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

smart set was impersonated in the fat figure of Monseigneur. The picture is completed with the “military offices destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a ship; civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives”. – This notable, very Dickens – like allogism sets out the rotting and declination of the luxurious empire where everybody who had any power either secular or ecclesiastical was totally unfit for their several callings. The fact is that “the leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance upon Monseigneur.” Thus, the apt metaphor compares the state of affairs in the country to the foul disease which corrodes the body of the state just like the leprosy eats away the human body. It contributes a lot to the gloomy atmosphere of the chapter and plainly intimated that the “body” i.e. “the system rooted in a frizzled hangman, powdered, gold-laced, and white-silk stockinged” would very soon be rotten through and through, down to its very core.

Later on Dickens will show the revolutionary shoots of the dragon’s teeth sown by the gentle-born imposters, plunderers and profligates. The blindness, rashness and criminal negligence of the subordinates will lead to such state of things when the shining Bull’s Eye of the court is gone. “It had never been a good eye to see with”, – observes the author, – “had long had the mote in it of Lucifer’s pride, Sardanapalus’s Luxury, and a mole’s blindness – but it had dropped out and was gone”. – Here is the most excellent example of convergence. This sentence needs special attention being also a perfect example of the infinite variety of Dickens’ stylistic means. It begins with the transference of meaning based on the associated likeness between the creams of the royal society and the very centre of the target. These two notions sharing the quality of importance and the exposure of the eyes constitute a vivid metaphor of the Bull’s Eye, which being also treated as not “a good eye to see with” is transformed into the pun. Then follows a metaphoric allusion to the Holy Scripture and to the old myth about the extravagant king: “the mote of Lucifer’s pride, Sardanapalus’s luxury etc.” (See Matt.7:3 – “Why do you look at the mote that is in your brother’s eye, but do not see the beam that is in your own eye?”) This gorgeous cluster of stylistic devices well renders the intensity of the aristocrats’ outrage and prepares the reader for the people’s universal recoil to the immense transgressions. “Like the fabled rustic who

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raised the Devil with infinite pains, and was so terrified at the sight of him that he could ask the Enemy no question, but immediately fled; so, Monseigneur, after boldly reading the Lord’s Prayer backwards for a great number of years, and performing many other potent spells for compelling the Evil One, no sooner beheld him in his terrors than he took to his noble heels”. – What strikes the reader is that through the entire sentence there runs the metaphoric representation of the revolution in the images of the old legend about the wisard’s disciple and the devil (who in his turn is presented through the synonymic repetition: the Devil – the Enemy – the Evil One). Isn’t it wonderful, the way Dickens arranges his view of the French revolution within the boundaries of the ancient fairy-tale? First, the nobles personified in Monseigneur are metaphorically compared to the foolish rustic youth who took “infinite pains” to raise the devil, i.e. who aroused the people to riots by violent excesses of power. The impression is strengthened by the allusion to the ancient superstition that the magicians and warlocks are reading the Lord’s Prayer backwards in witchcraft practices. This allusion calls forth the idea of all Christian virtues trampled on by the impious aristocrats, whose deeds were equal to the black magic. They did nothing but perform “potent spells for compelling the Evil One”

(figurative periphrasis) that is they incessantly misused and perverted their high privileges and neared to the hour of vengeance.

So, this indivisible tangle of stylistic devices is pinned together with the final brilliant attack against the contemptible Monseigneur: no sooner had he beheld the revolution outbroken, than “he took to his noble heels”. Here zeugma restores the literal primary meaning of word

“heels” by violating the phraseological unit. The word “heels” is almost lost in the phraseological unit “to take to one’s heels” which means “to run away”. Attaching the qualification of the heels to the unit the author revives the meaning of the word and the description of Monseigneur who cowardly deserted his post and evaded the responsibility becomes very fresh and original acquiring the fiercely derisive colour.

Thus, the reader enjoys the splendour of Dickens’ vocabulary and gets a huge amount of information concerning the situation in France

(the poetry and emotive contents of the extract for its “hugeness”) without even noticing that all this is concentrated in ONE sentence!

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So, the reader is thoroughly informed that nothing was omitted to be done that had led to the furious outburst of the people’s wrath. Much earlier Dickens managed to fill the reader with confidence that this outburst was inevitably coming; managed by personifying Death as a terrible Woodman who marked the trees for future guillotines (the exact denomination – “a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history” – contains in itself the vast material for analysing) and representing Fate as a Farmer whose rude carts would soon be transformed into the tumbrils of the Revolution. These manifold stylistic means prepare the setting and when the Terror begins the reader is disposed to justify the atrocities of the risen mob. But this is where

Dickens’ preoccupation with contrasts reveals itself with particular vividness. Well may the suffering people be pitied and lamented over, UNLESS they fight back and turn into the blood-stained and bloodthirsty savages. The fact is that the people’s blood, suddenly of some value, after many years of worthlessness, is avenged by the ferocious massacre. Could that possibly be approved by Dickens, the humanist?

By no means. As long as the oppressed “scarecrows” are the suffering party they are “the people”; no sooner they took arms and Dickens called them “the mob”. The victims instantly turned into the butchers, for no revenge can be just, thought Dickens, and those who perform it are none other than “lost spirits”. Thus, almost in the spirit of romantic contrasts took place the transformation and reversal of the parties: Madam Defarge and her friends – firy patriots, Madam Defarge and her friends – fierce murderers; the royalty and nobles – haughty oppressors, the royalty and nobles – dignified martyrs.

The abominable degradation of late sufferers was presented in the impressive description of Carmagnole – the revolutionary dance, “a something one innocent, delivered over to all devilry – a healthy pastime changed into a means of angering the blood, bewildering the senses, and steeling the heart. Such grace as was visible in it made it the uglier, showing how warped and perverted all things good by nature were become”. – Everything got mutilated and distorted, Dickens implies, when justice turns into revenge, and redemption into slaughter. All that had always been, was now gone forever and it is not accidentally that Dickens speaks very Hamlet-like about the “dis-

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jointed time”.1 The society got depraved and disintegrated from top to bottom; good and evil were intermingled and nobody discriminated between them any longer. The vivid testimony to this statement is the description of the tribunal which should be the body of justice but “of whom some members were asleep and some awake, some dirty with murder and some clean, some sober and some not”. – Here Dickens felt intuitively that antithesis is the most suitable device to express the absurdity of turbulent times. Truly did Isaiah say: “We look for justice, but there is none; for salvation, but it is far from us”.2 And above all crimes, bloodshed and iniquity there rose their horrifying symbol – a dreadful machine of destruction – La Guillotine. “It superseded the

Cross. Models of it were worn on breasts from which the Cross was discarded, and it was bowed down to and believed in where Cross was denied”. – The sign of salvation – and the sign of regeneration of the human race. The sign of Mercy – and the sign of Vengeance. The sign of Love – and the sign of Inexorability. Life and Death clashed in intent strife. Still the mob preferred the latter. Could Dickens sympathize with them? Not he. He foresees their fall, for the only mature fruit of their rebellion – the Guillotine – is sure to devour her creators. “They made idols for themselves, that they may be destroyed”. (Hosea. 8:4)

Yet Dickens is emphatic in his belief that the terrors of the revolution were just the due recompense for the evil ways of the downright wicked rulers. The resources of the nation were expended not on the works of public utility but on the personal aggrandizement of the nobles. In the means they took to gratify their passions, they showed themselves to be little better than savages (See the astounding story of the rape of the peasant girl, of her family’s bloody extermination, and of Doctor Manette’s prolonged imprisonment). The coming revolution was the direct outgrowth of the nobles’ unholy self-indulgence. Because of their extravagant expenditures in the maintenance of the luxurious royal

1See W. Shakespeare “Hamlet”: “The time is out of joint, o cursed spite – That ever I was born to set it right.”

2As “A Tale of Two Cities” is called “the most Christian” of all Dickens’ novels, it will be justified to bring forward some quotations from the Holy Scripture, thus drawing the parallel when appropriate between the writer’s creation and one of the sources of his inspiration i.e. the Bible. The more so, as there are many scriptural allusions in the novel and even direct quotations.

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court, they resorted to forced labour and heavy taxation. Bitter opposition to their rule thus engendered the distresses to come. “For whatever a man sows, that and that only is what he will reap” (Gal. 6:7) says the

Bible and Dickens echoes it with Charles Darnay’s words: “Good could never come of such evil, a happier end was not in nature to so unhappy a beginning”.

So, boldly contraposing eager expectations of better life and their morbid realization that set the people of one country against each other in deadly feud, Dickens achieved great emotional effect through antithetic literary constructions. Consequently, antithesis being the leading stylistic principle underlying the whole novel, is applied to lay bare the contrast between the society disintegrating and the society gathering its minutest forces in self-destructive up-heaving. But it is precisely in these masterly contradictory characterizations and their manifold stylistic means that the writer’s art lies.

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“A Tale of Two Cities” – the first of Dickens’ “tale” novels – has no division of good and wicked concerning the characters. Even for the antagonists the author seeks for the motives that explain if not justify their behaviour. In protagonists, likewise, he reveals blameworthy qualities; they are by no means irreproachable. His characters are not the bearers of one static quality any longer, but are torn asunder by the contradictory emotions impossible for his early heroes as Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit and the like. The Mask and the Face under it is an old problem of Dickens, but now it got the new philosophically realistic realization. In his early works the mask – be it good or evil – had nothing for it was the essence of the personality much like in commedia dell’arte. Later the mask began to come gradually off, sometimes even showing the face to be better.

In “A Tale of Two Cities” the duality of the human nature is transmitted by the pairs of doubles. There are even physical counterparts – Darnay and Carton. They are, nevertheless, the opposite characters, linked together by the appearance of great resemblance and by the love for Doctor Manette’s daughter Lucie. On the whole, drawing the pairs of “twins” Dickens resorts not only to contraposing two sepa-

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rate characters as in the case with the said Darnay and Carton; nay, he poses one character as a contrast to several personages at once; e.g. Carton and Darnay – Carton and Stryver. The whole system of images in the novel is permeated with the antitheses.

Carton and Darnay being the mainspring of the plot are therefore the vehicle of author’s self-expression; the action and the denouement are determined by the unusual outward likeness of two young men. Sydney Carton is a talented though sinking young lawyer. He drinks and gets entangled with the chance affairs thinking himself a lost man. Then he meets Lucie Manette whose heart belongs to another. Lucie loves Darnay and Carton fills her with compassion at best. At the time none other than Carton twice saves Darnay’s life and takes death at the guillotine in his stead.

Whereas Charles Darnay is a model hero, a true Dickensian protagonist endowed with almost all manly virtues imaginable: he is resolute, energetic, brave, self-sufficient, self-dependent, self-confident – to be continued with a long row of “self” adjectives. Undoubtedly, by his inner qualities Charles Darnay is much more the hero of the Dickens the readers got used to than the debauched Carton. Nevertheless, it was Carton who accomplished a noble deed. Here Dickens settles the most difficult question of man’s nature, true and imaginable, of aspect, genuine and assumed.

In the court-scene that introduces them to the novel, the juxtaposition of two men is carried on all levels. First, their appearance is contrastingly opposed, though “they were sufficiently like each other to surprise (…) everybody present”. Every little detail about their looks is carefully collected and presented to the reader:

The dress

The hair

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The features

Thus, describing two most unlike young men (despite their physical resemblance) Dickens would have seemed to aim at acquiring the readers’ sympathy for one and rousing the readers dislike for the other, if it were not for the countless “buts” sprinkled on Carton’s description.

He behaved very unrespectfully and distractedly in the court, BUT he noticed Lucie’s sickness; he spoke carelessly and insolently to Darnay, YET he saved his life by the well-timed interference in the proceedings; he looked slovenly and debauched, SAVE for his momentary earnestness that strengthened his natural resemblance to Darnay. Whenever Dickens speaks of Carton the text is full of reservations. With Darnay everything is definite, precise and clearly outlined. No blurred adjective ever misted his image. He is so very positive, though not absolutely insipid, that all his emotional movements (and noble movements are these) are easily perceived and even predicted. That doesn’t mean his being sickly-sweet, on the contrary, he is rather human, liable to doubts and remorse, but there is really a certain amount of uniform goodness in him that prevents him from being a full-length portrait of a man. Darnay is a static character; on the last page he is exactly what he was on the first, and this spiritual inertness creates, perhaps, the most striking contrast to Carton’s inner dynamism.

Weak and dissipated, wasted and desponded, Carton still possesses such true-to-life vitality as makes him an impressive and profound figure. Carton’s strife with his very self, the complexity of his motives and his ways, his numerous lapses and final victory are written with the hand of a genius.

To confirm the idea of the opposition of those two characters one may well resort to their declarations made to one woman – Lucie Manette – and compare them. Darnay, as a true victorian protagonist, keeps modestly on the background and would never confess his love to

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Lucie personally, unless he had an approbation of her father, though his generosity, as well as good understanding, urges him to disclaim any paternal influence that Doctor Manette would have in his devoted daughter in the matrimonial manner. All that is noble, devoted and prudent revealed itself in his deferential proposal, delivered in “a tone of fervent admiration, true homage, and deep love”. With Carton, on the contrary, it is the “fixed despair of himself” with which this “selfflung away, wasted, drunken, poor creature of misuse” expressed his affection. He never mentioned, nor did he ever hope of any return. Unlike Darnay he didn’t need the mediator of a father, for he hadn’t the slightest doubt as to Lucie’s feelings toward him. Quite undeserving as he knew himself to be, he came straight to his lady and told her what rose out of his soul. Darnay strove to acquire Lucie’s love – Carton renounced it from the first; Darnay wanted to deserve Lucie’s confidence – Carton was sure of it, therefore he sought none. Somehow he knew Lucie better, than his happy rival, if the word “rival” can be used where chances are so unequal. There is a gradation in both men’s declarations –

but in the first case it is hope that increases, and in the second – it’s opposite – hopelessness. Darnay is far from being cock-sure or conceited, but he is certainly not desponded of ever gaining Lucie’s affection, he is already half-aware of it. He says to Doctor Manette: “If Miss

Manette held me at this moment in her innocent heart – do not think I have the presumption to assume so much – I could retain no place in it against her love for her father”. – this concession (marked out even syntactically with two dashes) of a whole-hearted man with clear conscience and unpolluted memory, only intensifies the cheerful prospects awaiting for the handsome, attractive and noble suitor and makes a striking contrast to the lot of his degraded counterpart who is so

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humble in his claims doesn’t even dare to hope. And Carton indeed thus expressed himself addressing Lucie: “I know very well that you can have no tenderness for me, I ask for none; I am even thankful that it cannot be”.

Corrupted, ruined, incorrigible as he is, and oh! so miserable, Carton stirs much more in the heart of the reader than Darnay, altogether good and correct. In the final analysis his image appears to be deeper and keener on all hands than that of his regular antipodes thanks to sheer force of inner contradictions truthfully conveyed by the author. And here one comes close to another level of contrasting used by Dickens who not only depicted the most subtle strings of another’s soul, but interwove them so, as to make impossible any decomposition into vice and virtue alloyed in a compound mixture called human personality. Creating his hero the writer endowed Carton with a broad emotional amplitude that allowed him to go quickly from one extreme to another.

The “seesaw Sydney” can in one and the same breath be reckless and cautious, revealing his spiritual entanglement that ranges wide from defiant to tender, from humble to negligent. This peculiarity also accounts for Carton’s inability to stay out of abominable pit of degradation whereto he gradually descended. This instability of his nature drove him to hard drinking and humiliating drudgery for his prosperous companion’s benefit; the same snatched him out of his aimless life and urged to pluck up his spirit and gather all strength for the desperate stake. The light and the shadow masterly mixed in his image make him so intensely alive! It is almost the pendulum case, when to get at the extreme point one must start the opposite spot: the farther the reach, the greater the swing. Carton stewed in corruption and fell deeper than Darnay ever could be able to fall under any circumstances, yet only in their last mutual scene within the walls of Conciergerie when Carton came to change places with the tomorrow’s condemned, he showed more resolution, courage and unselfishness than Darnay showed in the whole novel.

So, summing up the creative method used by the author in this book we must notify that applying for the antithesis he chose the best possible device to stress the social contradictions and to focus the characters he wanted to single out among the background of traditional or secondary personages.

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4.2. Analysing style and meaning in a passage from

“The Great Gatsby” by F.S. Fitzgerald

Here is a passage from The Great Gatsby where the I – narrator, Nick Carraway, is describing to us the series of large society parties which Jay Gatsby throws at his mansion in the hope that the young woman he is in love with, but who is now married to someone else, will come to one of them. Nick is a near neighbour, living in a small house from which he can observe the party at a distance. This extract is marked by the fact that there is almost no conversation in it (hence the style features will be univocal, as there is only one addresser, Nick), and it is a description which is full of action and exhibits interesting internal textual contrasts:

Example

(1) At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough coloured lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. (2) On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. (3) In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.

(4) By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. (5) The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colours, and hair bobbed in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. (6) The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.

(7) The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. (8) Laughter is easier minute by

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