Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

The Ambassadors
, Henry James 2001 [1903])
f ) We were in a garden in Mons. Young Buckley came in with his patrol from
across the river. The first German I saw climbed over up the garden wall. We
waited till he got one leg over and then potted him [. . .] Then three more came
over further down the wall. We shot them. They all came just like that.
(from a story in 
In Our Time
, Ernest Hemingway 1925)
g) Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation
from one sex to the other takes place, and it is only the clothes that keep the male
or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it 
is above.
(
Orlando
, Virginia Woolf 1998 [1928])
Summary
I hope your analysis of the sample passages above will have underscored the stylistic
significance of modal shading as a marker not only of point of view but of narrative
style more generally. As with all the units in this Exploration section, I do not propose
to provide a circumscribed set of ‘answers’, and in any case my own interpretation
counts as just one of many possible interpretations that can be systematically reached
on the basis of a stylistic analysis. I will however footnote briefly one of the passages,
the Toni Morrison excerpt c), because of the particularly interesting issues it raises.
On the grounds that it is devoid of any modality at all, my analysis suggests that
this passage embodies neutral shading. Whereas its narrative mode is third person,
its point of view is aligned, significantly, with the reflector of fiction. That is to say,
in spite of the third-person framework, the narrative camera angle assumes the
vantage point of a particular character, here Sethe, and it is her experience of events
which is recorded and relayed. (Notice how this is established by the word ‘felt’, the
one verb of perception in the passage.) Interestingly, this generally ‘flat’ modal frame-
work tends in this discourse context to make the central character seem numb, and
very much acquiescent to the advances of Paul D. We are given no information as
to whether she welcomes or is offended by his advances, the sort of information that
would be communicated precisely by a positively shaded modality. Prior to this point
in the novel, we have learned of Sethe’s experience of having to have sex with a stone-
mason simply to get an engraving on a dead child’s headstone, and this and other
traumatic events may have rendered her emotionally dead, and unable or unwilling
11
111
11
111
E X P L O R I N G P O I N T O F V I E W I N N A R R A T I V E F I C T I O N
129

---

to react to the events around her. This is not to argue, though, that the modality of
the novel as a whole is neutrally shaded nor indeed that this character’s perceptions
of the world are always relayed in this way. It is very much in the idiom of the ‘post-
modern’ novel, of which 
Beloved
is a preeminent example, that it tangles up different
domains of discourse and allows its characters to migrate between different text
worlds (McHale 1987). To my mind, variable narrative focalisation is just one of the
reflexes of the post-modernist ‘style’, such as it is, where the oscillations in point of
view give rise to many alternating viewing positions and modalities.
Looking at how patterns in point of view mark out not just the postmodern novel
but other genres of narrative fiction would make for a useful future study. Another
would be to see if additional modal frameworks could be developed, beyond the three
proposed in this unit, which could more subtly delineate types of writing style. Some
more general issues to do with narrative viewpoint are raised in Mick Short’s reading,
D5, which ‘doubles up’ as a useful reading for this thread.
A WORKSHOP ON SPEECH AND THOUGHT
PRESENTATION
This workshop programme is designed to encourage you to use your stylistic analyses
in tandem with your affective responses to literary texts and to enable you to chal-
lenge and (re)evaluate some of the literary critical commentaries that have been
written on the texts you are studying. Before moving onto the more practical aspects
of the programme, it is worth introducing here the short passage that will form 
the nucleus of the workshop activity. It is taken from American writer Ernest
Hemingway’s short novel (or novella) 
The Old Man and the Sea
(see also unit B1).
The intention will ultimately be to place this passage against a series of literary-
critical comments about the novella and then to use an analysis of speech and thought
presentation as a way of reappraising these critical comments and of reaching more
systematic interpretations about Hemingway’s narrative technique.
The passage itself is taken from the lengthy central section of the story which
covers the time the old man spends at sea during his struggle with the huge marlin
that he has hooked. This particular episode occurs early in the morning of the second
day of his battle with the fish (thus explaining the references in the text to ‘the line’
slanting into the water). He is confronted with two practical problems: eating the
small tuna that he caught the day before and solving the problem of his cramped left
hand. The passage is quite neatly rounded in that it stretches from the preparatory
stages to the completion of the old man’s meal. To facilitate subsequent referencing
to the passage, lines have been numbered and paragraph boundaries have been
double-spaced. Read the passage now. Don’t worry about locating any stylistic
features in the passage at this stage and don’t feel you that are being asked to make
any kind of interpretative judgment about the text.
130
E X P L O R A T I O N
C8
✪