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 DOI: 10.1177/096394709800700113

1998 7: 89Language and LiteratureRoger Fowler

  

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Roger Fowler

Coincidentally, as I was writing this piece, on my desk was sitting the PenguinDictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Tlreary (Cuddon, 1991). The frontcover displays pictures of Aristotle, Samuel Johnson and Roland Barthes, rangedleft to right. Each of these heroes of literary theory looks warily across towardshis successor - Barthes peers out of the right-hand side of the book covertowards a future which, as his apprehensive expression predicts, would be bleakfor structuralism. The three faces increase symmetrically in size, Barthes’s beingtoo large for its frame. This book cover is an icon of Importance, Influence andProgress. In a word, it pictures the myth of filiation, one of the received views ofliterary relationships analysed in Barthes’s article ’From Work to Text’ (1979[1971]).

Three writers above all have influenced my work in critical linguistics:Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes and Michael Halliday. For me they rank abovethe following, all of whom have made their mark but who are of less .

significance in the formation of an overall theory: Althusser, Sir F. Bartlett,Chomsky, Foucault, Genette, Iser, Jakobson, Malinowski, Mukafovsk’, ElinorRosch, Shklovsky.

’

It is difficult to nominate a specific piece of writing by Bakhtin. His books,under his own name or aliases, appeared in the 1970s in uninspiring translations,and it was easier to get a half grasp of the general idea of dialogism than to

’

deploy the specific terms confidently. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics in itsfirst English translation (1973) made available polyphony and dialogic, but ittook an effort to detach them from a tendentious argument about Dostoevsky,and to try and work out their more general applicability. The later Rabelais andhis IVorid-(1984 [1965]), though entertaining and stimulating, invites us topursue a metaphor - carnival - and to extrapolate from the social practices ofcarnival to the structures and processes of language and literature. Voloshinov’sMarxism and the Philosoplry of Language (1973 [1930]) puts the linguistictheory in a more accessible way. What is being argued, contra structuralism, isthat (a) language is a dialogic process, not an abstract object; (b) discourse isinherently plural or heteroglossic; (c) words are multiaccentual rather than ofsingle meaning. Dialogism, heteroglossia and multiaccentuality have become, forme, central tools in linguistic criticism.

Critical linguistics has always to refer to a range of different facets of textstructure, and Halliday’s three-function model of language provides the mostcomplete and workable account I know of the multiple structures and processesat work in a text. Though complex, and sometimes obscure in the writing andeccentric in terminology, the model is indispensable in teaching text analysis;generations of students at UEA, aided by ingenious and attractive charts anddiagrams drawn by Bill Downes, have mastered the use of a Hallidayan toolkit.But it is more than a toolkit, it is a most powerful theory, not least in the area of. representation: Halliday’s ’ideational function of language&dquo; gives an account of

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the way in which language ’lends structure to experience’, by, principally, theorganization of vocabulary as a system of categories encoding a view of theworld, and by transitivity, the theory of different ways in which an event orprocess is analysed conceptually in discourse. As Halliday observes, an eventmight be represented a number of different ways, and this is a central insight forcritical linguistics, which maintains that such differences in representation areideologically significant. One article of Halliday’s has been especially valuablefor its concise and clear exposition of the three functions and the theory ofrepresentation: his ’Linguistic Function and Literary Style: An Inquiry into theLanguage of William Golding’s The Inheritors’ (1971). I find myself constantlyquoting this article, and reading it closely in classes.

Halliday’s article was published in 1971; Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky in 1973;Barthes’s seminal SIZ in 1970. These influences came together for me while Ispent the academic year 1972-3 teaching in the Department of ComparativeLiterature at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. I recall with greatpleasure reading SIZ with a class of graduate students. I feel that I made thetransition from ‘stylistics’ to ’critical linguistics’ at that stage of my career, and adetailed reading of Barthes, Bakhtin and Halliday was a decisive and lastinginfluence.Now that university courses are as modularized as a slot-and-bolt kitchen,

there is no longer the time to ’play’ a complex text such as SIZ over severalweeks, as I did at Brown. But the article ’From Work to Text’ is brief, dense, and

far-reaching, can be read in one class session, and forms an admirableintroduction to Barthes’s ideas; it therefore ranks with Halliday’s ’LinguisticFunction and Literary Style’ as an effective introduction to some ideas which aremassively important for linguistic criticism. I wish there were a similar compactpaper by Bakhtin.

References .

*Bakhtin, M. (1973) trans. R.W. Rotsel. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.*Bakhtin, M. (1984 [1965]) trans. H. Iswolsky. Rabelais and his World. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press.*Barthes, R. (1970) SIZ. Paris: Seuil.*Barthes, R. (1979 [1971]) trans. J.V Harari. ’From Work to Text’ in J.V Harari (ed.) Textual

Strategies, pp. 73-81. London: Methuen.Cuddon, J.A. (1991) Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin.*Halliday, M.A.K. (1971) ’Linguistic Function and Literary Style: An Inquiry into the Language of

William Golding’s The Inheritors’, in S. Chatman (ed.) Literary Style: A Symposium, pp. 330-65.London and New York: Oxford University Press.

Voloshinov, V.N. [= Bakhtin] (1973 [1930]) trans. L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik. Marxism and thePhilosophy of Language. New York: Seminar Press.

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