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ITERARY TEXT AS POETIC STRUCTURE
VERBAL AND SUPRAVERBAL LAYERS OF THE LITERARY TEXT
While reading a literary text one gradually moves from the first word of it on to the last. The words one reads combine into phrases, phrases into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs making up larger passages: chapters, sections, and parts. All these represent the verbal layer of the literary text.
At the same time when one reads a text of imaginative literature one cannot but see another layer gradually emerging out of these verbal sequences. One sees that word sequences represent a series of events, conflicts and circumstances in which characters of the literary work happen to find themselves.
One sees that all these word-sequences make a composition, a plot, a genre, and a style, that they all go to create an image of reality and that through this image the author conveys his message, his vision of the world.
Plot, theme, composition, genre, style, image and the like make the supraverbal (poetic) layer which is, nevertheless, entirely revealed in verbal sequences. The supraverbal and the verbal layers of the text are thus inseparable from each other. The fact that all the elements of the literary text, such as those mentioned above, materialize in word sequences makes the latter acquire a meaning that is superimposed by the whole of the literary text.
Thus, the text of a literary work or any part of such is not a mere linguistic entity, it is something more involved. The involved nature of the literary text makes it entirely individual (unique), makes it essentially unsubstitutable for any other word sequences. When we substitute some purl of a literary text, i. e. some given word sequence for a synonymous one, we simultaneously change the content, for the content of the literary work is indivisible from its text, (It should be mentioned here that it is in the literary text that the etymological meaning of the word text/ from the Latin textum, texo – to weave/is completely motivated.) A linguistic text, on the contrary, allows of substitution; one verbal sequence may have a sense similar to that of another verbal sequence, consequently, one verbal sequence may stand for another, e. g. the sentence: "He was one of the most inefficient liars I have ever known" when viewed just as a linguistic entity allows of a number of substitutions, such as: "one could easily see when he told a lie", or "he didn't know how to tell a lie", etc. When this sentence is part of a literary text its meaning cannot be completely rendered in so many other synonymous words. Something of the meaning will be left unconveyed. And this something is the implication the sentence acquires from the whole of the supraverbal layer. To understand what "an inefficient liar" means in the sentence given above as part of a literary text we have to know the whole poetic context, in this case the poetic context of the novel "The Quiet American" from which the sentence is taken.
The cohesion (сцепление) of the two layers, i. e. of the strictly verbal and the supraverbal constitutes what is known as the poetic structure of the literary text. There is nothing in the literary work that is not expressed in its poetic structure. It is the whole of the poetic structure that conveys the author's message. One element (or component) of the poetic structure is as important as any-other, for through them all the author's message is conveyed. All the components of the poetic structure compose a hierarchy, .an organization of interdependent layers. The basic unit of the poetic structure is the word. All the various layers of the structure, i. e. the syntactic, the semantic, the rhythmical, the compositional, the stylistic are expressed in words.
The concept of unity and interdependence of elements in the poetic structure nuiy be illustrated by the following example. The simile “he watched me intently like a prize-pupil” when taken by itself is nothing oilier than just a play on words, a word-image. But within a literary text (in this case "The Quiet American") it is a unit which along with others in the system of similes (and the latter in its turn as a unit in the system of all tropes and figures of speech used in the novel) goes to depict the image of Pyle. The image of Pyle in its turn, as one of the character-images together with all the other ones in the novel, goes to convey the author's message.
Representation of the literary work in terms of a structure or a hierarchy of layers presupposes the concept of macro- and micro-elements (components) and bears upon form-content relationship.
Macro- and micro-elements is a functional, not an absolute category. Within a literary work a simile, for instance, is a micro-element in relation to a macro-element which may be the image of a character, and the latter, in its turn, is a micro-element in relation to the macro-element which is the literary work itself, understood as an image of reality.
The fact that macro-elements of a literary work are made, out of micro-elements means in the final analysis that micro-elements are form in relation to macro-elements which are content.
An isolated simile taken by itself as any other verbal entity is a unity of content and form. The same simile within a literary work is either form or content depending upon the element in relation to which it is taken. Thus, the simile he watched me intently like a prize-fighter is form in relation to the macro-element, the image of Pyle, which this simile goes to build up. On the other hand, the quoted simile is content in relat.ion to the form, the elements which it is made up of: watched, intently, prize-fighter.
The following should be emphasized in connection with what has just been stated: an analysis in which the idea of the literary work is considered separate from its verbal materialization is an erroneous and harmful practice. It is harmful in that it leads the reader away from the appreciation of the essence of verbal art. Also it indirectly inculcates in the reader a view that literature is an unnecessarily long and circumlocutions way of expressing an idea which could otherwise be expressed in a much shorter and simpler manner. Unfortunately this erroneous practice is often followed in classroom discussions of literary works.
Principles of Poetic Structure cohesion
Each literary work is a unique instance of imaginative representation of reality. Imaginative representation, however, has its own principles (known as aesthetic principles) which cohere all elements of the literary text and render it possible for the latter to constitute a world complete in itself. These principles are common to all literary works.
We now proceed to discuss some of these principles.
Principle of Incomplete Representation
Wholeness in art is different from wholeness in actual reality. We have already shown (see Introduction) that an author in re-creating an object or phenomenon of reality selects out of an infinity of features pertaining to the object only those which are most characteristic. In other words, a literary image represents features that are most characteristic of an object, or which at least, seem such to the author. For instance, in the description of a farmhouse (J. Steinbeck's "The Chrysanthemums") the following features are singled out: "It was a hard-swept looking house, with hard-polished windows, and a clean mudmat on the front steps." The farm-house had many other peculiarities, no doubt. But those selected very well convey the image of the place. Moreover, they indirectly suggest the image of its owner, the vigorous, beauty-seeking Eliza. Thus, the author, in depicting an image, makes a selection: he picks out part (or parts) which can stand for the whole.
All images in a literary text, those of people, events, situations, landscapes and the like are incompletely represented. At least two factors seem to condition this. First, the linguistic factor. Verbal representation of the whole image is a venture which cannot or should hardly ever be endeavoured. This would take up innumerable pages of writing in which (lie image itself would invariably he dissolved, for Micro is a considerable disproportion between linguistic means of representation and the reality which is to be represented. The second, and the main, is the aesthetic factor. Literature, as we know, transmits aesthetic information. To achieve this aim literature must first of all stir up the reader's interest. One way to do this is to make the reader strain his perceptive abilities and fill in for himself those fragments of the whole which have been gapped or, as we have termed it, incompletely represented, that is, represented through a part. The part selected to fulfill such a representative function must, indeed, have the power of stirring up the reader's imagination so as to make him visualize the whole. The trick of conveying much through little is one of the greatest secrets of imaginative literature. An achieved harmony of the whole and the part is a sign of a truly talented work.
The degree of incompleteness of representation depends upon the genre of the literary work as well as upon the individual manner of the writer. The degree of incompleteness is greater in lyrical poems and smaller in epic works. But even in large works of narrative prose the degree of incompleteness (or gapping) is considerable.
Poetic detail. The part selected to represent the whole is a poetic detail. The term "poetic detail" defies a rigorous definition for as any other element of poetic structure it is a functional category. It emerges as a result of correlation with other elements of the text and can be evaluated only against the background of all of these. Take, for instance, the following extract from W. Faulkner's story "That Evening Sun" in which Nancy, the main character of the story, a Negro washer-woman, is first introduced: "Nancy would set her bundle (of washing) on the top of her head, then upon the bundle in turn she would set the black straw sailor hat which she wore winter and summer. She was tall, with a high, sad face sunken a little where her teeth were missing. Sometimes we would go a part of the way down the lane and across the pasture with her, to watch the balanced bundle and the hat that never bobbed nor wavered, even when she walked down into the ditch and up the other side and stooped through the fence." Nancy is described by a number of features: the way she set and carried her bundle of washing, her height, her face, her missing teeth. But some of these features stand out more prominent than the other: her "black straw sailor lint which she wore winter and summer" and "her missing teeth", These are the details which suggest the image of Nancy. Not that the reader becomes conscious of their suggestiveness at once. Their full impact may get home to him on recurrence or after he has read more about Nancy and her life. One way or another, in his appreciation of an image the reader will be guided by detail, for it is by carefully selected details that the author depicts his image.
It would be true to say, that the more vivid the detail the greater is the impetus the reader's imagination receives and, accordingly, the greater is his aesthetic pleasure.
There are details of landscapes, of events, etc. The central image of any literary work, that of a character is manifold, so are the details that represent it. These may be the details of: action, speech, physical portrait, ethical, political views, etc. Here is a detail of Babbitt's speech (S. Lewis, "Babbitt"). Mr. Babbitt and his best friend Paul, greet each other over the telephone.
"'How's the old horse-thief?'
'All right, I guess. How're you, you poor shrimp?'
'I'm first-rate, you second-hand hunk o'cheese.'"
The author then remarks "Reassured thus of their high fondness, Babbitt grunted..."
Another detail from the same novel gives the reader an idea of Babbitt's (the owner of a real-estate firm) attitude to common workman. "He almost liked common people. He wanted them well paid and able lo afford high-rents — though, naturally, they must not interfere with the reasonable profits of stockholders."
A poetic detail may be some directly observed and directly expressed feature of an image. Thus, the image of cold autumn ("In Another Country", by E. Hemingway) is conveyed in such details of simple and direct perceptions which may be described as verbal photography: "... small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers." ... "On one of them (bridges) a woman sold roasted chestnuts. It was warm, standing in front of her charcoal fire, and the chestnuts were warm afterward in your pocket."
A detail of the depicted image, on the other hand, may be represented in an association with some other phenomenon. In such a case it usually takes the form of a trope as in the following detail of the winter-in-Salinas-valley description from J. Steinbeck's story "The Chrysanthemums": "(the fog) sat like a lid on the mountains and made of a great valley a closed pot."
The nature of a truly poetic detail is such that it both typifies and individualizes the image.
Principle of Analogy and Contrast
Analogy and contrast are known to be universal principles of cognition. It is by analogy that the essence of a phenomenon is revealed, the similar and the contrastive in different phenomena discovered.
In the arts and especially in literature analogy/contrast is a way of imaginative cognition. The author contra- and juxtaposes images of real life and in that way reveals the good and the evil, the beautiful and the ugly, the just and the unjust in life.
Analogy and contrast are the organizing axis of poetic structure. They permeate the whole text, all its components, both macro- and micro-: the character and the event representation, the imagery, etc. G. Greene's novel "The Quiet American" may very well serve as an illustration. The author's ethical message that of the man's responsibility in the modern world is conveyed by a contrast of the two main characters: Fowler and Pyle. The author depicts them as antipodes in everything: in their physical appearances, in their spiritual and mental make-up, in the stand they take on all essential issues of life. Pyle is young and quiet. With his "unused face, with his gangly legs and his crew-cut, his wide campus gaze" he seemed, at first sight, "incapable of harm". He came to the East full of York Harding's ideas about the Third Force, eager to help them materialize.
Fowler, on the contrary, is an aging man, cynical and sophisticated. He prides himself on detachment, on being uninvolved, on not belonging to this war. Step by step showing Pyle's activity in Viet-Nam the author makes the reader see that in the tragic world of that country it is the quiet, earnest Pyle that turns out to he cold, cruel and menace-carrying. He is impregnably armoured by York Harding's teaching and his own ignorance. His innocence, the author says, is a kind of insanity.»
The cynical Fowler, the man who had prided himself on not being involved, on the contrary, comes to realize that he is responsible for the war "as though those wounds had been inflicted by him." Pyle did not abandon his stand, York Hunting and his teaching. Civilians killed in the street are just mere war casualties for him. To Fowler their deaths cannot be "justified by any amount of killed soldiers".
Thus, it is through the antithesis of Pyle — Fowler and the spiritual and ethical worlds they represent that the author conveys his idea of what man's true responsibility is, of what man should do in the world torn by enmity and conflict.
The principle of analogy and contrast may not be so explicit in some works as it is in the work we have mentioned above, but it infallibly finds a manifestation in any literary work.
As will be shown below, analogy and contrast underlie quite a number of such elements of poetic structure as tropes and figures of speech.
Principle of Recurrence
When we read a literary text our thought does not run in just one, onward, direction. Its movement is both progressive and recursive: from the given item it goes on to the next with a return to what has been previously stated. This peculiar movement of the thought is conditioned by the fact that the literary text as we have shown above (see pp. 25—27) represents a cohesion of two layers the verbal and the supraverbal. The supraverbal layer is not coincident with the strictly verbal layer. The verbal is direct, linear, the supraverbal is essentially recursive.
When we begin to read a book we do not yet perceive the complexity of the content contained in the whole of it, though the text (considering that it is written in the language we know) is well understood by us. The covered portion of the text is part of the literary work and as such it gives us but a rough approximation of the meaning of the whole work. This part, however, deepens our understanding of that portion of the text, which we proceed to read. And the newly read portion of the text adds to our perception of the whole. In this recursive or spiral-like manner we gather the content of the literary work as a whole.
Poetic structure of the literary text is so modeled that certain of its elements which have already occurred in the text recur again at definite intervals. These recurrent elements may be a poetic detail, an image, a phrase, a word.
The recurrence of an element may have several functions, i. e. be meaningful in a variety of ways. One of these functions is that of organizing the subject matter, giving it a dynamic flow. Consider, for instance, the following expository passage from E. Hemingway's "Old Man at the Bridge" and see how the recurrent phrase "old man" organizes and frames it up. "An old man with steel-rimmed spectacles and very dusty clothes sat by the side of the road. There was a pontoon bridge across the river and carts, trucks, and men, women and children were crossing it. The mule-drawn carts staggered up the steep bank from the bridge with soldiers helping push against the spokes of the wheels. The trucks ground up and away heading out of it all and the peasants plodded along in the ankle deep dust. But the old man sat there without moving. He was too tired to go any farther."
A recurrent element may represent the leit-motif of the literary work, expressing the author's message as, for instance, in "The Basement Room" by G. Greene. The story tells about a seven-year-old boy whose parents have gone on a fortnight's vacation leaving him in charge of the butler, Baines, and his wife, Mrs. Baines. The boy descends into the basement room, the dwelling-place of the Baines' and ... finds himself involved in their life, with its conflicts, its secrets and its bitterness. Each of them, in turn, entrusts his/her secret to the boy and expects him to keep it. The boy is entirely on the side of the butler; he hates and abhors the butler's wife. But when it happens that the s butler unintentionally causes the death of his wife, the boy betrays him to the police, for he feels it unbearable to keep the secret, to have the responsibility Baines has laid upon him.
The following two sets of phrases run parallel to each other at certain intervals through the whole of the story. The first set is: "Philip began to live"; "this is life", "this was life"; "it was life he was in the middle of;" "Philip extracted himself from life"; "a retreat from life". And the second set: "And suddenly he felt responsible for Baines"; "Again Philip felt responsibility"; "He would have nothing to do with their secrets, the responsibilities they were determined to lay on him"; "he surrendered responsibility once and for all." These two recurrent sets of phrases run as the leit-motif of the story: living means having responsibilities, asserts the author; when one surrenders responsibilities one retreats from life.
It may be mentioned here in passing that it is Upon the recurrent elements (phonetic, syntactic, lexical, etc.) and their peculiar distribution within the poetic structure that the rhythm of the text largely depends, for rhythm is repetition with variation.
Quite a number of figures of speech are based upon the principle of recurrence.
COMPONENTS OF POETIC STRUCTURE
MACRO-COMPONENTS OF POETIC STRUCTURE
Poetic structure of the literary work involves such entities as image, theme, idea, composition, plot, genre and style. As components of poetic structure they are essentially inseparable from each other, but as basic categories of the theory of literature they may be treated in isolation.
Literary Image. The world of a literary work is the world of its characters, situations, events, etc. similar to those of real life. Characters and the situations they are engaged in may be entirely phantastic, nevertheless, they, too, are inspired by' objective reality. Here is how H. W. Longfellow has poetically expressed this idea in his "Song of Hiawatha".
The fact that literary images are similar to life breeds a belief in an untrained reader that literary characters are people of real life and not imaginative representation of the author's perception of life. This is an erroneous belief, stemming from one's ignorance of the intrinsic properties of literature. Literature cognizes and interprets life by re-creating life in the form of images inspired by life and in accordance with the author's vision (see Introduction). It means that, for instance, Soames from J. Galsworthy's "Forsyte Saga" is not just an English bourgeois, but a literary character created by Galsworthy in precisely the way his talents, his vision, his understanding of the English middle class life have urged him to create. In giving the image of Soames as well as the other images of "The Forsyte Saga" the author transmits to the reader his own philosophy of life, his ethic and moral code.
Literary image is thus the "language" of literature, the form of its existence.
The term "image" refers not only to the whole of the literary work or to such of its main elements as characters or personages but to any of its meaningful units such as detail, phrase, etc.1
Literature being a verbal art, it is out of word sequences that literary images emerge, although images as such are supraverbal entities. Consider, for instance, the following word sequences from E. Caldwell's short story "Wild Flowers" that build up an image of nature. "The mocking-bird that had perched on the roof top all night, filling the clear cool air with its music, had flown away when the sun rose. There was silence as deep and mysterious as the flat sandy country that extended mile after mile in every direction. Yesterday's shadows on the white sand began to reassemble under the trees and around the fence posts, spreading on the ground the lacy foliage of the branches and fuzzy slabs of the wooden fence."
All images in the literary work constitute a hierarchical interrelation. The top of this hierarchy is the macro-image, the literary work itself, understood as an image of life visioned and depicted by the author. Say, "The Forsyte Saga" by J. Galsworthy, or "An American Tragedy" by Th. Dreiser taken as a whole. Within the literary work it is the image of the character or characters that top the hierarchy of images. Say, the images of Old Jolion, Soames, Irene, Fleur in "The Forsyte Saga", or the images of Clyde, Roberta in "An American Tragedy". At the bottom of the hierarchy there is the word-image, or a micro-image: simile, epithet, metaphor, etc. They together with other elements build up character-images, event-images, landscape-images, etc. E. g. "The three with the medals were like hunting-hawks." (E. Hemingway) "The rain hissed on the live-oak and magnolia trees." (R. P. Warren).
Each such micro-image, when in isolation, is just a trope, but within the poetic structure it is an element which, equally with others, shares in the expression of the content. Its meaningfulness becomes apparent when such a word-image or its synonymic variant is found to recur in the text. A. Huxley's story "The Gioconda Smile" is a good example in this respect. Here is its plot: A certain Miss Spence had poisoned the wife of her neighbour, Mr. Hutton, a country gentleman. She had done that in the hope that <Mr. Hutton would eventually marry her. But when it became obvious that the gentleman was not in the least inclined to propose to her, she spread rumors accusing Mr. Hutton of the murder. The man was tried and condemned to capital punishment.
The surface layer of the story contains no direct hint of the true nature of Miss Spence, That she is the murderess is revealed to the reader only at the very end. It is the layer of word-images superimposed upon the simple story layer that is suggestive in this respect. It begins with the title: "The Gioconda Smile". The allusive epithet "Gioconda", -that describes Miss Spence's smile, later recurs in a number of its variants such as: "her queer face"; "there was something enigmatic about her"; "the mysterious Gioconda"; "there was some kind of a queer face behind the Gioconda smile"; "every woman's small talk was like a vapour hanging over mysterious gulfs"; "a pale mask", etc. Such words as "mysterious", "enigmatic", etc. interplay with another set of. phrases suggestive of the nature of the "enigma", e. g. "She leaned forward aimed so to speak, like a gun, and fired her word"; "She was a machine-, gun riddling her hostess with sympathy"; "Today the missiles were medical"; "'Your wife is dreadfully ill,' she fired off at him"; "She shot a Gioconda in his direction" and at last: "Her eyes were two profound and menacing gun-barrels". It remains with the reader to put all these suggestive metaphors together and decipher their meaning-fullness, the simple story layer being his guide.
Theme and Idea
The theme of a literary work is the represented aspect of life. As literary works commonly have human characters for their subject of depiction, the theme of a literary work may be understood to be an interaction of human characters under certain circumstances, such as some social or psychological conflict (war and peace, race discrimination, a clash of ideologies, and the like). A writer may depict the same theme, say, the theme of war, from different angles. The same theme may, on the other hand, be differently developed and integrated with other themes in different works. Within a single work the basic theme may alternate with rival themes and their relationship may be very complex. Thus, for instance, the basic theme of "The Forsyte Saga" may be defined as the life of the English middle class at the end of and after the Victorian epoch. This basic theme is disclosed mainly in the representation of the Forsyte family, specifically in its Jolion — Soames lines. The by-themes in this comprehensive trilogy are numerous: the Boer and the First World War, the first Labour government, the post-war generation, the general strike, the arts and artists, etc. They are all linked together to represent a unity. Indeed, a link between the various constructive themes is indispensable: without such a link the literary work loses its essential characteristic, which is unity of all its elements.