Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

The Secret Agent
(Kennedy 1982). In this
climactic scene of the story, Mrs Verloc, who has just discovered that her husband
has been involved in the death of her brother Stevie, kills a seated Mr Verloc with a
carving knife. What is of particular interest to Kennedy is the manner by which Mr
Verloc’s death is described. For example, in over four hundred words of narrative
description, it is striking that no mental processes at all are attributed to Mrs Verloc,
giving little if any indication of what this character feels, thinks or perceives.
Moreover, although one would anticipate that Mrs Verloc would feature in some
material processes – she is after all the ‘doer’ of the killing – very few of the processes
that are realised are Goal-directed. Instead, Goal-less patterns like the following are
common: ‘She started forward . . .’, ‘she had passed on towards the sofa . . .’. Mrs
Verloc is thus represented as a character whose actions are done seemingly without
reflection and without directly affecting the entities (including her husband) that
surround her.
The pattern of transitivity which defines Mr Verloc is rather different. He partic-
ipates in a few non-Goal directed material processes, such as ‘He waited . . .’ or ‘He
was lying on his back . . .’. In fact, some of these sequences, like ‘He stared at the
ceiling’, would be coded in the later version of the transitivity model (see A6) as
behavioural
processes insofar as they tend to straddle the interface between material
and mental processes. However, the overwhelming majority of the processes ascribed
to Verloc are full-blown mental processes which feature him in the role of Sensor
and which normally include a Phenomenon element. Patterns like the following are
the norm: ‘Mr Verloc heard the creaky plank in the floor’; ‘He saw partly on the
ceiling and partly on the wall the moving shadow of an arm’; ‘Mr Verloc [recog-
nised] the limb and the weapon.’. Thus, Verloc is portrayed as someone who is
thoroughly aware of everything that is going on around him, yet in spite of his mental
acuity, paradoxically, is unable to instigate the action necessary to prevent his own
death. By contrast, his wife is portrayed as an insensate being, and as a being whose
physical actions rarely influence any external objects in her environment.
The question which these two different characterisations-in-transitivity raise, then,
is how is it that Mr Verloc comes, as it were, to be dead? One technique Conrad uses
is simply to push the narrative forwards by using material processes with non-human
Actors. In this respect, the sequence ‘the carving knife had vanished’ is especially
revealing. A similar technique is the use of the passive (see A6) which allows the dele-
tion of any human Actor that might be responsible for a process: ‘The knife was
already planted in his breast’ is, again, a telling sequence. So, while Mrs Verloc may
in the strictest sense be the killer of Mr Verloc, that is not what the transitivity profile
of Conrad’s text asks us to see.
Conrad employs a further stylistic technique known as 
meronymic agency
, the 
use of which to some extent unites the interests of both Kennedy and Halliday. A
slightly misleading term in that ‘metonymy’ (A11) is the concept which informs 
it, meronymic agency involves the part ‘standing for’ the whole in such a way as to
place a human body part, rather than a whole person, in the role of an Actor, Sensor,
Sayer and so on. This technique stands in contrast to the default position, known as
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D E V E L O P M E N T

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holonymic agency
, where the participant role is occupied by a complete being.
Although not articulated explicitly in either paper, much of what Mrs Verloc does
and most of what Lok does is, in experiential terms, carried out through the inter-
cession of their body parts. For instance, it is Mrs Verloc’s hand, never ‘Mrs Verloc’,
which acts in key Goal-directed processes in the passage like ‘Her right hand skimmed
lightly the end of the table’ and ‘a clenched hand [was] holding a carving knife’. By
contrast, Lok’s nose and ears seem to do most of the work for him: ‘His nose smelled
this stuff ’, ‘His ears twitched’ and so on. Although these meronyms do different styl-
istic jobs in their respective narrative contexts, this type of agency is a recurring
feature in the transitivity profile of many types of prose fiction. The (literal) disem-
bodiment of a character often makes what they do, say or think appear involuntary,
cut adrift from conscious intervention. It can also serve to differentiate the character
experientially from other characters who are portrayed, say, in holonymic terms.
Importantly, the technique sometimes connects a style of writing with a particular
literary genre. This particular theme is resumed across the way in unit C6 where
some observations are made on how the transitivity model can be extended to account
for these broader dimensions of style. In the unit below, attention turns to the concept
of point of view, which is a facet of narrative characterisation which complements
well patterns of transitivity.
APPROACHES TO POINT OF VIEW
The first unit along this thread introduced some basic terms and categories for the
study of point of view in narrative. It was noted in that unit that a great deal has
been written on, and various models have been proposed for, the stylistic analysis 
of point of view in prose fiction. This unit provides an opportunity to review some
important developments in point of view studies as well as to ‘tidy up’ theoretically
some of the competing models of analysis.
Planes of point of view in narrative fiction
In an influential publication on prose composition, the narratologist Boris Uspensky
proposed a four-way model for the study of point of view in fiction (Uspensky 1973).
This model was later revised and refined by Roger Fowler (Fowler 1996 [1986]:
127–47) so it is probably best to refer to this composite framework of analysis as the
‘Fowler-Uspensky model’. The four components identified by the Fowler-Uspensky
model of point of view are as follows:
(i) point of view on the