Classic Literary English model - need to evolve?

essay by cheryl yow
English Language, Past, Present and Future.

William Shakespeare

Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs,

Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes,

Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers' tears.
What is it else? A madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.

-- William Shakespeare
 


 

Sonnet LVII

Being your slave, what should I do but tend

Upon the hours and times of your desire?

I have no precious time at all to spend,

Nor services to do, till you require.

Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour

Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour

When you have bid your servant once adieu;
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought

Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,

But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought

Save, where you are how happy you make those.

So true a fool is love that in your will,

Though you do any thing, he thinks no ill.

-- William Shakespeare

Love Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

-- William Shakespeare

I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud
by William Wordsworth


I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling leaves in glee;
A poet could not be but gay,
In such a jocund company!
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.





Question:
‘ It is not uncommon to find established writers of English
with a penchant for making their characters speak in a
peculiar and unfamiliar accents, dialects and idioms.’
With this observation in mind, discuss why and how some
writers of literary English purposefully break conventional
ways of writing.



Some writers argue that literary language does not
represent the best and most prestigious form of English.
The formalists of literary English focus on different
specialized uses of English language working together to
create an ideal self-contained work of art with rigid fixed
meaning. This belief that a work of language is complete in
itself with a definite meaning waiting to be discovered;
neglecting the social/historical context in which it is
written or the writer’s life, or reader’s experience so that
they all became irrelevant has been the dominant British-US
approach to literary criticism. However, some
established writers of literary English choose to
break conventional rules of literary writing making
their characters speak in a strange and unfamiliar
accents, dialects and idioms in depicting diversity
in their cultural expressions. They want to make a
 point about the validity of different varieties in
literary English. We shall see what are the characteristics
of formal literary English and how they can be manipulated
by foregrounding to create interesting effects; and how some
writers deliberately break conventions by their different
techniques of applying the vernacular language in order to
establish the authenticity of the characters along with the
world they live in.


The notion that literary language is a special quality
different from everyday language is because it
highlights/foregrounds some properties of the language.
Stylistics, an aspect of linguistic analysis identifies
specific artistic language features found in written
texts of literary English. The foregrounding concept of
literary English: rhythms, alliteration, sounds,
grammar, imagery and meaning gives prominence
to the inherent characteristics of English by
selective arrangement and carefully encapsulate it
resulting in the potency of its meaning. Readers
are amazed, enlightened into appreciating a crisp
refreshing consciousness and sensation through
foregrounding.




Foregrounding qualities such as regular patterns of rhythm,
rhyme and repetition are used in poetry in order to appeal
to the senses. For example, in
William Blake poem, The Tyger:

Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Here we can see the rhyme - a phonetic echo as in
bright/night, not only does it rhyme in sound but also in
‘eye rhyme’ (like bough/cough based on sight). The rhythm
here is created by the four stressed syllables alternating
with unstressed syllables in every line associated with
traditional nursery rhyme: Jack and Jill went up the hill.
By spicing this rhythm with plosives /d/,/t/,/p/, it
imitates the animal’s foot striking the ground, creating
an obvious beat, evoking the sounds of the powerful tread
of a dangerous animal.




However, some writers in foregrounding or highlighting
certain aspect of their writings do intentionally break,
manipulate or play with rules. Rules governing the sounds,
the word structures and grammar can be manipulated
individually or in combination. For instance, Dickens
removes the main verbs from each clause to focus on the
accumulation of the fog and using present tense he
accentuates the actual scene and the effect that there was
no escape from the stifling damp and cold:

‘Fog everywhere… Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the
Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of
collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards,
….fog drooping……. Fog in the eyes and throats…….’.
(Dickens (1850) 1948, p.1)




In narrative writing, authors need to make decisions about
how they are going to represent natural speech in their
character’s dialogues to draw us into the reality of the
stories. Formal writers give careful attentions to the kind
of details they want to foreground in their plots, they
tidied up written dialogues usually conforming to certain
conventions. These dialogues differ from ‘real’,
spontaneous speech; they lack interruptions, hesitations
or overlaps in a normal conversations and they can be
‘framed’ for aesthetic reasons.




By contrast, some writers in breaking convention, do not
tidied up/framed written speech. Instead, some use
non-sequitters, inconsistencies as in direct ordinary
conversations. For instance, Jean Rhys of ‘Wide Sargasso
Sea’ who uses a third person narrator, telling the story
through emotions and reactions of various characters;
reflecting the natural thought processes ‘stream of
consciousness’ of particular characters. Differences of
vocabulary and syntax are used in mirroring the authentic
characters. This use of English to represent a stream of
thoughts which look strange in written English, is a
challenge as the readers are expected to be ‘shocked’ out
of feeling comfortable with the language.




There has also been a considerable increase of writers
breaking conventions by using vernacular languages which
look strangely odd in the context of established literary
conventions. Writers use non-standard varieties to construct
a character or use eye-dialect to mark a character in order
to show the kind of person who would use non-standard
English with all the social connotations it conveys. An
‘eye-dialect’ (word is written as non-standard with its
pronunciation mirroring the spoken variety) for a character,
for example, what as in ‘wot’ as a symbolic representation
of non-standard.




In Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Hoban even invented a vernacular
variety as part of a futuristic world to symbolise iconically
the degeneration of a future post holocaust society ; his
invented degenerated version of English is frighteningly
metamorphosed: its vocabulary, its spelling, its grammar and
its meaning:
‘Wunnering who ben the las to look at Greanvine befor me…
Did it come from a Punch mans fit up or Eusa show mans?’
( Hoban, 1982, p.163)




Writers’ purpose in choosing vernacular English also reflect
the society within according to their own perspective, values
and motives. Language is now seen as being shaped by its
context both linguistic and socio-political. Authors are
influenced by their cultures, upbringing (education, family,
wealth) and their social context (country, period, history).
Unlike the traditional approach of a rigid self-contained
meaning, the ‘meaning’ of any text is a kind of negotiation
between producers and receivers both are conditioned by
their own cultural positioning. The choices and reasons
writers make reflect not only upon these individual writers
and their work but also on the societies from which they
emerged. Irish poet Seamus Heaney in ‘Belfast’ best expresses
this sentiment:
‘I speak and write in English, but do not altogether
share the preoccupations and perspectives of an
Englishman….’
(Maybin & Mercer, p.275)
The sensibility of one’s mind is in a cast of the spirit
that comes from belonging to a place, an ancestry,
a history and a culture.




In Carribean, postcolonial writers like Brathwaite try to
break away from the English classic pentameter to get a
rhythm that intimately reflects their natural environmental
experience. Brathwaite claims that the pentameter
‘carries with it a kind of experience which is not the
experience of a hurricane.
The hurricane does not roar in pentameter’.
(Maybin & Mercer, p. 268/9). It is in the nation
language, a vernacular variety, influenced by the African
model and Caribbean heritage that finally they are able to
dismiss the pentameter. The nation language is English in
lexicon but not English in terms of its syntax, timbre or
rhythm, it has its own sound explosion. Using an ancient
form the calypso which employs dactyls they break down the
pentameter. Iambic Pentameter: To be or not to be, that is
the question.Kaiso (calypso):
The stone had skidded arc’d
and bloomed into islands
Cuba San Domingo
Jamaica Puerto Rico
(Maybin & Mercer, p. 271)
Here, there is a difference in the stress pattern and
the intonation that echo the African/Carribean
temperaments.




In speech and characterization writers use different
deliveries to represent vernacular languages and regional
accents. The authors’ purposes in plot and character
development often reflects their own values and attitudes.
In Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Dicken made Oliver uses flawless
Standard English to convey his own attitude of the
character; that despite Oliver’s poverty, Dicken wanted to
highlight Oliver innate incorruptible goodness and
respectability. By contrast, in Chandler’s The Big Sleep,
vernacular is being used to authenticate the character, an
American private eye, Marlowe and his world, Chandler
displays vernacular by not modify any spelling instead uses
vocabulary and snappy sentences:
‘I don’t know, pal. I’m dropping down to look see.
Want to go along?’
‘Yes’
‘Snap it up,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in my hutch.’
(Chandler, 1948, p.47)




Achebe a novelist in Nigeria, in his vernacular language,
he chooses to use Igbo idioms with formal standard English
in the ‘Arrow of God’:
‘I shall slap okro seeds out of your mouth.’
‘He is as tall as an iroko tree and
his sun is white like the sun,’
(Maybin & Mercer, p. 302)
He also alters the grammar rules- different form of negation
- to depict the natural conversation of pidgin English of
the policemen: ‘ We no go return back’ he went on further
to change the pronunciation in written form:
‘Give me tat ting’
‘All dis waka wey we waka come here no fit for nating.’
in written form. Writing in non-standard variety also
reflect different kinds of social relations as in the
special bond between the policemen speaking in casual
pidgin English.In recreating dialogue, the characters
of the novels of Achebe for most part are not thinking
or speaking in English. The English evolved by Achebe to
represent the material sounds of language in a postcolonial
setting. Acebe’s novels while resistant to certain aspect
of English usage skilfully presents the subtlety, intimacy
and ritualistic of the English language by adoption of
English englishes.




Naipaul, an Indian writer, uses a variety of methods:
Standard English to substitute Hindi speech or English
dialect forms reflecting the actual spoken language by
using grammatical variation from standard English. In
Naipual’s A house for Mr Biswas, the photographer of mixed
Chinese, Negro and Europeanblood use the grammatical
variation in the English dialect forms:
‘Is a nice little touch. Flowers on the ground.’,
‘Next to mother, young boy and young girl.
Next to big son, smaller son’.
(Naipaul, 1992, p.33-4)




The use of non-standard variety can reveal the thoughts and
the kind of person that character is. Writers wanted to
give regional authenticity to their characters. In Waving,
Mcllvanney, the Scots writer’s character of Duncan uses
a noted vernacular speech to accentuate his naivety. Richard
Crompton, another writer uses non-standard speech for William
in her ‘William’ novels. ‘Gotter bit of money this mornin’
(Crompton, 1972, p.12) to convey William as a nonconformist
rascal contrasting him with his family. Vernacular speech
can be associated with earthiness, naturalness, roughness
or the uneducated, for less intelligent and less socially
prestigious characters. Using vernacular in writings is
powerful; it convey the authenticity of the characters, the
setting with its distinct culture and history. Their first
language with its own linguistics awareness,narrative richness
and values could not be substituted by the classic literary
model.




We have seen how some writers make their characters speak
in uncanny regional accents and idioms by breaking literary
English convention ( altering the grammar, spelling
/vocabulary, syntax, rhythm or simply using regional idioms)
to foreground and to authenticate their characters along with
their social relations and the world they live in. Writing in
non-standard English help to draw us, the readers into the
reality of their world. Writers also use non-standard
varieties for personal reasons- a matter of identity and
of cultural allegiance. The formal literary English model of
a single, self-contained fixed meaning is taking them further
from their roots, restricting their cultural expressions that
are not rooted in the English tradition. The classic literary
English model need to evolve, it is static and does not
accommodate nor express diversity in thoughts, speech and
culture, authentically and accurately. Perhaps, writing in
vernacular variety will be the new foregrounding aspect in
literary English for writers of other cultures in the English
speaking world.

(1939 words)




Bibliography:

Maybin, J., and Mercer, N. (1996), Using English from
conversation to canon, Open university, London, Routledge.

Rhys, J., (1996), Wide Sargasso Sea, Penguin Classics.