1.Literature and linguistics
Every piece of literary criticism of any literary work in any
culture from any period of human history would be better if more rigorous
attention were paid to its language. The same could be said of any
analytical account of any text, but it is a particular oddity of the
scholarly criticism of literature that any knowledge of linguistics has
often been regarded as an optional add-on. In his published work and by the
example of his life, Bill Nash achieved a seamless integration of critical
interpretation, linguistic mastery, and aesthetic sensibility that remains a
testament to a fully holistic literary linguistics. In this, he was ahead of
his time. Developing a series of observations originally published in
Nottingham Linguistic Circular in 1977, Nash (1982) presented a case study
of modern stylistics in which linguistic patterning, discoursal framing, and
aesthetic effects were linked together: the account focused on an early
passage from D. H. Lawrence’s
(1914) short story “Odour of chrysanthemums”. In the preface to
the original edition of NLC, the editors Christopher Butler
and Nash himself outline how this “short account of a passage of Lawrentian
prose emphasises the necessity of determining a textual and thematic
structure as a framework of reference for the location of stylistic devices”
(Butler and Nash 1977: 2). The
chapter Nash (1982) polished for
wider publication stands not only as an example of stylistic analysis, but
also as an attempt to set out the wider parameters of what a fully
integrated rhetoric of literary criticism should look like. On a website
themed around “Odour of chrysanthemums” (http://odour.nottingham.ac.uk), Nash’s (1982) chapter appears alongside some
early comments on the story by Ford Madox Ford (1937: 70–2), and is followed by a critique not only of
Nash’s chapter but of stylistics in general by Peter Barry (1985). Barry’s criticism of stylistics is
a theme in his work, further developed in Barry (1988) and in his literary theory textbook (there are four
editions – 1995, 2002, 2009, 2017 – though each tends simply to add
chapters, and the “Stylistics” section has remained fairly consistent: page
numbers here refer to the 2002 edition).
In this chapter, I would like to revisit Nash’s stylistic
analysis, and Barry’s objections to some of it, in order to clarify the
current and persisting value of stylistics. It is useful, I think, to
identify both where and why Nash was correct, and where Barry’s criticisms
had some foundation. It is also important to locate their dialogue
historically, in order to show that some of what Nash was trying to do was
very much of its time, and some of his ambitions required stylistic tools
that did not become available until much more recently. Like Nash’s original
account, my aim is to offer a general defence of stylistics as modern
literary linguistics, and recommend the method as the exemplary practice for
literary criticism.
2.Stylistics and some familiar objections
In a move that Barry
(1985) criticises for being randomly selective, Nash (1982) presents the opening
passage from “Odour of chrysanthemums”:
Nash’s analysis is principally a careful stylistic explanation for the sense of alienation and isolation that he feels in the characters while reading the story. His is a general reaction that is evidently very common (see the overwhelming majority of reader-responses at Goodreads 2017), and, as with stylistics in general, the objective is not so much to produce a new or eccentric reading but to account as clearly as possible for predominant readings which exist in the world. The opening passage is selected because it sets up the scene and over-arching mood of the whole story, which develops as the woman’s husband’s body is returned home to her from a mining accident. In the course of the narrative, as the woman and the miner’s mother clean and prepare the corpse, the wife comes to realise her own isolation and failed relationships. Nash explores the narrative structure of the story, the way that perspective shifts especially in this opening scene, the relative agency and descriptions of the woman and her son, and their relationship to the setting and landscape. He illuminates the tonality of the setting “as a psychic shadow-partner to the human world” (Nash 1982: 117). He draws out, admirably for a short analysis, the rich details that Lawrence includes that accumulate into what most readers agree is a powerfully resonant study of alienation, loss and regret. Much of the analysis is concerned to show how the detailed stylistic texture builds up into an overall sense of polyvalent discomfort, and a feeling that the relationships and conclusions of the episode are complex and subtle.The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway line to Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass. The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon’s stagnant light. Just beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black head-stocks of Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the sky, and the winding-engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners were being turned up.The engine whistled as it came into the wide bay of railway lines beside the colliery, where rows of trucks stood in harbour.Miners, single, trailing and in groups, passed like shadows diverging home. At the edge of the ribbed level of sidings squats a low cottage, three steps down from the cinder track. A large bony vine clutched at the house, as if to claw down the tiled roof. Round the bricked yard grew a few wintry primroses. Beyond, the long garden sloped down to a bush-covered brook course. There were some twiggy apple trees, winter-crack trees, and ragged cabbages. Beside the path hung dishevelled pink chrysanthemums, like pink cloths hung on bushes. A woman came stooping out of the felt-covered fowl-house, half-way down the garden. She closed and padlocked the door, then drew herself erect, having brushed some bits from her white apron.She was a tall woman of imperious mien, handsome, with definite black eyebrows. Her smooth black hair was parted exactly. For a few moments she stood steadily watching the miners as they passed along the railway: then she turned towards the brook course. Her face was calm and set, her mouth was closed with disillusionment. After a moment she called:“John!” There was no answer. She waited, and then said distinctly:“Where are you?”“Here!” replied a child’s sulky voice from among the bushes. The woman looked piercingly through the dusk.“Are you at that brook?” she asked sternly.For answer the child showed himself before the raspberry-canes that rose like whips. He was a small, sturdy boy of five. He stood quite still, defiantly.“Oh!” said the mother, conciliated. “I thought you were down at that wet brook–and you remember what I told you –”The boy did not move or answer.“Come, come on in,” she said more gently, “it’s getting dark. There’s your grandfather’s engine coming down the line!”The lad advanced slowly, with resentful, taciturn movement. He was dressed in trousers and waistcoat of cloth that was too thick and hard for the size of the garments. They were evidently cut down from a man’s clothes.As they went slowly towards the house he tore at the ragged wisps of chrysanthemums and dropped the petals in handfuls along the path.“Don’t do that – it does look nasty,” said his mother. He refrained, and she, suddenly pitiful, broke off a twig with three or four wan flowers and held them against her face. When mother and son reached the yard her hand hesitated, and instead of laying the flower aside, she pushed it in her apron-band. The mother and son stood at the foot of the three steps looking across the bay of lines at the passing home of the miners. The trundle of the small train was imminent. Suddenly the engine loomed past the house and came to a stop opposite the gate.The engine-driver, a short man with round grey beard, leaned out of the cab high above the woman.“Have you got a cup of tea?” he said in a cheery, hearty fashion.It was her father.(Lawrence 1914: 281–4)
Barry’s (1985)
criticism of Nash’s procedure focuses on four main points: stylistics is
selective and overly micro-analytical; stylisticians produce no new or
startling readings; stylistics cannot justify the leap from linguistic
evidence to interpretation; and matters of linguistic structure are treated
as if they had inherent meaning. These are criticisms that Barry has also
made more generally about the discipline, so I will consider them both in
response to Nash’s original account as well as in relation to the field
overall.
Firstly, Barry complains that Nash displays a lack of literary
sensitivity when his selection of a single passage neglects the narrative
dynamic flow of the rest of the story. Nash extracts the passage reproduced
above for the obvious reason that it is the opening of the text and so is
relatively constrained for readerly context. It sets the scene, both
physically and tonally. He closes the passage at the line, “Suddenly the
engine loomed past the house and came to a stop opposite the gate.” Nash
justifies this by identifying a shift in viewpoint and topic that moves from
engine – miners – cottage – chrysanthemums and then
reverses the sequence to create a symmetry with the engine that defines the
opening. Barry suggests that Nash identifies symmetry across the passage
arising from his own selective observation, and that this pattern is then
circularly used to define the end of the passage. He makes a particular
point that the exclusion of the “cheeriness” of the last lines that I have
included in the excerpt above leads Nash to a “misreading” (Barry 1985: 57) that is more
negative than it should be. This criticism derives from a general flaw in
objections to stylistics that posit an exclusive distinction between
objectivity and subjectivity. Barry claims that stylistics is subjective and
idiosyncratic because it is not absolutely objective; it therefore rests on
the very intuition that it claims to reject. However, these are false
contraries, and modern stylistics certainly does not reject intuition. To my
mind (and apparently for Nash too), the passage excerpted above represents
an identifiable setting for the story, in which a narrative viewpoint tracks
the scene by zooming in and out of perspective as the steam-engine moves
closer and then stops. There are many elements of scene-setting and the
establishment of world-building in the passage (some of which are identified
by Nash), but the point of articulating these explicitly is to invite a
reader to recognise them as reasonable observations about the text. The
appeal is not to an objective parsing of the text but to an intersubjective
recognition.
Alongside the objection to the articulation of
pattern-recognition, Barry more generally dislikes the micrological detail
of stylistic analysis: the excerpt
is then analysed as if it were poetry rather than prose, for [Nash] searches out patternings and recurrences which are like those found in lyric poetry and provide him with “a framework of reference for stylistic features” ([Nash 1982:] 112). This transfer of a poetic method to the analysis of fiction is of dubious validity.(Barry 1985: 52)
Again, here, there is a confusion of the activity of reading
(naturally) and the practice of literary analysis. Of course no one normally
reads in as much detail or with such a degree of intensity as Nash, or any
other stylistician. The patterns that are brought to awareness by linguistic
description are laid bare so that others can see the craftedness of the
literary work. Cumulatively, all of these details amount to the overall
artistic achievement of the object. They can either be seen as a careful
examination and appreciation of the object itself, or as stylistic
components that operate at a subliminal level of awareness but nevertheless
accumulate into a definite impression: the micro-texture of a reading which
is mentally organised into a macrostructural representation that constitutes
the effect in the reader. Either way, the analyst is trying to account for
and value the source material for naturalistic reading. Neither does this
method imply that authors are sort of super-stylisticians before the fact,
as Barry elsewhere suggests. Commenting on analyses by Fowler (1966) and MacCabe (possibly 1984, 1985 or 1988, Barry doesn’t bother to reference the example here), he
writes:
Literary meaning, this suggests, goes down to the very roots of language and is reflected at the level of grammar and sentence structure. Hence, no aspect of language is neutral; the patterns of grammar and syntax, morphemes, and phonemes are all implicated in literary meaning. Again, I think there are difficulties with this as a general argument: for instance, it seems to make authors into intuitive genius figures who instinctively “know” the content of modern linguistics.(Barry 2002: 213)
The final point here is an astonishing
non-sequitur. Good writers do instinctively have a feel
for their language (not for linguistics); their intuitive senses are
distilled mainly subconsciously from the culture that they largely share
with their readers. The task of the stylistician is to elucidate as
professionally as possible all the elements that contribute to a writer’s
output and a reader’s engagement with their works. When Freeman (1996), for example, observes the
mechanics of conceptual metaphor in King Lear, he is not
claiming anything about Shakespeare’s attendance in his cognitive
linguistics class, but he is pointing out a powerful matter of rhetoric that
connects the use of English across four centuries.
Barry also seems here to deride the idea that “no aspect of
language is neutral”. Well, no aspect of language is neutral, as the last
four decades worth of critical discourse analysis and linguistics have
demonstrated with an exhaustingly huge body of evidence. Barry’s textbook of
critical theory sets stylistics apart for rejecting the relativism of other
critical theories in favour of a positivist outlook on language. This is
because it responds to our current best understanding of language and mind,
not to an outdated and discredited pseudo-Saussurean notion of linguistic
arbitrariness [see Stockwell
(2017: 35–48) for a rehearsal of the origins of this error]. The
principal characteristic of linguistic meaning, we now know (thanks to
cognitive linguistics), is its iconicity. Indeed, “the patterns of grammar
and syntax, morphemes, and phonemes are all implicated in literary meaning”
(Barry 2002: 213). Aspects of
formal structure always have meaning, and often in literary texts their
significance is foregrounded in a variety of stylistic ways. Elsewhere,
Barry (1980 and 2002: 19–20)
scornfully derides the similarity between stylistic practice and F. R. Leavis’s (1955: 143) notion of
“enactment”, which can be seen as an impressionistic version of the effects
of linguistic iconicity. Leavis developed the term specifically arising from
a discussion of D. H. Lawrence, but the idea that a literary text
presents patterns that can be regarded iconically as being aligned with its
theme or key interpretation is a notion that has found a widespread
application in stylistics (Müller and
Fischer 2003, Willems and De
Cuypere 2009). We now know that iconicity is one of the most
powerful mechanisms of literary power and resonance.
Nash is criticised for the “curious habit of treating grammar
literalisticly” (Barry 1985: 57).
Elsewhere, Barry complains:
The critic’s contention is that the effects are achieved, at least in part, by a miming or echoing of the sense by the syntax. He believes that the underlying inchoative structure of the verbs constitutes “a kind of syntactic pun … again reinforcing a structural pattern in the poem’s language which makes processes … out of states” ([Freeman 1978] p. 88). But this central contention that “the poem’s syntax and its semantics interact perfectly” is irredeemably subjective, because, for one thing, there are no proper criteria for determining the semantic values of syntax.(Barry 1988: 180)
In fact, both systemic functional grammar and cognitive
linguistics take as a founding premise the notion that syntax and semantics
cannot be completely distinguished, and both have a symbolic value.
Langacker’s (1987, 1990, 1991, 1999, 2008) Cognitive
Grammar can be regarded as a decades-long project of elucidating the “proper
criteria” and principles for their inter-relation; it will be drawn upon in
the analysis later in this chapter. In fact, most of Barry’s errors (in
1985: 57–8) derive from the fact that he does not understand the difference
between semantic and pragmatic meaning, nor the functional effects of
active/passive agency, nor the different types of process that predicates
can manifest. To give one example, Nash notes “one fine stylistic touch” in
the Lawrence passage, in which
instead of “she hesitated” we read her hand hesitated. There is a shift of initiating agency from the whole person to a part, the hand, which is treated as though it had an independent will. This device expresses in a very telling way her division against herself, her alternations of voluntary act and involuntary response, and her reluctance to admit any feeling of tenderness about her marriage. It betrays a vulnerability which we might not suspect in a tall woman of imperious mien. .. with definite black eyebrows.(Nash 1982: 112)
Barry (1985: 57)
says that the effect “exists in the grammar only”, dismissing the point
since he thinks that grammar is merely meaningless formal structure in a
text. In systemic functional grammar, the stylistic choice in the predicate
manifests a process (“hesitates”) that can be construed by a reader either
as a material action intention or as a mental process that indexes an
emotional stance. The polyvalence is tonally suggestive, of course. In
Cognitive Grammar, the perspective of this shift from “his mother” to “her
hand” constitutes a zooming of attention that serves to focus readerly
construal on the “wan flowers” of the delicate chrysanthemum. In the context
of the story and its title, the symbolic importance of this subtle piece of
foregrounding is surely important to notice.
Barry’s central dissatisfaction with Nash and stylistics in
general is a repeat of Fish’s
(1973) complaint that stylistic practice moves from linguistic
description to interpretation by leaping over the “hermeneutic gap”, and
failing to define the relationship between evidence and conclusion. Others
have resolved this question at length (see Toolan 1996, Stubbs 2005, O’Halloran
2007), but the fundamental validation that connects textual
evidence to interpretation lies in the appeal to recognition in the reader.
A stylistician sets out, as clearly and articulately and precisely as
possible, a set of features in a text that seem to be significant; and the
reader of the analysis is implicitly invited to evaluate whether the claims
seem to correspond with their own intuitive response. In much recent
stylistic practice, these validations have further been triangulated with
empirical support from cognitive linguistics, reader-data, psycholinguistic
measurements such as eye-tracking, and corpus linguistic framing. In the
last of these, the language system as a whole is drawn on, using
computational power, to understand the cultural usages of linguistic
elements; these generalisms are then specified back towards the individual
reader in that culture. Stylistics does not presume an ideal reader (as
Barry 1988 claims) as a sort
of imaginary psychologically omniscient being, but generates a sense of an
idealised reader, distilled from the linguistic practices and patterns of
the language system at large, and evidenced by corpus techniques. Corpus
stylistics generalises the problem of subjectivity by raising the evidence
from massively intersubjective data.
3.Updating the stylistic analysis
In his wider work, Barry
(2002) elaborates his criticisms of stylistics as a discipline.
He includes “Stylistics” as a section in this literary theory textbook,
alongside critical approaches such as Marxist criticism, Cultural
materialism, Feminist criticism, Ecocriticism, and so on. Oddly, he has a
separate section on Narratology, though this field and stylistics seem to me
now so closely linked that they can be regarded as a single over-arching
area, with shared approaches of method and principle, and overlapping
personnel (such as Toolan 2001,
Herman 2003, Fludernik 1996, and Bell 2010, among many others). He
also misses the point in the Lawrence analysis where Nash (1982) makes narratological points, possibly
because he does not see comments on narrative development as part of
stylistics. This was debatably true at the time, but is certainly not the
case now. The section on “Stylistics” (Barry 2002: 203–21) begins by asking whether stylistics is “a
theory or a practice?” The discussion does not actually address the
question, instead suggesting that there is little difference between
stylistics and either New Criticism or close-reading, and that stylistics is
merely a terminologically-saturated version of liberal humanism. Barry
clearly thinks stylistics is a critical theory by including it in his
best-selling book, though he notes that it is rather different as a practice
from those other critical theories. The claim that stylistics is principally
a method can be seen in the fact that it could work in the service of almost
all of the other theories in the book.
Nash’s (1982)
analysis could fit within the frame of a number of critical theoretical
approaches to D. H. Lawrence. Over and over again, Nash (1982) points to key stylistic patterns,
explaining them carefully in order to offer them to a reader for recognition
and use. Of course, he could only draw on the state of linguistic
description as it was available to him at the time. Barry, similarly, had
those resources, though he appears less informed on matters of linguistics
than Nash. So what was Barry
(1985) right about in his early criticism of stylistics? Some of
his points are true, but are not the criticism he thinks they are. He
correctly notes that stylistic “rules” are not predictive of literary
interpretation, though he has the method the wrong way round here: readings
already exist, and the job of the stylistician is to account for their
textual origins. He rightly notes that scholarly knowledge of linguistics is
not necessary to produce an insight, but imagines this is a criticism only
because he confuses professional analysis with natural reading. He suggests
stylistics is a critical theory because it defines and generates a canonical
set of literary texts. This was probably true in the 1960s and ‘70s, where
stylisticians preferred linguistically deviant poetry texts as affording a
richer ground for interesting exploration, but the stylistics certainly of
the last three decades has been characterised by its diversity of genre,
culture, and style. Barry (1988)
criticises stylistics for searching for universals that are in fact not
generalisable. The example he cites (Holloway 1979) attempts to apply transformational-generative
syntax to poetry, and in this respect Barry’s objections are well-judged.
Stylisticians realised around this time that TG could not be used for
stylistics, principally because it was not particularly interested in
surface realisation: it is a sign of the progressive nature of the
discipline that TG was almost completely abandoned by subsequent
stylisticians.
Indeed, stylistics has proven itself progressive in the sense
that its commitment to the best current understanding of language and mind
necessitates a constant re-evaluation of the most apt analytical methods. It
is not surprising that Nash, writing at the end of the 1970s, was not yet
able to avail himself of some of the insights which have developed in
linguistics and cognitive science since then. In the “Odour of
chrysanthemums” analysis, he was attempting to capture a full tonal and
thematic sense of the story. His aspiration is captured in this diagram,
reproduced from the earliest version of his analysis.
(Nash 1977: 72)Here Nash is trying to make the tools of contemporary
linguistics work to capture the “intersection” or “intermeshing” of textual
patterning at the discourse level with readerly knowledge, experience,
feeling and response (as he articulates it in Nash 1982: 120). Subliminal “intuition” is both
central to this scheme and related by feedback with the other elements. By
“plane of articulation”, he is trying to gesture towards a
stylistically-driven discourse analysis of the sort that was only just
emerging at the time (see, for example, Stubbs 1983, Brown and Yule
1983); by “plane of information” he is trying to grasp the
schematic cognitive knowledge that a reader brings to a literary text,
including a sense of how characterisation or symbolism work. This latter
level was not fully systematically developed until the rise of cognitive
poetics two decades later (Stockwell
2002). By this time, such literary framing was part of the
systems that Nash presents as being further distanced from the centre of his
scheme: non-literary contextual knowledge and aesthetic matters of feeling,
value and significance. We might now fold all of these concerns into an
integrated text-world theory approach (Gavins 2007), or an account drawing on schema poetics (Cockcroft 2002). Within literary
linguistics, the domain of what is encompassed as a purely “linguistic”
matter has expanded significantly since 1982 to include much of what Nash
aspires to here:
It is important to realise that the reader’s intimations of the patterning of a text may be guided by clues other than linguistic. A literary text has a total power of appeal which is to be described in terms of semiotics or aesthetics, including some aspects of linguistics, rather than of a strictly and exclusively linguistic model. In certain respects a text may be similar to a picture, in that it has an iconographic programme (this could, indeed, be said of the Lawrence passage); or it may have something in common with music, say, in its repetitions of a Leitmotiv, or even with mathematics in its modelling of some principles such as that of binary alternation. All these things may be described in linguistic or quasi-linguistic terminology, but they are not in the strictest sense proper to linguistics. The point is perhaps obvious, yet it is one that linguistic stylisticians do not always readily concede.(Nash 1982: 119, original emphasis)
The “total power of appeal” of a literary work is a composite
of textual patterning, readerly experience and expectation, cultural
framing, and interpretative effects, all of which are now amenable to
stylistic analysis broadly conceived (see Gregoriou 2008, Lambrou and
Stockwell 2010, Simpson
2014, and the historical progression throughout Carter and Stockwell 2008).
We can return to the Nash analysis with some of these new
insights into the cognitive stylistic texture of the Lawrence story. Much of
his stylistic account attempts to describe the correlates of mood, theme and
ambience – the resonant aspects of the text that his linguistic tools could
not capture very well, and that Barry finds dissatisfying or incomplete.
Nash is also handicapped by the lack of a general account that combines
local texture, narrative patterning and readerly involvement, needing the
sort of cognitive discourse grammar that was not available until more
recently (see Harrison et al.
2014).
The opening passage to “Odour of chrysanthemums”, as provided
at the beginning of this chapter, sets up many of the most resonant elements
that make the story so powerful, evocative and memorable. The term
resonance here is used in the cognitive poetic sense
first proposed in Stockwell (2009a, 2009b) and
developed and applied by Giovanelli
(2013) and McLoughlin
(2016): the means by which a literary text manipulates readerly
attention in order to evoke feelings and impressions that persist in the
mind after the reading is over. The attention-resonance
model draws heavily on Langacker’s (2008) Cognitive Grammar, together with insights
from the cognition of attention (see Styles 2005, 2006) and gestalt psychology (see Ellis 1999). Briefly, a textual element can be
regarded figurally as a mental “attractor” if it is perceived as having one
or a combination of the following effects:
newness
currency: the present moment of reading is more
attractive than the previous moment
agency
noun phrases in active position are better
attractors than in passive position
topicality
foregrounded subject position confers attraction
over grounded object position
empathy
human speaker > human hearer > animal >
object > abstraction
definiteness
definite > specific indefinite >
non-specific indefinite
activeness
verbs denoting action, energy, violence, passion,
wilfulness, motivation or strength
brightness
lightness or vivid colours being denoted over
dimness or drabness
fullness
richness, density, intensity or nutrition being
denoted
largeness
large objects being denoted, or a very long
elaborated noun phrase used to denote
height
objects that are above others, are higher than the
perceiver, or which dominate
noisiness
denoted phenomena which are audibly voluminous
abnormality
aesthetic distance from the norm (beauty/ugliness,
danger, dissonance).
(after
Stockwell
2009a: 25)
Across a reading of a text, attractors are sustained or
occluded by newly refreshed figures as the reading moves on, accumulating
into an overall attentional sense of the impact of the work. The first half
of the list above would traditionally be considered “linguistic” matters and
the second half more impressionistic, meaningful or world-related matters.
Taking a principled cognitive poetic view of attractors means that the
distinction between syntactic form and meaningfulness, for example, is
rendered relatively unimportant here. So it seems to be the case, documented
in the work cited above, that readers’ attention is attracted by syntactic
agency as well as by phrases which denote noise, for example. There is a
continuity across linguistic representation and bodily simulation; and this
observation is a foundational principle of cognitive linguistics.
An exploration of the subtle manipulations of readerly
attention across the Lawrence passage reveals both consistent thematic
patterns and complex undercurrents. The most obvious effect, perhaps, is the
animation of the industrial landscape. This is achieved by a set of
stylistic patterns that might lead a reader to profile a sense of human
empathy and wilfulness in normally inanimate objects. A full shift from
object to human along the empathy scale would involve a thorough
personification of the landscape; however, what happens in the opening to
“Odour of chrysanthemums” is much more subtle – just enough to give a
subliminal flavour of animation and wilfulness. The steam engine, for
example, receives an unusually high level of definite specification in the
opening sentence: “The small locomotive engine, Number 4”. It is the
agentive topic of a repeated predication “came clanking, stumbling”, and it
is figured strongly against a specified ground “from Selston” and “with
seven full waggons”. There is even a numerical increase from “4” to “seven”,
including from the single numeral to the physically larger word on the page.
Each time the engine is mentioned, it is combined with a prepositional
phrase “with” – this is an image-schematic structure that is used when
objects are enlarged: “with seven full waggons”, “with loud threats of
speed”, “with slow inevitable movement”. Several of the lexical choices
associated with the engine are drawn from the human domain: “stumbling”,
“threats”, “thumped”, “whistled”.
In context, the profiling of the engine is also achieved
contrastively by grounding and diminishing other elements, most notably here
a woman standing by: “The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow
inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the
jolting black waggons and the hedge”. The “trucks” are placed in active
topic position and specified definitely, and are then post-modified so that
the subject takes up half the length of the sentence here. The multiple
object that is the trucks is itemised as each one passes by
(this is “sequential scanning” in Langacker’s (1987: 245) scheme), so that the trailing sequence
iconically matches the slow passing of the train. By contrast, the woman who
has just been (indefinitely) introduced (“A woman”) is reduced down to a
single unmodifiable pronoun (“she”). She has been cumulatively rendered
static (“walking … drew back …
held … watched”) to the point at which she “stood
insignificantly trapped”. She disappears at that point and is never seen
again. Even as she is diminished, the surrounding objects are more definite
than her: “the railway line … the hedge … the
footplate … the engine … the
trucks … the jolting black waggons … the hedge”.
On close inspection, this sentence appears to track the woman’s viewpoint
and experience as the trucks thump past her; the feeling of being “trapped”
is hers; and they are seen to “curve away” from the point where she is
standing. However, at this point, the diminishment and disappearance of this
woman from the text is mirrored by the fact that the viewpoint leaves her
perspective, and instead picks up and cinematically follows the train once
again. Again, the landscape is profiled with definite articles to make a
reader more readily lose sight of the woman: “the coppice …
the withered oak leaves … the birds … the
scarlet hips … the track … the
dusk … the spinney”, and so on. The effect is also to make the
landscape one that is presumed familiar and part of prosaic experience.
The profiling of the engine and de-profiling of people are
also aligned with agency for other aspects of the industrial landscape in
the passage. So other items, both natural and artificial, in the landscape
receive highly active, fast, bright or anomalous verbal processes: as well
as the engine stumbling, threatening, thumping and trapping, the colt
“outdistanced it”, the gorse “flickered”, the withered oak leaves “dropped”,
the birds “pulling at the scarlet hips” “made off”, the dusk “crept”, the
smoke “cleaved”, the fields were “forsaken”, the fowls “abandoned their
run”, and so on. The last few of these move even further along the empathy
scale towards anthropomorphisation, with flames “like red sores licking”,
black “head-stocks” are “clumsy”, “the winding engine rapped out” “its
little spasms”, and the engine “whistled”. Note too that many of these align
with noisiness and danger.
There is similarly an up/down symbolic
orientation that is a correlate of height and largeness: the engine “came
clanking” towards our viewpoint “stumbling down”, the withered oak leaves
“dropped”, the smoke “sank”. Even the place name has a downward feel:
“Underwood”. Contrastively the woman is “walking up” and away from us, and
the miners are “turned up” by the machine. Almost all of the objects of
industry and nature in the first paragraph are definite, and the only
indefinite is “a woman”. When the miners appear they are instantly faded
from perspective, dispersed “single, trailing and in groups” and turned
“diverging” into “shadows”. The second major paragraph attaches human
characteristics that prefigure the corpse later in the story: “the ribbed
level”, the cottage that “squats”. A “large bony vine clutched” “as if to
claw down” the roof, and the chrysanthemums are “dishevelled” “like pink
cloths”. There are even formulations such as “the marshy strip that led”,
“the pit-bank loomed up”, “rose the tapering chimneys,” and “round the brick
yard grew … primroses”. These are all examples of
fictive motion (Talmy 2000) that are common metaphorical forms, but in this
passage they take on significant animation by being clustered together and
aligned with the industrial landscape. A passage such as this by another
writer might distinguish between industry and nature, but Lawrence has the
natural elements subsumed into the grimy industrial scene, and the words for
natural objects are almost always modified with negative lexis: “raw
afternoon”, “withered oak leaves”, “rough grass”, “dreary fields”, “tarred
fowl-house”, “ashy sides”, “stagnant light”, “raspberry-canes that rose like
whips”. The birds give up the trees for the man-made tarred fowl-house,
which even sounds foul. The pond is not a village green pool but a “reedy
pit-pond”. The apple-trees are “twiggy”, the cabbages are “ragged”, the
chrysanthemums are “dishevelled” “ragged wisps”.
The scene thus sets up a tone, mood and emotional disposition
in which objects are invested with symbolic value. The setting is largely
dimmed down (“flickered indistinctly”, “black waggons”, “the dusk”, “red
flames”, “stagnant light”, “black head-stocks”, “like shadows”, “a low
cottage”). This dimming and down-ness increases just before the main
character appears: “low cottage”, “three steps down”, “claw down”, “the
garden sloped down”, “half-way down the garden”. With her appearance there
is a contrastive raise in height (she “drew herself erect”, also with
agency) and brightness (“white apron”). The character-description that
follows aligns several attractors: height (“tall woman”), definiteness
(“definite black eyebrows”), and her agency and activeness increases clause
by clause: “She was”, her hair “was parted”, “she stood steadily watching”,
“she turned”. The double mention of “black eyebrows” and “black hair” ties
her to the industrial scene, but there is a final clear zooming in of
attention onto her face, and then onto her mouth, and then she speaks.
As readers, we are clearly being set up tonally for the story,
and focused towards the woman’s interior feelings. However, this move is
gradual, and the opening passage is entirely a slow, inexorable inward
movement towards the woman’s consciousness. Mid-way, we are outside her
perspective: from outward appearance, the boy’s trousers are “evidently cut
down from a man’s clothes” (Lawrence 1914: 283), but the woman who probably
did the alteration knows that already.
We don’t arrive in her mind until the very end of the extract:
looking up at the “engine-driver, a short man with round grey beard”, she
knows “It was her father” before we do. From then on, the first section of
the story largely consists of direct speech, where the characters tell us
what they think. Only at the end of this section do we again slip into her
consciousness: “Meantime her anger was tinged with fear” (Lawrence
1914: 292). Part II of the story increases our access to the woman’s
feelings, though initially with some distancing and vagueness: “Elizabeth’s
thoughts were busy elsewhere” (Lawrence 1914: 298). However, the end of the
story finds us thoroughly inside Elizabeth’s mind, as she contemplates her
husband’s dead body and feels the distance that has always been between
them.
Where the opening of the narrative is highly concrete in its
objects, and several of those items are heavy with symbolic value, the
closing of the narrative is relatively abstract:
Elizabeth looked up. The man’s mouth was fallen back, slightly open under the cover of the moustache. The eyes, half shut, did not show glazed in the obscurity. Life with its smoky burning gone from him, had left him apart and utterly alien to her. And she knew what a stranger he was to her. In her womb was ice of fear, because of this separate stranger with whom she had been living as one flesh. Was this what it all meant–utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of living? In dread she turned her face away. The fact was too deadly. There had been nothing between them, and yet they had come together, exchanging their nakedness repeatedly. Each time he had taken her, they had been two isolated beings, far apart as now. He was no more responsible than she. The child was like ice in her womb. For as she looked at the dead man, her mind, cold and detached, said clearly: “Who am I? What have I been doing? I have been fighting a husband who did not exist. He existed all the time. What wrong have I done? What was that I have been living with? There lies the reality, this man.”–And her soul died in her for fear: she knew she had never seen him, he had never seen her, they had met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met nor whom they fought. And now she saw, and turned silent in seeing. For she had been wrong. She had said he was something he was not; she had felt familiar with him. Whereas he was apart all the while, living as she never lived, feeling as she never felt.(Lawrence 1914: 307–8)
In the opening, perhaps only the word “disillusionment”
stands as an abstracted emotion; here at the close we find “the obscurity”,
“Life”, “apart”, “alien”, “intact separateness”, “deadly”, “wrong”,
“reality”, “soul”, “fear”, and so on. Across the whole narrative, the woman
first emerges from the industrial landscape and gradually takes active
control of her surroundings, but by the end her agency is turned inwards. By
the close of the story, in the extract above, she is presented with
reflective agency (“looked up”, “she knew”, “she saw”) against reified
abstract nouns. These nouns are reified by being grounded (“in the
obscurity”, “In dread”, “There lies the reality”, “in the dark”) or by
metaphorical shift towards objectification (“Life with its smoky burning”,
“ice of fear”). The story ends altogether with “fear and shame”, “grief and
pity”, “agony” and “horror”, and the final paragraph:
At last it was finished. They covered him with a sheet and left him lying, with his face bound. And she fastened the door of the little parlour, lest the children should see what was lying there. Then, with peace sunk heavy on her heart, she went about making tidy the kitchen. She knew she submitted to life, which was her immediate master. But from death, her ultimate master, she winced with fear and shame.(Lawrence 2014: 310)
There are several elements in the closing of the story that
point to shifts that are subtle: the presence of fire and ice as metaphors
for ambivalent feelings; the literal darkness and the figurative darkness of
unawareness; they had come together but as “two isolated beings”. The
movement across the entire story represents a gradual, subtle, ambivalent
alienation. This makes Nash’s interpretation not a “misreading” (as Barry (1985: 57) would have it), but
an incomplete account which he did not have the means to articulate in its
rich complexity. Barry suggests Nash misses the ambivalence in the story,
but in fact Nash notes in Elizabeth how the subtle passives, for example,
express in a “very telling way her division against herself, her
alternations of voluntary act and involuntary response” (Nash 1982: 112) – patterns of ambivalence that
are fully realised by the end of the narrative.
4.Towards a stylistics of subliminal effects
I suggest that a great deal of the story’s resonant power
derives from the subtle and incremental manner in which these ambivalences
are figured, occluded and backgrounded across a reader’s profiling of the
text. Nash’s initial identification of a sense of alienation in the story is
necessarily a recognition that alienation is an ambivalent emotional
response: the feeling requires a sense of what is lost as well as the fact
of the loss. While his contemporary stylistics could not quite capture the
subtlety in this, our current understanding of the field allows us a greater
degree of sensibility. The purpose of this sort of stylistic analysis is to
render explicit some of the most significant subliminal effects that a text
might offer to a reader. One objection to the notion of subliminality would
simply be to deny that those effects are real, and of course when dealing
with matters of subconscious effects, such a criticism is difficult to
refute absolutely. However, the stylistician can only note features which
are actually available for profiling in the first place – this is the only
location for textual objectivity. Further, though, the stylistician must
then offer an account that finds a sense of recognition in a reader, and an
analysis that chimes with a reader’s own intuitive senses.
Chrysanthemums themselves have multiple cultural meanings. In
Europe, they tend to be funeral flowers, though this exclusive symbolism
seems a late 20th century development: settlers to America and Australia
developed a tradition that regards chrysanthemums as Mother’s day flowers
(“mums”), or symbolising birth and joy. In Eastern tradition, the flowers
are meditative and symbolic of happiness. When Lawrence was writing, their
symbolic value was not entirely settled, and could be seen as having several
of these meanings. They bloom late in the summer, and turn brown swiftly
after picking. The odour of chrysanthemums is primarily defined by a
combination of eucalyptol, pinene and camphor (Surburg et al. 1993), a complex of fragrances
which people find it difficult to ascertain. Common responses appear to
discern very close associations on the borderline between both attractive
and repulsive senses of heady sweetness and decay (Sell 2015): the flowers themselves have an
inherently ambivalent scent. Perhaps it was this subconsciously resonant
intuitive sense that led Lawrence to place chrysanthemums so significantly
in the story, and perhaps it was this resonance in Nash’s sensibility that
pushed him towards a desire to be more precise about Lawrentian literary
style. Our task is to take up this ambition, with better tools and
understanding, towards a stylistics of subliminality.