Style, Rhetoric and Creativity in Language by Simpson Paul;Nash Walter;

Author:Simpson, Paul;Nash, Walter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Published: 2019-11-08T14:23:00+00:00

Keywords

focaliser;

politeness;

speech presentation;

text worlds;

thought presentation;

turn taking

1.Introduction

Walter Nash, who, in informal contexts, was usually referred to as Bill by those who knew him, was a friend I much admired. He had an insightful subtlety of understanding and response to literary texts which was matched by the dedicated stylistician’s concern to analyse them with exactitude and dispassion, to check his intuitive responses, and to “get things right” argumentatively. The analysis I am going to perform in this chapter is of a passage I am sure Bill would have enjoyed because of its complex manipulation of viewpoint features, including discourse presentation. The passage is the closing section of William Trevor’s story “Cheating at Canasta” from a book collection with the same name (Trevor 2007). Because my concerns in this chapter are mainly with viewpoint and discourse presentation in the passage, I will not have the space to perform full analyses of other aspects which would be needed in a complete stylistic analysis (e.g. pragmatics, text-worlds, lexis and grammar). Instead, I will refer briefly to such aspects as and when needed in the discussion.

The 2,977-word, 3rd-person omniscient narration effectively takes place during the time that the main character, Mallory, is having dinner, alone, at a famous restaurant in Venice, called Harry’s Bar (Harry’s Bar was a favourite of Ernest Hemingway and numerous other well-known figures). But much more than what happens during the meal itself is explored in the story. We learn that Mallory, who is the story’s focaliser or Reflector (in Simpson’s (1993: 75) terms, the narration is in the Category B (heterodiegetic) reflector (R) mode) has come to Venice to keep a promise made some time ago to his wife, Julia, who is now suffering from severe dementia and in a nursing home. He had promised that he would return alone to their favourite destination once her illness had progressed so far that she could no longer travel herself.

The title of the story is foregrounded because, despite what is asserted, Mallory does not cheat. I was tempted to use the term “ironic” to describe the “cheating” but although the use here is irony-like in some respects (e.g. we can infer a semantic opposition between what is said and what is meant), in this case what is said is semantically negative and what is meant is semantically positive, whereas in irony the reverse is the case; what is said is semantically positive and what is meant is semantically negative. As far as I know, we do not have a rhetorical term to attach to this “irony-like but not really irony” example (though see Pattison 2018). Mallory and his wife often played Canasta (a card game of the rummy family) together and we are told near the beginning of the story that, now she is in the nursing home, “he cheated at Canasta and she won”. Normally, cheating involves intentional deception which is in the interests of the cheater, not the cheated. But Mallory deceives Julia by ignoring the cards she unknowingly drops, so that she can have the pleasure of thinking that she has won the game legitimately.

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