Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

18.3 The functions of parallelism and the variety of texts in which it is found
Unit 18 Parallelism
Section 4 Poetic form

Parallelism is a ’formal practice’. When we say this, we mean that parallelism is a way of organizing the material from which a text is made - both the forms of the language (the words and sentence structures) and the meanings of the text. As a formal practice it is widespread. It is found in many English texts, and indeed in texts in all languages. For some languages, it appears to play an organizatory role in verse equivalent to (and usually instead of) metrical form. Thus Mongolian verse, ancient Semitic verse (e.g. Hebrew, Egyptian, Akkadian), South African verse traditions (e.g. Xhosa, Tswana), Indonesian verse traditions, Central and South American Indian verse traditions and so on all have parallelism as a fundamental structural principle, where it is expected that components of the verse will systematically and thoroughly engage as members of parallelisms (Jakobson calls this systematic parallelism ’canonic parallelism’). It is also found in different genres of text: in English we find it not only in poetry such as Pope’s, which is designed for pleasure, but also in religious texts (such as the Bible), in advertising, in political speeches and so on. Here is a text from a political speech, laid out to show the parallelisms:

Aspects of parallelism particularly worth noting in this text include the high amount of repetition, and the fact that the four-unit section is ended with a unit that, unlike the others, does not have internal parallelism: ’I have a dream today!’. Here we see a similar use of formal difference to mark the end of a section (in the Pope poem, the formal difference involved not less parallelism but more parallelism).

Why is parallelism so common in texts (cross-linguistically), and why is it used in specific texts or groups of texts? It is very difficult to find an answer to this question. Literary studies is, however, a discipline that encourages speculation, and ’trying out’ possible answers. Hence we can speculate on the functions of parallelism; that is, we can provide a functional explanation of a formal practice. We need always to remember that functional explanations of formal practices can seem very convincing on the basis of almost no evidence; they appeal to common-sense views, and thus should be treated with caution.

The influential linguist and literary theorist Roman Jakobson suggested that parallelism functions to draw attention to form. He suggested that this worked by choosing as members two items that normally would be alternatives and putting them one after another. Thus ’blindly creep’ and ’sightless soar’ (from Pope’s poem) are alternative ways of describing a living thing’s movement, and, instead of stating one or the other, Pope states both in sequence. Jakobson claims that this draws attention to the formal characteristics of ’blindly creep’ and ’sightless soar’: that we notice the words themselves, and are aware of the possibilities of what can be said - of the system of language itself. Jakobson says that, when our attention is drawn in this way to language itself (thus taking some portion of attention away from what is being communicated by the language), the forms of the text are performing a specific function, which he called the ’poetic function’. The poetic function is dominant in poetry, though it is also a function that can be found performed in non-literary texts as well.

Parallelisms in a text can correspond to stereotyped parallelisms - and particularly polar parallelisms (oppositions) - in a culture, and by so doing they can both reinforce and indeed construct such cultural parallelisms. Pope’s poem draws on the stereotyped oppositions between human and animal, culture and nature, and human and God; whether or not he reinforces these oppositions or undermines or renegotiates them is a matter that a reading of the whole poem might seek to establish. Claude Levi-Strauss is a structural anthropologist who has argued that certain structures of parallelism (and specifically opposition) might be fundamental to the way that cultures think. This suggests that parallelistic texts that draw on and transform stereotyped parallelisms might function as more general ways of thinking about the world; not just about the overt topics (such as culture and nature) that they seem to be fixed on.

Parallelism between the text and something outside the text can also be seen in texts like the following, which would be said by a parent to a small child, the parent tapping the child’s face while saying the text.

Though this is a simple text, it has an interesting complexity, which relates to ’here they run in’; should this be paired with ’here sit the little chickens’ (given the paired gestures otherwise found), or is it indeed part of a four-part set with the previous three lines, parallel to the three+one chucking in the final part? In fact, the parallelism structure is formally somewhat unstable at this point, just before the gestures shift from touching to more aggressive or ticklish chucking - a kind of textual anxiety or excitement on the edge of the exciting final gestures.

For most texts we feel that the text must hold together as a whole: it must be ’coherent’. Coherence is partly a matter of interpretation: the reader or listener can impose coherence on a text that in itself might seem not to be coherent. But coherence can also be fostered by text-internal devices that are called ’cohesive devices’. (Halliday and Hasan (1976) is a sustained examination of some of the words and phrases that foster cohesion in this way.) Parallelism might function as a cohesive device - a way of making the text seem coherent. As an example of this, consider the use of parallel plots (e.g. main and sub-plot) in a narrative - a type of narrative parallelism where one story

is parallel to the other. In many episodic television programmes, the hour-long, self-contained episode may run several parallel plots; often the coherence of the episode will be bolstered by implicit similarities between the themes raised by each plot.

Parallelism, along with other formal practices (such as metre), might be a way of making a text easier to remember. This might be one reason why laws can be formulated in parallel structures, why political and persuasive texts have parallel structures, and why religious texts have parallel structures. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that proverbs (such as that quoted on p. 221) and other kinds of ’wisdom literature’, cross-linguistically, often have parallelistic structures: these are short texts that are memorized, and the parallelism may help memorization.

Finally, parallelism might be explained in terms of intertextuality or allusion (see Unit 13). It is always possible that there is no inherent relation between a formal practice and the function it performs: it may be that a formal practice is just used because someone else used it before. Here, it is worth considering the influence of the Bible, for example in the English ’Authorized version’ translation. In the eighteenth century, the first theorist of parallelism, Robert Lowth, described how the original Hebrew texts (those that were translated into English as the ’Old Testament’) were governed by parallelism. (This is a characteristic of many other texts of the ancient Near East, including Egyptian texts.) The translation into English preserves the principle of parallelism, such that it is possible to open the English Old Testament at any page and find examples of parallelism. Here is an example:

Because the Bible has parallelism, parallelism carries a certain cultural value with the consequence that a text can acquire cultural value by using parallelism. Perhaps this is another reason for the widespread use of parallelism in political (and advertising) discourse: the speaker is claiming the kind of authority associated with the Bible by borrowing its formal practices. The extract from King’s speech (p. 225) is soon followed by his quoting this passage from the Bible, thus connecting his speech both formally and in content (and morally and religiously) with the Bible.

This activity uses a poem by Emily Dickinson, written about 1863:

Because I could not stop for Death -

He kindly stopped for me -

The Carriage held but just Ourselves -

And Immortality.

We slowly drove - He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility -

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess - in the Ring -

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain -

We passed the Setting Sun -

Or rather - He passed Us -

The Dews drew quivering and chill -

For only Gossamer, my Gown -

My Tippet - only Tulle -

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground -

The Roof was scarcely visible -

The Cornice - in the Ground -

Since then - ’tis Centuries - and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses’ Heads

Were toward Eternity -

(Note: a ’tippet’ is a garment (for the shoulders), and ’tulle’and ’gossamer’ are materials. A ’cornice’ is a decorative structure below the ceiling of a room.)

1 Write this poem out to show the parallelisms (using the method shown for An Essay on Man (p. 223) in this unit). How does the structure of the parallelisms relate to the other structural aspects of the text: the division into stanzas, and the division into lines?

2 For the lexical parallelisms, distinguish polar parallelisms (opposites) from non-polar parallelisms. How do the lexical parallelisms, both polar and non-polar, help develop and clarify the meaning of the poem as we read it from first to last stanza?

3 Identify any chiasms. How do chiasms help structure the poem, and develop its meaning?

4 Is sound systematically or significantly organized in this poem (e.g. rhyme, alliteration or other forms of sound patterning, including sound pattern parallelism)?

Reading

Fabb, N. (1997) Linguistics and Literature, Oxford: Blackwell, Chapter 6.

Fox, J.J. (ed.) (1988) To Speak in Pairs: Essays on the Ritual Languages of Eastern Indonesia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, R. (1976) Cohesion in English, London: Longman.

Jakobson, R. (1988) ’Linguistics and Poetics’, in D. Lodge (ed.) Modern Criticism and

Theory: A Reader, London: Longman, pp. 32-57.

Leech, G. (1969) A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, London: Longman, Chapter 5.