e79_web

THE MAGAZINE FOR ADVANCED LEVEL ENGLISH

ISSUE 79 FEBRUARY 2018 ENGLISH AND MEDIA CENTRE

Atonement, Sense and Sensibility, Regeneration
British National Corpus
Miller and Marxism
Gender Identity and Language
Hamlet
Child Language Acquisition

Contents

This magazine is not 04 19 Miller, Marx and The
photocopiable. Why not
subscribe to our web package Close Reading Competition 2018 American Dream
which includes a downloadable
and printable PDF of the 06 An Interview with emag – Reading A View from
current issue? the Bridge and Death of
Tel 020 7359 8080 for details. Linguist John McWhorter Speaks a Salesman through a
Marxist lens shows
About us John McWhorter, Professor of Linguistics at us not only how
Columbia University, responds to questions Miller questions
emagazine is published by the English put to him by emagazine’s editors. the American
and Media Centre, a non-profit making Dream, suggests Dr
organisation. The Centre publishes a 08 Briony, Morality and Kurt A. Johnson,
wide range of classroom materials and but also how he
runs courses for teachers. If you’re Textuality – Atonement exposes the tragic
studying Media or Film Studies at A commercialisation of
Level, look out for MediaMagazine also Fergus Parnaby human relationships
published by EMC. asks questions in a capitalist system.
about the moral
The English and Media Centre compass of Ian 24 A Room
18 Compton Terrace, London, N1 2UN McEwan’s novels
Telephone: 020 7359 8080 and shows how – and a Narrator
Fax: 020 7354 0133 issues of morality – with a View
are explored not just
Subscription enquiries: in life but also in the Maya Little’s
[email protected] very act of writing account of the
fiction. narrative voice in
Website: www.englishandmedia.co.uk E.M. Forster’s novel
12 Leonie Speaking – draws attention to
Co-editors: Barbara Bleiman both its variety and subtlety, showing how
& Lucy Webster One Year On the narrator is anything but a detached
information-giver.
Design: Sam Sullivan, Newington Design In 2016, teacher Gillian Thompson wrote
about conversations with her granddaughter 28 To Just Listen in on
Print: S&G Group Leonie. Now, just over one year on, Gill has
followed this up to see what has changed British Chit Chat – Spoken British
Issn:1464-3324 in Leonie’s speech, relating it to theories of National Corpus 2014
Established in 1998 by Simon Powell. CLA.
Robbie Love explains what the BNC2014 is
Cover: Regeneration, 1997. Moviestore collection 14 A Great Combination – and how the data was collected. He offers
Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo one fascinating example – the split infinitive
English Language & Literature – to show how the corpus can be compared
How to subscribe with that of the 1990s.
Student Noah Matthews has loved studying
Four issues a year, published September, the combined Language and Literature A 31 The
December, late February and late April. Level. Here he explains why it has been
We now offer five subscription packages such a stimulating and challenging course, Importance of
for UK schools: and looks ahead to continuing his studies at Small Things
• Web & 1 x print copy of the magazine, university. – Style in The
Namesake
four times a year (£110) 16 The Internal Divisions of
• Web & 2 x print copies of the George Norton
Regeneration’s Billy Prior offers three ways
magazine, four times a year (£130) of thinking about the language and style
• Web & 5 x print copies of the Billy Prior, argues of Lahiri’s novel, each of which makes one
Charlotte Woolley, realise that her ‘lack of stylisation’ in no
magazine, four times a year (£180) is key to the way implies a lack of style.
• Print only – 1 copy of the magazine, moral questions
that Barker raises 34 Keeping Mum – The
four times a year (£40) throughout the
• Print only x 2 copies of the magazine, Regeneration trilogy. Silence of Gertrude in Hamlet

four times a year (£60) Clare Gunns questions readings of Gertrude
that minimise her importance, arguing
2 emagazine February 2018 rather that her character is ripe for rich
interpretation.

38 Where Do We Find the 54 A Question of Trust – Correction

Literary? Everywhere! Narrative Voice in The Murder of Our apologies to Mukahang Limbu whose
Roger Ackroyd name was spelled incorrectly in emagazine
Gabi Reigh investigates whether a rigid 78. This has been corrected in the PDF
division between the literary and non- Agatha Christie establishes trust in her edition available online.
literary is either desirable or possible, narrator in ways that we might associate
arguing that many so-called non-literary with a writer like Jane Austen. But is that emagplus
texts draw on literary conventions. trust wise? Judy Simons suggests that far
from leaving us in the safe, comfortable • Rose Page explores silence and trauma
41 Native Son – The Soul Frets terrain of classic fiction, Christie draws us in The Handmaid’s Tale.
into the more murky world of the modern
in the Shadow novel, where part of the pleasure for the • Fran Hill discusses the issues (and
reader is in having that trust betrayed. emotions) around initial ‘so’.
Although it is over
70 years old, Richard 59 Referring with Respect – • Andrew Green analyses a passage
Wright’s narrative from The Great Gatsby.
voice still resonates, The Way We Talk about Gender
especially in the Identity • Gillian Thompson’s transcript to
context of today’s accompany the article ‘Leonie
America of cultural Margaret Coupe explores the ways in which Speaking – One Year On’.
suspicion and racial second-wave feminism, ideas about political
tension. Roshan correctness and an increasing awareness emagClips
Doug explores these of the experience of people of trans and
ideas. non-binary gender have brought significant • New in emagClips: Leonie
language change. Speaking – One Year On
44 Ariel in The Tempest –
62 Women and Mobility in emag web archive
Servitude and Freedom
Sense and Sensibility Look out for the links to
John Hathaway uses recommended articles in the archive,
multiple readings, Katherine Limmer explores modes of listed at the bottom of each article.
from those of directors, transport and journeys in Austen’s novel, • You can access these articles by
to postcolonial revealing the vital significance that access
perspectives, to the means of travel has for the female logging onto the subscriber site of the
psychoanalytic characters. emagazine website, if your school or
readings and even a college subscribes.
re-interpretation by Remember, the login details can be
Margaret Atwood, to used by any student or member of
question conventional staff, both in the institution and
thinking about Ariel’s from home.
relationship with See www.englishandmedia.co.uk/e-
Prospero. magazine for tips on getting the most
from the new and improved website.
48 Facebook and a 65 ‘His dodgy foot’ – Meter

Fractured Society – How Online and Identity in Poems of the
Communication is Changing Decade
Friendship and Politics
Jack Palmer’s
What, if anything, is the link between account of the use of
getting annoyed by your friends on meter in Turnbull’s
Facebook and the fake news epidemic which ‘Ode’, Burnside’s
supposedly led to Brexit and the rise of ‘History’ and
Donald Trump? This article tells you. Barber’s ‘Material’
explains how meter works in poetry before
51 Sylvia Plath – Reimagining applying this understanding to develop a
rich reading of its effect in the three poems.
Motherhood

Brittany Wright explores a much-neglected
aspect of the poetry of a poet whose troubled
life, early death and marriage to Ted Hughes
have threatened to drown out everything
else.

February 2018 emagazine 3

Close Reading The Impressionist –
Hari Kunzru
Competition 2018
This extract is taken from part way
The emagazine Close Reading into the first chapter of the novel.
Competition is now a well-established Published in 2002, The Impressionist
fixture in the year. We pride ourselves is an historical novel set in India
on selecting very different passages each at the turn of the nineteenth and
year for you to respond to (from Edith twentieth centuries.
Wharton, John le Carré and Charles
Dickens to Lisa McInerney) and this year Fire and water. Earth and air. Meditate
is no exception. We’ve chosen an extract on these oppositions and reconcile them.
from Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist. Collapse them in on themselves, send them
Winner of the Betty Trask Award 2002 spiralling down a tunnel of blackness to
and the Somerset Maugham Award 2003, re-emerge whole, one with the all, mere
it's a novel described by the New York aspects of the great unity of things whose
Times as ‘sweeping [and] audaciously name is God. Thought can travel on in
playful...’ and by the Literary Review as this manner, from part to whole, smooth
‘marvellous, original and intelligent’. as the touch of the masseur’s oiled hands
in the hammam. Amrita wishes she could
We’re confident it’s a passage you’ll enjoy carry on thinking for ever. That would be
reading and writing about. true sweetness! But she is only a woman,
and for ever will not be granted her. In
This year the competition will be judged the absence of infinity, she will settle for
by the emag editors and Professor John spinning out what time she has, teasing it
Mullan, University College London and into a fine thread.
author of How Novels Work.
Inside the palanquin it is hot and close,
Entering the competition the smells of food and stale sweat and
rosewater mingling with another smell,
• Write a 500-word close reading of the passage from The sharp and bitter. Once again Amrita’s hand
Impressionist. reaches out for the little sandalwood box of
pills. She watches the hand as she would a
• Download the official entry form from the emagazine page of snake sliding across a flagstone floor, with
the English and Media Centre website: detachment and an edge of revulsion. Yes,
https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/e-magazine/ it is her hand, but only for now, only for
a while. Amrita knows that she is not her
• Fill in your details and paste your entry into the body. This crab-like object, fiddling with box
space provided. and key and pellets of sticky black resin,
belongs to her only as does a shawl or a
• Email your entry to [email protected], piece of jewellery.
using emagazine Close Reading Competition 2018 as
the subject line. A bump. They have stopped. Outside
there are voices. Amrita rejoices. At
Timeline

• Close of competition: 5pm Thursday 29th March 2018.
(Please note: we will NOT accept entries received
after 5pm Thursday 29th March, so don’t leave it to
the last minute!).

• Results announced online and by email: 8th May 2018.
• Results and winning entry published in emagazine:

September 2018.

4 emagazine February 2018

nineteen years old, this is will be her Soon the rain is falling steadily, swollen tongue. Soon the rain is pouring through in
last journey, and any delay is cause droplets splashing into the dust like little a constant stream. The soaked curtains start
for celebration. She swallows another bombs. Camels fidget and grumble as to flap limply against her side. The wind is
opium pellet, tasting the bitter resin on they are hobbled. Servants run around rising, and still no one has come for her. No
her tongue. unpacking bags. Moti Lal keeps up a one has even told her what is happening.
steady stream of conversation as Forrester With no mother or father she is mistress
* dismounts and unsaddles his horse. Moti now. If only she could gather the energy to
Lal is not the master here, oh no, just assert herself.
As it does every year, the wind has blown a trusted family retainer. It has fallen
steadily out of the south-west, rolling its to him, the duty of escorting the young Amrita unlocks her box, shielding it from
cargo of doughy air across the plain to mistress to her uncle’s house in Agra. the water. She is to be delivered to her
slap hard against the mountains. For days, Most unusual, of course, but there are uncle, and that will be an end. He writes
weeks, the air has funnelled upwards, extenuating circumstances. that he has already found her a husband.
cooling as it rises, spinning vast towers of At least, said the old women, she will arrive
condensation over the peaks. Now these Extenuating circumstances? What is the with a good dowry. So much better off than
hanging gardens of cloud have ripened bloody fool on about? Forrester asks where other girls. She should thank God.
to the point where they can no longer they have come from, and the man names a
maintain themselves. small town at least two hundred miles west Within half an hour the dust has turned to
of where they stand. mud. Despite his tent, Forrester is drenched.
So, the rain. He clambers to the top of a hill and looks
‘And have you walked all the way?’ out over the desert, scored by a fingerprint
It falls first over the mountains, an whorl of valleys and ridges. There is no
unimaginable shock of water. Caught in the ‘Yes, sir. The young mistress says walk only.’ shelter. As the wind tugs at his topi and
open, herdsmen and woodcutters pull their forked lightning divides the sky into fleeting
shawls over their heads and run for shelter. ‘Why on earth didn’t you go by rail? Agra is segments, he is struck by the thought that
Then in a chain reaction, cloud speaking hundreds of miles from here.’ perhaps he has been a fool. His red-brown
to cloud, the rain rolls over the foothills, world has turned grey, solid curtains of
dousing fires, battering on roofs, bringing ‘Unfortunately train is out of the water obscuring the horizon. Here he is, out
smiles to the faces of the people who run question. Such are extenuating in the middle of it, not a tree in sight. He
outside to greet it, the water for which they circumstances, you see.’ is the tallest thing in this barren landscape,
have been waiting so long. and he feels exposed. Looking back down
Forrester does not see, but at the moment at his tent, set at the bottom of a deep
Finally it comes to the desert. As it starts he is far more concerned with erecting his gully, he wonders how long the storm will
to fall, Forrester listens to the grubby tent before the rain worsens. It seems to last. The Indians are still struggling to put
Brahmin’s chit-chat, and hears himself be getting stronger by the second. Moti up their own shelters, fumbling with rope
tetchily agreeing that now would be a Lal puts up his umbrella and stands over and pegs. Amazingly the palanquin is still
good time and here a good place to camp. the Englishman as he bashes in pegs, just where they discarded it. If he had not been
Perhaps this Moti Lal is offended by his close enough to get in his way without told otherwise, he would have sworn the
brusqueness, but Forrester can’t worry actually offering any shelter. Forrester thing must be empty.
about that. His eyes are fixed on the curses under his breath, while all the time
palanquin, the grumpy maid fussing around the thought circulates in his head: so she Before long, a trickle of muddy water
its embroidered curtain. Its occupant has is a young woman. is flowing through the gully, separating
not even ventured a peek outside. He Forrester’s army tent from the Indians’
wonders if she is ill, or very old. Rain drips through the ceiling and lands contraptions of tarpaulin and bamboo.
in her lap, darkening red silk with circles A fire is out of the question, and so the
of black. Amrita turns her face upwards bearers are huddled together forlornly,
and sticks out her tongue. The rain sounds squatting on their haunches like a gaggle
heavy. Outside it is dark, and perhaps, of bidi-smoking birds. Moti Lal climbs
though she is not sure, she feels cold. To the ridge to engage Forrester in another
ward off the feeling she imagines heat, pointless conversation, then follows him
calling up memories of walking on the back down the hill and crouches at the door
roof of her father’s haveli in summertime. of the tent. Finally Forrester is forced to
Vividly she senses the burning air on her give in and talk.
arms and face. She hears the thud of carpets
being beaten and the swish of brooms as ‘So who exactly is your mistress?’
the maids sweep sand from the floors. But
heat leads on to thoughts of her father, of Moti Lal’s face darkens.
walking round the pyre as the priest throws
on ghee to make it flame, and she recoils THE IMPRESSIONIST by Hari Kunzru (Penguin
back to the dark and cold. Drops of water Books, 2003). Copyright (c) Hari Kunzru, 2002, with
land on her forehead, on one cheek, on her permission.

February 2018 emagazine 5

An interview with emag

Public Domain

Linguist John McWhorter speaks

John McWhorter is Professor of Linguistics at Columbia University and
has written several books on language and dialect and language change.
He also reaches out to non-specialist audiences, his TED talk on texting
having been viewed by over two million people! Here he responds to
questions put to him by emagazine’s editors.

1In Words on the Move, you 2 Is a dialect different from a version of the real language’. But the only
describe how word meanings language? Why does it seem to reason one variety is enshrined as standard
change as a ‘step-by-step inching’. matter so much? Is that a linguistic is historical accident – i.e. the English of
Is there a risk that language issue or a societal/attitudinal one? the London area became ‘standard English’
is changing more quickly than because things were run from London.
that, and leaving some people The term is essentially meaningless. A
confused and uncertain? linguist ‘wants’ it to mean that languages 3 Black English, Ebonics, AAVE –
are mutually unintelligible while dialects does the naming matter? If it’s a
Never. It’s easy to suppose that such a thing are mutually intelligible varieties of a single language, not a dialect, why is that?
might happen, but no such case has ever language. But actual speech doesn’t work Do you think it’s important to treat it
been recorded – i.e. of a group of humans that way – Mandarin and Cantonese are as a language?
encountered whose language has for some called ‘dialects’ when they are as different as
reason escaped their comprehension and Spanish and Italian, because of the unity of I actually do not think of AAVE as a
fallen to pieces. Language change, whatever Chinese culture and writing. Norwegian and ‘language’. It is a variety of American
its rate, is communal, not individual – we Swedish are called ‘languages’ because they English, and therefore what anyone would
talk to each other, and thus it’s only things are spoken in separate nations despite the call a dialect of it. The point is that non-
that afford communication that make fact that their speakers can converse. Then standard dialects are as coherent and
it into the flow. laymen ‘want’ dialect to mean ‘a degraded nuanced as standard ones. It’s good to name

6 emagazine February 2018

a dialect, to counter the idea that it’s a 5 Is standard English more about that the subfield of sociolinguistics tilts
degraded version of the standard. But that imposing an arbitrary set of significantly towards exploring the speech
doesn’t mean that it is a separate ‘language’. rules on language users than it is of the disempowered – there is only so
In my opinion, to claim that only fosters about mutual intelligibility? much explicit interest in how affluent,
public scepticism, as we all have a horse straight white men talk! My own work as
sense of how different ‘languages’ are Yes. It is certainly handy for allowing a linguist is sociopolitical where I write on
from one another. communication among people who might Black English for the general public; that,
have trouble understanding one another however, is not what I usually work on in
4 You’re quoted as being an otherwise, although that problem would be the academic sense. Most of my academic
opponent of the Sapir-Whorf much more acute in your part of the world linguistic work is just geeky exploration of
hypothesis. Is this so? If so, why? than here in America. However, the reason issues relating to how language changes
the standard emerged was a sense that and how languages come together in
Because the hypothesis as popularly because it was on the page, and was the the structural sense, with the social part
presented implies that to speak a language variety outlined and described by scholarly marginal. I adapt as I need to.
is to have one’s thoughts channelled into people, that it was somehow the ‘real’
distinct patterns, which the evidence English. After a few generations it was all 7 Which linguists have influenced
simply doesn’t support. Experiments but impossible to imagine a time when no you most and why?
show that a language’s grammar makes one thought of any one kind of English as
a person infinitesimally more sensitive, the ‘real kind’ in that way. The first one was Mario Pei, who wrote
under artificial conditions, to certain popular books on language in the late 20th
fine distinctions such as shades of blue 6 Is there a political element century. I read many of them and wanted
or types of material. However, to allow to your work as a linguist? to be him; I still explicitly think of his
this to foster the idea that every language Is linguistics a scientific, neutral work when I write my own. Then Derek
marks a different thought pattern leads discipline, or is there room for Bickerton’s work on creoles lit my mind
to uncomfortable conclusions you’d have bringing to bear one’s own political up. He and I had many disagreements back
to take along with the ‘cooler’ ones. For and social beliefs? in the day and many of his basic ideas on
example, Chinese is much more telegraphic creoles have been revised heavily since the
than European languages – a lot is left Linguistics is, in many of its facets, highly 80s, but his work revealed creole languages
to context. Does that mean that to speak sociopolitical. One mission of linguistics, as interesting in a way that I am now
Mandarin is to be less attuned to life – i.e. which I applaud, is helping the public to battling other creolists in defending.
less intelligent? Of course not – but to understand that it doesn’t make scientific
understand that requires being very careful sense to suppose that most people John McWhorter is Professor of Linguistics at
about the usual arguments made about speak their native language ‘badly.’ As Colombia University.
what languages make you more sensitive to. an outgrowth of that, I would venture

Public Domain

emag web archive

• Dan Clayton: At War with the
Pedants: an Interview with
Henry Hitchings, emagazine
53, September 2011

• Alison Ross: Unsilent Witness – The
Work of a Forensic Linguist, emagazine
15, February 2002

• Susie Dent: Tribes of English,
emagazine 76, April 2017

emagClips

• Kevin Watson on Language
– Sociophonetics

February 2018 emagazine 7

Saoirse Ronan as Briony Tallis - Age 13 in Atonement. Entertainment Pictures / Alamy Stock Photo

8 emagazine February 2018

Briony, Morality and Textuality

ATONEMENT

Fergus Parnaby asks questions about the moral compass of Ian McEwan’s
novel and shows how issues of morality are explored not just in the lives
portrayed but also in the act of writing fiction.

Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement is a The Tallis house is itself a boiling pot of
complex and problematic text that explores conflicting emotions: Robbie and Cecilia’s
morality from several angles. At the heart awkward and suddenly disclosed love for
of the story is the wrong committed by its one another, signposted by references to
protagonist, Briony, whose false accusation novelists Richardson and Fielding, and
against Robbie Turner, her sister’s lover, feckless brother Leon’s sinister friend
results in his imprisonment and her sister’s Paul Marshall, whose assault of cousin
estrangement from their family. The text Lola precipitates Briony’s accusation
goes further than a morality tale, however, against Robbie and seals his fate later in
in interrogating its own reality, and raising the novel. As for the parents, Jack Tallis
the question as to what fiction is, and to is ensconced in London, busy with work
what extent it can reveal the ‘truth’. and possibly having an affair, leaving his
wife Emily nominally in charge; she is
Setting Up a Moral Boiling Pot incapable of looking after the household
effectively, spending most of her time in
The novel opens with a day in the Tallis bed. Meanwhile, Briony, like any child left
house, somewhere in the Home Counties, to her own devices, shows a preternaturally
before World War Two. Briony is a girl strong awareness of the inherent romance
of 13 with a powerful imagination and of the surrounding world, and an innocence
a propensity for wild fantasies; she is threatened only when she opens Robbie’s
possessed by a ‘controlling demon’, as graphic love-letter to Briony’s elder
we are warned on page 5, which subjects sister, Cecilia.
everything and everyone around her to her
wish to be in charge, to create a stage and Briony, of course, sees herself as the
control the characters for her own personal heroine, as well as the author, of her drama,
drama; she has even written a play at the her story. This is what her ‘controlling
beginning, more or less compelling her demon’ really means: that she is driven
young cousins to take part while she directs, to transfer what she sees into a romance,
the first clue to the blurring between reality or thriller, based on the books she has
and fiction that occurs in the novel (the consumed. (McEwan gives tell-tale clues,
play’s title, ‘The Trials of Arabella’, is a name-checking several novels and literary
reference to The Female Quixote, a take on works throughout Part One whose themes
the famous Cervantes story). echo the story, as above.)

February 2018 emagazine 9

Romola Garai as Briony Tallis in Atonement (2007). AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Detective or Victim? destiny but also that of the ‘characters’ whatever skivvying or humble nursing she did
in her story – then, results in the jailing [...] she would never undo the damage. She was
In Briony’s mind, McEwan shows us, she of Robbie and the rupturing of his and unforgivable.
is not merely a nosy child but a detective, Cecilia’s relationship. Part Two shows
piecing together clues from Robbie’s us how, after Robbie is let out of jail on By slaving away on the ward looking after
behaviour, his letter to her elder sister, the condition that he join the army, he is sick soldiers that put her in mind of Robbie,
moment she sees him seemingly attacking involved in the headlong retreat from she tries to remove the stain of guilt from
Cecilia in the library, the bruise on Lola’s Dunkirk. Here McEwan ratchets up his herself. By visiting Robbie and Cecilia she
arm. The novel presents these events from playing with ideas of truth, highlighting becomes a penitent, begging forgiveness,
different perspectives, showing the ease again the author as puppetmaster. offering to do whatever is necessary to set
with which they could be misconstrued. Presented to the reader as ‘truth’ within the record straight. She apologises to the
Indeed, so sure is Briony of Robbie’s guilt the world of the novel, this story too couple again as she leaves them at Balham
that when she confronts Lola she seems to is later revealed to be a reconstruction Tube Station, noting her response as ‘foolish
force the words out of her: by Briony. She appropriates Robbie’s and inadequate’. It might be a true moment
‘story’ and creates her own version of of atonement, although on the next page
‘It was Robbie, wasn’t it?’ events, even recreating a wartime rendez- we see that this is just a manuscript, signed
vous between Robbie and Cecilia. All by her own hand, dated 1999, the final
Although Briony is a child, she is growing of this section carries the trademarks of draft for her novel. Though this removes the
into adulthood; yet at no point does she melodrama and romance – the wartime sense of ‘objective’ fact from the narrative,
think to check her facts – the ‘demon’ hero, fighting his way back to his love at perhaps it is evidence of something deeper,
has her in its thrall throughout. Briony’s home – and is evidence of McEwan’s meta- the ever-present will to put things right.
testimony ultimately seals Robbie’s fate, textual fixation. For the reader, it provokes a troubling
and although we are told she has the question about fiction: by presenting Briony
chance to withdraw or change her version Guilt and Atonement – Life as attempting to atone for her crime (and
of events on several occasions, she feels and Fiction its consequences) through her imaginative
helpless, a slave to their momentum. Her reconstructions, what is McEwan saying
youth and her vividness of imagination Why do this? One answer is that McEwan about literature?
make her as much a victim of the chain of is showing Briony as having learnt her
events as Robbie. Nonetheless, she becomes lesson and being remorseful for the Writing as an Act of
increasingly aware that she has done wrong, suffering she has caused Robbie and Redemption
and it is this that, more than anything, Cecilia. In this section, Briony presents
signals the transition into adult awareness us with a different aspect of wartime, Can Briony find forgiveness for her
that poses the novel’s key dilemma. documenting her experiences as a wrongdoing? In order for someone to
volunteer nurse who has taken up the qualify for forgiveness, society requires
An Author’s Invention of Truth call as an attempt to ‘atone’ for her crime; that they first face up to their misdeeds;
although she admits to herself that they cannot do so if they are still lying to
Briony’s compulsion for invention – her themselves (and to others, if the novel is
desire to be the author not just of her own

10 emagazine February 2018

taken as that). Does Briony really face up The Reader as Judge of Briony emag web archive
to the wrong she has done through writing (and Fiction’s) Truth
her text, or is she still trapped by her • Neil King: Atonement – Questioning
own fictions, unable to escape them and Ultimately, the reader is invited to judge, the the Imagination, emagazine
reach redemption? The answer rests upon postscript leaving the door open. Perhaps 31, February 2006
whether her story itself can be considered the character Briony meant it to be this
an act of atonement. She gives some clues way, opening herself up for judgement • Robert Kidd: Atonement, emagazine
as to how she sees things: to a third party, allowing her readers to 38, December 2007
decide on whether to forgive or condemn
There was our crime: Lola’s, Marshall’s, mine […] her. There is a certain honesty in her • Georgina Routen: A Close
revealing her uncertainty at the end, as Reading of Atonement – Extended
There was the crime, but there were also the narrator (and even in portraying herself as Interior Monologue, emagazine
lovers [...] stubborn and fallible in her convictions as 49, September 2010
a character in the novel). McEwan himself
It is interesting that she implicates suggests one answer: • Dr Natasha Alden: Atonement
herself in the ‘crime’, and that through and Postmemory, emagazine
playing the detective, she has become the She cannot undo what she has done. But she can, 66, December 2014
criminal. Nonetheless: however, live the ‘examined life’. Over her lifetime
she has written many versions of the story that • Professor John Mullan: Slips and
As long as there is a single copy [...] of my final won’t let her go [...] The reader has possession only Shifts – Time and Viewpoint in
draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and of the final version, the one that deliberately invents Atonement, emagazine 70,
her medical prince survive to love. and distorts in order to re-unite the lovers that she December 2015
once, as a foolish little girl, irrevocably forced apart.
For Briony, the act of writing the novel • Kevin Finniear: Atonement –
is still capable of redeeming her and the It is in living the ‘examined life’ that Briony Revelations Withheld, emagazine
whole situation, and McEwan shows us simultaneously crosses the line from immoral 73, September 2016
that the narrator of a story can use it to to moral, guilty to innocent, and from
wrest back control of the narrative itself: character to author. Atonement thus uses its • Professor John Mullan: Coming to the
it becomes a vehicle for the exploration of self-reflexive nature to show that fiction can End, emagazine 54, December 2011
her conscience. not only re-create, but re-write history, and
perhaps even redeem what has gone before. emagClips
But even she feels uncertain of this:
Fergus Parnaby is a teacher of English • Professor John Mullan on Key
The problem these fifty nine years has been this: at Stowe School. Aspects of Narrative
how can a novelist achieve atonement when,
with her absolute power of deciding outcomes,
she is also God?

Vanessa Redgrave as Briony Tallis in Atonement (2007). AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo

February 2018 emagazine 11

Leonie Speaking

In 2016, teacher Gillian Leonie. Photo: Paul Thompson, with thanks
Thompson wrote about
conversations with her This recording threw up a problem that the child to describe the pair. Children, who
granddaughter Leonie. wasn’t there a year ago: at nearly 3¾, had never heard adults say ‘wug’ (as they
We published her Leonie is much more aware of technology. don’t exist!), were able to apply the plural
article, with a transcript When she was first filmed, she showed little rule ‘wugs’, thus suggesting that they have
and video recording on or no concern that there was a cameraman an implicit knowledge of the way words are
the emagazine website. in the room. As he didn’t interact with her, formed. Although Leonie failed to do this
Now, just over one year she ignored him. This time, however, she a year ago, labelling my attempt to draw a
on, Gill has followed looks at him curiously from time to time ‘wug’ variously as a ‘duck,’ a ‘birdee’ and
this up to see what has and speaks in a shy voice, not the confident ‘Pingu’ (see emag 74), this year she happily
changed in Leonie’s tone she normally uses. William Labov, forms the plural (see line 149 of transcript).
speech, relating it to the American socio-linguist, referred to She also does this with some of Berko’s
theories of CLA. As this as observer’s paradox. He pointed other drawings of fictitious creatures – the
before, you can read out that we need to gather authentic ‘kazh’ (line 153) and the ‘lun’ (line 182).
the article here, and see data in order for our research to be fully These examples show that over the last year
the transcript and video representative, but can only do so through Leonie has gained a knowledge of how the
on the website. observation. Being observed makes us plural is formed and can apply it to different
self-conscious and less inclined to speak nouns, even made-up ones.
Leonie is now three years and eight months naturally, hence the paradox. An added
old. A lot has happened in the last year. She complication was that I was setting the She can also do this with verbs. When
currently attends pre-school four mornings agenda for the conversation as I wanted shown a man who is said to be ‘ricking’
a week and so her social circle has widened. to focus on particular experiments which (line 154), and asked what he did
Her speech will be influenced by her peers demonstrated how Leonie’s speech had ‘yesterday’, Leonie replies ‘he did rick’
and teachers as well as by her family. She changed. She only really relaxes at line 199, (line 159). She does a similar thing on line
has also acquired a little sister, Corinne, when she is eating chocolate, and exclaims 187 when she declares that a man who
born at the beginning of May 2017. spontaneously, ‘they’re a bit crunchy!’ and is ‘spowing’ today, ‘did spow’ yesterday.
line 243 when she is recalling an event (‘I Leonie does something quite interesting
Language researchers refer to investigations did go in my jamas’). Nevertheless, I do with the past tense and this is consistent
over time as longitudinal studies. Their gain some interesting insights into Leonie’s throughout the transcript (when asked
advantage is that you can monitor language linguistic development. what she did at her friend’s house she says,
change in real time – as in my analysis of line 243, ‘I did go in my jamas’). Rather
the changes in Leonie’s speech over the last The ‘Wug Test’ than add an inflection to the verb stem (ie
year. The problem with this, though, is that ‘spowed’ for ‘spow’ and ‘ricked’ for ‘rick’),
it can take a very long time. If you want to Psychologist Jean Berko devised this test she uses an auxiliary verb instead (‘did
gain a quick impression of change, you need back in 1958, to test children’s capacity to rick’, ‘did spow’). This is quite a clever way
to conduct an apparent time study. In apply grammar rules. She drew a fictitious round a tricky situation! We have many
terms of children’s language acquisition, for creature called a ‘wug’ and showed it to a irregular verbs (such as ‘go’, ‘come’, ‘is’,
example, you could analyse the speech of a child. Then she drew another one and asked
2 year old, a 3 year old and a 4 year old and
so gain a quicker impression of the changes
that occur over that period, even though it
is with a different child. Luckily, as she is
my granddaughter, I have regular access to
Leonie so I can monitor her speech changes
as they happen.

12 emagazine February 2018

One year on

‘has’) in English and it takes a long time to ‘uggerly’ sisters (line 64), a ‘stepmother’ Accessing the Transcript
learn them. Leonie has worked out that all (line 75) and a ‘fairy mother’ (line 84).
she needs to do to form the past tense is to She is even aware that ‘they got married’ Subscribers can access the transcript
use the main stem of the verb (‘go’, ‘rick’, represents a happy ending (line 132). on the website in emagplus 79 and
‘spow’) but add the past form of the verb in the archive, while the video can
‘to do’ (‘did’) as an auxiliary. That way she Abstract Concepts be found in emagClips. If your school
doesn’t have to change a thing! Another does not subscribe to the website,
explanation is that I quite often frame the In the 1960’s and 70’s, a psychologist called please see the emag home page for the
question using ‘did’ (as in ‘What did you Walter Mischel conducted what he called transcript. The video is available in the
do at Sienna’s house?’ on line 235 of the the delayed gratification experiment Previews for emagazine.
transcript). It could be that she repeats the where children were offered a choice
auxiliary verb from my question in her between one small reward provided straight emagplus
answer, assuming that is an appropriate away or two small rewards if they waited
thing to do. Either way, she shows great for a short period. When I tried this with • Gillian Thompson’s transcript to
economy of effort! Leonie (lines 189 to 195 of the transcript) accompany the article ‘Leonie
she immediately goes for the instant reward Speaking – One Year On’.
Adjectives in my re-creation of Jean Berko’s (‘one piece of chocolate now’). She clearly
test prove a little more tricky. When asked, wasn’t prepared to risk waiting! This tells emag web archive
‘What do you call a dog with ‘quirks’ all us something about her understanding of
over him?’ Leonie is unable to make up time: she has no set idea what ‘ten minutes’ • Dr Marcello Giovanelli: ‘It’s Sleep
the adjective ‘quirky’, instead offering the feels like. It could be forever! In previous Time’ – Children’s Routines and the
rather more prosaic answer ‘dog’ (line 174 conversations she uses the time adverbial Language of Bedtime (CLA), emagazine
of the transcript). Mind you, last year, the ‘yesterday’ to mean anything from several 62, December 2013
only adjectives she used were colour words, days to several hours ago. Although she can
such as ‘green’ and ‘purple’. This year she use words from a semantic field of time, she • Amy Bidgood: Learning about
has many more: ‘soft’ (line 32) ‘uggerly’ has little idea of the periods they represent. Language Acquisition – The
(line 64), ‘crunchy’ (line 199) ‘yummy’ Language 0-5 Project (CLA),
(209). She can even supply synonyms: Similarly, when I try to engage her in a emagazine 72, April 2016
when I ask if her playdoh heart is ‘rough’ conversation about what happened a few
(line 33) she replies that it is ‘bumpy’ (line days previously when she went to play • Amy Bidgood: What Comes Before
36), both demonstrating an understanding with her friend Sienna (lines 230 to end of Words? – The Beginnings of
of the meaning of the adjective ‘rough’ and transcript), she initially struggles to recall Language Development, emagazine
the fact that it has other words that are the event, preferring to stay in the present 73, September 2016
similar in meaning. where she is rolling a piece of playdoh
((lines 236 to 240 of the transcript). • Gillian Thompson: Doing What Comes
Pragmatics and Play Naturally – Leonie Speaking (CLA),
She is gaining some knowledge of abstract emagazine 74, December 2016
Leonie is developing a sense that language concepts though: when asked what a heart
can be fun as well as functional. In lines 210 represents (line 19 of the transcript) she • Gillian Thompson: Leonie Talking –
to 229 of the transcript, we play a rhyming replies, ‘I love you’ suggesting she has some Theories and Transcript, emagplus 74
game. Leonie rhymes ‘yummy’ with awareness of symbolism. for emagazine 74, December 2016
‘tummy’; ‘flower’ with ‘power’ and ‘tower;’
and ‘house’ with ‘couse’. It doesn’t matter Leonie has learned a great deal over the • Fran Hill: How Daisy’s Writing
that the last example isn’t a word: it sounds past year: her utterances are longer and Develops, emagazine 75, February 2017
like one and for Leonie, in this instance, more fully formed; she has expanded
playing the game is more important than her vocabulary considerably and her • Rebecca Woods: Child Language
communicating accurately. pronunciation is more developed. Acquisition – Behind the Text,
emagazine 78, December 2017
She is also learning that language can Who knows what the next year will bring?
be imaginative. In lines 48 to 134 of the • Nikolai Luck: Delving into the emag
transcript we look at the story of Cinderella Gillian Thompson teaches English at Archives: Child Language Acquisition,
(in hindsight an unfortunate choice Godalming College. emagazine 68, April 2015
as Leonie insists on calling her ‘Belle’
throughout, suggesting she is more familiar • And many, many more articles!
with Beauty and the Beast!). However, what
is clear is that she knows words from a emagClips
semantic field of fairy tales such as the
• Leonie Speaking – Child Language
Acquisition (CLA) and Leonie
Speaking – One Year On (to
accompany this article)

February 2018 emagazine 13

A Great
Combination

Studying English Language
and Literature A Level

Student Noah Matthews has loved studying the combined Language and
Literature A Level. Here he explains why it has been such a stimulating and
challenging course, and looks ahead to continuing his studies at university.

What did you particularly enjoy a huge influence on an overall text. This to support your claim. However, if I were
about the course? meant that when creating my own pieces to analyse texts with my stylistics approach
I also paid more attention to particular I feel I’m able to access so much more
The dynamic variation of texts was linguistic choices rather than merely information about the text and what the
something I found intriguing as your studies ignoring them to focus on the general author is trying to convey. This by now
range from examining the linguistic devices form of the text. I’m not denying that ingrained sense of analytical particularity
of tabloid journalism, with its particular large decisions about form can have a really helps when you go on to study
kind of rhetoric, to the exploration of more major impact – Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest English at university. It gives Lang/Lit
literary texts, such as novels and plays. Proposal’ is a good example of how a big students an edge in analysis. Cambridge’s
One lesson may centre on Russell Brand’s structural shift can be of critical importance. Practical Criticism paper, which many
linguistic battle with MP Keith Vaz during However, the lexical choices he employs to would argue is a staple of their course,
Brand’s evidence to the parliamentary initially gain the trust of the reader, and the makes undergraduates study unseen texts
drug reform, whilst the next lesson you lexical comparisons of children and food without applying literary theories to them.
may employ more literary critical ideas are just as important for the overall tone They are forced into close reading with
when looking at Fitzgerald’s The Great of the text. When I began my own creative emphasis on form and stylistics. Moreover,
Gatsby. These examples also highlight coursework, a satirical newspaper column Oxford’s English course is combined; they
the larger social implications of English, on Brexit, the impressions made by the do not offer a pure literature course. These
as to study language you are examining non-fiction anthology had a huge impact two Goliaths of the academic world both
the insinuations, sometimes subtle or on my style of writing. Moreover, once emphasise that you need some form of
even subconscious, we all make when you have learnt the linguistic conventions knowledge of stylistics to fully analyse texts.
we communicate. To study literature is to of such texts, you know how to flip them
study how writers have turned this human for effect, which I found more interesting Would you recommend the
experience into art, through narrative, as that freedom to twist expectations is course?
description and self-exploration something I think all aspiring creative
writers wish for, and to make a teacher I would definitely recommend the course
Can you talk about the laugh, which I did, is quite an achievement, to any students wanting to study some
relationship between reading even if I say so myself. form of English A Level. I believe it offers
and creative writing on the a great combination of literary approaches
course? Did you find that How well do you think the course as I experienced through my study of The
particularly engaging and if has prepared you for university Great Gatsby and Blake’s Songs while also
so why? What do you think English and why? foregrounding the linguistics that underpin
writing contributed to your all texts, literary, non-literary, spoken and
understandings as a reader? Language and Literature A Level really written. I think the pairing of analytical
does prepare you for any English BA out study and creative writing works incredibly
I found the academic study melded well there. The skills I learnt in studying texts well as both activities develop the other. You
with the creative aspects of the course as have been crucial to the way I analyse become more aware of the creative devices
I was able to gain a greater appreciation texts. It’s fairly straightforward to take a on offer to writers and the most applicable
for small, stylistic choices as they can have literary approach to a text and find points ones to use, whilst also heightening your

14 emagazine February 2018

analytical eye when using reading new texts Sebas Ribas on Unsplash
as you then have a deeper insight into the
mind of an author. Janko Ferlic on Unsplash

What am I doing now? Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

I am hoping to go to university to read
English next September. Although it will
obviously be a challenge, I’m also quietly
confident as my analytical skills have been
developed greatly through this A Level.
Currently I’m also working as a filmmaker
on short films, both fiction and non-fiction,
having transferred my tonal gauge from
text to the visual form. That’s the thing
about this A Level: although it’s rooted in
the written format, the ways to tell a story
that I’ve learnt are universally applicable.
Literary choices can be translated to visual:
plosive to quick cuts, elongated sentences
to isolated framing, unreliable narrators to
visual cutaways (thank you Mr Fitzgerald).
The essence of the course is that what you
learn when studying English can be adapted
to whatever creative endeavours you want
to pursue. That’s what I learned. That’s
what I have loved about it.

Noah Matthews is studying English Language and
Literature A Level at Godalming College and hopes
to study English at university next year.

emag web archive

• Jenniah Brown: From GCSE to Degree
– A Student Perspective, emagazine
69, September 2015

• The Brilliant English Undergrad
Student – What Are We looking For?
emagazine 72, April 2016

• Ed Limb: English at A Level and
University – What emagazine Can Do
For You, emagazine 74, December 2016

February 2018 emagazine 15

Regeneration, 1997. Moviestore collection Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

The internal divisions of

Regeneration’s
Billy Prior

Billy Prior is obsessed with sex, determined to shock and
resolved that everyone around him should dislike him
intensely – including himself. Yet throughout the Regeneration
trilogy he’s even more key to the moral questions that Barker
raises than Sassoon’s ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’. So argues
Charlotte Woolley.

16 emagazine February 2018

James Wilby in Regeneration, 1997. Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

Divisions Personified confirms that Prior volunteered for army returns, Rivers identifies Prior’s mutism as a
service without his approval: reflection of his class:
Regeneration’s Billy Prior is riddled with
internal divisions. His class experiences Time enough to do summat for the Empire when ‘What you tend to get in officers is stammering
place him in both the working class and the Empire’s done summat for you. […] [the physical symptoms] are all common in
middle class. His war experience is also private soldiers and rare in officers. It’s almost as
divided, between service at home and in Mrs Prior’s contrary insistence on gentility if for the […] the labouring classes, illness has to
France, punctuated by his short stay at creates conflict between father and son, be physical.’
the Craiglockhart war hospital for officers and their aspirations for Billy’s future.
suffering from shellshock, which is where Billy’s father calls him ‘neither fish nor Barker’s novel develops the philosophy
he meets Dr William Rivers. Prior is not a fowl’, unable to settle into the traditional of shellshock that soldiers, trapped in
historical character, unlike both Wilfred masculine working-class lifestyle yet trenches without control even over their
Owen and Siegfried Sassoon (whose ‘A not accepted by his social superiors. own movements, develop ways of coping
Soldier’s Declaration’ begins the novel’s Although in the officer class, Prior’s or symptoms that make it impossible for
moral discussion over the cost and process attitudes are a complex combination of them to continue serving. In what Rivers
of war) but his experiences are drawn adopting their mannerisms and attitudes describes as ‘the labouring classes’ (soldiers
from Barker’s extensive research. In an to fit in, and adopting them in order to like Prior), these are physical symptoms that
EMC interview, Barker describes Prior as mock those who look down on him as a prevent them from continuing to fight.
‘designed to elucidate something in Rivers’. ‘temporary gentlemen’.
Through Prior’s constant probing of Rivers’ Victorian psychologist Henry Maudsley
internal conflict over his work, curing men Although Prior is abrasively conscious suggested that women were more likely to
to send them back to war, she explores the of his internal class conflict, the chip on suffer ‘hysteria’ (an early term for many
moral conflicts of World War One and its his shoulder is well-founded. He points mental illnesses), because
effect on a generation of young men. out that while Rivers always used other
officer’s surnames (Sassoon, Owen), he the range of activity of women is so limited,
Conflict of Class and Status was always ‘Mr Prior’, and he angrily and their available paths of work in life so few,
contradicts any suggestion that class is compared with those which men have.
Through their treatment sessions with irrelevant in the army:
Rivers, Barker juxtaposes Prior and Sassoon In The Female Malady, Elaine Showalter
– an upper-class officer. For Prior the deep It’s made perfectly clear when you arrive that develops this idea, concluding that
class divisions of the army heighten the some people are more than others. It helps if historically women’s depression has
tension his background creates. A visit from you’ve been to the right school. It helps if you been driven by
his parents reveals the upbringing that hunt.
has shaped him. Prior’s father is almost a women’s oppressive social roles rather than by
caricature of the working-class man, seeing Psychological Interpretation their bodies or psyches.
physical labour as both his job and that
of his son. Gruff, associating masculinity The psychological impact of these In Regeneration, Pat Barker uses Prior to
with dominance, drinking and violence, he conflicts is explored through physical interrogate the differences between pre-war
manifestations of class difference. Prior women and the soldiers trapped in France.
arrives at Craiglockhart mute and unable to The soldiers are powerless, at the mercy of
remember his experiences. After his voice the Germans on the other side of No Man’s
Land but equally beholden to the generals

February 2018 emagazine 17

far behind the lines orchestrating each deliberately flirting with Rivers as a way alongside Wilfred Owen. He comments
movement and battle. In contrast, women to provoke and challenge his authority with dark irony:
like Prior’s girlfriend Sarah found their as well as to deflect discussion from
horizons expanding. Prior thinks when he uncomfortable subjects. We are Craiglockhart’s success stories […] We
meets her that women don’t remember, we don’t think, we don’t feel
Prior’s relationship with Sarah Lumb is […] By any proper civilised standard […] we are
seemed to have changed so much during the war, equally ambivalent. Walking with her on objects of horror.
to have expanded in all kinds of ways, whereas the beach front he feels ‘callous towards
men over the same period had shrunk into a her’ and is ‘determined to get her’, implying Prior and Owen are killed a week before
smaller and smaller space. that possession and control of her are a kind Armistice Day. The horror and futility
of retaliation against civilians who can’t of their deaths is juxtaposed with the
For Sarah, munitions work is well-paid understand his experiences. Yet just a page impression that, for Prior, this is the only
and offers her significant independence far later, there is a surprising combination of possible ending to the conflicts that the war
removed from the life of service she was passion, tenderness, and sensuality in the has deepened in him. Although engaged to
destined for before the war. description of their first lovemaking: Sarah, it’s impossible to imagine him having
any future ordinary life. Troubled already
Rivers’ treatments regularly explore the Through the thickness in his throat, he said, ‘I’m by his struggles with class and sexuality,
‘division’ his patients experience. Of all the not pushing, but if you wanted to, I’d make sure it the war has sharpened his sense of injustice
trilogy’s characters, Prior’s internal division was all right.’ [...] his nostrils filled with the scent and anger. In Prior, Barker represents those
is the most profound, resulting in an ‘alter- of rock pools at low tide. He slipped his hands soldiers who came back, but never really
ego’ appearing in The Eye in the Door. His underneath her, and lifted her, until her whole succeeded in leaving the war behind, and
other persona seems to have all Billy’s inner pelvis became a cup from which he drank. the generation of young men sacrificed
strength and none of his moral conscience. to a war that originally seemed just, but
Attending a therapy session, Rivers sees Prior appears to fall in love with Sarah, transformed into a bloody mechanised
Prior in his alternative form as finding emotional and sexual comfort. conflict on an unimaginable scale.
However, in another symptom of his
quite different, suddenly: keen, alert, cold, internal divisions she is kept separate from Charlotte Woolley teaches A Level English
observant, detached, manipulative, ruthless. much of his life, a safe haven to which he Literature at Skipton Girls’ High School, and
can retreat or a symbol of the life he could regularly blogs about literature at
While in this alternative state he have had if the war had not interfered. www.charlotteunsworth.com
investigates and betrays conscientious
objectors, working-class people he has The Only Possible End emag web archive
been best friends with since childhood.
Through hypnosis, he and Rivers discover In Rivers’ treatment of all his patients, • Ros Fraser: Internal Division
that the ‘alternative personality’ is a way Barker addresses a fundamental conflict: in Regeneration, emagplus for
Prior has previously coped with his parents’ when a doctor works for the army, the emagazine 40, April 2008
violent marriage, enabling him to block out responsibility is no longer to the patient but
traumatic memories. The other personality to the state, to enable the patient to recover • Priscilla McClay: History and Fiction
resurfaces in France when he is injured and well enough to be sent back to the front. – Regeneration and Birdsong, emagazine
trapped in a shell hole overnight. By the end of Regeneration, Prior’s mutism 49, September 2010
has been cured. Rivers visits another doctor,
Sex – Comfort, Weapon, Shock treating a patient (Callan) with mutism • Dr Paul Norgate: Who’s Who?
by applying electrodes to his tongue. Billy Prior and Wilfred Owen
Barker’s characters also struggle with issues Rivers connects Callan, Sassoon, and Prior. in Regeneration, emagazine 65,
of sexuality and Prior is no exception. Sassoon returns to the front; although September 2014.
Rivers says to Sassoon that the war has he refuses to rescind the Declaration he
developed concerns about the differences knows he can only continue to protest • Mike Peters: World War 1 in
between comradeship and romantic feeling: through his poetry. For Prior and Callan, Contemporary Novels, emagazine
losing their voices was the only method of 74, December 2016
[there is] this enormous emphasis on love protesting against the war: by getting them
between men – comradeship – and everybody to speak again, Yealland and Rivers have emagClips
approves. But at the same time there’s always this silenced them.
little niggle of anxiety. Is it the right kind of love? • Professor John Mullan on Key
By the end of the trilogy, Prior has Aspects of Narrative
Contrasting Rivers’ implicit asexuality and returned to active service in France, serving
Sassoon’s matter-of-fact homosexuality,
Prior’s sexuality is overt and often
manipulative. He uses sex as a weapon,

18 emagazine February 2018

Public Domain and The
American
Dream

February 2018 emagazine 19

Public Domain

20 emagazine February 2018

A View from the Bridge. Geraint Lewis/Alamy Stock Photo

Reading A View from the Bridge and Death of a Salesman through a Marxist
lens shows us not only how Miller questions the American Dream, suggests
Dr Kurt A. Johnson, but also how he exposes the tragic commercialisation of
human relationships in a capitalist system.

Marco: Sardines. Why does Miller make Eddie a longshoreman fuse for Eddie’s tragedy; that, even before the
off-loading (and stealing) these imported play ever begins, trap Eddie in his tragic fate:
Eddie: Sure. (Laughing.) How you gonna goods – and not, say, a postman, like my being the everyday, blue-collar worker whose
grandfather who humped the streets of a terrible destiny is fixed by his impoverished
catch sardines on a hook? Red Hook-like neighbourhood back in Philly economic circumstances.
during the 1950s? Why does Miller make
Beatrice: Oh, I didn’t know they’re Marco and Roldolpho’s primary employment In this way, Miller reveals the real tragedy for
as fishermen who traverse the Adriatic and ‘sardines’ like Eddie: not so much that they
sardines. (To Catherine.) They’re Mediterranean Seas – from the coasts of Sicily, cannot achieve the American Dream, but
to what is now Croatia and Tunisia? Why is that the American Dream was never there for
sardines! Catherine’s first impulse, after Eddie agrees them to achieve in the first place.
to the stenographer job at the plumbing
Catherine: Yeah, they follow company, to buy a new rug and table cloth Miller and Marxism
for the house?
them all over the ocean, Africa, Miller grew up in an initially well-to-do
In short, why does Miller spend significant German-Jewish household in New York
Yugoslavia... (She sits and begins stage time and dialogue on seemingly trivial City during the 1910s and 20s; however,
matters that appear to do little to drive the his family lost their business during The
to look through a movie magazine. tragic plot or the prominent conflicts forward? Great Depression and Miller grew to know
the hard-luck poverty most working-class
Rodolpho joins her.) The realisation came suddenly: wrapped in Americans experienced at the time. During
these scenes of placid, mundane domesticity the 1940s and 1950s, Miller began to
Beatrice (to Eddie): It’s funny, y’know. You were the hallmark references to capital, sympathise with Communist critiques of
commodities and modes of production – the capitalism; this was dangerous given that, at
never think of it, that sardines are base machinations of Marxist theory. These the time, anti-Communist sentiment in the
things that Miller fills his play with are all US was at a fever pitch. In 1956, the infamous
swimming in the ocean! (She exits to the material goods of a capitalist system anti-Communist senator Joseph McCarthy
that compel Marco and Rodolpho to leave a brought Miller in front of the House Un-
kitchen with dishes.) war-torn and economically-stagnant Italy to American Activities Committee requiring him
seek the American Dream in the States; that to condemn Communism and its supporters
‘Sir’, one student asked aloud in the middle of compel Catherine to seek not just sexual but in the theatrical trade. Miller refused. As a
reading A View from the Bridge, ‘why is Miller financial independence, thereby igniting the result, he was held in contempt of court and
banging on about sardines?’ My student’s
question suggested exasperation, but buried
within her voice was genuine inquiry. I
had, after all, been teaching my students all
year that writers use language purposefully;
everything means something.

So, it was with some embarrassment that I
responded, ‘Huh, well...I don’t really know.’
But her question burned in my mind: why
does Miller bang on about sardines? And
coffee? And bananas? And oranges and
lemons? And whiskey?

February 2018 emagazine 21

Antony Sher as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, A Royal Shakespeare Company Production directed by Gregory Doran. Geraint Lewis/Alamy Stock Photo

22 emagazine February 2018

his passport was rescinded. Miller would Willy spend most of the play residing in the sporting goods that allow for the otherwise
allegorise this Communist ‘witch hunt’ – intangible realm of memory. wholesome fatherly interaction of playing
which largely defined the Cold War period of football to take place. By acquiescing in
geopolitical intrigue and mistrust between the Interestingly, even ironically, we never the theft, Willy not only taints his paternal
US and Soviet Union – in his play The Crucible. know exactly what Willy sells, because in relationship with Biff, but ultimately teaches
(Incidentally, this was the very play whose the end what he ultimately sells is himself him that material goods are more important
opening he was unable to attend in Belgium – his own life (and for a measly $20,000 in than knowledge, laws and even people.
because of his passport revocation.) life insurance at that). That was the market
value for a man of Willy’s socioeconomic In the same scene, Willy pushes Happy
Given his personal connections with standing. By giving up his life for the material aside – despite Happy’s incessant attention-
Communism, Miller’s plays are ripe pickings benefit of his family, Willy’s death symbolises seeking interjections – in favour of Biff’s
for a Marxist interpretation. the moral void which forms the centre of (mythologised and morally-compromised)
a consumerism-crazed American society. sportsmanship. This emotional rejection is
As a literary theory, Marxism asks the reader The death of the salesman is not only the one Happy channels into womanising in
to critique the economic circumstances that death of the American Dream – because, later life, relegating women to mere sexual
bear influence on the characters, the narrative as Charlie and Happy put it, the dream is commodities. Happy laments this to Biff – he
and the general production of the text. It asks all the salesperson has – but the death of a dreams of a steady and loving relationship
us to question the capitalist system and why moral society that values human life and with a woman – but the fact that he can, like
it disadvantages or favours the characters. dignity above conspicuous consumption and Ben, go into the jungle and come out rich
It asks us to consider the exploitative and/ commodification. when it comes to sexual relationships is a
or exploiting labour conditions in which our form of emotional capital from which Happy
protagonist(s) may work. Marxism is not just Thus, Miller’s use of material goods – cannot divest himself.
about those with and those without, but also from sardines to footballs, rugs to Chevys
about the systems – and ideas – that are put – highlights the ways in which he sees The ideology of the American Dream is
into place that entrench economic disparity. individuals becoming commodities to be enough in this instance not only to destroy
exchanged and traded to the impairment not a life, but to destroy the entire humanity of
Miller, Willy and The American only of the individuals themselves, but also the Loman family.
Dream the very familial foundations that serve as the
bedrock of society. In the vast economic oceans of capitalism,
In Death of Salesman, Miller explores the Miller makes the reader realise the extent
exploitative ideology of capitalism through Death of Salesman – The to which there are only so many sharks; the
the American Dream. With its roots in the Commodification of the rest of us are just sardines swimming around
Declaration of Independence’s revolutionary Individual unknowingly. And just as many people don’t
statement that ‘All men are created equal’ think about sardines swimming in the ocean,
who have a right to ‘life, liberty and the Willy’s notion of the American Dream is many people don’t think about the untold
pursuit of happiness’, the American Dream, based on flawed superficiality, investing poor struggling to make it in an economic
simply stated, is the cultural belief that in the physical materialism of ‘personal system designed to make them lose … and
any American, regardless of ethnicity or attractiveness’ rather than intellectual rigour lose everything.
socioeconomic status, can be (materially) (Bernard) or honest labour (Biff’s ranch
successful if they work hard enough. work out West). Willy constantly equates Dr Kurt A. Johnson is Head of English at Hill House
other people’s ‘love’ for him with his material School in Doncaster.
Miller uses ideas about the American success, indelibly tying human emotion to
Dream to critique the economic reality of capital gain. That Willy’s older brother Ben emag web archive
his characters, showing how economic embodies the personal magnetism of the
circumstances fuel the play’s larger tragedies. American Dream – • Tony Coult: The Salesman Lives –
As a salesman, Willy travels around the Arthur Miller’s Product Placement,
country to sell products, investing his Why, boys, when I was seventeen I walked into emagazine 17 September 2002
labour to create within those products a jungle and when I was twenty-one I walked out
sense of desirability, all at the expense of […] and by God I was rich! • Tony Cavender: Love for Sale:
his relationship with his family. He is an Death of a Salesman, emagazine
illusionist who must use his powers of only further strengthens the appeal of the 53, September 2011
persuasion to make people see potential and American Dream for Willy, despite the falsely
necessity that may not be there – to, as Miller fabular nature of Ben’s tale, along with its • David Lister: Death of a
said, peddle the ‘bullshit’, ‘pseudo life’ idea gross impracticality as a sustainable and fair Salesman – Country and City,
that one could ‘touch the clouds by standing economic model for working people. emagazine 40, April 2008
on top of a refrigerator’. Quite literally, Willy’s
labour has no material substance. It is not But most depressing of all is the extent • Tony Cavender: ‘All Kinds
real. This lack of substance serves as the crux to which Willy bequeaths this ideology a Greatness’ – Tragedy and
of Willy’s existential crisis: if a person’s labour of human commodification to his sons. Death of a Salesman, emagazine
is worthless, then the person must also be This mentality frames many of his fatherly 70, December 2015
worthless. Willy’s worth is only as material interactions with the boys, (presented in
as his dreams, suggesting why Miller has flashbacks). In Act I, Willy lauds Biff for • Francis Gilbert: Arthur Miller – A
his sporting prowess, thereby forgiving his Life’s Work, emagazine 29, April 2006
criminality in stealing the very material
• Carol Atherton: Exploring King Lear
and A View from the Bridge, emagplus
for emagazine 42, December 2008

February 2018 emagazine 23

A ROOM

– and a Narrator –

WITH A VIEW

Maya Little’s account of the narrative voice in
E.M. Forster’s novel draws attention to both its
variety and subtlety, showing how the narrator
is anything but a detached information-giver, but
instead plays a key role in shaping our views on
the characters and events.

24 emagazine February 2018

Many novels use a detached narrator Authorial Intrusion
whom we trust implicitly, but in A Room
With a View, the narrative voice is not so The most obvious of these is when the
impersonal. This is crucial in forming the narrator addresses the reader directly:
social comedy of the novel. It also allows
the reader access to Lucy’s feelings, whilst It is obvious enough for the reader to conclude,
never being caught in her ‘muddles’, the ‘She loves young Emerson.’ A reader in Lucy’s
narrator always rescuing us before we place would not find it obvious. Life is easy to
become stuck in any one character’s mind. chronicle, but bewildering to practice […] She
loved Cecil; George made her nervous; will the
In simple terms, the narrator of A Room reader explain to her that the phrases should have
with A View is third person, and omniscient. been reversed?
What this categorisation ignores, however,
is that whilst Forster’s narrator is indeed This authorial intrusion is a perfect instance
all knowing, this does not make them of Forster using the detached nature of
impartial. It also ignores the moments in his omniscient voice to create a clearer
the novel where we feel the presence of this overview of the characters’ relationships
narrator, not simply as someone who relates in the novel. It is not ‘obvious’ to Lucy
information, but as a voice with its own that she loves George, but the reader can
opinions and motivations. still know this fact because the narrative
voice is separated here from the voices of
E.M. Forster by Dora_Carrington, 1924-25[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons the characters and thus can give us these
emotional insights. The direct references
to the ‘reader’ seem to acknowledge that
the novel is a fiction, but the phrase ‘will
the reader explain to her that the phrases
should have been reversed?’ is a question
which invites dialogue between the reader
and the characters, with the narrator
straddling our reality and that of the novel,
bringing us closer together. For example,
‘Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to
practice’ acts as a reminder that the reader
is supposed to view Lucy as someone who
is practising life, rather than simply an
artefact being written about, thus evoking

Domenico Loia on Unsplash

February 2018 emagazine 25

our sympathy for Lucy’s mistakes as we are the narrator, a mid-sentence shift in
reminded of our own bewilderments. perspective, then perhaps this narrator is
suggesting that Lucy has to ‘strive’ to feel
This passage also forces the reader’s the correct way – to unnaturally change
attention onto the narrator themselves; her feelings to keep in line with the polite
able to ask questions of us, their presence sentiments demanded by her society. If
becomes more substantial as they act as so, Forster’s use of an omniscient narrator
Lucy’s sympathetic chronicler. This is allows him to clarify Lucy’s feelings, but
something that separates the voice of the also, by allowing us to view Lucy’s muddle
narrator from Forster; Forster is writing a from the outside, to hint at a social message:
fiction. The narrator is telling a truth. that Edwardian society was restricting
people’s access to their emotions, leaving
How Lucy’s ‘Muddle’ is them unsure of what they actually felt, and
Handled which of their feelings they had shaped in
order to conform with the conventions of
Lucy’s ‘bewildering’ life is often represented their social class.
in the novel by her ‘muddle’, and the
handling of the ‘muddle’ through the More Than One Voice – Free
narrative voice is significant. The narrator’s Indirect Discourse
omniscience means that Forster can both let
Lucy’s thoughts and feelings bleed in to the As well as weaving his own opinions
narrative, and withdraw from this ‘muddle’ into the narrative voice, Forster also, at
in order to offer clarity for the reader. times, weaves in the voices of the novel’s
characters by employing a technique called
This technique is present in the words free indirect discourse. Free indirect
discourse is when a character speaks, but
Charlotte’s energy! And her unselfishness! [...] so without the usual indicators of speech (‘she
Lucy felt, or strove to feel. said’/’he said’ or speech marks). This means
that the characters words are essentially
Here, the first two exclamatory sentences blended with the narrative voice, as in the
are clearly Lucy’s thoughts, as reported to following passage:
us by the narrator, but the latter part of the
sentence is more ambiguous. ‘So Lucy felt’ Miss Bartlett was, after all, a wee bit tired, and
seems to be a continuation of the thought, thought they had better spend the morning
but ‘or strove to feel’ is a contradiction. settling in; unless Lucy would at all like to go out?
If this is still part of Lucy’s thoughts, the Lucy would rather like to go out, as it was her
contradiction highlights her constant first day in Florence, but, of course, she could go
confusion about what she truly feels. alone. Miss Bartlett could not allow this. Of course
she would accompany Lucy everywhere. Oh,
If, instead, the phrase ‘So Lucy felt, or certainly not; Lucy would stop with her cousin.
strove to feel’ is seen as a comment by Oh, no! that would never do. Oh, yes!

The backwards-forwards rhythm of this
section seems to reflect the constant
restriction of freedom that Miss Bartlett

26 emagazine February 2018

imposes on Lucy – yet another instance of a lulling rhythm, with the long sentence emag web archive
Forster manipulating the narrative voice emphasising the profusion of flowers. Lucy
to best point out the failings in his society; and George kiss – a heightened moment • Mike Peters: Reading A Room with a
both Lucy and Miss Bartlett fail to express which the narrator has described in a highly View as a Modern Novel, emagazine
a definite opinion in this exchange, using poetic style. And then – 70, December 2015
hedging devices to weaken their suggestions
at first (‘wee bit’, and ‘rather like’ are two The silence of life had been broken by Miss • Bridget Tiller: A Room With a
examples) and then quickly switching Bartlett, who stood brown against the view. View – A New Religion? emagazine
sides, with Miss Bartlett declaring a firm 75, February 2017
‘Oh no!’ in response to Lucy essentially This ends the chapter abruptly, ‘brown
agreeing to do what Miss Bartlett had against the view’ a startling change in
wanted. The insincerity of what is said tone from the enclosed world of beauty in
is thus brought to the forefront, and the which George and Lucy had just a sentence
expressions of everyday speech, like ‘of earlier been kissing. This change of tone
course’, and ‘a wee bit’, seem pointlessly has several effects on the reader: coming
indirect when quoted outside of the context just before the end of the chapter, it leaves
of conversation. It also heightens the social us as disorientated as Lucy; coming just
comedy; rather than each person’s speech after her kiss, it immediately de-escalates
being clearly defined, they flow on from the romance, leaving us uncertain as
each other, giving Lucy and Miss Bartlett’s to whether that moment ought to have
conversation a flustered, jumbled tone. happened; it is also comic – Miss Bartlett is
Thus, by employing different aspects of the dull, incongruous ‘brown’, and stands
narrative voice for different conversations ridiculously small against the expansive,
(free indirect discourse here, direct overwhelming ‘view’ that has just been
speech when old Mr Emerson speaks, for described to us. This ability to vary tone
example), Forster’s narrator influences so quickly for effect is an important part
the reader’s perception of the sincerity of of Forster’s narrative voice. The narrator is
different conversations. not only directing the reader’s opinions of
the characters through the content of what
The Narrator’s Tone – is said and unsaid, but through the very
Contrasts and Comedy style of writing they choose to use when
talking about them.

Not every student will think ‘comedy’ The narrator’s voice is a manipulated one.
when they think of A Room With a View. It’s It is sometimes Forster’s voice, sometimes
unlikely to leave one helpless with giggles Lucy’s, but never simply a conveyor of
on the train, but there is something lastingly information. It is not consistent, but instead,
comic about the line it is constantly adapted to the situation.
Thus, the narrator seems to be a kind of
Miss Bartlett […] stood brown against the view. shadow character, roaming through the
story that Forster has created, and every
It’s the contrast that brings the comedy. now and then, catching our eye.
Throughout the novel, Forster skilfully
manipulates the narrator’s tone between Maya Little is an English undergraduate student,
poetic and blunt styles of writing, and now in her first year at Mansfield College,
this is another way in which the narrative Oxford. She wrote this soon after completing her
voice is able to take on an opinion about A Level studies.
the matter of the story. In this particular
chapter, there’s the melodic description
of the violets, which ‘ran down in
rivulets and streams and cataracts’. Here,
Forster uses the repeated ‘and’ to create

Domenico Loia on Unsplash

February 2018 emagazine 27

To just listen in on

British chit chat

Spoken British National Corpus 2014

Robbie Love explains on examples of writing and not speech. Our innovative method for collecting
what the BNC2014 Transcripts of spoken interactions are rare. recordings reflects how heavily we use
is and how the data technology in all of our lives. We wanted
was collected. He Enter the Spoken British National Corpus people to make recordings wherever and
offers one fascinating 2014 – 11.5 million words of informal whenever was convenient to them by
example – the split British English chit chat collected between using whatever recording equipment they
infinitive – to show 2012 and 2016, and fully transcribed for had available – usually smartphones, and
how the corpus can be the benefit of linguists, educators and, of sometimes tablets or laptops. We found that
compared with that of course, students. this produced excellent results. We received
the 1990s to look at the recordings made in a wide range of settings
realities of how we are What is BNC2014? – at home, in cafes, in pubs and bars, during
‘actually’ speaking. journeys and on holiday. We also gathered a
We at Lancaster University and Cambridge hugely eclectic range of topics – some of the
Every day, billions of words are uttered University Press have worked together for most common include food, family, work,
in hundreds of languages all over the several years to gather this huge corpus TV and relationships.
world. For corpus linguists – that is, people (a corpus – plural corpora – is simply the
who study the form, use and function name for a large collection of language). Nearly 700 speakers were recorded in more
of language using specialised computer It is the largest and most comprehensive than 1,200 conversations which, after being
software – speech is like the golden snitch modern collection of British English speech transcribed, equate to more than eleven
in a game of Quidditch. It appears to ever released to the public. To achieve million words of text.
be everywhere around you and yet it is this, we encouraged contributors from
incredibly difficult to capture. The reason is all over the UK to record their normal, Descriptivists and
very simple – examples of writing, especially everyday conversations with friends and Prescriptivists
those found online, are already committed family and send them to us. We then
(or can be easily converted) to a format listened to, transcribed and anonymised There is a diverse range of opinion
that can be read on a computer screen. these recordings so they could be collated about language change and variation.
These include e-books, online news articles, into one big corpus. The finished corpus It can be characterised very simply as
Tweets, blog posts, play scripts and such was recently made freely available for a divide between ‘descriptivists’ and
like. On the other hand, speech is rarely researchers, academics and teachers to use ‘prescriptivists’. Descriptivists accept
captured in a permanent form – especially in their studies and teaching. changes in language and seek to observe
private conversations among family and and understand them. They may speak
friends. Words are uttered and then they We aimed to capture a wide representation of ‘rules’, but only when based on
disappear, leaving no trace. The result of the UK today – the way people talk and, evidence from actual language use.
is that linguistic research is often based importantly, how people talk about all kinds Prescriptivists make value judgements
of topics – this means we had to gather about aspects of language – positive and
recordings from people of different regions, negative – and therefore believe that
ages and backgrounds, who spoke in a certain aspects of language ought to
range of accents and dialects about a wide remain unchanged. The ‘rules’ that they
variety of things. speak of are often based on what they
believe to be right or wrong.

28 emagazine February 2018

© Linda Combi

February 2018 emagazine 29

Are We Following Prescriptive In the 1990s corpus, the most frequent split What is certain is that the split infinitive
Rules? infinitives are: is a common feature of present-day
to actually say conversational British English. Insights
With the corpus finished, we can now start to just go about this and other grammatical
to investigate all sorts of questions about the to just sit features are very useful – we can help
nature of spoken British English, comparing to really do learners of English by teaching them the
present-day speech to that of the 1990s. We to really get features of English they are most likely
can do this because a very similar collection to routinely encounter in conversation.
of British English conversations was made In the 2010s corpus, the most And the split infinitive can take its rightful
in the early 1990s – the spoken part of the frequent ones are: place among them.
original British National Corpus – so we to just go
can see how informal chit chat may have Robbie Love wrote this article when he was a PhD
changed over the last two decades. Research Student at the University of Lancaster,
working with the Department of Linguistics and
One question we can ask of the data to just be English Language.
is whether the ‘rules’ laid out by
prescriptivists actually carry weight in to just do Finding Out More
casual spoken discourse. In English, a good
example is the split infinitive. This happens to just have You can find out more about the
when one or more words, usually with BNC2014, which is funded in part by the
adverbial function, come in between the to just get Economic and Social Research Council,
word ‘to’ and the infinitive form of a verb. by visiting the project website: http://
Examples include: Interestingly, the most common split corpora.lancs.ac.uk/bnc2014/
infinitives in the 2010s are split by the
to boldly go where no one has gone before adverb ‘just’. In total, the ‘just’ infinitive To get in touch, email Robbie Love:
Star Trek accounts for 28% of all split infinitives in [email protected]
the 2010s corpus, compared to 25% of @lovermob
so they’re going to actually buy the desserts from the 1990s split infinitives. Conversely, the @BNC_2014
the college ‘actually’ infinitive has fallen from 17%
of the 1990s split infinitives to just 11% Coming in April
1990s corpus of the 2010s ones. It seems that the ‘just’
infinitive is holding its ground as a resilient How to do your own investigation
you might want to kind of make sure that they’re split infinitive. This is largely responsible using corpus data.
highlighted for its rise: the word ‘just’ alone has almost
doubled from 3,926 instances per million in
2010s corpus the 1990s to 7,484 per million in the 2010s.

Some people regard splitting the infinitive
as a grammatical error – something which
should be avoided at all costs. In each of
these examples, the underlined adverb
would have to occur anywhere but in
between the ‘to’ and the verb.

The question is: are British English speakers © Linda Combi emag web archive
paying any attention to this rule? Well,
the evidence suggests not. In fact, they • Professor Paul Baker: Using a Corpus
appear to be paying much less attention to Analyse Gender and Language,
to it now than they were in the 1990s. In emagazine 75, February 2017
the 1990s corpus, the split infinitive occurs
47.06 times per million words. (In corpus • Gill Francis: Language Change and
linguistics, frequency is often presented as Corpus Data – A Super-Mega-Free-
occurrence-per-million. This allows us to For-All? emagazine 62, December 2013
compare how often a word occurs across
corpora of different sizes.) But in the 2010s • Coming in April 2018: Using a Corpus
corpus, it occurs 189.27 times per million – to Investigate Language – A Guide to
that is, four times as frequently. Getting Started

The Resilience of the Just emagClips
Infinitive
• Elena Semino on Stylistics includes
What might have caused this large discussion of corpus data
increase? It is hard to say, but the most
frequent forms of the split infinitives might
provide a clue.

30 emagazine February 2018

Flaticon

The Importance of Small Things

Style in The Namesake

George Norton offers three ways of thinking about the language and style
of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, each of which makes one realise that her ‘lack of
stylisation’ in no way implies a lack of style and that the small shifts in the
writing perfectly match the subtle changes in identity of the main characters.

I’ve always found writing about language renounced the writerly flourish, never once played the characters. Although Gogol’s viewpoint
and style in prose fiction a difficult thing. the exotic and […] scaled her characters to actual dominates, different parts of the book are
Poetry is so much easier. By their very human existence narrated from the point of view of Ashima,
nature, poems use more concentrated Moushumi, and, in key passages in the first
language, more foregrounding, more while the Guardian’s reviewer noted two chapters, Ashoke. These shifts between
metaphors and complex images; because that the novel’s omniscience and restriction enable Lahiri to
the writer’s craft is more obviously on create a subtle set of ironies. For example,
display, there are more things to write guileless vocabulary and an appealing lack of the scene in which Ashoke presents Gogol
about. With prose fiction – especially in the stylisation [conjured] a bleak, arm’s-length mood, with the book of his namesake’s short
realist mode, with apparently ‘transparent’ a sense of a life spooling inevitably on. stories is narrated largely from Gogol’s
language – what, I’ve often asked myself, is perspective; the verbs of perception and
there to discuss? So, is the sort of formal analysis, so beloved cognition give us his point of view:
of A Level examiners, impossible for this
The problem of how to talk about the text? I want to offer three ways of tackling Gogol is especially surprised to see a gift in his
ways in which meaning is shaped is one the language and style of The Namesake father’s hands.
which immediately confronts students of which will, I hope, enable us to answer that
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. The realism question in the negative. But then the omniscient voice gives us this
of its characters and settings and the key piece of information:
clarity of Lahiri’s undemonstrative prose Complex Shifts of Focalisation
were recognised by many of the novel’s He has never been told why he was really named
first critics. ‘She writes with journalistic Let’s begin with The Namesake’s deceptively Gogol, doesn’t know about the accident that
precision,’ enthused the Daily Telegraph; the simple narrative style. Lahiri moves nearly killed his father.
New York Times was pleased that Lahiri between an unintrusive omniscient
narration and a technique called The reader knows about Ashoke’s accident
focalisation where the action is narrated – it’s narrated analeptically in the opening
from the restricted perspective of one of chapter – but knowing what Gogol doesn’t

February 2018 emagazine 31

Irfan Khan ,Tabu, Sahira Nair & Kal Penn in The Namesake
(2006). AF archive / Alamy Stock

know informs our response to his almost marked off as direct speech, the voice of Lahiri is scrupulous in obeying this rule. Her
dismissive receipt of the book, making the character takes over from the narrator, symbols are everyday objects (shoes, food,
his ingratitude more understandable, and bringing us closer to that character’s clothes) which create important meanings
increasing our appreciation for his father’s consciousness). As one of the novel’s most without seeming contrived. One such object
stoic sensitivity when he decides ‘to keep perceptive critics, Judith Caesar, has noted, is the mailbox. The Gangulis’ mailbox is
the explanation of his son’s name to despite the shifts in viewpoint, mentioned for the first time when they
himself’ because his ‘birthday is a day to move to Pemberton Road:
honor life not brushes with death.’ we almost never know what the characters are
thinking, about who they are to themselves as The Gangulis, apart from the name on their
Another interesting shift in viewpoint they experience the rush of sounds and sensations mailbox […] appear no different from their
occurs in Chapter 10 when Moushumi that are their lives. neighbours.’ The mailbox is both a signifier of
becomes the focal character. This change in their assimilation into American suburbia
perspective is partly pragmatic – the chapter We never learn, for example, how Gogol (everybody has one) but also of their otherness
deals principally with Moushumi’s affair feels about his separation from Maxine and because their name denotes their ethnic
with Dimitri of which Gogol is painfully know only a little more about his reaction difference. A few pages on, the mailbox is
ignorant – but it also enables Lahiri to to Moushumi’s betrayal. Caesar argues that vandalised, the name ‘shortened to GANG, with
develop the ideas of names and naming. such absences signify the word GREEN scrawled in pencil following it.
The word ‘Gogol’ appears only twice in the
chapter, once in relation to Gogol’s change the ways in which essential identity […] is beyond Gogol is ‘sickened, certain of the insult his
of name and once as part of a neutral the power of words to describe. We can only father will feel’, but Ashoke is ‘unaffected’,
speech tag. This shows us that Moushumi know the surface. and replaces the letters that evening.
thinks of her husband only as ‘Nikhil’; his This is the only explicit example in the
Gogol-ness is, for her, firmly in the past. The Symbolism of Everyday novel of racial prejudice; as the episode is
But the strategic near-absence of the word Objects narrated from Gogol’s half-comprehending
from the chapter foregrounds its presence in perspective, Lahiri allows the reader to
the rest of the text. Because Gogol is always A second aspect of Lahiri’s style is her infer that although Ashoke tries to protect
referred to as Gogol, even after he changes intricate use of symbolism, especially the his son from the realities of racism, they
his name, Lahiri suggests that he cannot symbolism of everyday objects. David Lodge are impossible to escape. Later, when
wholly escape who he is; the overcoat of has noted that en route to vacation in New Hampshire,
Nikhil-ness cannot entirely eliminate his Gogol introduces Maxine to his parents,
earlier identity. the novelist should make his spade a spade before Lahiri reminds the reader of the mailbox
he makes it a symbol. by having Gogol park next to it. The
Absence of Free Indirect Style significance of this becomes apparent
This, he says, is especially important for when Gogol and Maxine arrive at the
For a novel that uses so much focalisation, writers (like Lahiri) who are Ratliffs’ holiday home:
it’s interesting that there is very little free
indirect style (where, without being aiming to create anything like the ‘illusion of life’. There is nothing to mark where they turned, no
If the spade is introduced all too obviously just mailbox or sign.
for the sake of its symbolic meaning, it will tend
to undermine the credibility of the narrative as
human action.

32 emagazine February 2018

Complacently assured of their identities and unappreciated link to his family heritage, the aspects of meaning-making discussed
place in the world (Maxine, Gogol realises, he’s listening to an album which is literally here are subtle and undemonstrative. This
‘has never wished she were anyone other white, connecting him to a set of Western is not to suggest that The Namesake isn’t
than herself’), the Ratliffs have no need of cultural practices and values (although a political novel but rather to argue that
the signifying security of a mailbox; for the ironically many of the songs on the record Jhumpa Lahiri shows us that the immigrant
Gangulis, an immigrant family whose social were written while the Beatles were on a identity is constructed by small shifts in
position is far more unstable, the mailbox rather ill-fated retreat in India, so Gogol personal and familial relationships, and that
becomes a symbol of their tentative claim to isn’t separating himself from his Indian the nuanced and understated aspects of
their ‘small patch of America’. Once Gogol culture as much as he’d like to think). her style discussed here – small alterations
has moved into the Ratliffs’ house, a ‘willing The choice of the White Album rather than of narrative viewpoint, the symbolism of
exile from his own life’, the ‘metal box’ at another of the Beatles’ 13 studio albums everyday objects, the significance of pop
his own apartment from which he collects also connects to the novel’s key motif cultural references – function almost as a
his mail becomes his only connection with of ‘good’ and ‘pet’ names. Although the metaphor for that incrementally evolving
his old life; it is, significantly, ‘nameless’, White Album is what the record is usually dynamic. If, as Arundhati Roy puts it in The
the person to whom that mail is sent is called because of its simple white sleeve God of Small Things, Great Stories are
ceasing to exist. design, its ‘real’ name is The Beatles, the pet
name becoming, like Gogol’s own, a good the ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit
Popular Cultural References name. Later, in the short chapter describing comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills
Gogol’s solitary activities in New York when and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with
A novel with a protagonist named after a he believes Moushumi to be away at a the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house
famous Russian writer is bound to contain conference, he listens to the Beatles’ Abbey you live in
significant intertextual references to Road which contains their final recordings
canonical literary texts; indeed many of the and includes a song called ‘The End’, a then surely The Namesake qualifies as a
scholarly accounts of the novel have focused clear indication to the reader that Gogol’s Great Story and one that richly repays
on the relationships between Lahiri’s text marriage is doomed. Lahiri’s pop cultural attention given to the ways in which it
and Nikolai Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’. I want references almost invariably do more than shapes its meanings.
to focus on Lahiri’s use of popular cultural locate the narrative in a certain social
references because it exemplifies further the moment; they contribute to the novel’s George Norton teaches English at Paston Sixth
ordinariness of her style. I’m about a year ideas and themes just as powerfully as her Form College in North Norfolk.
older than Gogol (born August 1968) and more conventional literary intertexts.
recognise how acutely Lahiri skewers the Author’s Note
pretentious cultural interests of the 1980s The Unremarkable Details of
middle-class teenager (I never grew a goatee Ordinary Life I should probably say this at the end of
but, like Gogol, I listened to Charlie Parker every article I write but this one really
and Elvis Costello, and read Nietzsche). Unlike other postcolonial novels dealing couldn’t have existed without the insights
with the immigrant experience (Mohsin of my students at Paston, especially
She does especially clever things with Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Kiran Charlie Williams-Burchell and Sarah
Gogol’s Beatles obsession. In the scene Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, Salman Rigby, my fellow Beatlemaniac, who
discussed earlier dealing with Ashoke’s Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses to name only came up with those brilliant ideas about
present, Gogol is listening to the Beatles’ a few), The Namesake eschews grander the White Album.
White Album, specifically to side three of geo-political concerns and focuses instead
the double LP which includes a track called on the unremarkable details of ordinary
‘Birthday’. Its choice isn’t accidental. At the life. It is appropriate then that many of
moment when Ashoke is offering Gogol the

emag web archive

• George Norton: The Immigrant
Experience – Key Concepts and Terms,
emagazine 74, December 2016

• George Norton: Imaginary Homelands
– The Reluctant Fundamentalist
and Other Contemporary Novels,
emagazine 69, September 2015

Flaticon emagClips

• Dr Priya Gopal on
Postcolonial Literature

February 2018 emagazine 33

KEEPING

The Silence
of Gertrude
in Hamlet

Clare Gunns questions
readings of Gertrude
that minimise her
importance, arguing
rather that her
character is ripe for
rich interpretation.
Shakespeare, she argues,
offers us plenty of scope
for thinking about
Gertrude’s invidious
position, which is at the
heart of the play, rather
than peripheral to it.

From a critical perspective, Gertrude
has suffered because she is most often
constructed as the mother of Hamlet, or
wife of Claudius, rather than being analysed
as a character in her own right. In fact,
Shakespeare gives her just 155 lines, fewer
than any of the major characters and
around just four percent of the total lines
in the play, so it is perhaps understandable
that she is treated as somewhat of a
bystander in terms of the tragedy. However,
by analysing Gertrude’s language and
understanding her presence on stage, one
can discover unexpected depths both to her
own individual drama and role within the
play as a whole.

34 emagazine February 2018

MUM
February 2018 emagazine 35

Angus Wright as Claudius, Andrew Scott as Hamlet, Juliet Stevenson as Gertrude.
Manuel Harlan, with permission of Almeida Theatre and Emma Holland PR

Benjamin Boucvalt as Hamlet and Ginger King as Gertrude, 2010.
AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Why is Gertrude Ignored? Hamlet, who sees her new relationship as very presence on stage. (Gertrude is on
one of lust, rather than strategy. Perhaps stage in 10 scenes, compared with 11 for
Gertrude’s motivations for marrying like any son he finds the idea of his Claudius and 14 for Hamlet.) She is privy to
Claudius are largely missing from academic mother as an object of sexual desire an the visit from the ambassadors of Norway
criticism, and the focus on her construction embarrassment, and Shakespeare conveys in Act 1 and is a companion to Claudius
as a mother, even more so. Carolyn Hamlet’s distaste by lumping her in with during official appointments such as the
Heilbrun, writing in 1957, sought to redress the extended metaphor of degradation that play. She guides conversations, instructing
the balance. She pointed out that critical pervades Elsinore. Polonius to hurry up in his speech, and
views by male critics such as A.C. Bradley participates in questioning Rosencrantz and
who calls her ‘very dull and very shallow’, Reading Gertrude Against the Guildenstern about her son.
and Harley Granville-Barker who describes Grain
her as ‘but a passive part in the action of the Private Mother, Public Queen
play’ are misinterpreting the language of However, there are some aspects of her
Shakespeare in his time and removing her presentation by Shakespeare that could It is here then, that the real interest in her
importance as a major influence on the plot. be read rather differently than critics as a character is revealed, as the dual roles
Yet still, Gertrude is ignored or vilified as traditionally have done, giving Gertrude of queen and mother begin to become
the audience continues to focus on Hamlet’s more strength and depth as a character, problematic for Gertrude and her power
interpretation of events. providing more scope for audience wanes as she attempts to fulfil the desires
reflection. In Act 1 Scene 2, the initial of both her husband and son. For example,
Is this because the play itself chooses to on-stage encounter between mother and after all of their plans have failed to
ignore potentially fruitful and fascinating son conveys Gertrude’s authority, and the establish the reasons for Hamlet’s behaviour,
angles on Gertrude’s plight, rather than relationship is shown to be mainly positive; Polonius suggests that Gertrude should be
a failure of critical interpretation of the Hamlet is not angry with her, but with employed as a last attempt:
play? For instance, in events before the Claudius. Gertrude issues imperatives, ‘cast
play begins, we can suppose that Gertrude, thy knighted colour off,’ (1.2 l.68) and Let his Queen mother all alone entreat him
keenly aware of her loss of power through ‘Go not to Wittenberg.’ (1.2 l.119) where To show his grief…
the death of old Hamlet, might seek to Hamlet pointedly explains he will obey If she find him not,
stabilise her precarious political position her, rather than Claudius. Equally, she To England send him
through marriage to Claudius, the new establishes her concern for him and praises
King. This was not unusual in Tudor times; his father as ‘noble’(1.2 l.71), recognising 3.1. l.183-187
indeed Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine of it is difficult when mourning the death of
Aragon, was initially married to his elder a parent, but challenging her son that it is Gertrude’s public and private personas
brother, Arthur, and after his death, was time to look forward. become increasingly mixed and as Hamlet
wedded to Henry in order to continue an and Claudius recognise this duality in
alliance with Spain. However, Shakespeare As a queen, too, despite the lack of speaking Gertrude, both mistrust her, or think that
constructs Gertrude through the eyes of lines, Gertrude retains her power by her she represents the other’s interests more.

36 emagazine February 2018

In the closet scene, for instance, Hamlet Hamlet, ‘What shall I do?’ (3.4 l.182) as an Gertrude may not have the lines of dialogue
accuses her of duplicity by labelling her, indication of her loyalty to him once more. of the other main characters, but it could
be argued that this space allows directors to
the Queen, your husband’s brother’s wife, Ending as Mother not Queen? explore the reactions of the protagonist and
And were it not so, you are my mother. antagonist to her wavering allegiances. By
As soon as Gertrude appears to give up carefully reading her actions and presence
3.4 l.16-17 her role as a sexual object, it could be on stage, reading between the lines and
argued, Hamlet reclaims his ability to act. noticing the shifts in her words and
The last comment is meant to hurt the most She sacrifices her power and position in behaviour, recent critics have demonstrated
– it is an outright rejection of her love – but court for her son, and is similarly spurred that far from minimising her drama,
Hamlet is correct in that she is, as he speaks, on to act against her new husband during Shakespeare’s presentation of her places
conspiring with her husband against him. the final scene of the play. Gertrude’s final Gertrude at the very heart of the play.
She is failing in her loyalty to her son and words and actions suggest that Claudius
thus her reaction to him is not as strong was correct to question her loyalty to him Clare Gunns is an English and Media teacher at The
as it could have been if she knew she was over Hamlet. Marguerite Tassi explains that British School of Brussels.
innocent. For instance, Lisa Jardine points choosing to oppose Claudius in public helps
out that she continues to use the formal Gertrude to make amends for her guilt and Further Reading
‘you’(3.4 l.18) rather than the familiar simultaneously prompts Hamlet into killing
‘thou’ (3.4 l.10) with which she began Claudius and avenging their family unit. Heilbrun, C. ‘The Character of Hamlet’s
her telling off. What is also interesting Mother’ in Shakespeare Quarterly Vol. 8,
about this scene is that the presence There is debate over Gertrude’s knowledge No. 2 (Spring, 1957), p201
of Polonius indicates Claudius’ own of whether the wine is poisoned or not, or Jardine, L. 2005. Reading
mistrust of Gertrude. Her seeming lack of when she realises, although her movements Shakespeare Historically.
understanding is also ripe for interpretation. on stage show that she ‘openly goes over Tassi, Marguerite A. 2011. Women
Reading the subtleties of pronoun use, and to Hamlet’s ‘side’ leaving the throne and and Revenge in Shakespeare: Gender,
the detail of what is said, reveals much. the King’ before deliberately defying Genre, and Ethics.
Speaking little does not mean that a lot isn’t Claudius’ order not to drink from the cup.
going on under the surface. Tassi notes that there is a clear gap of five emag web archive
syllables in the rhythm between Claudius’
Scope for Interpretation line and Gertrude’s, and it is in this space • Marcella McCarthy: Hamlet and
that Shakespeare makes it clear that she Cinderella – Reading Tragedy
There are a number of opportunities in this understands Claudius is trying to poison as Family Drama, emagazine
scene for directors to explore the character Hamlet and sacrifices herself in his place. 49, September 2010
of Gertrude, which have implications for the Her last words directly oppose her husband’s
drama as a whole. For instance, it is only attempts to cover his actions as she clarifies • Dr Sean McEvoy: Hamlet’s ‘Mighty
when Hamlet is absolutely explicit, in this that she is not fainting because of the blood, Opposite’, emagazine 64, April 2014
scene, that she seems to understand why he but because ‘I am poisoned.’ (5.2 l.305).
is so upset. Is this blindness, a reluctance to • Richard Vardy: Stewed in Corruption –
acknowledge what she secretly understands, However, she is still not explicit in her Polonius and the Politics of Denmark,
or a sign of how little she really knows accusation of Claudius at this point, leaving emagazine 74, December 2016
about the machinations of Claudius? it to Laertes to declare, ‘the King’s to
blame’. (5.2 l.314). Indeed, Hamlet suggests • Katy Limmer: Male Friendship in
Claudius clearly doubts Gertrude’s feelings Gertrude will be in hell when he tells Hamlet, emagplus for emagazine
for him are as strong as her love for Claudius to ‘Follow my mother’ (5.2 l.321) 74, December 2016
Hamlet, understanding that as mothers, and labels her ‘Wretched Queen’ (5.2 l.327)
‘nature makes them partial’ (3.3 l.33) and in a last denial of their bond so that, even in emagClips
entrusts Polonius to watch on his behalf. death, Gertrude’s dual roles and motivation
Thus, although we watch the closet scene are questioned by her son. • Andrew Dickson on Shakespeare
knowing that Gertrude is deceiving Hamlet, • Dr Emma Smith on
we must also be aware that she knows she
is also being watched and judged. Once Women in Shakespeare
her husband’s spy is dead, she is free to ask

February 2018 emagazine 37

Where do we find the literary?

EVERYWHERE!

Teacher Gabi Reigh investigates whether a rigid division between the literary
and non-literary is either desirable or possible, arguing that many so-called
non-literary texts, whether in print or other media, draw on literary
conventions as part of the very nature of what they’re doing.

The study of A Level Language and start, there is literary non-fiction – forms as the use of imagery or conventional plot
Literature involves the exploration of like diaries, autobiographies or travel structures, in order to persuade or entertain
relationships between literary and non- writing that are written to be read in the their audiences.
literary texts. Superficially, we tend to same way one might read a novel but
think of literary and non-literary texts as are based on real events and experiences Defining ‘Literariness’ –
polar opposites, the former characterised by rather than invented ones. These clearly Metaphor
rich metaphorical language and carefully position themselves close to the ‘literary’
plotted narratives, while the latter is end of the spectrum. However, it could ‘Literariness’ is usually a concept we
perceived as being entirely dependent on also be argued that non-literary factual associate with fiction. Some theorists have
objective factual sources, with a radically texts, with a readership or audience that argued that one of the key distinguishing
different set of linguistic features. However, is not expecting something ‘literary’, features of such works is the use of
it is possible instead to see all texts on a such as newspaper articles or reality TV metaphorical language. In his 1917 essay
continuum, occupying different positions transcripts, often exhibit features which we ‘Art and Device’, the Russian literary critic
on the spectrum of ‘literariness’. For a normally associate with literary texts, such and linguist Victor Shklovsky aimed to

38 emagazine February 2018

define the intrinsic qualities of literary texts articles, particularly from the tabloids, opera’. Even after her acquittal in 2011, the
by stating that: constantly use imagery and hyperbole to media’s fascination with Knox continued,
engage the reader and manipulate their as she appeared in a Netflix documentary,
The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of sympathies. The French literary theorist wrote her memoirs, and was even the
things as they are perceived, and not as they are Roland Barthes commented on the way the subject of a play. The ‘mythologising’ of
known. language of the mass media uses symbolism Amanda Knox in the tabloids calls to mind
to create particular ‘sensations’ in their recognisable literary constructs, such as
According to Shklovsky, metaphors are used audience, rather than simply delivering the stock characters of ‘The Black Widow’
in literary texts in order to ‘defamiliarise’ objective factual information. In the preface and ‘The Femme Fatale’. Mirroring the
ordinary events and present them in a new to his collection of essays Mythologies, iconography of these characters, Knox
light. For example, in Great Expectations, the Barthes wrote that his aim was to deliver was stereotyped as a seductive, yet
protagonist Pip is threatened by a convict manipulative sociopath. Far from being
he encounters on the marshes and forced an ideological critique bearing on the language of factual or objective, the language of the
to bring him supplies. As he watches the so-called mass culture. news coverage of her case was laden with
convict eating, he is reminded of the image metaphors and emotive language. An article
of a dog devouring his food. Dickens uses He expressed from the Daily Star (1.2.2014) used both
a simile to present the scene through Pip’s metaphor and language from the semantic
homodiegetic narration: a feeling of impatience at the sight of the field of artifice: she was described as an ‘Ice
‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and Maiden’, her ‘glamorous’ ‘veneer’ hiding
The man took strong sharp sudden bites, just like common sense constantly dress up reality. the heart of a ‘magnetic and manipulative’
the dog. killer; a ‘brilliant actress’ who ‘paint[ed]
His essays looked at the way real objects herself as a warm, loving human being’ and
By superimposing two familiar images, or people, such as the actress Greta Garbo, shamelessly promoted herself as a ‘TV star’.
that of a dog and that of a man eating a are presented in the press through imagery
pie, we are presented with the ‘sensation’ which recreates them as cultural symbols or Narrative Structure – The
of Magwitch’s desperation and ravenous ‘myths’ – in other words, literary constructs. World’s Strictest Parents
hunger, and we ‘perceive’ Pip’s fear and
disgust towards him. Amanda Knox – The Myth of Another defining aspect of literary texts
the ‘Black Widow’ such as novels and drama is the way
Barthes and Mythologies they use particular narrative structures.
The same theory can be applied to the Aristotle’s Poetics provides one of the earliest
However, it is clear that metaphorical presentation of Amanda Knox in the media theories of what the structure of a literary
language permeates every aspect of our in more recent times. In 2007, Knox was text should be. When defining the elements
lives – it is part of the way we think about convicted of the murder of her flatmate of the ‘complex plot’ in tragedy, he outlines
ourselves and create narratives about our Meredith Kercher in Perugia, where they that it should involve events which evoke
world. It is there in our use of idioms (as were both studying. Looking at newspaper fear and pity in the audience as they
dead metaphors, such as ‘raining cats and articles written about her, it is possible witness the suffering of the protagonist.
dogs’ or ‘speak of the devil’, as well as to see that metaphors and patterns of The drama reaches its climax as the hero
more freshly minted ones such as ‘the glass imagery are used in order portray her as experiences a change of fortunes and
ceiling’). But metaphorical language in a a charismatic, yet villainous character. In undergoes the process of anagnorisis – a
more ‘crafted’ sense can be found not only her column in The Sun newspaper, Louise
in literary texts such as novels or poetry, but Mensch described the press representation
also in many non-literary texts. Newspaper of the investigation as a ‘macabre soap

February 2018 emagazine 39

moment when they finally understand the anything else, or that anything or anyone is really
cause of their suffering. This plot structure being addressed, or changed, or helped would be
finds an echo in another literary genre, the a mistake.
bildungsroman. This genre, which has its
origins in the novels of Goethe in the 18th In The World’s Strictest Parents we see how
century, uses a formulaic plot structure even the most ‘natural’ recording of human
which charts the development of a young behaviour has been edited to follow the
person who, after enduring suffering and conventions of a well-known narrative
experiencing conflict, finally matures and structure in order to create an entertaining
gains a greater understanding of the world. ‘drama’ for the audience.

Despite the fact that ‘Reality TV’ is supposed ‘The Literary Mind’ emag web archive
to be unscripted and spontaneous, it is
possible to see how episodes of programmes So if literary and non-literary texts • Carol Atherton: Graphic Novels – Joe
such as The World’s Strictest Parents have have many similarities in terms of the Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde, emagazine
been edited in such a way as to follow the metaphorical language and plot structures 55, February 2012
narrative structures outlined above. In an which they use, how does this help us
episode first aired on Sunday 17th October understand what is ‘literariness’? On the • Steph Jackson: A Conveyance
2010, Tamsin, a teenager from Brighton, one hand, it is possible to argue that tabloid of Meaning – Metaphor in
is sent to New Jersey to be ‘reformed’ journalists or TV producers deliberately Life and Literature, emagazine
by the world’s strictest fathers. The include literary features in their texts 45, September 2009
narrative here certainly fulfils Aristotle’s or programmes in order to engage and
definition in Poetics of a ‘complex plot’ entertain their audiences by creating strong • Dr Graeme Trousdale: Metaphor
which provokes shock and pity towards emotional responses. However, as suggested – a Figure of Thought?, emagazine
the protagonist’s actions and results in previously, some theorists have contended 61, September 2013
a change of her fortunes by the end of that ‘literariness’ is something which is
the 60 minutes. Like all the episodes fundamental to all of our communication • Beth Kemp: Metaphors of Life and
in this series, Tamsin’s ‘story’ involves and even our thinking. For the cognitive Death, emagazine 65, September 2014
anagnorisis but with a happy ending that scientist Mark Turner, author of The Literary
is plotted in terms of the conventions of Mind – the Origins of Thought and Language, • Professor Elena Semino: Metaphors
a bildungsroman. Typically, it begins with the presence of imagery and other literary for Cancer, and Why They Matter,
the protagonist’s journey, in this case from qualities in everyday communication or emagazine 67, February 2015
Brighton to New Jersey. There is also a newspaper articles should come as no
conflict between the young character surprise. In his book, Turner contests the • Karina Licorish Quinn: Story-telling
and her parents, who are concerned that idea that ‘literariness’ is a kind of ‘special and Memory in Paris – The AQA B
she is taking drugs. However, with the performance’ only to be found in fiction or Anthology, emagazine 76, April 2017
help of ‘the world’s strictest parents’, that language is ‘built up from the sober to
Tamsin experiences anagnorisis as she the exotic’. Instead, Turner argues that the • Danuta Reah: Making Monsters
becomes aware of the need to change ‘literary’ is right there from the beginning, – How the Press Decide Who
her self-destructive behaviour but, unlike an essential part of how we make sense of We Love and Who We Hate,
Aristotle’s tragedy trajectory, the typical the world. In particular, he looks at the way emagazine 60, April 2013
bildungsroman goal of maturity is reached. that parables have been used to explore
The narrator of the programme stresses the our place in space and time and to help us
need for Tamsin to confess her failings and understand life. ‘Parable’, Turner states:
embrace society’s values through a series of
metaphors such as is the root of the human mind – of thinking,
acting, knowing, creating, and plausibly even
Tamsin’s drug use is a major barrier between her thinking.
and her parents
According to Turner, ‘the literary’ – be it
and metaphor, parable, or narrative structure
– is present in all texts because it is central
The dads are slowly getting Tamsin to open up. to our rationalisation of our experiences
and our communication with others.
All the episodes in the series share the Turner concludes:
same ending, sceptically described by Sam
Wollaston in a review in the Guardian: Language is the child of the literary mind.

By the end of week they’re all hugs and kisses and Gabi Reigh teaches English at The Sixth Form
love-yous and tears at the airport and stay-in- College, Farnborough.
touches.

According to Wollaston, what we see here
is just as much a fictional construct, as a
simple depiction of real life, because it is

television. Nothing more; and to think it’s

40 emagazine February 2018

Native Son

The soul frets in the shadow

Although Native Son is over 70 years old, Richard
Wright’s narrative voice still resonates, especially
in the context of today’s America of cultural
suspicion and racial tension. Roshan Doug
explores the sense of exclusion and yearning for
the unattainable at the heart of Bigger’s tragedy.

In this article, I want to illustrate how the a capitalist society that creates economic very area in which his ‘soul frets in the
main protagonist in Richard Wright’s Native alienation. They themselves are excluded, shadows’. The protagonist arouses polarised
Son (1940), Bigger Thomas, is a complex ostracised from the social privileges that feelings: on the one hand, empathy
character who personifies the concerns of come with that capital, such as titles, class, and understanding and, on the other,
black America by becoming the mouthpiece education, clubs and political contacts. indignation, horror and condemnation
of the author. The politics of race are central It is what the French sociologist and when he murders a white girl, Mary
to this novel. philosopher, Pierre Bourdieu refers to as Dalton. This is because Wright illustrates
‘social capital’. the plight of the black people with both
Often what characters in novels want, humour, understanding and sensitivity. His
their raison d’être, is the very thing that Yet, ironically, the very thing Bigger yearns text acts both as an artistic work of fiction
is the cause of their greatest anguish. The for – wealth and materialism, brought and psychological documentary that paints
fiction shows them struggling to come about through capitalist exploitation – is a realistic though complex picture of the
to terms with a sense of exclusion, loss the very thing that binds him to poverty main protagonist.
or desire for something they cannot yet and injustice, creating the unrest of his
attain. James Joyce’s protagonist, Stephen spirit. The world he inhabits is strange and The story centres on Bigger Thomas a
Dedalus illustrates this powerfully in the alienating. It keeps him ‘at bay’. Writer 20-year-old ‘son’ who lives in a slum and
seminal text A Portrait of the Artist as a Young and social critic, James Baldwin, Wright’s is denied all prospects of breaking ‘the
Man, when he comments on the speech of protégé, develops this idea of social and mind-forged manacles’ placed on him
his English dean that represents for him a racial disconnectedness in his perspective of by the racist America of the 1930s. With
world from which he feels excluded. This is white society: little elementary education he knows how
speech that he finds unsettlingly foreign and deeply entrenched in poverty he and his
unfamiliar but desperately wishes to inhabit These people cannot be, from the point of view fellow black people are. He gets involved
and make his own: of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they in crime, mainly petty robberies. For
have made the modern world, in effect, even if Bigger, even the harsh sentences passed on
The language in which we are speaking is his they do not know it. The most illiterate among black people for these crimes, exemplify
before it is mine. How different are the words them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, the injustice. Jealousy, anger and hatred
home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, naturally build up, elements brought
I cannot speak or write these words without Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres about by a capitalist system that thrives on
unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so says something to them which it cannot say to inequity. Bigger is aware that it is no longer
foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State slavery but capitalism that ‘shackles’ him.
I have not made or accepted its words. My voice Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of He highlights this in his recognition of his
holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and own oppression:
his language. Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in
their full glory – but I am in Africa, watching the ‘They don’t let us do nothing.’
We see the echoes of this paradox in Native conquerors arrive. ‘Who don’t?’
Son. It is a novel about racial tension ‘The white folks!’
in USA, communal inequity and black Baldwin, 1953
subjugation. But to many readers, it is also Later he acknowledges that it is the white
a portrayal of a distinct dichotomy in which Complex, Psychological, people who have ‘got everything. They
African Americans find themselves as the Conflicting own the world.’
subject of racial segregation. They serve
In Native Son we witness Bigger Thomas
wanting equality of opportunity – the

February 2018 emagazine 41

Richard Wright and Gloria Madison, on-set of the Film, “Native Son” directed by Pierre Chenal, 1951.
Glasshouse Images/Alamy Stock Photo

The hardship of the depression is captured Bigger Thomas is unable to equate this with ‘No; please,’ Mrs. Dalton said. ‘What is it, Mrs.
when Bigger is offered employment by an genuine compassion and, instead, treats it Thomas?’
employment relief agency. The job is as a as a manufactured and patronising gesture Bigger’s mother ran and knelt on the floor at Mrs.
chauffeur at the Dalton’s palatial residence. of certain class sensibilities. Bigger is Dalton’s feet.
Although it is something, the meagre salary further perplexed when Jan and Mary ask ‘Please, mam!’ she wailed. ‘Please, don’t let
will barely support him, let alone his family him to take them to his neighbourhood, ‘em kill my boy! You know how a mother feels!
as well. Initially, it is the inadequacy of the the ‘Black belt’ to get a feel of what life is Please, mam […] We live in your house […] They
employment that preys on his mind. like in such a ghetto. It is condescension done asked us to move […] We ain’t got nothing
at the deepest level but it is the power […]’
Alienation, Powerlessness, imbalance that bothers and shames Bigger. Bigger was paralyzed with shame; he felt
Confusion This sense of powerlessness comes to a violated.
climax when Bigger’s mother comes to see
Later, upon taking employment with Mr the Daltons pleading for his life: His subjugation and submission to white
Dalton, he notes the mansion and the middle class community is cemented.
household. The opulence is so far removed ‘Is you Mrs. Dalton?’ she asked.
from his own local familiarity with the Mrs. Dalton moved nervously, lifted her thin, Baldwin – A Contrived
‘Black belt’ ghetto in Chicago that he feels white hands and tilted her head. Political Statement
a sense of alienation. When Mary and Her mouth came open and Mr. Dalton placed an
her boyfriend extend a proverbial hand of arm about her. Despite its success, Baldwin described the
understanding, friendship and camaraderie, ‘Yes,’ Mrs. Dalton whispered. novel as contrived and synthetic, where
‘Oh, Mrs. Dalton, come right this way,’ Buckley the characters are artificially brought
said hurriedly. together to highlight the themes of

42 emagazine February 2018

positive image of the black male. But it could
be argued that Wright is, unapologetically,
painting a complex psychological picture
of Bigger Thomas, portraying incongruous
and conflicting feelings that are themselves
capable of both arousing the same kind of
conflicting feelings in the reader – both deep
empathy and sheer abhorrence.

Even today, over three quarters of a century
later, Native Son continues to resonate
with readers who are perturbed about
race politics and the ever-growing tide of
cultural antagonism. Wright’s concerns are
re-contextualised and echoed in the protest
campaign, Black Lives Matter and Trump’s
explicit vilification of Muslims, Mexicans
and immigrants. They act as a reminder of
social and cultural inequities and the kinds
of prejudice which black people have to
navigate. The disparity between wealth and
abject poverty – personified by mainly black
communities residing in ghettoes and the
disproportionate number of black men in
prisons in relation to their white counterparts
– is indicative of how, more than class, race
is the core of civil unrest sweeping through
America. Even today, black people remain
excluded from wealth, privilege and cultural
and symbolic capital which the upper strata
of white society enjoys. Like Bigger, black
people’s souls continue to fret in the shadows
of racial inequality and injustice.

Dr Roshan Doug teaches English at
Halesowen College.

segregation, economic deprivation, poverty Critiques of Bigger – References
and inequality. To him the plot pushes the Justifiable or Not?
boundaries of credulity because Bigger Fanon, F. 1952. ‘The Fact of
Thomas is all too knowing, especially in There is little doubt that Wright was using Blackness’ (essay).
the early part of the novel when Wright Bigger Thomas as a device to lecture his Baldwin, J. 1953. ‘Stranger in the Village,
evidently places Bigger as someone more readers about the imbalance of wealth an essay published in Harper’s Magazine.
intelligent, more in tune with the politics of distribution, about America’s unfair treatment Baldwin, J. 1949. ‘Everybody’s Protest
race than his friends and peers. To Baldwin, of black people and the inhumanity of its Novel’ (essay).
the didactic element interferes with the Art ignorance – or cold indifference at their Forster, E.M. 1927. Aspects of the Novel.
because the text becomes, to him at least, plight. However, for some readers and Joyce, J. 1916. A Portrait of the Artist
a mere political statement. Further on, commentators, including black writers, the as a Young Man.
the humanity and compassion Jan shows representation of Bigger Thomas has been
even after his discovery that Bigger killed quite contentious. There has been some emag web archive
his fiancée, is rather utopian, idealistic and debate about whether Wright plays into the
thus implausible. stereotypes of the aggressive black male or • Oscar Rickett: The Alienated
does something more radical with him (and Individual – a Theme in
his readers). For instance, both Baldwin American Prose Texts, emagazine
and Fanon argue that Bigger’s propensity to 41, September 2008
crime, his anger, his hatred and his partiality
to violence suggest Wright is negating the

February 2018 emagazine 43

The Tempest at the Barbican (press image)

Ariel

in The Tempest

Servitude and
Freedom

John Hathaway uses multiple readings to question conventional thinking
about Ariel’s relationship with Prospero and suggest that perhaps
‘delicate Ariel’ has more power than his master. He draws on postcolonial
perspectives, psychoanalytic readings, theatrical interpretations by directors
and even a re-writing by Margaret Atwood.

44 emagazine February 2018

The Tempest at Shakespeare’s Globe (press image)

It is perhaps fitting that a character who a loving, close relationship with his master. Ariel left the stage slowly and reluctantly to
is described variously as ‘brave spirit’, He delights in serving Prospero, and is eager embrace his freedom, at one point turning
‘delicate Ariel’ and ‘tricky spirit’, and to show his devotion, asking for work: back to his master, before leaving Prospero
who is so strongly associated with the bereft and alone, deserted by the one
elements of air and water, should be so To thy strong bidding, task character that knew him unlike any other.
difficult to pin down in any concrete form. Ariel and all his quality
For such a major and instrumental role, A Postcolonial Reading
Ariel remains fluid, mobile and changing and
throughout The Tempest. His importance However, it is also possible to view Ariel’s
as a character can be usefully explored What shall I do? Say what? What shall I do? relationship with Prospero in a more cynical
through his relationship with Prospero and way, particularly if a postcolonial reading
a consideration of the power that he wields. In a play that examines master/servant is applied to the play. Jonathan Miller’s
relationships from a number of different 1970 production of the play cast Ariel as an
Master and Servant angles, Ariel is an example of a servant educated slave who desired to seize power
Relationships who loves his master and seeks affirmation when Prospero left the island. The play
of that love when he poignantly asks ended with Ariel brandishing Prospero’s
The only character who is aware of Ariel’s ‘Do you love me, master?’ He fulfils his broken staff menacingly towards Caliban,
existence is Prospero, and it is highly duties precisely, and, in addition, acts to who was portrayed as an uneducated
significant that it is Ariel alone who is privy protect Prospero, warning him of Caliban’s slave working in the fields. Seen in this
to Prospero’s plans and ambitions. This plot to usurp him. As such, he is clearly light, Ariel is just as contemptuous and
foregrounds the relationship between these juxtaposed to Caliban, who is repeatedly resentful of Prospero as Caliban is. The
two characters, making void any assessment referred to as Prospero’s ‘slave’ and openly only difference is that Ariel seeks to
of Ariel’s role or function that does not defies his master. In contrast, Prospero deceive Prospero and convince him of his
consider how he relates to Prospero. Ariel, calls Ariel his ‘chick’, reflecting an almost faithfulness and loyalty as a deliberate
on the one hand, is often viewed as having paternal, nurturing relationship. The 2016 strategy in order to gain power. Whereas
RSC production captured this dynamic in
Prospero and Ariel’s relationship when

February 2018 emagazine 45

Caliban repeatedly challenges Prospero,
Ariel only makes this mistake once, asking
‘Is there more toil?’. The word ‘toil’ is
particularly significant, reflecting the fact
that his acts of service are not joyfully
completed out of love, but are necessary
acts of compliance. It is perhaps fitting that
Ariel is a character associated with illusion
as he seeks to fool Prospero with the
illusion of his servitude, whilst constantly
agitating for his freedom beneath this
veneer. His repeated references to Prospero
as ‘potent master’ and ‘noble master’ can
thus be viewed as nothing more than
obscuring flattery. It was Sam Mendes who
in his 1993 production most infamously
expressed this view of Ariel. When granted
his freedom, Ariel spat in Prospero’s face,
drawing gasps from the shocked audience.
In fact, so unpopular was this that Mendes
altered the production, having Ariel
withdraw from the stage defiantly without
spitting. Arguably the audience reaction
reflects how easy it is for us to be taken
in by the myth of Prospero’s supposedly
benevolent dictatorship. In a postcolonial
reading, Ariel’s shocking act of spitting in
Prospero’s face confronts the audience with
the true nature of Prospero’s totalitarian
control, drawing clear parallels with colonial
relationships.

A Victim of Rhetoric Public Domain

Margaret Atwood, when discussing her causing Ferdinand to drop his sword and This of course does nothing to hide the
rewrite of The Tempest, Hag Seed, called drawing a magic circle. Some productions fact that Prospero threatens a similar but
Ariel ‘Prospero’s special effects guy’. Such rob even these deeds from him, giving them more severe punishment on Ariel than
a view relegates Ariel to the position of to an invisible Ariel to perform. This begs he suffered under Sycorax, replacing the
second fiddle to Prospero. After all, Ariel the question: if Ariel is more powerful than ‘pine’, a soft wood, with a firmer and more
in many ways acts as Prospero’s stage Prospero, why does he serve him? Caliban is solid (and therefore more painful) ‘oak’
manager, enacting his plans and fulfilling tortured for his disobedience, and yet Ariel that he will ‘peg’ Ariel inside. Threaten,
his purposes. He keeps the various groups of does not face the same kinds of punishment however, is all Prospero appears able to
characters separate and leads them around that Caliban frequently faces. Perhaps the do. Arguably, the true tragedy of this
the island, only allowing them to converge only power that Prospero has over Ariel play is that Ariel never realises he is
when Prospero wills it. In addition, he is the power of rhetoric: he bullies Ariel imprisoned in nothing more than a cage of
magically creates the Masque scene and into serving him and makes him believe words. Orwell wrote
himself takes the role of harpy to allow that he is indebted to Prospero and in his
Prospero to succeed in his goal of presenting control. This explains why Prospero, in the He who controls the past controls the future
marriage as a social (and not a sexual) space of a few lines, moves from calling
union and confronting the courtiers with Ariel ‘my brave spirit’ to denouncing him and Prospero here (as he does elsewhere
their wrongdoings. Prospero himself tells as a ‘malignant thing’. Prospero’s monthly in the play) presents his version of the past
Ariel after the harpy scene that recounting of how he saved Ariel from in order to control and manipulate Ariel
Sycorax’s torture very firmly casts himself in in the future. This explains why Prospero
Of my instruction hast thou nothing bated the role of saviour: continually dangles Ariel’s freedom in front
In what thou hadst to say. of him to ensure his compliance. Prospero
It was mine art… that made gape recognises that he is nothing without
Ariel can thus be viewed as nothing more The pine and let thee out. Ariel, and he uses his considerable powers
than a performing puppet, fulfilling every of rhetorical manipulation to control
wish of his master. and enslave him.

And yet it is Ariel and not Prospero that
appears to have most power. After all, the
only acts of magic that Prospero enacts
in the play are putting Miranda to sleep,

46 emagazine February 2018

The Tempest at Shakespeare’s Globe (press image)

An Inhuman Human against those who have wronged him. It is emag web archive
only Ariel, the inhuman alien, who is able
Psychoanalytical readings of the play, to remind Prospero of his own humanity, • David Kinder and Juliet Harrison:
such as Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror, triggering his epiphany that Interpreting The Tempest Theatrically,
posit a relationship between Ariel, Caliban emagazine 17 September 2002
and Prospero which sees all three as The rarer action is
being inextricably bound together. Ariel In virtue than in vengeance. • Richard Jacobs: Claribel’s Story in The
represents the super-ego, or Prospero’s Tempest, emagazine 28 April 2005
internal desire to do good, whilst the Ariel therefore acts as Prospero’s moral
earthy Caliban represents Prospero’s id, compass, saving him from turning into • Neil Bowen: The Tempest – Authority
or instinctive desires. This is most clearly a power-crazed despot who commits and Leadership, emagazine 35
seen when Ariel confronts Prospero inhuman acts by leading him towards
with his own inhumanity, expressing accepting his own humanity and • Angus Ledingham: Interpreting
the sympathy that he would feel, ‘were I recognising the danger inherent in the Prospero, emagazine 43, February 2009
human’, when gazing upon the distracted god-like omnipotence that he possesses.
royal party following the harpy scene. Regardless of Ariel’s true feelings towards • Malcolm Hebron: Prospero – A
Prospero’s response to Ariel’s pointedly Prospero or questions of who is more Renaissance Magus, emagazine
chosen and moving depiction of Gonzalo’s powerful, it is this act that fundamentally 51, February 2011
suffering is telling: shapes the play and foreshadows Prospero’s
renunciation of his magic and release of • Dr Sean McEvoy: Interpreting The
Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Ariel. In setting Prospero free from his all- Tempest, emagazine 65, September 2014
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself consuming desire for revenge, Ariel himself
(One of their kind, that relish all as sharply, guarantees his own freedom. His final song • Fran Hill: The Tempest – Our Noble
Passion as they) be kindlier moved than thou art? in which he celebrates his liberty acts as Selves, Our Baser Instincts, emagazine
a thematic coda to the play, allowing the 73, September 2016.
This section comes just after Prospero’s audience to contemplate the freedom that
declaration of his total power and control: all characters, to a greater or lesser extent, • Sam Brunner: Beyond Tragedy?
experience as we applaud Prospero’s Shakespeare’s Romances, emagazine
At this hour actions after his Epilogue, beguiled until 54, December 2011
Lies at my mercy all mine enemies. the very end by this masterful manipulator.
emagClips
Prospero’s dangerous delight in having John Hathaway is Head of English at
manipulated all of his foes into a position Glenalmond College. • Andrew Dickson on Shakespeare
of absolute weakness reflects his desire to
take a more permanent form of revenge

February 2018 emagazine 47

© Linda Combi

48 emagazine February 2018

Facebook and a

Fractured Society

How Online Communication is
Changing Friendship and Politics

What, if anything, is the link between getting annoyed by your friends
on Facebook and the fake news epidemic which supposedly led to Brexit
and the rise of Donald Trump? This article by Dr Philip Seargeant and Dr
Caroline Tagg suggests that an understanding of how people communicate
on social media can help us understand the way that society as a whole is
changing – and can give insights into how to cope with these changes.

There is apparently a growing trend among dumbing down of culture, for the lowering news stories were promoted on Facebook
people working in Silicon Valley to send of IQs, and for creating a whole new and Google which claimed that the gunman
their children to schools where the use category of addiction. Research shows that was a supporter of the Democratic Party
of iPads and iPhones is banned. They’re people today touch and swipe their phones and had an anti-Trump agenda. These
worried, it seems, about the harmful on average over two and a half thousand stories were entirely made-up, and were
influence that technology – and particularly times a day. And for some commentators, spread by political trolls intent on exploiting
social media – can have on the cognitive there’s a direct link between this addiction the tragedy for their own ideological ends
and social development of their children. and the seismic shifts that have taken place – a trend which has become ever more
They’re worried about its addictive nature, in the political landscape in the last couple common in recent months.
the effects it has on the attention span, of years – shifts which are threatening
and the pressures that come from constant to undermine the idea of democracy The reaction in the newspapers to this
and limitless exposure to the online world. as we know it. incident was to blame Facebook and Google
In other words, the very people who are for helping the stories to flourish. Ever
responsible for designing this modern online Fake News, Personalisation since the beginning of the ‘fake news’
world are now emerging as its leading Algorithms and Filter Bubbles panic, this has been the main response:
sceptics. They’re the ones now stressing not blame the technology for allowing people
only about how it’s altering the way we At the centre of this panic over the assault to manipulate it for their own exploitative
communicate, but how it’s reconfiguring on democracy is the concept of ‘fake news’. purposes. The particular focus for this
society as a whole. The phrase ‘fake news’ can refer to a range criticism has been the personalisation
of different things these days. At one end of algorithms that the companies use. These
Media reaction to sites such as Facebook the spectrum it’s become a cover-all insult are designed to feed users stories that are
and Twitter has always swung between used by politicians to disparage their rivals likely to appeal to them, while filtering
naïve idealism and moral panic. For some, and to criticise occasional lapses in the out ones they’ll be less interested in. In
social media has great democratising ‘mainstream media’. At the other end of the theory, this allows Facebook to create a
potential. It gives everyone the ability to spectrum it refers to purposefully fabricated positive, individualised user experience. But
publish their thoughts and opinions; to have news stories which are spread either for what it also does is create so-called ‘filter
their voices heard. This, so the argument profit (from the advertising revenue they bubbles’, whereby users are shielded from
goes, offers potent new ways for people can attract) or for political manipulation. ideas and opinions they disagree with. Add
to hold those in power accountable. But For example, in the aftermath of the recent to this the fact that news is not editorially
for others, social media is responsible for a deadly shooting in Las Vegas, several false scrutinised by the company, and that

February 2018 emagazine 49

Facebook is now used by over two billion © Linda Combi Still, I don’t think Facebook is really the place that desire to come across in a certain way and to
people – which is the equivalent of the people choose to listen to opposing views, so I align themselves with friends. Whether or
entire world population only ninety years usually ignore posts of that nature. not something is ‘fake’ may be less important
ago – and you have an environment where than questions regarding who shared it and
misinformation can spread far and wide The various responses suggested that, even whether a user is willing to offend them. If
with great speed and ease. where someone feels strongly about a topic, we want to tackle the problem of fake news,
they don’t engage the person who’s made therefore, we need to take into account the
Technology or a Product of this comment in debate, or publicly denounce impact that people’s desire not to annoy
Human Interaction? them. Instead, they respond by quietly their friends – or to show their annoyance
unfriending the offender, blocking their posts with them – might have on their decisions
There’s a lot of sense in this analysis of the from their newsfeed, or simply ignoring them. regarding whether to denounce, ignore or
situation. But to see it entirely in these share potentially misleading information.
terms – and thus to claim that the ‘fake The reasons for this are complex but they
news’ epidemic is solely a technology issue revolve around two main issues. Firstly, Philip Seargeant and Caroline Tagg both lecture
– is to overlook how people themselves there’s the perception, for the respondents in in applied linguistics at the Open University.
are using this technology. It neglects any our survey at least, that Facebook isn’t really a Their most recent book is Taking Offence on
consideration of how people’s own actions Social Media: Conviviality and Communication on
may contribute to the situation, and the way place [where] people choose to listen to opposing Facebook (2017, Palgrave Macmillan).
that filter bubbles may in fact not simply be views.
a product of the machines, but of human emag web archive
interaction as well. This is partly because the interaction isn’t
face-to-face, and also because people are • Dr Claire Hardaker The Language
To investigate this issue we carried out a keen to maintain a harmonious and convivial of Online Abuse – Seven
survey of over one hundred Facebook users environment. The attempt to create ‘online Forms of Antisocial Behaviour,
as part of a research project entitled Creating conviviality’ is prompted by the wide variety emagazine 64, April 2014
Facebook. The survey was designed to elicit of different people that make up any one
how people viewed Facebook as a forum for person’s network of ‘friends’ – a miscellaneous • Andrew McCallum: Why It Went
communication, why they behaved in the group of parents, extended family, close Viral – the Power of Non-standard
way they did on the site, and how they felt friends, work colleagues, vague acquaintances Language, emagazine 72, April 2016
about their experiences on it. To elicit this, and so on – and the attempt people make to
one of the questions we asked was whether manage all these diverse relationships. On the • Dr Claire Hardaker: A Linguist in the
people were ever offended by what their one hand, this diversity appears to increase Media, emagazine 75, February 2017
friends posted on the site, and, if so, what the chances of any one user being offended,
they did in response. because they’re more likely to come into • Nicola Ball: Online Interactions
contact with a wide range of different views. and Gender Distinctions,
What we found was that people were On the other hand, it seems to stop them emagazine 76, April 2017
overwhelmingly offended by political and from engaging or arguing with offending
religious opinions that they disagreed with, posts, as they don’t want to provoke too • Professor Deborah Cameron: Blogging
as well as by posts they found homophobic or much conflict with their ‘friends’. About Language – @wordspinster
racist. For example, respondents told us: Speaks, emagazine 77, September 2017
I remember defriending one person (friend of a The True News about the
friend) as she kept posting her political opinions that Facebook Experience • Suzanne Williams: ‘Selfie’ – What’s it
were the complete opposite of mine. all About? emagazine 64, April 2014
I know someone who posts quite racist comments. I So what does any of this have to do with
cannot defriend her so have simply adjusted things fake news? Firstly, this research shows that • Suzanne Williams: The Hashtag,
so I never see her posts. people do have access to opposing views on emagazine 71, February 2016
I have a particularly hard time with pro-gun posts... Facebook, and so these aren’t completely
filtered out by the site’s personalisation
algorithm. Secondly, rather than filter bubbles
being created solely by the technology, it
seems that people’s own actions contribute to
the echo chamber effect by filtering out views
with which they disagree. In other words,
both the technology and people’s own actions
combine to create the particular experience
that any one user has of Facebook.

What all of this means is that any attempt to
find a solution to the problematic relationship
between fake news and social media needs
to take into account the fact that Facebook
isn’t only a news-sharing site; it’s also still
very much a place where social relationships
play out. A place where people are often
motivated not by the quest for truth but a

50 emagazine February 2018