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A Stylistics Approach to HG Wells's the Invisible

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A Stylistics Approach to HG Wells's the Invisible International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 5, No. 8; August 2015 Swallowing the Impossible: A Stylistics Approach to H. G. Wells's the Invisible Man Dr. Abdullatif al-Khaiat Assistant professor of English Philadelphia University-Jordan Ph. D. in English Literature University of Istanbul Turkey Abstract This research focuses on H.G. Wells's use of language in his novel The Invisible Man as a means to creating his effect. It is supposed here that Wells is aiming to create the impact that a science romance usually aims to achieve: startling and thrilling the readers; and at the same time convincing them to believe the novel's imaginary events that draw on scientific facts. To achieve these objectives, the author enlists all kinds of grammatical and semantic deviation; and the deviation may be noticed to exist at all levels, from the word level to the level of discourse that encompasses the chapters and the whole novel. Enough examples are drawn from the novel to support these observations. It is noted, however, that it is not in the plenty of deviated elements that the novel strikes the researcher, but in their scarcity. Wells is keen to use concrete, factual language, but the sentences get shorter and more elliptical as the action grows more intense and urgent. It is also noted that the author uses very skilful means to bring the impossible to be accepted by the reader: marshalling more and more evidence, some by learned scientists, who turned from denying the invisibility of Griffin, the protagonist, to believing it. At the same time, through manipulating the language, the novel gets more and more thrilling and captivating until the end. Keywords: science fiction; adventure story; foregrounding; deviation; style 1. Introduction A reader of Wells's The Invisible Man will notice that, instead of packing a lot of 'literary' devices, the author keeps such devices to the minimum. And the reason is simple enough: He is implicitly claiming in every word of the novel that he is no more than an honest, precise, and objective reporter of the seemingly impossible facts. At the same time, Wells comes as close as possible to a journalist's method of representing situations – with all the thrill and charged style this may entail. To combine these two methods is not an easy feat, but Wells is masterly enough to achieve that. About this we may refer to Adam Roberts, who writes (67): "Both Verne and Wells were writing deliberately popular fiction, and working within the traditions of popular publishing of their day; so it is that Wells’s writing grew out of his speculative, mass-market journalism." It may be added that Wells was master enough not to deign to produce what Roberts describes as 'pulp' (68), i.e. "kinetic, fast-paced and exciting tales that are also clumsily written, hurried in conception, and morally crude." On the contrary, Wells is very careful to tightly relate whatever he is presenting to at least plausible reality, with all the skill he can wield. In stylistic terms, Wells is pushing excitement and the fantastic to extreme, but is being mostly economical in using metaphorical and intellectualized language; and it will be observed through the following sections how he succeeds in combining the above two features of a good fiction romance. Although this research discusses various kinds of foregrounding, like grammatical and semantic deviation, and considers such devices as tropes, and tackles discourse; it is, as indicated above, the relative scarcity of deviation that is most striking. What is quite visible in The Invisible Man is the masterly manipulation of the language in a way to excite and startle the readers, and to ensure their utmost attention to details. This will not be effected without sometimes charged language, especially at critical moments; and the usual striking adjectives and nouns that this will require: the spectacular and exciting are given priority, but only at times of heightened intensity and risk. Wells does that with masterly ability – for as Leech and Short point out (2) "the great novelists of the English language have been, arguably without exception, also great artists in the use of words." 49 ISSN 2220-8488 (Print), 2221-0989 (Online) ©Center for Promoting Ideas, USA www.ijhssnet.com It may be added that when a researcher opts to analyze a novel stylistically, they must necessarily be selective: selective in the amount set out for study, since a novel as an entire work may take a lifetime to carry out a stylistic analysis of– and the analysis will of course fill many many volumes. This has been expressed by Jean Jacques Weber (2) as follows: "The literary stylistician's crucial role is hence to define the semantic loads and effects of the selected textual units, correlate these units with macrosemantic ones (theme, world view, attitude), and indicate how and in what way they reflect, contribute to, or help shape (determine?) the text's large-scale semantic and thematic structures." 2. What to Look for? No matter whether Wells was talented enough to write first-order mainstream novels or not (his novel Tono- Bungay, and maybe some other novels of his, show no little talent in that domain), he insisted on going ahead with the genre he had himself established, together with Jules Verne: what has come later to be designated as 'science fiction' (or SF). This particular domain of popular fiction requires the kind of faculties journalists need. He wrote to James: "I had rather be called a journalist than an artist, that is the essence of it," (Simpson, 75). This is not of course to be taken as a denigration of Wells's talents; but, to mainstream novelists, writing about the 'fantastic' is not the same as their particular art. After reading The Invisible Man (1897), Wells's friend Joseph Conrad called him the “Realist of the Fantastic,” (McLean, 3.) The idea here is that to opt to write about the 'fantastic', as Wells has done, is to abide by certain rules rather than others, and this will transpire throughout this stylistic analysis of The Invisible Man. But one general rule that applies to all fiction is that to do a stylistics approach one needs to overcome the illusion that they are dealing with a chunk of life; and to realize that what they are really dealing with is a text, a text consisting of words. It is as Halliday has said (59): "It is the text and some super-sentence that is the relevant unit for stylistic studies; this is a functional-semantic concept and not definable by size." A good starting point in a stylistics approach to The Invisible Man is to inquire into what Wells is trying to achieve. All stylistic analysis must boil down to this: how the writer comes to fulfilling his/her objectives through their use of language. It is what can be brought out from the use of language, its structures and components, to turn the intuitional hunches about the writer and his/her work into as precise statements as possible about the linguistic features of the work under discussion, and the particular way the writer uses language. This researcher is aware, at the same time, that such endeavour will never be as rigorous as a scientific study. For no one seems, as Leech and Short remind us (3), "to have provided a satisfactory and reliable methodology for prose style analysis;" and that no adequate theory of prose style has emerged (3). In the following sections, Wells's style, and the particular method he has employed for achieving what he set out to achieve in linguistic terms, will be elaborated by first giving attention to some grammatical, semantic and stylistic aspects, including figures of speech; and then to broader aspects, a consideration of discourse, in addition to some other relevant points; and by ending up with some conclusions. 3. Foregrounding Three terms that a researcher about stylistics is bound to bear in mind are 'foregrounding', 'defamiliarization' and 'deviation'. Foregrounding is, according to Wales's A Dictionary of Stylistics, "'The throwing into relief' of the linguistic sign against the background of the norm of ordinary language;" (166) and that, "foregrounding is achieved by a variety of means, which have been largely grouped under two types: Deviation and repetition or paradigmatic and syntagmatic foregrounding, respectively." (167) Defamiliarisation has been defined by Jeffries and McIntyre as: "foregrounding by deviation and parallelism," (31). Closely related is the term 'deviation' which is, according to the same authors (31) the "occurrence of unexpected irregularity in language and results in foregrounding." But when a researcher comes to tracing foregrounding in The Invisible Man, a curious observation will transpire: If one comes across a cluster of figures in this novel like, 'The whole subject (of optical density) is a network of riddles (metaphor)" "But I went to work – like a nigger (simile) … light came through one of the meshes suddenly – blindingly! .. (hyperbole);" (206-207) it is amazing how long it takes to find such few examples – more than fifty line. Foregrounding appears, when it does, at all levels, from the word level to the level of the chapter and even the whole novel, and this latter feature may be discussed under 'discourse'. It is good in this research to follow this order, from the smallest grammatical units through the largest ones and on to discourse. 50 International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 5, No. 8; August 2015 The research then tackles how The Invisible Man deals with the problem of depicting the impossible and getting it to be accepted by the reader.
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