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A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX GARTH TWA D. Phil CRITICAL AND CREATIVE WRITING May 2011 LISTENING TO WRITING: a sociolinguistic enquiry into the creation of meaning and effect in modern American literature, focusing on the work of Kurt Vonnegut and George Saunders. 2 SUMMARY This thesis proceeds in two modes, utilizing both a critical and a creative lens to think about the use of simple language in formal writing. It examines the production of a register that categorizes insider/outsider status (the mechanics) as well as interrogating the (un)conscious attempts of authors seeking to prise into or remain removed from established cultural identity (the intention). It investigates the use of the vernacular and the informal in American writing in general and how it is ultimately reflected and reworked through an autobiographical channel: an examination of voice, register, and code-switching in my own writing. The first section, ‘Listening to Writing,’ is a forensic analysis of Vonnegut and Saunders, two exemplars of literary informality in American writing. It seeks—employing the work of Sarangi, Milroy, Hunston & Thompson and others to pinpoint, at a microanalytical level, what makes the conversational conversational, and the sociolinguistic work of Austin (performativity), Giles, Coupland, and Gumperz (accommodation and identity), and Auer (code switching)—to investigate the authors’ specific manipulation of pitch and register to create effect. It also appraises the historical and cultural imperative of the American abhorrence of intellectualism and hence the disdain for high-flown language and how that is reflected in not only the literature but also the very social self-positioning of the authors. The second section, ‘My Ice Age,’ is an autobiographical foray into outsider/insider, normal/abnormal categories and boundaries, extending the investigation of voice and 3 register as examined above to explore the complex nature of belonging and alienation, of community and identity, from being a white boy in an Inuit settlement to being from an Inuit settlement in Los Angeles to the complexities of belonging and alienation that arise from being gay. The juxtaposition of two different tones in ‘My Ice Age’ is used to reflect the juxtapositions of geographic and temporal otherness, the distance (formality) and increased vernacular in the Los Angeles sections reflecting a need to fit in, to forge a place for myself both geographically and socially through the use of voice and register. Both the critical and the creative lenses elucidate use of simple language and variations of registers to create sociological bonds/alienation. Simple language—and humour—forges communion with reader. The adoption of the vernacular, therefore, has a purpose beyond mere stylistics, in that it also is used in a social and community building (or razing) way. In other words, the use of informality becomes a performative speech act. 4 CONTENTS 1. Listening to Writing, and introduction 5 2. Eggheads, Good Ol’ Boys, and the Plain Talk Express 12 3. Still Listening 32 3.1 Say It Like You Mean It 33 3.2 Literature for Deviants 35 3.3 Of Charm, Drupelets, and Penises 51 3.4 Tears of a Clown 57 3.5 Hearing Voices 59 4. Meet the Baselects 73 4.1 Greetings from the Dangerous Craphole 77 4.2 Talking Funny 79 4.3 Literature as Co-dependence 107 5. Scripto Ergo Sum 113 5.1 Talking the Talk 114 5.2 Alien Life 117 5.3 Lies, Lies, Lies 124 5.4 Rules of Engagement 130 6. ‘They Eat That Shit Up’ 132 My Ice Age 137 Chapter 1 The Edge of the Known World 138 Chapter 2 Cracks In The Ice 153 Chapter 3 Fata Bromosa 170 Chapter 4 2% 188 Chapter 5 The Expanding Horizon 194 Chapter 6 10% 215 Chapter 7 Annexation 232 Chapter 8 Animae 254 Chapter 9 Anchors Away 272 Chapter 10 Humiliation and the Sour-Toe Cocktail 286 Chapter 11 Denial and Acceptance 297 Chapter 12 Winter Wonderland 312 Chapter 13 Days Draw In 322 Bibliography Creative 331 Critical 332 5 1. LISTENING TO WRITING Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Begins Slaughterhouse-Five1 (Vonnegut 1969); one simple, profound, thrilling sentence. Listen? One word, one paragraph. Listen to what? An odd request, considering I’m reading it. I’m holding a book. Listen: an attention signal (Sarangi 2000), an imperative, emphatic, a demand to behave ourselves and pay attention; something that one would normally expect in spoken conversation. There is a sense of immediacy, a sense of the colloquial, a verbalness. It is a directive, directed at us, and ‘there is strong support for the view that the addressee or audience is a very important influence on speaker’s style’ (Holmes 2001). This, then, is not the kind of book we’re accustomed to reading. The distance between us and the author is narrowing. But then it gets even more alarming: a colon. ‘Listen:’. A colon—more profound than a comma, which would have been adequate. Stronger even than an exclamation point—which can be, well, fun— for when do we see a colon used? What usually follows it? Lists. Directions. Vital information, basically. Time to sit up straight. Take notes if necessary. We know this is serious; it’s like the Emergency Broadcast System of punctuation. Our attention has been got. 1 It begins the story, that is, and opens the second chapter. The book, however, starts in the first chapter, where Vonnegut injects himself into his fiction, detailing both the origins and the difficulty in writing Slaughterhouse-Five. Chapter 1 is Vonnegut showing his hand, vanquishing all artifice, all authorial authority, putting himself in there, revealing himself, conceptualizing ‘his own life the way he later does Billy’s, in terms of Tralfamadorian time theory’ (Lundquist 1976 in Allen 1991: 82) and ‘reminding the reader that fictions are provisional realities and not bedrock truth is the essence of Vonnegut’s work: his one enduring theme’ (Klinkowitz 1982: 17). 6 This is an author with no pretence to the normal niceties of literary expectations, the kind of books we have to read in school, clean, unmessy, traditional: the kind of book our grandmothers’ like. The pantheon of ‘good books,’ the kind Miss Wedderburn used to teach us in seventh grade, the kind sanctioned by the Kansas State Board of Education. This is someone with something urgent to say, someone informal, someone like us; an author who ‘respects the reader’s creative intelligence and incorporates it in the making of literary art’ (Klinkowitz 1982: 89). But then something odd. A code switch, or con/textual shift, where ‘speakers use their language differently from how they were using it before’ (Sarangi 2000: 30). After the, well, abrupt, even rude directive—and its informality—we get a clause whose predicate—the present perfect ‘has come’—is somewhat archaic, has something vaguely biblical in the syntax, like the cadence of St. Luke, like perhaps Luke 2:10,11. Vonnegut seems like he’s trying to say something that is not normally said, something that is unfamiliar. Like Luke was (‘Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy…’). There is something spontaneous-seeming about this. It feels urgent, and sloppy in the way that urgent things are. It doesn’t smack of the care and assiduity that proper literature demonstrates: this is immediate, where rules of grammar and syntax and consistency matter less than the imparting of meaning in as quick a way as possible in order to stop conversation from flagging or losing one’s conversational turn. It’s like speech, with the register shifts from imperative to crypto-biblical, a variety pack of syntax and vocabulary, like he’s scrambling in real time to find a way of saying. It feels made up on the spot. This is strengthened by the next word. ‘Unstuck.’ This is neologism (or might as well 7 be), a survival word (Carter 2004).2 There are certainly easier, more succinct ways of saying the same thing. Why not ‘loose’? That would be more precise, more literary. Again, this seems conversational, with the extemporaneity and improvisation that conversation entails, making things up as he goes along in order to keep the flow going, sacrificing the optimal word for one that’s merely serviceable—if lexically suspect—to at least get meaning across.3 This mixing of formal, slightly clunky present perfect with a word that seems drawn out of a meagre lexical pool has created a voice, a relationship between author and reader, a relationship of greater intimacy that one would have had with one’s dustier experiences with literature. In a word, Vonnegut has positioned himself, right from the very first line, utilizing conversational tropes to achieve a confederacy (Benwell & Stokoe 2006: 140). He employs a ‘we-code,’ which Gumperz associates with ‘in-group and informal 2 Ersatz words we grab and stuff into a conversation to keep it from lagging, whether they’re the right word or not; indeed, whether they’re a word at all. This is explored in greater detail below (see 4.2 ‘Talking Funny’) 3 Although the realm of nomenclature is not with the remit of this paper, Vonnegut’s protagonist does bear some comment as it fits into the nature of linguistic register, Sarangi’s con/textualization.