devised to help itemise the main categories of the analysis can of course be modified
to accommodate different types of sociolinguistic code in other contexts of writing.
Whereas Welsh’s novel is principally ‘monolingual’ in the sense that it exploits soci-
olinguistic variation in
and around a single language, the grid can be extended to
account for literary code-switching which straddles different languages. And it can
also work for both poetry and drama, as well as for works of prose fiction.
There are a number of advantages to being rigorous in the identification of the
various styles employed in a literary text. The procedure
serves well to illustrate in
practice the concept of
polyphony
. Coined by the Russian theoretician Mikhail
Bakhtin, polyphony refers to a quality of ‘multi-voiced-ness’ which is displayed by
certain genres of discourse. These genres, known as ‘complex speech genres’, arise in
the artistic discourses of ‘more complex and comparatively
highly developed and
organised cultural communication’ (Bakhtin 1986: 62). Bakhtin adds that during the
process of their formation, complex speech genres ‘absorb and digest various primary
(simple) genres that have taken form in unmediated speech communion’ (62).
Literary discourse is a preeminent example of a complex speech genre and the prin-
ciple of polyphony is situated at its core. Irrespective of how the academic literary
institution views Irvine Welsh’s work, the stylistic activity suggested here does indeed
highlight this writer’s capacity to build a text through multiple and varied aspects of
language and style.
GRAMMAR AND GENRE: A SHORT STUDY IN IMAGISM
This unit experiments with grammatical patterns in poetry in order to help us think
about the processes involved in translating experiences and thoughts into the type
of text that is a poem. The activity proposed here draws principally on the concepts
introduced and developed across units A3 and B3, and it will also feed into unit D3,
an article by Ronald Carter which offers a detailed stylistic analysis of grammatical
patterns in modern poetry.
From experience to language
Below you will find part of a letter that was penned in 1911 by a well-known American
writer to his friend. It tells of an experience that befell
the writer while he was
resident in Europe. Read the letter through carefully:
For well over a year I have been trying to make a poem of a very beautiful thing that
befell me in the Paris Underground. I got out of a train at, I think, La Concorde, and
in the
jostle I saw a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and another,
and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful face. All that day I tried to
find words for what this made me feel.
That night, as I went home along the Rue
Raynouard I was still trying. I could get nothing but spots of colour. I remember
thinking that if I had been a painter I might have started a wholly new school of painting.
108
E X P L O R A T I O N
C3
This is the inspiration, the ‘felt experience’, that prompted
the writer eventually to
construct a poem. Before we move on to look at this poem, think of the sort of poem
that
you
might produce if you had had such an experience in the Underground. If
you were asked specifically to produce a short poem of only a few lines, what sort
of imaginative impulse would you draw upon? Here are some further questions that
might shape and influence your creative thinking:
(i) Would you, as the writer does in his letter, position yourself as a ‘voice’ in the
poem? (Notice the ‘I’ pronouns in the letter which locate the writer as the autho-
rial source for the text.)
(ii) Would you situate your poem in a specific time and place (as, again, the writer
does)?
(iii) What type of evaluative vocabulary would you use to capture the impact of this
experience on you?
(iv) Would you address your poem to an imagined reader, through markers of direct
address such as ‘you’? Or would you instead
prefer to depersonalise it, making
it stand as a more generalised statement for all readers?
(v) What sort of sound and rhythm structure (if any) would you use? Would you
try to adopt a formal metrical scheme or instead prefer to render it in ‘free verse’?
(See unit A4.)
Jot your poem into the box below (if this is your book, of course). Don’t
feel you
have to shape a complete and rounded piece of poetry – you may simply have some
ideas for fragments or particular constructions of language that might begin to
capture the experience. We shall return to this exercise shortly.
Probing grammatical patterns, back to front
Your next task is to look at the following text, which is the complete text of a very
short poem (including its title). The poem has been grammatically ‘scrambled’ in
that the
noun phrases
and
prepositional phrases
(see A3) which comprise it have been
jumbled up. Orthography (the capitals, punctuation and so on which normally signal
line endings and sentence boundaries)
has been stripped away, so that all that you
are left with is a collection of unordered phrases.
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111
11
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G R A M M A R A N D G E N R E : A S H O R T S T U D Y I N I M A G I S M
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