Linguistic indicators of point of view
Task F - Verbs of perception and cognition
In the extract below, we are clearly given the point of view of the character
Ida Arnold. What role do the highlighted verbs play in this?
Ida Arnold sat up in the boarding-house bed. (1)
For a moment she didn't know where she
was (2). Her head ached with the thick
night at Sherry's (3). It came slowly back
to her as she stared at the thick ewer
on the floor ... (3)
(Graham Greene  ,
Brighton Rock)
Our answer
Value-laden expression - attitudinal
and ideological viewpoint markers
Besides the spatial, temporal and social aspects of viewpoint,
we also need to consider personal and ideological attitude. Someone's
viewpoint can also apply to how they feel about something, or what their
attitude to it is. Consider the quotation below from a short story by
D. H. Lawrence. Fanny is an educated woman who had left her village and
the working class man she would otherwise have had to marry, in order
to become a governess. Now her job has come to an end because her charge
has now grown up, she is forced to return to the village to marry Harry,
something which she appears very unwilling to do. We have highighted the
words and phrases we are going to concentrate on:
She opened the door of her grimy branch-line
carriage, and began to get down her bags (1). The porter was nowhere,
of course, but there was Harry (2). There,
on the sordid little station under the
furnaces, she stood, tall and distinguished,
in her well-made coat and skirt and her
broad grey velour hat (3).
(D.H. Lawrence ,
Fanny and Annie.)
First of all we can note the way in which the adjectives
concerning the carriage of the train and the railway station are not just
descriptive. They also have connotations which suggest disapproval on
the part of the narrator and the character Fanny, from whose viewpoint
the scene is surveyed, The external description of Fanny herself is, by
contrast, approving in terms of the adjectives used. She appears to be
a cut above her surroundings. We can also note the use of the distal deictic
'there' being used not just to suggest physical apartness from the perceiver,
but also an analogical attitudinal distance. Harry is being coded in the
same was as the unpleasant surroundings.
In the Lawrence extract we have just examined, the attitudes indicated
are by and large personal. But when such views are representative of more
general attitudes they are often referred to as ideological in nature.
Hence the shared social or political views of a group of people might
be called ideological. We can see this if we return to the example from
Something Out There by Nadine Gordimer, which we reproduce here
for convenience:
Whatever it was, it made a nice change from the usual sort of news,
these days.
The phrases 'a nice change' and 'the usual sort of news'
can now be seen as marking the attitude of the woman who is thinking these
thoughts. Hence the news about the presence of the dangerous animal is
described in approving terms (which is surely odd in itself), compared
with ;'the usual sort of news'. But what is 'the usual sort of news' in
this context? She is a white woman in South Africa as the apartheid system
is breaking down. Hence it is possible to see her as representative of
many white South Africans who had become to believe that their privileged
existence at the expense of their black countryfolk (who were educated
less well, had fewer legal rights and so on) was a right. Here, then we
have an ideological viewpoint being expressed, to which to some degree
we are being made to 'accommodate' via the use of deixis, given and new
information and value-laden expressions. But in this case it is rather
difficult to agree with the ideological viewpoint being assumed by the
woman, and so we are left with an ironic tension between the pull of the
viewpoint markers and the content of what is being expressed. Viewpoint
considerations in this little extract are thus quite complex, and the
irony involved is not unlike that we saw with Mr Verloc waiting to be
murdered by his wife.
|
