Analytical reading of fiction. Учебное пособие для студентов старших курсов факультетов иностранных языков

"Were there postmen then, too?"

"With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all that the children could hear was a ringing of bells."

"You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?"

"I mean that the bells the children could hear were inside them." "I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells."

"There were church bells, too." "Inside them?"

"No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks. And they rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy under my window; and the weathercocks crew for Christmas, on our fence."

"Get back to the postmen."

"They were just ordinary postmen, found of walking and dogs and Christmas and the snow. They knocked on the doors with blue knuckles..."

"Ours has got a black knocker..." "And then they stood on the white Welcome mat in the little, drifted porches and huffed and puffed, making ghosts with their breath, and jogged from foot to foot like small boys wanting to go out."

"And then the presents?" "And then the Presents, after the Christmas box. And the cold postman, with a rose on his button-nose, tingled down the tea-tray-slithered run of the chilly glinting hill. He went in his ice-bound boots like a man on fishmonger's slabs. He wagged his bag like a frozen camel's hump, dizzily turned the corner on one foot, and, by God, he was gone."

"Get back to the Presents." "There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be tug-o'- warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o'-shanters like patchwork tea cozies and bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of headshrinking tribes; from aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were mustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us. And pictureless

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books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles' pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why."

"Go on the Useless Presents."

"Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any colour I pleased, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknels, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Ladders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man next door to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall. And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast under the balloons."

"Were there uncles like in our house?" "There are always uncles at Christmas. The same uncles. And on Christmas morning, with dogdisturbing whistle and sugar fags, I would scour the swatched town for the news of the little world, and find always a dead bird by the Post Office or by the white deserted swings; perhaps a robin, all but one of his fires out. Men and women wading or scooping back from chapel, with taproom noses and wind-bussed cheeks, all albinos, huddles their stiff black jarring feathers against the irreligious snow. Mistletoe hung from the gas brackets in all the front parlors; there was sherry and walnuts and bottled beer and crackers by the dessertspoons; and cats in their furabouts watched the fires; and the high-heaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling pokers. Some few large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, uncles almost certainly, trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms' length, returning them to

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their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion; and some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edge of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers."

Not many those mornings trod the piling streets: an old man always, fawn-bowlered, yellow-gloved and, at this time of year, with spats of snow, would take his constitutional to the white bowling green and back, as he would take it wet or fire on Christmas Day or Doomsday; sometimes two hale young men, with big pipes blazing, no overcoats and wind blown scarfs, would trudge, unspeaking, down to the forlorn sea, to work up an appetite, to blow away the fumes, who knows, to walk into the waves until nothing of them was left but the two furling smoke clouds of their inextinguishable briars. Then I would be slapdashing home, the gravy smell of the dinners of others, the bird smell, the brandy, the pudding and mince, coiling up to my nostrils, when out of a snow-clogged side lane would come a boy the spit of myself, with a pink-tipped cigarette and the violet past of a black eye, cocky as a bullfinch, leering all to himself.

I hated him on sight and sound, and would be about to put my dog whistle to my lips and blow him off the face of Christmas when suddenly he, with a violet wink, put his whistle to his lips and blew so stridently, so high, so exquisitely loud, that gobbling faces, their cheeks bulged with goose, would press against their tinsled windows, the whole length of the white echoing street. For dinner we had turkey and blazing pudding, and after dinner the uncles sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, put their large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept. Mothers, aunts and sisters scuttled to and fro, bearing tureens. Auntie Bessie, who had already been frightened, twice, by a clock-work mouse, whimpered at the sideboard and had some elderberry wine. The dog was sick. Auntie Dosie had to have three aspirins, but Auntie Hannah, who liked port, stood in the middle of the snowbound back yard, singing like a big-bosomed thrush. I would blow up balloons to see how big they would blow up to; and, when they burst, which they all did, the uncles jumped and rumbled. In the rich and heavy afternoon, the uncles breathing like dolphins and the snow descending, I would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and try to make a model

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man-o'-war, following the Instructions for Little Engineers, and produce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tramcar. Or I would go out, my bright new boots squeaking, into the white world, on to the seaward hill, to call on Jim and Dan and Jack and to pad through the still streets, leaving huge footprints on the hidden pavements.

"I bet people will think there's been hippos."

"What would you do if you saw a hippo coming down our street?" "I'd go like this, bang! I'd throw him over the railings and roll him down the hill and then I'd tickle him under the ear and he'd wag his tail."

"What would you do if you saw two hippos?"

Iron-flanked and bellowing he-hippos clanked and battered through the scudding snow toward us as we passed Mr. Daniel's house.

"Let's post Mr. Daniel a snow-ball through his letter box." "Let's write things in the snow."

"Let's write, 'Mr. Daniel looks like a spaniel' all over his lawn." Or we walked on the white shore. "Can the fishes see it's

snowing?"

The silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea. Now we were snow-blind travelers lost on the north hills, and vast dewlapped dogs, with flasks round their necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying "Excelsior." We returned home through the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged uphill, into the cries of the dock birds and the hooting of ships out in the whirling bay. And then, at tea the recovered uncles would be jolly; and the ice cake loomed in the center of the table like a marble grave. Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year.

Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs and the gas meter ticked. And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn't the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us

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too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house.

"What shall we give them? Hark the Herald?"

"No," Jack said, "Good King Wenceslas. I'll count three."

One, two three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew.

We stood close together, near the dark door. "Good King Wencelas looked out

On the Feast of Stephen..."

And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle- gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the town.

"Perhaps it was a ghost," Jim said.

"Perhaps it was trolls," Dan said, who was always reading.

"Let's go in and see if there's any jelly left," Jack said. And we did

that.

Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

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Questions for discussion:

1.Thomas often exaggerates in describing real people – for example, when Mrs. Prothero announces “ruin like a town crier in Pompeii.” Find two other such descriptions of people, and explain the effect of each.

2.Explain how Thomas’ conversation with the small boy shows that memory cannot always be trusted.

3.What do you think Dylan Thomas wanted us to understand about his childhood from reading “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”?

What does the very last sentence add to his picture of his childhood? If you were writing a new version of “A Child’s Christmas”, what colourful winter and holiday images of your own would you use?

4.The poetry in Thomas’ prose is the delight in sound, the determination to make every word do its utmost. Choose a passage from

“A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” and read it aloud. Which words in particular do you think Thomas chose for their sounds? What do you think the sounds of these words add to the effect of the passage?

5.Thomas’ various memories are held together by images of snow. Find similes and metaphors that he uses to describe snow. Explain what effect is created by these devices.

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IV. Samples of Fiction Analysis

4.1. Analysing style and meaning in the novel “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens

Best known for his host of distinctively cruel, comic and repugnant characters, Charles Dickens remains the most widely read of the Victorian novelists.

Since the 60-ies of our century up to now what is called “the Victorian renaissance” is to be observed. The complete works of Jane Austen, William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë are published anew as well as single novels. Charles Dickens’ literary heritage takes a prominent place in the revival of the interest to the literature of the 19th century, as he was “the greatest representative of realism in England and one of its founders in the world’s literature as a whole”. After the period of almost complete oblivion, when Dickens was interpreted at the best as “a spokesman of servants and shopkeepers”, the revision of his works commenced. What attracts modern readers in Dickens is the strength of moral principles lost today. His novels are popular because of the breadth and truthfulness observed in them which were an outcome of life itself; his novels are rich in longueurs, but these are found in life indeed, and their main attraction is the combination of ennui and tensity which is exactly the lot of any man of mould.

The reason of the Victorian renaissance is to be found in the deep dissatisfaction with the modern cultural climate and in the inner protest against the worship of self-indulgence. The readers of all ages are choked in this stuffy atmosphere and long for the morally healthy culture. The heightened sense of responsibility, the unassumed compassion for people and the finesse of moral principles – these three characterize the most prominent victorian authors, Dickens among them.

By turns absorbingly comic, dramatic, ironic and tender, his novels bring into energetic life the society and the preoccupations of the mid-Victorian world. Today the readers are drawn to his works not so much by his humour and satire as his mastery of penetration into the psychology of men and symbolism

It is scarcely worth wondering therefore that another name arises of late in the context with Dickens – that of Dostoevsky. The works of many authors of psychological tend – Dostoevsky including – become

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clearer after the thorough and intend study of Dickens’ novels, his complex symbolism, his deep penetration into the inner world of characters, especially in the mature period of his creative search.

The Dickens’ language, one of the mightiest descriptive vehicles of the author, is insufficiently studied as yet. His vocabulary is infinitely rich, original and diverse. The extraordinary versatility of Dickens’ language calls forth irresistible impression of his comic sketches. Speech characterizations of personages contribute to the profound exposure of the characters in the novels by Dickens since he displayed inexhaustible ingenuity in the peculiar forms of expressing his various characters’ way of thinking. Few authors are his equal in the variety of the stylistic devices, the plenitude and gorgeousness of the vocabulary, the unexpected originality of expressions.

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Written during the crisis in Dickens’ life “A Tale of Two Cities” reflects all the contradictory emotions that tore him apart at the time. The break-up of his marriage and the killing of his magazine “Household Words”, all contributed to the writing of this stirring tale. No wonder it is permeated with contrasts on all levels – phraseological, syntactical, textual. The devices of parallels and contrasts are rather favourites with Dickens and the novel abounds in them, whether it deals with the individuals or with the whole nations. Parallel structures being the most frequent stylistic means in the novel contribute a lot to its exposing pathos as well as the psychological depth.

In fact, nearly all essays on Dickens’ personality and works note the tremendous intensity of his emotions, that undoubtedly influenced the novel. His perception of life was built on contrasts and suffered no half-tints. This couldn’t but effected the technique of his writing. Now, as regards the novel in question, Dickens himself admitted his partial attitude towards his creation in the preface to the first edition of “A Tale of Two Cities”: “I have so far verified what is done and suffered in these pages, as that I have certainly done and suffered it all myself”. That emotional perturbation and partiality found its expression in the representation of the antithetic social systems and in the heart-rending display of the characters’ conflicting emotions.

The very sentence that initiates the novel and consequently sets the intonation to the whole book, is the brilliant example of antithesis

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that assumes the shape of the classical parallelism. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times , it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…” Such a mighty beginning surely prepares the reader for the extraordinary events and intense feelings awaiting for him further in the novel that should be received in the superlative degree of comparison only. It is no mere chance that these abstract statements precede the official narration: “It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventyfive.” The germs of the French revolution originated in that remote year, but before the historical outline of the period the author introduces his reader into the world of spiritual strife and intent passions which are the true contents of this book.

The first contraposition to be met with in the novel (or should it rather be called a juxtaposition as yet) is the description of social evils and the state of affairs in both France and England. “There were a king with a large jaw, and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw, and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France.” Thus, the anaphoric repetition makes clear that there was a great similarity in political and social situations in two countries, the only “considerable” difference being the queen’s good looks or the absence of such. The conservative Albion and the frivolous Gaul shared the absurdity of the laws and the blood of penal code. Terrifying are the examples of the laws’ bestial cruelty:

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The latter example imparts the idea of the crushing juridical machine, which destroyed everybody methodically and monotonously, no matter whatever crime one had committed. The impression of the overwhelming iniquity is well rendered by the oxymoron used on the account of the outlaw who “gallantly shot” his victim through the head. This figure of contrast emphasizes the misunderstood idea of valour and the depravity of all the society in which murder could be taken for a gallant deed. The picture is supported by the chiasmus: “the mob fired on the musketeers and the musketeers fired on the mob”. Everything, it implicates, got mingled in the society and nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way. To sum up the horrifying outline of the period Dickens introduces the descriptions of execution in France and England, descriptions which despite their seemingly casual character and the separated location in the novel, are, nevertheless, an astounding testimony against the human atrocity. These are as follows (the first case refers to the treason, the second – to the parricide):

Now, on juxtaposing the statutes and social establishments of both countries, Dickens turns exclusively to France, presenting the

French nobility and the very “Bull’s Eye” of the Royal court in the impressive figure of Monseigneur, one of the great lords in power at the court; thus describing the corruption and iniquity of the nobles, that would result in the insurrection of the 14th of July. Monseigneur is initiated in the novel with the metaphor that denounces him of “rapidly swallowing France” as he swallows his chocolate. This device evidently pursuits the double aim – to emphasize the Monseigneur’s habitual gorging himself amidst the surrounding poverty and to attribute to his appetite some ogreish tint as he was sucking the life out of the people. The whole useless, good-for-nothing, terribly extravagant and depraved

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