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

19.2 Convention and deviation in literature
Unit 19 Deviation
Section 4 Poetic form

As we have just suggested, literature - to a greater or lesser extent - separates itself from other uses of language by deliberately bending the rules of everyday communication. Indeed, the literary institution could be seen as operating within a spectrum constituted by degrees of linguistic deviation, so that some authors, periods and genres are more deviant than others. The literature of the first half of the twentieth century, for instance, probably involved more conscious linguistic experimentation, and hence deviation, in literature than, say, that of the first half of the eighteenth century.

The pleasure we experience from linguistic deviation in everyday language depends upon our knowledge of the norms or conventions of ordinary usage: deviation only becomes pleasurable and interesting when we know what it deviates from. The same is true of deviation in literature. In this case, however, there is a complicating factor. In literature, deviation may operate against the background of two sets of norms:

1 the conventions or norms of ordinary usage;

2 the conventions or norms of the literary system itself.

Indeed, what is at first deviant and ’original’ in literature can quickly become conventional - which is why writers continually invent new kinds of deviations in the attempt, as Ezra Pound put it, to ’make it new’.

We will now examine some common types of linguistic deviation in literature, considering examples of deviation in substance, form and meaning.

19.2.1 Deviation in substance

In modern as opposed to traditional, pre-literate societies, literature exists primarily as a body of printed works rather than as a set of oral performances. Since the principal mode of literary expression in English is now written rather than spoken, it follows that, where we get deviation at the level of substance, this is primarily a matter of typography, layout, punctuation and spelling. Poetry routinely adopts modes of layout that are peculiar to itself - relatively short lines indented on the page, and so on; but this has itself become a poetic convention against which even more extreme deviations can be measured. The following poem by Edwin Morgan, for example, takes liberties with many aspects of substance simultaneously - principally features of typography, layout and punctuation (1967):

Perhaps the most deviant feature of this text is the way in which the conventional method of using spaces to indicate the boundaries between words in the written medium has been violated by using them within words as well as between them. Moreover, not only do the spaces seem to be randomly distributed with no respect for word-boundaries, they also vary in length. This deviation may seem trivial in itself, but it makes the text initially difficult to read and understand because the conventional signals about how letters combine together to make up words have been abandoned. It is only as we approach the final line - perhaps on a second or third reading - that we recognize that all the previous lines are variations on the last line in that they delete some of its letters, leaving blank spaces instead. The letters that remain in each line are thus placed in exactly the same position as they appear in the last line. Yet, if the resulting irregular spacings are carefully negotiated, these apparently random letters can be read as words and phrases. By doing this, we discover that every line anticipates the last line not only by selecting letters from it, but also by making a series of statements (’i act’, ’i am the sun’, etc.). These statements, it turns out, can be interpreted as partial but congruent versions of the message of the final line - ’I am the resurrection and the life’. The title, ’Message Clear’, initially might seem to be an ironic comment on the struggling reader, but by adopting a different way of reading the deviations begin to make sense so that the ’message’ finally begins to become ’clear’.

Deviation of substance is not restricted to poetry but may also be found in novels such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67), James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) or Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981).

19.2.2 Deviation in vocabulary

Deviation in vocabulary occurs in literature when new words are deliberately created for particular effect. This may be done in various ways, but the most straightforward strategy is simply the pasting of words or elements of words together into new combinations. Many words in English have been formed in this way:

fortunate = fortune+ate

unfortunate = un+fortune+ate

unfortunately = un+fortune+ate+ly

unusually = un+usual+ly

uncool = un+cool

breakfast = break+fast

laptop = lap+top

We can see from these examples that even the small elements or affixes - such as un-, -ate and -ly- can have a fairly predictable meaning in the structure of a word: the affix un- usually means ’not’; -ate usually suggests ’quality’; and -ly usually suggests ’manner’. These basic patterns of meaning and word construction allow us to make sense of words that we have never encountered before, but they also give poets manifold opportunities for innovation. When the Victorian religious poet and Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, refers in The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875) to the sea as ’widow-making, unchilding, unfathering deeps’, he is using the ordinary possibilities of affixation and compounding to form ’one-off’ neologisms or new words, providing him with a resource for conveying in a particularly compressed fashion the way in which the sea can take husbands from their wives, children from their parents and fathers from their children. Similarly, when T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land(1922) puts a neologism into the mouth of the blind seer Tiresias, so that he says ’And I Tiresias have foresuffered all’, our knowledge of the conventional function of ’fore-’ means that we are able to derive a meaning for ’foresuffer’. (Tiresias is presumably claiming that his prophetic powers mean that he not only ’foresees’ events but also suffers or endures them before they occur.) Thus, we make sense of neologisms in the same way that we make sense of other kinds of deviation - through using our implicit knowledge of the underlying conventions of the language. These principles enable the production and understanding of puns in everyday life, and they help us to at least attempt to interpret the radical deviations in word formation found in Finnegans Wake:

I have just (let us suppraise) been reading in a suppressed book - it is notwithstempting by measures long and limited - the latterpress is eminently legligible and the paper, so he eagerly seized upon, has scarsely been buttered in works of previous publicity wholebeit in keener notcase would I turf aside for pastureuration.

In this comparatively mild example of the novel’s lexical deviations, Joyce employs what Lewis Carroll called ’portmanteau’ words (because they pack several meanings into one word): ’notwithstempting’, for example, can be read as containing both ’notwithstanding’ and ’not tempting’.

Lexical deviation of a less exalted kind may also be found in comedy, such as Ronnie Barker’s television sketches that featured Dr Small Pith, ’president of the loyal society for the relief of the sufferers of pismonunciation’. Here is the beginning of one of his appeals:

Ronnie Barker: Good evening. I am the president for the loyal society for the relief of sufferers from pismonunciation; for the people who cannot say their worms correctly. Or who use the wrong worms entirely, so that other people cannot underhand a bird they are spraying. It’s just that you open your mouse, and the worms come turbling out in wuk a say that you dick knock what you’re thugging a bing, and it’s very distressing.

Here, although we find the occasional neologism (turbling, thugging), much of the comic effect derives from substituting one word for another on the basis of similarities in pronunciation (worms for words, mouse for mouth, underhand for understand, spraying for saying, etc.) to incongruous effect. This is lexical deviation on a large scale, though dependent on establishing a clear frame within which both the item (e.g. words) and its substitute (e.g. worms) can be simultaneously evoked.

19.2.3 Deviation in syntax

Conveying one’s meaning depends not only on one’s choice of word as opposed to another but on how these are arranged in sentences. Indeed, if words are to make sense there are strong constraints on the ways in which they can be combined into sentences. (See Unit 3, Analysing units of structure.) These constraints are called the syntax of the language and all language users are subject to them. The importance of syntactic conventions in English can be demonstrated by how relatively small shifts in word order and combination can significantly alter the meaning of sentences. In the following example the change from a statement to a question is brought about by a simple change in the order of the initial two items, the Subject and Verb:

This is the ten o’clock news.

Is this the ten o’clock news?

Poets, no less than other language users, have to subscribe to syntactic constraints if they are to be understood; even when they deviate from them, they depend upon our tacit knowledge of the conventions that are broken in order to achieve their effects. In poetry, inversions of normal word order are quite common, may be motivated by considerations of rhyme and rhythm, and are tolerated if not too blatantly intrusive. Consider the following:

Silent is the house: all are laid asleep:

One alone looks out o’er the snow-wreaths deep . . .

    (Emily Вrоnte, ’The Visionary’, 1846)

A more conventional order would be:

The house is silent: all are laid asleep:

One alone looks out over the deep snow-wreaths . . .

This more conventional order, however, misses those opportunities for patterning in rhyme and metre that were taken by the poet. In effect, the poet’s extra patterning in phonology has gone hand in hand with deviation in normal word order. An extended example of deviant word order may by found in the following poem by E.J. Scovell (1907-99):

The Paschal Moon

At four this April morning the Easter moon -

Some days to full, awkwardly made, yet of brazen

Beauty and power, near the north-west horizon

Among our death-white street lamps going down -

I wondered to see it from a lower storey

Netted in airy twigs; and thought, a fire

A mile off, or what or who? But going higher

I freed it (to my eyes) into its full glory,

Dominant, untouched by roofs, from this height seen Unmeshed from budding trees; not silver-white

But brazed or golden. Our fluorescent light,

That can change to snow a moment of the young green

In the maple tree, showed ashen, null and dead

Beside such strength, such presence as it had.

Formally, this poem conforms to most of the conventions of the sonnet genre. There are fourteen lines; and, despite some half rhymes (moon/down; dead/ had) (see Unit 16, Rhyme and sound patterning), the rhyme scheme is that of an English sonnet, with three quatrains (abba, cddc, effe) and a concluding couplet. Indeed, in meeting the requirements of the sonnet form, this poem deviates markedly from the normal word order of English. When making statements, for instance, the English clause or sentence tends to follow a pattern of Subject followed by Verb followed by Object (as, for instance, in ’Ellen Macarthur [S] broke [V] the record [O]’). (It is for this reason that English is sometimes described as an SVO language.) The opening of the poem, however, deviates from this usual syntactic pattern. If we try and turn it into something closer to everyday English it might read like this:

I wondered to see the Easter moon at four this April morning from a lower storey, netted in airy twigs, going down among our death-white street lamps near the north-west horizon, awkwardly made, yet of brazen beauty and power, some days to full.

This version of the content of the poem restores the more normal order of core constituents of an English clause or sentence: the Subject comes first (in this case ’I’), followed by the Verb (or Verb Phrase) (’wondered to see’) and then the Object (’the Easter moon’). These elements are followed here by syntactically optional elements relating to time, place and circumstance of the action (’at four this April morning from a lower storey . . .’, etc.). In the poem, however, the conventional order of the main elements is reversed, giving first the syntactically non-essential elements, relating to circumstances, and delaying specification of the Object. We do not encounter the Subject and the main Verb of the first sentence until line 5. Only then does the structure and sense of the poem’s first sentence fall into place and become evident to the reader.

This kind syntactic ’suspensefulness’ is unusual in everyday speech and, although it does occur in writing, is more typical of poetry, especially where the poet - as here - is working against, or within the self-imposed limits of, a tight poetic form. In short, the unusual or deviant syntax may be explained as

the result of the pressures exerted by the constraints of the sonnet form on the syntactic shaping of the sentence.

The diction of the poem is also curious. There are turns of phrase that would be surprising in everyday prose. Again we can compare the opening of the poem with a second attempt at an everyday, prose rendering of its content:

I was surprised to see at four o’clock in the morning - around Easter time - the moon silhouetting the outline of a tree, descending among white street lamps near the north-west horizon. It was not yet a full moon, was awkwardly made, and was of brazen beauty and power.

Some of the phrasing of this everyday prose version and the poem itself may be compared in the opposing columns below:

’I wondered to see’  ’

I was surprised to see’;

’netted in airy twigs’

’silhouetting the outline of a tree’

’some days to full’

’not yet a full moon’

In every case the phrasing of the poem seems deviant by comparison with the more usual linguistic choices that we could make. For instance words that combine more usually with wondered are as follows:

wondered + if

wondered + what

wondered + why

On an intuitive basis, bearing in mind our everyday immersion in ordinary usage, the combination wondered + to (as in the poem) seems unusual. We can test this empirically by checking the frequency of occurrence of this combination in a large corpus of English text such as the Collins Online Birmingham University Corpus of English (COBUILD). This corpus, which may be searched online for the likely occurrence of phrases, is composed of fifty-six million words of contemporary spoken and written text - including books, newspapers, magazines and transcribed speech from everyday conversation and radio. (For further details see www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx.) In this corpus surprised to see (as in our prose version) occurs more than a hundred times; but wondered to see (as in the poem) occurs not at all. Although wondered + to does occur, it does so only in combinations such as I wondered to what extent or I wondered to what degree.

Similarly, ’netted in airy twigs’ is a highly distinctive word combination in the poem. By searching again the COBUILD corpus of everyday English usage we find that ’netted’ occurs most usually either in angling contexts or in relation to money, prizes and other financial gains, as in:

netted the carp

netted five bream

netted this eleven pounder

having netted £66 million from the re-release

Black netted £73 million profit by selling shares

By contrast, ’netted in’ is extremely rare. Here is one example from the corpus:

The foal lay bloody and inert in the muck, half netted in the amniotic sack, its visible eye open and opaque.

Significantly, the use here verges on the metaphorical - like the example in the poem.

Two further examples in Scovell’s poem are the title, ’Paschal Moon’, and the reference to the moon’s ’brazen beauty and power’. ’Paschal’ is a word that pertains to the Jewish festival of Passover and the related Christian festival of Easter. It typically combines in religious contexts with words such as ’joy’, ’mystery’ and ’optimism’, but not with ’moon’. ’Moon’ typically combines with words such as ’full’, ’half’ and ’blue’. The phrase, ’Paschal Moon’, combining the notion of lunar cycle with that of Judaeo-Christian religious festival is most likely unique to this particular poem. It certainly does not occur in the fifty- six million words of text that make up the COBUILD corpus.

Similarly, ’brazen beauty’ is a distinctive phrase tending to be out of step with everyday usage. In the COBUILD corpus we find typical phrases such as:

brazen cheek

brazen deception

brazen boasting

brazen denial

brazen crooks

brazen con-man

Thus, a common association of ’brazen’ is with negative activities - e.g. deception, boasting, crookery. In the poem, however, we find precisely the opposite kind of association in its unusual combination with ’beauty’. Indeed, a COBUILD search reveals that the combination ’brazen beauty’, while undoubtedly a possible combination in grammatical terms, occurs only once within the corpus. (’A stunning brunette, whose brazen beauty makes Raquel with her blonde curls, baby blue eyes and little-girl voice look rather ridiculous in comparison.’)

Generally, therefore, we see the poet avoiding common usage and opting for combinations that are rare, distinctive and unusual. Indeed, the combination, ’the brazen beauty and power’ of the moon, provides one route to a paradox at the heart of the poem. The paschal moon is depicted as dominant, a thing of beauty and power and of glory and strength - most unlike the ashen, fluorescent street lamp. When, however, we look at the actions associated with her, she is invariably on the receiving end of them: she is ’awkwardly made’, ’netted in airy twigs’, ’freed’ and ’seen unmeshed’. The nearest thing to a positive action attributed to the moon occurs in the last few words of the poem: ’such presence as it had’. So we have a tension between the moon contemplated, experienced and acted upon by others while simultaneously being a thing of power and beauty. Indeed, its power emerges from within this contradiction as integral to its very being rather than a quality discernible in its actions or behaviour. This complex meaning is nowhere simply asserted by the poem but is the cumulative outcome of sets of unusual linguistic choices and patterns that deviate from the patterning of everyday speech and writing. Indeed, if the poem consisted simply of unusual word choices, we as readers might easily just give up on it, finding its linguistic peculiarities rebarbative. If, however, its unusual choices can be seen to cohere within an overarching interpretation, the extra efforts demanded of readers may come to seem worthwhile - a sign, then, of the work’s literary value.

19.2.4 Deviation in semantics

All the cases of literary deviation that we have considered so far have consequences for meaning and interpretation: breaking the rules of punctuation, for instance, affects the way we read and make sense of a text. However, it is also possible to find cases of direct manipulation of conventional meanings in themselves. Joseph Heller’s novel, Catch 22 (1961), is particularly rich in this kind of deviation. Set during the Second World War, it gets its title from the famous paradox (Catch 22) that is used by the authorities in the novel to keep American fliers flying an ever-increasing number of bombing missions. Although fliers can appeal to be grounded on grounds of insanity, [t]here was only one catch and that was Catch 22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he would have to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.

Conventionally, the expressions ’sane’ and ’crazy’ are opposite in meaning. Part of the fascination (and the humour) of Catch 22 is the way in which it constructs conditions under which such opposites can both be true at the same time. Love and hate are conventionally opposite, yet the novel tells us that ’Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly.’ Many examples of semantic deviation in the novel are structured like jokes in two parts:

Doc Daneeka was Yossarian’s friend

and would do just about nothing in his power to help him.

This profusion of semantic anomalies in the opening chapters of Catch 22 helps to create the impression of a world in which war has undermined the rational basis of social and moral action.

Another, more fundamental, way in which literature produces and exploits semantic deviation in meaning is through its use of figurative language, since figures of speech can be thought of as deviations from literal meaning (see Unit 10, Metaphor and Unit 11, Irony). Figures of speech play a large part in other kinds of discourse, but there they tend to become conventional and we lose our sense of their ’deviance’. In literature, on the other hand, figurative language tends to be freshly minted and calls attention to the way it deviates from literal usage or conventional figures.

19.2.5 Literature as deviant discourse

Perhaps the most fundamental kind of deviation that characterizes literature stems not so much from its manipulation of linguistic rules, but from peculiarities in the way it relates to the world at large. These peculiarities include:

1 the way that literary texts construct imagined worlds;

2 the way that literary texts construct imagined speakers;

3 the way that literary texts address imagined addressees.

Most kinds of discourse - news, problem-pages, research reports, gossip or even advertising - operate under certain conditions of truth; we expect their assertions to be true, or at least to amount to a reasonable claim. Literature, on the other hand, is full of things that look like assertions about the world but that actually contradict our everyday sense of what the world is like. Literary discourse, then, is deviant in the sense that it is non-referential and, even when it claims to refer to things in the world, we are not expected to take those claims seriously. Take, for instance, the opening sentence of George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949):

It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.

To a British readership, the notion of there being a bright cold day in April may be completely unremarkable, but the fact that the same sentence tells us that ’the clocks were striking thirteen’ serves to place the events of the novel outside that readership’s everyday world (since clocks in public places in Britain don’t habitually strike thirteen). Furthermore, although for many years the title of the book (written 1948, published 1949) looked forward to a date in the future, the past tense of the first sentence refers backwards as if to events that have already happened. Yet most readers would not interpret the first sentence as the beginning of a factual record of events that had really happened but would realize that Orwell’s point was that such events could conceivably come to pass.

However, it is not just the way that literature refers to non-existent entities that marks its peculiarity as a discourse. The narrators of novels and the speakers of poems are as fictional as the events that are presented. When Julian Barnes uses a woodworm to retell the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark from an unusual angle in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989), he follows a long tradition of using non-human narrators in literary narratives. The speaker of Sylvia Plath’s poem ’Elm’ (1962) is a tree.

In the case of poetry in particular, literature’s whole mode of address turns out to be deviant since it typically addresses someone (or something) other than the reader. During the Romantic period, for instance, there are poems that directly address a rose, a skylark and even a piece of pottery (a Grecian urn):

O Rose, thou art sick

(Blake, ’The sick rose’, 1794)

Hail to thee blithe spirit!

(Shelley, ’Ode to a skylark’, 1820)

Thou still unravished bride of quietness

(Keats, ’Ode on a Grecian urn’, 1820)

Addressing entities that are incapable of talking back may have become a fairly unremarkable literary convention (known as ’apostrophe’), but it is worth noting how deviant this is by comparison with everyday conditions of discourse. We might swear at the cat when it gets under our feet, but we don’t write an elaborate note to it - not, at least, unless we’re writing poetry.