Reading Novels

Part IV: The Language of the Text

Part IV The Language of the Text When we decide to start analysis of a literary text, we do so in the hope that it is possible to observe the features of the text in a reasonably stable way, and to discuss them. As we have already seen, there will always be differences in our readings, because we do not share complete and coherent systems of value, but our discussions become most fruitful where there is common ground for a starting point. One of the chief areas in which we should be able to find such common ground is in the detailed analysis of the language of the text. The language is what is “there on the page.” Not everyone agrees it is worth close examination in the case of the novel. T. S. Eliot, for example, wrote that novels “obtain what reality they have largely from an accurate rendering of the noises that human beings currently make in their daily simple needs of communication; and what part of a novel is not composed of these noises consists of a prose which is no more alive than that of a competent newspaper writer or government official.”1 But it is not difficult to find novelists who have taken language seriously. Maurice Blanchot points out that “the events, the characters and the dialogues of this world of fiction we call the novel are necessarily impregnated with the particular nature of the words on which their real- reading novels 162 ity is based.” The words of a novel, Blanchot thinks, do not “disappear into their meaning.”2 Analytic reading, then, should pay attention to language. But having agreed on this as a general principle, how should we proceed? Rules about how language works at a local level are not simply transferable to the full text, or “global level” of the text: we cannot shift from one level to the other by a simple process of extension. There is, as A. Culioli explains, a “theoretical rupture” between local and global analysis.3 As readers of novels we are concerned with meaning, and meaning cannot be separated from context. If we think of a verb like to sneeze, which can be classified for the purposes of the Concise Oxford Dictionary as an intransitive verb and defined as “make explosive sound in involuntarily expelling anything that irritates interior of nostrils”; then a sentence like “John sneezed Mary the football” should be impossible. And “He sneezed his way into the room” should be nonsense. Rules of use that work at the local level would classify these sentences as ungrammatical. But is quite possible to imagine both sentences being used in a literary context.4 Our capacity to contravene rules does not, however, indicate that there is endless slippage in the signification of words, or that their combination in sentences is free of constraints. There must be conventions operating, or there can be no communication, but the conventions are radically affected by context.5 Meaning, usage, and even truth-value depend upon context. A sentence like “France is a hexagon” is found to be true in certain situations (in a school geography lesson, for example, or in a newspaper article)—but not always. Its “factuality” is limited to situations where we are accustomed to quick, inaccurate sketch maps.6 As Thomas Pavel points out, “global truth is not simply derived from the local truth-value of the sentences present in the text.”7 Our point of departure and return in this book is the novelistic text at its global level, and the methods of analysis we employ need to take this into account. The texts we are looking at are nothing if not heterogeneous, so we cannot expect them to conform to any one pattern throughout. As we have already seen, the novelistic text may use (and interweave) narration, description, and dialogue, as well as explication and argumentation. One important context for our reading of any particular passage becomes the novel itself (perhaps more precisely called the cotext). We can, then, find the stability necessary for discussion if we try to keep in mind that our analysis of a local part of a text will also be affected by other factors: the language of the text 163 • What we see as the situation of its production (or enunciation) • The reference we think it has to the world (in the case of fiction, a suspended reference...