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

7.3 Literature and register
Unit 7 Language and context: register
Section 2 Language variation

There are two ways in which register impacts upon literature. First, the fact that literature - especially novels and plays - typically attempts to represent recognizable social worlds in convincing ways means that literary texts may draw on, or quote, any of the non-literary registers that exist in the social world at the time of writing or in the period in which the text is set. Second, literature has its own register, or registers, that have been built up and transformed through history. Consequently, the reader of any literary text needs to be alert to the various non-literary registers that it is ’voicing’ and to the way that it is engaging with the various possible literary registers that are available from the history of literature.

7.3.1 The novel and non-literary registers

In essays such as ’Discourse in the Novel’ (written in 1934-5, first published in Russia in 1973), the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the novel as a genre is typified by what he calls dialogism - that is, a novel, any novel, is comprised of a multiplicity of different, and potentially conflicting, voices. At its most obvious level, this refers to the fact that novels typically include the voice(s) of the narrator(s), together with the voices of its characters. All these voices will necessarily be marked by register. Who or what or where is the narrator supposed to be? Is he or she supposed to be speaking or writing? Is his or her narration ’literary’ or not? How are the characters located in terms of class or employment? What speech situations are they placed within? Do they write letters, and if so to whom? At a second level, though, Bakhtin is suggesting that novels are typically composed out of a wide range of language types - i.e. the palette of the novelist is precisely the whole range of possible registers. In fact, Bakhtin’s list of the kinds of ’voices’ that may be woven into a novel is a list of registers:

(1) Direct authorial literary-artistic narration (in all its diverse variants);

(2) Stylization of the various forms of oral everyday narration (skaz);

(3) Stylization of the various forms of semiliterary (written) everyday narration (the letter, the diary, etc.);

(4) Various forms of literary but extra-artistic authorial speech (moral, philosophical or scientific statements, oratory, ethnographic descriptions, memoranda and so forth);

(5) The stylistically individualized speech of characters.

(in Leitch, 2001, p. 1192)

Bakhtin then suggests that the discursive material available to the novel constitutes what is in effect an almost inexhaustible range of registers:

The internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour . . . this internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence is the indispensable prerequisite for the novel as a genre.

(in Leitch, 2001, p. 1192)

In order to test out what Bakhtin is saying we can look at Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which is often regarded as one of the first novels in English. Although it is a first person narrative, and although for a great deal of the novel the narrator is alone upon a deserted island, Robinson Crusoe is a good example of the dialogic nature of the novel genre. This is so because the narrator’s monologue is actually composed of a polyphony of various ’voices’ or registers that were in circulation in early eighteenth-century Britain. Crusoe’s narration contains features of the Puritan spiritual autobiography of the period, along with features of another related contemporary genre - the private journal. Yet close analysis reveals that the registers of other contemporary discourses also inhabit Crusoe’s private inner voice. One of these is the register of seafaring and navigation - an important and prominent discourse at a historical moment when England’s imperial project was carried out via sea voyaging. Other prominent registers include the languages of building, agriculture and husbandry as Crusoe begins to exploit the natural resources of his island. At the most general level, Crusoe’s response to his situation wavers between the register of Protestant self-examination, with its notions of sin, providence, divine retribution and salvation, and the twin registers of early capitalism (business and trade, profit and loss) and economic individualism (an emphasis on individual effort, rational calculation, trial and error, cause and effect). This means that Crusoe’s monologue is internally riven by two of the dominant registers in English culture of the period. The two come together in the following passage in which Crusoe sets out a balance sheet of his condition on the island:

I now began to consider seriously my condition, and the circumstances I was reduced to, and I drew up the state of my affairs in writing . . . and as my reason began now to master my despondency . . . I stated it very impartially, like debtor and creditor, the comforts I enjoyed against the miseries I suffered, thus:

In this passage, the register of the content is partly that of Protestant faith (’He that miraculously saved me from death, can deliver me from this condition’), but its form - the balance sheet of ’debtor and creditor’ - draws on the register of economic individualism. While these two registers and impulses sometimes went hand in hand in early eighteenth-century England, and sometimes do in Robinson Crusoe, Defoe’s weaving of these two registers into Crusoe’s narration sometimes shows them to be mutually incompatible views of the world.

In Robinson Crusoe the various registers that resonate in Crusoe’s narration are generally motivated. In other words, there tend to be realistic reasons for the presence of these registers: Crusoe uses the registers of seafaring and navigation when describing his experiences at sea, for example. Even the mixing of religious and rational/economic registers is motivated in that these are the voices of Crusoe’s inner conflict and derive from the historical moment in which Defoe was writing. This use of motivated registers is generally characteristic of the novel from the early eighteenth century through to the early twentieth century, especially in the ’realist’ novels of the nineteenth century. The experimentation that characterizes the modernist literature of the early twentieth century, however, includes an experimentation with register mixing that largely abandons realistic motivation.

James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) epitomizes modernism’s use of unmotivated register mixing; its pages often seem like a ragbag of odds and ends taken from a huge variety of different and usually incongruous registers. However, although, as we might expect, this mixing of registers is often used for comic effect, it also seems to have more far-reaching implications. In the following paragraph, for example, one of the central characters of the novel, Leopold Bloom, has invited the other main male character, Stephen Dedalus, back to his house for tea after a bizarre night on the town; it is late, and Bloom has to move carefully in order not to wake his wife sleeping upstairs. The places where the register changes have been numbered:

[1] What did Bloom do?

[2] He . . . drew two spoonseat deal chairs to the hearthstone, one for Stephen with its back to the area window, the other for himself when necessary, [3] knelt on one knee, composed in the grate a pyre [4] of crosslaid resintipped sticks and various coloured papers and irregular polygons [5] of best Abram coal at twentyone shillings a ton from the yard of Messrs Flower and M’Donald of 14 D’Olier street, [6] kindled it at three projecting points of paper with one ignited lucifer match, [7] thereby releasing the potential energy contained in the fuel by allowing its carbon and hydrogen elements to enter into free union with the oxygen of the air.

[8] Of what similar apparitions did Stephen think? . . .

In order to identify the various registers here, we need to identify the context in which each one would usually occur. Tentative names for these registers are given in Table 7.1, together with the textual features that provide evidence for such decisions.

According to the analysis in Table 7.1, this short passage from Ulysses contains six different registers. Part of its comic effect depends upon our sensitivity to a number of clashes between language and context - for example, the incongruity of describing the act of lighting a fire in a terraced house in Dublin in the early part of the twentieth century in various registers (the religious, the technical, the scientific) that seem too ’elevated’ or too precise for this humble action. Note, however, that each of these registers would be appropriate for describing the lighting of a fire in a different context (e.g. in a religious ceremony or in a scientific experiment). A second context to be considered is that of the novel genre itself: in a realist novel (see Unit 23, Narrative realism) we would expect the scene to be narrated in register 2 rather than in registers 3-6.

Table 7.1 Identifying registers in an extract from Ulysses

Furthermore, we do not expect a novel to be narrated in a series of questions and answers (as this whole chapter is) - this procedure is, in fact, more appropriate to religious instruction by catechism in the Christian Church.

The mixing of registers in this passage not only produces comic effects but also raises a series of unsettling speculations. The description of this commonplace action in the religious register seems to invite us to recall the spiritual significance of fire, while the scientific register forces us to remember that fire is a process of chemical transformation. Thus we could argue that these incongruous registers defamiliarize a process that has become so familiar that we hardly think about it any more. Conversely, it could be argued that the ’conservative’ registers of the Church and science are being undermined insofar as they are shown to employ ’pretentious’ terminology to describe the most commonplace of events (the interweaving of the commercial register perhaps adds to this by undercutting the religious and technical registers that precede it). The passage is unsettling, however, in that it gives us no clues about which of these readings is ’correct’. Hence it becomes impossible to decide whether the ’elevated’ registers are meant to have more authority than the ’low’ register of commerce or vice versa. This is partly because the text seems to abdicate the authority that realist texts usually maintain through a clearly defined narrative voice. The register of narrative prose (2) is simply one register among others in this passage, without any special authority; and, although the narrative is presented through a technique reminiscent of the Christian catechism, the mixing of registers undercuts the potential authority of both question and answer. Ulysses, then, by undermining or rejecting the register thought appropriate for narrating novels, can be interpreted either as attempting to rejuvenate the novel genre or as challenging the genre’s claims to be a special or elevated discourse.

7.3.2 Literary registers

One of the ongoing debates in literary criticism and literary theory is whether literature has its own register or registers. For a large part of the history of thinking about literature, the answer to this would have been ’yes’. The assumption that literature had its own peculiar registers was based on the notion of ’decorum’ - the idea that there was an appropriate language for each kind of subject matter and genre. Just as we expect that a funeral sermon, say, will be conducted in an appropriate language, so too did literary critics from classical Greece through to the eighteenth century assume that the subject matter of a literary text ought to dictate the register. In fact, this was partly a matter of genre: each genre - epic, tragedy, comedy, pastoral and so on - was linked to a particular register. But the notion of appropriateness was also shaped by social, political and cultural factors. In the eighteenth century - an age characterized by reason, politeness and social distinctions - literature was governed, for the most part, by notions of decorum: its language is educated, polite, upper middle class. Its assumptions about what kind of language is appropriate to literature are best summed up by Alexander Pope in 1711: ’Expression is the dress of thought, and still / Appears more decent, as more suitable’ (An Essay on Criticism, II, 318-19).

At the end of the eighteenth century, however, when ideas of democracy and revolution began to challenge the stabilities of the neoclassical period, there was a parallel revolution in the register thought appropriate to literature. In the ’Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ (1800), Wordsworth explains that Lyrical Ballads ’was published as an experiment . . . to ascertain, how far . . . a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation’ might be a suitable language for poetry, and he indicates that the language ’of low and rustic life’ - suitably adopted and ’purified’ - was chosen because ’such men . . . convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions’. Wordsworth thus attempts to change the register considered appropriate to poetry and so participates in a struggle over literature’s role in society (raising questions such as whether it should be the preserve of an elite or be as widely available and accessible as possible).

At the same time, however, in some of his other poems - such as ’Tintern Abbey’ (1798) and The Prelude (1805) - Wordsworth developed a recognizably ’Wordsworthian’ register that is part of a larger ’Romantic’ register that came to characterize poetry from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century and that is still the register of poetry for many readers. When Keats’s speaker addresses a Grecian urn (or a figure on its design) as ’Thou still unravished bride of quietness’, we know we are in the presence of poetry - or at least of ’Romantic’ poetry. However, just as modernist writers experimented boldly with the registers of the novel, they also attempted to transform the existing poetic register - or perhaps to destroy the very notion that there was a special register for poetry. The opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s ’The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915) provide a shock that is largely produced by the way the third line jars with our preconceptions about the poetic register:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table.

While the first two lines are in a recognizably poetic register that correlates with the idea of a love song, the third line provides a simile for the evening sky that comes from a wholly different and incongruous register (a medical register or, more precisely, that of surgical theatres).

Following in Eliot’s wake, the history of twentieth-century poetry - and of poetic theory - can be seen as a history of attempts to escape from the (Romantic) poetic register. Yet, as St John Butler demonstrates, the fact that a text (any text) is set out on the page as poetry is itself a signal of poetic register regardless of what the words themselves consist of. When we see this typographic generic signal (poetic layout) we tend to read what we are presented with as poetry; and, if the content (the subject matter and the vocabulary) seems radically non-poetic, then this produces a register clash between form and content. Rather than abandoning or refusing to recognize the poetic register, then, such poems depend on our notion of the poetic register for their effect. Thus, as St John Butler puts it, ’Those who would maintain that there is no such thing as poetic register need to answer the question: what is it that such poems as these are reacting against?’ (1999, p. 194).

We should be wary, however, of assuming that register mixing and clashing is somehow unique to modernist poetry and the poetry that followed it. In fact, it could be argued that the practice of recycling and mixing registers is central to the literary process and its effects in general. One simple but revealing example of this is that parody is a genre that depends upon the notion that certain kinds of language are conventionally associated with particular genres and themes. Pope, who was cited above as arguing that poetic language should be ’suitable’, can also exploit the possibilities set up by this notion in order to produce comic irony. In his The Rape of the Lock (1712/1714), the humorous effect depends precisely upon the reader’s familiarity with the register used in epic poetry and consequent ability to recognize the mismatch between Pope’s use of this ’high’ register and the ’low’ subject matter of the poem. In just the same way, novels such as Ulysses or poems such as ’The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ depend upon the notion of appropriateness built into the fact of register in order to achieve their effects - whether this be to challenge established ideas about literature, or make a joke, or both.

We might summarize this discussion by making a number of general observations about the way literature draws upon the possibilities opened up by register:

1 Literature - because it uses language - draws on and is continuously open to all the non-literary registers that surround it.

2 Through unusual juxtaposition, parody, irony and so on, literature can draw attention to the notion of register by foregrounding the features of particular registers and can show how arbitrary and often absurd certain registers can be.

3 By being so open to the registers that surround it, literature seems to challenge the strict distinctions maintained by conservative registers and seems ultimately to question the idea that literature itself is a privileged or special discourse.

4 At the same time, there are special literary registers that have been created and transformed by writers throughout the history of literature. As our reading experience develops, we become sensitized to these registers and are able to recognize when a text deviates from its established register (sometimes by ’quoting’ registers from the past). Even when a poem is written in a non-poetic register, its impact depends on the reader’s inner sense of the poetic register it is deviating from.

5 At different historical moments, literary and poetic registers may be conservative or open. Nonetheless, literary and poetic registers are continually renewed or changed, often by borrowing from other registers or by recycling the registers of previous literature. One of the skills that readers need to develop is the ability to recognize the registers of a wide range of different periods and genres: Renaissance courtly love poetry; Restoration drama; eighteenth-century satire; Romantic lyric poetry; the realist novel; modernist poetry; and so on.