Theory of Speech and Thought Presentation - Essay Example

? THEORY OF SPEECH AND THOUGHT PRESENTATION al Affiliation) Key words: Speech, characters THEORY OF SPEECH AND THOUGHT PRESENTATION This essay analyzes the theory of speech and thought presentation. This analysis incorporates the analysis of extracts from the books Ulysses and The Dubliners in light of the theory of speech and thought representation, as a means of understanding the lightness and darkness in terms of moral relativism of Joyce’s characters. The contrasts that are presented in Joyce’s characters make this analysis an interesting one as a whole. Speech and thought presentation dwells in the presentation of the characters’ speech and thoughts. It is a little bit different with the first-person homodiegenic narrations which incorporate the speech and thoughts of the narrator too. Many of the formal features telling apart the modes of speech and thought presentation are similar. Their effects, however, vary and more so in the narrator’s language distance from or proximity to the ideology they seek to put across. Free Indirect Speech and Free Indirect Thought are usually put under the umbrella of Free Indirect Discourse (FID) (Zelma, 2010). Theory of speech In analyzing the theory of speech, its presentation can be categorized as follows: 1. Direct Speech In the following sentence: She said, “I will make avocado juice tomorrow.” The formal markers are as follows; There are two clauses. One being the reporting ‘She said’ and the other the reported ‘I will make avocado juice’ There are the quotation marks placed around the reported clause First and second person pronouns have been used The tense of the verb used in the reporting clause is always either in the past or historical present, for example,’ She said’ or ‘She says’ Any tense can be applied in the reported clause as per the time reference of the proposition. However, the correct grammar has to be adhered to at all times. Deictic markers can be used as per the time and place reference (Zelma, 2010) 2. Indirect Speech (IS) She said she would make avocado juice the following day The formal markers that point to the transition from direct speech to indirect speech are: The reporting clause in this case is viewed as the main clause (She said), and the reported clause is seen as the dependent clause. The sign that she shows this dependency is the use of the relative pronoun ‘that’ (Zelma, 2010). There are no quotation marks placed around the reported clause The first and second person pronouns transform into third person pronouns. The tense in the reported clause is brought from the back to the front  “Close” deictic markers transform to farther markers. For example, here changes to there and tomorrow changes to the following day. Verbs of movement that imply “ motion towards” (come) transform to verbs of movement that imply motion “away from” ( return, go) However, depending on the perspective, the deictics may retain their form. This is especially relevant in the case that the perspective refers to the person ‘here’. In such a case, the sentence becomes ‘She said she would make avocado juice tomorrow’ (Zelma, 2010). 3. Free Direct Speech Free Direct Speech is a type of Direct Speech which does not include either the quotation marks or reported clauses. The effect of Free Direct Speech is that the narrator appears as the intermediary. 4. Narrative Reports of Speech Acts This entails sentences that only give the impression that speech occurred without necessarily stating what was said. 5. Free Indirect Speech Thought presentation The presentation of s character’s thought is not very easy given that the thoughts of a human being can not be directly reached. However, the authors tend to make the readers believe that they can read the minds of their characters in order to enable the full understanding of characters. The author may choose from the categories of the speech presentation but despite this, the very fact that they are posing to be readers of others’ minds is a display of both the artificiality of the method coupled with the conventionality of literary communication (Zelma, 2010). Thought presentation can be categorized as follows: Free Direct Thought (FDT) Direct Thought (DT) Free Indirect Thought (FIT) Indirect Thought (IT) Narrative Report of a Thought Act (NRTA) Description of the texts The Ulysses Ulysses is a novel that was written by James Joyce who has an Irish background. It consists of eighteen chapters which were produced in bits in the American Journal known as The Little Review. This publication was done from March 1918 to December 1920. The whole novel was published in Sylvia Beach in France in the year 1922. The novel is epic and has been acclaimed as one of the best novels of the 20th Century. It has also been mentioned as the epitome of analyzing the course of thinking. It is therefore an interesting novel to look into as it tries to bring the different thoughts of its characters to light (Carlin & Evans, 2010). The main character of the Ulysses is one Leopold Bloom who embarks on a normal day through the city of Dublin in Ireland. The entire story unfolds within twenty four hours starting with the morning of 16th June 1904 (Carlin & Evans, 2010). This day is in real life the day that author James Joyce had his first day with his wife to be. This novel has some allusions drawn from the Odyssey of Homer. This is further enhanced by the fact that ‘Ulysses’ is in fact the Latin translation of Odyssey. The chapters unfold in correspondence with the events in the Odyssey. The Ulysses had a rough time in its onset. It came at a time that the society had its reservations concerning the publishing of material that alluded to sex. It was dismissed by many critics at that time and the magazine that was publishing sections from this novel was even sued. The filing of charges against the novel and the magazine that was concerned with its publication eventually led to its banning in the United Kingdom. For some time the novel was not allowed in the country and the germ also spread to the United States where it also encountered the same obscenity accusations. The final novel left out most of these controversial episodes though Joyce still held on tight to them. He distributed them to his friends and critics when they could not find favor with the public eye. In the United States a judge dismissed the book as not being pornographic hence the charges seemed irrelevant. In defense of the book and its author, the relationship of the book and the Odyssey was expounded together with the internal framework. The judgment was upheld by an American jury which saw to the ban being lifted. United States therefore became the first country to allow for the circulation of the book. Ironically, the book was not banned in Ireland, neither did it exist in that particular country in which it was set. The book has received negative and positive criticism in equal measure. Though much acclaimed as one the best novels of that century even the most pro-Joyce critics have claimed that the novel is ‘also possibly mad’ (Cullinan, 1971). This could be true because while the author talks much about Ireland and in the unfolding of the episodes, some things just appear very funny and generally insane. In terms of speech and thought presentation, the stylistic devices that have been applied in this book are remarkable. As he author seeks to express the characters’ thoughts and speech he employs a range of speech devices which include stream of consciousness method, careful planning and adventurous prose. This prose includes the wide use of puns, parodies and allusion. The characterization and the use of humor have also earned the novel a place among the highest ranked novels in the modernist platform. Stylistic analysis of the extracts The first chapters of the book are usually referred to as the Telemachus. The first chapter of the novel involves a character named Stephen Dedalus. Stephen is a medical student who at that time teaches a class. Stephen has an associate, Buck Mulligan, who is also a medical student. On this particular day, Stephen is nursing hard feelings toward Buck because he passed a rude comment aligned to his mother’s death. Stephen has declined to pray at his mother’s deathbed for reasons best known to himself. Buck therefore chides him that this decline would lead to bad luck. The two men together with an English acquaintance known as Haines have breakfast together. They get there milk form an old woman with whom Haines clicks and they start a conversation. Stephen is asked to expound on the theory behind Hamlet, something he refuses. Milligan then asks for the key to the tower then goes his way. The theme of dispossession is rampant in this episode. Stephen has just come back from France where he had escaped in a bid to look for freedom. What brought him back was his mother’s death. He is also in such of his a father, not a biological father as such because he has a biological father who goes by the name Simon. The interesting father-to-son allusion is father enhanced by Stephen’s second name, Dedalus. Daedalus who is charged with responsibility of seeking to invent the art of flight had a son called Icarus. This father-son pair points to Stephen’s search for a spiritual father while not acknowledging the existence of his own father. This brings into play the issues of paternity and inheritance which will resonate throughout the book. By Mulligan taking the key to the tower which can be represented as Stephen’s home, the theme of dispossession materializes. Stephen also sees some priest’s clothes in the church. The church here comes as a representation of the state. It is seen as the basis of power, imposition and hypocrisy for Stephen who avers that he serves two masters, one of them being English and the other Italian. This means that he has sworn allegiance to the English colonialists and at the same time serving the Roman Catholic. These two forces have manipulated Ireland so much that it ha left it as desolate. There is an intermittency of the spoken and the internal language in this episode, though the prevalence of the style of internal monologue is notable. This style has widely been used as a train of speech and thought presentation. Direct speech does not include the quotation marks but Joyce uses the dashes instead at the beginning of every spoken sentence. ‘Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.’ In this extract, Stephen is musing about one of his students who has remained behind to be helped with some work. The author intrudes Stephens thoughts and bring them to light. Stephen is wondering that despite the boy’s unappealing physical appearance, he has a mother who nursed him and loves him. This reminds him of his own mother at whose deathbed he refused to pray. Stephen has a humane heart, at least compared to Mulligan who does not give the least care to human needs. Mulligan is in fact likened to Antinous, the villain in Odyssey who gave him a hard time in his quest to return home. There is metaphor that is employed in these thoughts to represent how hopeless the boy looked to Stephen. The first sentence describes his physical appearance as ugly and futile. Stephen’s feelings for this boy border the paternal theme that had been earlier introduced while at the same time bringing in the mother’s love into the picture. In chapter 4, titled Calypso, we are introduced to a new character who goes by the name Leopold Bloom. Bloom embodies the wanderer in Odyssey. Bloom wakes up in the morning and goes to the butcher to get himself breakfast. He buys pork kidney and makes his way home. On the way his eye is caught by an article in the newspaper wrapping. This is mainly because he is an advertising agent. He thinks about his relationship with his wife. The sky is covered by clouds at this time. Having thought of his wife, he hurries into the house taking with him mails for himself and his wife. Bloom in this extract is represented through the free indirect speech discourse just as the previous contexts. However, what really stands out is the difference in consciousness of Bloom and Stephen. Bloom stands for every other man and his line of thinking point to his modern and universal status. Stephen had this analytical and philosophical approach to the world, with Bloom however; there is a different relationship with his environment. He gives his environment a more physical and sensual approach. In sense, he interacts with his world, on a series of levels. In the course of Bloom’s development in the novel, some of the questions that arise are whether he is an anti-hero in a mock-heroic novel, or whether he is this particular 'hero' of a particularly modernist epic. A number of images and motifs accrue from the development of Bloom in this novel. The Dubliners The Dubliners is an array of fifteen short stories whose author is James Joyce. The stories reflect the middle class way of lives of the people who dwelled in Dublin in that era. It was published in 1914 for the very first time. The stories were written when the people of Ireland were so much into their search for a national identity. There were many ideologies and influences that racked the history and culture of the people of Ireland at this time. James Joyce writings aimed at the characters’ realization of oneself. The stories at first majored on children. The stories gradually segued into adulthood stories. This revealed James Joyce’s division of this series into childhood, adolescent and maturity epics. In these writings, Joyce is apparently against the nineteenth-twentieth century way of life. The stories in this anthology can be perceived in two different ways. One of the ways is taking th stories as they are while the other way is looking in to them deeply and trying to find out their relationship with Dublin and the entire Dublin at this time. The story Araby is about a boy who had a crash on his brother’s sister. He resolves to buy him an expensive gift during a fair. This however does not happen as he arrives late. The story can be taken as it is and assumed to embody the childhood disappointments that make up almost every human being’s existence. However, if one was to delve deeper and read between the lines of this story something different arises. Joyce brings in it a series of political, religious and sexual undertones that translates to the boy looking for something different. He might have been looking for the Holy Grail, his desire for the girl having been changed to thirst for spiritual fulfillment and his attempts thwarted by political forces of the British and religious forces of the Italian Catholics (Gray, 2010). Joyce’ writings emanate a strong feeling of his characters. However, he does not impose on the reader what they should perceive about the characters. That he leaves to the reader’s judgment. It becomes hard to tell whether Joyce harbors some dislike to the characters or the criticism he aims at them is just sympathetic (Gray, 2010). Joyce has almost widely applied the repetition of images into the stories. This is also known as chiasmus. It is especially evident in the opening of ‘The Sisters’. "There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: I am not long for this world, and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis." This is a story that surrounds death and the church. Therefore, Joyce puts the repetition of images in such a way that is similar to the chants that would be heard in the church. This repetition achieves a numbing effect to the reader. This numbing is also the effect that the death of the priest has had on the people. The repetition is like a funeral bell that rings and brings with itself the somberness of the atmosphere. The last sentence culminates the repletion ‘Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis.’ The effect achieved here is the putting across of the lack of forward movement which reflects the paralysis (Gray, 2010). In this passage, Joyce employs the two types of chiasmus, that is, the lengthened chiasmus and the tightened chiasmus. With reference to the above passage, the first two appearances of night are separated by only one single word. On the other hand, many words, some of which are sentences, can separate the final sentence from the initial ones. This is what is referred to as the lengthened chiasmus. The opposite is true for the shortened chiasmus where two images that have been widely separated are brought into close proximity (Gray, 2010) Reverse chiasmus, involves the reversal of images just as the name suggests. It has the ability to create moving melodic effects, just as it is in the final sentence of the final paragraph of "The Dead. Joyce first of all uses the word "falling" five times in a short paragraph, he then brings the passage to an end by using the image in a reverse chiasmus: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." There is an apparent employment of the stream-of-consciousness in this work (Gray, 2010). In ‘The Dead’, Joyce employs a series of Free Indirect Speech in the work. In Free Indirect Speech, it can be observed that: The reporting clause does not exist The tense and pronouns selection are those that are in sync with the indirect speech. This is to mean that the first and second pronouns become the third person. However, in the case that the narration has some sought of historical present, then the Free Indirect Speech is also in the present tense (Zelma, 2010). ‘Near’ deictics are always maintained. Word order and sentence type can be maintained especially the inversion and use of auxiliaries in questions, ellipsis and interjections in exclamations, speaker’s individual syntactic choices. Individual speech markers of dialect or idiolect are in many occasions also maintained, and the same is done to sentence adverbs such as “of course,” “certainly,” and conjunctions such as “and,” “but,” etc. The following is an excerpt from Joyce’ ‘The Dead’: While she was threading her way back across the room Mrs. Malins, without adverting to the interruption, went on to tell Gabriel what beautiful places there were in Scotland and beautiful scenery. Her son-in-law brought them every year to the lakes and they used to go fishing. Her son-in-law was a splendid fisher. One day he caught a beautiful big fish and the man in the hotel cooked it for their dinner. (Joyce, “The Dead”) In this account, the Free Indirect Speech expounds Mrs Malin’s experience rather faithfully. This is to mean that it allows for her simplicity of language and thought to be brought put. This is an example of the effect of Free Indirect Speech. This is explained by the fact that it introduces distance between the characters’ words, hence making it a vehicle of irony (Zelma, 2010). Examples of Free Indirect Speech maintaining the syntax and wording of interrogative sentence are seen in the seventh sentence of yet another extract from Joyce ‘The Dead’. The second and eighth sentences are also instances of Free Indirect Speech but these are normal. It is of great importance to notice that the fifth sentences somewhere in the middle of Indirect Speech and Free Indirect Speech. They entail a reporting clause but this is preceded by the FIS-type of sentences (Zelma, 2010). The effect brought out here is very interesting. It would be easy to assume that there is no presence of the narrator in this context. However, we are continually reminded of this presence by the repetition of the words ‘she said,’ in the second sentence and ‘he said’ in the fifth. This shows that there is someone present at the conversation. This person is here either as omniscient narrator or as a focalizer. In this case, the person plays both roles (Zelma, 2010). (1) Nobody answered this question and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera. (2) One of her pupils had given her a pass for Mignon. (3) Of course it was very fine, she said, but it made her think of poor Georgina Burns. (4) Mr. Browne could go back farther still, to the old Italian companies that used to come to Dublin--Tietjens, Ilma de Murzka, Campanini, the great Trebelli, Giuglini, Ravelli, Aramburo. (5) Those were the days, he said, when there was something like singing to be heard in Dublin. (6) He told too of how the top gallery of the old Royal used to be packed night after night, of how one night an Italian tenor had sung five encores to Let me like a Soldier fall, introducing a high C every time, and of how the gallery boys would sometimes in their enthusiasm unyoke the horses from the carriage of some great prima donna and pull her themselves through the streets to her hotel. (7) Why did they never play the grand old operas now, he asked, Dinorah, Lucrezia Borgia? (8) Because they could not get the voices to sing them: that was why. The use of the Free Indirect Speech aids in bringing out the characters’ thoughts and habits in these writings. The use of FIS has been particularly prevalent in the entire Dubliners. Conclusion After the analysis of the texts, I am in full agreement with most of the critics of James Joyce who while acknowledging the great modernist works, maintains that there was a hint of awkwardness in the book. There is a lot of internal monologue applied in the Ulysses coupled with the stream of consciousness, a device that is usually related to Joyce. In the Dubliners, however, the Free Indirect Speech prevails. In the case of FIS, it is impossible to tell at just by the use of formal markers, whether we are seeing the thoughts or speech of the character or those of the narrator. This ambiguity has to be solved contextually, it creates the need for finding out whose perspective is enhanced in the entire passage or even the whole book so that it can be easy to tell the source of the words or thoughts. Free Indirect Thought usually displays a situation from the point of view of the character whose thoughts we are encountering. This does not necessarily mean that the author is in full agreement with the particular character’s line of thought. This presents an interesting case of irony as seen in Joyce’s works. Direct Thought, Free Direct Thought and Free Indirect Thought has this interesting ability to represent an incoherent flow of thought to an extent that is very rare with speech presentation, since at least a minimal coherence has to be present in order to establish an effective face-to-face communication. This is the reason why all the three categories are important in the development of effective for the stream-of-consciousness technique which makes up most of Joyce’s works. The Free Indirect Speech takes us further from the characters but the Free Direct Thoughts and the Free Indirect Thoughts offers us an access into the character’s mind. References A, Zelma. "Speech and Thought Presentation." MODES OF SPEECH AND THOUGHT PRESENTATION 1.1 (2010): 1. Print. Cullinan, John. "Anthony Burgess, The Art of Fiction No. 48." Anthony Burgess, The Art of Fiction No. 48 1.1 (1971): 1. Print. Hardy, D. E.. "Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing, And Thought Presentation In A Corpus Of English Writing. Routledge Advances In Corpus Linguistics. * Elena Semino And Mick Short.." Literary and Linguistic Computing 22.4 (2007): 489-490. Print. Joyce, James. The dead. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House Pub., 1914. Print. Joyce, James. Dubliners,. New York: Modern library, 1926. Print. Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1946. Print. Marnette, Sophie. Speech and thought presentation in French concepts and strategies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub., 2005. Print. Semino, Elena, and Mick Short. Corpus stylistics: speech, writing and thought presentation in a corpus of English writing. London: Routledge, 2004. Print. Wallace, Gray. "James Joyce's Dubliners: An Introduction by Wallace Gray." World Wide Dubliners 1.1 (2010): 1. Print. Younger, Irving. Ulysses in court: a speech. Hopkins, Minn.: Professional Education Group, 1988. Print. Read More