (Woolf Reference Woolf1969: 7–8)

The main difference between the two extracts is that, in the earlier version, Woolf reports the conversation between Mrs Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread in its entirety using direct speech, whereas the later passage exhibits more complex modes of report and embedding. The complexity in the rendering of perspective in (C) is found in the syntactic construction of the paragraph following the direct-speech exchange that records Clarissa’s thoughts. The first sentence of this thought presentation contains two interruptions to its smooth syntactic surface – the parenthetical ‘she thought’, accompanied by a non-finite clause ‘walking on’ and the apposition ‘fifty, fifty-two’ which gives a sense of an internal dialogue conducted in Clarissa’s mind. The main part of the sentence ‘of course, Milly is about my age’ is thus disjointed, but not incomprehensibly so. The next sentence, more fragmented, shows Woolf’s accomplished method of transcribing consciousness. The arrangement of the first three clauses (‘So it is probably that, Hugh’s manner had said so, said it perfectly’) relies not on logical linkage with a conjunction, but on asyndetic juxtaposition. A dash makes the sentence veer off onto some new association in the form of interior monologue (‘dear old Hugh’) which is never completed, but instead the continuation of Clarissa’s thoughts is rendered in internal narration (‘remembering with amusement, with gratitude, with emotion, how shy, like a brother – one would rather die than speak to one’s brother – Hugh had always been’), only to be interrupted by another stretch of interior monologue between dashes. A further interruption to the subordinate clause (‘when he was at Oxford, and came over, and perhaps one of them (dart the thing!) couldn’t ride’) disrupts the syntactic continuity.

Woolf’s style of consciousness presentation in the short story is beginning to emerge as a complex dissolved style of orality, but its execution is not yet consistent throughout the text. When transposing the text into the novel Woolf’s revisions confirm that her authorial quest is to render consciousness in the most fragmented and verisimilar way possible by not only disrupting syntactic structures (the typical stylistic form for centuries), but by also disrupting modes of thought presentation and thereby blurring the boundaries between narratorial report of action and character thought and experience.

The presentation of Clarissa’s and Hugh Whitbread’s conversation is only partially carried out using direct speech in the later text. Most of this conversation is presented through embedding Hugh’s free indirect speech in Mrs Dalloway’s free indirect thought, thus creating more complex levels of discourse presentation. The three instances of embedding are further complicated by the method of integrating them into the surrounding discourse, a method that causes further disruption to the syntactic and stylistic coherence of the text.

The first instance of Hugh Whitbread’s words in free indirect speech (‘They had just come up – unfortunately – to see doctors. Other people came to see pictures; go to the opera; take their daughters out; the Whitbreads came “to see doctors”’) displays some features of the reporter’s discourse – Clarissa – and some that are explicitly attributed to the original speaker Hugh, thus blending the two discourses. The next instance of embedding occurs in a sentence that stems from Clarissa’s point of view: ‘Evelyn was a good deal out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by a kind of pout or swell of his very well-covered, manly, extremely handsome, perfectly upholstered body (he was almost too well dressed always, but presumably had to be, with his little job at Court) that his wife had some internal ailment, nothing serious, which, as an old friend, Clarissa Dalloway would quite understand without requiring him to specify.’ The evaluative comment on Hugh’s appearance, the mocking irony at his expense suggest that the reporter and perceiver of his words is Clarissa. This part of the sentence is subordinated to the reporting parenthetical ‘said Hugh’ and makes the whole sentence digress into a series of evaluative adjectives and a clause in parentheses. We are also given a report of the rest of Hugh’s utterance, or rather intimated utterance, in what would normally be classed as indirect speech because of the presence of a reporting verb ‘intimating’ and a subordinating conjunction ‘that’, had it not been for the fact that the reported part of this sentence veers off into a looser, colloquial style that captures Hugh’s unspoken words or perhaps rather Clarissa’s way of reporting them. Clarissa’s experiences are simultaneously recorded, as the half-spoken dialogue between her and Hugh unfolds (‘and felt very sisterly and oddly conscious at the same time of her hat’). The incongruous pair that these two sensations make attests to the associative leaps in the syntax that capture the associative leaps in Clarissa’s thoughts. In this instance of authorial revision the dismantling of the syntax is again deliberately sought in order to record character words and thoughts with a degree of orality that renders them verisimilar. The transformation of the mode of discourse presentation, from direct speech in the earlier text to free indirect speech and thought in the later, as well as the discontinuous flow of modes of presentation and the frequent shifts from one mode to another, add more layers of complexity and allow for the simultaneous rendition of Hugh’s words and Clarissa’s evaluative comment on them. This dual perspective is made possible by the greater degree of indirectness and distance which creates the space for irony.

The third embedded utterance occurs in the last sentence of the passage, and its positioning is perhaps the most intricate and unexpected syntactically. The sentence begins in free indirect style, giving us an incomplete glimpse of Clarissa’s internal reaction (‘For Hugh always made her feel, as he bustled on, raising his hat rather extravagantly and assuring her that she might be a girl of eighteen’), but we never learn how Hugh always makes her feel. The digression from the unity of the main clause in the form of three subordinate clauses is carried further in another coordinated construction which breaches the grammatical coherence of the sentence and the narrative coherence of the mode of presentation, a construction which constitutes the third embedded report of Hugh’s utterance (‘and of course he was coming to her party tonight, Evelyn absolutely insisted, only a little late he might be after the party at the Palace to which he had to take one of Jim’s boys’). This embedding of Hugh’s words within a sentence already disintegrating into a loose syntax that follows closely Clarissa’s thoughts and inner states is unmatched by anything in the earlier text of the short story. After a dash, and having lost the thread of the main clause, we return to Clarissa’s experience of how Hugh makes her feel, necessarily with what in spoken discourse might be classed as a repair (‘she always felt a little skimpy beside Hugh; schoolgirlish’). The digressions in the syntax continue for several more clauses which form the final part of the sentence (‘but attached to him, partly from having known him always, but she did think him a good sort in his own way. . .’) and which display a semantically incongruous use of two adversative conjunctions ‘but’.

Overall, then, the two passages show some similarity in the peculiarly Woolfian way of rendering consciousness, but the later passage from the novel exhibits greater complexity in the handling of syntax, a complexity that does not reside in convoluted hypotaxis, but rather manifests itself in digressions and interruptions to the grammatical coherence of sentences associated with spoken discourse. When transposed into the written medium this looseness of syntactic construction might pose problems of intelligibility. Why Woolf would be seeking deliberately to dismantle the syntactic coherence of her sentences and discourse can be explained as a gesture towards extreme mimeticism in the presentation of human consciousness with its fleeting impressions, momentary perceptions and associative leaps. Her intention, as stated in 1925, to break the linearity of syntax in order to capture fully the non-linear nature of consciousness can be uncovered and explained as part of her aesthetic aim to record ‘the atoms as they fall upon the mind’ (see McNeillie Reference McNeillie1994: 161).

One final passage recounting Clarissa’s visit to the gloves/florist’s shop when an explosion takes place will complete this comparison between the short story published in 1922 and the novel published in 1925 (Figure 10.3).

Figure 10.3: Comparison of extracts from ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ and Mrs Dalloway (Woolf Reference Woolf1969: 16)

There is nothing unusual in the expression of Clarissa’s interior monologue in (E): it uses verbless constructions to mimic the flow of inner speech, but the sentences are still grammatically coherent. The second paragraph reports in a traditional way the occurrence of the explosion using an existential construction that almost makes it too matter-of-fact, which seems to be in line with Clarissa’s measured reaction.

The breaking down of sentence structure is very apparent in the extract from the novel. The passage begins with what seems like a narrative report of action, but as the sentence progresses it becomes more and more tightly bound up with Mrs Dalloway’s experiential consciousness. Even if we ignore the sudden interruption in the form of direct speech (‘nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself’), the expressivity and deixis in the subordinate clauses (‘choosing more and more gently, as if this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting her, were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that hatred, that monster, surmount it all’) is enough to position them closer to a rendition of Mrs Dalloway’s perceptions and inner states than to the narratorial reporting voice. This blending of narrative modes, I have argued (Sotirova Reference Sotirova2013) is one of the features of the modernist writing of consciousness, perhaps most emphatically present in Woolf’s writing.

But what goes further in the experimental handling of free indirect style is the digressive and discontinuous syntactic arrangement of clauses within the sentence. We have one portion of direct discourse interrupting the flow of a non-finite clause at a most unexpected juncture (‘choosing, nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, more and more gently’) which is not only not syntactically integrated into the sentence, it does not seem to have much of a semantic relation to it either. And we have a similar discontinuous structure towards the end of the sentence where the temporal adverb ‘when’ prepares us for another subordinate clause in which we would expect a report of an action or event, only to be interrupted by the interjection ‘oh’ as if transcribing Clarissa’s perceptions as they take place. This last interruption brings the final clause of this sentence within the boundaries of Mrs Dalloway’s consciousness, thus transforming what could potentially be interpreted as a narrative report into an experiential report of events in the outside world. In contrast to the short story, here the whole narrative seems to be filtered through the experience of the character, even sentences that report her actions. This is partly achieved through the use of expressive features, such as the repetition of the adverb ‘up and up’, but mostly through the dissolution of distinct narrative modes: report of action, thought presentation in free indirect style or interior monologue, internal narration and so on, all of which result in syntactic discontinuities which in the written medium appear almost as disfluencies.

What in Woolf’s story began as a fairly traditional presentation of consciousness that mostly observes the continuity of narrative modes and the syntactic coherence of sentences, developed in Mrs Dalloway into an experimental and verisimilar rendering of human consciousness that observes hyperrealistically the digressions, asides and interruptions of private thought, but also causes problems of intelligibility with its fragmented syntax and its dissolved grammatical structure. This breaking down of syntax and modes of presentation that we have observed in the examples from Mrs Dalloway was not an instantaneous act of literary craftsmanship; it emerged through a process of revision which forces the interpreter to acknowledge that the inconsistences in Woolf’s writing are not accidental, but the result of deliberate authorial intervention and thereby intention.

The close linguistic study of authorial revisions, then, can illuminate the crucial points of the author’s technique, those that the author chooses to intensify. In this way, the comparison of earlier drafts with the final text can provide strong evidence in the explication of the significance of stylistic techniques. Intention can thus be uncovered in a linguistically sustained way. Returning authorial intention to our stylistic exploration of texts would prevent us, in the words of Close when lamenting the critical fate of Don Quixote, from using the text, ‘as a peg on which to hang the diverse preoccupations (artistic, moral, political and philosophical) of the nineteenth and twentieth [and twenty-first] centuries’ (Close Reference Close and de Molina1976: 174) and would save the stylistic study of literary texts from its alleged sin of ahistoricity.

Introduction

In stylistics, characterisation commonly refers to the cognitive process by which readers comprehend fictional characters. In effect, characterisation is the process of forming an impression of a character in your head as you read. This includes determining the personal qualities of the character in question as well as other aspects such as their social and physical characteristics. In this chapter I explain how stylistics has tackled the issue of characterisation. I begin by discussing four different views of the ontological status of characters. I argue in favour of the standpoint that sees characters as mental representations in readers’ heads. Consequently, I outline a particularly influential cognitive stylistic model of characterisation proposed by Culpeper (Reference Culpeper2001). I show how this can be used to uncover aspects of characterisation by analysing a number of extracts from prose and dramatic texts, as well as a longer extract from Dennis Potter’s 1978 TV drama Pennies from Heaven (D. Potter Reference Potter1996). I focus particularly on the opening scene of the first episode. Finally, I demonstrate the practical value of understanding the characterisation process by analysing the hearing-impaired subtitles for the scene from the Pennies from Heaven DVD (Pennies from Heaven Reference Haggard1978). I show how the differences between these and the original dialogue are likely to impact on viewers’ impressions of the two characters in the scene.

The ontological status of characters

According to Eder et al. (Reference Eder, Jannidis, Schneider, Eder, Jannidis and Schneider2010), there are four major opinions about the ontological (i.e. existential) status of characters, none of which are without controversy:

My focus in this chapter is on position 2 from the above list, since this is the view currently dominant within stylistics (see, for example, Culpeper Reference Culpeper2001; Culpeper and McIntyre Reference Culpeper, McIntyre, Eder, Jannidis and Schneider2010; Walker Reference Walker2012). Nonetheless, it will be useful to briefly outline the other three positions in order to explain how the cognitive approach differs in terms of its underlying assumptions about characterisation.

Eder et al. (Reference Eder, Jannidis, Schneider, Eder, Jannidis and Schneider2010) immediately dispense with position 4 in the list above, on the grounds that this view causes too many logical problems and essentially means that instead of discussing characters we are forced to talk instead about the texts in which they appear. In essence, position 4 suggests that it is impossible to separate out character from the other aspects of stories. Certainly, there are interrelations between characters and other story elements, such as plot, as Hogan (Reference Hogan, Eder, Jannidis and Schneider2011b) points out; it is because of these interrelations that adherents to position 4 would claim that characters in their own right do not exist.

Position 1 is similar but less extreme. Adherents of this position note that characters are indeed tied to stories but that this is no reason to deny their existence. From this standpoint characters are signs arising from signifiers in the texts to which they belong. In essence, this position sees characters as part of the fabric of a text. The problem with this is that if characters really are signs arising solely from textual structures then this would suggest that they are restricted to the texts in which they originate. This, though, is not the case. For example, the Elizabeth Bennett of Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is clearly intended to be the same Elizabeth Bennet as the protagonist of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, despite the fact that the former is trained in martial arts while the latter is not. That we understand this to be the case would suggest that characters have an existence that goes beyond being purely textual elements. This is position 3, subscribed to by Reicher (Reference Reicher, Eder, Jannidis and Schneider2010: 132), who notes that characters ‘are something over and above stories and works’ and points out that it is entirely possible to create a character before creating a story (Reference Reicher, Eder, Jannidis and Schneider2010: 116). For an example of this, see Daniels’ (Reference Daniels2004) account of Bob Kane’s creation of the comic book superhero, Batman, initially as a response to DC Comics’ desire for a character to rival the popular appeal of Superman.

Reicher’s (Reference Reicher, Eder, Jannidis and Schneider2010) work offers a convincing account of the ontological status of character from a philosophical semantic perspective. What position 2 aims to add to this is an account of how real readers comprehend characters. This is important since the experiences of readers often conflict with traditional literary-critical accounts of character. Culpeper (Reference Culpeper2001: 6–8) points this out in his summary of the distinction between what he terms humanising and de-humanising approaches to the notion of character. Humanising approaches, most famously represented by the early twentieth-century work of the literary critic A. C. Bradley (Reference Bradley1965), proceed on the assumption that characters are essentially like real people. This leads humanising critics to speculate about the motives and intentions of characters in the same way as we might wonder about the aims and objectives of people we actually know.

One of the fiercest critics of the humanising approach was L. C. Knights, whose essay ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’ (Reference Knights1946) clearly lampoons the assumptions of Bradley and his ilk. Knights’s argument was that speculating about the behaviour of characters outside the bounds of the text in which they appear is a fruitless critical exercise, since characters are purely textual constructs (in line with position 1 in Eder et al.’s list, above). Knights argues that any critical analysis of a text should be based on evidence found in the text itself. To take a humanising approach is to introduce extraneous elements into one’s analysis and is therefore methodologically unsound. On the face of it, Knights’s position seems reasonable. However, we have already seen that there are problems with the notion of characters as purely textual constructs. Moreover, when we consider how real readers talk about characters, it is clear that there is a common tendency to discuss them as if they are actual people. For example, actors in soap operas often report being on the receiving end of fans’ ire if the characters that they play behave badly. And in an article for Slate, an online magazine, Tom Scocca writes of his frustration with fans of the US TV series Mad Men who talk about the lead character Don Draper as if he is real:

It is unlikely that Scocca really thinks people believe Don Draper to be an actual person; it is more likely that his irritation is with the humanising tendency that real readers (and audiences) display when they talk about fictional characters. But rather than dismissing the behaviour of real readers as irrational, we would do better to provide a theoretically sound account of how and why readers behave in this way. In effect, this is what cognitive stylistic accounts of characterisation try to do. In the next section, I will explain one of the most influential cognitive stylistic accounts of the characterisation process.

Culpeper’s cognitive stylistic model of characterisation

Neither Bradley’s (Reference Bradley1965) nor Knights’s (Reference Knights1946) views about character are entirely wrong. Bradley’s humanising approach reflects how real readers discuss fictional characters, while Knights’s de-humanising position emphasises the necessity of grounding our analyses about character in empirical evidence. As is often the case when two critical positions are set in opposition to each other, the most profitable way forward comes from taking the best elements of the two to form a middle position. This is essentially what cognitive models of characterisation attempt to do.

Culpeper’s (Reference Culpeper2001) model of the characterisation process (originally outlined in Culpeper Reference Culpeper1994) draws on the cognitive notions of top-down and bottom-up processing and assumes characterisation to occur through a combination of the two processes. In the case of characterisation, top-down processing refers to the role that prior knowledge plays in forming an impression of a character, while bottom-up processing refers to the practice of taking characterisation cues from linguistic triggers in the text itself. Schneider (Reference Schneider2000, Reference Schneider2001) proposes a very similar model, in which characterisation occurs when readers combine knowledge stored in their long-term memory (i.e. prior world knowledge) with textual knowledge accumulated in their working memory. The striking similarities between Culpeper’s and Schneider’s approaches are indicative of the logical composition of the models. I focus on Culpeper’s (Reference Culpeper2001) model since this has had most application within stylistics.

Culpeper’s (Reference Culpeper2001) model is predicated on the notion that what you already know about character types will influence how you perceive characters when you read. Conversely, what you read will shape your prior knowledge. Characterisation occurs when we combine prior knowledge and textual knowledge through top-down and bottom-up processing.

Top-down processing involves the application of schematic knowledge to help us understand character. Schemas (or schemata, to use the Latin plural) can be thought of as bundles of background knowledge about the world that are stored in our long-term memories. Schemas can be formed directly (i.e. as a result of personal experiences) or indirectly (as a result of reading or watching plays, films, etc.). When we read, we use our schematic knowledge to shape our impressions of characters. For example, Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose tells the story of a series of murders that take place in a remote Italian monastery in the Middle Ages. The hero of the story is a monk who is sent to investigate the murders and bring the murderer to justice; we only have to read the back-cover blurb to learn this. Before we even open the book, then, we are likely to have formed some sort of idea of what the hero is like. That is, learning that he is a monk is likely to activate our schema for monks, which we will use to form an impression of his character (for details of how schemas are instantiated, and for a more detailed treatment of schema theory in relation to stylistics, see Jeffries and McIntyre Reference Jeffries and McIntyre2010: 127–33). Our schematic knowledge might give us an indication both of his appearance (perhaps he wears a brown tunic with a hood and is fat, like Friar Tuck in the Robin Hood stories) and his personality (maybe he is kindly and concerned, like Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet). If our schema is more detailed and sophisticated, we might know that friars tend to work among lay people while monks do not. Consequently, the images of Friar Tuck and Friar Laurence may not be foremost in our mind and instead we might have an image closer to Saint Francis of Assisi. But we also have schematic knowledge of character types (Propp Reference Propp, Scott and Wagner1968) and if we know that the main character is the hero of a murder mystery novel then we would expect him to display heroic characteristics. In this case, a monk in the mould of Saint Francis of Assisi is perhaps not a best fit for the context of story.

Schemas are also shaped by culture. For a reader from a non-western background, the notion of a monk may be radically different from any of those described above.

Despite the possible differences between readers’ schemas for a monk, then, what should be apparent is that we are likely to have at least some impression of the main character of The Name of the Rose before we start reading the novel. Once we begin to read, however, these general impressions will be challenged by what we encounter at a textual level. That is, cues from the text itself will lead us to fine tune our schema. For example, in the case of The Name of the Rose, the hero’s name turns out to be Brother William of Baskerville. Readers with any knowledge of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (particularly The Hound of the Baskervilles) are likely to see an association between Brother William and Holmes. Indeed, William turns out to be a detective very much in the vein of Conan Doyle’s hero. The name of William’s character thus acts as a textual trigger for characterisation which, when combined with our prior knowledge, shapes the way we imagine his character. Of course, since we also gain schematic knowledge from past reading experiences, if we have encountered characters anything like Brother William in the past then these will influence how we perceive his character. For instance, readers of Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael murder mystery novels will notice a distinct similarity between Cadfael and Brother William.

Character names are just one of the many bottom-up indicators of characterisation identified by Culpeper (Reference Culpeper2001). In broad terms, he divides these into explicit cues, implicit cues and authorial cues. As might be expected, explicit cues are those where a character makes specific reference either to his or her own character traits or those of another character. For instance, in the extract below from Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule, the Merchant speaks directly to the audience about his own characteristics:

The Merchant’s description of himself as shrewd and ruthless constitutes explicit self-presentation, in this case in the presence of other characters (see McIntyre Reference McIntyre2006: 74 for a discussion of the Merchant’s status as a narrator). Such self-presentation is also found in soliloquies, distinguished from the above example by the absence of other characters (for example, Gloucester’s opening soliloquy in Richard III; see McIntyre Reference McIntyre2008 for a discussion of what this reveals about his character). What is often more common than talking explicitly about their own characteristics, however, is for characters to describe the traits of others. This is what Culpeper (Reference Culpeper2001: 171) terms explicit ‘other-presentation’. The following extract from Roald Dahl’s blackly comic novel My Uncle Oswald (Reference Dahl1979) illustrates this:

In the above example, the first-person narrator offers unambiguous statements about his uncle, the titular Oswald. Of course, as Culpeper (Reference Culpeper2001: 171) points out, the credibility of the describing character will have an effect on the extent to which we take account of the characterisation information they present. For instance, in the following example from Louis De Bernières’s novel A Partisan’s Daughter, the narrator, Chris, offers a strongly negative portrayal of his wife based on a deeply sexist generalisation:

Culpeper (Reference Culpeper2001: 171) points out that research in social psychology has demonstrated that we have a tendency to overlook contextual factors when inferring character traits, such that our natural inclination is to take explicit statements about character at face value. In the case of the above example, however, the extent to which we accept Chris’s description of his wife may be affected by whether we are naturally inclined (or not) to side with such a misogynistic portrayal. In any case, as the novel progresses and we begin to question the degree to which Chris is a reliable narrator, we may well reconsider his portrayal of his wife’s character traits.

So far I have shown examples of the explicit presentation of character but implicit characterisation is equally important and, arguably, more common. The variety of implicit characterisation triggers identified by Culpeper (Reference Culpeper2001) includes lexis, syntax, accent and dialect, paralinguistic features, visual features, and pragmatic cues such as conversational implicature and politeness strategies. In Andrew Martin’s 1905-set novel The Blackpool Highflyer (Reference Martin2004), for example, the first-person narrator, Jim Stringer, is a working-class Yorkshireman who only ever refers to his spouse as ‘the wife’. It is only towards the end of the novel that we learn her first name is Lydia; and this information is revealed only in the reported speech of her friend, Cecily. Stringer’s proclivity for not referring to Lydia by name works initially to invoke a schema for a subservient housewife (as well as suggesting a fairly distant relationship between Stringer and his wife, due to the lack of proximal social deictics). This characterisation stems entirely from Stringer’s presentation of his wife to the reader. However, Lydia’s behaviour is incongruous with the schema that Stringer’s naming convention invokes: she is outspoken, in favour of women’s suffrage and not inclined to have Jim’s tea on the table when he comes home from work. And as if this isn’t enough, she refuses to clean the front step of the house (an action likely to have made one a social pariah in 1900s Yorkshire). Part of what makes Lydia’s character interesting, then, is that her behaviour clashes with the schema for the character type that is triggered by Jim’s language use (as well as the fact that Jim clearly adores her, which to some modern readers might seem inconsistent with his naming practice). For readers, the clash between prior knowledge and textual knowledge is likely to foreground Lydia as a character.

The examples from Brecht and Martin indicate how characterisation can occur as a result of the linguistic choices and behaviour of characters. But significant characterisation effects also come from what Culpeper (Reference Culpeper2001) terms authorial cues. One of the most obvious triggers is an author’s choice of names for characters, as we saw above in the example of Umberto Eco naming his detective monk Brother William of Baskerville. In this case it is the intertextual allusion to Sherlock Holmes that contributes substantially to what we are likely to infer about Brother William’s character. Names, then, can convey significant characterisation information. This includes information about gender, nationality, social class, level of education and much more. In the case of The Blackpool Highflyer, for some readers the name Jim Stringer will be strongly evocative of (possibly northern) working-class origins. Jim, for instance, is a diminutive of the more formal James, while Stringer is an occupational surname dating back to the medieval period when it originally denoted someone who made longbow strings for a living. Of course, without this background knowledge the characterising potential of the name is lost. Indeed, a lack of relevant schematic and pragmatic knowledge can be one of the disadvantages that make reading literature in a foreign language particularly difficult.

The above division of textual characterisation cues into the categories of explicit, implicit and authorial cues might suggest that each of these methods of characterisation is distinct and unproblematic. In reality, it is eminently possible to find a number of methods operating simultaneously in a piece of text. Consider the following extract from Louis De Bernières’s Reference Bernières2004 novel Birds Without Wings.

Here, the narrator, a six-year-old girl in the fictional town of Eskibahçe in 1900s Anatolia, describes both herself and her friend Drosoula. There is explicit self-presentation from Philothei (‘i am prittier that anyon else but i don’t bost about it’) as well as explicit other-presentation (‘i went with drosoula who is not pritty by ugli’). We might also interpret Philothei’s claim that she does not boast about her good looks as tautological, thereby conveying implicitly that she is indeed boastful. In addition, the non-standard spelling and syntax causes a foregrounding effect which we are also likely to link to characterisation. Since Philothei’s inability to spell would not be noticeable in speech, it seems likely that the example above is intended to be interpreted as something that Philothei has written rather than Philothei talking to the reader directly. As a result, the reader is likely to attribute the non-standard spelling and syntax to Philothei’s age (and possibly gender, given the setting of the novel) and consequent lack of education. In this respect, the unconventional spelling and syntax constitute implicit self-presentation.

One issue with the categorisation of characterisation triggers as explicit, implicit and authorial is that, in effect, all textual cues for characterisation stem from the author and are thus authorial in nature. Culpeper (Reference Culpeper2001: 229) explains that authorial cues are those ‘over which the character notionally has no power of choice’. But note that this claim implies a humanising approach to character in which characters do have choices concerning what they say and how they behave. Given that cognitive approaches to characterisation attempt to avoid the extreme positions of the humanising and de-humanising approaches in favour of explaining how readers construct mental models of characters as they read, it would perhaps be more accurate to describe all characterisation cues as authorial but to specify at which discourse level of the text they operate; in other words, whether this is the level of author addressing reader (discourse level 1), narrator addressing narratee (level 2, in the case of prose texts) or character addressing character (level 2 for plays, level 3 for prose; see Short Reference Short1996 for a discussion of the prototypical discourse architectures of the three main literary genres). This reformulation of Culpeper’s categories allows us to avoid the implicit suggestion that the model is skewed towards a humanising approach to character. This slight modification thus improves the objectivity of the model. In addition, we can note that authorial triggers at the discourse level of author addressing reader can also be sub-divided into explicit and implicit cues, in the same way that self- and other-presentation can be explicit or implicit (Pfister Reference Pfister1988: 184; see also Walker Reference Walker2012 for an alternative reformulation of the model). An example of an explicit authorial trigger at discourse level 1 would be a stage direction offering an unambiguous statement about character. An example of an implicit trigger would be a character’s name.

In order to demonstrate the combined effects of the wide variety of textual characterisation cues, in the next section I analyse an extract from Dennis Potter’s TV drama Pennies from Heaven.

A cognitive stylistic analysis of characterisation in Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven

The following extract is from the opening scene of Pennies from Heaven, a TV drama originally broadcast in 1978 (turns are numbered for ease of reference). If you are unfamiliar with the drama, while reading the extract, think about what characterisation triggers it contains. What information can you infer about the characters? How old are they? What do they look like? What do they sound like?

(D. Potter Reference Potter1996: 1–3)

One of the long-standing methodological issues in the stylistic analysis of drama is whether the text or a performance of the text should be the object of study. Traditionally, the dominant view in stylistics has been that, since text is more stable than performance, stylistic analyses should be of the play script (Short Reference Short1996). Although there are situations where replicable analyses of performances are possible (see, for example, McIntyre Reference McIntyre2008), generally speaking, starting with the dramatic text is a sensible methodological position to take, not least because this is a necessary starting point for actors and directors (especially in situations where the play has never been performed before). The accessibility of cognitive stylistic methods of analysis makes them particularly suitable for this task. Indeed, one of the merits of cognitive stylistics is the democratising principle on which it is founded; that is, cognitive stylistics aims to account for how real readers respond to texts. Cognitive stylistic analyses therefore aim to be transparent explanations of the reading process and the interpretative effects arising from this, rather than rarefied literary-critical ‘readings’. In this respect, the cognitive model of characterisation outlined above is not only a logically sound account of how readers construct mental models of characters as they read. In addition, it offers a practical method for the analysis of character that is grounded in the structure of the text while taking appropriate account of the existing world knowledge of the reader. In the case of the Pennies from Heaven example, there are numerous textual triggers which allow us to infer information about context and character.

To begin with, we might consider two distinct authorial cues at discourse level 1. First, the stage directions indicate explicitly that Arthur and Joan are married (‘a husband and wife are asleep’). Secondly, the names Arthur and Joan are rather old-fashioned and this suggests that the drama is a period piece. Of course, an alternative explanation is that the play is contemporary and the characters are simply elderly. In practice, though, anyone reading the script in its entirety or seeing the drama on TV is likely to have read a synopsis of the drama and will know that it is set in the 1930s. This small amount of information is enough to trigger our schematic knowledge of married couples. This, combined with the subject matter of the extract (Arthur wanting to have sex and Joan refusing), is enough to generate a range of stereotypical assumptions. For example, Arthur and Joan’s marriage appears to be rather staid so they are unlikely to be newly-weds. These inferences can lead to other, indirect assumptions. When I give this extract to my students, they routinely say that they expect Arthur to be wearing striped pyjamas. This information is purely schematic, since there is nothing in the text to indicate this. Nonetheless, watch the drama (Pennies from Heaven 2004) and it transpires that this is indeed the case.

The initial level 1 authorial cues pertaining to the names of the two characters and their marital status are enough to invoke a basic schema for a married couple. This is then tuned as a result of the many level 2 implicit textual triggers of characterisation in the dialogue. Some of these appear to indicate permanent characteristics (for example the dialect features of Arthur’s speech in turns 21 and 27; though it may also be argued that the sparse use of dialect spellings indicates Arthur momentarily playing up to a stereotype) while others appear to mark transitory characteristics (for example, the anger that can be inferred from the taboo language and exclamation mark in turn 17).

The first turn of the scene is likely to strike readers as odd. Arthur’s first words on waking up are ‘Some day if luck is kind’. Turn 1 is foregrounded by virtue of the fact that this is an extremely unusual statement to make on waking from a night’s sleep. Grammatically, the statement is incomplete, lacking a main clause to follow the conditional subordinate clause. The significance of this line can be determined once we have access to some contextual knowledge. This is the first episode of Pennies from Heaven, the title of which is ‘Down Sunnyside Lane’. This was also the name of a popular song from 1931, performed by Jack Payne and His BBC Orchestra, which features as the title music to the episode. Arthur’s utterance is a line from the lyrics: ‘Some day if luck is kind, I’ll leave my cares behind.’ There is an existential presupposition in the main clause that the speaker does indeed have cares (indicated by the object noun phrase; see Simpson Reference Simpson1993). That this is Arthur’s first utterance would suggest that he does too, and that these must be at the forefront of his mind if the song is in his head as he awakes (note that we take all characterisation information as salient in drama, whereas in real life we might be inclined to dismiss some triggers as non-salient). Because only the conditional clause is uttered, the sentence is foregrounded. And if we are aware of what the main clause is, then its absence is likely to lead us to infer, via Grice’s (Reference Grice, Cole and Morgan1975) maxim of relation, that Arthur is not confident that luck will be kind to him.

Arthur then turns his attention to Joan, trying to persuade her to have sex. The variety of terms that he uses to address her (Joan, Joanie, sugar, my pet, my pigeon, old girl) characterise him as affectionate, though the repeated use of terms of endearment may also be seen to convey desperation and insistence. Culpeper (Reference Culpeper2001: 190) uses Taavitsainen’s (Reference Taavitsainen and Lester1999) term surge features to describe the linguistic elements used for emotional outbursts. That these are transitory characteristics displayed for a particular purpose is suggested by the fact that in turn 17 Arthur’s manner changes abruptly.

Aspects of Joan’s character are revealed in the way she responds to Arthur’s pestering. Her use of repeated imperatives to stop Arthur’s attempts to initiate sex characterise her as both firm and determined. (These characteristics can also be seen in her repeated admonishing of Arthur for swearing; see turns 18, 20, 22, 24 and 26). After Arthur has relented, she then attempts to offer some explanation for her lack of interest (‘You said you wanted to get away early’), perhaps in an effort to defease any alternative implicatures that Arthur might infer from her refusal (see P. Brown and Levinson’s Reference Brown, Levinson and Goody1987 notion of off-record politeness strategies). This suggests both a degree of consideration and an element of self-protection. Readers are likely to infer that Joan feels uncomfortable with the situation and, perhaps, with her own actions.

Joan’s verbal behaviour also works to characterise Arthur as somewhat downtrodden. In turn 14 she dismisses his halting efforts to initiate a discussion about what he perceives as her lack of interest in sex. She does this directly: ‘That’s a very silly thing to say, Arthur dear.’ This casual dismissal of a serious subject is reminiscent of how parents might dismiss the naive concerns of a child, which indirectly conveys extra information about the power relations between Arthur and Joan.

In turn 15 Arthur attempts to steer the topic of conversation back to sex. However, Joan’s pause and abrupt change of topic in turn 16 signals her unwillingness to discuss this. From this we might infer that she is ill at ease with the topic, and potentially also embarrassed by it. Arthur’s outburst in turn 17 is another surge feature, which may be interpreted as conveying anger and/or frustration. He attempts again to return to the topic in turn 19 but is rebuked by Joan for swearing. Arthur then appears to accept the rebuke and give up on his earlier inclinations by abruptly changing the topic: ‘Cup of char is it then, old gel?’ (27). The term of endearment indicates social closeness and the non-standard spelling of girl as ‘gel’ is suggestive of accent and dialect. The fact that Arthur’s attempts at a serious conversation about his and Joan’s marriage is eventually abandoned by both of them is perhaps indicative of underlying problems which, given the nature of drama, the reader/viewer is likely to expect to have some significance later on. The reader’s/viewer’s initial schema for a married couple, then, is tuned as a result of the textual triggers encountered in the dialogue, demonstrating how the characterisation of Arthur and Joan is achieved through a combination of top-down and bottom-up processing.

The initial aspects of characterisation described above do indeed feed into the plot of Pennies from Heaven. Arthur is a sheet-music salesman in 1930s England with dreams of exchanging his humdrum existence for the kind of excitement described in the lyrics of the popular songs that he sells. His dissatisfaction with his marriage to Joan leads him to have an affair with a schoolteacher, Eileen. This causes him to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and he finds himself convicted of the murder of a young girl and sentenced to hang. The actions that cause him to end up in this situation are all the result of the frustration that he feels with his life, emotions that are conveyed from the very beginning of the very first scene of the drama.

Effects of hearing-impaired subtitling on characterisation

It should be clear from the analysis above that even in the fairly short extract from Pennies from Heaven there is a substantial number of textual triggers of characterisation. What the above analysis does not take into account, though, is how characterisation is likely to be different for viewers watching the drama as opposed to readers interpreting the play script itself. If we are dealing solely with the play script we may well find ourselves rereading particular lines in the light of information contained elsewhere in the text. Our impressions of character may thus be determined through post hoc rationalisation rather than online processing. If we are watching a TV drama, however, and we choose not to pause and rewind at particular points, our bottom-up impressions of character will be determined solely on the basis of those textual triggers we are able to pick up on; in other words, we may well miss some of the cues for characterisation contained in the text. Furthermore, if the cues that we fail to notice would have invoked particular schematic knowledge, missing a textual trigger can also affect our top-down processing. This becomes a particular problem for viewers relying on subtitles. In the case of foreign language subtitling, a whole range of additional non-linguistic variables can cause problems of comprehension when it comes to interpreting character (see Luyken Reference Luyken1991 for a comprehensive survey of subtitling practice). However, the general effect of subtitling on characterisation can be seen if we examine subtitles for hearing-impaired viewers (i.e. subtitles that are in the same language as the original dialogue). Below are the hearing-impaired subtitles for the extract from Pennies from Heaven discussed in the previous section. Underlining indicates additions to the original dialogue while square brackets indicate deletions:

What is apparent from the above is that the subtitles do not include all of the textual triggers of characterisation that are in the original script. In some cases this is likely to have a significant impact on how those viewers relying on the subtitles interpret the characters. For example, in the original script (D. Potter Reference Potter1996) turn 3 is: ‘C’mon Joanie – sugar – wake up, my pigeon. . .’. In performance, this line was changed to: ‘C’mon Joanie. Wake up. That’s my girl.’ The difference between the original script and the performance is that, in the latter, two vocatives which are terms of endearment are omitted (‘sugar’ and ‘my pigeon’). Although the utterance ‘That’s my girl’ is added, the omission of the vocatives reduces the extent to which this line characterises Arthur as both affectionate and insistent. The subtitle for turn 3 is even shorter: ‘C’mon Joanie. Wake up.’ The lack of any terms of endearment (save for the diminutive form of Joan) removes the mitigation (cf. P. Brown and Levinson Reference Brown and Levinson1987) of the two imperatives (‘C’mon’ and ‘Wake up’). The effect on characterisation is that we are likely to consider Arthur to be much blunter and more forthright than if we were relying on the performed dialogue.

Similarly, in turn 18 the dialogue as it is performed is: ‘That’s a very silly thing to say, Arthur dear. I’m not even properly awake yet.’ In the subtitles, however, this is reduced to: ‘That’s a silly thing to say. I’m not properly awake yet.’ The omission of ‘Arthur dear’ from the first utterance makes the proposition much more impersonal and, potentially, more damaging to Arthur in relational terms (see Bousfield Reference Bousfield2008 and Culpeper Reference Culpeper2011 for revisions to P. Brown and Levinson’s Reference Brown, Levinson and Goody1987 taxonomy of politeness). This characterises Joan as much less concerned with Arthur’s feelings than she is in the original dialogue.

Elsewhere there are numerous textual characterisation triggers missing. For instance, Arthur’s dialectal pronunciation of girl in turn 27 is not accounted for in the accompanying subtitle, nor are the discourse markers ‘Now’ (turn 23) and ‘Well’ (26, 27, 28), or the conventional implicature of ‘Anyway’ (27). In short, the viewing experience of anyone relying on the hearing-impaired subtitles is likely to be impoverished when compared against that of viewers who do not need the subtitles. Of course, there are technical constraints on subtitling that restrict the number of graphological characters which may be displayed on a line (see Luyken Reference Luyken1991), but in many cases in the above extract there is no unassailable reason for having omitted elements. One way of improving subtitling, then, would be to provide clear guidelines to professional subtitlers on the effects of particular linguistic choices on such macro-level issues as characterisation. Indeed, Luyken (Reference Luyken1991: 65) is clear that research on the linguistic and stylistic implications of subtitling is much needed.

Conclusion

My aim in this chapter has been to indicate the importance of characterisation in stylistic analysis and to demonstrate the application of one of the most influential models of characterisation available to stylisticians. I have also pointed towards the practical value of characterisation analysis as a first step towards improving hearing-impaired subtitling for TV drama. There remain, of course, issues with current approaches to characterisation that need to be addressed. The extent to which Culpeper’s (Reference Culpeper2001) checklist of textual characterisation triggers is falsifiable is an issue that would benefit from further research, since this impacts on the replicability of analyses that utilise the model. There are also, as I have suggested, refinements which could be made to the model. For instance, authorial cues can feasibly be divided into explicit and implicit triggers, as Culpeper (Reference Culpeper2001) does with self- and other-presentational triggers. Furthermore, all characterisation cues are effectively authorial and the objectivity of the model can be improved if we integrate this into the description of the different categories of triggers. Despite these issues, the model described in this chapter offers genuine insights into (i) how real readers are likely to respond to characters as they read and watch fiction, and (ii) the stylistic effects that readers are likely to perceive as a result.

Introduction

As an art form, literature transports its readers to real or imaginary spaces, invites them to take part in ordinary or extraordinary adventures and, as Palmer (Reference Palmer2004: 10) puts it, pleasurably shows readers what ‘a variety of fictional people are thinking’. It is through access to fictional others’ thoughts that literature invites readers to adopt different ways of seeing the world. This chapter focuses on this latter literary quality, taking ‘Voice’ to refer to language as a projection of individuals’ mental functioning rather than their actual voice, in the sense of their verbal interaction/dialogue with others (for the latter, see Short’s Chapter 23 in this very collection). Like in previous work of mine (see for instance, Gregoriou Reference Gregoriou2007, Reference Gregoriou and Effron2011b), I employ Roger Fowler’s (Reference Fowler1977: 76) linguistic concept of mind style, originally coined to refer to ‘cumulatively consistent structural options, agreeing in cutting the presented world to one pattern or another’, giving rise to ‘an impression of a world-view’. Roger Fowler (Reference Fowler1977: 103) then takes ‘mind style’ to refer to ‘any distinctive linguistic representation of an individual mental self’, the phenomenon in which the language of a text projects a characteristic world view, a particular way of perceiving and making sense of the world:

With Fowler’s mind style premise in mind, I take a close look at the linguistic make-up of three novels which portray such more or less radical fictional ‘minds’, meaning minds assumed to be characteristic, unique, and even unusual and unorthodox compared to the readers’ own, acknowledging of course that novels might well have a number of readerships, and therefore multiple readings. In accordance with other such mind style research (see, for instance, Bockting Reference Bockting1994; Leech and Short Reference Leech and Short2007; Semino Reference Semino2007; Semino and Swindlehurst Reference Semino and Swindlehurst1996), aspects of note here cover all linguistic areas: phonology, lexis, semantics, grammar and pragmatics. Specific features which can be used to project unique views of the world include, but are not limited to, over- and under-lexicalisation (suggestive of underlying understandings surrounding referents and their related senses), particular syntactic transitivity choices (to do with agency and responsibility), metaphors and other figurative language choices (suggestive of underlying thought structures and ideologies), and choices of particular types of speech and thought presentation (see, for instance, framework in Leech and Short Reference Leech and Short1981). It is not always easy to distinguish between narratorial and character voice/thought; as Palmer (Reference Palmer2004, Reference Palmer, Lambrou and Stockwell2007) argues, the boundary between pure narrative and thought presentation is fuzzy, there is a thought–action continuum (statements found in novels often refer to action suggestive of a state of consciousness), while cognitions and emotions are too inextricably linked. Along the same lines, Bronwen Thomas (Reference Thomas2012: 7) argues that:

It is such suspense-driven novels projecting the view of characters finding themselves estranged that I focus on here. I adopt the premise that textual means enable readers to take particular implied reader positionings when engaging in literary reading. Even more so, novel-reading is mind-reading (Palmer Reference Palmer, Lambrou and Stockwell2007: 83), meaning that readers can only understand literary texts by engaging in a process of following, and therefore understanding, the workings of their characters’ minds. Since ideological viewpoint refers specifically to the attitudes, beliefs, values and judgements shared by people with similar social, cultural and political backgrounds (Semino and Swindlehurst Reference Semino and Swindlehurst1996: 145), ‘ideology’ is also a term entangled with my definition of mind style. Nevertheless, having taken mindset-related linguistic choices to project characteristic world views, language here enables readers to mind-read the world via the mental functioning of the sorts of focalised characters that are rather unusual in the context of fiction. In doing so, language can prove instrumental in enabling readers to think about, even question, their own positions and grounding in the world they actually inhabit. I next analyse the mind styles of three contemporary fictional and literary character-focalisers: a child in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (Boyne Reference Boyne2006a, the title spelling of ‘pajamas’ being American), an obsessive self-harmer in Sharp Objects (Flynn Reference Flynn2006), and an angel character-narrator situated in heaven in The Lovely Bones (Sebold Reference Sebold2002). All three projections received high commercial acclaim, the related books reaching various bestsellers’ lists, and their authors gaining award nominations. Among others, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was a New York Bestseller, Sharp Objects a twice CWA (Crime Writers Association) Dagger winner, and The Lovely Bones a number one Bestseller. The Lovely Bones and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in particular were also adapted into major films (dir. Jackson Reference Jackson2009 and dir. M. Herman Reference Herman2008 respectively), because of or despite these two books also generating some controversy.

A boy’s mind style

Boyne’s (Reference Boyne2006a) The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a historical fictional novel projecting the perspective of 9-year-old Bruno, the privileged son of a German official posted as a commandant at a house nearing the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp. In an interview with the author published in the book’s final pages, Boyne himself asserts he does not think of this as either a children’s book or an adults’ book (Boyne Reference Boyne and Boyne2006b: 5). In fact, he adds he is not entirely sure he understands the difference: ‘You know who these distinctions are for? They’re for bookshops’, he explains (Boyne Reference Boyne and Boyne2006b: 6). Much like with other young adult fiction, Pajamas is focalised through a young character-narrator, whose perspective we have access to through a limited internal narrative mode, meaning a mode giving us access to the character’s perceptual (or psychological), spatio-temporal and ideological standpoint on the world (for more on viewpoint, see Short Reference Short1996; Simpson Reference Simpson1993). Unlike some such fiction though, the narrative is here communicated through the third- rather than first-person mode. As the author himself explains in the same interview, ‘I wanted to view it in the third person. To do it from Bruno’s point of view, but to do it from a slight distance as well, as an observer’ (Boyne Reference Boyne and Boyne2006b: 4). Perhaps most importantly, the book’s own back cover asserts that, despite its framing as ‘a fable’, ‘this isn’t a book for nine-year-olds’, the reader here advised that ‘sooner or later you will arrive with Bruno at a fence. Fences like this exist all over the world. We hope you never have to encounter one.’ ‘Fence’ acquires a certainly figurative meaning here, standing for racial problems, genocides even, parting people the world wide. Boyne himself hopes that, by avoiding to specifically name ‘Auschwitz’ throughout, his story acquires generic dimensions; ‘By removing that word, even though we are clearly there, and all the signs are there . . . by not specifically basing it there, it broadened it’ (Boyne Reference Boyne and Boyne2006b: 9).

When readers first encounter young Bruno, they meet a boy who is alert, bright and inquisitive, the over-coordination of clauses helping construct his observing, yet also childlike world view: ‘The servants still came and washed things and swept things and cooked things and cleaned things and served things and took things away and kept their mouths shut unless they were spoken to’ (Boyne Reference Boyne2006a: 96, my italics). The grammatical parallelism alongside lexical repetition of unnamed ‘things’ additionally suggests the monotony he experiences living in his new house. He also finds himself objecting to others’ hostility, describing Nazi officials as ‘plain nasty’ (2006a: 77) for instance, while being, to a certain extent, unafraid to express his rather liberal ideology when confronted with fascist ideology:

Pragmatically speaking, Bruno of course does not define either his own liberal or his father’s fascist ideology as such; he appears to lack the knowledge structures, otherwise known as ‘schemata’ (for an introduction to ‘schema theory’, see chapter 5.2 in Gregoriou Reference Gregoriou2009), with which to conceptualise them as such. His Nazi upbringing does, however, creep in at times, even when Bruno appears to be admittedly uneasy with it:

Bruno is also importantly too naive and innocent to understand what the camps actually entail, his parents deliberately protecting him from that knowledge.

Being lonely and devoid of friends his own age in his new surroundings, Bruno regularly observes concentration camp inhabitants and interacts with some. He even secretly closely befriends prisoner Shmuel, an exactly same-aged Polish boy living on the other side of the wire fence, the boy whom the book’s title is in reference to. Bruno remains oblivious to the reality of the camp’s use, and even wants to be inside it so he can make friends, until he meets his own tragic fate at the novel’s end, when he disguises himself as a camp inhabitant and crawls into the camp so as to, ironically, help Shmuel find his ‘missing’ father. Much like Shmuel’s dad (the readers will of course assume), the boys are murdered in a gas chamber, ironically unafraid in their naivety, and holding hands. As Osherson (Reference Osherson2009: 256) notes, the author renders the novel a self-proclaimed fable, ‘its ironic closing sentences [pointing] more dully to the author’s intentions’: ‘Of course all this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever happen again . . . Not in this day and age’ (2006a: 216). The story therefore carries a moral message for its readers. As Curry (Reference Curry2010) puts it, the text calls for multiracial acceptance; like its apolitical protagonist, the text invites readers to also penetrate walls, barriers and borders, increasing social awareness, and giving those marginalised among us an actual visibility and ‘voice’. Having said that, others, such as Gilbert (Reference Gilbert2010: 355), instead argue that ‘the blunt didacticism of Boyne’s text might close down possibilities for the child reader’s imaginative engagement with the ungraspable nature of the Holocaust’; Gilbert therefore questions whether ‘such works do necessarily perform a progressive educative role’. Similarly, Eaglestone (Reference Eaglestone2007: 53, cited in Gilbert Reference Gilbert2010: 356) rather provocatively asserts that ‘it is as risky to turn the Holocaust into a fable as it is to deny it’.

Devices in use in the novel imply Bruno’s narrative unreliability, and innocent ignorance of his surrounding horrific circumstances. Naming strategies are particularly revealing. Bruno refers to his own parents with the formalised ‘Father’ (2006a: 17) and ‘Mother’ (2006a: 3), suggesting he has a perhaps distancing respect for them, while he contrastingly refers to his teasing sister Gretel as ‘a Hopeless Case’ (2006a: 19) or uses others’ reference for her as ‘Trouble From Day One’ (2006a: 21), her unpleasant friends being likewise reduced to ‘monsters’ (2006a: 22). Limited Bruno also mistakes the camp prisoners’ stripy prison outfits for comfy striped pyjamas: ‘In fact [Bruno] did like stripes and he felt increasingly fed up that he had to wear trousers and shirts and ties and shoes that were too tight for him when Shmuel and his friends got to wear striped pajamas all day long’ (2006a: 151–2). The under-lexicalisation of the prisoner uniform referent highlights an ironic similarity with respect to the two outfits, but also suggests a world view consisting of relaxation and game-playing with friends, an image contrasting the very real institutionalised murderous violence taking place in the prison camp. The ‘striped pajamas’ reference of course also shows Bruno’s lack of understanding as to camp inhabitants, mistaken for farmers at first, being in fact dehumanised, kept in captivity against their will, until the time comes for them to be gassed to death. In linguistic deterministic terms (see Sapir Reference Sapir1921, Reference Sapir1929; Whorf Reference Whorf and Carroll1956) and, as Fowler (Reference Fowler1981: 152) puts it, under-lexicalisation spells out the crucial assumption that lacking a referent from one’s lexicon (in this case ‘Nazi prisoner’) suggests that the individual lacks the relevant concept. Importantly, the boy wonders why these ‘striped pajama people’ were never invited to dinner, and forms questions suggestive of important underlying realisations he himself even is not completely aware of: ‘And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms?’ he asks (2006a: 100).

As many, such as Gilbert (Reference Gilbert2010), have noted, Bruno also revealingly phonetically mispronounces ‘Auschwitz’ into ‘Out-With’ (2006a: 25) (note that /aʊʃvɪts/ and /aʊt wɪð/ are phonetically similar), the relexicalisation interestingly alluding to the otherness of those placed ‘outside’ of his own surroundings yet ‘within’ confinement, and therefore inside the camps. The word acquires numerous meanings for readers of the text but not the character-narrator himself, or indeed his sister:

In contrast to Bruno’s line of thinking, Gretel’s explanation of the mispronounced reference is instead suggestive of an ideology approximating the fascist one, as certain races would indeed be literally ‘done out/away with’ in that very locale.

Bruno similarly phonetically mispronounces ‘the Führer’, literally meaning ‘the leader’, into ‘the Fury’ (2006a: 5) (again note /fjurə/ and /fjurɪ/ being near-homophones), Bruno’s impersonal wording suggesting the Nazi leader’s anger and aggressive, irrational even, behaviour toward all others, particularly since Bruno has met Hitler in person. The reference being inclusive of a definite article highlights the man’s uniqueness though, through mispronunciation, Bruno appears to lack awareness as to the implications of the adjectival referent sense the article is followed by. The boy also mistakes Heil Hitler as another way of simply saying ‘Well, goodbye for now, have a pleasant afternoon’ (2006a: 54), oblivious that this salute actually has the proposition of a fascist ideology. Bruno also performs the salute-accompanying arm action ignorant of its same connotations: ‘As they left they stood in a row together like toy soldiers and their arms shot out in the same way that Father had taught Bruno to salute, the palm stretched flat, moving from their chests up into the air in front of them in a sharp motion’ (2006a: 43–4). Bruno’s simile linking the soldiers to ‘toy’ ones implies his child’s game-playing world view but also perhaps hints at a belief in behaviour that is questioning and distinctive as opposed to unthinking and automatic. In any case, while reading Bruno’s mind, here and elsewhere, readers are indirectly invited to read aright the signs that Bruno misreads, engaging in frame repair (Emmott Reference Emmott1997: 225) throughout, even when Bruno fails or is simply unable to repair his own understanding. Along the same lines if not on an ideological level, when he is asked for a spare tyre to use as a swing, Lieutenant Kotler jokingly refers to a sergeant being ‘attached to his spare tyre’ (2006a: 73). Literal-minded Bruno is unable to process the metaphorical meaning of the bodily-weight-related expression: ‘He doesn’t understand you. He’s only nine’, his sister Gretel says (2006a: 74). Bruno overall has age-related limitations where pragmatic processing is concerned.

Numerous such meaningfully ironic instances occur throughout. When Polish camp prisoner Pavel nurses Bruno’s lightly cut knee after the boy has fallen from the swing, his mother worryingly asks to take the credit for the wound’s cleaning wanting to, unbeknown to Bruno, protect Pavel in the long run. Bruno misreads his mother’s kindness for selfishness: this ‘seemed terribly selfish to Bruno and a way for Mother to take credit for something she hadn’t done’ (2006a: 85). In possible world theory terms (see Ryan Reference Ryan1991a, Reference Ryan1991b, Reference Ryan1998), there appears to be a conflict here between Bruno’s knowledge world and his mother’s (and also the adult readers’). The conflict needs resolving, and the boy’s innocent framing of the circumstances needs repairing, both of which generate tension. Finally, before the boys die, Bruno tells Shmuel ‘You’re my . . . best friend for life’ (2006a: 213), neither of the boys yet knowing how literal the expression is, their lives being about to end indeed.

When Bruno and Shmuel innocently discuss the commonality or otherwise of the boys’ names, Bruno notes his name being unique on his side of the fence, to which Shmuel responds with: ‘Then you’re lucky’ (2006a: 109). On the implied and pragmatic author–reader communicative level, a question of identity arises: Shmuel, as an imprisoned mirror-image of Bruno, lacks one. While discussing how they can play without a fence separating them, Shmuel tells Bruno ‘You’re on the wrong side of the fence’ (2006a: 132), here ‘wrong’, like ‘lucky’ in the previous example, acquiring different interpretations for the readers from the basic ones the words have for the two boys; aspects of moral ethics and fate are brought to bear on the interpretative level of the implied author and mature reader. Such momentary switches to Shmuel’s viewpoint show the Polish boy to be also oblivious to his own circumstances, though perhaps not to the extent that Bruno is, the latter not appreciating how bad living conditions are on the inside of the fence. When Bruno disguises himself as a prisoner, readers are told: ‘It was almost (Shmuel thought) as if they were all exactly the same really’ (2006a: 204), a realisation that rings true for readers yet on a deeper semantic level than it does for the characters. Shmuel also later adds ‘I never see the people after they’ve gone on a march’ (2006a: 211), readers repairing an understanding of prisoners walking to their death in a way the boy cannot appreciate.

Gilbert (Reference Gilbert2010: 364) also notes the linguistic structure of the book’s individual chapter titles themselves, ‘manipulating’ readers where perspective is concerned, the ‘Thinking Up the Final Adventure’ (2006a: 193) chapter title ironically and, in Gilbert’s view distastefully, echoing the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ for instance. Many of the chapter titles are themselves clause-long, and indicate a perspective that is distinctively Bruno’s, such as the ideologically slanted ‘How Mother Took Credit for Something That She Hadn’t Done’ (2006a: 67) chapter title and the increasingly subordinated and visually perceptually slanted ‘The Dot That Became a Speck That Became a Blob That Became a Figure That Became a Boy’ (2006a: 104). Ultimately, the second to last chapter ends when the focalised character dies, as readers no longer have any of the two boys’ internal consciousness to tell the story through. The story being given in the third person also allows for a further last chapter though, a chapter given in the external mode with glimpses and blends into Bruno’s surviving family members’ viewpoints. While those Bruno left behind come to manage their loss, the overall style is not dissimilar to that of preceding chapters. Despite Bruno’s physical absence, his mind style survives; the lexicon and sentence structure remain mostly simple, the naming strategies appropriate to Bruno’s mind style still remain, as does the plain yet deeply ironic, for readers, tone: ‘Father stayed at Out-With for another year . . . and he ended up sitting on the ground in almost exactly the same position as Bruno had every afternoon for a year, although he didn’t cross his legs beneath him’ (2006a: 215–16).

A self-harmer’s mind style

Flynn’s (Reference Flynn2006) Sharp Objects gives voice to the dark mind of the troubled self-harming journalist Camille who, while coping with her own psychological disorder, becomes involved in a multiple-victim murder case unravelling in the Midwestern town in which she grew up. Instructed by her editor, she returns to her home town to report on the case, only to find herself interested in solving it, and even working alongside the police in doing so. In the meantime, as suggested by the title itself, Camille tries to recover from her compulsive self-cutting of her skin, which left her with the scars of written words across her whole body, a cutting that relates to the distress and emotional pain she herself experienced after the death of her young sister Marian when Camille too was young. As signalled through the mind style, Camille’s troubling relationship with her neurotic mother Adora and young half-sister Amma cause her ‘cutting’ tendencies to worsen, all while the horrific involvement the last two have with the numerous murder cases come to be revealed.

The first hint at Camille’s self-cutting past comes in the reference to her not liking showers: ‘I can’t handle the spray, it gets my skin buzzing, like someone’s turned on a switch’ (Flynn Reference Flynn2006: 7) the character-narrator says, the (transitivity speaking – see Chapter 19 in this volume, by Simpson and Canning) material process of her inanimate skin ‘buzzing’ hinting at what later is to be explained: that she has scars and/or open wounds which, in interaction with the shower spray, cause her some sort of involuntary physical or psychological reaction in the form of a ‘buzz’. For the reader as yet oblivious to her body being scarred, the shower buzzing reference would be taken to be non-episodic, meaning not immediately relevant, only to later be re-classified as episodic, meaning ultimately relevant to the unfolding murder story; her scars later prove indicative where her own family’s involvement in numerous murders is concerned (see Emmott Reference Emmott1997 for more on the episodic/non-episodic information distinction). Later on in the novel, Camille comes to write, in blue ballpoint, victims’ names, among other words, on areas of her body she ensures stay hidden, conscious or perhaps paranoid of others seeing not only those words penned, but also those knifed (the reader later realises) onto her bare skin: ‘I pulled my sleeves down over my hands, balled the ends up in my palms’ (2006: 58).

It is not until page 63 when the narrator explicitly mentions words being ‘traced’ on her skin (‘I traced the word yelp on my right palm with a fingernail’). The reader here realises that Camille indeed has words physically knife-scratched and not just visually penned onto her body, the italics graphologically indicating the body wording as such. To show her losing more and more control of her cutting tendencies, Camille’s skin also starts to take personified dimensions, involuntarily taking agency over the cutting process, as do her scars, which eventually get named as such:

Camille’s skin here becomes animated, and appears to be audible on some level (‘blare’, ‘screams’), therefore taking over her perceptions on an aural as well as visual (‘see these letters’), tangible (‘I remember feeling that word . . . sticky across my pubic bone’), and also affecting level (‘Burning on my left hip’). The sentences are simple (‘I have a purpose’), or indeed minor: noun-phrased (‘My mother’s steak knife’) and non-finite (‘Cleaning myself’), hence acquire a ‘stream-of-consciousness’ effect, the acts appearing to be organised yet also continuous and habitual. As Camille here revisits her memory of first cutting herself, after being unable to cope with her sister’s loss, she also draws on similes (‘as if a knife-wielding first-grader’, ‘cutting like a child’) to ironically compare her experience with that of a child first learning to write. The redness of lines alludes to visual blood lines, her self-injury writing growing compulsively enthusiastic. Camille, like a child, here takes pleasure in a newly learned task. It is a bit later that, having grown to be a writer, Camille explicitly links her compulsive worded self-harming with compulsive writing: ‘By eleven, I was compulsively writing down everything anyone said to me in a tiny blue notepad, a mini reporter already’ (2006: 77). Compulsion with words appears to haunt Camille, the cutter and the writer, everywhere. Besides, Camille does not just ‘cut’; ‘I cut words’ she says (2006: 308).

To return to the body wording, it soon becomes personified, the words loudly and menacingly interacting with each other:

Taking on life of their own, the animated words attract attention to themselves somehow, Camille becoming all the more aware where exactly words are on her body and what personalities they have. The reader is here left wondering as to the meaningfulness or otherwise of what types of words she has on her body, and also what context she herself thinks of particular words in. Camille does in fact hint as to some patterns: ‘Why these words? Thousands of hours of therapy yielded a few ideas from the good doctors. They are often feminine, in a Dick and Jane, pink vs puppy dog tails sort of way. Or they’re flat out negative. Number of synonyms for anxious carved on my skin: eleven’ (2006: 76); ‘I had a dirty streak my senior year, which I later rectified. A few big cuts and cunt becomes can’t, cock turns into back’ (2006: 78). In terms of context, and though mostly random (‘The word tickle flashed randomly from my right hip’, 2006: 162), the words mentioned occasionally bear relevance to what actually happens in the unfolding narrative. The word ‘favourite’ ‘buzz[es]’ (2006: 182) when Adora overly protects Amma for instance, while in ‘[a]ll I did was write sick place sick place over and over for twelve pages’ (2006: 209), Camille’s compulsive reaction to the place she was born clearly emerges through her pen-writing.

Elsewhere, words are described as involuntarily flashing, getting hot, blazing up and burning, suggesting a now stronger affective reaction on her part: ‘A word suddenly flashed on my lower hip: punish. I could feel it getting hot’ (2006: 120); ‘I felt the word wicked blaze up by my pelvis’ (2006: 143); ‘Belittle burned on my right hip’ (2006: 153). The words are also animated in the sense of figuratively crawling from under her clothes and skin; ‘I could see the word lipstick crawling out from my right shirtsleeve’ (2006: 138); ‘The words on my chest looked swollen in the fluorescent light, like worms tunnelled beneath my skin’ (2006: 153). Overall, grammar plays a crucial role in the projection of Camille’s mind style, as she finds herself tempted to return to ‘cutting’, a word that, as a verb, is here used mostly intransitively; ‘I wasn’t going to cut, just allow myself that sharp pressure. I could already feel the knifepoint gently pressing against the plump pads of my fingertips, that delicate tension right before the cut’ (2006: 155). Here the knife acquires grammatical agency itself doing the cutting, while the nominalisation of ‘pressure’ and ‘cut’ too disguise Camille as the actor, her participation deemed almost irrelevant to the self-harming action. In other words, grammar itself suggests that Camille is overwhelmed with cutting urges; she simply cannot help herself.

As her cutting urges grow, Camille’s skin and its wording become more audible in their agency: ‘My skin began to quiet down’ (2006: 157); ‘Catfight began thumping on my calf’ (2006: 171); ‘On my left calf freak sighed suddenly’ (2006: 236). Words also become more sensationally affective in their agency: ‘Sugar flared on my thigh, nasty burned near my knee’ (2006: 172); ‘Nurse began throbbing’ (2006: 248); ‘bundle began tingling’ (2006: 261), boulomaic modality more explicitly taking over: ‘I wanted to cut. . . . I wanted to slice barren into my skin’ (2006: 172). Words even metaphorically and eagerly are said to ‘pop’ (2006: 230), ‘flicker’ (2006: 269), ‘beat’ (2006: 284), unwillingly ‘pant’ (2006: 231), ‘light up’ (2006: 300) and ‘[catch] fire’ (2006: 211), her skin ‘blinking’ (2006: 212). The book ends with Camille struggling to come to terms with the revelation of her mother and half-sister’s murderous actions. She gives into the cutting urges: ‘I slipped a knife up my sleeve . . . and dug it deep into the perfect circle on my back. Ground it back and forth until the skin was shredded in scribbly cuts’ (2006: 320–1). The lack of a reference to an emotional reaction here suggests that Camille is only doing what feels best. It is here that she gets rescued by her editor, who takes her in, cares for, and parents her. Her skin, nevertheless, continues to ‘pulse’ at night (2006: 321).

An angel’s mind style

A survivor herself of a brutal rape, Sebold sets her (Reference Sebold2002) The Lovely Bones in the 1970s, where the raped and murdered teenager Susie Salmon watches her killer and surviving family members and friends as she looks down from heaven. Despite Susie not referring to herself as an ‘angel’ as such, the term appears appropriate here. Described as a postfeminist Gothic novel (Whitney Reference Whitney2010), The Lovely Bones is unlike other murder mystery novels of the ‘whodunit’ tradition; readers are made aware of 14-year-old Susie’s murderer’s identity from the novel’s start, a killer who her father also finds himself suspicious of, despite being unable to prove his guilt. It was secret serial killer Mr Harvey, Susie’s neighbour, and a man her own parents have interacted with on several occasions, who raped, murdered and dismembered Susie in an ice-cold cornfield. The deceased character Susie’s reference to her killer with the respectful and formalised title alongside surname format ‘Mr. Harvey’ (2002: 6) is revealing in itself. Despite the horridness of his actions, and Susie’s reference to ‘his audacity’ (2002: 8) on one occasion, Susie’s overall tone suggests a certain level of composure on her part after the murder act. As Whitney (Reference Whitney2010: 353) puts it, Sebold chooses elegy rather than anger for her heroine. Interspersed with extracts from Susie’s life on earth, and therefore frame switching as well as mixing in Emmott’s (Reference Emmott1997) terminology, the novel appears to focus on the emotional turmoil Susie’s death has had on those she left behind. Like Susie’s own body, her family is also disintegrated; her mother leaves the family home for numerous years, her father suffers and is crippled by a heart attack, and her siblings find themselves emotionally distanced from their parents. It is not until the end of the novel that the heroine’s family is brought back together in celebration of the joys that life can bring. Susie’s murderer meets some justice also, when he dies by a blunt-force trauma caused by a falling icicle. An icicle previously appeared as Susie’s murderous weapon of choice when game-playing: ‘I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away’ she says (2002: 125). The second reference to the icicle finds it in an (inanimate) subject rather than an object position, and in a material event and not a material action: ‘The icicle fell’ (2002: 327). (Material events are, by definition, events that feature inanimate subjects, material actions featuring animate subjects instead.) The choice of structure suggests a lack of agency on angel Susie’s part, the icicle’s ‘heavy coldness’ (2002: 327) ironically linking back to the coldness of the weather in which Susie herself was kidnapped, and also Harvey’s body’s physical ‘heaviness’ and metaphorical ‘coldness’ in his rape and murder of the girl as well. Dismissingly, Susie directly then changes her focus to talk about ‘someone special’ (2002: 327), her sister Lindsey instead, suggesting that he is not special and is not worth dwelling on from then on, and certainly not worth ending her story on.

The narrative voice is in the first-person mode throughout. Uncharacteristically for such crime fiction, and also for first-person narratives, the voice is given from the perspective of a crime victim now deceased: ‘My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered’ (2002: 5). An early reference to an identity now belonging to the past (‘My name was Salmon’) suggests that this is no ordinary character. It is not the voice of a physical Susie addressing readers, but one in fact separated and dislocated from her body, who speaks of herself in terms of ‘body parts’ (2002: 49), and retains access to earth even after she physically dies. References to ‘my heaven’ (2002: 6) suggest a universe where not only does heaven exist, but every deceased person has their own. As she later explains, ‘in my heaven I can make a bonfire in the classrooms or run up and down the halls yelling as loud as I want. But it doesn’t always look like that. It can look like Nova Scotia, or Tangiers, or Tibet. It looks like anything you’ve ever dreamed’ (2002: 308). In Susie’s heaven, ‘intake counsellor[s]’ (2002: 8), ‘roommates’ (2002: 17) and other ‘residents’ (2002: 35) help the departed manage their own death. Such first-person narration is, by definition, internal but, unlike other such character-narrators encountered in fiction, Susie is here reliable and unlimited. Susie has omniscient, all-knowing abilities, not only having thoughts of her own after death (‘After I was dead I thought about . . .’, 2002: 6), and the capacity to actually relive memories, but also the ability to access the thoughts, feelings, perceptions and reactions of all others. As she puts it, she manages to ‘[break] through’ (2002: 45) and ‘fall inside’ (2002: 81) others, their container-like bodies enterable by Susie’s spirit. She has, for instance, access to her father’s memories (‘He remembered the day . . .’, 2002: 47), her sister Lindsey’s perceptions, knowledge and thoughts (‘If the house was quiet or if she heard murmurs below her, she knew she would be undisturbed. This was when she could think of me’, 2002: 59) and her mother’s mind, at times even before Susie was born. The narrator even has access to her killer’s ideological viewpoint, internally congratulating himself over, and celebrating, her death with a good meal, for example. She has access to his perceptions (‘Mr. Harvey could see for miles’, 2002: 54), his reactions (‘He liked the Pennsylvania keystone [he kept as a trophy]’, 2002: 54) and even senses (‘and then Mr. Harvey, sensing my father had no intention of leaving, asked him if he wanted to help’, 2002: 55). Like with her own mother, Susie also has access to a young, non-criminalised Mr Harvey, existing prior to Susie’s birth. In these episodes he is meaningfully relexicalised into ‘George Harvey’ (2002: 97), the naming pointing to an as yet innocent first-named boy witnessing his mother’s leaving, and hinting at later criminal behaviour towards women, possibly as a result of this event. In other words, we here get not only access to the victim but, through her, also access to the criminal mind style and his own indirect justification for his aggressive acts over the victim (for more on the criminal mind style, justification for murder, and also generic and social deviance in contemporary crime fiction, see Gregoriou Reference Gregoriou2007; for serial killer narrative discourses, including mother blaming, see Gregoriou Reference Gregoriou2011a).

When recalling her own rape, Susie resorts to similes: ‘I felt like a sea in which he stood and pissed and shat. I felt the corners of my body were turning in on themselves and out, like in cat’s cradle . . . How [my heart] skipped like a rabbit, and how his thudded, a hammer against cloth’ (2002: 14). The experiences she draws on here hint at her innocent nature (‘sea’, ‘cat’s cradle’, ‘rabbit’, ‘cloth’), itself contrastingly attacked by violence (‘pissed’, ‘shat’, ‘thudded’, ‘hammer’). When recalling the knife attack that followed, the knife is animated: ‘He brought back a knife. Unsheathed, it smiled at me, curving up in a grin . . . The end came’ (2002: 15, my italics). Here, the knife is personified, smiling and even menacingly grinning at the victim it is about to attack, somewhat distancing the murderer from the slashing act itself. The final sentence being a material event naturalises Susie’s passing, as if inevitable and predestined rather than effected by her attacker. When Susie later watches her sister Lindsey having sex, she likens the experience to a concretised room: ‘At fourteen my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows’, metaphorically enabled to express the difference between the two girls’ sexual experiences.

Susie ‘hovers’ (2002: 279), ‘roves’ where others ‘rove’ (2002: 232), and ‘moves with’ others (2002: 237). She also ‘pushes’ on ‘the Inbetween’ (2002: 180) when striving for communication with those she left behind. She even mentions being seen by family members on occasion, though it is unclear how conscious others are of seeing her. She ponders over not being able to grow, and enjoy sex when others can (‘My mother had my body as it would never become’, 2002: 197), but is ultimately enabled to enjoy sex with Ray, the boy she loves, through a girl she shares a strong connection with at earth, Ruth. Unaware of having fans in heaven, Ruth has an affinity with the deceased, can see them in ways others living cannot, and even has special access to the circumstances of their death. By allowing Susie access to her body, Ruth enables her to experience the one thing Susie had not, an experience that Ray too understands to be sharing with Susie and not Ruth.

Language proves instrumental for characters on a metalinguistic level as well. Deceased Susie now notes newly appreciating word meanings (‘by then I knew the meaning of forever’, 2002: 20; ‘And they had never understood, as they did now, what the word horror meant’, 2002: 21). Her mother struggles to come to terms with Susie’s murder, and is in need of it being acknowledged, and named, as such: ‘“My daughter’s murder,” my mother said . . . “No one says it. No one in the neighbourhood talks about it. People call it the ‘horrible tragedy’ or some variation of that. I just want it to be spoken out loud by somebody”’ (2002: 147–8). It is towards the end of the book that Susie gives another meaning to its title. Though The Lovely Bones could be taken to refer to Susie’s actual body parts, it comes to acquire a meaning related to family connections:

‘Lovely’ does not collocate with ‘bones’ in everyday language. The loveliness of the ‘bones’ alludes here perhaps not just to Susie’s remains and the ‘loveliness’ of her innocence, but also the eventualities of all our lives. It may even refer to the loveliness of our ability to find pleasure in pain.

Introduction

Modern narratology is a highly eclectic landscape that can be characterised by a magpie-like utilisation of work in other disciplines, a concern with incorporating an authentic consideration of ‘real’ readers within narrative analysis and a far-reaching infiltration of the ‘cognitive turn’ in literary linguistics. This postclassical model of narrative analysis is not an abandonment of narratology’s structuralist roots so much as it is the product of an explosion of the innovations and capabilities of research and a resultant evolution of traditional models to allow the field to reap the benefits of advancements in areas such as psychology, anthropology, gender studies and computer science. This takes place alongside an opening up of narratology to welcome in narrative studies in other mediums and modes, with a parallel development of approaches to accommodate this expansion.

This chapter considers how the evolutions of postclassical narratology, particularly in terms of cognitive models of reading, can contribute to an examination of Stephen Chbosky’s novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Reference Chbosky1999). Framed within traditional models of intertextuality (Genette Reference Genette and Lewin1979, Reference Genette and Lewin1980; Kristeva Reference Kristeva1981; Riffaterre Reference Riffaterre, Worton and Still1990), this analysis draws in particular on schema theory (J. R. Anderson Reference van Dijk and Kintsch1983; Bartlett Reference Bartlett1932; G. Cook Reference Cook1994; Rumelhart Reference Rumelhart, Bobrow and Collins1975; Schank Reference Schank1982a, Reference Schank1982b, Reference Schank1984, Reference Schank1986; Schank and Abelson Reference Schank and Abelson1977; van Dijk and Kintsch Reference van Dijk and Kintsch1983) to show how the postclassical approach can capture, more acutely, the process of narrative interrelation in reading and assess how individual difference among readers can impact the role of intertextual reference in reading.

Narratology: from classical to postclassical

The structuralist paradigms which characterised early classical narratology placed heavy emphasis on the attempt to discover the universals of narrative experience. In some senses, it was an attempt to discover the homogenising features, the common laws and structures, which would enable us to incorporate readers into our understanding and analysis of texts by flattening them out into a collective entity which was definable and therefore manageable.

The problem with this approach is not the desire to incorporate a consideration of real readers into narrative analysis; it is the attempt to do this while clinging furiously to the idea of establishing universals. The result is an inevitably unrepresentative and inauthentic, often highly idealised, vision of ‘readers’; in trying to pin down ‘all readers’, the result was often simply a dislocated version of the analyst themselves. This approach proves problematic.

Consider the example of intertextual references, the recognition and interpretation of which are highly nuanced and subjective. In trying to homogenise reader response in terms of how we find, understand and interpret intertextuality under the structuralist paradigm, many papers framed reading as a game of ‘spot the reference’. Riffaterre, for example, casts a complete and holistic awareness of all texts to which a given narrative makes reference, the intertext, as a necessary component of an individual’s journey to the ‘correct interpretation’ of a text. That is, ‘an intertext is one or more texts which the reader must know in order to understand a work of literature in terms of its overall significance’ (Riffaterre Reference Riffaterre, Worton and Still1990: 56, my italics). Rather than trying to account for the range and degree of difference across readers regarding the recognition, or not, and interpretation of intertextual references, the classical narratological approach looked to reason away these variations, believing that the universal reading can be found if all criteria are met. At worst, this sometimes teetered dangerously close to suggesting that not only do all readers notice and consistently interpret the intended salience of intertextual references, no matter how subtle or obscure, but that anyone who fails this test of literary hide-and-seek is essentially ignorant. In his analysis of an André Breton poem, for example, Riffaterre respectively describes two references:

1. ‘Even the most absent-minded readers will find the thread leading to the solution’ (Reference Riffaterre, Worton and Still1990: 65)

2. ‘The recovery of an intertext proceeds in two stages both so overdetermined that they are unlikely to elude for long any reader equipped with basic linguistic competence’ (Reference Riffaterre, Worton and Still1990: 73).

These kinds of statements are indicative of how the composite aims of the earlier structuralist-based models in narratology became self-limiting. The only way to neutralise the variation across readers in order to meet the desire for universality of reading outputs is to introduce a measure of skill and competence. In essence, Riffaterre argues that, in order for Breton’s poem to be read ‘correctly’, readers must identify the intertext as Breton intended otherwise they simply do not qualify as having read the poem properly. Any proper reading will, he argues, incorporate ‘the intertextual drive’; readers’ responses will be compulsory and interpretation will be universal: ‘facts of reading suggest that, when it activates or mobilises the intertext, the text leaves little leeway to readers and controls closely their response’ (Riffaterre Reference Riffaterre, Worton and Still1990: 57). These initial ventures into giving proper credence to reader response inevitably led to a dissatisfaction with this treatment of ‘the reader’. In this sense, postclassical narratology is something of a misnomer; it is not so much a ‘moving past’ as a renovation, a reworking. This is why David Herman’s (Reference Herman1999, Reference Herman2002) definition of the postclassical seeks to incorporate, rather than reject, classical narratology as part of an evolution of the discipline.

Postclassical narratology ‘prefers to consider the circumstances that make every act of reading different’ (L. Herman and Vervaeck Reference Herman and Vervaeck2005: 450). The transition to postclassical narratology can perhaps best be characterised as a movement from trying to deal with the capricious ‘reader’ by flattening out their quirks and squeezing them into a one-size-fits-all to an acknowledgement and celebration of their difference. This shift presented narrative analysis with a new but equally difficult task: how to account for that difference.

Giving primacy to readers and all their messy, discordant behaviours, their infinitely variant backgrounds, readings and ideologies required an explosion of new approaches and methodologies as varied as the factors narratology was now tasked to explain. As a result, postclassical narratology is best described as an umbrella for a range of a diverse group of methods and approaches variously triangulating aspects of the individuality of ‘the reader’. These approaches have been grouped in an assortment of ways (D. Herman Reference Herman1999; Nünning Reference Nünning, Kindt and Müller2003), but there is general consensus that the following constitute substantive strands which characterise the postclassical landscape of narrative analysis:

1. Thematic: Many researchers group readings by ideology. Analyses adopt a ‘feminist’ reading, a ‘postcolonial’ reading, ‘a queer theory’ approach, to name but a few. This methodology deals with the reader subjectivity problem by tracing the readings possible via a specific ideological perspective. It uses a narrowing lens technique, generating narrative analyses which cohere with a particular viewpoint and making no claim to speak for all. This methodology selects out a certain strand of readers rather than trying to homogenise across groups. In being explicit about its biases, the thematic approach serves to both acknowledge and celebrate reading from a particular perspective in a particular context.

2. Interdisciplinarity: Looking to other disciplines for answers which escape the remit and capabilities of our own characterises the interdisciplinary strand. Postclassical narratology casts a wide net in the quest to make the earlier models better able to cope with the scope of factors and variables the field now seeks to account for, rather than brush over. The aim is rarely to replace many of the models and approaches that were pervasive in the classical, more structuralist, period but to use research from other disciplines to evolve the way we approach our own. David Herman terms this, ‘covering blind spots’ (Reference Herman and Ryan2004: 397). Deviation and foregrounding, for example, now borrow extensively from attentional psychology (Gavins and Steen Reference Gavins and Steen2003; Stockwell Reference Stockwell2002, Reference Stockwell2009; Whiteley Reference Whiteley2011a). Possible worlds theory, which is pervasive enough that many separate it into a category of its own, is in many senses an amalgam of narratology, philosophy and psychology. Cognitive poetics leans heavily on neuroscience, psychology, sociology and rhetoric.

3. The cognitive turn: As becomes quickly apparent from the previous category, the nature of interdisciplinary borrowing has led to widespread interest in incorporating consideration of cognition processes, in what has been termed ‘the cognitive turn’ (D. Herman Reference Herman1999; Stockwell Reference Stockwell2002; Tsur Reference Tsur2008) in narrative analysis. This is perhaps unsurprising given that examining ‘real readers’ prompted the initial shift toward postclassical narratology in the first instance: the problem of dealing with the subjective ways in which humans think, experience and feel when they engage with narrative makes a cognitive turn the inevitable consequence. David Herman, who coined the term ‘postclassical narratology’ to group this new set of methodologies, championed the integration of the cognitive into existing models in particular: ‘according to Herman, the key to the logic of stories and storytelling lies in the preference rules and processing strategies of cognitive (re)construction, simultaneously facilitating narrative comprehension and the creation of intelligent world models’ (Herman, Jahn and Ryan Reference Herman, Jahn and Ryan2005: 70). Fields such as cognitive poetics have historically borrowed substantively enough from the cognitive disciplines since the early 1990s to come to stand as disciplines in their own right. Cognitive poetics, as the name suggests, has become independently interdisciplinary, concerning itself as much with cognition as with literature and thus facilitating a decreased need to depend on the research of other disciplines. This is the evolutionary aim that typifies much of postclassical narrative analysis; to develop and nurture the models to a point of fully functional independence.

From intertextuality to narrative interrelation

The following analysis of Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Reference Chbosky1999) attempts to exemplify the postclassical approach via an examination of some of the novel’s intertextual references. Using the more structuralist-based models of intertextuality (Genette Reference Genette and Lewin1979, 1982; Kristeva Reference Kristeva1981; Riffaterre Reference Riffaterre, Worton and Still1990) discussed above as a start-point, it exemplifies the benefits of the postclassical approach. The analysis typifies two strands of postclassical narratology, namely working interdisciplinarily, drawing on work adopted into linguistics from other disciplines in the postclassical era, notably schema theory from computer science, and incorporating a consideration of cognition. It will first highlight some of the weaknesses and ‘blind spots’ (D. Herman Reference Herman and Ryan2004: 47) in current approaches, in particular the limitations of having no mechanism by which to account for variation across different readers. It then adopts a postclassical approach to advance the capabilities of previous accounts of intertextuality prevalent in literary criticism and classical narratology (Genette Reference Genette and Lewin1979, 1982; Kristeva Reference Kristeva1981; Riffaterre Reference Riffaterre, Worton and Still1990). I propose parsing out intertextual references as they appear in narratives and narrative interrelation, the process by which readers make intertextual links, in order to more accurately account for intertextuality, its role in reading and the cognitive mechanisms by which it works.

The curious case of Naked Lunch

Readers have two available sources of knowledge when dealing with an intertextual reference:

1. 1) Previously existing information known prior to encountering the intertextual reference, the archived schema.

2. 2) The information about the referenced text available in the base narrative.

Naked Lunch provides an interesting example in Wallflower in terms of the role and scope of application of intertextual references in narrative. These references offer readers the opportunity to apply their schema to a number of different characters. Naked Lunch, for example, could be applied to tell readers:

1. about how Bill sees Charlie – What is Bill trying to teach Charlie by giving him Naked Lunch? What does he think he will gain from it?

2. about Bill – How does Bill see himself ? Why does he give Charlie Naked Lunch?

3. about Charlie – What does Charlie think about Naked Lunch? What do we learn about him through his interactions with Burroughs’s novel?

4. about how Charlie sees Patrick – What is Charlie trying to teach Patrick by giving him Naked Lunch? What does he think he will gain from it?

5. about Patrick?

6. about Stephen Chbosky – What does Chbosky think about Naked Lunch? What does his narrative schema look like? Why did he choose to include this particular text to pass across his characters?

Charlie outlines his own experiences of Naked Lunch. Thus by the time readers encounter it in the final extract, they have all had the opportunity to accrete their ‘Naked Lunch schemas’ with the following:

1. Bill deviated from his usual selection process in giving Charlie Naked Lunch. Charlie recognises this because ‘everything Bill tells me to read or see are similar. Except the time he had me read Naked Lunch’ (177). Naked Lunch is different from the other texts we have seen Bill give Charlie.

2. Bill tells Charlie he gave him the novel to read because ‘he had just broken up with his girlfriend and was feeling philosophical’ (177). Naked Lunch is the kind of book you might give someone if you were feeling philosophical, particularly if you were sad because your relationship had ended.

3. Charlie’s sister offers us some biographical information about the author, telling Charlie ‘Burroughs wrote the book when he was on heroin and [Charlie] should just “go with the flow”’ (115). Naked Lunch might not have a clear linear narrative. It was written by someone who was taking a lot of drugs and probably reflects that fact.

4. Charlie’s impression of the novel was that he ‘had no idea what [Burroughs] is talking about’ (114–15). Enforcing the previous point. Naked Lunch might be difficult to understand and follow.

5. Charlie interrelates Naked Lunch with two of the other books, eventually giving one to Patrick and the other to Sam. He tells his Friend that The Fountainhead ‘wasn’t like The Stranger or Naked Lunch even though I think it was philosophical in a way’ (181). Naked Lunch is philosophical but not in the same way as The Fountainhead. It might be similar to The Stranger.

6. In this last evaluation Charlie even offers up a comparative analysis of these three texts (The Fountainhead, The Stranger and Naked Lunch) and the others Bill has given him over the course of the novel, an opportunity for mass schema accretion: The Fountainhead ‘was a different book from the others because it wasn’t about being a kid. And it wasn’t like The Stranger or Naked Lunch even though I think it was philosophical in a way’ (181). Naked Lunch is more like The Stranger and The Fountainhead than any of the other books Bill has given Charlie. Those books are all about being a kid. Naked Lunch is therefore not about being a kid.

The schema features derived from the intratextual presence of Naked Lunch that I have suggested here are by no means fixed. None are immediately available to readers when they encounter the gift-giving scene and many may have passed over them without any accretion of their Naked Lunch schema taking place. However, it seems uncontroversial to suggest that having a sort of ‘authorised presence’ in the base text is likely to prime many readers to tune their schema to give these particular features, if attended to, primacy in making sense of vaguer references to Burroughs’s novel, such as that in the final extract.

Conclusion

Intertextual references are made by texts; narrative interrelations are made by readers. Highly explicit references which clearly delineate the preferred points of contact between a base and a referenced text may sometimes, even often, produce consistent interpretations across readers. But readers read holistically and interrelate freely. A lifetime’s gathering of narrative experiences across contexts and mediums provisions readers with a library of potential contacts which can be activated impulsively and cannot always be bridled, even by the strongest of steers from a text. Readers often report their interrelations as though they have little control over them: ‘this book made me think of. . .’; ‘I found myself comparing this with. . .’ ( J. Mason unpublished).

It seems that the more limited the amount of information about a referenced narrative available in the base and the richer the schema in the mental archive, the greater the opportunity for variation in the interrelations which result from a given intertextual reference. The vaguer the intertextual reference, the more reliant readers are on their archived or co-textual knowledge of that narrative. Consistency across interpretations is likely to be attributable to intratextual information about the referenced narrative, which primes tuning for salience. However, this intratextual tuning can easily be ignored, disrupted or overshadowed by readers’ archived knowledge of referenced texts.

Some may find my analysis frustratingly inconclusive. I make no apology for this: the postclassical shift in narrative analysis demands it. Seeking the ‘answer’ to how readers interrelate the narratives referenced in the Wallflower scene will only ever be an exercise in flattening out, stripping away and dulling down. The real task of exploring reading as a holistic process, which so often involves the interrelation of its parts, is to celebrate its eclecticism and, as far as possible, to account for how it occurs.

Ultimately, with Patrick I confess to having read only one of his books; it is unsurprising then, especially having engaged in such an attentive reading of Chbosky’s text, that I characterise his gifts as more ‘philosophical’. I read Patrick as a headstrong character who is surprisingly comfortable with himself and self-assured, but who gets a little lost. Maybe Charlie surrounds Patrick with other ‘lost boys’ to help him find his way. I fare a little better with Sam’s selection, four out of six. The Great Gatsby, while a favourite of mine, does not sit well with any cohesive sense of the group I can make which still sits well with the character herself or how I model Charlie as seeing her. It takes a back seat. Perhaps Gatsby is the caution of not being more like Scout or Holden – inquisitive about the world and managing what it throws at them as best they can. Postclassical narratology’s emphasis on how readers make meaning rather than how to get to the right one means that having read a higher or lower percentage of these referenced texts does not make a reading better or worse, only different. Intertexts, as they belong to readers, are personalised; a different intertext can yield different points of contact between narratives, interrelating, accreting and tuning each other in exciting and unpredictable ways. Thus my conclusion about the Wallflower passage may ring true with some because it draws on the text itself and is informed by some fairly rich schemas besides, but it is just that, my conclusion, and not necessarily the ‘right’ one if such a thing exists. Neither is it really conclusive. If I ever read any of those other texts I may well tune and reassess my reading, precisely because individual narrative experiences dynamically contribute to reading as a holistic endeavour.

This is perhaps the key advancement of postclassical narratology: an acknowledgement that readers are not consistent, with each other or themselves; they evolve, vary and change both as a group and as individuals. Nor are they readers of only one thing. If intertextuality wants to give such primacy to the role of other texts then it must accept that readers’ narrative experiences extend beyond, and will not always include, those things concretely referenced in the text under examination, no matter how convenient that would be for researchers – more so, that this is a good thing. Movements in postclassical narratology represent a necessary and integral shift in the drive to incorporate substantive consideration of readers in narrative analysis. Recognising that readers are not stable has liberated and redirected the field to focus on the aspects which are, like the cognitive processes, cultural variations and differences in ideology which enable us to arrive at such diverse and eclectic interpretations and which allow these interpretations to happily coexist.

Art as technique

The concept of defamiliarisation has played an important role in a large number of studies of literary style since the early twentieth century. The origins of the term are normally traced back to the work of Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984), a Russian Formalist critic who argued that the function of literary texts is the ‘making strange’ (ostranenie in Russian) of familiar, everyday experiences. According to Shklovsky, art exists in order to ‘recover the sensation of life’ (Shklovsky Reference Shklovsky, Lemon and Reiss1965: 20) and to portray the world to be discovered by the reader as if for the first time. He goes on to argue,

As van Peer (Reference van Peer1986: 1–26) outlines, Shklovsky’s ideas primarily had influence on the earliest forms of stylistics which began to develop along a formalist vein in the 1960s and 1970s (for example Halliday Reference Halliday and Chatman1971; Leech Reference Leech and Fowler1966b, Reference Leech and Freeman1970; Short Reference Short1973) and which focused on the sorts of phonetic, lexical and syntactic analysis that Shklovsky begins by advocating above. However, the additional notion he expresses here, that literature has the ability to slow perception, also continues to resonate within some of the most current approaches to literary language and style. As I will demonstrate later in this chapter, Shklovsky’s argument that the linguistic configuration of a literary text can create thought structures which possess a continuity extending beyond initial perception is one which is echoed in many stylistic analyses today, particularly those attempting to explain the experience of literary reading from a cognitive perspective.

Van Peer points out that Shklovsky’s concept of art as a technique is not without its complications and inconsistencies. He notes, for example, that Shklovsky is frequently criticised for the imprecision of his ideas and the lack of systematicity in his application of them and points out that the terms employed by the Russian Formalists as a whole (‘defamiliarisation’, ‘estrangement’, ‘palpability’, ‘perceptibility’ and so on) have a tendency towards near-synonymy. He comments, too, on the slippage that exists in Shklovsky’s work between formal linguistic analysis and an appreciation of the psychological effects of literary art. As van Peer explains:

Later work in the formalist tradition, such as that of Jakobson (for example, Reference Jakobson and Sebeok1960, Reference Jakobson1966, Reference Jakobson1968) and Mukařovský (for example, Reference Mukařovský and Garvin1964a, Reference Mukařovský and Mark1970, Reference Mukařovský1976), argued more clearly that the defamiliarising effect of literature is located in the formal structure of the text and, specifically, in its deviation from certain norms of standard, non-literary language. As van Peer (Reference van Peer1986: 14–16) explains, the stylisticians of the 1960s and 1970s developed this initial idea further towards a fully synthesised theory that deviation and parallelism bring about the foregrounding of certain elements of literary texts. He notes, too, however, that foregrounding itself is still ‘at least in part a psychological phenomenon’ (Reference van Peer1986: 14), later commenting that ‘although intuitively appealing, [the concept of foregrounding] is still rather speculative and on the whole rests on inconclusive evidence’ (van Peer Reference van Peer1986: 27). Van Peer goes on to deliver one of the first attempts to test the intuitions of stylisticians about the psychological effects of foregrounding through empirical experimentation. Much of van Peer’s subsequent work (for example, van Peer Reference van Peer1986; van Peer and Andringa Reference van Peer and Andringa1990, van Peer et al. Reference van Peer2007, Reference van Peer, Hakemulder and Zyngier2012; and with Zyngier et al. Reference Zyngier, van Peer and Hakemulder2007) is similarly dedicated to the empirical-stylistic enterprise of providing scientific evidence for the effects of particular features of literary language on readers.

Since the early 1980s, numerous other analysts have also sought to broaden the focus of literary study beyond introspection to examine a far wider range of reader responses to literary language (see, for example, Andringa Reference Andringa1996; Bortolussi and Dixon Reference Bortolussi and Dixon2003; Bray Reference Bray2007; Emmott et al. Reference Emmott, Sanford and Morrow2006, Reference Emmott, Sanford and Dawydiak2007, Reference Emmott, Sanford, Alexander, Eder, Jannidis and Schneider2010; Hanauer Reference Hanauer1998; Hunt and Vipond Reference Hunt and Vipond1985; Miall Reference Miall2007, Reference Miall2008; Miall and Kuiken Reference Miall and Kuiken1994, Reference Miall and Kuiken1999, Reference Miall and Kuiken2002a, Reference Miall and Kuiken2002b; A. J. S. Sanford et al. Reference Sanford, Sanford, Molle and Emmott2006; Sotirova Reference Sotirova2006; Zyngier et al. Reference Zyngier, Bortolussi, Chesnokova and Auracher2008). Among these, the work of Miall and Kuiken (and specifically Reference Miall and Kuiken1994) is worthy of special attention in the present chapter for its specific concerns with the concept of defamiliarisation. Miall and Kuiken begin by reiterating Mukařovský’s (Reference Mukařovský and Garvin1964a) argument that, although the foregrounding of particular linguistic features can occur in non-literary language, it tends to do so without systematic design. Like other stylisticians before them, Miall and Kuiken also link the textual phenomenon of systematic stylistic foregrounding in literature with the psychological effect of defamiliarisation, in Shklovsky’s (Reference Shklovsky, Lemon and Reiss1965) sense of the term, but also argue that this effect has an additional, emotional dimension:

Miall and Kuiken set out to test Shklovsky’s intuitions that defamiliarisation may also lead to a slowness of perception, arguing that this may in part be due to the process of ‘refamiliarization’, referred to above, by which readers ‘discern, delimit, or develop the novel meanings suggested by the foregrounded passage’ (Miall and Kuiken Reference Miall and Kuiken1994: 394). Their experiment began with three ‘judges’ (one of the researchers, plus two graduate English students) analysing three literary short stories for the presence of foregrounded stylistic features. The stories were then given to three separate groups of undergraduate university students, who rated segments of the stories for their strikingness and emotional affect. On the whole, Miall and Kuiken found that the presence of stylistic foregrounding in the stories was a predicter not only of strikingness and affect, but also of reading times: in the stories containing the greatest concentration of foregrounding, as assessed by the experiment’s ‘judges’, participants took longer to complete their readings of the texts. These findings not only appear to support Shklovsky’s notions of slowed perception but, because the groups of participants in Miall and Kuiken’s study were selected for their varying levels of literary competence and interest, they suggest that such psychological effects are independent from reader’s expertise in literary analysis.

Swann and Allington (Reference Swann and Allington2009) have pointed out, however, that many empirical studies of literary style and its effects examine readings produced in artificial reading or discursive environments by readers engaged in atypical reading behaviour and often interacting with atypical texts or textual fragments (although it must be said that this final point is not true of Miall and Kuiken’s study). More recently, a greater leaning in stylistics can be identified as developing towards what Swann and Allington (Reference Swann and Allington2009) term ‘naturalistic studies’, with a focus on contextualised reading practices and on examining readers’ behaviours in their usual environment, engaged in habitual reading behaviour and interacting with unmanipulated texts (see, for example, Allington Reference Allington2011, Reference Allington2012; Allington and Swann Reference Allington and Swann2009; Gavins Reference Gavins2013; Peplow Reference Peplow2011; Sedo Reference Sedo2003; Stockwell Reference Stockwell2009; Whiteley Reference Whiteley2010, Reference Whiteley2011a, Reference Whiteley2011b). These studies examine a range of readers interacting with literature in a variety of contexts, including academic literary analyses and student seminar discussions, but also reading groups taking place in non-academic contexts and discussions in online literary websites of various kinds. They tend to take a qualitative approach to the data gathered in these environments, data which represent voluntarily produced and often highly detailed accounts of everyday literary interaction, unmanipulated by the observing analyst. In what follows, I will be examining defamiliarisation from a similar perspective, as a psychological effect reported by a range of readers in naturalistic reading contexts. The constraints of the present chapter mean that my investigation will necessarily be limited in scope, but I am interested in exploring at least a selection of responses from readers interacting with a highly popular text, in order to ascertain whether defamiliarisation forms an important part of what makes such texts so well liked. My aim is to provide further evidence to support Miall and Kuiken’s notion of defamiliarisation as a textually based phenomenon possessing an important emotional dimension.

Defamiliarising the commonplace

Billy Collins (b. 1941) is a former US poet laureate and Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College, New York. His numerous collections of poetry have enjoyed sales figures that are exceptionally high for the genre, regularly breaking US records in this respect. Easy access to the typical evaluations made of Collins’s work by readers reading in non-academic settings is available through a number of online literary discussion websites, such as Goodreads (Goodreads 2012), LibraryThing (LibraryThing 2012), and Shelfari (Shelfari 2012). These sites currently boast millions of members situated all over the world, and they provide a means through which readers may share, discuss, rate and tag the literary works they encounter. As I have pointed out elsewhere (Gavins Reference Gavins2013), such websites normally offer their members the possibility of complete anonymity and it is impossible to be certain of the age, gender, occupation, ethnicity and social background of the readers involved. However, for the purposes of the present discussion, this anonymity is immaterial since what distinguishes the reading context of an online literary website from that of a peer-reviewed academic publication is its informal and dynamic nature, rather than the profiles of its participants. Even though the responses of academics undoubtedly form a considerable part of the discourse of online literary communities, these are nevertheless responses that are produced and shared outside the usual, highly formalised expectations of literary criticism and pedagogical practice.

It becomes quickly evident on examining the discourse surrounding Billy Collins’s poetry on Goodreads, Shelfari and LibraryThing that he is an immensely popular writer. On Goodreads, for example, his poetry collections score an average rating 4.17 out of a possible 5.00 based on 22,962 reader ratings (as a quick comparison with a canonical text, Shakespeare’s sonnets score 4.24 under the same system). Reviews and discussions of Collins’s work online number in their hundreds and below is a typical, if small, selection of some of the most positive responses to Billy Collins’s poetry offered within online discussion environments:

It is clear from these responses that the readers concerned have experienced what cognitive theorists commonly describe as psychological transportation into an imaginary world (see, for example, Brock and Green Reference Brock and Green2005; Gerrig Reference Gerrig1993; M. C. Green Reference Green2004; M. C. Green and Brock Reference Green and Brock2000; M. C. Green et al. Reference Green, Brock and Kaufman2004; Nell Reference Nell1988). It is also clear that for these particular readers this transportation has been highly immersive and emotionally affecting. Note, in particular, how reader (1) describes losing awareness of her surroundings while reading, a key indicator of psychological immersion according to M. C. Green and Brock (Reference Green and Brock2000), who develop a fifteen-point scale on which to measure such readerly sensations. Note, too, how reader (3) describes Collins’s poetry as allowing her ‘to transcend ordinary life’, explaining her experience of his work initially in terms of physical movement, followed by a profound renewed perception (‘and to realize the deep beauty and interconnectedness of life’).

In later empirical studies Kuiken, Miall and Sikora (see Kuiken et al. Reference Kuiken, Miall and Sikora2004; Miall and Kuiken Reference Miall and Kuiken2002a) develop the initial ideas on literary effect put forward in Miall and Kuiken (Reference Miall and Kuiken1994) to categorise the feelings associated with literary reading as occurring within four key domains. The first of these they term ‘evaluative feelings’ and argue that these relate to the overall pleasure derived from reading. Second, ‘narrative feelings’ are feelings provoked by an event or situation within the fictional world and include feelings of sympathy or empathy with a character. The third category of ‘aesthetic feelings’ relates to a heightened interest prompted by the formal features of a text and, finally, readers may also experience feelings of ‘self-modification’ during or after reading, described as follows:

In these studies, Kuiken, Miall and Sikora delineate the aesthetic feelings stimulated by the foregrounded stylistic features of a text from the more profound and potentially long-lasting feelings of self-modification which may or may not also be induced through literary reading. Interestingly, reader (3)’s comments, above, on the new-found realisation prompted by Collins’s poetry, would seem to fit neatly into the category of self-modification, and these feelings are also described as following on from an aesthetic appreciation of the craft of the poems. Indeed, all three responses report positive feelings in both the evaluative and aesthetic domains. Even more interesting for the present discussion, however, is the fact that all three, in one way or another, make an explicit connection between these feelings and the commonplace aspects of everyday life, which frequently feature in Collins’s texts. Reader (1), for example, situates the activity of reading Collins itself as typically taking place in a mundane setting (‘in your armchair with your tea’), suggesting through an inclusive second-person pronoun that this might be universally true for all Collins’ readers. Reader (2) describes Collins as a ‘master of this kind of simplicity’, bringing ‘poetry down to the familiar, even the mundane’, while reader (3) praises Collins’s ‘ability to portray the beauty in every moment of life’.

While the online readers above describe their positive emotional interactions with Collins’s work in terms of a sudden and extraordinary sensitivity to the ordinary, it should not be assumed from these quotations that Collins has the same effect on all of his readers. Indeed, his work appears, more accurately, to polarise opinion much of the time. Nowhere does this polarity become more marked than when positive readings reported in a non-academic context, such as those above, are compared with some of the negative evaluations of Collins’s work which have been put forward by readers reading in an academic context. Consider, for example, the following:

Here, the same commonplace qualities of Collins’s work, which the online readers responded to so positively, are levelled against the poet as markers of flippancy and banality. Despite the fact that Collins has won a multitude of national and international literary awards for his poetry over the years, he has also been subject to quite vicious criticism from a minority of literary academics, and another prominent feature of such critical attacks is Collins’s popularity, his ‘celebrity’ as Shivani describes it above, and his ability to make a living from his writing. Perhaps most alarmingly, the exception taken by some literary critics to Collins’s popular success appears to be rooted to a great extent in prejudices expressed along the lines of class and ethnicity:

In this example, Merrin outwardly relishes the temptation to indulge in snobbery against Collins, making several swipes at the poet’s Irish-American working-class roots as well as at his ability to please his audiences. These audiences, however, far outnumber the literary critics who have expressed such indignation at Collins’s success. Stockwell makes the following noteworthy comment in his analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’, another poem which enjoys great popularity in the UK in particular:

Taking Stockwell’s remarks into consideration, then, the readers engaging positively with Collins’s work in non-academic contexts form the most interesting subject for examination in this chapter on defamiliarisation, while responses such as those made by Merrin and Shivani may be regarded as eccentric by comparison.

Defamiliarising forgetfulness

In order best to understand the psychological impact of Collins’s poetry on his most affectionate audiences, in what remains of this discussion I will explore one the poems most frequently cited in online literary discussion sites as a favourite or particularly affecting text:

We have seen clear evidence in the extracts from online readers’ reports above that Collins’s poetry creates imaginary worlds that have the potential to be highly immersive. To understand the configuration of these worlds, and consequently the possible stylistic causes behind readers’ emotional responses to them, the framework of Text World Theory (see Gavins Reference Gavins2007 and Werth Reference Werth1999 for full accounts) provides an ideal analytical apparatus. The theory is rooted in cognitive linguistics and aims to understand how real-world contexts influence the production of discourse and how that discourse is perceived and conceptualised in everyday situations. It unifies text and context under one analytical system, allowing the analyst to gain both an overall understanding of the interactional nature of a discourse and to achieve a precise explanation of its textual and conceptual components. Under this approach, the mental representations created by literary texts are known as ‘text-worlds’ (see Gavins Reference Gavins2007: 10), conceptual spaces constructed in the minds of readers and initially based on the deictic markers contained within the text. These markers are known in Text World Theory as ‘world-building elements’ (see Gavins Reference Gavins2007: 35–52) and they define the spatio-temporal parameters of a text- world; they specify any characters (referred to as ‘enactors’ in Text World Theory) or objects present in the world, establish social and physical relationships between those entities, as well as describing time and place more generally. World-building elements include spatial deictics such as locatives, spatial adverbs and demonstratives, as well as temporal deictics such as variations in tense and aspect, temporal locatives and temporal adverbs. Crucially, Text World Theory recognises that the text-worlds readers construct in their minds based on these deictic foundations have the potential to be as richly detailed and immersive as the real world, as the information provided by the text is fleshed out with readers’ real-world knowledge and experiences in a process known as ‘inferencing’ (Gavins Reference Gavins2007: 24–5). All text-worlds originate from a ‘discourse-world’, the immediate real-world situation surrounding the participants in any discourse (see Gavins Reference Gavins2007: 18–34). The discourse-worlds of literary communication are normally split, with the author and the reader occupying separate spatial and temporal locations. This means that the participants must rely even more heavily on their inferencing abilities and it is from their immediate environment, and from the background knowledge and experiences which feed into it, that the participants draw the inferences they make in relation to the language they encounter. The specific knowledge the participants need to understand the discourse at hand is regulated and defined by the text itself, according to what in Text World Theory is known as ‘the principle of text-drivenness’ (see Gavins Reference Gavins2007: 29).

Adopting a text-world perspective on Collins’s text, then, the first point of stylistic interest in ‘Forgetfulness’ is the manner in which the construction of a coherent text-world is complicated from the very beginning of the poem. In the first stanza there is an abundant use of the definite article (‘the name’, ‘the author’, ‘the first’, ‘the title’, ‘the plot’, ‘the heartbreaking conclusion’, ‘the entire novel’), which might normally be associated with familiar objects and entities and be used to aid the relatively straightforward mental representation of a deictic configuration. In the case of Collins’s poem, however, these definite articles occur as part of a series of references to non-specific, abstract concepts (such as ‘the author’ and ‘the plot’), which are in turn connected to a similarly non-specific novel. Figure 14.1 illustrates the basic structure of the text-world of the opening lines of ‘Forgetfulness’ using standard Text World Theory notation (see Gavins Reference Gavins2007, and Werth Reference Werth1999 for summaries).

Figure 14.1: Indefinite figures and metaphor worlds in ‘Forgetfulness’

In Figure 14.1, the temporal signature of the text-world (in the top left of the diagram) is shown as the present, since the poem begins in simple present tense. However, the under-specificity of the objects and entities described in the first stanza makes them difficult to conceptualise as text-world-builders. They are therefore shown in greyed font as somewhat ghostly figures in the mental representation in Figure 14.1. As a means of better conceptualising the poem, readers may make recourse to an additional metaphorical mental representation in these lines. This possibility is opened up through the personification of the definite but non-specific name, plot, title and so on, signalled in the words ‘obediently followed’, which suggest that these figures may be walking away. In Text World Theory terms, metaphors such as this one create new text-worlds, formed from a blend of conceptual items initially nominated by the text but also drawn from the reader’s individual background knowledge and experiences. In this regard, Text World Theory to a great extent follows Fauconnier and Turner’s (Reference Fauconnier and Turner2002) ideas of metaphor as arising from the integration of two or more ‘input spaces’ into a new conceptual space with its own emergent structure. In Figure 14.1, the input spaces generated by world-building elements in the text-world (‘the plot’, ‘the novel’ and so on) are shown feeding into the metaphor world to the right of the diagram. When I gave this poem to a group of twelve undergraduate students in a seminar at the University of Sheffield in 2012, eight students in the group reported that a mental representation of a dog had also formed an input space in the blended metaphor worlds they formed for this line of the poem, a discourse-world inference suggested by the adverb ‘obediently’. Another three students in the group said that elderly people were also a component of their conceptualisation of this image, and both sets of inputs are shown in Figure 14.1 feeding into the metaphor world from the discourse-world. My student readers all suggested that the input spaces are blended together in the emergent metaphor world to form a complex mental representation of an elderly but obedient dog-book, walking away. A further transformation happens to ‘the novel’ later in the first stanza when it ‘suddenly becomes one you have never read, / never even heard of’. The shift in tense in this line, from the simple present to the present perfect, creates what Text World Theory terms a ‘world-switch’ (see Gavins Reference Gavins2007: 48), a new world created through a shift in the deictic parameters of its originating text-world and representing a separate time-zone. In this case, the world-switch is complicated further by the fact that it is negated. In line with other cognitive-linguistic theories of negation, Text World Theory views such constructions as essentially foregrounding (see Hidalgo Downing Reference Hidalgo Downing2000b), since the reader must first conceptualise the novel being read (at another temporal point) before then unconceptualising this event (see also G. Lakoff Reference Lakoff2004).

Another embedded world of a different kind is created at the beginning of the second stanza, but it is one which nevertheless follows a similar conceptual pattern to those created in the poem’s opening lines. ‘As if’ signals the creation of a hypothetical world, an unrealised possibility embedded within the world of the poem. Text World Theory terms all such worlds ‘modal-worlds’, a category which includes the mental spaces which occur as a result of the use of conditionality, those which arise from modalised forms, worlds relating to inner thoughts and feelings, alongside hypothetical worlds such as this one. All these linguistic features, Text World Theory argues, posit mental representations which are in some way ontologically remote from their originating world. In the case of the ‘as if’ that begins the second stanza of ‘Forgetfulness’, the world which is created here is a distant one and relates to another abstract concept, ‘memories’, represented in these lines as making a decision. The second stanza also contains a further world-switch, since the memories are described as having been harboured at a separate temporal point, indicated again by the switch in tense in ‘used to harbor’. Of course, a further metaphor world is also being created in this stanza, once again through personification. This time, our notions of fishing villages, quiet southern harbours, and retirement in old age, all feed into the blended metaphor world. Note again the embedded negative in these lines, ‘no phones’, which once more acts to foreground an everyday object as a prominent world-building element. This complex configuration of worlds is illustrated in Figure 14.2.

Figure 14.2: The text-world configuration of ‘Forgetfulness’

There is a marked shift as the text progresses from the definite non-specific references which predominate in the first half of the poem to a proliferation of indefinite non-specific items throughout its second half (for example, ‘something is slipping away’, ‘a state flower’, ‘an uncle’, ‘whatever it is’, ‘a dark mythological river’, ‘a famous battle’, ‘a book on war’, and so on). Rather than the poem adding clarity to the text-world as it develops, the world-building elements nominated in the text thus become increasingly difficult to conceptualise. There are also frequent further world-switches as the poem shifts backward and forward through three main temporal zones: the first and most current is the point at which ‘you are struggling to remember’; the second, more temporally distant, is the point at which ‘you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye / and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag’; and the third and most remote is the time when ‘you used to harbor’ memories and ‘you used to know’ a love poem by heart. The second-person pronoun in these examples and which runs throughout the poem is, of course, also worthy of attention here. Collins’s use of ‘you’ in ‘Forgetfulness’ conforms to a type of second-person address which David Herman (Reference Herman1994) terms ‘doubly deictic’. Herman argues that certain forms of ‘you’ act to conflate the text-world with the discourse-world, explaining in relation to prose fiction,

In Collins’s text, the second-person pronoun is clearly situated within the text-world, indicated, for example, in the proximal temporal adverbials ‘suddenly’ in the first stanza and ‘now’ in the third. However, at the same time as it specifies a fictionalised entity at this conceptual level, the ‘you’ in ‘Forgetfulness’ also appears to reach into the discourse-world containing the reader of the text. This cross-world extension is suggested mainly through the distancing effect of the indefiniteness of the poem; it is as difficult to fix the referent of the second-person pronoun within the text-world as it is to fix any of the poem’s other nebulous world-builders. Furthermore, after a series of unmodalised facts which seem clearly to relate to a fictionalised ‘you’ in the text-world (for example, ‘you have never read’, ‘you kissed the names’ and so on) have been defined, in the first line of the fourth stanza the pronoun suddenly becomes more generalised through the use of ‘perhaps’. This epistemic modal adverbial introduces a note of uncertainty into the poem, suggesting that ‘you’ relates both to a fictional entity, whose inner thoughts and experiences are fully accessible to the narrating poetic voice, and at the same time to the real reader, the content of whose mind can only be guessed at by this poetic persona. This uncertainty is repeated, and the doubly deictic nature of the second person is confirmed, in the first line of the fifth stanza with ‘Whatever it is you are struggling to remember’.

The pattern of negation is also repeated regularly throughout the text, either through syntactic means (for example in constructions such as ‘it is not poised’) or through repeated reference to objects and people leaving or disappearing (for example, ‘you . . . watched the quadratic equation pack its bag’, ‘something else is slipping away’, ‘It has floated away down a dark mythological river’). Modal-worlds, too, figure throughout the text, all of them epistemic in nature and functioning to question or undermine the certainty of key world-building elements. According to Text World Theory, any instance of epistemic modality (for example, the use of epistemic lexical verbs such as ‘believe’ or ‘suppose’, or modal adverbs such as ‘certainly’ or ‘perhaps’) creates an embedded world which exists at a remove from its originating world and through which the relative epistemic distance of a particular proposition can be conceptualised and understood. In ‘Forgetfulness’ this happens in the occurrence of ‘as if’ and ‘perhaps’, as already discussed, but also in ‘as far as you can recall’ in the sixth stanza and with ‘seems’ in the final stanza. The syntactic structure of these lines is also important here as, in two of these cases (with ‘perhaps’ and ‘as far as you can recall’) the positioning of the modal at the end of a clause leads these items to act as further negation: the reader must first conceptualise ‘a state flower’ and a name ‘beginning with L’ before quickly having to relegate these to a mere possibility and a vague memory respectively.

Defamiliarisation as embodied experience

The analysis of the text-worlds of ‘Forgetfulness’ carried out in this chapter has examined in particular the important roles played by negation, modality, metaphor and the doubly deictic second-person pronoun in Collins’s poem. Through these stylistic features, Collins captures the experience of ageing and the deterioration of memory which accompanies this universal process. In particular, Text World Theory has revealed how the linguistic structure of Collins’s poem leads to the mental representation and frequent subsequent derepresentation of a series of often commonplace but elusive figures: ‘The name of the author’, ‘the title’, ‘the plot’, ‘the heartbreaking conclusion’, ‘the entire novel’, ‘the memories’, ‘the names of the nine Muses’, ‘the quadratic equation’, ‘the order of the planets’, ‘something else’, ‘a state flower’, ‘the address of an uncle’, ‘the capital of Paraguay’, ‘Whatever it is’, ‘a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L’, ‘those who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle’, ‘the date of a famous battle’, ‘a love poem’. The overall under-specificity of these world-building elements helps both to universalise them and to render them tenuous, ill-defined and conceptually fragile. A proper understanding of such figures as ‘thought structures compounded from words’, as Shklovsky puts it (Reference Shklovsky, Lemon and Reiss1965: 27), rather than simple linguistic items leads to a fuller comprehension of Collins’s defamiliarising technique in this poem. By leading his readers through the process of perceiving and unperceiving over and over again in ‘Forgetfulness’, Collins not only represents the deterioration of memory to his readers but requires them to enact it for themselves. The experience is one which is highly engaging and material for many readers, as encapsulated in the following report offered by a reader on LibraryThing:

We have seen how many of Collins’s most devoted readers appreciate, in particular, his handling of the commonplace, the everyday, and locate their most profound emotional responses to his work specifically with this aspect of his poems. As reader (4) expresses above, this dimension of Collins’s work appears to encourage immersion and empathetic connection and, in some cases, to result in long-lasting self-modifying feelings. In ‘Forgetfulness’, I would argue that these readerly sensations are nurtured and encouraged by the fact that Collins’s poem forces readers to perform the act of forgetting for themselves. Indeed, an abundance of recent empirical research in cognitive linguistics and psychology has shown that embodied physical experience underpins all human understanding of language (see, for example, Barsalou Reference Barsalou2003, Reference Barsalou2009; Barsalou et al. Reference Barsalou, Solomon, Wu, Hiraga, Sinha and Wilcox1999; Gibbs Reference Gibbs1992, Reference Gibbs2003; Glenberg Reference Glenberg, Rickheit and Habel1999; Glenberg and Robertson Reference Glenberg and Robertson2000; Yeh and Barsalou Reference Yeh and Barsalou2006) and that encounters with particular linguistic items provoke psychological simulations of previous physical experiences. As Barsalou explains:

Thus, as Collins leads his readers to conceptualise flowers, rivers, bicycles and planets he revivifies past experiences of these categories. Such experiences are embodied and tangible in their primary occurence and remain so in their re-enactment through language. ‘Forgetfulness’ not only demands that readers activate the neural systems associated with definite, perceptible objects and concepts, but also subsequently destabilises many of these perceptions through negation, indefiniteness and epistemic uncertainty. The defamiliarising quality of Collins’s poem is realised through stylistic techniques which create text-worlds that are at once material yet nebulous, imagined yet embodied, textually driven yet psychologically experienced.

Imagery and embodied cognition

How can we account for the diverse meanings of these terms and how then can we propose a usable model? It appears that the existing approaches focus on different aspects of a very complex issue which exists at the intersection of the human body, the mind, and the reality we live in. As human beings, we interact with the world on many levels. First, we rely on our bodies to orient us in real-life situations. This includes sensory perception – vision, touch, smell, taste and hearing – but also the very spatial situation of the body and its ability to move and interact with objects. In other words, our bodies are the primary source of any form of experience. At the same time, as cognitive scientists have argued, the body is also a source of conceptualisation (see, for example, Barsalou Reference Barsalou1999; Gibbs Reference Gibbs2005; Gallagher Reference Gallagher2005; Pecher and Zwaan Reference Pecher and Zwaan2005b). Proponents of theories of embodiment and situated cognition claim that the mind is influenced by the body in that embodied experience and situated action are the primary sources of material for conceptualisation, including the conceptualisation of emotions and abstract concepts. Importantly, this approach also underlies an understanding of figurative language as reliant on ordinary areas of embodied experience – for example, our conceptualisation of mental processes (such as thinking) is often built on our direct experience of embodied processes, such as moving, using force, object manipulation, absorbing nutrition and so on. Lakoff and Johnson (Reference Lakoff and Johnson1999) discuss numerous such examples of linguistic expression which represent thinking as moving, visualising or eating (I need to digest this idea; I don’t see your point clearly; We’ll get to the next point soon).

Embodied functioning in the world thus creates correlations between forms of mental experience and forms of actual experience. Not only do I see a view (which engages my brain primarily, not just my eyes), but I can also construe the experience in some way – this may include the recognition of specific colours and shapes, but also the recognition of objects seen, the emotion the view evokes and so on. There are many components in our appreciation of what we experience, and many of these components participate in complex knowledge structures, called frames, so that full implications of experience are part of our understanding of the concepts referred to by linguistic forms. For example, talking about heavy clouds in the sky (as well as seeing them) involves recognising them as clouds, perceiving colour and shape, but also perhaps understanding that they may cause rain, which in turn may prompt me to take an umbrella along if I go out.

But such conceptualisations do not always have to emerge as a result of direct experience. They can also be prompted by exposure to visual representations (such as a photograph or a painting), and, crucially, through observations of other people’s behaviour, and through language (including its literary forms). I do not have to actually see the overcast sky myself to have a mental representation of it. Repeated exposure to the frames (see Fillmore Reference Fillmore1985, Reference Fillmore and Geererts2006) involved in actually seeing heavy clouds in the sky allows me to use these frames in interpreting other situations, such as viewing pictorial representations or hearing/reading words. In fact, having experienced a situation, I can also reproduce it from memory or imagine another instance of it, one which has not actually occurred. There are many possibilities, but two points are crucial: firstly, mental imagery would not be possible without us having access to embodied frames and associated perceptual memories, and, secondly, images are structured by existing knowledge and can be prompted in our minds through many different channels.

We should also note that the concept of ‘imagery’, in whichever sense, assumes a subjectivity, whether real or imaginary, whose mind can be claimed to ‘hold’ the image. In daily interactions, we not only rely on our own experiences and their mental representations, but we can also align ourselves with the experiences of others. Watching a person in a particular situation usually evokes an understanding of how that person is affected by that situation – mentally, or emotionally, or both. Also reading a person’s account of their experience, or another person’s account of that experience triggers certain construals and representations of other situations in our minds. This phenomenon has been explained variously in terms of theory of mind skills or, at the lowest level of embodiment, through activation of mirror neurons. Importantly, however, the reader’s reaction may not be identical to that of the actual experiences – while the actual experiencer may be angered, the viewer or reader maybe amused by the situation they see others in. Exposure to verbal (or visual) images comes with the same reservation: mental images evoked in readers’ minds will vary widely.

Additionally, mental imagery can be used figuratively, to evoke other meanings (as in metaphor, simile, allegory, etc.). This pathway to meaning construction is in fact quite common, as the study of conceptual metaphor suggests. It seems to rely on a somewhat different pattern of evocation. Every image evokes frames of some kind, but it can evoke more than one, often based on the perceived links across different areas of experience. For example, there is a tendency for the frame of purposeful motion through space (a journey) to be used to structure an understanding of other purposeful activities, and even the very course of the human life. On the one hand, the exploitation of a concrete, embodied frame for the construal of a less directly experiential one seems to be a pervasive pattern in language use. On the other hand, given the experiential source of such construals, images rich in embodied detail can be naturally read as referring to more abstract domains.

Definitions of imagery often stress the expectation that the image created be ‘vivid and particularized’ (M. Abrams Reference Abrams and Harpham2005: 128). The specific meaning of this requirement is not clear, but in what follows I want to suggest that it reaches into the core of the role of imagery. I argue that the concept of ‘vividness’ refers to rich experiential detail, attributed to an experiencing subjectivity which the reader can align herself with. But what seems even more important is that the style should not be simply descriptive, in an objective manner, but it should evoke a subjectified response. The central idea is that the reader’s mind can experience (as opposed to understand) things through the mental and emotional arousal only, not through intellectually absorbing the situation described. I argue that the contrast we should be talking about is that between ‘experience’ and ‘description’ – the effect of imagery, rather than what it depicts. Importantly, the experience evoked can be formulated through sensory perception or through other aspects of our embodied interaction with the outside world. It seems natural to include embodied experiences such as movement, the sense of weight, of proximity to other objects, of temperature and so on. In order to achieve a cohesive concept of imagery we have to define it in terms of giving verbal access to embodied experience, of whatever kind.

The processes to be captured seem to be firmly rooted in the concept of embodied cognition. Discussed in Gibbs (Reference Gibbs2005), Gibbs and Matlock (Reference Gibbs and Matlock1999), Pecher and Zwaan (Reference Pecher and Zwaan2005b) and many others, the embodiment hypothesis sees human mental and emotional life as directly emerging from bodily processes. The body is viewed as closely linked with the mind; in fact, it is claimed to be the source of various patterns of conceptualisation. As Gibbs (Reference Gibbs2005: 9) describes it, ‘People’s subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action provide part of the fundamental grounding for language and thought.’ Embodied processes are central not only to our own inner life, but also to our ability to understand the inner life of others. With the help of neural responses such as simulation (or, at a very low level, the firing of the mirror neurons), we are able to align with what others are feeling, without confusing our own experience with that of another experiencer. A broader discussion of these neural and cognitive mechanisms is beyond the interests of this chapter, but I will rely on certain general hypotheses outlined in recent research.

The use of imagery – in its embodied sense – is often connected with a specific poetic mood, and is naturally correlated with the expression of feelings. However, the way in which the connection emerges between the bodily perceptions described by the text and the feeling awakened in the reader is not clear at all. My contention is that stylistic analyses, paired with the general view of feelings as it emerges from literature on cognition, could clarify some of the sources of the connection.

As regards the very concept of ‘emotion’ in the context of the body, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (Reference Damasio1999, Reference Damasio2003) proposes a further distinction, between ‘emotions’ and ‘feelings’. Emotions are ways in which our bodies respond to the environment (e.g. increased heartbeat, sense of warmth or cold, changes in the rhythm of breathing). These responses are then appreciated by our mental processes and identified as the ‘feeling’ of, for example, fear. Additionally, our brains can simulate the feelings of others, building on the bodily experience we have of our own emotional responses. These ideas are clearly pertinent to the question of what verbal imagery can do, especially since it has been shown repeatedly (Gibbs and Matlock Reference Gibbs and Matlock1999; Pecher and Zwaan Reference Pecher and Zwaan2005a) that words evoke simulations in our brains in ways quite similar to observing actual actions, and, as Prinz shows (Reference Prinz2002, Reference Prinz2004), embodied action also prompts emotions. Although the complexity of acts of writing and reading has not been, and cannot easily be, addressed in a neuroscientist’s lab, we can still rely on what we know about cognition and language to try to fill at least some of the gaps.

I argue, then, that the effects of imagery depend in equal measure on the bodily roots of experience and on the role of language in prompting conceptualisations and simulations. Specifically, descriptions of bodily responses to the environment (involving vision, touch, taste and smell, but also body posture, motion, etc.) can evoke reactions through the vocabulary of perception and movement. In what follows, I want to consider three examples of the specific linguistic means through which imagery is evoked. After some initial explanation of the concepts I will be using, I will consider three literary texts which represent interesting aspects of the use of imagery, with specific poetic effects. I will start with a classic lyric, Wordsworth’s Daffodils, and then consider a prose example (Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse), and, finally, a contemporary poem, Philip Larkin’s Going. These textual examples provide interesting material for a stylistic and cognitive reconsideration of how imagery achieves its effect.

Experience and subjectivity

What are, then, the means to prompt a construal of an experiencing body through linguistic choices? It does not occur entirely through vocabulary of sense perception, but also through the linguistically prompted alignment of the reader with an experiencing subjectivity. The subjectivity is roughly equivalent to what is meant by ‘the poem’s persona’, but the latter term seems overly specific for the purposes of my discussion. The examples to be looked at below show that such a subjectivity is in fact not more than a point of view, attributed with the ability to be engaged in perception or motion (see Dancygier Reference Dancygier2012 and the papers in Dancygier and Sweetser Reference Dancygier and Sweetser2012). For simplicity’s sake, I will refer to such an experiential viewpoint as an Ego (which is not a person, and has no connection to Freudian psychology). The concept of the Ego does not assume a fully profiled personhood, but it does assume an aspect of experience that a person should be capable of having. For example, saying that The filing cabinet is to the left of the desk typically assumes a visual viewpoint available when one is facing the desk, which is a rather common viewpoint for a desk-user, even though there is no assumption that anyone is standing in front of the desk at the moment of the utterance. I will discuss my examples in terms of such an experiential Ego’s alignment with an aspect of the specific situation described.

Crucially, we need to distinguish the various possible Egos involved in a basic act of reading. The process starts with an Ego constructed by the writer, which then becomes the locus of the experience described in the text (whether it is assumed to be an experiencing person, an element of nature (flower, bird, etc.), an observer, or a narrator). In each of these cases, the experience attributed to such an Ego is different, but because personhood is not assumed, the experience itself is what determines the type of viewpoint profiled. In fact, in some cases, the experience is attributed to non-sentient entities. For example, in Wisława Szymborska’s poem Advertisement, a tranquiliser drug speaks to the reader, assuming consciousness and agentivity.

It does not matter whether a drug can in fact choose to act in specific ways, but what matters is that the Ego of the poem has been constructed in this way (for further discussion of the poem, and of the concept of Ego, see Dancygier Reference Dancygier2012). The drug in Advertisement can think, act and speak, and it has expectations of its addressee. Even though we typically assume that no such powers are available to pills of any kind, we have an understanding of what a sentient Ego is like and can align it with an inanimate object. Overall, every poem constructs some Ego, though what kind of viewpoint the Ego is profiled to represent is a matter of the discourse choices made.

In the process of reading, the words of the text may then move the reader into two kinds of responses. Firstly, one aligns oneself mentally with the Ego the text profiles (so, for example, understanding what intentionality is attributed to the speaking drug, which requires mentally simulating ‘being-the-drug viewpoint’, as emerging from the text). Secondly, the reader needs to become another experiencing Ego by responding to the construal the poem proposes, albeit only through simulation of what the text evokes. To return to the drug example again, readers are compelled to construe themselves as addressees of the drug’s tempting words. Also, they typically report feeling upset by the construal where their own power as agents is so totally appropriated by an inanimate object whose purpose is to relieve the stress of action without taking the ability to act away from us.

What should be kept in mind is that none of the reader-constructed Egos is fully predetermined by the writing. In general, when we simulate other people’s responses (as in an act of empathy), what we feel is not identical to what the target of the empathy feels, as we do not map observed behaviour identically to actually experienced behaviour, but what has been experienced is needed for the observations to evoke some kind of feeling. This is what seems to be happening in reading. Readers can re-create the intentionality of the drug on the basis of their own experience of being in control of their actions, and they can understand the poetically suggested powerlessness of the drug taker, even though they may not feel generally intimidated by the power of drugs. But each reader’s response may lead to somewhat different feelings (of anger at our weakness, amusement with the cleverness of the construal, vulnerability, etc.). The point is that the situation described in a poem is often a source of dual emotional response, aligned with at least two viewpoints: the text’s and the reader’s own.

All the ideas introduced above are naturally applicable to the construal of and response to poetic imagery, except that descriptions of experiences can be linked more directly to the kinds of feelings that emerge in reading. The point can be illustrated through a glimpse of Wordsworth’s classic poem Daffodils. Taught in many school curricula, popularised through anthologies and family books of poems, the text has often been seen as highly representative of the romantic approach to lyrical poetry, and, especially, to feeling. In spite of its simplicity, the poem evokes an interesting set of responses to the images described.

The poem’s Ego is here aligned with a narrating voice, represented in the text by the first-person pronoun ‘I’, and presumably cross-linked with the ‘Poet’ in the third stanza. The Ego is seen here in two situations: first the past encounter with the flowers and then the present repeated situation where the memory of the flowers is reconstructed in the Ego’s mind. It is thus indeed a case where the experiencing Ego is construed as having full personhood – which makes it possible for the poem to describe memories, reflect on various moods, consider the role of mental imagery in changes of feelings, and so on. Our appreciation of the Ego’s feelings is mainly through vision: either the memory of what was seen, or the recalled image displayed before ‘that inward eye’ – the conscious mind.

But the central image I want to focus on is that of ‘dancing’. Daffodils are ‘dancing in the breeze’, ‘tossing their heads in sprightly dance’; the waves on the lake dance too, though not as joyfully as the flowers; and finally, the poet’s heart ‘dances with the daffodils’, or rather, with their memory. The movement of a dancer is construed differently from the movement of, say, a hiker. It is not motion along a path towards a destination. On the contrary, in dance, the body posture is expected to be expressive, and loaded with emotive elements. In a sense, a dancer is somewhat like a writer: there is a construal (fully embodied, not textual) of the creative act’s Ego, whose postures are aligned with any possible feeling. The viewer then, like a reader, reads the experiencing Ego’s viewpoint (deciphers the emotion) and feels something in response – possibly simulating the same bodily movement and the associated emotion in her body and mind.

For flowers or waves to dance we need to construe them as having bodies that can move in expressive ways. In the case of the waves, their repeated up/down motion can be read as a pattern of certain significance, but with flowers we can assume a projection of a body posture – upright, energetic, with the head swaying to the rhythm of the wind. Flowers have a bodily structure that can easily be mapped onto a human body – the blossom being the head, and the stem being the legs and the trunk; additionally, leaves can move like arms. In the poem, the description of dancing daffodils evokes the image of joyful expressive movement of a human body, and thus the experiencing Ego is attributed to the flowers based on perception of their movement and the attribution of emotive underpinnings of such movement. The reader can then understand the Poet’s sense of elation at the sight – the Poet’s experiencing Ego is simulating the emotive body posture of the flowers. Finally, recreating the source of joy and the Poet’s emotive response, the reader is likely to experience some sense of gaiety herself, as a result of the next step of simulation.

There is, however, one more step in the sequence. The last stanza is in sharp contrast to the first three, since the poem’s Ego is described as lying down – not in an upright position suggesting activity and alertness, not moving at all, and not joyful. In this context, the ‘dancing heart’ is clearly not connected to bodily movement and is not (presumably) construed as moving in sync with the daffodils swaying in the breeze. What appears to be the case is that the first three stanzas describe a situation where movement of upright bodies (humans or flowers) is read as a symptom of joyous feelings, and in the last stanza the dancing movement and joy are now treated as inextricably connected. The ‘dancing’ heart is the consciousness that can feel joy without the body participating in the joyous act, and without even observing it in a realistic setting. Crucially, the Poet need not have danced happily before to attribute emotions to moving flowers – all it took is an embodied sense of how a specific form of movement of a fully upright body, with its head held high, can evoke the emotion of energised elation and, consequently, the feeling of joy. Then the joy can be conceived of without actually experiencing the bodily engagement, since it can now be simulated based on the experiential memory built into all human bodies (linking bodily movement and emotion). The role of ‘imagery’ in the poem is essentially summarised through this progression of construals: viewing bodies in a happy scene creates emotions of happiness, which our mind can preserve and reproduce based on the mental representation of the scene. Finally, it can inspire similar emotions in a reader, whose bodily sense allows her to re-simulate the feeling. Reproducing the feeling may also be paired with prompting the body into a similar state – so that we can imagine the Poet snapping out of the period of pensiveness and getting up from the couch; we can also expect the reader to feel re-energised and more optimistic – which is perhaps the whole point of reading this kind of poetry.

A disembodied subjectivity

Wordsworth’s poem evokes body posture and movement to suggest action and joy. However, fine differences in the description of body posture and perception can create an image that evokes entirely different emotions and feelings, as in a fragment from Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. The entire novel takes place in the summer house of the Ramsey family, located on the shore, with a lighthouse on an island nearby. In the first part, the family and many of their friends spend the summer in the house, but, to the dismay of the Ramsey children, they never reach the lighthouse. In the final part some of the members of the group return, many years later. The middle part, titled Time passes, is a kind of interlude, when the house, abandoned for many years because of war, deaths in the family and so forth is left to the forces of nature. The haunting emptiness of the house and the depressing events elsewhere create an atmosphere of gloom, solitude and hopelessness. And yet, the cycle of nature runs its usual course:

The description in this fragment stands in stark contrast to Wordsworth’s poem, even though in both the focal point is the description of flowers in bloom, especially daffodils. Importantly, the flowers are also described in terms of upright body posture and attributed with human bodily features (‘standing there, looking before them’). But the description involves a different construal of a human body – not moving and energetic, but simply standing in the ‘stillness’. The effect of evoking a human body prepared for interaction (upright), but not engaged in any meaningful action is strikingly different from the ‘dancing daffodils’ – instead of joy and high spirits, we sense inaction, despondency, purposelessness. But the mechanism is the same – the emotion evoked reaches the reader through the described body posture. The fact that it is projected onto the flowers only makes the image more depressing, since embodied signs of mood are more readily expected of humans than of nature. Furthermore, the analogy between flowers and people is developed in a way that deprives the experiencing Ego construed of the central perceptive modality – that of vision. The flowers are first portrayed as looking before them, looking up, but this description applies only to projected body posture, as in fact they are beholding nothing, eyeless, and so terrible. At the basic embodied level, lack of vision makes interaction, object manipulation or purposeful action very difficult, and is in fact only possible when other senses compensate for the lack of visual input – clearly not what Woolf’s construal suggests. Also, the adjective eyeless extends the projection to an image of a human face, which adds to the strange sense of a body deprived of its human features and incapable of acting or interacting.

Even more importantly, the Ego projected onto the flowers here is not in some feedback loop with a human experiencing Ego – as the ‘Poet’ in Daffodils is. The first four sections of the second part of the novel (Time passes) are written without an experiential engagement of any of the characters, and yet the narrative seems full of activity – though not human activity. First, darkness gradually fills the house and turns it into lifeless, colourless landscape:

This description treats a static concept of darkness as if it were capable of purposeful motion and causative action (as we can see in verb forms such as creeping, stole round, came, swallowed). This is somewhat related to process-profiling uses such as it became dark, but enhances the agentless ‘change of state’ meaning into the presence of a wilful agency. In effect it treats imagery not in terms of states to be perceived, but in terms of actions taken. In the fragment, the experiencing Ego is aligned with the changing availability of light. But the destructive force of the darkness is in fact more tactile than visual. Objects disappear, but not only from sight. The flood of darkness feels their presence, touches them, much as a person would in the dark, and removes them out of any perceptive reach. The darkness does not experience the house as a human would, but we can project specific abilities of the human body onto its destructive presence. Imagery it is, then, but re-construed for the purpose, explicit in the whole second part, of conveying the emptiness and desolation of the house, abandoned by the summer crowd and withdrawn from their lives.

Some analysts might be inclined to simply describe this construal of darkness as ‘personification’ (in fact, one could quickly dismiss Szymborska’s Advertisement in the same way, which would miss the whole complexity of construal there). I believe, though, that the category of personification is not helpful, in this as well as in other cases. It is very broad, and it relies on our ability to use words denoting inanimate objects and abstract concepts with verbs assuming agency (the tomato sauce ruined my stomach/my dress/the meal; our beliefs give us power to endure, etc.) or adjectives describing human feelings (the tree looked lonesome; the house felt anxious). The use of personification is extremely common, especially in descriptions of natural phenomena (the wind howled; the clouds raced across the sky). It is also not restricted to literary expression, or not necessarily more common in literary texts than in colloquial discourse.

In G. Lakoff and Turner (Reference Lakoff and Turner1989), personification is treated as an example of the EVENTS ARE ACTIONS metaphor (though this does not cover the adjectival use). Indeed, the point of most of this usage is to present what happens without any agency as if a volitional or sentient entity were involved. But this does not imply that we are indeed adding ‘personhood’ to our construal of an object or a phenomenon, but it is, rather, double alignment with an experiencing Ego – as in the cases described above. Sentences such as the clouds raced across the sky or the house felt anxious imply, initially, that an observer perceives the motion as determined and fast (as in a race) or the atmosphere of the house as tense. The construal is then projected onto the terms describing the objects or natural phenomena involved, and the experience felt is aligned with them, as they are the source of the perception of the observer. There is a metonymic relationship between the observer and the objects, such that the perception registered by the recipient is attributed to the source of the perception. The issue is thus directly relevant to the concept of imagery as outlined here, though in colloquial discourse the alignment of an experiencing Ego with an object is much less elaborate.

What, then, makes Woolf’s narration ‘literary’? There seem to be two reasons why her text goes beyond what is ordinarily referred to as personification. First, the usage is sustained through the entire passage and elaborated into a narrative – there are various ‘actions’ attributed to darkness and they create a dynamic story, a sequence of related events. Second, the specificity here is that there is no directly available Ego to whom the experience of seeing darkness swallow furnishings can be attributed. The only Ego in Woolf’s narrative is that of the darkness itself. An interesting construal emerges that way: what could be a perception of darkness falling over the house is truly an action of darkness overtaking the house. The image emerges based on our ability to entertain two unusual conceptualisations: one, we can imagine perception without a perceiving Ego, and we can entertain an experiencing Ego without full personhood.

In further paragraphs of Time passes similar powers are attributed to the ‘sliding lights’ (passing beams of light from the lighthouse) and ‘the fumbling airs’, which enter the house, but, being unable to ‘touch nor destroy’, finally disappear. But then people leave, the house stays abandoned, and the airs return:

Here, again, is a narrative solution to a problem of how perception of change can be construed without the perceiving Ego. Besides resembling the ‘darkness’ example above, in that the ‘airs’ explore the house, allowing the reader a glimpse into its state, there is an interesting description of abandoned objects. Clothing is naturally associated with the person who wore the garment before it was abandoned, and thus the text plays not just with the current state of emptiness, but also with its past alternative, a busy summer house filled with people.

Also, the reader’s expected alignment with the perspective of the wondering ‘airs’ has the expected effect of emotions associated with the sense of loss and emptiness. The Ego profiled is fully sentient: it can touch the objects it passes (brushed, nibbled, fanned), it can hear the hangings flapping loose, without anyone attending to them, and the creaking wood, making sounds, but not disturbed by a human step, and it can detect ‘human shape’ in the discarded objects. It ‘sees’ what a human would see, but there is no human to whom the experience could be attributed. Overall, the purpose of the construal seems to be primarily to create an Ego that the reader can follow in the experience of the abandoned house. But at the same time, the absence of a human experiencer contributes to the sense of emptiness in the passage.

What Woolf’s text shows is that it is so natural as to be almost necessary to assume a perceiving observer in order to describe a scene. The existence of an experiencing Ego is what any description of imagery relies on, which might question the very idea that a discussion of imagery alone is in any way useful in analysing texts. But at the same time, the discussion of how various texts profile the experiencing Ego seems to be a more fruitful enquiry, involved in imagery, but not restricted to it. In the examples I have shown so far, various degrees of presence or absence and various configurations of perceiving and conceptualising Egos yield interesting poetic and narrative effects.

Experiential void and the body

My next example shows a text that refers to the senses more explicitly, though not in a straightforward description of sensory perception. Philip Larkin’s short poem Going is a simple, yet convincing example of how the body and the senses are used in the evocation of a basic awareness of the fragility of everyday experiences. The poem begins:

The poem’s mood is dark. I often ask my students for a reaction to the first reading, and I invariably hear words such as ‘depression’, ‘sadness’, ‘despair’ or ‘death’. The effect is achieved, again, through a depiction of the states of the body, but these states are here directly related to the senses. The most interesting suggestion seems to be that the poem is describing the experience of dying, and there are several different reasons to follow that suggestion. The poem’s title, Going, can be read as suggesting death, via the conceptual metaphor DEATH IS DEPARTURE. This does not stand in conflict with the use of ‘coming’ in the first line, since the two deictic verbs suggest two different metaphorical construals of events in time – either we are moving towards them (we are approaching Christmas) or they are moving towards us (Christmas is approaching) (see Burke Reference Burke2005; Dancygier and Vandelanotte Reference Dancygier, Vandelanotte, Brône and Vandaele2009). There is a further metaphorical elaboration, through the word ‘evening’, evoking another conceptual metaphor of life and death, LIFETIME IS A DAY. The metaphor maps a life cycle onto the cycle of a day, where morning is the beginning, and evening is the approaching end of the cycle, as well as the period of darkness – which reinforces the ‘death’ reading, since death is often metaphorically construed as sleep or darkness.

Even independently of these metaphors, the text of the first stanza evokes a contrast between our bodily sense of ‘day’ – light, being active, being in control of one’s actions, ability to interact with objects and other people and so on, and the embodied sense of night – lack of daylight, time of inaction, reduced mobility and limited interaction. The evening approaching us is not the familiar evening of a safe domicile (‘one never seen before’) and does not bring the relief of artificial light (‘lights no lamps’). Such an evening can naturally be associated with a situation where inaction and lack of sensory input is forced an experiencing Ego.

The middle section of the poem evokes the sense of touch (silken [. . .] to the touch), but lines 5 and 6 disperse the sense of comfort that the word silken evokes. These lines also build on the embodied experience of closeness as intimacy and comfort – whether because of proximity of other people or because of a protective enclosure that separates the body from outside stimuli. The questions in the third stanza have an additional effect. First, the tree is described as gone (CHANGE IS MOTION), but it is also removed from the field of vision, and as a result the spatial/vertical structure of the ordinarily perceived world is shattered. The sense of cohesiveness of the surrounding world is destroyed; through these lines, a perceptive dimension is added to our embodied sense of well-being, that of predictable directionality and spatial organisation. The next question (‘What is under my hands that I cannot feel?’) returns to the sense of touch, but the expected recognition of what our hands rest on is disturbed – the understanding of the immediately surrounding world is collapsing. Both these questions build heavily on the fact that sensory perception constitutes the basic feedback on our experience – lacking an accurate sense of the situation our body is in is a clear sign of loss of the basic connection to our own life functions, our identity and our surroundings.

The final question (‘What loads my hands down?’) evokes yet another embodied dimension – the sense of our own weight and the resulting appreciation of our ability to move and to manipulate objects – the ability that is necessary in all life situations. Overall, the poem conveys a sense of loss of one’s basic ability to use one’s body, and the disturbing sense of distance between one’s conscious thought and the experiencing body. Once the connection with the body is weakened, the resulting state of the diminished or severed bond between the body and the mind is possibly the most disturbing state to imagine. And yet that is what the poem forces the reader to do – to align with an experiencing Ego who/which is in fact losing its ability to experience.

Let us return briefly to the question of whether the poem describes the experience of death or some other state of inaction and withdrawal. The title of the poem was in fact changed, and the text was first known under the title Dying Day. While in this version there is at least some indication of death, it is in fact spurious, because of the ambiguity – it could be the day of dying or a day that is dying. The latter reading is aligned with the word ‘evening’ in the first line, and so the whole poem can still be read as evoking a depressing end of a day, but also, metaphorically, the end of life. Naturally, there is no point in arguing for one interpretation or the other, as both are equally valid, but whichever one we choose, we are still bound by the clear and evocative descriptions of the embodied states which we naturally connect to emotive states of inaction, lack of energy, depression, etc. The feelings thus evoked in the reader will be just those that the reader’s body and mind will first suggest – of fear of death, of tiredness, of psychological trauma.

However, it has often been commented that Larkin truly feared death and struggled with the thought that it is inevitable. In another poem, Aubade, he expresses his fear explicitly. He describes the source of fear of death not as fear of pain or afterlife, but of ‘the total emptiness forever’, ‘Not to be here, Not to be anywhere’. His explicit description of why death terrifies us is again appealing primarily to the senses.

These words clearly match what Going describes, but the effect is different in the two cases. While Going forces us to align ourselves with the very experience of dissolving into lack of experience, into perception-less, sense-deprived nothingness, Aubade is a reflection on the abhorrence of such a state. The Ego of Aubade is a fully sentient and intellectually alert person, considering death. Going attempts to re-create the experience of dying and prompts an alignment of the reader’s Ego with such a state, in a sense giving us a taste of what he thinks it might be. Aubade, for comparison, is a discourse, a reflection on death and the possible experiential aspects of its arrival. Going simulates the experience of dying, Aubade does not. In this sense, one might argue that only Going is a true example of the use of imagery, as it prompts an embodied alignment with the situation construed.

Experiencing imagery

In view of the above examples, imagery seems still to be a useful concept, as it allows us to distinguish the ways in which language can refer to embodied experience with different effects (descriptive or experiential). We can also attempt to explain the affective implications of image-rich texts through a better understanding of the evocative power of linguistic choices. From the stylistic perspective (properly cognitive poetics: see Brône and Vandaele Reference Brône and Vandaele2009; Stockwell Reference Stockwell2002, Reference Stockwell2009), this approach requires a focus on the specific ways in which language can be crafted to simulate experience. While this kind of investigation may not be easily accomplished with a study of formal or grammatical means, a better understanding of the evocative power of language is a goal worth pursuing. For this to be accomplished through the study of imagery, we need to de-focus the actual matter of the description (what was seen, smelled, tasted, etc.), and emphasise the linguistic means that allow us to construe different experiences and experiencing Egos. The specific configuration of such Egos in a text and the mechanisms which invite the reader to one pattern of experiential alignment rather than another could be our primary tools. In other words, posing the question of imagery as the question of an experiencing Ego may lead to a better understanding of the processes involved and a more accurate stylistic tool-kit. The possibilities are numerous, often stylistically complex, and though poetry offers an intense example, they can be observed in any genre.