Creative use of English - Essay Example

Rebecca (1938) by Daphne Du Maurier is consciously set in a world of polite psychological suspense that uses creativity to engender ambiguity as one of the primary forces that drive the language play of the novel. Rebecca lacks the straightforward Modernists touch and narrative experimentation, drawing broadly on gothic and Victorian sensibilities. What is essentially interesting about the language play is that though it indeed draws from sources like Jane Eyre or Vilette, it does not categorize this dream sequence and the experience of it to a logical semantic domain where diachronic linguistics may not help the reader to understand the language play. The use of language in Rebecca can be best understood when approached phenomologically as they reflect the perception of the perceiver and seemingly constitutes a prototype that is culturally defined and generated infinitely everytime there is an attempt at understanding it through the process of cognition. Thus cognition and language play are essential categories that wrestle dialogically until a decision in sentence production is taken everytime to fix or anchor authorial intent. But it does not rest there, as cognition is also an attempt to translate all linguistic and communicative possibilities for each level of word play or use at the lexical stage and at the level of poetic metaphor and metonymy at the semantic level. "It is clearly understood that one of the qualities that all languages have in common is their "creative" aspect. Thus an essential property of language is that it provides the means for expressing indefinitely many thoughts and for reacting appropriately in an indefinite range of situations" (Chomsky, 1965) Chomsky unlike Humboldt argues for the necessity of a universal grammar, which must accompany a generative grammar that "assigns to each of an infinite range of sentences a structural description indicating how this sentence is understood by the ideal speaker hearer" and is also "perfectly explicit" (Chomsky, 1965). Humboldt talks about the truly creative aspect of man's cognitive faculty and how man resolves particular creative challenges given to them since language cease to be just syntagmatic and paradigmatic modes of representations and enter the reader's "horizon of expectations" (Jauss, 1982) and self-conscious-ness as Hegel situates it. Thus the cognitive "potentialities" (Jauss, 1982) as per the Reader-response theory are derived out of cumulative responses of readers and hence is rests outside the individual mental struggle with understanding and is thus more result oriented. But cognitive approach concerns itself more with the working understanding of the mind as it tries to derive and synthesize meanings out of language that are creatively distorted beyond their functional and immediate lexical meanings and also not quite semantically or culturally relevant but intertwined with the progress and context or mood of the narrative itself. Thus in Rebecca, word play, unlike say as used in Finnegans Wake by Joyce is less a universalization of the protean qualities of dream. Both the novels use creativity through language to represent the conventions and the workings of the sleeping mind that are communicative but in a many possible ways. Cognition thus comes when language is embedded in a larger social or narrative context and faces danger in a new usage that challenges it to redefine language use and deconstruct all grammatical pragmatism. Thus new semantic domains can be best analyzed through deep introspection and understanding of reader's role in interpreting metaphors while deciphering language. Metaphors are thus the dominant demarcators of new language constructions that lack any objective ready meaning and rests mainly on conceptualization, categorization, grammaticalization and the use of language for communication of meaning. It lacks any older positivist paradigms of linguistics and archetypal expressions. Rebecca uses an archetypal imagery of dream sequence to indulge into creative language play so as to hurl readers into a supernatural scenario where the dream is a subjective leftover of the real vision that is all but lost in the very act of gaining consciousness and at the moment of writing. What happens here is the creative recreation of a dream that is colored with the author's imaginative subjectivity, the social paradigmatic embeddedness of the language use and most importantly, the emergence of a new meaning and cognitive challenge through the use of creative language. The opening sentences of the passage in the novel talk about the unnamed character's first person narration of a dream that occurred "Last night". The author (in the voice of the character) is aware of the fleeting nature of the dreams sensations but tries to convey the feelings through imageries. The imageries are thus important in many ways. First, they refer to the psychosexual position of the character/author, the characteristic mood of the novel, the direct involvement of the reader in experiencing the writer's mental spaces. These mental spaces are cognitive chunks that cover the territory of "possible worlds" in a semantic network. (Fauconnier, 1994, Fauconnier and Sweetser, 1996). They include referential mappings by referring to a real world object or criteria, which may be "Manderley" or typical fleeting nature of dreams that Maurier refers to when she says that the dream is but partly remembered by her character "like all dreamers", she explains. More complex relationships include blending or conceptual integration, which make use of mappings between two or more spaces (input spaces) to set up a new space (the blend); mappings between these input spaces are normally structured by a generic space. (Turner and Fauconnier, 1995; Turner and Fauconnier and Turner, 1996,1998, 2002). When the text describes through metaphors it allows the blending to happen to the seemingly confused adjectives allotted to the roads, trees, and the house itself. The road is more tortuous than ever and the plants are monstrous whereas the oaks and other trees seem to be pregnant with emotive qualities that are not understood conventionally. Cognition can be achieved by the overall knowledge of the language presented (schema theory), by applying formal knowledge to the reading, and by applying knowledge about the content. Thus when the author uses Freudian complexities that are used to heighten Gothic mood of the dream. The heroine give vent to her repressed reactions to Manderley through the images that she uses to describe her dream Odyssey. Words like "insidious", "menace", "dark", "uncontrolled", "secretive" directly set the mood of the dream or of the book. There is an unsurity about the narrator and the barred gates and the "iron" determination with which they hold her back anticipate the later unfolding of the story. What is remarkable is the subterranean word play with phallic imageries. The passage is replete with sexual fantasy and terror. The feminine gaping space of the author/characters mind is displaced from the encroached wilderness: "Naturein her stealthy, insidious way, had encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers. The woods, always a menace crowded, dark and uncontrolled, to the orders of the drive. The beeches with white, naked limbs leant close to one another, their branches intermingled in a strange embrace And there were other trees[that] had thrust themselves out of the quiet earth" Jacobson says that metaphor and metonymy are used as pervasive forces of organizing the creative alienation of the new-formed language, from their respective and usual connotations. Thus in the above passage cognitive approaches has to be largely associative and creative so as to allow more understanding of the words used in a new context. The context is feminine, Gothic, Victorian and subjective all at the same time and the cognitive process must veneer from one to another in a complex synthetic manner. Thus according to Jacobson any linguistic communication is composed of six factors; like the Addresser (speaker, narrator, author), the Addressee (hearer, reader, viewer, reader, user), the Code (system), the Message (text; discourse, what is being said), the Context (referent), the Contact (channel of communication; psychological or physical connection). Corresponding to it are the six functions of language usage that help cognition are, Emotive (expressive; emphasis on addresser), Conative (appellative; emphasis on addressee), Metalingual (focus on code), Poetic, Referential (denotative; focus on context), Phatic (emphasis on contact). Metonymy implies time, cause and effect and a chain of successive events, while metaphor implies space, a-temporal connection, and simultaneity. The above passage achieves all that through its creative use of language since it allows a horizontal cognition of the sentences and also helps to understand the vertical essences and nuances of the language chosen and played on for greater psychological impact on the reader and invoke a special mood. The cognition of this mood through the play on language use can be understood further by emphasis on Jacobson's model. As he stresses that though all the words use here are basically English and familiar in their unique lexical meanings, their combination in an unusual way creates a new language altogether which is understood by a poetic translation of it. Hence cognitive approach helps itself to new horizons of understanding by creatively interpreting the motifs given. The dominant subjective position of the dreamer or author can be thus understood as "forlorn" with gaping eagerness to be accepted and yet she is unheard ("I calledand had no answer"). She plays with wish fulfillment, as she is somehow able to enter which can be understood by the use of the emotive trope in this line "Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me". The proportions within her dream are controlled by words that facilitate the use of the space. Like "The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done" and later she says "surely the miles had multiplied, even as the trees had done, and this path led but to a labyrinth, some choked wilderness, and not to the house at all". The language dwells more on the frustration of her search and the puzzled space that her search seems to encompass. The whole dream is about a peculiar sense of nostalgia that tries to construct a bad-experience. Surely the narrator remembers no pleasing aspect of Manderley but goes to show only how the wilderness and uncomfortable supernaturalism of that place has "multiplied" and the wilderness that as "always" threatened the place has finally "encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers". A later reading of the text will surely give further light into this particular use of language. Nature can as well be the narrator's symbolical replacement of Rebecca's and the "long" fingers of her "dark" presence that has finally devoured the physical presence of Manderley, except for its untarnished memory in the narrator's mind since Manderley remains in her mind "secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream". But the symmetry has been restored in her mind (since she has no way of knowing the future of a desolated Manderley that later reader comes to know gets destroyed by afire) as she defines it by the metaphor "jewel in the hollow of a hand". But the apparent unparalleled quality of Manderley is also contrasted with the word "hollow". Hollow of the hand denotes the palm, but connotes hollowness, of emptiness. The imagery is corresponding to the futility of the whole place, its sterility and its "uninhabited" emptiness. The trees "embrace" and interlock their "naked", "white" limbs and immediately form a "Church" vault. This is a jarring self-conscious image where the presence of profane is justified by the presence of the sanctified. The mind looks at the elms as "tortured elms" and the thrusting "monster shrubs and plants" that are nothing but "choked wilderness". This is a symbolic fear of sexual act. The fear of the "white" limbs full of chaste "vault" like womb is being entered by a choking "wilderness" that can be best described as brutal. In a strange way Manderley represents the narrators failure to inhabit it, since Nature and the wilderness of her fears has "triumphed in the end". Manderley represents her failure and hence it is a Jewel in the "hollow" space shining in her dream. Here the birth of the language could be thus situated in the transition (Aufhebung, sublation) from consciousness to self-consciousness; understanding to insight. Hegel explains that to a conscious subject reality offers itself as an object and the world reflects the categorizing activity of the intellect where the presentation of words is realized in the verbal signs, which are "objective correlative" to internalized conceptualization of the worlds accomplished by the self-conscious subject. The language creativity thus plays to bring out the subjectivity of experience and increase its possibilities. Thus the words are used and played upon the metalangue and the element of differential specificia [specific differences]. Thus the reader uses discourse to play on the differences and undecidable meanings of the texts to create greater understanding of the text. Cognition is thus achieved through achievement of greater dimensions of thinking. Thus the word "hollow" can be placed within the langue of post-Eliot Hollow-men England and again in the context of gothic genre like Northanger Abbey, which influenced Du Maurier. The feminist's perspective will produce greater depth of cognition since it will yield the psychosexual dimensions of the word play. The language does not mirror the author's intention but must be explored creatively to multiply sensitivity. Creativity is located within the individual as per Chomsky. "You cannot have a man handle paints or language or the symbolic concepts of physics, you cannot even have him stain a microscopic slide, without instantly waking in him a pleasure in the very language, a sense of exploring his own activity. This sense lies at the heart of creation". Science and Human Values (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 8. Thus, creative impulse is central to the development, understanding, and application of knowledge. The poetic function of language is crucial to individuals who attempt to relate new knowledge to their own cultural contexts. Although this does not mean that cognitive linguistics can make any claim to reality (Kant's noumena), but it actually challenges the assertion that language is the most immediate artifact of human thought. Cognitive linguistics tends to lean more strongly toward empirical data and tries to elaborate the later from the former. The idea that language is an integral part of cognition which reflects the interaction of cultural, psychological, communicative, and functional considerations, and which can only be understood in the context of a realistic view of conceptualization and mental processing is the basis of cognitive linguistics.1 Cognitive linguistics that dispels the notion that linguistics is an exact science and depend much on prediction and mental processing for understanding the dynamic dependence between data and interpretation. Thus the data provided by the passage in Rebecca can only be creatively understood since there are arbitrary symbols and an absence of "universal" pattern within the intricate design of the imageries. But language-specific conventions can be predicted by keeping in mind the actual lexical definitions of the adjectives or words used. Take for instance the syntagmatic use of the word "gaped". It has a history of u8sage that does not correspond to this present use with "forlorn". But in the context of the perceived reality this information can be understood with the help of their primary meanings only. If gaping approximately means to open wide the mouth or to yawn, and forlorn means forsaken, abandoned, deprived and seemingly sad, then "gaped forlorn" can be intuitively felt to generate the physical feeling of a wide open abandonment that multiplies the sense of despondency in the line. Thus, the simply imagery that has been used to describe a non-living object, i.e. the house assumes an emotional quality and becomes the extension of the speakers psyche. This meaning is again understood by referring to the dream-motif (the author simply says it is a dream), which is traditionally taken to be the subjective exploration of one's deepest desires. Thus In the big picture, cognitive linguistics' ultimate goal is to understand how human cognition motivates the phenomena of language, to be described in terms of abstract trends rather than airtight, absolute rules. One could say cognitive linguistics recognizes that human beings are not rule-guided algorithms, but individuals with a free will which they exercise in ways not entirely consistent and predictable, but on the whole well-motivated and according to certain patterns.2 And hence this is where it relates to the processes of creativity that is at best eclectic and beyond any bound rules. The nature of meaning exists in the amount of manipulation. Thus basic meanings too are bound to change by their concurrent transformation. One of the best examples here is the word "hollow", which by its simple presence to the post 1922 "Hollow-men" Eliot's poem may become apart of the cognitive process of the readers since it is a monumental work of influence. It also lends additional dimension to the dream and to the overall sterility of the narrator's psyche. Though one cannot say that this word has been used in an allusive sense but it does over-imply itself to the present readers. Thus cognitive process and creativity are dependent on the readers understanding and manipulation of the texts meaning beyond the manipulation of the authors meanings. A reader may simply choose to ignore and selectively creative for a specific desired end. Here too cognitive process is at work through selective creativity. Thus one explores shades beyond obvious presence of the words in proper syntax. Thus creative use of words is a creative way of introducing plausible codes and sub codes within the work that will work for and against each other that may or may not be interpreted. Cognitive linguistics play on such chances because as per Stanley Fish the actual aim is to fish out as much as meaning of the utterance possible, but to focus on the reader's experience of it all. The reader's mistakes or experimentations thus become part of the cognitive process and hence part of the creative experience. If literature and language is a projection of fantasies then creative use is another way of arriving and experiencing that fantasy. Thus the use of such words like "branches intermingled in a strange embrace" project emotional turbulence not of those branches but like transferred epithets, the narrators repressed desires to escape her angst become projected on those "tortured" branches. Thus creative language also helps to situate multiple meanings within the context of the plot and characters. Understanding is thus not a purposeful uni-directional flow but a dialectic hesitation of the "to be or not to be" syndrome. Thus cognition is overarching and selective, dialectic and diachronic. It is a constant process of multiple derivations that builds upon itself. Hence one will pass from the literal meaning of the "white, naked limbs leant close to one another, their branches intermingled in a strange embrace, making a vault above my head like the archway of a church" which seemingly creates the picture of Birch trees having white barks and heavily planted along the sides of the path have created an effect of an arcade that looks like that of a Church's vault in height and dimension. Thus one is able to understand the actual size of the given imagery and the mental space is set up. Then the intricacy of the word play like "white" both refers to feminine when used in the context of "naked" and to a kind of blanched supernatural milieu. It helps to create a mood of foreboding, which is delicate and full of sexual currents. Freudian knowledge of the reader may help to delve into stranger depths of female psychology and the psychology of the narrator, and also derive the generic gothic sense of the word "vault". The lateral forces and the dominant forces are all conducive for a creative re-writing of the text. "Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls nor the site itself " can be understood as a dramatic irony once the reader understands that the house has already been destroyed by fire but the apparent flow of language is suddenly shocking because one is pulled along the winding wilderness and lack of symmetry to the sudden perfection of the walls and the site itself. This sentence apparently upsets the logic of the narrator and not of the dream. Thus the language complicates the reality of the narrator's perception. Therefore, when we examine meaning, our goal is not to find a correspondence between utterances and a world (real or otherwise), but rather to explore the ways in which meaning is motivated by human perceptual and conceptual capacities.3 Human beings are usually ignoring the vast majority of perceptual information available at any given instant. This ability to attend to certain inputs while ignoring the rest is essential to successful cognitive functioning, and can be manipulated at various levels of consciousness.4 The tension between what is perceptually and cognitively fore grounded and what is backgrounded can be resolved in a variety of ways, and can even be resolved differently by the same person at different moments. In cognitive linguistics we call this phenomenon construal, and it has significant linguistic consequences.5 Instances of different linguistic expression can be seen in the novel way the narrator tries to express her unique dream by using expressions like "moonlight of my dream", "jewel in the hollow of a hand", "mullioned windows", "squat oaks and tortured elms that straggled cheek by jowl with the beeches, and had thrust themselves out of the quiet earth, along with monster shrubs and plants". Human cognitive sense tend to have a defining subjective ideology and no boundary that pertains to prototypes and pragmatic categories that contain dynamic embodiment of meanings at different times with the same reader. Thus meaning has no fixed locus, but a fixed subject at a particular moment of cognition. Hence, cognition must come only when meaning is derived out of its universal code and given creative treatment to adjust into a new ambiguity in the language altogether, which is unique to a particular text or use of language. Cognition thus acts always and has no basic understanding of a language until it is presented with an overall schema, which in this text is dream. Thus source meaning is interchanged or acted upon or overlapped with extended meanings that play itself around the morphology of the given reality and the equivalent other embodiments whose range is resultant of the individuals cognition. Thus creative use of English enhances further scope for empiricist study of language not as universal wholes but as problematic categories that has no fixity. Works Cited Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press. Pg 4-6. Fauconnier, G. Mental Spaces. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press. Originally published 1985, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) Fauconnier, G. Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge, 1997, Cambridge University Press. Fauconnier, G. and Sweetser, E (eds) 1996 Spaces, Worlds and Grammar, Chicao,IL:University of Chicago Press. Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. Blending as a Central Process of Grammar, in A. Goldberg(ed) Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language, pg 113-30. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. 1996 Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. 'Conceptual Integration Networks', Cognitive Science 22(2): 133-88, 1998 Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. The Way We Think, 2002. New York, Basic Books. Jakobson, Roman. Linguistics and Poetics, in Language in Literature, ed.by K. Pomorska and S. Rudy, Harvard UP, Cambridge MA, 1987, Pg.69-70 Janda, Laura. http://www.indiana.edu/slavconf/SLING2K/pospapers/janda.pdf as retrieved on 28.07.06, Indiana University Website, Copyright, 2006, SLING2K Workshop, February, 2000 Cognitive Linguistics By Laura Janda. Science and Human Values (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 8. Read More