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LECTURE 7
Antithesis is a stylistic device presenting two contrasting ideas in a close neighborhood. “They went down to the camp in black, but they came back to the town in white; they went down to the camp in ropes, they came back in chains of gold; they went down to the camp in fetters, but they came back with their steps enlarged under them; they went also to the camp looking for death, but they came back from their thence with the assurance of life; they went down to the camp with heavy hearts, but came back with pipes and tabor playing before them.” (J. Bunyan).
The phenomena opposed to one another can be pictured in an extended way:
“… as we paused it seemed that two worlds were meeting. The world of worry about rent and rates and groceries, of the smell of soda and blacklead and No Smoking and no Spitting and Please Have the Correct Change Ready, and the world of the Rolls and the Black Market clothes and the Coty perfume and the career ahead of one running on well – oiled grooves to a knighthood.” (J. Braine).
Here the writer first enumerates all the features of one world, and then all the features of another world, so finishing one picture and contrasting it in its completeness to the other.
Or else the contradictory ideas may intermingle, thus creating the effect of not only the contrast, but also of the close unity of the contrasting features: “The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion, of decay and birth, burden the air.” (Steinbeck). Antithesis should not be mixed up with oxymoron, where two contrasting ideas are expressed by words syntactically dependent upon each other within one syntagma.
Represented / reported speech is a stylistic device peculiarly combining characteristic features of direct and indirect speech. It is a comparatively “young” stylistic device dating its increasing popularity from the end of the IXIth century. Introducing represented speech into his narration the author creates the effect of the hero’s immediate presence and participation:
“He saw men working, and sleeping towns succeeding one another. What a great country America was! What a great thing to be an artist here! – these simple dramatic things … If he could only do it! If he could only stir the whole country so that his name would be like that of Dore in France or Vereshchagin in Russia. If he could but get fire into his work, the fire he felt!”
The morphological structure of the given example is that of indirect speech: the hero is referred to in the third person singular, the verbs and pronouns are, too, of the same form. But though the quotation marks are absent and though the structure of the passage does not indicate the hero’s interference into the writer’s narration, still there are certain features which enable us to distinguish it from the author’s indirect speech proper. They are the syntactical and lexical aspects of the passage, which stand close to the norms and patterns of direct speech. See how many exclamatory sentences there are in the extract: they help to reflect the emotional state of the hero. Parallel constructions, repetitions – all take part in bringing in the character himself with his ideas, dreams and sentiments. The writer does not eliminate himself completely from the narration as it happens with the introduction of direct speech but coexists with the personage.
“… You ought to make a good mural decorator some day, if you have the inclination.” Boyle went on, “you’ve got the sense of beauty.” The roots of Eugene’s hair tingled. So art was coming to him. This man saw his capacity. He really had art in him. (Dreiser).
“So” at the beginning of the sentence has the function of summing up certain preceding meditations and arguments. Introducing represented speech into the extract it preserves its function sums up all the reflections which are left in implication. “Really”, confirming the statement, belongs also in the personal key of the personage, and is a component of direct speech.
Turning from the structure of affirmative sentences to that of interrogative and exclamatory the writer marks off the introduction of an emotive passage, which more often than not represents reported speech: “He was hypnotized by the wonder of this – the beauty of it. Such seething masses of people! Such whirpools of life! (Dreiser), or: “He kept thinking he would write to her … and just before he entered art school he did this, penning a little note saying that he remembered so pleasantly their ride; and when was she coming?” (Dreiser). The last sentence is separated from its predecessors not only by a semicolon; the form of a directly asked question introduces the “voice” of the hero and so makes a turn from direct to represented speech.
The effect of the presence of the hero is achieved and through reproducing his phonetic peculiarities: “ … the effect was that of a hanging judge … sentencing some poor devil of a clerk to death by dislocation of the neck as an aperitif to a good dinnah with a bottle of the very best – the very best, waitah, - port.” (J. Braine). These “dinnah” and “waitah” are the main ways to bring the character in and to create represented speech.
Represented speech can be divided into two groups: represented inner speech and represented utter speech.
The first group is incomparably larger, it enables to give a fuller and more complete picture of the hero’s state of mind as if from within: “To bed then and to sleep. To total darkness. No thoughts, no dreams, nothing till morning came – and then the sharp swift torture of waking life”. (Du Maurier) or: “ … he was telling her of his prospective art studies, and talking of Paris. What a wonderful thing!” (Dreiser). It is not seldom here, in this division that the writer resorts to represented speech with the commentary: “he thought”, “he dreamed”, etc.: “Then he would bring her back with him to New York, he, Eugene Witla, already famous – in the East. Already the lure of the big eastern city was in his mind, its palaces, its fame, its wealth. It was the great world, he knew, this side of Paris and London. He would go to it now, shortly. What would he be there? How great? How soon? So he dreamed.” (Dreiser). One more example: “The girl noted the change for what she deemed the better. He was so nice now, she thought, so white-skinned and clear-eyed and keen.” (Dreiser).
In the early XX-th century European and American literature the device of represented inner speech gave birth to the so-called stream-of-conscious technique, which strives to imitate not the possible workings of a human mind in a deliberately and skillfully organized form, but to literally stenograph them. The main representative of this technique was a well-known English writer of the early XX-th century James Joyce, in whose novel “Ulysses” the concluding 45 pages of the text present the unbroken stream of all her former life in an almost incoherent flow of irregular broken sentences, phrases and separate words. Here is an extract from the book, where one of the characters is thinking of the widower heroine: “He looked down at the boots he had blacked and polished. She had outlived him, her husband. More dead for her than for me. One must outlive the other. Wise men say. There are more women in the world than men. Condole with her. Your terrible loss. I hope you’ll soon follow him. For Hindu windows only. She would marry another. Him? No. Yet who knows after? Widowhood not the thing since the old queen died. Drawn on a gun carriage. Victoria and Albert. Frogmore memorial mourning. But in the end she put a few violets in her bonnet. Vain in her heart of hearts. All for a shadows. Consort not even a king. Her son was the substance. Something new to hope for not like the past the wanted back, waiting. It never comes. One must go first: alone, under the ground: and lie no more in her warm bed.” (J. Joyce).
Such a hypertrophied understanding of represented speech cannot find its place in progressive literature intended for the masses and not for the selected few, and should be totally denounced by the writers striving to by understood and appreciated by the broad masses of reading public.
Represented uttered speech is a mental reproduction of a once uttered remark or even a whole dialogue:
“ … So I’ve come to be servant to you.” – “How much do you want?” – “I don’t know. My keep, I suppose. Yes, she could cook. Yes, she could wash. Yes, she could mend, she could darn. She knew how to shop in a market. (Du Maurier).
The contests of the last four sentences leaves no doubt that they are answers to further questions, though their form – the third person of the pronouns, the change of the tense, the abolition of quotation marks-clearly shows that the author turned from direct to represented speech.
Or: “Angela who was taking in every detail of Eugene’s old friend, replied in what seemed an affected tone that no, she wasn’t used to studio life: she was just from the country, you know – a regular farm girl – Backwood, Wisconsin, no less!” (Dreiser). Here the change into represented speech is achieved through introducing into the indirect answer the negative particle “no”, used only in direct answers. The conversational parenthetical “you know”, characteristic, too, of the direct speech, serves the same purpose of intermixing elements of direct and indirect speech, which creates represented speech, so narrowing the distance between the character and the reader.
Close to represented speech stands the effect of immediate presence. Its function is similar to that of represented speech: to show a certain picture through the eyes of immediate direct participant, and in this way to involve the reader into the proceedings: “The first matador got the horn through his sword hand and the crowd hooted him out. The second matador slipped, and the bull caught him through the belly, and he hung on the horn with one hand and held the other tight against the place, and the bull rammed him wham against the barrier and the horn came out, and he lay in the sand, and then got up like crazy drunk and tired to slug the men carrying him away and yelled for his sword, but he fainted. The kid came out and had to kill five bulls because you can’t have more than three matadors, and the last bull he was so tired he couldn’t hardly get the sword in. He couldn’t hardly lift his arm. He tried five times and the crowd was quiet because it was good bull and it looked like him or the bull and then – he finally made it. He sat down in the sand and puked and they held a cape over him while the crowd hollered and threw the things down into the bull ring.” (Hemingway). This is now Hemingway describes a bullfight, but both its emphatic syntax and the choice of its vocabulary lie in the vein of oral speech. It is not merely a descriptive passage written by a disinterested indifferent observer; the reader sees the event through the eyes of one of its passionate fans, though the immediate spectator is not even mentioned; his figure remains in implication and is easily reconstructed due solely to the lexical and syntactical organization of the chapter.
Cumulation is the connection of phrases that are grammatically and semantically independent. For example: “During Aunt Juley’s momentary and horrified silence he caught some words of Irene’s that sounded like: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!”
But Swithin had finished his ham.
“Where do you go for your mushrooms,” he was saying to Irene in a voice like a courtier’s. (Galsworthy)
The cumulative constructions are usually connected by the conjunctions “but”, “and” sometimes “or”. For example:
“On the station platform were Negro soldiers. They wore brown uniform, and were too tall to stare.” (Hemingway).
As cumulative constructions are grammatically and semantically more or less independent there is rather a long pause between them in speech, and graphically they are often separated even by a full stop and semicolon.
In oral speech a cumulative construction is often a kind of afterthought, as in this example:
Old Jolyon said simply: “I suppose I oughtn’t to have come here, Jo: but I get so lonely!” (Galsworthy).
The cumulative sentence here may be regarded as an afterthought which is added to explain why Old Jolyon had come to see his son.
In written speech a cumulative construction cannot be considered as afterthought as it is used deliberately by the author. Comulation may have various stylistic functions. Very often the linking thought between cumulative constructions is missing and cumulation stressed a sudden transition from one thought to another. For example in his novel “To Let” Galsworthy describing Irene’s and her son’s trip to Spain writes:
It was “already hot and they enjoyed an absence of the compatriots.”
The first clause (it was already hot) cannot be regarded as the clause for the second clause (and they enjoyed …). The missing thought implied here may be as follows: in summer when it is hot rich English bourgeoisie do not usually travel in Spain and as Irene and her son dislike most travelling Englishmen “they enjoyed an absence of their compatriots.”
Cumulative constructions often introduce represented speech thus bringing out a sudden transition from one kind of speech to another.
She had no spirit to dance again for a long time, though she might have had plenty of partners; but, ah; they did not speak so nicely as the strange young man had done.” (T. Hardy).
Very close to cumulation stands a group of cases where the syntactical unity of semantically alien elements brings forth a humorous effect. We shall begin a brief review of them with those called semantically remote units which is a combination of words semantically greatly differing from one another but placed closely together in identical syntactical conditions:
“Wanted as governess; must possess a knowledge of French, Italian, Russian and Roumanian, Music and Mining Engeneering.” (Leacock).
- In this advertisement side by side with the ordinary demands from a governess stands the claim to teach mining engineering, which is, naturally never included into the list of subjects taught to little children. All the enumerated items are homogeneous members of the sentence, and this identity of syntactical position brings them extremely close to one another. The clash between the syntactic unity and semantic distance produces as a rule a humorous effect
“ … he had enjoyed a disease composed of little spots, bed, honey in spoon, and many Tangerine oranges.” (Galsworthy)
“That was a wonderful Spring, extremely hard on his knees suits and the patience of Da”. (Galsworthy).
- Here scarlet fever is described by a little boy, who indiscriminately heaps together all the various outward manifestations of the disease.
- The first two concrete nouns to a certain extent are connected with the third abstract nouns as cause and result, but they are realized as such only when brought so closely together.
The co-called nonsense of non-sequence, too, presents a combination of two ideas semantically not following each other, but syntactically united by coordinative or subordinative connection: “The Emperor Nero was playing a fiddle, so they burned Rome.” (Esar). Or a headline in a newspaper: “Couple breaking up; friend helping”, or: “Synopsis of the previous chapters; there are no previous chapters”. (Leacock)
The second part of every sentence is in no way explained or prompted by the first part. Their connection is of purely formal nature, and the semantic incongruity creates, too, a humorous effect.
Asyndeton The connection of sentences, phrases or words without any conjunctions is called asyndetic. Asyndeton helps the author to make each phrase or word sound independent and significant. For example:
The Colonel looked carefully at Wolfe. At his derisive eyes, his big frame, his burnt face, his black hair, his big hands, at the ridge that ran from his hair strait down to his nose. (J. Aldridge).
Asyndeton generally creates an effect that the enumeration is not completed as in the above example. Asyndeton also creates a certain rhythmical arrangement, usually making the narrative measured and energetic. She watched them go; she said nothing; it was not to begin then. (W. Faulkner). Asyndeton is a deliberate avoidance of conjunctions used to connect sentences, clauses, or words. As far as its stylistic role is concerned, asyndeton creates a certain rhythmical arrangement, usually making the narrative measured, energetic, and tense, e.g. That’s all I’m to do, all I want to do (D. Hammett); Tree and hall rose peaceful under the night sky and clear full orb; pearly paleness gilded the building; mellow brown gloom bosomed it round: shadows of deep green brooded above its oak-wreathed roof (Ch. Bronte).
Polysyndeton is the connection of sentences, phrases or words based on the repetition of conjunctions or prepositions:
He put on his coat and found his mug and plate and knife and went outside. (J. Aldridge).
The repetition of the conjunction “and” before each word or phrase stresses these enumerated words or phrases. This emphatic function of the conjunction is obvious in the following example:
The anger and the emptiness and the hate that had come with the let-down after the bridge, when he had looked up from where he had lain and crouching, where still all through him. (Hemingway).
Polysyndeton is sometimes used to retard the action and to create the stylistic effect of suspense, as in this extract from the story “A Canary for One” by Hemingway:
The train left the station in Marseilles and there were not only the switchyards and the factory smoke but, looking back, the town of Marseilles and the harbour with stone hills behind it and the last of the sun on the water.
Besides, polysyndeton is one of the means used to create a certain rhythmic effect.
Polysyndeton is a repetition of conjunctions in close succession which are used to connect sentences, clauses, or words and make the utterance more rhythmical, e.g. She had herself a rich ruby look, for what with eating and drinking, and shouting and laughing and singing her face was crimson and almost steaming. (J. Priestley).
Enumeration is a repetition of homogeneous parts of the sentence, aimed at emphasizing the whole utterance, e.g. / found battlers, secondmen, chauffeurs, cooks, maids, upstairs girls, downstairs girls, and a raft of miscellaneous flunkies – he had enough servants to run a hotel (D. Hammett).
Syntactical tautology is a superfluous repetition of semantically identical words or phrases to say stress on a certain part of the sentence e.g. She’s always one for a change, Gladdie is… (A. Christie).
Emphatic constructions may intensify or contract any part of the sentence, giving it an emotive charge. The emphatic construction with “do” is used as a predicate intensifier. The construction “it is smb/smth who/that” intensifies the subject; the construction “it is then that” stresses the adverbial modifier of time; “it is by/with/through smth that” makes prominent the adverbial modifier of manner. “It is to that/smth there that” brings to the foreground the object of the sentence, e.g. That evening it was Dave, who read to the boys their bed-time story (D. Carter); It was then that Poirot received a brief note from Sady Willard (A. Christie); / do know it! (D. Hammett).
Parenthetical clauses are sentences or phrases inserted into a syntactical structure without being grammatically connected with it. The functions of parenthesis are those of exemplification, deliberation, or reference. Parenthetical clauses may produce various stylistic effects:
Task: Find out from literary texts examples of antithesis, represented / reported speech, cumulation, semantically remote units, nonsense of non-sequence, asyndeton, polysyndeton, enumeration, syntactical tautology, emphatic constructions, parenthetical clauses.
Do the practical assignment 3.
Give the example of stream-of-consciousness technique, the effect of immediate presence.