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

3.3 Literary applications of grammatical description
Unit 3 Analysing units of structure
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving

Analysing a text into constituent elements becomes useful when it illuminates how that text is working. Rather like an action replay, descriptive analysis can examine in slow motion and close detail a process that in composition or in spontaneous reading occurs without conscious attention.

3.3.1 Descriptive analysis

Perhaps the most basic usefulness of analysis employing units of structure in literary texts is that it enables us to describe potentially significant patterns, such as repetition. Take the first stanza of William Blake’s ’London’ (1794), for example:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

This textual fragment could be described in terms of a range of different units: stanza, sentence, line, phrase, word, parts of speech, etc. The notion of repetition would almost certainly be involved in a description involving any of these units. Consider here, though, a description based simply on observed repetition and using analysis by part of speech. An account of the poem might want to discuss not only the repetition of ’charter’d’ in the first and second lines of the stanza, but also the repetition of ’mark’ in the third and fourth lines. It is more accurate, however - and so potentially more useful - to note that ’mark’ in line three is being used as a verb, meaning to see or to notice, while in line four it is used (in the plural) as a noun. We might then use that distinction to ask why these ’marks’ in the fourth line are being linked, through

the verbal echo, with the speaker’s act of seeing, or ’marking’, them in the previous line.

3.3.2 Parallelism

By identifying units in a text that are repeated, or repeated with local variation, we can make visible the structure of certain kinds of parallelism (see Unit 18, Parallelism), for example the repetition of grammatical structures. Consider Blake’s ’London’ again. The whole of this poem is highly structured by verbal and grammatical parallelism, a characteristic illustrated in the fourth line of the verse quoted above: ’marks of weakness, marks of woe’.

3.3.3 Descriptions of style

The example drawn from Blake focuses on specific, local effects. By analysing larger stretches of text (or a number of whole texts), however, it is also possible to identify characteristic linguistic choices made by individual writers. A writer, for example, may show a predisposition towards - or a reluctance to use - adverbs, complex sentences or relative clauses. By detailed analysis of recurrent structures (or noting structures that do not occur but that are known to occur frequently in the given type of discourse generally) it is possible for editors to ascribe a text of unknown origin to a particular author. This process of attribution of authorship is greatly helped by computer analysis of a large number of texts, or corpus (as discussed in Unit 2, Using information sources). It is also possible to begin to describe exactly why the styles of different authors can feel different when you read them, almost irrespective of what they are writing about. The perceptible differences between the writings of Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and Henry James, for example, can be accounted for in grammatical terms.

3.3.4 Deviation

A grammar of a language is the set of rules for combining units (parts of speech) into sequences. But it is always possible to break the rules in order to achieve a specific effect (see Unit 19, Deviation). Rule-breaking texts can be analysed by looking at which rules have been broken and considering what effects are created by each transgression.

Consider, for example, the first line of a poem by e e cummings (1940):

anyone lived in a pretty how town

This line seems odd. But we can begin to explain its oddity by showing which grammatical rules it deviates from. The sequence ’a pretty how town’ is odd because ’how’ is a degree word (see Table 3.1 on p. 32), which appears in a place where we would expect not a degree word but an adjective (e.g. nice, awful). In fact, the sequence article-adj ective-degree word-noun is not a possible sequence in English. (A parallel example would be ’the stone very houses’.)

Another problem with the line is ’anyone’. ’Anyone’ is an indefinite pronoun, and as such potentially fits into the place it appears in. The pronouns ’it’ or ’someone’, for example, would be perfectly acceptable before the verb ’lived’. But users of English instinctively realize that ’anyone’ does not make sense in the sequence of words that cummings has used.

How can analysis in terms of units of structure help with reading in this case? The reader might simply abandon the poem as nonsensical. Alternatively, however, he or she might try other ways of reading it. It might help, for example, to rearrange the words in order to ’make sense’ of them, as if other, related strings of words are being echoed or evoked:

how anyone lived in a pretty town

In this new sequence, ’anyone’ does make sense in the position preceding the verb ’lived’; and we seem to have the beginnings of an interpretation, which would go something like ’how anyone lived in a pretty town like that is a mystery to me’. However, if we try to match this interpretation with the rest of the poem, we find it doesn’t seem to work - nothing similar or evidently compatible seems to happen elsewhere - and so this beginning of a reading probably needs to be abandoned. There is, however, another way we might use analysis of units of structure to deal with this grammatical problem. If we look at other uses of ’anyone’ in the poem, we may discover a pattern. Consider:

anyone’s any was all to her (line 16)

one day anyone died i guess (line 25)

Neither of these lines makes grammatical sense. But we can see that ’anyone’ appears consistently in a position in sequences where we would normally expect expressions that refer to particular, definite entities (e.g. proper names; noun phrases, such as ’the woman’; or pronouns, such as ’he’ or ’she’):

one day (Bill/Alice/the woman/he/she) died i guess

Close reading of the poem following this insight suggests that ’anyone’ could be a man who lived in a pretty town and married a woman referred to as ’no-one’, and that they were eventually buried side by side. Whatever the merits of this reading, we have begun to make sense of the poem by exploring how it may work through a kind of grammatical substitution: indefinite pronouns used as if they are definite pronouns referring to particular people. The next step would be to ask why the poem would be written like that, and what effects it has as a result. The paraphrase given above suggests that, if we substitute definite nouns in place of ’anyone’ and ’no-one’, the poem becomes quite banal. One general effect of using ’anyone’ and ’no-one’, therefore, might be that of making the poem ambiguous or more thought-provoking. The two figures and their experience are given more general significance (they stand for every man and every woman) by being kept anonymous and emptied of individual significance (they are both anyone and no one).