Texture and Identification - TerpConnect



Peter Stockwell

TEXTURE AND IDENTIFICATION

It is clear that there is an increasing divergence between the concerns and discourse of professional readers of literature and the experience engaged in by natural readers. In particular, natural readers foreground emotional and motivational aspects of literary works, areas which are neglected or poorly handled in the academy. This paper explores the emotionally affecting dimension of how readers identify with literary works. Drawing on cognitive poetic developments within stylistics including text world theory, a method is proposed that equates empathetic identification with spatial conceptualisation and distance. A short analysis of a very popular poem illustrates how the method can gauge differences between artificial and natural reading.

Keywords: texture, text-worlds, identification, empathy, cognitive poetics, stylistics, rhetoric, Kipling.

If there is a canon of literary texts that move in and out of preference over time, there is also a canon of acceptable critical discussion that usually accompanies it. The theoretical awareness of critical methodology and theory constitutes a field in itself, of course, and critical theory has become as much the defining label of the individual literary scholar as the period of literary history to which she is most closely attached. The vast majority of literary scholarship today remains historical and archaeological in practice, with academics identifying themselves either as card-carrying new historicists, feminists, or ecocritics, or at least as fellow-travellers on a road defined by critical theory. Almost all literary criticism that is not concerned with textual production is focused on a meta-critical issue, with the literary work (merely) as an occasion for the discussion. Our discourse circles around our own technical register, which would not be a problem if it articulated reading experiences other than professional academicised ones. Meanwhile, this artificial reading in the academy as a whole drifts further away from the natural readings engaged in by almost everyone else.

In short, there is very much a canon of acceptable ‘literary talk’. It is established and fixed in the main journals in our field; it forms the specified medium of expression in the assessments we require of our students; it delineates the limits of what we should converse about in seminars, and what we ought to regard as inadmissible in talking about books. Unfortunately, it no longer bears any resemblance to the discourse on literature outside our walls. Worse, it does not even concern itself with that everyday activity. And worst of all, it sees itself as a professional discourse that has little to do with the untrained folk reading of lay people.

How do people who aren’t us talk about literature? You don’t have to travel far to hear its accents. In bookshops and bus-stations, in reading groups and at parties, at the next table in the restaurant and the seat behind you on the train, people are talking about characters as if they were real acquaintances; people are telling their friends how much they were moved by a book, or saw something of their own perspective in it, or remembered a phrase or a passage that seemed apt in a completely decontextualised part of their lives – they don’t worry about extracting a quotation and altering its original meaning by writing it in a birthday card, or reading it at a wedding, or sending it with flowers. They talk about the smart storyline, the great twist, the quirky view; how it was better than the film; how Mr So-and-so was an absolute bastard, and how they sympathised with the heroine, and just why on earth did she go back to him?

In other words, natural readers are primarily concerned with character, and empathy, and identification, and recognition, and motivation, and story, and coherence, and feeling, and texture, and mood, and sensation, and emotion. They read for the pleasure of it, and because they feel better for it, for engagement or escape, to illuminate and enhance the day. Almost all of these things are inadmissible in professional discourse, or are articulated at a meta-theoretical level that places them at several removes from the natural experience. Natural readings are hopelessly subjective, or presented as case-studies in subjectivity, and literary scholarship continues its tangential trajectory away from the world it long ago left behind.

If this sounds desperately disparaging, it is meant to be. When I entered the academic cloister twenty years ago, I became increasingly dismayed by what passed for literary critical discourse. It was largely what drew me to the discipline of stylistics, as a means of engaging with the texture of the text, drawing on advances from other disciplines, and sharpening my thinking through analyses that were rigorous, systematic and therefore available for others to understand or challenge. It increased my impatience with impressionistic and intuitive literary criticism, or discourse about literature that was sometimes poetic and often obscure but was ultimately undisciplined and ignorant.

Stylistics has had its problems too, of course. Many of us for years have complained that literary critics talk about language without really understanding anything about linguistics, but it is also true that many linguists need a sharper sense of critical theory and the philosophy of language. (A recent book (Robson and Stockwell, 2005) was designed to address this precise deficiency). Stylistics has also had a strong formalist tendency, which, even though overstated by its detractors, has nevertheless served to marginalise it in literature departments. However, unlike much literary critical discourse, stylistics is a progressive discipline in the sense that new frameworks and approaches are generally seen as improvements on older perspectives. Stylistics has drawn in pragmatic, sociolinguistic and other contextualising dimensions in order to enrich the text-linguistic analysis of literary works (see, among many others, the Text to Context series, Verdonk, 1993; Verdonk and Weber, 1995; Culpeper, Short and Verdonk, 1998).

It is perhaps ironic, given this progressive scientific impulse, that stylistics is currently in the process of rediscovering major concerns of ancient Greek rhetoric as a means of developing its toolkit for literary exploration. Aristotle’s division of the rhetorical field into ethos, logos and pathos gave equal emphasis to the emotional dimension of talk alongside the rationality of the content and the ethical standing and believability of the speaker (Aristotle, 1995). The Roman rhetorician Cicero maintains this balance, claiming that spoken discourse ought to be concerned with moving the audience, as well as teaching and pleasing them. As both Wales (2001) and Cockcroft (2002) point out, in the Renaissance the reformist French rhetorician Peter Ramus argued for a new conceptualisation of the ‘canons’ of rhetoric, into elocutio (style), memoria (memory), and pronuntiatio (delivery). He further argued that inventio (the invention of ideas) and dispositio (the arrangement of ideas), though crucial to discourse, were not rhetorical in nature. Within elocutio, Ramus sub-divides rhetorical aims into the low style of teaching, the middle style of persuading, and the high style of entertaining.

In my very crude sketch of rhetorical history here, the essential development to notice is the loss of the emotional dimension into an implicit sense of discoursal affect. Emotion becomes an ornament to meaning, and the stylistics of the last century – the descendant of elocutio – has focused very successfully on meaningfulness and the craftedness of texts, while avoiding much exploration of the emotional impact of literary works. While stylistics aspired to be the best tool for literary analysis, its lack of a framework for discussing aesthetics rendered it unattractive to many literary scholars. However, stylistics is currently in the process of continuing its evolution by encompassing insights from psychology and cognitive science, in the form of a cognitive poetics (see Stockwell, 2002; Semino and Culpeper, 2002; Gavins and Steen, 2003). The current challenge is to follow the polemic arguing for an affective stylistics (Oatley, 2003, Burke, 2005, Miall, 2005) with some practical methods for doing it. This paper presents a step in this direction.

In order to begin to explore textual emotional impact, and rather than engage in an artificial test situation under lab conditions, I need a literary work which is demonstrably identified by natural readers as an important and involving text. In 1995, the BBC programme The Bookworm held a vote in Britain to discover ‘the nation’s favourite poem’ (an popular anthology was published as Jones, 1996). The runaway winner, polling more than double the votes of the second placed poem, Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott, was this:

If

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master,

If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son.

Rudyard Kipling

Published in the collection Rewards and Fairies in 1909, the poem seems to be based on the British administrator in South Africa, Dr Leander Starr Jameson, who led a force of 600 men against the Boers in 1896 aiming to overthrow the government. Jameson was gaoled first by the Boer government and then sentenced in Britain to 15 months in prison. The Jameson raid is largely credited as a major cause of the second Boer War, during which the British developed a range of atrocities including scorched earth tactics and the innovative use of ‘concentration camps’.

The poem, then, is viewed from the academic perspective of literary history as an expression of imperial, nationalistic Britishness, extremely jingoistic (the coinage of this term is contemporaneous with the poem), and with a patriarchal twist. Christopher Hitchens (2002), for example, notes: ‘When he was alive many critics thought Kipling to be a bad writer, and also a bullying and jingoistic one, and many readers today agree’. Phillip Mallet (2003) quotes a contemporary view of Kipling as ‘the voice of the hooligan’: ‘The poet most synonymous with, and if some were to be believed responsible for, the war was Rudyard Kipling. To his many detractors he was the Bard of Bloodshed, an apologist for aggressive Imperialism. They could point to “If”, inspired by Jameson and Rhodes, or the Barrack Room Ballads’ hooliganism in the name of Queen and country...’ He adds a backhanded compliment: ‘Kipling’s talent lay in understanding public sentiments and expressing them in verse designed for the music hall’. The poem often appears in school-based anthologies and teachers’ resources, but is largely seen in higher education as sentimental, corny and trite. Greeting the news that this was the nation’s favourite poem, there was a broad academic sense of dismay and scorn in the letters pages of liberal British newspapers such as The Guardian and The Times Higher Education Supplement at the poverty of critical skills in the general populace.

However, this is obviously a poem that large numbers of non-academics regard fondly and would like to identify with in sympathetic terms. For example, Alan Chapman, a business guru with a consultancy company based in Leicester, describes the poem as ‘inspirational, motivational, and a set of rules for “grown-up” living. Kipling’s “If” contains mottos and maxims for life, and the poem is also a blueprint for personal integrity, behaviour and self-development. “If” is perhaps even more relevant today than when Kipling wrote it, as an ethos and a personal philosophy... The beauty and elegance of “If” contrasts starkly with Rudyard Kipling’s largely tragic and unhappy life’ (Chapman, 2005).

In a similar vein, the corporate team building specialists Progressive Resources Ltd quote the poem in full alongside a few lines by that other great imperialist, Theodore Roosevelt, neatly skewering the activities of critics:

‘It’s not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or when the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worth cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.’ (Theodore Roosevelt).

The relevance of these words to team building: when trying to improve a situation at work people are often confronted by critics... These very powerful words ... can be a comfort in these situations.

(Progressive Resources Ltd, 2005)

Likewise, Sahar Huneidi (2004), writing in Psychic and Spirit magazine, directly challenges the prevailing academic view: ‘Kipling is often seen as the archetype of Imperial poets, but he was no jingoist, but rather a man who could put complex ideas in a way that everyone could understand them, “If” is one of the best examples of this talent.’ There are many similar positive comments. The Cancer Research UK website includes a testimonial from Paul Workman: ‘While undergoing MRI scans I recite to myself “If” - by Rudyard Kipling. It gives a sense of purpose, and takes my mind off what is going on’ (Cancer Research, 2005). The poem is often quoted in various inspirational materials, such as greetings cards, and the two lines on ‘Triumph and Disaster’ appear over the players’ entrance to the centre court at Wimbledon.

How do we systematically begin to address such strongly-held identifications? One obvious starting point is to draw on the cognitive linguistic work that has been done on the metaphorical forms which are conventionally used to express emotion (see, among a large body of work, Kövecses, 1986, 1988, 1990, 2000; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff and Turner, 1989; and Turner, 1987). A very strong conceptual metaphor that underlies the articulation of emotion in many languages is emotion is motion through space. Typical forms of expression would include:

‘I can’t get through this’

‘We’re much closer these days’

‘I just feel so distant from her’

‘She’s in a bad place right now’

‘He’s in a depression’

‘We can get him out of it’

‘I felt swept off my feet’

‘It was a whirlwind romance’

‘That book really moved me’

and so on. It is clear that emotion is often figured spatially, and articulated in terms of the conceptualisation of distance. Gibbs (2002) sees these as part of the generic-level metaphor emotion is force (‘gripped by emotion’, ‘driven by fear’, ‘it was a terrible blow’), but the outcome is the same in terms of a sense of physical closeness and distance being altered by emotional states.

Given these observations, we need an analytical means of talking about textual and emotional distance, such as that provided by possible worlds theory (Ryan, 1991; Ronen, 1994; Semino, 1997) and text-world theory (Werth, 1999; Emmott, 1997; Gavins, 2005). These world theories in general posit a conceptual space that constitutes the actual world, and a projected imagined space that represents an alternate world. The alternate world can be a displacement (past, future or geographically elsewhere), a fantasy or fiction, a desired or feared state, or a set of circumstances that is related to the actual world either conditionally, modally or negatively in some way. The worlds that are mentally constructed by texts, for example, are perceived as having a close or remote distance from the actual discourse world of the authoring/reading participants. Text-world theory, specifically, sets out the relationship between the discourse world and the projected text-world based on text-linguistic features.

Worlds theories taken together give us a toolkit for investigating emotional distance. Imagined worlds are rich worlds, fleshed out by the reader drawing in schematic knowledge from his own experience; text-worlds thus have a texture that is richer than the underdetermination offered by a mere semantic analysis of the text. Other key concepts such as trans-world identity will be useful for pinpointing the elements in the text-world that are closely mapped onto elements in the discourse world. For example, ‘Nottingham’ in the text-world of the tale of Robin Hood has a counterpart ‘Nottingham’ in the discourse world outside my window, and though they share similarities that allow me to enrich the text-world entity, they also feature differences that constitute an inaccessibility of conceptual distance. Nottingham Castle in the myth is a Disneyesque fortress of turrets and crenellations, where the real Nottingham Castle is a rather disappointing eighteenth century building with an art gallery and nice tea room.

Text-worlds, and sub-worlds that they may contain, often have such counterparts – these are the basis of measures of identification between a reader and the literary work. ‘Nottingham’ is clearly a counterpart of Nottingham. But ‘Utopia’, or ‘Middle-Earth’, or ‘Narnia’, or ‘Airstrip One’ are also more distant counterparts of our discourse world. Where a text forges a close identification of a text-world counterpart with a discourse-world participant, the potential for empathetic engagement and strong emotion (which might include revulsion) is generated.

Even within a text-world and its sub-worlds, it is useful to have a notion of enactors (Emmott, 1997): different versions of the same character. For example, the character of David Copperfield is constituted by several different enactors (the young boy and the older narrator looking back on his own youthful perception), which the reader has to keep track of and monitor. Furthermore, the complexity of distances across Dickens’ novel generate different emotional identifications and empathies in relation to those enacted versions.

Sub-worlds, in text-world theory, consist of the same world-building elements (time, location, characters and objects) and function-advancing propositions as the text-world level. Sub-worlds are conceptual spaces triggered by temporal alternations (such as flashbacks), spatial alternations, metaphors (which are literal in the sub-world but metaphorical in the text-world), negatives (positive in the sub-world and negated in the text-world), and modalised propositions (such as speculation, conditionals, imagined alternatives, obligation, desire and emotion). Clearly, ‘If’ is dominated by this final category. We can say that sub-worlds create distance from ‘you’ in the discourse world, but the dense sub-world conditionals of the poem also serve to create lots of opportunities for counterpart identification. ‘If’ consists almost entirely of modal sub-worlds.

The poem begins by creating, very rapidly, a text-world consisting of a speaker and an addressee ‘you’ – which is very naturally identified as a counterpart of the reader, You, in the discourse world. However, the poem leaves this text-world almost immediately, to enter a conditional modal sub-world, in which you ‘can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.’ In fact, if we want a closer analysis, some readers might even make a rapid double conceptual jump in this line where the modal auxiliary ‘can’ creates a further embedded sub-world, and the comparator ‘when’ creates a parallel temporal sub-world. If we take this more delicate analysis, we can see that almost the whole poem consists of sub-world texturing of the form: ‘If you can [sub-world 1] when/or [sub-world 2]’.

The resolution of the conditional is resisted across seventeen primary sub-worlds, some of which contain additional secondary complications, consequences and elaborations. For example, the first stanza contains five primary sub-world conditionals: keeping your head, trusting yourself, waiting, being lied to, and being hated. Even within this density of situations, there are further embedded sub-world circumstances: a co-ordinate world when all men doubt you; a negated sub-world in which you are tired by waiting; a metaphorical sub-world in which you are a dealer of the cards or business of lies; and a co-ordinate and doubly negated final world in which you simultaneously don’t look good and don’t talk. Other stanzas – such as the third – only contain two primary sub-worlds (the gambling loss and the forcing of your stamina), but have elaborated function-advancing propositions that develop your characterisation through mini-narratives. This stanza in particular exploits the breathlessness of the additive syntax to force you to ‘hold on’ to your breath in order to be able to reach and hoarsely whisper out the final direct speech, ‘Hold on!’ A physical identification is being made between the material effort of Your reading with the grim mental determination of Your counterpart ‘you’ in the sub-worlds.

The poem sets out a series of seventeen enactors of ‘you’. These are literally character-building, and the character that they build is a multi-faceted and admirable ‘you’ addressee in the initial text-world. Your readerly attention is focused on these qualities of the various enactors, of course, partly because the detail and conditional syntax holds Your attention, but also because the sub-worlds are very much richer than the initial text-world, which still only contains a vague speaker and ‘you’ the addressee. Through the poem, ‘you’ are tested in the worlds of many different social and moral circumstances, involving both decisive material action and calm mental deliberation. In each case, other participants at the various sub-world levels are accumulating attributes diametrically opposite to yours, and are described as ‘knaves’, ‘fools’, and ‘foes’; even your ‘loving friends’ are out to hurt you, and the poem repeatedly sets ‘you’ up against ‘all men’.

In the course of these sub-world dependencies, the constant identification of You and ‘you’ is hard to resist, either because the qualities being placed conditionally on ‘you’ are attractive to You, or because You as a reader are so anxious to resolve the conditional ‘If....., then...’ Either way, when the conditional resolution finally comes in the last two lines, there is a huge sense of completion:

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son.

With ‘Yours’, you are returned to the text-world level, where it suddenly becomes apparent that the speaker is your father-figure. In contrast to ‘all men’ who are knaves and fools, you are now a ‘Man’, and the only other capitalised entities Triumph and Disaster are resolved and defeated by your ‘Will’. As personification metaphors, ‘Triumph’ and ‘Disaster’ are now even more remote from you, buried at several sub-world levels deep from your current text-world. The completion of the conditional (‘Yours is the Earth’) sets a true simple present tense against the modalised present of the seventeen sub-worlds. The final clause takes advantage of the grammatical possibilities of conditionality to collapse what appears to be a future aspect (‘you’ll’) with a reference to the present situation, as long as you have identified yourself with all the testing circumstances of the conditional sub-worlds.

Reading the poem, then, is both a test (of identification) and an ordeal (of syntax). In the course of reading, ‘you’ is enriched by a series of attributes in conditional form. If You map Yourself closely onto Your counterpart ‘you’, then these attributes become Your qualities too. It is the degree to which You perform the trans-world mapping from text-world to discourse-world which determines how far You identify with the sentiments of the poem or not. Those readers who hold the poem in high esteem clearly make a strong identification between themselves and the ‘you’ of the text-world level. For these readers, the acceptance of attributes and the identification of ‘you’ and You is full, rich and closely enacted.

By contrast, those (mainly academic) readers who find the poem repellent or uncomfortable are making no such strong identification. For them, the ‘you’ of the text-world level is not closely mapped as a counterpart of You the reader in the discourse-world. The identification is not performed. Indeed, we could model this reading as a further distancing, by which the text-world level ‘you’ remains a projected dramatic character, separate from You in the discourse-world. Even more complicatedly, a resistant reader trying to imagine the emotional impact of the text on an acceptant reader (such as I am trying to do here) must place a further projected text-world between their discourse-world and the ‘you’-father-figure world – a text-world which includes the acceptant reader as a participant in the father-figure’s (and ‘Kipling’s’) ideology.

This has been a short and illustrative sketch, and of course a full stylistic analysis would combine the sort of cognitive poetic discussion here with more of the textual detail, in order to arrive at a rich discussion of texture. The proper exploration of emotion in literary work is not a matter of throwing out stylistic insights into meaningfulness, of course. A large part of the emotional impact of Kipling’s poem lies in the content of its ideology (logos and ethos need to remain alongside pathos).

Stylistics has always been a practical business, in every sense, and it is also important as a practical matter to break the domain of emotion down into features that can be handled. Empathy, coherence, satisfaction, characterisation, motivation, mood and sensation, for example, are aspects for further work. I do not claim that the issue of identification has been entirely resolved by my approach here, but it is at least important to make a start, and I do think that the methodology proposed is the right one, even if the method itself is yet to be enriched. I am happy for both the principles and the tools to be challenged and refined, and hope that in making my method transparent I have allowed this to happen. There is much at stake in the aspirations of a stylistics informed by cognitive poetics. The objective, bluntly, is to do literary criticism properly, and develop a discourse of literature that is disciplined and rigorous while remaining in contact with the naturalness of reading.

References

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Verdonk, Peter and Weber, Jean-Jacques (eds), Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context. London: Routledge, 1995.

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Peter Stockwell is Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Nottingham. His recent publications include Language in Theory (with Mark Robson), Cognitive Poetics, Sociolinguistics, The Poetics of Science Fiction, and Contextualised Stylistics (edited with Michael Burke and Tony Bex). He is currently working on a book on surrealist writing, a book on texture, a reader in stylistics (with Ron Carter), and a companion to sociolinguistics (with Carmen Llamas and Louise Mullany). He edits the Routledge English Language Introductions series.

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