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11 Conceptual Perspectives on Time and Timelessness in martin Carter’s “University of hunger” Barbara Lalla martin Carter’s “University of hunger”is about arrival and the formation of a mind—the collective mind of a people—by the circumstances of that arrival.1 It is, therefore, a historical vision: They come from the distant village of the flood passing from middle air to middle earth in the common hours of nakedness. (ll. 12–14) however, in “University of hunger,” only the last verse is standard english past tense,with the single exception of line 20:“is they who had no voice in the emptiness.”on the other hand,Caribbean english-lexicon Creole may convey reference to past time without marking past tense. Therefore, the time reference of some verbs in the poem is ambiguous. If the poem echoes with voices in both codes, it may well interweave past and present vision, and, in so doing, refocus our view of history.Thus, an important issue in interpreting this poem is its multidimensional time reference. In a phrase like they come (in the quotation earlier), come may be present or past, depending on whether the voice is english or Creole.The linguistic situation of the Caribbean enables Carter to address an international audience through the widely comprehensible code of standard Caribbean english, but, at the same time, to counter traditional poetic discourse by intercepting standard structures in a number of ways. “Is the university of hunger the wide waste.”To begin with, if we view this first line as standard english,we assume from the punctuation that it is a statement but from the constituent order that it is a question. If it is a statement, it is mutilated by subject deletion, and it omits a comma between complement and appositive. from the outset, then, if we assume a standard english voice,Carter tampers with the conventions of traditional literary discourse.The fact is that the structure is more recognizable as Creole. however, he yokes 192 / lalla the Creole sentence patterns, familiar in oral discourse, to literary diction unfamiliar in the vernacular. The tendency to frustrate reader expectations continues throughout the poem, which departs from linguistic norms not only at syntactic but at lexico-semantic levels (“The print of hunger wanders in the land” [l. 3]). however, anomaly at the lexical level creates no anxiety; it is the usual stuff of metaphor. Apart from the first sentence (if it is read as Creole), the poem seems at first glance to make sparse use of Creole diction. The use of one feature consistently may reflect selectivity aimed at a representational effect, even in the presence of non-Creole structures such as the passive, “The huts of men are fused in misery”(l.6).At the same time,familiar trappings of traditional standard english literary discourse reveal their own discrepancies on examination. The second verse opens with a normal standard english subject (they). however , the pronoun has no identifiable referent: is the university of hunger the wide waste. is the pilgrimage of man the long march. The print of hunger wanders in the land. The green tree bends above the long forgotten. The plains of life rise up and fall in spasms. The huts of men are fused in misery. (ll. 1–6) Again and again, mechanisms that would orient the reader are suppressed or frustrated. The limited number of Creole features is not an argument against the reality of a Creole voice. orality in literary discourse is a function of representational features in any case.As any transcript of spoken discourse readily shows, it would be impractical for literature to mirror actual speech with its hesitations , false starts, incomplete sentences, and pauses for feedback. moreover, literature that represents speech in a code other than the official written code usually samples features of that unofficial code. The writer selects a workable balance of features. most should be well-enough known to be easily comprehensible , but some must contrast strongly enough with the official form to remind readers of the code they represent. representation can be subtle in the Caribbean.representing the Caribbean voice need not mean producing an array of Creole features in contrast to english features. such representation may mean exploiting features that are ambiguous in the sense of having one meaning in Creole and another in international english.This ambiguity is often lexical,but it can also be grammatical, as in come, where time reference depends on the code involved. [18...

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