Linguistics and Novel by Fowler Roger;

Author:Fowler, Roger;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

4

DISCOURSE

Representation and expression

PERHAPS it ought to have been said earlier that prose fiction (like painting or drama, or, indeed, ostensibly non-fictional modes such as history-writing) is a representational art: it conveys the illusion of a represented ‘reality’ which might have an existence independent of and external to the medium through which it is communicated. One of the aims, and, hopefully, benefits of our linguistic theory is to contribute some ideas about the problem of representation.

First of all, we have rejected the notion or attitude of ‘naïve realism’. Even though we may empathize with the fates and fortunes of the people of fiction, they are not ‘real’, and the novel is in no sense simply a transparent, undistorted, picture of a palpable reality. The content can only be experienced as represented content, and representation (thus, our experience) is controlled by the techniques of language.

As we have seen, representation is a strongly conventionalized process upon which the medium (and in general, the way our society makes use of signs) exerts some restricting influences. First, there are limitations on the content that can be represented: it is made out of a conventional stock of processes, roles and semantic features or ‘semes’ deriving partly from the way all human beings perceive the world, and partly from the structure of the institutions and preoccupations of particular societies. These semantic features are incorporated in the abstract, latent, structure of the language as a whole. Second, the world of fiction is necessarily ‘retrieved’ or ‘decoded’ through the medium of a particular linguistic expression, a surface structure derived transformationally from the abstract semantic potentialities just mentioned. Representation is thus inevitably an expressive process, and expression in language has two aspects which we have called text (the shape of the message) and discourse (the speech participation and attitudinal colouring imparted by the author). In this chapter we are concerned with the language of fiction as discourse – as active utterance and as ideological commitment. I will discuss the linguistics of perspective, first, and briefly, in the elementary sense of temporal and visual angle, then in the more subtle sense, most relevant to fiction, of attitudes and clash of attitudes.

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