Chapter VI, Part 3 (and last)
39.
The most elaborate and widely recognised Stylistic Parameter is Figurality
as a scale between Literal, as in [1836] and Figurative,
as in [1837].
[1836]
The man with the grey suit stopped the omnibus, and got out in Oxford Street. (Moonstone)
[1837] He began to feel in their conversations that she did not sufficiently think of making
her-
self a
nest for him. Steely points were opposed to him when he bared his bosom. (Egoist)
On
the side of practice, contrasting examples like [1836-37] are easily found; and
at times writers exploit the contrast for a pun [1838-39]:
[1838]
Two
earth scientists at the University of Illinois have, literally and figuratively,
broken new ground by synthesizing a type of clay. (College News)
[1839] That the Democrats are vulnerable in the heel, is not merely figuratively but literally true. Their officials scampering away with the public money
[…] are most distressingly affected in their heels with a species of running
itch. (Abraham Lincoln)
40.
But on the side of theory, this Parameter has not been captured by a unified,
consensual account despite its frequent mention under various labels since
antiquity. Such has not even been achieved for literal meaning alone, which
should be the most perspicuous sector. Projects for doing so have typically
discounted the styles of discourse in favour of speculations about
‘language’ and ‘reality’, drawing either on
philosophical
conceptions like ‘truth’ or ‘reference’,35 or on
psychological ones like ‘sensory perception36 and
‘observation’.37 ‘Reality’ itself was taken as given for
everybody in advance — stable, secured, self-evident, and univocal.
41.
Such theorising marginalizes the intentions and goals of discourse participants
deploying a range of styles to promote or create particular versions or views of
‘reality’, with no express appeal to truth or observation. ‘Being
literal’ is a discursive practice that may not even be privileged, as when it
is obviously not the
intended meaning, viz.:
[1840]
New faces sit on boards (Las Vegas News)
[1841] Accused rapist finds God in jail (San Antonio
News)
[1842] Jury is still out on composting toilets (Salem
Statesman-Journal)
[1843] Genetic Engineering Splits
Scientists (Washington Post)
The
Adverb ‘literally’ appears where the most literal meaning might otherwise
not be intended [1844-45]; and even where it could not be intended anyway
[1846-47].
[1844] I literally jumped for joy when I heard that key turn in the lock (Where There’s Life)
[1845] Those flowers are literally buzzing with honey-making, pollinating bees (Gardeners’ World)
[1846] Gladstone was an omnivorous reader, […] and his home in Hawarden literally overflowed with books. (Bibliomaniac)
[1847] Smith struck a
match and relighted his pipe. […] His eyes were literally
on fire. (Fu)
Moreover,
being ‘literal-minded’
can be Pejorative [1848], if not downright misleading [1849]:
[1848]
The
courts accept that ordinary readers are not literal-minded
simpletons. They are capable of divining the real thrust of a comment (Media
Law)
[1849]
To
the literal-minded regulators at the Food and Drug Administration,
‘energy’ means calories, [and] any
food with calories is an ‘energy’ food. Never mind that no more than one in
a million consumers would ever guess that.
(Nutrition Action)www
So
we cannot take ‘literal’ at face value as the foundation for a theory that
relates meaning to style.
42.
Perhaps we could adopt a practice-driven definition for this Parameter.
Consulting the relative proportions in attested usage, we would assess how
highly the actual meanings of
Expressions in a particular text correspond to their typical
meanings, higher for literal usage, and lower for figurative usage. By this
account, ostensibly basic meanings as listed in dictionaries need not be more
literal. In the BNC, only 74 out of 253 occurrences show the meaning of
‘torrent’ as a rush of ‘water’ (or ‘river’, ‘rain’ etc.). The
rest was mostly for an outpouring of pejorative discourse like ‘of abuse’
(20 uses) and ‘of words’ (14), plus ‘criticism, complaints, rebukes,
recrimination, innuendo, gossip, lies, foul language, incoherent shouts,
defamatory invective, party oratory’.38
43.
The traditional approach has been to enumerate ‘figures
of speech’, from ancient times down to contemporary textbooks and handbooks
like this one:
[1850] Any departure from the literal use of
words is the figurative use of language. […] The more common figures
of speech are allegory, euphemism, hyperbole, innuendo,
irony, litotes, metaphor, metonymy, paradox, personification,
pun, simile. (Handbook of the English Language)39
Symptomatically, this list is in
alphabetical order rather than any logical order.
Here, I shall essay to describe these ‘Figures’ with frequent reference to
the Stylistic Parameters proposed so far.
44.
Being ‘literal’ purports to situate the other Parameters just where the
expressed content warrants, e.g., unmarked Clause order and low in Weight for
dreary weather [1851], and just the contrary for ‘excited’ behaviour [1852].
[1851]
The
weather
was cold and wet, and wood for fuel was difficult to obtain. (Lewis and Clark)
[1852] Osterman got on his feet; leaning across the
table, gesturing wildly with his right hand, his serio-comic face, with its bald
forehead and stiff red ears, was inflamed with excitement. (Octopus)
Literalness seems essentially neutral in regard to
the other Stylistic Parameters.
45.
One set of Figures might be described as manipulating the Weight decisively
higher or lower. Understatement gives significantly less Weight than
seems war-ranted, as if to show caution and reserve [1853]. You can reverse the
effect by giving High Weight to the act of ‘understating’ itself [1854]. As
a strategy of power, official discourse deploys Understatement to avoid
Pejoratives that would be more accurate [1855].
[1853] To say that some people are angry these days is an understatement. The streets are boiling with unhappy, impatient and selfish people just spoiling for a fight. (Star Tribune)
[1854]
‘Himmler […] had no social graces whatever.’
This must be the understatement of the century.
(Independent)[1855] Macmillan […] said, with
typical understatement, ‘We have not
done badly. But we have not done quite well enough.’ That blandly papered
over the facts that Britain’s share of world trade had steadily declined, its
prices had risen more and its exports less than those of its ex-enemies (Fifties)
46.
Conversely, hyperbole
gives far more Weight than seems warranted. This Figure is more innocuous than
Understatement in being more obvious [1856-57];
and, in rural Usage, it is the essence of the beloved tall tale [1858-59].
[1856]
Jerome saw at Rome a triumphant husband bury his twenty-first wife, who had
interred twenty-two of his less sturdy predecessors. But the ten
husbands in a month of the poet Martial is an extravagant hyperbole (Decline)
[1857]
The evidence presented by the Bush administration for war in Iraq […] was
exaggerated, distorted, selective and fabricated evidence masquerading as
absolute certainty. […] This adds up to a pattern of half-truths,
deceptions and outrageous hyperbole (Chicago Tribune)
[1858]
I was quaking from head to foot, and I could have hung my hat on my eyes, they
stuck out so far. (Mississippi)
[1859] It got so tarnation dry that fish a-swimmin’ up the river left a
cloud of dust behind them. (Punkin Centre)
47.
Litotes purports to lower Weight by saying what something is by negating its
opposite [1860-61]. Yet a subtly opposite rise in Weight may ensue from
suggesting that it is most decidedly opposite [1861-63].
[1860]
An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome.
(Emma)
[1861]
she married a poor man, an act which was not
disgraceful, since he was not unworthy.
(Middlemarch)
[1862]
It was curious to see how the great ladies forgot her, and no doubt not altogether
a pleasant study to Rebecca. (Vanity)
[1863] ‘You know that I love you, and you led me to believe,
Miss Fairfax, that you were not absolutely indifferent to me.’
‘I adore you’. (Earnest)
48.
Euphemism lowers Weight in order to spare discomfort or embarrassment for
speaker or hearer (or both). Potential signals of Pejorative Attitude get
manipulated to seem blandly innocuous, e.g., circumstances of birth [1864]
and death [1865].
This strategy may be
encouraged by doublespeak [1866-67] (cf. VII.12-16).
[1864]
‘The girl was in the club’. […] ‘If
you intend me to infer that she was pregnant, then
for the life of me I can see no reason why you
don’t actually say so.’ (Major Maxim)
[1865]
‘Don’t grieve for her’, the priest said, […] ‘she’s gone to her reward.’ (Singing Birds)
[1866]
The Israeli government is currently erecting the Wall of Separation – euphemistically
called the ‘Security Fence’ – which is supposed to block ‘terrorist
attacks’, but certainly won’t prevent missiles and helicopters from hitting
their human targets. (Stop the Wall)www
[1867] Humboldt County’s policy of using
pepper spray directly on the eyes of non-violent protesters, euphemistically
called ‘pain compliance’, shows the dark side of law and order. (Earth
Films)www
Not
a bit surprisingly, one thematic epicentre for Euphemisms these days is the
Dispositive Action of ‘making not do’ and ‘making not possess’, honestly
termed ‘firing’ or ‘laying off’. According to one recent survey by
William Lutz,40 workers were said to be ‘dehired’, ‘selected
out’, ‘transitioned’ ‘surplussed’, ‘excessed’, ‘rightsized’,
‘uninstalled’, or ‘managed down’; or they underwent ‘workforce
adjustments’, ‘headcount reductions’, ‘negative employee retention’
(Litotes too?), or ‘a volume-related production schedule adjustment’ (cf.
VII.16).
49.
The function of Euphemisms weakens when the actual meaning is no longer
effectively camouflaged.
Such is the status of ‘privatisation’ for putting public industries into
private hands at jumble-sale prices and switching priorities from job security
to shareholder profits, which has justly earned the opprobrium of labour unions
and wider circles [1868], and was tellingly rechristened ‘briberisation’ by
Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate for Economics and former Chief Economist of the
World Bank [1869] (cf. VII.106). So now fresh Euphemisms are displacing it, such
as ‘rationalisation’ [1870]
and ‘disinvestment’,
the latter actually stipulating just how much money is to be ‘raised’ and
when [1871].
[1868] Privatisation of electricity and
water also puts a hole straight through the Government’s claim to be guardians
of the environment. (Independent)
[1869] Stiglitz called privatisation ‘briberisation’
because of the readiness with which national leaders are bought by offers of
commissions paid into Swiss bank accounts. (Arvind Sivaramakrishnan in The
Hindu)
[1870] privatisation
would provoke knee-jerk opposition from the labour movement, and a more neutral word, such as rationalisation, would be more palatable.
(South African data)
[1871] the politically correct euphemism of ‘disinvestment’
has come to acquire a life of its own and the privatisation imperative
has become secondary to target-setting and revenue-raising. (Indian Express)
Surely the most sinister euphemisms of our times apply to
warfare [1872], the top prize going to ‘ethnic
cleansing’
to disguise the filthiest actions [1873].
[1872] Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants
driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire
with incendiary bullets: this is called ‘pacification’. Millions of
peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no
more than they can carry: this is called ‘transfer of population’ or
‘rectification of frontiers’. (George Orwell)
[1873] Fighting in the former
Yugoslavia has been accompanied by accounts of mass killings and rapes, torture,
so-called ethnic cleansing or mass
expulsions of rival ethnic groups, and detention centres reminiscent of Nazi
concentration camps. (Scotsman)
50.
The smear, in contrast, radically raises Weight to intensify Pejorative
Attitudes about a person or group. Smears
increasingly dominate political discourse attacking ‘anti-war and civil rights
protesters’ [1874] and insubordinate foreign nations [1875]. The
‘flakspeak’ of the ‘New Right’ described in VIII.27ff not merely
launches incessant smears [1876] but then claims to be ‘smeared’ by the
outraged responses [1877].
[1874] 40 years ago, anti-war and civil rights
protesters were bugged, followed, smeared, arrested, impersonated, and
disrupted by the government. (Gilmore v.
Ashcroft)
[1875] France says it is the victim of a smear campaign by the Bush administration […] leaking false stories about alleged French complicity with the Iraqi regime (CNN)
[1876]
The abortionists,
and
the
feminists,
and
the
gays
and
the
lesbians
who
are
actively
try ing to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, […] I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’ (Jerry Falwell on 9/11)
[1877] In an appeal for funds,
Jerry Falwell Ministries accuses ‘liberals and especially gay activists’ of
launching ‘a vicious smear campaign to discredit’ him. (Americans
United)
How
anyone could ‘smear’ the ‘Reverend’ Falwell more ‘viciously’ than he
richly deserves I cannot begin to imagine.
51.
The quip, in contrast is rather the opposite: a light-hearted,
low-weight, and amusing poke at a meritorious target
[1878]
Whites kill themselves by jumping from a tall building, blacks kill themselves
by jumping from a low basement. (Dick Gregory)
[1879] He was born with a silver
foot in
his mouth. (Texas Governor Ann
Richards on
the gaffs of Bush Sr)
[1880] Rumsfeld also toured a torture chamber in Iraq, which
he said gave him a lot of good Christmas-gift ideas for John Ashcroft. (Barry Crimmins)
[1881]
The U.N. is a place where governments opposed to free speech demand to be heard!
(Alfred E. Neuman of MAD Magazine)
52.
Sarcasm also deploys Weight and Pejorative Attitude, but is routinely
directed at irritating or belittling another face-to-face participant [1882-84].
The Flow can be intensified as well.
[1882]
Using
her most sarcastic voice, she said, ‘I
think your hat is the is the loveliest thing I have ever seen in my whole
life!’ (Stuart Stories)www
[1883]
He said, with that jarring, sarcastic tone to his voice:
‘I realize
that things
are different
for you,
living in
1990. We
poor savages, way back in the Dark
Ages, still think that our women might possibly be satisfied with one man.’ (Strawberries)
[1884] Nixon,
on the stage, looked down at Rather
and asked with heavy sarcasm, ‘Are you
running for something?’ Dan snapped right back, ‘No, sir, are you?’ (Topics)www
53.
Irony tweaks the Parameter of Belief and is less obtrusive in Weight,
Attitude, and Flow than sarcasm and may indeed go ‘unrecognized or ignored’
[1885]. It is more directed to a whole situation, and it may be strategic to
claim irony in excusing a smear [1886], or to deploy it in satirising the
personal courage of Bush Jr [1887] (who evaded the draft to stay out of the
Vietnam War, and fled to Offutt
Air Force Base, near Omaha, Nebraska, on
the day of 9/11).
[1885]
‘He’s changed a lot — got a lot older looking.’ ‘Sixty years will do
that to you’, I said. ‘Present company excepted, of course.’ He didn’t recognize, or ignored, the irony in my voice. (HandHeld
Crime)www
[1886]
[When] Schultz also criticized the Italian’s perceived conflicts of interest,
[…] Berlusconi said: ‘Mr. Schulz, I know that in Italy a producer is now
shooting a film about the Nazi concentration camps. I propose you to play the
role of capo’ [camp commander]. […] ‘What I said was said with irony’,
Berlusconi responded, almost plaintively. (Seattle Times)
[1887] An Iraqi vice president
offered a unique solution to the U.S.-Iraq standoff: a duel between George W.
Bush and Saddam Hussein […] with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan as the
referee. […] Reporters who were present detected a note of irony in his
voice. (Associated Press)
Wholly
unintentional irony breaks through in the discourse of the ‘New Right’:
[1888]
How Parents Can Help Children Live Marijuana Free, […] with a preface
by Orrin Hatch, listed warning signs that your kids might be inhaling, [such as]
‘excessive preoccupation with social causes, race relations, environmental
issues’ (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting)www
[1889] The very document that
protects our liberties more than anything else, the Constitution, was of
course drafted in total secrecy. (‘Press Secretary’ Ari Fleischer, on why
Dick Cheney withheld records of secret meetings of the ‘Energy Task Force’)
These
discourses involuntarily stumble by unmasking the ‘War on Drugs’ partially
as a right-wing war on left-wing ideologies; and by equating the fundamental
document of American democracy, which was fully published along with all records
and minutes as soon as the work was finished, with a shameful record of
corporate and governmental cronyism (see VII.23 for details when the record was
leaked).
54.
Satire is more creative than sarcasm or irony and more likely to amuse a
wider audience, rather like an elaborated quip. It helps to release Pejorative
Emotions like anger and disgust when direct Actions are hardly feasible, e.g.,
in imaginary news headlines from Internet websites:
[1890] Bush: ‘Our
Long National
Nightmare of
Peace and
Prosperity Is
Finally Over’
(Onion)
[1891] U.S. Suspects World Not Putting U.S. Interests
First (SatireWire)
[1892] U.S. to Arab World: ‘Stop Hating Us Or Suffer
the Consequences’ (Onion)
[1893]
Pentagon Debating
Which Age
to Bomb
Afghanistan Back
Into (National Lampoon)
[1894] Congress Forbids Economy to Recover until
Congress Passes Bill to Help Economy Recover (SatireWire)
[1895] Bush Vows to Remove Toxic
Petroleum from National Parks (Onion)
Whereas
sarcasm may be insulting and irony patronising, satire may be flattering in
attributing background knowledge to the audience, e.g., about Bush Jr’s
devious environmental policies of approving ‘toxic’ emissions and opening
‘National Parks’ to his oil-drilling pals in [1895].
55.
Satire creates entire whimsical non-realities, e.g. with mock news items:
[1896]
AFGHAN MOUNTAINS SURRENDER! –
Those Who Said Bombs Wasted on Mountains Proved Wrong – After
weeks of relentless bombing that has taken a devastating toll, the mountains of
Afghanistan unconditionally surrendered to the United States today. ‘We said
from the outset that those harboring terrorists were just as culpable as the
terrorists, and the mountains were’, said Rumsfeld. ‘Also, if we include the
mountains, more than 90 percent of our bombs have hit their targets.’
Responding to complaints from Afghans that many bombs had hit people, Rumsfeld
conceded there was ‘some collateral damage’, but insisted many mountains
were parked in residential areas. For
Afghanistan’s neighbors, the surrender staves off an unprecedented
mountainarian crisis, as hundreds of peaks, fleeing the war, were arranged in
makeshift refugee ranges along the borders with Pakistan and Tajikistan. (Onion)
I
would see here one effective mode of the ‘deconstructive’ counter-discourse
along the lines proposed in II.172.
56.
Parody is a low-Weight Intertext aimed at a one previous Text [1897], or
else at a Text Type, such as the Mills-and-Boon style romance [1898] (cf. III.77).
[1897] Mark Lowry entertains the notion of plastic surgery in a parody
of the Michael W. Smith song ‘Place in this
World’, Mark’s version in ‘Face In This
World’ beginning, ‘My hairline’s
moving, but I’m standing still.’ (Mouth in Motion)www
[1898]
‘You don’t love me!’ he hoarsed, thick with agony. […] ‘Don’t!’
she thinned, her voice fining to a thread. ‘Answer me’, he gloomed. […]
Night was falling. A molten afterglow of iridescent saffron shot with
incandescent carmine lit up the waters of the Hudson till they glowed like
electrified uranium. (Stephen Leacock)
Yet like satire, parody can exert
impressive social and political Weight in deconstructing hypocrisy, e.g., by
inventing an unimaginably forthright ‘State of the Union Address’ for Bush
Jr with this opening:
[1899]
Fellow Republicans, distinguished campaign contributors, fellow white males: As
we gather tonight, our nation is at war against an insidious foreign force
funded in no small part by my father, our economy is in recession exacerbated by
the economic policies imposed upon us by my campaign’s financial backers, and
the civilized world decries my administration’s policies on the death penalty,
petrochemical whoredom, global warming, and grotesquely shameless jingoism. Yet
today, the state of my popularity rating has never been stronger. (Applause.) (www.whitehouse.org/news)
At
times, I can’t decide whether to laugh or cry. But parody, quips, irony, and
satire have helped to make the geopolitical and economic nightmare scenario of
the non-legitimate, violent, and devious 'Bush Administration' almost
bearable.
57.
The paradox associates two concepts that logically should be
incompatible. It prefers opposed Content Words, like ‘find – lose’ in [1900],
‘enthrall – free’ and ‘chaste – ravish’ in
[1901],
and ‘saving – exposing’ or ‘animals – humans’ [1902];
and can enhance its Flow with parallelism in the Grammar, e.g., ‘whosoever
shall save’ - whosoever shall
lose’ in
[1900], or ‘saving
dumb animals –
exposing dumb humans’ in [1902].
[1900] Given
an eternal life, such antagonisms can be worked out, but in one short human life
they are incapable of solution. Jesus referred to such a paradox when he
said: ‘Whosoever shall save his life shall lose it, but
whosoever shall lose his life for the sake of the kingdom, shall find
it.’ (Urantia Book)
[1901]
For I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor
ever chaste except you ravish me. (John Donne)
[1902] World In Action questioned
the Animal Liberation Front about the paradox of saving dumb
animals by exposing dumb humans to incendiary
devices. (Independent)
Oxymoron carries less Weight, but still links up incompatible
concepts [1903-05] and has been cultivated in some types of literature, viz.
[1906-07].
[1903]
Premier Nutrition offers a complete line of natural
artificial flavours.www
[1904] Human
Sexual Behavior was not as fun as it sounds. […] ‘I took this class
because I wanted to start out my summer with some good, clean porn!
(Rob’s Page)www
[1905]
An
oral contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. (Sam
Goldwyn)
[1906]
An honorable murtherer, if you will, for nought did I in hate, but all
in honour. (Othello)
[1907] His jarring
concord, and his discord dulcet, his
faith, his sweet disaster; (All’s Well)
Trendy websites offer established Collocations they wittily
classify as ‘oxymorons’. There, I enjoyed
‘working vacation’, ‘military
intelligence’, ‘sanitary landfill’, and (most of all) ‘compassionate conservative’ (cf. VII,1, 25).
58.
The pun derives its Weight by
exploiting coincidences among sounds to create a whimsical interplay of between
alternate meanings [1908-09], though it may be unintentional [1910-11], notably in hapless news headlines like [1912-13].
[1908]
falstaff: My honest lads, I will
tell you what I am about. pistol:
Two yards, and more. falstaff:
No quips now, Pistol. Indeed, I am in the waist two yards about;
but I am now about no waste; I am about
thrift. (Merry Wives)
[1909] Club Try-Angles. Once you get over the name (a super-clever pun), you’ll find a
nice addition to the Salt Lake City gay club scene. (saltlakecity.com)www
[1910]
‘I’m a sort of kennel-maid — dogsbody. I’m sorry’, she said quickly
again, ‘that wasn’t meant as a pun.’ (West of
Bohemia)
[1911]
I may be out on a limb here (pardon the unintended
pun) because I am not an expert on the type of trees that grow in Africa
(Stoves Archive)www
[1912] Lawmaker backs train through
Iowa (Des Moines Register)
[1913]
Sexual Battery Charged
(Columbus Dispatch)
Some
elegant, compact puns interchanging words of similar sounds, sometimes called
‘paronomasia’, would qualify as quips too:
[1914]
The war on Iraq is the weapon of mass
distraction. (Michael Moore)
[1915] We’ve had our second war in a decade to protect the
oiligarchies in the Persian Gulf. (Jim Hightower)
[1916] Without a never-ending enemies list, cancervatives cannot survive. (Chicago Sun-Times)
[1917]
The
silliness over ‘Bring ‘em on’ is getting out of hand. How do we know that they
understand the colloquial meaning of Dumbya’s41 braggadocio?
(Cal-Pundit)www
Rather than sounds, the anagram exploits coincidences
among letters to create pithy transformations. The results can be striking, the
more so when aided by a computer program like Anagram Genius,42 as in
these creations:
[1918]
compassionate conservative =>
Conspire to save a vast income!
[1919] Republican
National Committee => Inept
ballot count — America mine!
[1920] President
George Walker Bush => Sorest bungler (hawk pedigree).
[1921] George
Walker Bush, President of the USA => Pretender grabs White House — flag use
OK!
[1922]
The Republican Party => Entire rat club happy!
59.
Another set of Figures, sometimes called ‘tropes’, operates by associating
or equating seemingly incompatible components, one lower and one higher in
Weight, to create a novel perspective. These have been cultivated most
prominently in literature, though their occurrence is widespread, as my
selection of examples offered below may suggest.
60.
The easiest to recognise is probably the simile, formed by saying
something is ‘like’ [1923-24] or ‘as’ [1925-26] something at higher
Weight which it cannot literally be.
[1923] The corporate agriculture
establishment squawked like a bantam rooster
choking on a peach pit. (Yellow Stripes)
[1924] After half an hour’s
unsteady plodding, my buffalo let me dismount. My back was like a mangled
corkscrew, my legs like chicken wishbones. (Daily
Telegraph)
[1925] The altar was as a block of ice to
him. (Might Have Been)
[1926]
the stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts
and is desired. (Antony and Cleopatra)
Counterfactual similes with ‘as if’ are favoured in
popular fiction for depicting human Emotions, both Ameliorative [1927] and
Pejorative [1928].
[1927] She felt as
if she were floating on a soft, fleecy cloud (Double Fire)
[1928]
she felt as if she had been broken in two
and glued back together again all wrong. (Twist of Fate)
Similes are most effective when the thing
compared evokes lively visual images, as in these data.
61.
Metonymy, which is far less common, substitutes associated things, such as
an article of clothing for the human wearing it [1929]; or ‘grape’ for wine,
‘silkworm’ for fine clothing, and ‘protoplasm’ for humans [1930]. We
also find it used as a tool for textual interpretation [1931-32]
[1929] Many of the faces are vaguely familiar from faded newspaper
photographs of dark suits coming and going in Downing Street. (High Places)
[1930]
Up Broadway he turned, and halted at a glittering cafe, where are gathered the
choicest products of the grape, the silkworm and the protoplasm.
(Four Million)
[1931] Here, ‘oppression’ stands by metonymy for the riches that
can be gained by oppressive measures; […] ‘robbery’ stands by metonymy
for the riches that can be gained by theft (Psalm 62 Notes)www
[1932]
Here the production and consumption of ‘literature’ — where what
should be a joy feeds on and consumes the lives of the characters — is a metonymy
for the Victorian economic system itself. (George Gissing)www
In
the discourse of the news, a place is said to do what people are doing there:
[1933]
Whitehall last night confirmed the minimum-wage provisions have
been deleted from the draft (Guardian)
[1934]
There is still, at the end of the day, an odd unwillingness to state the simple
fact that in many cases the White House lied
to the American public, repeatedly and unashamedly, to pave the way for war.
(Josh Marshall)www
62.
Synecdoche substitutes the part for the whole or the specific for the
general:
[1935] Let not your ears
despise my tongue forever (Macbeth)
[1936]
It was clearly the night of Martin Scorsese,
Synecdoche for Directorial Art. Every
time directing was mentioned in any honorific way, we got to see Mr Scorese
sitting there (Urban Rubbish)www
[1937] Tredegar Iron Works
is a synecdoche for industrialized
antebellum Richmond. (Sarah Baumgardner)www
[1938]
Make
Gikonyo synecdochic of the town, which is synecdochic of
the region in which the town lies, which is synecdochic of all of Kenya (Grain of Wheat)
63.
Personification has non-humans acting like humans [1939-40]; and in absence
of another term (like ‘animalation’?), it could be applied to animals too
[1941-42].
[1939] The battered Renault
shudders along mirrored pavements, and coughs up suburban curves (Harvest of Thorns)
[1940]
Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein
he puts alms for oblivion,
A
great-sized monster of ingratitudes. (Troilus and Cressida)
[1941]
The belief in the Rainbow Snake, a personification
of fertility, increase (richness in propagation of plants and animals) and rain,
is common throughout Australia (George Chaloupka in
Aboriginal Art)www
[1942]
Tiamat is a Babylonian
dragon. She is a personification of the sea in the creation myth Enuma
Elish (Mythological Dragon List)www
To my surprise, I found the term applied to texts
where I’d expect, say, ‘representation’:
[1943] ‘Red
Wing’, an old song, is a personification of my 1942 Indian
motorcycle (D. Edgar Murray)www
[1944]
A work of poetry from 1661 may be described as ‘a personification
of a Morgan patriarch’. (Pencoed Castle)www
64.
The most important and indispensable Figure of all is of course the metaphor,
which directly expresses one thing as something else it could not literally be.
As we might expect if ‘metaphoric usage’ is presented as the opposite of
‘literal usage’ [1850] (VI.41ff), the metaphor readily overlaps with the
other figures. Even so, plausible examples are not hard to discover, and once
more literature and poetry outdo other discourse types [1945-48].
[1945]
the captain had seemed a creature driven by the steely
wheel of ambition (Harmattan)
[1946] he was tormented by the worms of rebellion which had made his body uncomfortable in that house (same)
[1947] He that depends
Upon your favours swims with fins of lead,
And hews down oaks with rushes. (Coriolanus)
[1948] Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light (Rubaiyat, 1ST edition)
More ordinary metaphors may be migrating
toward literal, e.g., body parts not used for bodies: ‘brains’ becoming
‘intellectual centre’, mostly for groups [1949]; or ‘bowels’ for the
‘deep inside’, mostly for places [1950]. Already literal enough are the
‘head of the table’, the ‘foot of the staircase’, and so on.
[1949]
The next Labour government will abandon the corrupt priorities of the Tories’
education policies and make Britain the brains
of Europe. (Jack Straw)
[1950]
From the bowels of Portland steps forth a
truly obnoxious band! (Reatards)www
More than other figures, ‘metaphor’
is a popular term for any special meaning:
[1951]
President Bill
Clinton’s turbid State of the Union address was a metaphor for modern
government — sprawling, metastasizing, undisciplined, approaching self-parody
(St Louis Post-Dispatch)www
[1952] Godzilla lays waste to New York City, perhaps
a metaphor for the Japanese threat to US economic interests
(Godzilla)www
65.
Symbolism assigns a deeper meaning to an Object [1953], an Event [1954],
or a Human [1955].
[1953]
Viewed as a crown by
Sikhs, the turban is a symbolism of discipline, integrity,
humility and spirituality that must be worn in public. (Farmingdale News)www
[1954] The Teapot
Dome incident became a symbol for supposed excesses and government
graft and corruption. (American
Presidency)www
[1955] Bush is a symbol of a corrupt system.
[…] He represents a cabal of men who are willing to sacrifice the lives
of thousands or millions, and the integrity of the biosphere, for the sake of
money and hierarchical power. (Walter
I. Zeichner)www
Whereas
the other Figures reviewed here often occur without being identified as such, a
‘symbol’ is usually named as one, and can overlap with other figures. In
[1955], Bush Jr relates to a ‘corrupt system’ as symbolism, but to ‘cabal’
as synecdoche.
66. The allegory is the most extensive Figure: a
more concrete Text standing for a more abstract Text. In older literature, the
allegorical quality is signalled by figurative Actors like ‘guilt’,
‘shame’, ‘fate’, and ‘virtue’ [1956]. Some writers expounded it
point by point [1957], which might seem patronising nowadays.
[1956]
Guilt and shame, says the allegory, were at first
companions; […] [but], guilt gave shame frequent uneasiness, and
shame often betrayed the secret conspiracies of guilt. [So] guilt
boldly walked forward alone, to overtake fate, that went before in the
shape of an executioner: but shame being naturally timorous, returned
back to keep company with virtue. (Wakefield)
[1957] ‘Agree with thine adversary quickly, […] lest at any time the
adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer,
and thou be cast into prison.’ […] In which allegory, the offender is
the sinner; […] the judge is God; the way is this life; the prison is the
grave; the officer, death; (Leviathan)
Being
a relation among texts makes the allegory useful for interpretation too:
[1958]
Goethe’s Fairy Tale is an allegory of inner transmutation of the
soul, in which various polarities emerge and are brought together again. (Alchemy
Drama)www
[1959] Monkey is the Chinese classic which
combines the divine and human and is an allegory of own personal journey
to spiritual development. (Wu
Cheng En)www
67.
The Figures in my terse overview are the most frequently cited resources for
style, at least in literary studies. They obviously have diverse effects on
style and are not clearly distinct. Some are used as Modifiers of a whole
‘style’:
[1960]
In a letter of February 1818, Keats writes in a colourfully metaphoric style:
‘let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive.’ (Negative
Capability)www
[1961]
R.L. Stevenson created […] a metonymic style of narrative,
allusive, historically rooted, [but] highly dialogic. (Kailyard Lockup)www
[1962]
The paralleling of the dramatic events
of the two witnesses with the dramatic collapse of the two towers is in keeping
with the symbolic style of the book of Revelation (Bible Codes)www
[1963]
Jaan Kross’s texts are an example of the allegorical style
widespread in Estonian literature, requiring considerable skill at reading
between the lines. His historical novels and short stories are an allusive
analysis of the present times, relationships between power and the individual. (Estonian Culture)www
[1964]
Not one came close to matching for lucidity and perceptiveness, delivered in an
icily ironic style, the essay penned at the time of the war by the
former Swedish prime minister, Carl Bildt. (Jonathan Power)www
[1965] In the typically hyperbolic
style of the ‘mainstream’ news media these days, Bush’s
confrontation with Iraq was being characterized as comparable to the Cuban
missile crisis. (Justin Raimondo)www
However,
I also find some as Modifiers of ‘meaning’:
[1966]
In his film, Strike, [Sergei Eisenstein] intercut heroic
striking workers being beaten by police with shots of a bull being slaughtered.
The metaphoric meaning is clear: strikers
are cattle. (TVCrit)www
[1967]
The
shechinah, the feminine sacred […] lives in exile during the week, an
exile that itself possesses the additional metonymic
meaning of representing diaspora. (The Shechinah)www
[1968]
Alev Croutier’s Seven
Houses is rich
with psychological insights that carry layers of allegorical
meaning,
and with a
subtle, lush beauty, engrossing and delightful on many levels at once (Susan
Griffin in the Turkish Times)www
[1969]
The phrase ‘good government’, which has proudly been used by our Wisconsin
citizenry to describe our political climate since 1848, now has the same oxymoronic
meaning as it does on the Beltway in Washington. (Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel)www
[1970]
And being a romance series, naturally, there are many scenes of lovemaking with
throbbing this-es and tumescent that-ses in that charming euphemistic style of the genre. (Lori Herter)www
[1971]
The lyrics from the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ […] take on a new, ironic meaning: On Vieques
Island, the ‘bombs’ show that ‘our flag is still there’, but that the
Constitution continues to be, at best, an uncertain presence
(Sanford Levison in Crisist)www
[1972]
those names of streets and rows now seem to have such a grimly sarcastic meaning:
Holly Bush Place, Green Street, Pleasant Place, […] which now consist of
ruinous tenements, reeking with abominations (London Dust)www
[1973]
Gangsta rappers and their advocates argue that they are simply doing what other
artists do in emphasizing certain elements of their world. ‘In drama you take
the mundane elements of life and you infuse them at times with hyperbolic
meaning’ (Ta-Nehisi
Coates in the Village Voice)
[1974] The words
‘population shift’ convey an innocence that gives a very euphemistic meaning
to a violent and tragic human phenomenon. (Today)www
[1975] Any meaningful characterization of a modern
economy must start with a fair assessment of the paradoxical meaning
of the globalization of economic activities (Technonationalism)www
So the particular figures are found to be the
tributaries of figurative meaning as a complex and variegated set of
alternatives to plain literal meaning. The figures are continually pushing at
the margins of language, helping us say one thing and mean another, or say and
mean different things at the same time, or mean what we could not or dare not
say — and ‘show some style’ while we’re doing it.
VI.E
Manipulating styles
68.
If a style is determined by parameters of choice, then it can be manipulated by
systematically interchanging the strategic choices that act as stylistic
indicators. A heuristic exercise might be to postulate a set of clines, pick an
intuitively straightforward authentic sample near one end of a cline and
resolutely manipulate the style toward the opposite end. Some plausible clines
might be:
Fancy
<=========================>
Plain
Formal
<=====================> Informal
Impersonal
<===================>
Personal
Deliberate
<================> Spontaneous
Strenuous
<=====================> Casual
Figurative
<=====================> Literal
Archaic
<=================> Contemporary
In
general, everyday speaking tends toward the right-hand side of these clines, and
careful writing toward the left. But, as remarked above, the styles of speech
and writing are more flexible than is often assumed (cf. VI.30).
69.
A Fancy Style displays lavish embellishments even when the content is ordinary
[1976], whilst a Plain Style eschews them, as in my rewriting [1976a].
[1976] Enthusiastic as we are in the noble cause to which we have devoted
ourselves, we should have felt a sensation of pride which we cannot express, and
a consciousness of having done something to merit immortality of which we are
now deprived, could we have laid the faintest outline of these addresses before
our ardent readers. (Pickwick)
[1976a]
Considering how eager we are, we’d feel too proud for words of an endless accomplishment if we could tell you even a little of what those speeches said, but we can’t.
A Formal Style sets the tone for official business of
self-important people [1977], whilst an Informal Style puts matters simply for
ordinary people [1977a].
[1977] In
the course of its deliberations, the committee acknowledged the diversity within
the land grant college system and that it would not be possible to collect all
the data or conduct the analyses that would lead to a credible evaluation of the
content and quality of the many diverse programs and curricula. (Land Grant
Universities)
[1977a] Once it got going, the committee confessed up that the
programs and curricula of land grant colleges were too many and too different to
get all the info and check it out enough to really say how good any were.
An Impersonal Style avoids addressing the participants in the discourse
by First or Second Person [1978], which a Personal Style freely adopts [1978a].
[1978]
The management have confidence in future earnings growth and the maintenance of
the target payout ratio. (Financial Investments)
[1978a]
We feel confident that in the future, our company can provide you with bigger
earnings and with a steady rate in the payout we have planned for you.
Spontaneous Style pops out on the spur of the moment [1979],
whilst a Deliberate Style is elaborately planned and composed [1979a].
[1979]
‘Who’s that waving?’ ‘Who where?’ ‘That car in front, I dunno.’
‘Maybe she wasn’t waving at us. It was only for a minute.’ ‘No,
no, no, she’s not.’ ‘I
think she’s realized she’s made a mistake.’ ‘Oh yes, yes, yes.’ (conversation)BNC
[1979a]
‘What is the identity of yonder gesticulator?’ ‘Which personage, and in
which locality?’ ‘The one ensconced in the vehicular conveyance preceding
our own. I profess myself unenlightened.’ ‘Conceivably, the gesticulations
were not destined for our attention. Their temporality was momentary.’
‘Egad, I strongly concur with your negative contestation.’ ‘I opine she is
now cognizant of her misprision.’ ‘Upon my word, there too I am in
consummate agreement.’
A Strenuous Style betrays hard work from the Producer
and demands it from the Receiver too [1980], whilst a Casual Style makes matters
easier [1980a].
[1980] I caught this morning’s
minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn falcon in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath
him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the
rein of a wimpling wing in his ecstasy!
(Windhover)
[1980a] This morning, I saw a favoured falcon, like a
prince summoned by the many-coloured sunrise, joyfully hovering high in the air,
stationary, braced on rippling wings.
A
Literal Style deploys no Figures [1981], whilst a Figurative Style parades them
[1981a].
[1981]
She was awake the whole night, and she wept
the greatest part of it. She
got up at dawn
with
a
headache,
was
unable
to
talk,
and
unwilling
to
take
any
nourishment.
(Sense)
[1981a]
All the while Night’s sable panoply enshrouded the Earth, somnolent Morpheus
shunned her eyes, now melted to o’erwelling fountains of Niobe. Under the
arching brows of roseate Aurora, she quitted her wakeful couch, her head wracked
by demons of pain, her powers of speech imprisoned, and her appetite exiled.
An Archaic Style chooses expressions long out of
currency [1982], whilst a Contemporary Style prefers the usages of today
[1982a].
[1982]
Ride betimes, and ride hard; for the Wood Perilous beginneth presently as ye
wend your ways; and it were well for thee to reach the Burg ere thou be
benighted. There be untoward things in the wood, though some of them be of those
for whom Christ’s Cross was shapen. (World’s End)
[1982a]
Ride early and fast, because you will soon come to the dangerous forest, and you
had better reach the castle before night falls. There are strange beings in the
forest, though some are Christians.
70.
To produce my rewritings, I manipulated the Stylistic Parameters described in
the previous section, varying the emphasis from cline to cline: Complexity for
Fancy and Formal; Markedness and Flow for Strenuous and Archaic; and Figurality
of course for Figurative. Admittedly, such calculated contrasts between styles
may seem a bit stretched, and some of my counter-discourses may savour of parody
— but then so may some originals, intentional for Charles Dickens [1976] but
unintentional for Gerald Manley Hopkins [1980] or Charles Morris [1982].
71.
Styles can this be regarded as mobile and dynamic, subtly ranging between
complementary extremes. Perhaps we might navigate the range by manipulating the
Parameters individually, e.g. starting with Milton’s Strenuous and Formal
original [1983], reducing first grammatical Complexity [1983a], then lexical
Complexity [1983b], and finally imposing a markedly Casual Informality [1983c].
[1983] thee chantress oft the woods among
I woo to hear thy evensong. (Il Penseroso)
[1983a] I woo thee, chantress, oft among the
woods to hear thy evensong.
[1983b] I often lure you in the forest,
nightingale, so that I can hear your evening song.
[1983c]
Lotsa times I decoys you in the boonies,
birdie, to dig
you evenin’ chirps.
But
at some point we again risk parody.
72. Contrasts can also be accentuated by manipulating the clines together:
Formal, Impersonal, and Strenuous, as in [1984] compared to [1984a]; or Informal,
Personal, and Casual, as in [1985] compared to [1985a].
[1984] The pooling effect enables capacity purchasers to
take advantage of the disparate temporal requirement for flexible capacity and
avoid the cost of capacity constrained operation and low asset utilization that
often face firms to which capacity is dedicated. (Coordination of Global
Manufacturing)
[1984a] A pool of competing providers with flexible capacity keeps purchasers from losing time and money when operations would otherwise be constrained and assets inadequately utilized.
[1985] What I want and what the people want is generals who will fight battles and win victories. General Grant has done this, and I propose to stand by him. (Abraham Lincoln)
[1985a] The proclivity of our illustrious populace, as well as of my humble self, esteems generals who superintend forcible bellicosities and achieve supremacy therein. These encompassments having been effectuated by General Grant, my resolve is to tender him my adamant allegiance.
73.
Exercises of this type might help to built stylistic fluency, and I have
deployed a simpler version in my own teaching.43 After some of my own
demos, my students in Botswana rewrote the formal [1986] as the informal
[1986a-86b].
[1986] Influential local authorities close to the offices associated with financial affairs have given the public to understand that a series of recent developments which have not been favouring the free distribution of information have left some uncertainty regarding the whereabouts of funds reported missing.
[1986a]
Local authorities have made the public aware of something not quite right about
the money reported missing.
[1986b] The public has been
informed that even now the money that was stolen has not been found.
Perhaps
such exercises could assist the National Curriculum English in making its chirpy
objectives more concrete (cf. VI.10.13.5f).
74.
On 26 June 1955, the
Congress of the People held at Kliptown, South Africa, adopted a remarkable
document entitled The Freedom Charter.44 Though the term was of
course not used, it was an outpouring of progressive ecologism, e.g.:
[1987]
We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to
know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white; […]
There shall be a forty-hour working week, a national minimum wage, paid annual
leave, and sick leave for all workers, and maternity leave on full pay for all
working mothers; […] Education shall be free, compulsory, universal and equal
for all children; Higher education and technical training shall be opened to all
by means of state allowances and scholarships awarded on the basis of merit;
[…] Free medical care and hospitalisation shall be provided for all, with
special care for mothers and young children…
In
1956, the apartheid ‘government’ responded by arresting 156 advocates and
charged them with ‘high
treason and a countrywide conspiracy to use violence to overthrow the present
government and replace it with a communist state’ (sound familiar?),
punishable by death. The ‘Treason Trials’ dragged on for five years with no
death sentences, given the sheer absurdity of proving a ‘conspiracy’ among
156 people, some of whom hardly knew each other. But major opposition figures
were kept out of circulation and burdened with heavy legal costs: some were
re-arrested and sentenced to long prison terms; and the police practices of
‘isolating, beating and torturing to elicit information’ soon ‘became
commonplace’ (Nelson Mandela).
75.
Among the ‘defendants’ of those asinine ‘trials’ was the
distinguished South African writer and human rights activist, Alex La Guma, His novel
Time of the Butcherbird45 opens with the unexplained scene
in [1988], which, we find out only later, is a black community displaced from
their ancestral village in the Karoo to a repulsive desert by greedy white
mining companies.
[1988] (a) When the government trucks had gone, the
dust they had left behind hung over the plain and smudged the blistering
afternoon sun so that it appeared as a daub of white-hot metal through the
moving haze. (b) The dust hung in the sky for some time before settling down on
the white plain. (c) The plain was flat and featureless except for two roads
bull-dozed from the ground, bisecting each other to lie like scars of a branded
cross on the pocked and powdered skin of the earth. (d) In the distance a new
water tank on metal stilts jutted like an iron glove clenched against the empty
sky. (e) The dust settled slowly on the metal of the tank and on the surface of
the brackish water it contained, laboriously pumped up from below the sand; on
the rough cubist mounds of folded and piled tents dumped there by officialdom;
on the sullen faces of the people who had been unloaded like the odds and ends
of furniture they had been allowed to bring with them, powdering them grey and
settling in the perspiring lines around mouths and in the eye sockets, settling
on the unkempt and travel-creased clothes, so that they had the look of
scarecrows left behind, abandoned in this place. (f) This was no land for
ploughing and sowing; it was not even good enough to be buried in.
76.
The topic is set and sustained by Thematic Sequences whose headwords
(‘dust’,
‘plain’)
fittingly
function
as
the
Subjects of most of the Independent Clauses
(a, b, c, e). One Sequence stages the desolate Place: ‘plain – plain – plain – flat – featureless – roads – ground – earth – place’. Another
features the stifling aridity: ‘dust – haze – dust – powdered – dust – sand – powdering’.
A grammatically linked Sequence features
Dispositive and Enactive events of the ‘dust’ dominating the place and the
people: ‘hung over – smudged – moving – hung – settled slowly – powdering grey – settling – settling’. Nearly
all of these lexical choices are unmarked, as if to highlight a Plain Style that
is iconic for the scene itself. Iconic too is the repetitive insistence on
‘dust’, ‘settle’, and ‘plain’, to enforce the dreary monotony of the
scene.
77.
Another key Thematic Sequence features the heat: ‘blistering sun – white-hot
metal
–
branded
–
perspiring’, which links
by natural metonymy to the ‘sand’ and ‘dust’ accumulating in hot places.
The other main Thematic Sequences are associated with ‘dust’ as well. At the
start of the novel, the ‘government’ or ‘officialdom’ responsible for
this bleak situation ‘leaves dust behind’, an Action parallel to the Actions
that left behind the ‘people’ and their ‘furniture’ as if they were
already equated with dust: ‘dumped – unloaded – abandoned’. The
Thematic Sequence for hard mechanical objects and rough actions is in turn
linked by Metonymy to the government: ‘trucks’ (the immediate cause of the
‘dust’) – roads – bull-dozed – water tank – metal stilts – iron – metal – tank’. The
‘tank’ is a Symbol of government cynicism leaving just the minimum for
survival; and, by the simile of ‘jutted like an iron glove’, also a Symbol
of the brutal power of the government which, in the irony playing off the
familiar Collocation ‘iron fist in a velvet glove’, dispensed with the
velvet.
78.
By skilful synecdoche, the ‘dumped’ people appear in parts: ‘sullen faces
– mouths – eye sockets’, as if falling to pieces and soon to be skeletons
whose ‘mouths’ and ‘eye sockets’ will be filled with ‘dust’ indeed.
Their plight resonates with the pain-fraught metaphor and personification (or
animation) of the injured landscape with metonymic links via ‘branded’ to
cattle, and via ‘pocked’ to disease.
79.
The Actions of the ‘dumped’ people are limited to the Dispositives of having
‘folded and piled’ their ‘tents and having ‘brought’ their ‘allowed
furniture’; and now just the bodily Enactive of dumbly ‘perspiring’, the
sweat ironically resembling the ‘brackish water’ they must drink. There will
be no Productives of ‘ploughing’ or ‘sowing’ in the future, which awaits
them, only the final Dispositive being ‘buried’ in this ‘land’ that is
‘not even good enough’ for that humble purpose. A double Irony inhabits the
metaphor of the ‘scarecrows’: that these people are made to represent
lifeless figures dressed in ‘unkempt clothes’; and that there will be no
crops grown here from which to ‘scare the crows’.
80.
The most marked lexical choice, ‘cubist’, carries the literal meaning of a
specific anti-realist art movement in early 20th century painting,
which, among other principles, represented objects and humans in the medium of
geometric planes. Here its meaning is figurative, bringing the ‘folded and piled tents’ into a
Thematic Sequence with geometric terms ‘bisecting’, ‘cross’, and
‘lines’, and symbolizing perhaps the dehumanisation of those expected to
live and die in those ‘tents’.
73.
These designedly laconic uses of stylistic figures render the overall style
deceptively Plain and Impersonal, as arid and sparse as the terrain. The
inhumanity of the scene and of the political and social system of apartheid that
engendered it speaks for itself out of the Visuality of the images, as in an
allegory for the dispossession and ‘dumping’ of the native Africans, like
refuse, in their own homeland.
Notes
to Chapter VI
1 See Rumelhart et al., Note 13 to Ch. V.
2
Quoted from the translation by S.H. Butcher.
3
All quotes from the translation by Hugh Lawson-Tancred.
4
Quoted from the translation by Benjamin Jowett.
5
Whether and how similar authorities of Greek antiquity — Gorgias,
Isocrates, Thrasymachus, Lycophron, Alcidamas, Licymnius of Chios, and so forth
— addressed this dilemma would be an issue of great interest if more of their
works were extant.
6
The Latin original title De Elocutione seems to me less apt, since
written language receives more attention than speech. I quote from the
translation of W. Rhys Roberts, who does not provide the original Greek data
(see following note).
7
Inevitably, translation obscures the stylistic indicators specific to
Classical Greek, such as the ‘length of vowels’ and the use of
‘particles’. The conception of style being relative to a particular language
is briefly aired in VI.10.6.2.
8
The Greek term ‘kôla’
(‘member’) is used in the text mainly for a sentence, but some-times for
a clause as well.
9
Charles Bally, Traité de Stylistique Française (Heidelberg: C.
Winter, 1909); compare Jules Marouzeau,
Précis de Stylistique Française (Paris:
Masson, 1941).
10
Compare Bernd Spillner, Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft:
Stilforschung, Rhetorik, Textlinguistik (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1974); and
Reinhard R.K. Hartmann, Contrastive Textology (Heidelberg: Groos, 1980);
and the references in both volumes.
11
By Mona Baker (London: Routledge, 1992).
12
Saussure, cited Note 28 to Ch II, p. 99.
13 Classics
include Max Deutschbein, Neuenglische Stylistik
(Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1932); Mathesius, Functional
Analysis,
in Note 96 to Ch. II; Jean Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet, Stylistique
Comparée du Français et de l’Anglais (Paris: Didier, 1958);
and Mario Wandruszka, Interlinguistik (Munich: Piper, 1976).
14
As of April 2003, ‘contrastive linguistics’ appeared on 2,393
Internet websites and ‘contrastive stylistics’ on only 16.
15
I am indebted to the students in my graduate seminar on Corpus
Linguistics at the Universidade Federal
da Paraíba for verifying the Portuguese data.
16
I strongly doubt if epigrams like ‘style is the man himself’ (‘le
style est l’homme même’, 1763) from the French naturalist Georges-Louis
Leclerc, Count Buffon, was intended to extend this far.
17
Sapir, cited in Note 28 to Ch. II, p. 266.
18
Chomsky, Aspects, cited in Note 60 to Ch. II, pp. 127, 222f.
19
J.R. Firth, Papers in Linguistics
1934-1951 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1957), p. 184.
20
Halliday, Explorations, cited
in Note 106 to Ch. II, pp. 103, 112ff.
21
By Geoffrey N. Leech and Michael H. Short (London: Longman,
1981).
22
Compare Josephine Miles, Style and Proportion (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1967); Lubomir Doležel
and Richard
Bailey (eds.),
Statistics and Style (NY: Elsevier, 1969).
23
Compare Stanley Fish, ‘Literature in the reader: Affective
stylistics’, New Literary History 1, 1970, 123-162.
24
Curtis Hayes, ‘A study in prose styles: Edward Gibbon and Ernest
Hemingway’, in Doležel and Bailey (Note 22), pp. 80-91.
25 E.g.,
Samuel Levin, ‘Internal and external deviation in poetry’, WORD 21, 1965, 225-237.
26 Where only the author’s name is given, the poem
is untitled.
27 The ms. is in the Huntington Library. Compare now Hugh
M. Hood et al. (eds.) Georgia’s Lost Poet, Dr. Thomas H. Chivers
(Birmingham, AL: Brookside, 2001).
28
It was the work of two quite
dissimilar authors writing at least 30 years apart: one an eccentric
professorial language guardian (William Strunk) legislating his biases; the
other, his former student and affectionate apologist (E.B. White), a
distinguished writer of prose. Quotes from pp. 60f, 48, 52, 66, 77.
29
Ironically, the most visible success falls to the official ‘guides’
and ‘handbooks of style’, issued by some prestigious institution like the
Modern Language Association or the American Psychological Association, for
authors who presumably already have a style of their own. Anyway, ‘style’
only refers there to standardising text formats, e.g., paragraphing, citations,
footnotes, and references.
30
I am chiefly following M.A.K. Halliday, e.g., ‘Notes on transitivity
and theme in English’, Journal of
Linguistics 1967-68, 3, 37-81, 3, 199-244, and 4, 179-215; see especially
pp. 213 and 219.
31
On Halliday’s estimate of the ‘duration’ of unstressed Syllables,
see Note 9 to Ch. IV.
32
Compare Kenneth L. Pike, The Intonation of American English (Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1945),
33
See Hightower, Yellow Stripes (Note 2 to Ch. I), pp. 114f.
34
Yet to judge from John Lyons’ compendious survey Semantics
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976), Attitudes have not received any substantive
treatment in the study of meaning.
35
E.g. Gottlob Frege, ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, Zeitschrift
für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100, 1892, 25-50.
36
E.g. James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).
37
E.g. Willard van Ormen Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1960).
38
The example of ‘torrent’ was brought up by John Sinclair in a talk at
the University of Vienna in 1994 that first set me thinking seriously about how
corpus research might redirect our studies.
39
By Brian Seaton (London: Macmillan, 1982).
40 Life
under the Chief Doublespeak Officer, at www.dt.org/html.Doublespeak.html.
41
For unfathomable reasons, this transmuted nickname has caught on, with
1,367 hits on the Internet in January 2004.
42 At
www.genius2000.com/ag.html.
43 Reported
in my ‘Stylistics in Africa’, College
Literature, special issue, to appear.
44 Posted
at www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/charter.html
and well worth reading.
45 Annie Gagiano of the University of
Stellenbosch writes me that the butcherbird, which in Afrikaans is ‘laksman’
meaning ‘executioner’, is a symbol for the African who would one day strike
back at the ‘brutally repressive Afrikaner elite’. She notes that the
bird’s ‘habit of hanging up its prey on thorns or barbed-wire fences’
could be ‘reminiscent (to the
anthropomorphic imagination) of the intimidation technique of killing opponents
or criminals and exhibiting their corpses in public’.
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VII