PART ONE.
On Saturday I was enjoying a thoughtful discussion of Susan Hill’s novel, The Small Hand. We were analysing the opening line of Susan’s Hill’s ghost story, and exploring several of the different aspects and implications of the opening.
Thinking about this exercise, I do feel that a ‘successful’ textual analysis might have certain similarities to a visit to a GP’s surgery!
You go to your doctor with several symptoms and as a result of these symptoms or bodily ‘evidence’ your GP is able to suggest what might be the underlying condition or ‘problem’. If symptoms are ignored or not included in the diagnosis, then there is a definite risk that the wrong diagnosis might be made.
So it is with reading a text. A reader has to pay full attention to the ‘symptoms’ of a narrative or poem or play. If a reader just skips over the textual ingredients, then the meaning or message of a text may escape the reader’s understanding.
I have always loved looking at the nitty gritty of a text. I ask myself:
‘How does this work and why does it work like this? Find me the evidence! ‘
Paying attention to language makes us wake up to language. We wake up to meanings too and this can be very useful in our relationships and communication too. Paying attention to what a person is saying and how they are saying it gives us the gift of WHY they are saying it even if we may not like it!
So let’s look at two openings from modern novels and see how paying atttention may help us understand the texts and help you obtain far better marks and grades.
‘It was a little before nine o’clock, the sun was setting into a bank of smoky violet cloud and I had lost my way.’ ( Susan Hill, The Small Hand)
1) Losing your way is important. When we are lost we become unsettled, possibly excited and often fearful . We are not in a familiar place, so our reactions are different. We are vulnerable and susceptible to different emotions. These heighten the drama of the text. Disorientation could even be read as an extended metaphor for the rest of the text, particularly if that text is a ghost story. Ghosts tales are about losing one’s way as we encounter ‘things’ that are supernatural and therefore out of our way. King Lear and Macbeth are other texts which deal very powerfully with losing one’s way!
2) The tense of this opening is the past tense. Thus we are aware that we are reading a retrospective or recollected piece of narrative. The narrator therefore knows the ending whilst he/she is narrating the text, as if he does not know or won’t admit, for fear of jeopardising the sense or the reader’s reactions. Jane Eyre and Great Expectations both manipulate this relationship to the ending very intensely and this adds to the mystery.
3) The very details of the sentence above show how carefully the teller recreates the events in the past that presumably form one of the ‘events’ of interest in the novel. Thus we know the time of the event and the position of the sun and even the colour of the cloud formation.The colour is slightly exotic as it is ‘violet’ and this makes the memory memorable and therefore even more TRUTHFUL or credible.
ii) We find these details create a context for the tale and show his desire to give credibility to what he is relating. This undermines any possible hesitancy in terms of belief on the part of the reader. This is key to many tales utilising the fantastic. Any disbeleif is either undermined by the credibility fo the details, the more ordinary the better sometimes!
iii) OR the hesitation of the reader is built into the text itself usuallly by a narrator who expresses doubt about the events but has to accept that they are happening as they unfold.
More in Part TWO.
( The picture shows I have lost my way around cropping a thumbnail image!)