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

6.5 Language variety in literary texts
Unit 6 Language and place
Section 2 Language variation

Historically, the language in which literary texts might be written in Britain has been a troubled question. Quite apart from the issue of Welsh and Gaelic, it is worth noting that, before the sixteenth century, Latin and French were serious competitors to English. In the sixteenth century itself, English was not always thought good enough for literary work (though writing in it did take place).

During the period of the late Elizabethans and early Jacobeans, the attitude that English might not be good enough for literary work gradually changed, partly in celebration of existing writing in English, partly because of attitudes towards Latin during the Reformation. Little more than a century later, however, English was widely believed to have produced an especially eminent literature. Many of the arguments about which language to write in, in many parts of the world today, have in this way (despite their otherwise major differences) an analogue in the circumstances of English in Britain during the later medieval and early Renaissance period.

6.5.1 Dialect representation

In the history of literary writing in English, there have been clear but shifting constraints on which variety or varieties might be used and how. A criterion of decorum was often invoked as a standard of appropriate style within a given genre, so excluding a wide range of voices from serious literary writing. Because of conventions of this kind, dialect speakers were represented in many works only as comic characters, with jokes (including many jokes specifically about dialect) made at their expense.

In tracing this history, it is important to remember that accent and dialect are primarily associated with speech rather than writing, and that representation of speech in writing does not reproduce how people actually speak. Rather, it draws on conventions that produce an illusion of speech (see Unit 26, Literature in performance). Representation of dialect speech in writing draws on a further set of specialized (but never formalized) conventions, including non-standard spellings, which are meant to signal that a character’s speech is different from that of other characters in the text.

Conventions surrounding dialect representation are more than a matter of how particular sounds should be represented, however. Differences between ’standard’ and ’non-standard’ voices set up a hierarchy of voices within a literary work. In nineteenth-century novels, for instance, the narrator and central characters tend to use Standard English, while regional or working-class characters - often minor characters in narrative and thematic terms - may speak with an accent or in a dialect. This raises the question of how far non-standard speech is used to reproduce the way people actually spoke in the place where the novel is set, and how far such use aims simply to signify contrasts of class or moral authority.

Consider The Mayor of Casterbridge again. Hardy’s Wessex novels are peopled with minor rural characters who speak in West Country dialect. Within this setting, however, Hardy typically explores the fate and fortune of middleclass characters, whose speech is more standard than that of the rural characters. In the following scene from The Mayor of Casterbridge, which centres on the rise and fall of a character called Michael Henchard (from destitute rural worker to mayor of Casterbridge, then back to destitution), Henchard chastises one of the workers on his farm for being late in the mornings:

Then Henchard . . . declared with an oath that this was the last time; that if he were behind once more, by God, he would come and drag him out o’ bed.

’There is sommit wrong in my make, your worshipful!’ said Abel, ’. . . I never enjoy my bed at all, for no sooner do I lie down than I be asleep, and afore I be awake I be up. I’ve fretted my gizzard green about it, maister, but what can I do? . . .’

’I don’t want to hear it!’ roared Henchard. ’To-morrow the waggons must start at four, and if you’re not here, stand clear. I’ll mortify thy flesh for thee!’

The worker’s dialect is rendered here through non-standard spelling (’maister’), non-standard grammar (’no sooner do I lie down than I be asleep’) and dialect phrases (’I’ve fretted my gizzard’). More interestingly, though, in his anger Henchard ’lapses’ into dialect (and/or biblical language) in a way that reminds us of his origins (’thee’ and ’thy’ remain in use in dialects long after their disappearance from Standard English). The narrative voice reinforces this, by introducing Henchard’s first comments in Standard English using indirect speech (’Henchard declared with an oath that this was the last time’) and then switching into free indirect speech in order to let Henchard’s own, non-standard speech come through: ’by God, he would come and drag him out o’ bed’. (For discussion of ’indirect’ and ’free indirect speech’ see Unit 22, Speech and narration.)

6.5.2 Modernist polyphony

One distinctive feature of twentieth-century modernist writing is that a wider range of voices is sometimes presented than was usual (or even possible) in earlier literary works in English. In many cases, this introduction of a wider range of voices takes the form of variety switching (as in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)), or juxtaposition (as in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land(1922)). But a fundamental question about dialect representation then arises: Do such texts introduce representation (or mimicry) of regional and class voices as a fundamentally new kind of polyphony, in which voices have become equal? Or is there still a hierarchy of voices in terms of relative seriousness and authority, with the extra voices included merely so that they can be finally subordinated to, or refined into, a reaffirmed, authoritative standard voice of the narrator or poetic persona? (The second of these alternatives is directly arguable in relation to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; for a discussion of this issue in Ulysses, see Unit 7, Language and context: register and Unit 12, Juxtaposition.)

In such experimental writing it is significant that regional varieties are used as much to create a visible (or ’visible-audible’), schematic contrast between Standard and non-Standard English as for their own qualities. Arguably only in forms of dialect writing linked to an expressed sense of regional identity (as in much Scottish writing since the early twentieth century) does dialect function less to contrast with the established standard than to affirm a distinct regional idiom.

How dialect will be used in literary works in future is far from certain. In contemporary Britain, people have many quite different experiences of place, partly because of the regional, class and ethnic diversity of the population; so this seems likely to give rise to continuing experimentation with juxtaposition and mixing of language varieties. Also, since people move from place to place and take their dialect with them, interaction between the regional and social dimensions of dialect seems likely to result in changing and unpredictable connections between voice, region and sense of identity.