Elizabeth Bowen's “Narrative Language at White Heat”

Elizabeth Bowen’s “narrative language at white heat”: A literary-linguistic perspective Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung des Akademischen Grades eines Dr. phil., vorgelegt dem Fachbereich 05 – Philosophie und Philologie der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz von Julia Rabea Kind aus Darmstadt Mainz 2016 Referentin: Korreferent: Tag des Prüfungskolloquiums: 20. Mai 2016 Contents 1. Introduction: The experience of reading Bowen’s “narrative language at white heat” 3 1.1 Bowen’s poetic practice: Composition, form and reading ...................................... 5 1.2 Literary scholarship on Bowen’s language ........................................................... 12 1.3 Parameters of analysis: The Last September, To the North and The Heat of the Day .............................................................................................................................. 15 1.4 A literary-linguistic perspective on Bowen’s language ........................................ 18 2. A model of literary sentence processing and aesthetic pleasure ................................. 23 2.1 Neuroscience: The human brain and experimental methods ................................. 27 2.2 Neuroaesthetics: Sources of aesthetic pleasure ..................................................... 29 2.3 Neurolinguistics: Sentence processing .................................................................. 43 2.4 Conceptual compatibility of neuroaesthetics and neurolinguistics ....................... 58 2.5 Difficulty, ease and aesthetic pleasure in reading Bowen’s narrative language ... 60 3. “Reading is eventful”: Ambiguous sentence structures .............................................. 63 3.1 Ambiguous Actor arguments and verbs in reduced relative clauses ..................... 69 3.2 Ambiguous syntactic dependency relations in complex clauses ......................... 102 3.3 Ambiguous similes .............................................................................................. 113 3.4 Conclusion: Ambiguity ....................................................................................... 129 4. “You have to precise”: Negation in sentence structures and morphology ................ 132 4.1 Negation in sentence structures: The Heat of the Day ........................................ 141 4.2 Negation in morphology: Lexical pairs ............................................................... 153 4.3 Conclusion: Negation .......................................................................................... 166 5. Sentences and paragraphs are “good in shape”: Parallelism, alliteration and rhyme 169 5.1 The written sentence: Parallelism and alliteration in The Heat of the Day ......... 180 5.2 The paragraph: Parallelism and rhyme in The Last September ........................... 207 5.3 Conclusion: Parallelism, alliteration and rhyme ................................................. 223 6. Directions for future research.................................................................................... 226 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 238 1 Abbreviations LS The Last September TN To the North Heat The Heat of the Day eADM The extended Argument Dependency Model 1. Introduction: The experience of reading Bowen’s “narrative language at white heat” In her novel The Heat of the Day, Bowen describes London’s cityscape during the Second World War. In sentences such as “Out of mists of morning charred by the smoke from ruins each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter” (Heat 98), Bowen depicts bombed-out buildings, obstructed roads and the psychological effects of this destruction on Londoners, here, on a typical morning after a night of bombing raids. On a first reading, the syntactic relations in this sentence are obscure. The reader might misinterpret the phrase “each day” as an adverbial in a subordinate clause, expecting it to be followed by the subject of a main clause: a) [Out of mists of morning, charred by the smoke from ruins each day], rose to a height of unmisty glitter; Although the above interpretation is in keeping with the sentence structure, the expectation of a subject phrase is not fulfilled and the misreading becomes apparent when parsing the second verb, “rose”. Even though processing this verb is initially straightforward as it is unambiguously active past tense, “rose” requires a subject which precedes it. At this point, the reader needs to correct the initial adverbial misrepresentation of “each day” into the subject phrase of a main clause: b) [Out of mists of morning, charred by the smoke from ruins], [each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter]; Because it is not easy to identify the main and subordinate clauses and the subject, the sentence is difficult to process, impeding access to its meaning. From a literary scholar’s perspective, such difficulty and the processing disfluency it produces might be seen, as with war, as an “expression or representation” of “[c]haos” or “disorder” (Bullot and Reber 2013, 135). That means, sentence form and the reading experience are seen as symbolic or expressive of content. While I do not contest the validity of such an approach, I view sentence form and disfluency from a very different angle: In this thesis, I examine how Elizabeth Bowen uses narrative prose language to produce aesthetic pleasure in readers. I hypothesise that sentence structures such as the one discussed above can elicit a sudden difficulty or a sudden ease in sentence processing. Overcoming this difficulty is the source of aesthetic 3 pleasure in reading literary texts and is based on a general cognitive mechanism which is not specific to reading or the perception of art. Even though Bowen utilises this mechanism as part of her poetic practice, this effect is not limited to her writing but may be present in other literary texts by other authors, too. In order to account for such sentences in Bowen’s novels, I combine an existing neuroaesthetic model of the perception and appreciation of art (Leder, Belke et al. 2004; Leder and Nadal 2014) and a neurocognitive model of sentence processing (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky 2009a) into a new model of literary sentence processing which can explain the potential of syntactic ambiguity and negation to elicit difficulty during sentence processing, and the potential of parallelism, alliteration and rhyme to facilitate it. All these forms are hallmarks of individual sentences in selected narrative episodes in Bowen’s novels, and I suggest that they all have the potential to produce aesthetic pleasure in readers. I approach these sentence structures from a literary-linguistic perspective, a field of research which is concerned with “the application of linguistic theory to literature” (Fabb 2001, 446; Fabb 1997). Even though I do not offer new interpretations,1 this thesis is written from a literary point of view because I draw on Bowen’s novels The Last September, The Heat of the Day and To the North, on her own writings about her poetic practice as a novelist, and on literary scholarship on Bowen and her language. At the same time, this thesis is also written from a linguistic perspective because I am interested in “generali[sing]” (Fabb 1997, 1) about sentence processing and aesthetic pleasure in reading literary texts. I combine literary and linguistic theories and practice by referring to Bowen’s novels and to her own writings about her poetic practice as a source for explaining how literary sentence processing might work. These insights should, ideally, be valid for individual novels in Bowen’s œuvre and also for any other literary text written in English. In order to provide such a general view on aesthetic pleasure in reading, I draw on neuroaesthetic research into the perception of art and on neurolinguistic research into sentence processing, conjoining them into a model of literary sentence processing. In the Introduction, I outline central notions of Bowen’s poetic practice and review literary scholarship on Bowen’s language, and I then describe my method and approach. In Chapter 2, I introduce the model of literary sentence processing and aesthetic pleasure which I develop in this thesis. In Chapters 3 and 4, I consider the role of syntactic ambiguity and negation in Bowen’s novels. In Chapter 5, I examine parallelism, 1 For a similar approach to literary texts see MacMahon (2009a). 4 alliteration and rhyme in her œuvre. In the concluding Chapter 6, I sketch three avenues of future research which can draw on my findings. 1.1 Bowen’s poetic practice: Composition, form and reading Although Elizabeth Bowen never formulated a unified manifesto outlining her poetic practice (Lee 1999a, 205), she published essays, speeches and broadcasts which shed light on her position on diverse issues such as the process of literary writing, the role of language in prose and poetry, and the cognitive and aesthetic experience of reading. Many of Bowen’s ideas about literature and prose language are particularly suited for a literary- linguistic analysis from the vantage point of neurocognitive research. However, any interpretation of her ideas from such a perspective must be subject to caution because Bowen’s writings predate modern neuroscience.2 A larger corpus of Bowen’s critical prose has now been published and studied (Bowen, Greene et al. 1948; Bowen 1962a; Bowen 1975; Hepburn 2008; Hepburn 2010a; Lee 1999a, 204-228). While literary scholarship has

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