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УДК 8-1751

Филологические науки

Ереванский государственный университет, Армения / Yerevan State University, Armenia mariana_sargsyan@yahoo.com

On some aspects of the writer's cognitive-stylistic individuality

Sarkisyan Mariana Samvelovna, к. филол. н. / Ph. D. in Philology

Annotation

individual style emotional text

The present article aims at substantiating the important role of the cognitive approach in the study of the writer?s individual style, the specific manner of his mental visualization of the reality and introducing the latter into the text structure. Concentrating our research basically on Carol Ann Duffy?s style, we have outlined as our main concern the elucidation of the interaction between the text and the conceptual and emotional thinking of its creator.

Key words and phrases: cognitive; individuality; style; cognitive base; contrast; embodied cognition; text meaning.

Аннотация

Целью данной статьи является обоснование важной роли когнитивного подхода в изучении индивидуального стиля автора, присущего ему способов визуализации действительности и его материализации в произведении. На основе произведений современного британского писателя К. А. Даффи мы попытались разъяснить взаимодействие между текстом и концептуальным и эмоциональным мышлением автора.

Ключевые слова и фразы: когнитивный; индивидуальность; стиль; когнитивная основа; контраст; воплощенное познание; смысл текста.

This work is completed within the frames of the research project N SCS 13YP-6B0025, supported by the RA MES State Committee of Science.

The interest toward various cognitive disciplines has been attracting a broader audience and the discussions and application of a number of aspects of cognitive approaches is continually growing especially with respect to the study of the text of fiction. It is due to this growing interest that a new discipline Cognitive Stylistics sprang up. The basic ideas of this discipline are reflected in the works of its founders: M. Freeman, E. Semino, P. Stockwell, R. Tsur, J. Gavins, G. Stern, etc. [1, 2]. Cognitive Stylistics, encompassing the tools and techniques applied in Psychology and meanwhile aiming at the study of relations between the text creation and the processes of how the human mind works, is anticipated to guarantee innovative results entailing a better understanding of the writer`s message and a closer approach to the core content of the text. Moreover, the integration of the cognitive and stylistic features of text analysis must add value to revealing the writer`s individuality itself, in this case, of course, it would be more appropriate to speak about the cognitive-stylistic individuality, the study of which should deal with the analysis of the specific features of the writer`s cognitive and discourse activities combined with the investigation of the unique manner of verbal thinking and its materialization in the text.

Cognitive Approach to the Study of Writer's Individuality

Presently, there does not exist a unanimously accepted model of how the mental representation of the reality takes place. The process of creating and understanding a piece of text combines several mental phases with the involvement of a number of mental and psychological processes in the meantime. It is undeniable that the mere knowledge of the language is insufficient for understanding the real meaning of the utterance. In this respect the key role should be ascribed to the adequate reference, i.e. the reference of the statement to the reality which is reflected in the utterance. The process of understanding the text meaning involves the interpretation of the latter by a reader, recognition of its kernel essence, revelation of the underlying intention, which should finally result in the creation of one`s own variant of the text based on that of the writer`s. Differences in the nature and the amount of knowledge available to readers will result in differences in their interpretation and appreciation of the text. The broader the reader`s knowledge, the greater is his ability to furnish the text meaning close to that of the writer`s.

By and large we accept the impossibility of achieving absolute agreement between the writer and the reader; this argument being particularly valid as far as the text of fiction is concerned with a view to its multilayered content. This can be explained by the fact that the units making up the text do not function as merely dictionary units, but rather as names of the special objects and as utterances about the reality or real facts or situations. In an attempt to depict the objective reality while verbalizing his thoughts the writer passes through several stages; first defining the specific features of the object that is to be described, then switching to contrasting and comparing it with other objects and finally proceeding to the search for the most appropriate image or symbol. The whole process is crowned by the generalization of the reality. This chain of phases can be found in all texts in the formal plane, the latter functioning as implication underlying the text. It is this complex of stages that accounts for the cognitive base building the textual reality. Consequently, the literary text becomes the medium through which we can reach the essence of not only the cognitive discourse activity, but also explore the cognitive stylistic peculiarities of the writer`s individual style.

In the present paper we aim at demonstrating that the whole range of mental processes preceding the act of creation accounts for the stylistic peculiarities of texts and its understanding helps in reconstructing the writer`s cognitive-stylistic individuality encompassing the specific features of the conceptual and emotional thinking processes and the typical ways of materializing the thoughts via language means.

Within the scope of the present research the cognitive and stylistics features of the text analysis are brought together since we firmly support the opinion that their integration will enhance the usefulness of the tools and techniques that have been developed and applied by Stylistics so far. On the whole, the cognitive turn in Stylistics is considered as the latest phase in the natural development of the discipline. As C. Hamilton has put it, ЇThe cognitive turn in literary study has led to a new understanding of materialism. Texts are material anchors for linguistic forms of communication that span time and space. Stories are objects produced by evolved human minds performing hardto-explain yet easy-to-do mapping tasks. The medium is language, the visible material for literature, but the referents and interpretations are all conceptual.[…]to study literature is to study language, and to study language is to study the mind?. ? [7, p. 1-3].

We also believe that the integrated approach gains a more significant status especially in terms of the study of the key elements of the text, which are the indispensable units of the verbal art. Key words and images become the most powerful tools which extensively stimulate the cognitive processes in the reader`s mind, enhancing the informative, pragmatic and aesthetic features of the text.

Let us demonstrate how the integration of the cognitive and stylistic strategies of the text analysis can be applied to a piece of text with a view to revealing the writer`s individuality and the unique style of representing the objective reality.

From Ordinary to Symbolic

From the perspective of cognitive interpretation of symbolic imagery Carol Ann Duffy`s works serve as a perfect material for examining the writer`s experience and manner of conceptualizing the objective reality. Her poetry largely concentrates on the perception and interpretation of reality imposed by a woman`s standpoint. Duffy`s aesthetic sense of language enables her to apply words in new stylistic coloring, thus directing the reader`s attention to separate images and words in their full and polyphonic functioning. Her language and the use of language means are fresh and unique and the whole range of associations are multi-layered, caused by the extension of the lexical meaning of the words and imposed thereon connotations.

As Duffy herself once mentioned, she likes to use common words but in an unusual for them linguistic environment, which enables her and the reader to better understand where the lie and the truth are in the poetry. The differentiation between the lie and the truth is very important both for the writer and the reader, because in doing so both of them get involved into an active process of cognizing the reality [5, p. 75-76].

“Duffy?s poetry is intelligent without being exclusive, it is humorous without being glib, direct without being reductive. It is a poetry that is intelligent enough to remember and question the past, while in the most exciting ways it struggles to rethink and rearticulate the new… her work also illustrates the anxieties of the age in which she lives: anxieties about the relationship of the self to the world, about the validity of communication, and the disturbance of gender roles” [10, p. 4].

In Duffy`s imagery simple and ordinary words acquire the status of key elements, or, symbols, which demonstrate the unique approach of materializing woman`s perspectives on reality. Her protagonists are endowed with emotions, like love, jealousy, hatred, fear, envy and the most conspicuous thing about Duffy and her style is the concentration on and cogency in specifying all these emotions in every minute detail, with the application of the most ordinary language, which for an inexperienced reader may sound comic or at times absurd. ЇValentine? which is quoted in full below, exemplifies the aforementioned.

Not a red rose or a satin heart. III

I give you an onion. II

It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.

It promises light

like the careful undressing of love.

Here.

It will blind you with tears like a lover.

It will make your reflection a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.

Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips, possessive and faithful as we are,

for as long as we are.

Take it.

Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring, if you like.

Lethal.

Its scent will cling to your fingers, cling to your knife [11].

The first-person narrator refuses to give her beloved a red rose or a satin heart, the traditional symbols of passion; instead quite unexpectedly exchanges the traditional symbols with the Їonion?, which sounds somewhat absurd at first glance. The absurdity arises under the influence of the prosodic arrangement of the first two lines: the long pause between the first two lines, which in written is expressed by a double-spaced arrangement of the first two lines.

The prosody and juxtaposition of red rose/satin heart vs onion and cute card/kissogram vs onion build the cognitive style of the poem constructed on the contrast, which Duffy has chosen as a means of reference [5]. In contrasting at first glance incomparable phenomena Duffy hardly intends to make the love affair between the two an ordinary matter and the word onion itself is not used as a mere dictionary unit. In the text of fiction structural elements build a verbal net of interrelations, hence the true meaning of one element cannot be exposed by immediate impressions; here the consideration of the result of its interaction with other elements is crucial. The interaction between the text elements accounts for the dynamic development of new meanings and connotations, resulting in the extension of expressive, evaluative and emotional components of meaning. Hence, the word onion and the semantic field of the poem creates the word meaning in the neighboring lexical environment (It will blind you with tears…; a wobbling photo of grief; its fierce kiss; Lethal. Its scent will cling to your fingers…) When viewed in a larger context, the logical antithesis, constructed by the juxtaposition of e.g. the red rose vs onion, reveals the symbolic essence of the whole poem. The onion, which is known for its persistent smell, in the writer`s individual system of visualizing the reality, seems to be the perfect choice for describing possessiveness in love, which is ultimately intensified in the end of the poem: with its smell clinging on the fingers and loops shrinking to a wedding ring.

Thus, under the influence of the idiosyncratic peculiarities of the writer`s linguistic thinking, a simple word, that hardly anyone of us could think of the poetic potential thereof, in an unusually versatile manner turns into something original and unique, symbolizing passion and possession.

From the reader`s perspective, the poem and the poet`s language turn to be the tools leading to a new kind of interpretation of the poet`s specific manner of encoding and transforming the intended message. The metaphoric or the symbolic meaning of the word onion is conditioned by the specific cognitive contexts which define the formation of the symbolic meaning, their adequate usage in the text of fiction and their adequate understanding by the reader [3]. The associations that accompany the reader throughout the poem create a sensational atmosphere involving him into active decoding processes. As a result, the reader sees before him the image of a resolute woman, who is ready to by all means possess her beloved and a woman who prefers attack and pain to tenderness. The repetition of the verb cling (which refers to both physical and emotional closeness) at the end of the poem is aimed at the intense concentration of emotions and resolution.

When considering Duffy`s individual style, it is to be observed that in the process of creating challenging images the writer, easily violating the norms of the grammar, actively employs a whole arsenal of expressive, evaluative and emotional means both on semantic and syntactic levels. The writer finds not only possible, but also necessary to use the language material in quite an unusual manner, inventing original combinations, Їplaying? with them, with a view to intriguing the reader, in the meanwhile urging active processes of constructing and interpreting the objective reality.

The analysis of even a small passage of a poem by Duffy enables us to penetrate into the depths of varieties of the poetic forms, which are employed by her to contribute to the creation of quite laconic, but insightful images encompassing a wide spectrum of emotions inherent to the female nature. This is achieved due to the first-person narration, which focuses on the internal state, making the emotions extremely visible.

Perhaps the best demonstration of the above-mentioned is the poem ЇHavisham? from the collection Mean Time (1998) in which Duffy aims to expose the woman`s inner world as a battlefield of contradicting emotions, where hatred and passion get intermingled causing utter misery.

Beloved sweetheart bastard. Not a day since then I haven?t wished him dead. Prayed for it so hard I?ve dark green pebbles for eyes, ropes on the back of my hands I could strangle with.

\Spinster. I stink and remember. Whole days in bed cawing Nooooo at the wall; the dress yellowing, trembling if I open the wardrobe; the slewed mirror, full-length, her, myself, who did this

to me? Puce curses that are sounds not words. Some nights better, the lost body over me, my fluent tongue in its mouth in its ear then down till I suddenly bite awake. Love?s

hate behind a white veil; a red balloon bursting in my face. \ Bang. I stabbed at a wedding-cake.

Give me a male corpse for a long slow honeymoon.

Don?t think it?s only the heart that b-b-b-breaks [11].

The title of the poem itself signals the intertextual connection of the poem with Ch. Dickens`s novel Great Expectations. It can be observed that the poem is intertextually connected not only on the level of texture, but also and no less importantly, on the level of the world created in the text, as the title presents the poetic speaker as Miss Havisham by Dickens. As was pointed out by Eco while dealing with this kind of texts the Їreaders should construct the text world by drawing both from the general frames that make up their Їencyclopaedia? and from Їintertextual frames? [6, p. 21], namely knowledge about language, text, genres? which L. Doleћel has characterized as Їfictional encyclopaedia? [4, p. 177].

In this poem the individuality and the concreteness of the life and experience of the female character, due to the first person narration is pushed to the foreground. The poem is utterly introspective and is constructed on the contrasting ideas of love and hatred, which is realized in the oxymoron opening the poem ЇBeloved sweetheart bastard?. The semantic field of the poem involves words with highly negative connotations appearing in close sequence (dead, dark, stink, the lost body, hate, corpse). On the syntactic level the one-member sentences “Spinster.? and ЇBang.? (pronounced with High Fall) from the prosodic perspectives carry a huge amount of information centralizing on the idea of irreversibility. The atmosphere of emotional chaos accompanies the reader which becomes especially tangible in the multiplication of sounds (b-b-b-breaks and Noooo) which further augment the emotional tension.

In interpreting the symbolic content of the poem the color terms (Dark green pebbles for eyes, the yellowing dress, puce curses, white veil, red balloon) and names of body parts (eye, hand, tongue, mouth, ear, face) are to be highlighted. In Duffy`s individual system of perceiving the reality, the embodied cognition, i.e. the representation of impressions, and feeling with reference to parts of human body and natural objects, is quite essential. According to D. Miall this type of reference in its turn may contribute to Їevoking a specific complex of feelings and may reshape the reader`s unconscious network of feelings and initiate the shift in self-perception that literary reading can sometimes accomplish? [8, p. 4]. Most apparently Duffy aimed at intense visualization of Miss Havisham`s sufferings and creation of a most convincing image of an abandoned woman. The syntax and the rhythm of the whole poem in their turn contribute to generating a scene of violence in the reader`s imagination.

Conclusion

Thus, bringing together the cognitive and stylistic perspectives we tried to demonstrate the specifics of Carol Ann Duffy`s cognitive style which finds its manifestation in the choice of contrast as a cognitive base for referring to the reality. This arises as a result of unique mental visualization of the reality and introducing the latter into the text structure. Though Їsimple? in form, C. A. Duffy`s images are challenging and do not easily yield to interpretation. Loading ordinary words and images with extra connotations on the one hand and building the textual reality based on contrastive ideas C. A. Duffy most evidently aims at creating a true picture of all kinds of emotions and convincing the reader of the truth of what she says. Intensification of emotions takes place on all the levels of her writings (segmental, phonetic, semantic, syntactic and stylistic) which define the originality of Duffy`s cognitivestylistic individuality. The complex nature of her poetic world outlook and multipersonality of the first person narrative are intermingled with such qualities as simplicity of expression, clarity and availability for an average reader.

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